50 Years Ago: Labour Government in Australia (1982)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Using “the preservation of Arbitration” and the protection of the living standard as a catch-cry, the Scullin Labour crowd were successful in gaining the confidence of the workers. They began grappling with the problems. It is here we get an insight into the real nature of the “Labour” Party. Under the slogan of “Build up Australian Industries,” benefits were gratuitously bestowed upon the Australian manufacturers, and the workers were callously disregarded.

The tariffs were revised, and more than 150 items were adjusted in the interests of the sections of the capitalist class represented by the “Labour” Party.

. . . But the services did not end here. During the last year of its regime the “Premier’s Plan” was introduced. Under this plan, on the plea of reducing government expense, the wages of public servants were ruthlessly reduced. Pensions of ex-soldiers and old people were chopped by 12½ per cent., and the maternity allowance was cut down similarly. The wages of all workers governed by Arbitration Court Awards were reduced by 10 per cent.

[From an article The Australian Labour Leaders by W. J. Clarke, Socialist Party of Australia, Socialist Standard, October 1932.]

Correction: Whose house (1986)

From the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the July Socialist Standard, on page 136 in the item Whose House?, we discussed ". . . a proposal announced by Norman Fowler, Social Service Secretary, that unemployed home-owners will lose their right to claim Supplementary Benefit to cover half their mortgage interest payments". This proposal in fact refers to only the first six months of unemployment.

Editors.

Running Commentary: Clerics’ confusion (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Clerics’ confusion

Are we all god 's children, or are some of us — women — rather more distant relations of his — nieces perhaps? Are we all made in his immaculate image or are those of us in the female sex less capable than those of the male gender?

The Church of England, which purports to instruct us in morality and keeping our place as docile wage slaves in the capitalist order of things, is having difficulty in deciding whether to allow women the same opportunity to be ordained as men. The recent vote of the Synod, to refer the issue to a panel of 53 bishops, was not so much a decision as a deferment, in the hope that the slickest religious brains in the church can use the next six months or so to cook up a face-saving compromise.

This is all rather curious. The church has been operating for centuries as a bunch of intellectual storm-troopers (although latterly rather more like a company in Dad's Army) for class society. Do they think they might perform better, on behalf of the ruling class, if women were allowed to dress up in those silly clothes, perform the same meaningless rituals and preach to us about the rewards waiting in heaven for all who do their duty for capitalism?

On the other hand, why should any of them oppose women priests? (Graham Leonard, the Bishop of London, hinted broadly that he would leave the church if women are to be ordained. Not exactly a grievous loss to us if he did). Other churches have female priests, as does the Anglican church in some other countries. They don't seem to have any problems in doing the church's work of putting across the baseless, reactionary nonsense of religion.

This brings us to the most important question, of why women should want an equal right to become priests, especially if this means first being insulted by people like Graham Leonard. Of course, it's all part of the drive for sexual equality, for proving that women can do any job as efficiently as men. So far the jobs where this has been proved have included the armed forces (in some states there are female combat troops); the police (watch Hill Street Blues of a Saturday night to see how a girl can handle a truncheon); the prison service (there are now female governors of male prisons in Britain, making sure the prisoners are firmly locked away and punished appropriately); and of course there's the Prime Ministership . . .

Perhaps there are some women libbers who think it is a worthwhile result for their long campaign, that they can now do the same dirty work for capitalism as men. In fact, there are worthier aims to campaign for. Like a society free, not just of sexual inequality and repression but also of the religious hypocrisy which has helped to keep us all — and especially women — enslaved for too long.

Health service priorities

Another recent demonstration of the perverse priorities in capitalism is the statement by Norman Fowler, the Social Services secretary, that he has authorised health authorities to pay managers bonuses of up to £3.960 for making cuts in health service expenditure — cuts that are likely to entail the closure of hospitals.

Health service managers who don't mind acting as the government’s hatchet people can expect an extra £ 1.660 a year if they are general managers (five per cent on top of their annual salary of £33.200); for district managers £3,160 (ten per cent of their maximum of £31.600); and for unit managers. who run individual hospitals, an extra £3.960. or up to 15 per cent of the maximum salary of £26.400.

One of the ways in which the government seeks to justify its programme of hospital closures is through the cosy euphemism of "community care". This is the name given to the plan to remove many long-term sick, disabled and mentally ill from hospitals to be "cared for" in the community. Most people would accept that being looked after by loving friends, family or neighbours backed up by appropriate medical, nursing and social work support is preferable to incarceration in impersonal hospital wards. Unfortunately the reality of "community care" is often very different. Many long-stay hospital patients have remained in hospital precisely because they don't have family or friends willing or able to care for them; social services and community medical provision are already over-stretched and are unable to provide the support that would make "community care" a reality; there are insufficient resources being put into sheltered housing, group homes and day centres. The result is that the reality of "community care" for many people is a lonely, near-destitute existence in a depressing hostel; or homelessness or. for some, relapse into illness and a return to hospital.

Health service managers are being offered bribes to close hospitals, not because they are no longer needed but because meeting the needs of those who make up waiting list statistics is too expensive. Neither are hospitals being closed because "community care" is a more humane alternative. They are being closed because it is a cheaper alternative.

Policing pupils

Over the last few months the government has done its best to try to divert attention away from uncomfortable, but real, issues such as the continuing suffering caused by apartheid in South Africa, the failure of economic policies to stem the rise in unemployment, questions being asked about the nuclear power industry after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and so on. Instead we have had our attention focused on a series of pseudo-issues which can be "solved" easily. Litter in the streets: solution — call in capitalist entrepreneur Richard Branson to start a "Clean-Up Britain" campaign. Hippy peace convoys in the New Forest: mobilise an army of police at five in the morning to break up and disperse the camp. Sexual promiscuity among the young: introduce an amendment to the Education Bill to require teachers to stress moral values and family life in sex education classes.

This amendment to the Education Bill attracted considerable media attention and yet at the same time another two amendments were being tacked on to the Bill which, although they attracted less comment, are perhaps more insidious. They will require school governors to pay attention to the view of Chief Officers of the police when making decisions about school curricula and head teachers to take account of Chief Officers' views when organising lessons.

Are the police going to use their newly-acquired influence to ensure that children are taught about road safety, or the necessity of having lights on their bicycles, or what to do if they witness an accident7 So far the evidence suggests that this is not what the police have in mind. The 1983 report from the schools inspectors suggested that the value (to the police) of closer liaison between the police and schools would be that of "intelligence-gathering":

Police forces generally attach considerable importance to the advantages to be gained through unofficial contact with schools. Home-beat officers “drop in" at school during break for a chat with pupils or teachers . . . Most schools welcome and encourage this informal contact and may ask home-beat officers or juvenile bureau officers to have an unofficial "word" with pupils, or their parents, about whom they feel anxious in relation to criminal activity.

Of course there's an official term for this informal, unofficial contact between police and schools — "multi-agency policing". In practice this means that as many different people as possible are co-opted to do the dirty work of the police and inform on their neighbours and fellow workers through neighbourhood watch schemes and the involvement of social workers. Now it seems that the police, having got their foot in the door of school, are going to be allowed some input into the curriculum too.

Most teachers who attempt to talk about the morality of family life in sex education lessons will simply be laughed down by sophisticated teenagers who have their own moral code. But it's much harder to laugh down a police officer who enters the classroom to glean information through chats with pupils or teachers, or a Chief Constable who insists on his right to vet the curriculum.

Blogger's Note:

Though this Running Commentary column is unsigned, there's a strong chance it was written by Janie Percy-Smith. During this period, she was on the Standard editorial committee and was one of the journal's most prolific writers, and the 'Clerics' confusion' piece indicates that the author is female.

Cuts in Education (1976)

From the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again capitalism is going through a pretty severe crisis. There is of course nothing new in this. Nor is there anything unusual. On the contrary, it is merely evidence of the normal working of capitalism; a society in which crisis is as endemic as weeds to a flower bed. Marx pointed out over a hundred years ago, that capitalism would inevitably move in phases, one of which was crisis which is what is happening now. When capitalism in Britain or elsewhere gets into a financial crisis its government must turn to anything which offers a prospect of saving the situation, one vulnerable arm of expenditure is education. The direct benefits of investment in education are not as evident to all the capitalist class as is investment in plant or machinery. It takes some considerable time to get any return on the expense of getting children ready for “the work of life” (one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of education); at least ten years in school to make a labourer, considerably longer for a worker with a technical degree, even longer for a scientist capable of inventing a new type of warhead. So capitalism cuts.

This cannot be in the long-term interests of capitalism. Advanced capitalism needs well-trained labour. Without it, the individual capitalist state may fall behind its competitors in world markets. But long-term interests seldom enter into it. To make his workers redundant, close his plant etc. means less profit for the capitalist, yet nevertheless the capitalist class finds itself doing just that. So also with education. The dictates of this crazy system do not allow for common-sense (even from the point of view of capital). For one thing there are no jobs available for all those expensively-trained students (especially those coming out of so-called higher education). The Times reported (16th January 1976) over 1750 vacancies in colleges, universities and polytechnics which could not be filled in the south-east alone. From the point of view of the capitalist class, with a situation like that, why not cut?

So the hatchet men of the capitalist class (currently the Labour party) start looking for ways of saving the capitalist class’s money. Apart from straight cutting, a future hatchet “person”, Mrs. Thatcher has been suggesting one way for the capitalist class to have its cake and eat it. The method? Easy; you have more colleges, universities etc., without the State paying for them. Which is in effect what she recommended when she open the new University College of Buckingham. This was launched in February of this year as the first "private” university to be started this century in the UK. It is private because there are no direct “public funds” being used for its establishment and maintenance as distinct from other universities in the country. Of course in the long run if this experiment survives, most of the money will come from the capitalist class anyway, but for the moment the state is not being asked to fork out directly. Which is what Mrs. Thatcher meant when she said that she hoped in the future universities would be “encouraged to take their destinies more into their own hands and to embark upon institutional adventures which do not involve the lobbying of public opinion or government departments.” (Times Higher Education Supplement, 13th February 1976). She means of course those that do not require direct public funding.

But apart from this limited possibility, the capitalist class must look at the situation as it is. It must have been clear to the capitalist class what education was costing them. In the financial year 1975/76 for example the total cost of education (admittedly including “libraries, science and arts” government figures) will be £6,164 million. The only item of government expenditure which would cost more this year is the one misleadingly called “social security”. The remedy was to cut £618 million for next year and £1,000 million from the education budget for the following two financial years.

The effects of the cuts were predicted in the run-up to the publication of the government White Paper on public expenditure. One result forecast by the Times education correspondent (23 January 1976) was a large number of staff redundancies; hardly a difficult prediction since there was a serious unemployment problem in the teaching profession before the cuts were introduced. Among the other estimated effects from the cuts are higher school meals charges, reductions in the numbers of students undertaking higher education courses from an estimated 800,000 to 600,000 in the year 1981, a standstill on staff appointments, a reduction in the target for the number of teachers, a standstill on the numbers of children able to attend nursery education etc.

The reaction of the teacher unions was as predictable as the results of the cuts themselves. Fred Jarvis, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, was typical. He complained about the wastage: it had cost millions of pounds to train teachers who were to be made redundant. “The amount of public money wasted in training them would be about £50m. ‘This is the economics of Bedlam’, he said.” (The Times 20 January 1976.) But it is the economics of capitalism, which unfortunately he and most of his members continue to support. Most of the unions talked of “action” to oppose the cuts. Teacher unions received motion after motion with “demands” for no cuts, opposition to redundancies, opposition to closures, etc. The National Association of Teachers in Higher and Further Education for its 1976 conference has a list of 111 motions almost all of which relate to opposition to the cuts, or financing and salaries. All about as effective as trying to stop Concorde by throwing paper darts at it.

In all the loud and useless flannel of the unions, there are few signs of any realization that the chaos in their lives and those of their children is the result of the capitalist system. For example the Technical Journal for December 1975 when commenting on the disastrous effects the cuts would have in higher education grudgingly acknowledged that as the funding of much of further education “is closely linked to industry, this sector of education has always encountered the occasional potential redundancy situation due to such factors as a declining industry.” Although that could qualify for the understatement of the year, it nonetheless demonstrates something of an awareness (as yet alas, dim) that anarchy in production must lead to havoc in human existence.

Of course it often used to be possible for expensively trained teachers who were suddenly made expensively unemployed to leave the UK and find work abroad, at least in some of the Commonwealth countries. But just as capitalism is world-wide, so also are its periodic crises and so also therefore is unemployment. The Observer (8th February 1976) reported that it is no longer possible for British teachers to get jobs abroad. It even warns teachers against accepting jobs if lucky enough to be offered them. The article ends by pointing out that in the USA teachers can find education authorities running out of money and not having sufficient to pay the wages! So much for “successful” capitalism.

The SPGB is not joining in the campaign to oppose cuts or redundancies. It is pointing out to workers instead, that the cutting down in teachers and resources, while schools are short of both, is yet another of the endless dilemmas created by a social system where cost is paramount. The dilemma in this case is for those who protest at cuts but cannot suggest where the money is to come from, and will go on supporting capitalism which creates such problems.

Ronnie Warrington

The Death of the Welfare State (1996)

From the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Supporters of capitalism have always denied the need for a fundamental change on the grounds that the system can take care of the 
poor through state help and welfare, now the welfare state, the
 sacred cow of reformists everywhere, is being attacked 
from every direction

Labour and the Tories have, it seems, moved closer together than ever with respect to their attitudes to the welfare state. On 8 May the Guardian reported Labour’s Chris Smith, shadow social security secretary, saying:

"Surely it is time to get away from the sterile battle lines of public and private. . . The principle must surely be that the state acts as guarantor of all provision, the regulator of all provision and the administrator of some. ”

How they intend to guarantee those provisions that they don’t provide, which will presumably have to be provided by individuals for themselves through insurance, is not made clear; in fact not a lot is made clear. What is crystal clear, though, is that Labour has abandoned its commitment to the welfare state along with Clause Four; the to-and-fro of reform and counter-reform between the major parties, such as it was, is over.

This to-and-fro was never, of course, a simple external relation between the parties but has been just as much a part of their internal make-up since the Second World War. Labour introduced the NHS but also introduced prescription charges and charges for dental and optical treatment; the Tories under Macmillan expanded the council house building programme; the current cause of much argument and agonising within Labour—child benefit—was introduced by the Tories in 1945 before Labour took office that same year. The case of child benefit is perhaps particularly interesting and informative, given the possibility of the next Labour government abolishing it for 16-18 year olds.

Family Allowance, the immediate forerunner of child benefit, was agreed in principle in 1943 by the wartime coalition government, and introduced by the Conservative government of May-July 1945, gaining the royal assent on 16 June 1945. The Labour movement was split on the issue, with many trade unions opposed to this reform—but why? Wasn't it to benefit working-class families? In fact, it wasn’t, anything but, the capitalist establishment wanted to introduce this reform because they felt that capitalism in the UK couldn’t afford not to. In 1940, Eleanor Rathbone MP, chair of the Family Endowment Society, argued in favour of the introduction of Family Allowance, saying that a “man with a wife and family is much less likely to act (revolutionarily) than one who has given society no such hostage”. Family Allowance was to be an incentive for working-class men to have dependent families—which could then be effectively held hostage by the state should he question capitalist authority. The ruling class also favoured the introduction of this “benefit" on a more basic level; the unions, hardly revolutionary' themselves, would have been less inclined to oppose it otherwise. The Tory MP L.S. Amery, again arguing in favour of this reform (in the Times, 14 January' 1941), said that Family Allowance would “afford a logical basis upon which a stand could be made against all further wage increases”. It was thus seen as a method of keeping wage bills down.

Who benefits?

If Labour now want to abolish child benefit for 16-18 year olds, is it in order to correct past mistakes, to somehow pass on a real benefit to working people after all? No chance. While they haven’t said exactly what they would spend the money on, they have gestured vaguely in the direction of education; but whose education would it be spent on? Many working-class families have, over the years, come to rely on child benefit, particularly to help support children in further education. If child benefit is abolished for precisely those of the age to go into further education, how will the less well off working-class families be able to afford to keep them in education? The simple answer is, they won’t. The only options for many will be for 16 and 17 year olds to try for places in the already over-subscribed YTS system (adding further to the already massive pool of cheap labour for bosses), to directly enter the employment market with little or no chance of a job and no benefits, or to leave home and beg on the streets. What a marvellous range of choice capitalism offers.

There is another option of course, at least for those families with at least one wage-earner—to fight the employers for higher wages to compensate for the money lost. But if this was thought even vaguely likely, Labour would have been more reluctant to have considered this particular cut. The last thing they want is to encourage class conflict, particularly under their own administration; but the relative weakness of the trade union movement at the present time makes an immediate escalation of class struggle unlikely.. this doesn’t mean that it won’t happen; workers may find themselves forced to fight by sheer material circumstances. But the point is that the ruling class, at least in the West, is being forced to take back reforms that have been previously granted and supposedly reformist parties are being forced to institute and administer the process.

On the one hand, capital feels it can no longer afford reforms, on the other, it also feels that it must take past reforms away and to bolster itself at the direct expense of the working class because of the relative weakness of the trade union movement. This is happening right across the west, with the temporary' exception of France where the government keeps trying to cut back on the welfare state but where workers’ solidarity has so far forced them to back down. They will keep trying, though, because French capital is no more isolated or “sovereign” than anywhere else. In other parts of the world, such as the Far East, home of what western capitalists habitually refer to, with some envy, as “tiger” (“dynamic market”—note the use of this term in labour’s new Clause 4) economies, there have often never been any reforms, even basic democratic ones, to roll back, while countries such as Vietnam refer to themselves as socialist while they introduce some of the most vicious, exploitative capitalist economic structures in the world. Global capitalism is precisely that; nobody is insulated from pressures on profits, which under capitalism is where sovereignty always really lies.

The to-and-fro of reform and anti-reform has always been the pattern to some extent, but things appear to have reached a state where reform has effectively lost its impossible fight. Reformist parties such as Labour have almost entirely capitulated; they were never going to introduce socialism anyway, having only ever been at most state capitalist parties, but now they have given up entirely. A never-ending pissing into the face of a gale has left them wet and weary and has exhausted what emancipatory desire they might once have had. All their desires now are masturbatory and egotistical, focused on nothing more than the plaudits of high office that mask a basic sterility.

There are few more frightening, deadly or apt symbols of the failure of reformism than the world-wide rise of tuberculosis. The steady and virtually inevitable erosion of welfare reforms has caused the number of cases of TB to rise steadily in the west over the last few years after most people had thought it had been effectively eradicated. In other parts of the world, of course, it had never gone away in the first place. A recent article on TB in the Guardian Weekend (27 April) put this point quite succinctly. In the 1970s there was a general optimism in the west that TB was effectively gone for ever, thanks to vaccine research and improved living conditions. But only in the west:

“Admittedly, no one country ever wiped it out completely. And in the third world, things remained not much better than they hail always been. But, hell, they were free to buy our superdrugs weren't they? ”

Well, no, they weren’t. They couldn’t afford them. Profits, as ever, came first. As they do with HIV research, even while HIV is forming what the same article designated a “devil’s alliance” with TB, not that it’s on the increase again in west. Who is most at risk from TB? The poorest and weakest members of society of course, the elderly homeless and immigrants shoved into cramped and poverty-stricken living conditions. But as the welfare state is dismantled, it seems highly likely that TB will spread further, and it will spread first through the poorer sections of the working class. As the Guardian article

again puts it:

". . .  tuberculosis is universally recognised as the disease of poverty. And as such, it acts as a chillingly efficient barometer of the human physical condition. Today, that barometer has swung right off the scale throughout the third world, and at the same time it is beginning to rise in Britain and other advanced capitalist states. ”

Reformism has failed and how the reformist project is collapsing; as it does so, evils we thought were wiped out or at least under control, are coming back with increasing vengeance. TB is not just a disease, in the contemporary world it’s also a symptom of the failure of reformism within capitalism.

In the film Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard says of American hypocrisy in war: “We cut them in half with a machine gun and we give them a band-aid.” Reformism was always a similarly inadequate response to capitalism’s violence in the name of profit, trying to patch up the symptoms of the disease that capitalism itself is. Now, though, the ruling class can’t even afford to keep the first aid kit stocked up. It’s high time the rest of us realised the necessity of taking on and eradicating the disease itself.

Jonathan Clay

The Unkindest Cut of All (1996)

From the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is rather amusing for Socialists to listen to the various apologists of capitalism try to justify their support for welfare cuts on the grounds that it is either “immoral” for the state to impose high taxes (the source of state expenditure), or that it is in the interests of the “nation” that welfare payments are kept to a minimum

That the double-speak beloved by newspapers and economists is a key clement in the ideological battle waged by the ruling class against the workers should be evident enough to anyone with a notion at all of class and class struggle. It is hoped by the bosses that the drip-drip-drip of this Chinese water torture will unbalance even the most rational of minds. Sometimes the newspapers and economists join together in a combined offensive on a particular topic of concern to their paymasters—the capitalist class. Recently the object of their ire has been welfare expenditure.

Robert Skidelsky, biographer of Keynes, and ennobled for his services to bourgeois economics, wrote on this theme in the Sunday Times on 11 February. His key argument was summed up in the headline of the piece — “Cuts To Benefit the Nation”. Coming in the wake of Peter Lilley’s announcement of planned changes and cutbacks for the social security budget, Skidelsky aimed to demonstrate why welfare cutbacks and other reductions in state expenditure would benefit “the nation”. By this he did not, of course, mean everyone. In fact, he probably meant only a small number of people at all would directly benefit, though he did not specifically say this. But who could the beneficiaries be?

Nation or Class?

The “nation”—primarily the productive resources of a state like Britain— is not owned in common or on anything like an equitable basis. Britain, like every other country, is a state divided on class lines between those who own and control the means of living and those who do not. For instance, recent statistics from Social Trends, an official government publication, show that one out of every 20 adults has a stake in the means of living equal to the other 19 put together. The top five percent of the population own 53 percent of all financial assets. It is the capitalist class—those who do not need to work for a living—who by-and-large own “the nation”, setting their wage slaves to work to put more wealth in the form of profits back in to the capitalists’ hands.

Although lackeys like Skidelsky present it as such, cutbacks in welfare expenditure and the like are not designed to benefit wage and salary earners. Workers receive an amount sufficient to keep them and their families in a fit condition, with skilled or highly educated workers usually receiving more than the unskilled. Their wages, properly speaking, are a real amount intended for this purpose not a hypothetical sum, and so the burden of taxation (which finances welfare payments) ultimately falls on the capitalist class. Workers may pay some taxes, but the burden specifically falls on the surplus value accruing to the capitalists and not on the wages and salaries of the workers, hence the interest of the capitalists and their representatives in keeping taxation as low as possible. High taxation eats into profits and reduces the amount available for accumulation as new capital.

The state currently takes about 42.5 percent of Gross National Product in Britain, about a third of which is taken up by social security expenditure, currently a colossal £92 billion. This means a large amount of tax taken out of profits, and the proportion has been moving up in most advanced countries for decades, with the state stepping in to cushion the fall from market failures and being further burdened by demographic change.

State expenditure acting as a drag on profits and capital accumulation is the real bottom line for the capitalists, but Skidelsky has a more lofty way to justify the competitive money-grubbing of the capitalists:

". . . the main argument for slimming down the state is moral: it is wrong that governments should take 40 percent and more of our earnings and decide to spend it as they see fit".

Skidelsky goes on to declare himself in favour of cutbacks in state health and education services, on the ground that this can only benefit “our earnings”, but it is a strange kind of morality which has to go to these lengths to defend the wealth of the privileged and justify taking a few more crumbs back oft' the poor. But then when has the morality of capitalism ever been concerned with anything more than the sanctity of profit?

Britain already has some of the lowest benefit levels in the western world so savings made from the unemployed or single mothers will be minimal, though this in itself will not stop the government from trying to stop people claiming benefit or cutting back on payments, as recently with Unemployment Benefit. This is part of the reason why an even greater line of attack has been waged on pensions, with employees being encouraged to take out private schemes to supplement the state pension. Since the 1980 decision to link state pensions with prices rather than earnings the basic state pension has fallen from 22 percent of average male earnings to 15 percent and no government of capitalism in Britain is likely to be able to offer pensioners anything better. The number of those living beyond 75 is expected to double from 4 to 8 million over the next fifty years and this demographic change alone will put further pressure on government expenditure, particularly the social security budget.

Hard Labour

The apologists for capitalism—whether Lord Skidelsky or, for that matter, Tony Blair—see little wrong with attacking the poor when capitalist profit dictates it, and no one should be fooled that attacks on welfare are merely the preserve of the right-wing of capitalism’s political apparatus. The pressures on them from the competitive market economy are the same. The last Labour government from 1974-9 had an equally bad record with inflation eating away at benefits and savings, together with real cuts in wages and salaries. As with the Conservatives, unemployment also rose and along with it job insecurity.

Given his infatuation with private pension schemes and the welfare arrangements beloved in the Far East, Blair and his cohorts offer nothing really new from what the Tories offer now. All that has changed in the world of welfare reform has been some of the language used justify further attacks on a beleaguered working class— the “drip, drip, drip”, this time with an allegedly moral dimension. Skidelsky has in fact put the argument of those who wish to attack benefit levels most succinctly— how despicable of the poor to drain the capitalists of profit! What he—and they— conveniently overlook, though, is that the workers made the profits for the owning class in the first place.

Lord Skidelsky is actually chairman of the Social Market Foundation. A more bizarre title for an organisation could not be found, for given the class nature of capitalism and the attacks it unleashes on the poor, what could be more anti-social than the market? But then such is the double-speak of our times.

Dave Perrin

Running Commentary: Free speech (1985)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Free speech

The ruling class in South Africa has imposed new censorship laws preventing foreign journalists reporting the current unrest and violence. The editor of the liberal (by South African standards) Cape Times, Anthony Heard, is to be prosecuted for publishing an interview with the banned leader of the African National Congress, Oliver Tambo, under a section of the Internal Security Act which prohibits the printing, publishing or dissemination without government permission of "any speech, utterance, writing or statement'' of a "banned'' person. Heard did not seek permission to publish the interview since he considered the public have a "right" to be informed about matters of importance. What he will discover is that in capitalism workers do not have "rights" except those legal rights granted by their political masters. Such legal rights are neither absolute nor inalienable. If the capitalist class feels that its interests are threatened by such "rights" as freedom of speech, a free press, freedom of movement or freedom to demonstrate then they will be suspended through Emergency Powers legislation, internal security measures or in the interests of "national security".

The white ruling class clearly feels itself under threat from the black nationalist movement, hence the tightening of the screw. But does it really believe it can conceal for long the contradictions inherent in the apartheid system, and the cruelty, poverty and inhumanity perpetrated in the name of white supremacy?

Race laws

Twenty years ago, in 1965, the first legislation was passed which attempted to outlaw racial discrimination in Britain, since when a number of other Acts have extended the scope of race relations law. So what is the position of blacks in Britain today?

As is well known, and as the Policy Studies Institute confirmed in its report Black and White in Britain, blacks are still relatively disadvantaged: they tend to live in worse housing than white workers, receive lower pay, get the worst jobs and are more likely to be unemployed. Increasingly they have been the victims of racial attacks and violence.

Various reasons have been given for this failure to improve the state of race relations but none has even begun to address the real problem. That is that it is impossible to legislate to change people's attitudes. They are shaped by the conditions of society in which we live. In capitalism conflict and competition between workers is inherent: competition for jobs, houses and other "scarce" resources. It is not surprising therefore that those who lose out in that competition frequently give vent to their frustration in the form of hostility towards blacks as an identifiable group.

No amount of legislation can change such feelings. What is needed is the recognition amongst all workers, men and women, black and white, that we do have interests in common, that transcend racial, cultural or gender divisions, but those interests will never be fully realised so long as capitalism continues. What we don't need is another piece of legislation outlawing racial discrimination; what we do need is democratic, political organisation to abolish the root cause of racism—capitalism.

Queen’s speech

Although the next general election is probably another two years away, it looks as if the government's campaign has begun in earnest. Its programme for the new session of Parliament, outlined in the Queen's speech, includes a Bill to deal with Public Order (likely to be a big vote-catcher given the hysteria whipped up over events on miners' picket lines and in inner cities); more privatisation to raise money for tax cuts; further "de-regulation", including the removal of restrictions on Sunday shopping, a limitation on the activities of Wages Councils so that workers under 21 will no longer have their pay protected, more private management of council housing estates; and changes in social security benefits.

What will this programme of legislation mean to workers? Is there anything to persuade us that the government is indeed acting in our interests?

Sunday shopping

Although some people might think that unrestricted opening hours are in workers' interests. we should remember that the shop-workers' union. USDAW, at least, is opposed to such a change. They fear that it will lead to their already badly paid members working much longer hours without the benefit of overtime rates. It becomes clear whose interests the proposed change is designed to serve when "Open Shop", the pressure group in favour of Sunday trading, lists among its members such giant retailers as Asda. MFI. Habitat/Mothercare, W.H. Smith and Woolworth.

Social security

The review of the Social Security system was intended to look for ways in which benefits could be "targetted" on those most in need, or at least that's the story we were given. The changes are likely to affect pensions. supplementary benefit, support for the low paid and housing benefit. A report published recently by the Policy Studies Institute (The Examination of Social Security) states that if the government s plans go ahead, some of the neediest and most disabled claimants will actually lose money.

Privatisation

The government expects to realise £10 billion from its sale of British Gas. It also plans to sell off shares in airports owned by the British Airports Authority and introduce "commercial management" into the naval dockyards. All this, it is hoped, will not only provide some spare cash for tax cuts, but also give people the opportunity to buy shares in companies presently legally owned by the state. If the workers weren't conned by the Labour trick of nationalisation. then maybe they can be duped into believing that they can have a real stake in the capitalist system of society by buying a few shares. The truth is very different. It makes no difference to the working class whether the means of production are privately owned or state owned; whether or not we own a few shares, workers will never have access to the wealth that we, as a class, collectively produce. Plans to give tenants some say in the management of council estates are part of an attempt to create the same illusion. Who wants to be part of a "property owning democracy" when the only property we own is a tower block slum?

Public order

The proposed changes to the law relating to Public Order will give the police greater powers to restrict marches and demonstrations. and to decide how many people should stand where on a picket line. A new offence of "disorderly conduct" will be created and the old common law offences of riot and affray will be tightened up (no doubt because of recent failures to secure prosecutions of people charged with these offences). These changes will mean that the legal rights of workers to protest, demonstrate and picket will be curtailed.

So the Queen's speech seems to have left out one important statement. It should have read as follows: "My government will continue to support absolutely the capitalist system of society which concentrates ownership and wealth in the hands of the minority capitalist class, at the expense of the working class who produce all wealth through their labour. My government will continue to support the police force and the other coercive machinery of state, which acts to protect the interests of parasites like myself against any perceived threat by the workers".

Janie Percy-Smith

Cooking the Books: ‘The markets’ before people (2024)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was always a bit of a mystery why Rachel Reeves was so insistent on presenting the Labour Party as the ‘Party of Business’ and emphasising that, if she became Chancellor of the Exchequer, she would enforce stringent government spending rules with a rod of iron.

This can’t have been aimed at catching votes; that would be too much like asking for turkeys to vote for Christmas. Nor even to reassure British business; these would know from past experience that a Labour government would be a safe pair of hands as far as looking after their interests was concerned. It seemed that the only explanation could be to reassure ‘the markets’ so as to avoid the fate of the unfortunate Truss government; to reassure, in other words, the international speculators who buy and sell currencies and who lend money to governments by buying the bonds they issue.

That this may well have been the reason was revealed on Sunday 1 September by the member of the Cabinet sent out that day to tour the radio and TV studios to defend the Labour government’s decision to take away the winter fuel allowance from most pensioners. Newspaper headlines the following day reflected what Lucy Powell, the Leader of the House of Commons, had said:

‘WINTER FUEL PAYMENT CUT HELPED STOP “RUN ON THE POUND” SAYS LUCY POWELL. “We would have seen the markets losing confidence”, Leader of the Commons said’ (iNews).

‘UK FACED ECONOMIC CRASH IF WINTER FUEL PAYMENT WAS NOT AXED, POWELL SAYS. The Commons Leader says Rachel Reeves’s decision to cut the payment was a “difficult decision” with “no alternative”’ (Belfast-based Irish News).

Her exact words, as recorded by these newspapers, were, respectively:

‘ . . . why we had to do that was because if we didn’t, we would have seen the markets losing confidence, potentially a run on the pound, the economy crashing . . . ’ (inews)

and

‘If we hadn’t taken some of these tough decisions we could have seen a run on the pound, interest rates going up and crashing the economy. It’s something we were left with no alternative but to do’ (tinyurl.com/yhs7t6se).

What she meant couldn’t have been clearer: that to retain the confidence of the international speculators and investors who trade in currencies and government bonds, the new Labour government had no alternative but to cut government spending.

Some might question whether the situation was that drastic. But that’s not the point. The government considered that it was and, in their role as guardian of the general interest of the British capitalist class as a whole, took the required action to maintain the confidence of ‘the markets’ by cutting its spending. In theory they could have cut something else — so-called defence spending, for instance — but, presumably to convince the markets how serious they were, deliberately chose to cut some social benefits, in this case those for pensioners.

In any event, the markets were satisfied. Under the headline INVESTORS DEFY ECONOMIC GLOOM WITH SCRAMBLE FOR UK BONDS, the Times (4 September) reported:

‘The record demand for gilts suggests that financial markets are shrugging off worries about the UK’s fiscal sustainability for now, after the government said it needed to carry out immediate spending cuts to prevent a collapse in the pound.’

More gruel, anyone? (1989)

From the March 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

As if life is not hard enough already for them, the people who depend on Social Security benefits for their living are now being targetted. And what, you might ask (unless you are on benefit yourself, in which case you know the answer) does that mean? To begin with we might consider the fact that "targetted’’ is a non-word, a verb created out of a noun. Such creations are not uncommon and often taken to be evidence of fresh, innovative thinking. If the new word catches on, in quarters where there is a real fear of not being thought of as fresh and innovative, it may become set into jargon, without which no speech or article commands proper attention and which is useful to evade an inconvenient reality or to confuse a simple issue.

Targetting, according to the rich Tory ministers who run the Department of Social Security, means rearranging the system of state benefits so that they are paid only to those who can prove to be in the greatest need. It is. they say, a reform long overdue. A recent TV programme about the difficulties experienced by claimants who try to get money from the meticulously targetted Social Fund included the contrasting case of a mother in a large, mock-Tudor house on the greener fringes of Croydon. She declared that she drew her recklessly non-targetted Child Benefit once every few months, when she remembered, and then only to pay it straight into her bank account.

The policy of paying flat-rate benefits to everyone in certain categories, regardless of need, was laid down as long ago as the Beveridge Report. When the policy was written into legislation there was a great shudder of relief among those who, whether through personal experience or not, understood what the Means Test had meant — a harrowing, degrading probing by officialdom for reasons to disqualify desperately poor people from benefit. The Means Test, we were told, had been abolished for ever. But targetted benefits are Means tested benefits, albeit under a zappy. freshly-created — distorting — name.

Dependency culture

It is true that means-tested benefits are recommended to us by Tory ministers as an essential antidote to the widespread scourge of the dependency culture, than which nothing is more dangerous to our morale. Dependency encourages us to live off others instead of using our abilities to contribute to the social good. Those who wondered whether these verbal assaults were targetted at the ruling class, whose income from the labours of the rest of us enables them to jet around the world's playgrounds. may have been reassured by the recent stream of bracing advice from ministers on how we can avoid falling into dependency. The common theme of this advice was that anyone who is poor, cold, hungry or homeless has only themselves to blame. Edwina Currie, before she made the bad mistake of upsetting the farming lobby, came unscathed through the anger provoked by her patronising dissertation to pensioners and any other potential sufferers from hypothermia about the advantages of warm underwear. Peter Lloyd, an Under Secretary at the DSS, recommends clothing ourselves from jumble sales (which many workers do in any case):

I am a great attender of second-hand sales for charities in my constituency. You can get very good bargains. (Daily Telegraph, 12 January 1989)

Lloyd is a member of Lloyds (no relation, presumably), which means that he has. apart from anything else, at least £100,000 which he can afford to lose in an adverse insurance deal. Someone with that kind of money may buy second-hand stuff at jumble sales — it’s all good clean fun, helps out some local charity which targetted claimants are applying to in unprecedented numbers and maybe wins a few votes by showing what a cheery, caring fellow he is. But living in need is not good, clean fun. Getting by on cast-off bargains is a way of life reserved for the class who, directly or indirectly, contribute through their exploitation to Lloyd s fortune and add also to his political comfort by voting him into parliament.

Young people — in whose hands, as politicians so often tell us, The Future Of The Country Rests — are finding their benefit so efficiently targetted that it is shot out of existence. This is happening because the government prefer to have them working. A recent leaflet from the DSS informs them, in terms which suggest that it is the best news they have had for a long time:

From September 1988 if you are under 18 you will normally not be able to get Income Support.

It then puts, and answers, a number of suspiciously docile questions:

Why can't I get Income Support?

Because there is a guaranteed Youth Training Scheme (YTS) place for everyone under 18 who does not go into a job. 

Must I go on YTS?

No. The choice is yours. But if you don't go on YTS any money your parents get for you will stop at the end of your extended Child Benefit period.

Removing workers from the scope of benefit by presenting them with this kind of “choice" does wonders for the unemployment statistics and it is right in the historic tradition of punishing people for being poor. Under the Tudors this was a matter of brutal persecution which, as more and more peasants were driven off the land, had to be modified into the subtler repressions of the Poor Law. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relief was based on, and administrated by, the parishes, which caused paupers who were unsettled to be carted backwards and forwards across parish boundaries as each tried to cast off responsibility for them. There was, of course, always the workhouse, which in the eighteenth century developed, through a process of reasoning which was a stranger to logic let alone humane concerns, as a deterrent to the condition it was supposed to relieve:

The great object of the poor law board is to ensure a constant unvarying and efficient discipline during the entire residence of the pauper within the workhouse. He rises to the minute: he works to the minute: he eats to the minute. He must be clean, respectful, industrious and obedient. In short the habits inculcated in the house are precisely those the possession of which would have prevented his becoming an inmate. (Chairman of the Sheffield Guardians. November 1855)

Undeserving poor

Another tradition — or perhaps a better word would be tactic — is to divide the people on the lower rungs of poverty into the deserving and underserving poor. The penury of the deserving poor is recognised as largely beyond their control: they are old. or unpredictably redundant (provided they have not neglected the approved ways of guarding against its consequences) or the victims of a sudden disaster. They may also be sick — except that a failure to join BUPA at the proper time may mean they don't deserve to be among the deserving. On the other hand there are the undeserving poor, tainted by a stigma so profound that only a brash rogue like Shaw's Alfred Doolittle would willingly confess to it: “I'm one of the undeserving poor, that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man." The undeserving poor are cunningly work-shy, preferring to live on state benefits to submitting themselves to a good day's exploitation. If they do work they dissipate their wages on booze or gambling. Before the days of smokeless zones, they kept coal in the bath. Nowadays they loll about all day watching the latest videos on an outsize TV set in the corner.

Nobody has yet been able to explain why the undeserving poor have a habit of increasing and decreasing all together and why they tend to concentrate in certain areas. For years — decades even — the undeserving poor lie dormant in their various employments and then suddenly sprout into indolence, their growth being especially luxuriant in places like South Wales. Scotland or Northern Ireland. For example a recent (16 December 1988) article in New Statesman and Society reported that in the region of Strathclyde 28 per cent of the population now live at or below the official poverty line. This includes about one third of the region's children, who are not yet able to choose whether to be deserving or undeserving, and 42 per cent of its old people, who are probably past caring how they are classified and only wish they were a bit better off. This mass descent from the normal poverty of employment into the lower reaches of destitution is largely due to unemployment (what Edwina Currie would call being workshy) which, according to the Strathclyde Council, now amounts to almost a quarter of a million people. A lot of these are trying to bridge the gap between their income and their needs by living on credit. For a while this method may work, in the same way as alcohol or any other drug, by blotting out reality. But the reckoning is unavoidable: the misery of Strathclyde's never-never hangover can be assessed by the fact that its Citizens' Advice Bureau is now dealing with almost 70,000 enquiries from people in credit-crisis — almost twice as many as they were in 1982

So what happened to the targetting of benefits? The National Association of Citizen's Advice Bureaux states that the changes in Social Security last April, which were supposed to bring a great rationalising of poverty into security, have left 82 per cent of the poorer claimants worse off. Some of this is due to the abolition of special needs grants and their replacement with, very often, loans from the Social Fund. There is a Catch 22 here which would impress Joseph Heller, because a loan will be agreed only when the applicant can repay it from their benefit but by definition anyone on Social Security who needs a loan is unlikely to be able to do this. As a result many claimants don't apply for a loan or if they do apply they are refused — which drives them to experiment with the tender mercies of the local loan sharks while about half the money allocated to the Social Fund lies unused.

The predictable response to this mess from the poverty lobby is to suggest that more money be allocated to the needy. This always has a certain appeal for it can't be denied that poverty in all its degrees is symptomised by a lack of money and rich people don't involuntarily live in slums or suffer from hypothermia or malnutrition. Neither are they to be seen queuing at their local DSS to have their domestic innards probed by the Biro of some harassed, sometimes callous, clerk on the other side of the shatter-proof screen. But the calculations of the poverty lobby tend to overlook the fact that the present situation, with its levels of destitution, was supposed to have been legislated out of existence by the so-called Welfare State modelled on the Beveridge Report. Since then there have been numerous re-arranging of benefits; the available money has been shuffled about, allocated first to this type of claimant and then to another. How successful this has been can be gauged from the suffering workers of Strathclyde and the despairing staff of any inner-city DSS office.

Redistributing poverty

All the plans to reform poverty out of existence ignore the vital fact that what counts is the source of our income — how we get our living — for that determines which class we are in and whether we live secure lives or are constantly under the burden of want. People who depend on being employed for a living are members of the working class, the group who experience poverty which can soon slide into destitution if they fall sick, or have more children than they can afford, or are made redundant, or become addicted to alcohol or some other drug. In this class are the people in places like Glasgow, the people whose budgets can be disastrously thrown out by an increase in their mortgage repayments, who can be quickly changed from a proud "owner-occupier'' into a wretched unit of homelessness In this class are the people whose abilities lie unused in a slump and who come to rely on state benefits to live, making themselves targets in the sights of any government looking for economies in its expenditure.

The other class are not to be found in inner-city slums and nor do they worry about temporary changes in capitalism's economy. They can afford to have as many children as they like and the best medical treatment in the most exclusive clinics when they are ill. Although they are socially redundant, as a class they do not suffer from being out of a job because they need never be employed in the first place. They live — in their several houses, their easy security, their luxury — off the exploitation of the working class. They are the people who really exist in a dependency culture for they rely on the workers labour. They are the class whose taxes finance schemes like Social Security and it is their representatives in government who are now concerned to reduce what is being paid out in state benefits". The "Welfare State" was not an act of generosity, a gift of historic proportions from the capitalist class to the workers. Destitution does not come cheaply for such is its cost in terms of crime, loss of production and social dislocation that to alleviate it through a system of state benefits is an investment rather than a gift. National schemes for sickness, unemployment and old age were designed to spread the load of that investment over the ruling class as a whole, even if clever politicians represented them as specifically intended to relieve distress among workers. That deception is now being eroded by the Tories equally specious claim that security for workers is to be found in less cohesive private schemes which will, through the wages they pay to their employees, adjust the burden among the employers.

What does it matter, if in the process a few thousand more people — children, their parents, retired workers, the sick and the elderly — suffer the stress of poverty that bites that much deeper? The indignant campaigners of the poverty lobby are strong on indictment, but like the boys in Dickens' orphanage their worry is that the gruel is too thin. Poverty need not mean an impoverished idea about how society works and how we can make it better.

Ivan

The workfare state: enforcing the wages system (2005)

From the December 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The changes which have taken place in what passes for welfare provision in Britain over the course of the last two decades were analysed in a book by Chris Grover and John Stewart, The Work Connection: The Role of Social  Security in British Economic Regulation, that came out in 2002. Largely inspired by Marxist economics, it represented a lucid  account of a domain where the harsh economic realities of capitalist exploitation contradict the illusions of reformist politics.

In many ways these illusions were fed by the extraordinary ideological success of the post-war Beveridge reforms, frequently presented as the triumph of half a century of reformist action led by Liberal, Labour and – to a lesser extent – Tory administrations. Any remaining illusions are now being dissipated. What welfare coverage and rights existed in the immediate post-war period are now being whittled away or simply done away with in order to more closely serve the form of capital accumulation which is now on the agenda. This new ‘inevitability of gradualism’ – to use the term adopted by the Webbs – means more exploitation and fewer rights of access to the means of subsistence for anyone unfortunate enough to have to try to find work for a living.

There never was a golden age of the welfare state. The history of income maintenance in Britain has been the history of coercion, discipline and surveillance. As the first functioning capitalist country, England experienced the workhouse test, ‘less eligibility’ and the doctrine of ‘deterrent’. It’s still one of the most miserly and punitive ‘welfare systems’ in Western Europe, although the other European countries are now catching up. (New rules in France mean that workers on the dole have fewer rights to refuse poorly paid jobs, the same is happening in Germany and Spanish workers are forced to be more mobile in the search for work. Whether the government is right or left changes nothing.)

However, now a new layer of social control has been added since the advent of British ‘workfare’, a policy loosely based on American precedents. In the past, maintaining labour discipline was a fairly simple task. Unemployment insurance benefits tended to be low compared to average wage rates. In a buoyant job market, the only workers who wanted to stay on the dole for a long period were the genial layabouts of the claimants’ unions, people who were using benefits to finance studies on the sly, actors ‘resting’ between roles and artists etc. In this situation, it was relatively easy to identify workers who were dodging work although, in practice, control procedures against the so-called ‘scroungers’ were not applied systematically. Nobody really had an interest in staying on the dole for too long but some did, much to the horror of Daily Mail readers.

The situation has now changed considerably. Successive governments have been trying to lower the wage levels of unskilled and semi-skilled workers (so-called ‘entry-level’ jobs) putatively in order to combat inflation. American ideas about the so-called ‘underclass’ popularised in the highly toxic pseudo-sociology of Charles Murray have replaced the episodic scrounger-bashing campaigns orchestrated by the Tories in the 1970s and 80s. Thus, whereas in the past the unemployed (now known as ‘jobseekers’) could refuse offers of work which didn’t correspond to their levels of skill or even standard trade union rates, now they are hassled into poorly paid jobs as quickly as their legs can carry them. This, in itself, has a particularly depressing effect on wage levels especially in the more lowly-paid occupations.

To make this process go even faster both Conservative and Labour administrations have introduced benefits to workers in low-paid jobs (in-work benefits) modelled on the Family Income Supplement set up in 1971 by the appalling Keith (later Sir Keith) Joseph, a Thatcherite bovver-boy and closet eugenicist. Officially, in-work benefits provide incentives to unemployed people – pardon, ‘jobseekers’ – to take on poorly paid jobs and to leave the supposedly luxurious world of inactive welfare dependency. In actual fact, subsidies to low paid jobs tend to have a depressive effect on wages. Employers know that they can get the labour power they need for less cash, the state stepping in to make up the difference. And of course, the increase in the number of workers coming onto the labour market increases supply and lowers price.

All this continues unabated under New Labour, indeed, with many subtle and often cruel refinements. These include the fine combing of the population of the partially disabled and their gradual inclusion in the reserve army of labour and the particularly brutal treatment meted out to lone mothers. Of course, New Labour has introduced the national minimum wage albeit on an extremely low level. But this only means that over the long-term the depressive forces working on wage levels will result in the legal minimum becoming the maximum paid out for unskilled work, the trade unions having been weakened by two decades of legal meddling.

In the final analysis, welfare administration is really only the problem of policing the frontier between the reserve army of labour – people who are on hold for later exploitation – and the surplus population – people who are simply maintained at low cost outside of the labour market. ‘Labour market activation’ – the trendy term for these new policies – is really about making some formerly excluded workers available for a spot of exploitation. Social welfare policies don’t solve the underlying problem of capitalist exploitation. But then again who would ever look to the Labour Party or New Labour to solve that problem?

MM

Poverty — fiddling the books (1986)

From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Creative accountancy is something which, it is claimed (by accountants, of course) can rescue companies from bankruptcy. It has nothing to do with production (so no need to worry about strikes, shortage of components and the like) and nothing to do with sales (so no need to worry about Japanese competition). It is an imaginative, elegant restructuring of the books so that what were once shown as losses can now be shown as profits. This can sometimes be done through hiding real costs in the accounts, for example:

. . . the (first) nuclear programme was politically determined and exempted from CEGB rate of return tests. Without that exemption no nuclear power stations would have been ordered between 1958 and 1964. (Atomic Crossroads. John Valentine).

Another example came during the coal strike of 1984/5. when it was argued that a change in the accounting method would move many of the pits which the NCB wanted to close out of the red. The mind of the ordinary person in the street may well boggle at such esoteric, unproductive wizardry; it might also grasp how this exposes the central motivation for production under capitalism, how the very concept of profit is so obsessional that it has to be seen to be assuaged regardless of what actually goes on in the real, physical world where coal is physically dug out of the ground by real, living human beings.

We can see a similar unreality when we compare how election promises and party propaganda compare to what actually goes on in the world. This social system is characterised by some horrifying problems, many of them so outrageous that it is difficult to appreciate their full enormity How, for example, do we confront the fact that each year millions of people endure slow, tortured. degrading death through starvation while in EEC countries there is such a "surplus" of grain on the market that the British government are considering paying farmers up to £80 an acre to let their land lie fallow? How do we cope with the fact that the way capitalism uses nuclear power — Chernobyl was the most recent case in such a way that it threatens to blanket vast areas of the world under lethal radiation? How do we keep in proportion the fact that the nuclear powers have amassed enough destructive force to wipe us all out many times over and to leave the world in a condition which no sane person is likely to want to be alive in?

Such things can be accepted — they are accepted by tens of millions of workers — with a little help from the political equivalent of creative accountancy, in which reality becomes lost behind expediency. In some cases, the aim is to convince us that certain problems don’t exist. Unemployment, for example, is due to workers being unwilling to look for work. British nuclear power stations could not possibly blow up like Chernobyl, which everyone knows was made of substandard cardboard and elastic bands. The best medical care is freely available to even the poorest people in this country, which makes us all overflowing with health and vital energy. Of course there are a few matters which still trouble us but they will be dealt with — they are, in Thatcher's recent words, dragons yet to be slain. This style of argument looks good on the political balance sheets in election programmes, newspaper articles, speeches to the party faithful.

This technique has been applied with special vigour and skill to the issue of poverty. First, there is the attempt to convince us that poverty has been wiped out; it was a problem. it is conceded, in the days when the hunger marchers came down from the idle pits and shipyards and when miners were photographed scratching desolately on slag heaps. But things are different now. with millions of cars choking the roads, millions of homes wallowing in the luxury of TV sets, washing machines, microwave ovens . . . Children are better fed, better clothed, than ever. Pensioners, who were once in so desperate a plight that they formed their own pressure group, can now survive comfortably on their benefits, topped up with lunch clubs, charity outings and so on.

However, in the face of these complacent assurances, the poverty lobby persists in churning out facts about the suffering of people who exist on the barest minimum people who are malnourished, who dress in jumble sale cast-offs, who are under the extremities of stress. When the evidence to show that this is happening is too compelling to be denied, another technique is applied, which allows an admission that the problem exists but asserts that it can easily be solved with some adjustments in state benefits or by fiddling with tax thresholds and rates. This is what the Labour Party meant, when they claimed in their 1974 election manifesto that they would ". . .  eliminate poverty wherever it exists in Britain . . . achieve far greater equality of income, wealth and living standards..."

That was a very ambitious promise and since then both Labour and Tory governments have had their chance to bring it to reality. And what have they been able to do? In Britain today something like nine million people — about one sixth of the population live at or below the official poverty line, that is to say at or below the level of Supplementary Benefit. (It is not possible to be any more exact about the numbers because the last official count to be made public was taken in 1981, since when there has been a convenient official silence in the matter; however we do know that since 1981 more than a million people have been added to those on Supplementary Benefit). To put this into proportion, it should be stated what this poverty level is. A single person gets Supplementary Benefit of £29.50 a week; a couple £47.85; a family with two children £68.05, with housing costs paid separately. Not surprisingly. there is some feeling that a more realistic measure of poverty would be rather higher, say 40 per cent above Supplementary Benefit. This would increase the numbers in official poverty to about 15 million, or one in four of the population.

Apart from the official line, there are many ideas about what constitutes poverty. Keith Joseph thought that it is not being able to afford to eat (perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Joseph once preferred to dine on a slice of wrapped British Rail fruit cake - the kind of eccentricity that only the rich can safely indulge). In fact, malnutrition is by no means unknown to people on Supplementary Benefit. Mrs L has five children between 11 years and nine months; her husband is disabled and unemployed and can't lose the drink habit he developed when he was a building worker. Their home reeks of material decay and of despair. Mrs L subsists on a diet of tea and apathy. Then there is Mr J who was a factory manager, many years ago, until the strain of his job pushed him into a mental breakdown and wrecked his marriage. He lives alone now with his anxieties and his bitter memories of the days when he could at least afford to pay the bills. He is, quite simply, starving to death. People like this are beset with advice, from Norman Tebbit's caustic goadings to social workers' desperate attempts to get Mr L to give up his drinking, Mr J to balance his meagre benefits against the costs of living. Against the inexorable effects of poverty, they are fighting a losing battle. In 1984 nearly a million council tenants were behind with their rent, to the tune of about £240 million; 1.5 million electricity users and over one million gas users are currently in serious difficulty over paying their fuel bills; nearly 11,000 people had homes which were described as "theirs" repossessed through mortgage arrears in 1985 — a fourfold increase since 1979. These symptoms are such as can be costed, recorded, put into statistical tables. Less calculable are the other, equally devastating effects of deep poverty — the inability to afford adequate clothes, or decent furniture, or a warm home in winter, or a holiday, or an outing . . .

In one degree or another these deficiencies, or the fear of them, exert a constant pressure on the entire working class — on everyone who depends on employment to live. There is however another group of people who can fall sick, or drink more than is good for them, without descending into unmanageable destitution. The present John Paul Getty suffers from a persistent disorder in his blood circulation; for the past 18 months he has been staying at the London Clinic, where it costs at least £200 a day to be a patient. This is no problem to Getty for his weekly income is in excess of £1 million. The Duke of Westminster recently suffered a reduction in his income, not because he was ill and off work but as a result of the 1967 Leasehold Reform Act which, the Duke complains. has cost his estate about £2½ million in income. There is no need to feel sorry for the Duke, or to offer him considerate advice for he is the richest man in England but we might speculate on the scale of ownership of the means of life which is required to produce an income of £2½ million and reflect that that is only a part of which the Duke owns and a fraction of his income.

Poverty is persistent because it springsfrom the existence of two classes in society — one which includes Getty and the Duke, who own the means of wealth production and distribution, and the other which includes Mrs L and Mr J who don’t own them. This second class needs to be in employment in order to live. When they are in work (although they often tell themselves that they are not impoverished) they receive wages which in general, overall terms amount to about enough to reproduce their working abilities. If for any reason they can't command a wage — if they are out of work or disabled or mentally ill or a single parent — they quickly slide down to the lower reaches of poverty where their very health is at immediate risk. Poverty can't be abolished unless something is done about the way society is organised at its basis. Reforms which promise an end to poverty at the most change its shape, or rearrange its emphasis, or shift its burden from one group of workers to another.

This is what has happened in recent years. The whole system of what is mis-called social security was based on the assumption that unemployment would never again amount to much and that workers who were in work would earn enough to fulfil the modest expectations about their standard of living without any state benefits. One consequence of this was that pensioners were relegated to the lower levels of poverty; in the early 1970s they made up a little over 50 per cent of Britain's worst-off people. There was much doleful debate, during the 1950s and 1960s, about the increase in the numbers of pensioners and about whether "the country" could "afford" to pay out more and more in benefits to them. And then the recession came to change the picture. In 1981 unemployment was said to be responsible for nearly three million people being at or below the official poverty line and was exerting a downward pressure on the wages of those in work. Nearly one million employed workers in Britain earn less than what the European Social Charter specifies as the "decency" wage and over a third of all adults off dally classified as being in poverty are families where the "head" is in full-time employment. Pensioners have now be superseded, as the worst sufferers from poverty, by couples, with or without children, who are in work.

Reformists and pressure groups, in which capitalism abounds, tell us that there is great merit in this shifting of the burden of poverty from one group of workers to another while the capitalist class enjoy their privileged riches. Some years ago, for example, there was a heated debate about whether allowance should be paid by voucher to the mother or to the father by means of an "income tax allowance". It was, as we say, a heated debate — so hot that it shrivelled the important issue of why workers should bother about so trivial an adjustment in their poverty. But the reformers had their way. As long as the working class allow this to continue their poverty, which cruelly represses them, degrades them and often kills them, will continue and the issue of creatively  ending it will not be confronted.

Ivan

Spending challenge (2010)

From the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

To prepare the cuts announced on 20 October the Treasury issued a “Spending Challenge” on its website for members of the public to suggest savings. Here’s a socialist reply.

The capitalist system has become obsolete for most purposes. It cannot prevent large numbers of the world’s population from experiencing worsening deprivation and misery. This includes Britain, where we face deteriorating living standards as the rich capitalist minority require governments to keep cracking down on the working class majority so that their pig troughs are kept as full as possible. The incomes of the many will keep being squeezed by whichever government is in office so that the incomes of the few on top can be protected and increased. Politicians will tell us all that is needed is better money management, and no doubt, some members of the public will fall for this, and go along with monetary cuts directed against others in their own (working) class.

In reality, what is needed is something that will strike most people as being bizarre and scary when they first hear it. A complete end to money, and the outdated capitalist system that requires it! Here’s a surprising fact. We, the working class majority, do NOT need money to produce all the goods and services that a modern society requires. Only capitalists need money to carry out their exploitation of those able to work and everyone else.

If we reject capitalism and money, and choose a new system (“moneyless real socialism”), how would the jobs that need doing get done? Well, when we are all the direct collective owners of the means of production and distribution (factories, farmland, power stations, rail systems, sources of raw materials etc) we will also collectively own everything that is produced and provided. The food produced in factories and on farms will be ours. The electricity from the power stations will be ours. The trains will be ours. Iron ore and all the other minerals mined from the planet will be ours. You do not have to buy what’s already your property, and therefore, everything that we have to pay for today will be freely available. Obviously, the work will still have to be done, but by doing so, everyone will have the right to a home of their own, the right to take whatever they need from shops (this will not result in blind greed because taking more than is needed will then be daft and pointless), everyone will be entitled to free travel, free medical care and education of the highest standard possible, and much more.

Won’t we have to work far harder? Absolutely not. The opposite, in fact. In Britain alone, there are millions of people doing fundamentally useless money-related jobs only necessary under capitalism (making money, manufacturing cash machines, sales, insurance, welfare benefits, banking, accountancy, debt recovery etc). When capitalism and money are dumped, all these millions of people will then become available to contribute something of real benefit to society. Furthermore, without money- related problems, arguments and crimes, many more people involved in policing, prison work, social work, solicitors, courts etc will also be freed up to contribute. All these millions of extra people, added to the millions of unemployed not wanted by capitalist employers, will mean that the average working week will be considerably shorter than it is now.

Money is not the answer. It, and the outdated system that requires it, is the problem. We need a new economic system, and moneyless real socialism is the only option.

Max Hess