Coping with the car (1964)

From the January 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of these days, we have been told by Mr. Marples, we’re going to wake up wondering what's hit us. In rather more elegant language, and at much greater length, the Buchanan report has warned us of the same thing. What is going to hit us, both literally and metaphorically, is the motor car.

Only recently the inhabitants of Kingston on Thames were given a foretaste of what Mr. Marples meant when one Saturday afternoon the whole of the town came to a complete standstill. For a couple of hours no vehicle could get into the town and nothing could get out. The panicky thought even occurred to some of those marooned, apparently, that they never were going to get out.

Is this really what is in store for us? Is the motor vehicle really going to end by overwhelming our cities, wiping out community life, completely dominating our existence? Or will capitalism, which has generated the monster, be finally forced to come to terms with it? And is it really capable of doing this? Are we to be impressed by Buchanan, or is he going to go the way of all the other Utopians up against the harsh realities of private interests and individual ownership? Let us consider a few facts first.

At the beginning of 1963, there were about eight million four-wheeled motor vehicles on this country’s roads; by the end of if, they will have been joined by another million. Estimates are for 13 million in 1970, and for 20 million by 1980, an average of one for every three people or one for every 20 yards of road (actually less since the population is concentrated into certain areas and not evenly spread). All this is prophecy, of course, and one hefty slump in a year or two's time could knock all these figures for six. But the essential problem has already posed itself and will only get worse unless it is dealt with one way or another.

This headlong development is not peculiar to this country. France already has nine million vehicles and will have increased on this number by a further half million by the end of the year; , with a much larger area the problem is not so far quite so acute, but Paris has even worse traffic jams than London, and the other big towns will soon be as bad. Germany will probably have 8½ million vehicles soon and Italy 4 million; many of the smaller European countries have traffic densities at least the equal of, and sometimes greater than, their bigger neighbours.

Far in excess of all of them, of course, is the United States, with the fantastic total of 80 million vehicles. The effects of this are, however, localised and in many areas one measures the number of square miles to the car and not the other way round. But the problem is no easier in the built-up areas where most of the population is concentrated, in fact, it is often much worse. Los Angeles, and similar towns, stand as terrible warnings of what the unrestrained advance of the motor car can do to man and his way of life.

At the same time, the car manufacturers of the world are busily expanding output, installing new plant, going in for more and more automation, opening up new factories. Spurred on by state financial aid and other encouragement, Ford go to Liverpool, Rootes to Linwood, Citroen to Rennes, Renault to Caen and Le Havre, Volkswagen to Emden; so linked has the motor industry become to the general health of modern capitalism that governments hardly dare interfere to control its booms and fall over themselves to stimulate it out of its slumps.

Whole industries have become its subsidiaries. Sheet steel and rubber are its hangers-on, petroleum pays it homage. It feeds upon vast quantities of glass, paint, plastics, chrome, and electrical equipment; it requires huge investment in heavy plant and machine tools. When the internal combustion engine misfires, the whole of capitalism begins to cough; when it is turning over well, the economy feels buoyant.

So far the motor vehicle has carried all before it. But the problem now threatening capitalism and its governments is how to reconcile this ever-increasing production with the need to keep the products on the move. Even its die-hard supporters can see the absurdity of turning loose hundreds of thousands of additional cars on to roads where the traffic already can hardly turn. Yet capitalism is on the horns of a real dilemma—how to impose restrictions on the car (which to be effective will need to be drastic) without disastrous repercussions on the industry itself.

Capitalism's Sacred Cow

In spite of all the evils and inconveniences it has brought in the way of noise, noxious fumes, dirt, nervous frustration, congestion, economic waste, death and injury from accidents, the car has so far had things pretty much its own way. It has become capitalism’s sacred cow, which nobody has been allowed to hinder or harm. Over the years it has steadily been allowed to reduce the public transport services to a joke and a travesty, and nobody has dared raise a hand to stop it.

The United States has always believed itself to be a step ahead of the motor vehicle (in contrast to this country which has always been a step behind it), but the net result, in the towns, at any rate, has not been very different. Driving magnificent motorways into the towns seemed a wonderful idea at the time, but all they did was to attract even more traffic and congest the centres still further. In the interests of the car, the Americans have assassinated their towns as decent, pleasant places to live in. Los Angeles has spread itself into a vast, inhuman sprawl over thousands of square miles; only now, after spending thousands of millions of dollars on super highways is it belatedly trying to put right its mistake with a new public transport system.

In this country and most of Western Europe the crunch has still to come, but it is not very far away. After the meters come the devices for charging for using road space—all very ingenious but a wonderful example of the fundamental idiocy of capitalism. The Buchanan report puts forward all sorts of inspiring ideas but one of the first very mundane things Mr. Marples is going to use it for is to provide independent weighty backing to his plans for restriction.

We referred to the idiocy of capitalism and it is true. Hundreds of thousands of cars, each taking up about 70 square feet of road space to carry seldom more than one passenger, crawl into our cities between certain fixed times in the morning, and crawl out again at another fixed period in the evening. It is only matched in idiocy by the way in which the urban public transport systems are geared to millions of commuters doing the same thing by bus, train, and tube. Many of these same commuters have themselves left a car in the garage taking up useful space at home or littering the streets, a car which they probably never take out on a journey worthy of the name more than once a week, plus the fine week-ends in the summer when they sally forth en masse to join the traffic jams, and the annual holiday when they often meet the same thing. The situation certainly has its ironies, as well. It is hardly more than ten to fifteen years ago that no Socialist meeting could go its allotted span without some questioner asking “And what are you going to do if everybody wants a motor-car under Socialism?," the implication being that there would never be enough to go round and matters would end in a mad free-for-all. How far away those days seem now! Today we are hardly asked the question—nobody questions that production will be a problem.

Capitalism itself has in fact already solved the problem of the production of the motor-car. Its real problem today is how to cope with what it has produced; how to reconcile social production with individual ownership. Its politicians, its experts, its planners, all accept without question that whatever else may happen the cars must still come rolling off the assembly lines in their millions. The Buchanan report puts forward the most grandiose schemes, all to deal with 13 million cars by 1970 and even 20 million by 1980; a BBC discussion on the report mentioned a figure of £9,000 million for town rebuilding alone and everybody seemed to think that that was quite normal to allow half a nation of car-drivers to go from one side of a town to the other or to stop half way through to do the shopping. And as for the really revolutionary suggestion—the one that would operate under Socialism—that perhaps we already had enough cars and that all that was necessary was for them to be utilised sensibly as a supplementary to a comfortable, convenient and generally well-run public transport service, this side of the equation was obviously not thought of, let alone considered.

The fact is that the cars will continue to roll from the assembly lines but that capitalism’s governments will do only so much to accommodate them as the necessities of private property will allow. Most of the Buchanan proposals, for example, will probably be quietly shelved; the government has already turned a cold eye on the suggestion that land for road schemes should be compulsorily acquired at a “reasonable price,” and hardly anybody believes that much of the drastic re-planning mentioned in the report will ever be realised.

What we shall probably get, as is usually the case, is a hotchpotch of a compromise that will ease the system where it is being pinched hardest with the rest left to look after itself as best it can. There will be restrictions in one form or another to keep the city centres reasonably free for commercial traffic and give essential services, such as getting the workers to work, more scope to operate. No doubt, also as usual, the wealthy will find ways round the permits and licences, and the charges will be chalked up with all their other odd financial items on the side against business expenses. Priority will also certainly be given to such things as motorways to carry capitalism's merchandise more quickly and thus more cheaply. But anything to do primarily with making our cities convenient and safe places to move about in, beautiful places to look at, and enjoyable places generally in which to live, will be well down the list of priorities. In other words, little is going to be done to rid us of the noise, the noxious fumes, the congestion, the waste of resources, the deaths and injuries, we mentioned earlier; indeed, they will probably become worse.

In short, we see little prospect of capitalism coping with the car, save perhaps in the sense that it will have to intervene to some extent to save itself from being strangled economically. And, to judge by the way it has been setting about the job so far, it looks as though it will not do even this too successfully either.

Where are you going? We may well ask. But wherever it is, or wherever you think it is, you're not going to find the car much of an asset.

Stan Hampson

Increasing Crime (1964)

From the January 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crime is one of the many scars upon the face of the so-called Affluent Age. And it is a scar which year by year grows ever more angry and disfiguring. Amid the increasing number of cars, washing machines, television sets, and so on, the crime graph also keeps on rising.

In 1961, the number of people in England and Wales found guilty of indictable offences was 11.5 per cent above that for 1960; and in 1962 the number was 11.8 per cent, up on 1961. There were 896,484 indictable offences known to the police during 1962, which is about double the figure for 1953. The largest proportionate increases were in those offences broadly known as “dishonest”—breaking and entering, receiving, fraud, and so on. The Metropolitan Police estimate the value of property which was the subject of petty thefts in their area alone as over £11 million for 1962.

It is the same sort of story for crimes of violence, although these showed only a slight increase over the past year. Even so, the two years since 1960 saw an increase in indictable crimes of violence of about twenty-five per cent., from 2,536 to 3,160. Eleven more murders were known to have been committed than in 1961, when the total was 132. Sexual offences were a little down last year.

These figures are gloomy enough, but gloomier yet is the fact that the steepest increase in crime is among young people. During 1962, the number of boys between the ages of fourteen and seventeen convicted of indictable offences rose by 8.2 per cent, and that for girls of the same age by 13.9 per cent. Proportionately twice as many male juveniles, and three times as many female juveniles, are found guilty of such charges as before the war. This rise has been pretty consistent over the past ten years, after a decline in juvenile crime from 1952 to 1954.

Naturally, every government regards crime as a serious problem. The inherent exploitation of capitalism has been well described as legal robbery, robbery committed within capitalism’s rules. But those who try illegal robbery—the sort which is outside the rules—are an obvious threat to whatever social and economic stability capitalism has. That is why—and not for any reasons of morality— capitalism fights crime.

Apart from this, crime is an expensive business. Courts, police forces, prisons and the rest cost a lot of money. One estimate of the yearly cost of keeping a boy at an approved school in Derbyshire put it higher than that of sending him to Eton—£639 against £554. Lord Stonham, who is President of the Prison Reform Council, recently complained that £60 million a year is spent upon keeping men in prison ". . . and only £250,000 a year trying to keep them out.”

Why does crime flourish? The government complain that there are not enough policemen to keep it in check. The police force in England and Wales is nearly 6,000 men below its authorised establishment, although this establishment itself is well below the actual requirement, bearing in mind the growth of population and increasing jobs which have been given to the police. By this standard, the Metropolitan Police alone is probably about 6,000 men short. This shortage may have contributed to the growing proportion of unsolved crimes—56 per cent. of the total in 1962.

Some so-called experts have blamed mounting crime onto the after effects of the war, or upon the restlessness of youngsters who, in the days of conscription, knew that they were shortly to waste a couple of years in the Forces. Time itself, with the relentlessly rising crime wave, has destroyed these theories although, of course, they have been replaced by others. It is now fashionable to put the blame onto the frustrations of full employment, telemania and the other features of life in the Sixties. In his recent book Crime and the Social Structure, Mr. J. B. Mays, who has had a lot of experience as a Liverpool youth club leader, says:

   It is not so much that the social structure, as such, forces people to become delinquents as that it makes it much more likely in cases where individuals fail, for a whole variety of reasons, to make a success of their lives as success is defined by normally accepted values. Crime is to such people an alternative road to achievement.

Now there may, or may not, be some sort merit in these explanations, at any rate as far as the immediate cause of a particular crime may go. But they are at best only temporarily valid; we are looking for something more permanent.

“The law in its majesty,” said Anatole France, “permits rich and poor alike to sleep under the railway bridges.” Put another way, one could ask how often does one find a millionaire up before the Magistrates accused of stealing. The property basis of society and the property basis of crime really do not brook of much argument. One need but recite a list of the crimes that spring most readily to mind—murder, theft, robbery, fraud, larceny—and, apart/from the first one, it is abundantly clear that they are all merely ringing the changes on one theme, namely, the taking away of the private property of an owner. (Even in the case of murder, a large proportion of such crimes are linked with taking of property in one way or another.)

Capitalism is a comparatively recent phase of human society whereas we know from such things as the “thou shalt not steal” commandment of the bible that crime was a problem in ancient society as well. But always in a property society. In those primitive societies in which property was owned in common and where there were not even words for the concepts of “mine” and “thine” (and it is remarkable how few people realise that the kind of property society which we have today did not exist from time immemorial) what basis for crime within the community could possibly exist?

The fact is that capitalism is stiff with crime and criminals because it is, if you look deeply enough into the matter, a criminal system. It is a system in which the mass of the people are forced to submit to daylight robbery every time they receipt of wages signifies that the recipient has done a surplus amount of work which the employer appropriates for nothing (else why should he employ anyone at all?). And it is to protect the ownership by the few of the means of production, and of the harvest of surplus value which they yield, that the majesty of the law exists.

But, it might be argued, it is only fair that those who own should reap the benefit of their owning. Whence then does the owning class derive its title to the possession of the earth? Obviously not by any law of nature. As the men of the Peasants’ Revolt in the Middle Ages put it: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” They had a clearer idea than workers have today of the dictum of Proudhon, the contemporary of Marx: “All property is theft” Human society did not start with an owning class and a propertyless class. A process of robbery had to take place so that the latter class should be stripped of their share of the earth. And it did not all take place in the mists of ancient history either. As a book recently published points out, in quite recent times the clansmen of vast areas of Scotland were driven—even burned—out of the glens they and their forbears had inherited for centuries by the very chieftains whose kinsmen they believed themselves to be. And this is a story that has been repeated over the centuries all over the world.

The whole capitalist system being based on a crime, it can hardly be surprising that there is such a proliferation of what are legally known as crimes. We live in a society where the ones who are looked up to are those who can live in luxury out of the proceeds of the work of others without themselves being called on to do any useful work at all. In a society whose motto is acquisitiveness and whose slogan is “I’m all right Jack ” nothing could be more natural than that a proportion of the wage slaves should try and emulate their betters by finding a means of enjoying the good things of life without working. And in a world where periodically it becomes not only permitted but a duty to steal and burn and kill in the wars of the master class it is clearly not so easy to keep “morals” in the convenient pigeon-holes that would suit our rulers.

Perhaps a suitably cynical conclusion to this article could be provided by mentioning that yet another committee has been recently set up to enquire into the causes of crime with the Home Secretary himself as chairman. But it is safe to assume that they will not reach the one conclusion which will make their deliberations worthwhile. We will eliminate crime only when we eliminate capitalism.

L. E. Weidberg

The Road Ahead (1964)

From the January 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

The case for Socialism rests upon the fact that the capitalist social system cannot provide a decent life for its people and that, in the interests of those people, it should make way for the next stage in social evolution.

It is true to say that man has developed sufficient technical and productive capacity to sustain a social system in which wealth is freely available to all human beings. Capitalism itself has removed the barrier of low-productivity.

The one remaining obstacle to Socialism is the fact that the working class, who make up the majority of the population of the modern world, are not Socialists. Many of them have never heard our case and of those who have heard it most have rejected it. One of the irritations of being a Socialist is that the reasons for this rejection are too often rooted in ignorance—are, in fact, little more than transparent illusions. Many workers, with the tumult of capitalism raging about their heads, prefer to take comfort in these illusions rather than face the facts.

It is, then, part of a Socialist's job to do his best to destroy illusions. This is not necessarily work in which we take great pleasure; there are sickenly too many illusions for that. It is simply work which must be done.

The idea that the working class today are prosperous, and that capitalism holds out a comfortable future for them, must be examined and shown up for what it is worth. The facts on work, housing, health, material possessions, and so on, must be publicised and—especially important—put into their proper perspective. It must be pointed out that capitalism is a social system in which the owning minority will always live off the best while the working majority exist off the mediocre.

The prospects which capitalism offers must be examined. They are not attractive.

The history of the working class has, inevitably, been one of superficial change. Nobody can deny—nobody would want to deny—that working class conditions have changed since the war. What can be questioned is whether those changes have always been for the better and whether those which might have been for the better are not outbalanced by others which have been for the worse.

This is the question which the preceding articles have put. If they do not make pleasant reading it is only because capitalism is still as full of urgent problems and discords as ever. Crime is still a running sore—worse than ever in recent years. Some illnesses—those that are typical of the rush and strain of post war capitalism—are increasing and have replaced the old killers which were characteristic of the days of unemployment. Popular cultural levels can never have been lower. And so on.

What this means is that, no matter how much capitalism changes, it remains the same. Workers are continually being deluded by plausible politicians who promise them that, if they will work harder, restrain their wage claims, and so on. they will soon enter the Promised Land of peace and plenty. Behind the delusion is the implied promise that capitalism is a system in which every prospect pleases.

In fact, it is always the prospects alone which can be made to sound attractive. The reality--the present—is never so good; that is why the politicians must always allude to the present as a sort of pause before the golden future.

It is all an illusion. Capitalism has no future to offer the mass of its people. The one solution to society’s problems is the establishment of i new social order—Socialism—in which the means of producing and distributing the world’s wealth will be owned by the world’s people. The work of the Socialist Party of Great Britain is to spread the understanding and knowledge which Socialism requires.

This month’s Socialist Standard asks the working class: Where Are You Going? The future depends on your answer.

Editorial: Where are you going? (1964)

Editorial from the January 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

If there is one idea which is firmly held by the majority of people in this country it is that they are now better off than ever before. In this, they are supported on all sides, by newspapers, television, and so on. The result of this, to take one example, is that the years between the wars are remembered as a time of hardship, unemployment and, in many countries, of political dictatorship. There is now a spate of books with the theme that the First World War was a futile, bloody business which cleverer, less avaricious leaders could have avoided. The obvious corollary of this concept of the past as a time of dark misfortune is that of the present as a time of bright opportunity. And this is now a very popular idea.

The first thing to be said about this idea is that it has always been popular. Whatever their conditions, people have always been convinced that they were a sight better off than in the past. The Twenties and Thirties were supposed to be years of enlightenment, in which the hardships and prejudices of Victorian England had been finally cast aside. Victorian England was itself supposed to be a place in which the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were coming to fruition. Society at large has always regarded itself as lucky to be living in its present and has been glad not to have been living in its past

The years since the war have been devoted to this idea. The commonest picture—the adman’s picture, perhaps—of a member of the working class, in England in the Sixties, is of a bright, smooth young man who lives in a gracious house in a leafy suburb, has a charming, intelligent wife and a couple of children who will obviously one day make a name for themselves at University. This young man has a smart car, the latest furniture and clothes. His tastes are impeccably up to date. He has a well-paid job, and one with prospects. He is a man with a background—and with a future. Every line on his face, every hair on his head, shrieks of a comfortable, secure, modern living free from the disabilities of a discredited past.

Well, what is the truth of this?

This issue of the Socialist Standard sets out to take a look, at the beginning of another year, at the working class. It examines their working conditions, their education, their health, the pace at which they live. It takes a look at the way in which they spend their time off and are entertained. It poses some facts and some questions on problems like crime, which are as much a part of the Sixties as the adman’s smooth talk. And it puts the question to the working class: Where Are You Going?

This question can be stated in many ways. Are working conditions really improving? What is happening to our health? Is modern education any good, and is it freely available to all of us? Can crime be eliminated, and if so, how? These questions, and many others, can be summarised into one enormous, overriding issue. Can capitalism give us the sort of life, the health, the abundance, the security, which all human beings should have? Can it offer the prospects of future security which a humane social system would take as a matter of course?

The so-called social surveys can never answer these questions, which probe into the very roots of private property society. Only a Socialist can ask whether the class ownership of society's means of wealth production is the best way of running human affairs, or whether it is wasteful and vicious and inhumane. It is by examining the lives of the people who work and suffer and, tragically, vote for capitalism that this question can be answered. This, within its limits, is what this month’s Socialist Standard offers. And behind the articles we publish is the biggest issue now facing the world working class.

Capitalism or Socialism? Where Are You Going?