What housing shortage? (1978)

From the March 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Listeners to the LBC 'phone-in on Sunday 23rd January (afternoon programme) were doubtless delighted to hear "Bill of Balham".

A lady rang in to complain that her daughter could not buy a flat in West Kensington because she had been priced out by "Arabs". "This neighbourhood is fast becoming 'Saudi Arabia'" she moaned.

Then it was "Bill's" turn. In a quiet, flat expressionless tone and in a Cockney accent you could cut with a knife, he proceeded to demolish Madame West Kensington. 'Housing shortage! What housing shortage?' quoth he. It is estimated, says he, that there are between 40 and 50,000 hotel bedrooms empty in London to-night; and there are thousands sleeping rough.

'It's not shortage of houses, but shortage of money' claims Bill. 'Now' says Bill (and this is what made his contribution) 'the great majority will never have the money because they work for wages'. 'Nothing but the abolition of the wages system can solve it'.

Actually, when asked by the interviewing broadcaster Bryn Jones, he added 'I completely support the position of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. I'm not a member, I've never been to any of their meetings, but they're absolutely right'.

'But, says the interviewer, 'you mean the abolition of capitalism'.

'That's right' says Bill, 'capitalism and the wages system are the same thing'.

Then he added 'These SPGB people never have a chance to put their point of view, I believe they did have an hour once on your programme? L.B.C., which is probably where I heard them.

'Now', says Bryn Jones (the interviewer) 'would it surprise if I say I entirely agree with you?'

'Not at all' says Bill, 'because it's right!'

However that may be, it certainly surprises us. Mr. Jones is so far removed from some of the boozy, incoherent oafs who have the impudence to pose as authorities on things they know nothing about, on radio phone-ins, as to be quite exceptional.

Horatio

All in the mind (1977)

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

People travelling on the Hammersmith Line can read the slogan on this month's cover of the Socialist Standard, painted on the side of the overhead motorway, every time their train passes between Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park stations. Very few of them even notice it as they worry about what the day at work will bring, try to relax from the tensions of that day on the way home, or try to "get away from it all" for a few minutes by turning to the sports pages of their papers.

To-day, although great advances have been made in eliminating or controlling illnesses like TB, one-third of all National Health Service beds are filled by people with mental illnesses. In addition, over 20,000 go to hospital for the whole day each day for treatment, plus nearly a quarter of a million who visit out-patient departments to see a psychiatrist. In fact, mental illness is the greatest single medical problem to-day. In publishing these figures, the National Association for Mental Health makes the point that they only represent identified (their italics) mental ill health which is being treated in some way.

The most usual reasons for mental illness are stated to be "the stress placed on us by an urban, competitive society. Stress is an integral part of our jobs, of growing up, of marriage, of being poor, of bereavement". The case-histories quoted vary as widely as the man who could not cope when he was "overpromoted", to the frustrated woman who became chronically "over houseproud"; from whose who resort to drink and drugs (in themselves an opting out of the "real" world) to the inadequate sexual partner.

The world of "Pop" has just mourned the death at the age of 42 of its idol, Elvis Presley. Before him, Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland died in similar circumstances. Nearer home, Tony Hancock, whose sad-faced comedy always had relevance to the day-to-day life of the "ordinary" man, could not bear the pressures of his own life. Their names were famous; their untimely end mourned by many, Their deaths have been attributed to the same basic reason as that of the man next door who could not face his problems any longer. Although by the money standards set by to-day's society they were at opposite ends of the scale, they had this in common—they succumbed because they could not deal, or come to terms, with the pressures if the system under which we live—capitalism.

There is a pleasant Jewish greeting "I wish you well", but we say to you, fellow members of the working class: while you have capitalism, it will remain a wish. When we have got rid of the world-wide system responsible—directly or indirectly—for almost all the mental illness to-day, there will no longer be any need for "Mental Health Week" or, indeed, for the National Association for Mental Health. Then, and only then, will that greeting have real meaning.

Eva Goodman 

No shortage of water - only a shortage of greedy people! (1976)

From the October 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are three common myths advanced by opponents of our proposal for free access to all that is produced by society. These are:

1. That there is a limited amount of wealth or 'cake' which can be divided up between society. As a result:
2. Socialism means the division into equal shares of this cake, and
3. since man is inherently greedy he will naturally want more than his "share."

These arguments can be shown to be fallacious by looking at them in the context of the current water "shortage". The word shortage is deliberately placed in inverted commas since, whilst there is a shortage of water compared to previous years, the present problem is merely one of collecting it. In a recent Guardian Special Report (30th July 1976) it was pointed out that an average six times the amount of water consumed, falls on the British Isles. And, as with everything under capitalism, the consideration is one of cost or profit. (A new reservoir scheme in Northumberland alone will cost £60 million.)

To return to myth number one. It is true that under capitalism the amount of wealth produced — be it water, houses or food — is restricted to what the market can afford. But in a Socialist society without money these things will be produced to meet the needs, not of a market, but of society. And since, contrary to myth number two, Socialism does not mean sharing the existing "cake" but taking according to one's needs, the needs of society will be determined by the needs of the people who make up society.

The third myth, that man is inherently greedy, can be exposed by looking at the results of the emergency water cuts in one of the worst affected areas, south Wales, where a daily 13 hour (7 p.m. to 8 a.m.) cut has been introduced. The Sunday Times (8th August 1976) reported that during the first two days of the cuts, " . . . consumption went up with a bang because people filled their baths and every tin they could put their hands on every night."

But: "On the third day demand dropped when people realised they were not using the stored water and began to syphon off a more realistic amount to see them through the night. After three weeks the saving has risen to 30 per cent." It would seem therefore that the only shortage is a shortage of greedy people!

In a world where enough wealth can and will be produced to satisfy everyone's needs people will take what they require as easily, freely and unconsciously as they (normally) take a glass of water.

Paul Moody

Disappearing Man (1975)

Book Review from the November 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Strange Case of Victor Grayson, by Reg Groves. Pluto Press, £2.

The tale of Victor Grayson's disappearance used to appear regularly in such series as "The World's Strangest Stories", flavoured by the possibility that somewhere he might still be alive. The idea can now be dismissed — it is ninety-four years since Grayson was born; this book assembles the facts of his life and political career.

Grayson was one of the figures thrown up by the pre-1914 Labour movement. Beginning in chapels and street-corner meetings in Manchester, he emerged as an outstanding young orator. The Colne Valley Labour League chose him as their candidate in the by-election of 1907; to everyone's astonishment Grayson was elected to Parliament, at twenty-five. The ILP and the Labour Party had refused to endorse his candidature, because it crossed their arrangements with the Liberals. Preaching a fiery radicalism which centred on demands for measures to deal with mass unemployment, he was continually at odds with the parliamentary Labour leaders.

After losing his seat, he joined with H. M. Hyndman and Robert Blatchford in forming the British Socialist Party — it was only a change of name by the Social Democratic Federation. However, personal failings had already taken hold of Grayson: in particular, drink. He still attracted large audiences, but it was never certain he would turn up. In 1915 he went to New Zealand, where eventually he joined the army and thus returned to England. His disappearance followed some dabbling in Irish politics and in the question of the sale of titles by Lloyd George; Reg Groves links it with a political agent named Maundy Gregory, who was in the latter affair.

One interesting aspect of the book is its account of the wheeling and dealing by Keir Hardie, Snowden and others to preserve their alliances or their ambitions, or both. It is a pity that Reg Groves has let his own political romanticism run away with the story in respects which are not essential to it, such as claiming that Grayson was "the first and last man ever to be elected to Parliament as a socialist". He was nothing of the kind: he was a brilliant and passionate demagogue, but a reformist who ended by supporting the 1914-18 war as did the men he condemned.

Likewise, Grayson's criticisms of the House of Commons are extended into a theory that he was destroyed by the "fraud" of parliamentary action and would have been saved by syndicalism. This is absurd, and the writer should think again about the implications of facts he himself gives. Nevertheless, the book is worth anyone's reading for its picture of a curious and tragic political figure, his contemporaries and times.

Robert Barltrop 

Short Cut to Nowhere (1974)

From the August 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

"I do not expect to be still alive at Christmas!" This dramatic message was delivered to a crowd of Saturday afternoon shoppers. The speaker then urged her audience to write to their MPs, to Khrushchev and to Kennedy, imploring them to ban nuclear weapons. For this was Autumn 1961 and The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was flourishing.

Eagerly I approached a CND supporter and introduced myself as a Socialist. Warmly greeted, I was handed a leaflet, with the assurance that CND drew its support from all shades of political — and non political — opinion. I quickly expressed my opposition to all war and was introduced to a Pacifist. Then I pointed out that to campaign against particular weapons whilst supporting the social system that gave rise to wars  . . . But the Pacifist had turned away and my erstwhile friend of the leaflets had moved on!

They had no time to listen to Socialist ideas. The fear of nuclear war, the dangers involved even in testing the horrific weapons, made it imperative to "get something done now." However the road from Aldermaston proved not to be a short cut, even to arms limitation, but a blistering dead end.

More than a dozen years have passed since I stood rejected at the edge of that High Street meeting. The recent British underground Nuclear test underlines the fact that these weapons, and the threat of war (plus actual conflict) are still around. Still in fact a cause for urgent concern. But where is CND?

It is a familiar story. The Socialist case was turned down because of an overwhelming concern with a specific issue. Getting rid of the nuclear threat could not, as members of CND put it, wait for Socialism.

Is it too much to hope that the tragic irony of it all has not been lost on those energetic campaigners?

As Socialists we too are horrified and sickened by the countless problems which are inseparable from capitalism. It is in fact this understanding, that a social system based on the profit motive cannot also be geared to human interests, which gives the obvious answer. The only way to resolve the multiplicity of problems, including war, is through the achievement of Socialism; it necessarily follows that this is the quickest solution. Which is, of course, the reason why we have no time to engage in reformist struggles.

The need for Socialism is too urgent.

Pat Deutz

Violence and Everyday Life (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Did you know that "journal", a weekly or monthly publication, actually means a day-book? However, there is a sense in which its customary misuse can be justified. Journalism, even the weighty theoretical stuff, comes from what is seen and heard in day-to-day living. The prosaic experience and the passing remark present social questions which require analysis or should be more widely seen. Capitalism is not an abstract category but our daily existence.

So there was this lady at a dinner-party. We were talking about the world in the way you do at dinner-parties, i.e. keeping on the surface and remembering the expression of strong opinions is in bad taste. And she said she and her husband would not like to come back to England to live because of all the violence there is today, the mugging and the football hooliganism. Nice lady, how mistaken you are. Where were you all my life?

*     *     *

One morning in 1936 that shopkeeper never served me. There was a crowd down the road, and he dashed out to join it saying: "That's old Lil, she can't half fight"—watching the two aproned women flailing and clawing all over the pavement. You could see men fighting practically any day, but fights between women were less frequent. However, the Whatsaname brothers who were all boxers paid homage to their aunt Alice as the best fighter in the family. One Saturday night she knocked her husband through the front-room window. In the morning she hung a gaudy curtain over the hole, and that afternoon the priest heading the Corpus Christi procession blessed this apparent decoration whereupon Alice flew out and threatened him for taking the mickey.

Violence was endemic. There were streets in every town that respectable people dared not walk along at night. One evening a man sent me to fetch the local copper because of a fierce male fight outside the pub, I found him and told him. He said: "If I were you, son, I'd go and get a policeman" — and turned and went the other way. But apart from the continual street-corner violence, its use in the home was taken for granted. Men kept their wives in order that way. In a divorce case for cruelty just before the war, a judge refused the wife's plea on the ground that knocking-about was the marital norm in East London.

Children could be, and were, knocked about by practically any adult: that was part of childhood. At school, from the infants' upwards, you were thrashed and clouted automatically. At home it was the foundation of parents' rule — father's belt, or a strap kept behind the door, or one of the canes sold for a penny in oil-shops. For petty larcenies and pilferings, the policeman did not charge you but thrashed you. Friends, neighbours, strangers, if there of mature years were licensed to hit children for any reason at all.

But there was more than just fighting and beating. It was by no means unknown for a murder to be successfully concealed. I remember the hated foreman in an industrial yard of whom it was said that a crane-load would one day fall on him; and one day it did. We knew a house where thirty-two people lived upstairs, and when a new baby arrived they buried it in the backyard. The activities of gangs like the Krays and Richardsons are horrifying, but less so than those of the race-track and protection gangs of between the wars. "The Sabini boys" represented a reign of terror; and the Glasgow razor-gangs were the subject of a book called No Mean City.  

We have heard of "political violence" at demonstrations in recent years. Compared with the nineteen-thirties, it is urchins' stuff. Fascists and Communists carried home-made weapons to demonstrations, and you could be slashed by a razor without much difficulty. What is now called "police brutality" raised no protests at all; it was what working people expected. As an instance, in the 1933 novel Love on the Dole the hero, Larry Meath, dies after being beaten by policemen at an unemployed men's march. Published today, it would bring controversy and indignation that such a thing could be envisaged. Then, its validity was taken for granted.

                                                                           *     *     *

There is not the violence in everyday life that existed in the past. Why, then, do some people think there is? To an extent, it is because the poor as individuals did not exist then: only as a mass, in the eyes of the State and the well-to-do. Individually, many had no recorded existence — it was only the second world war with identity cards, and the transition from them to to the processed data of the Welfare State, that made their presence or absence and what happened to them official.

But, more than that, the essence of capitalist democracy is for rulers to tell people they are to blame. Every economic problem is, inevitably, the population's fault: too greedy, too lazy, irresponsible, perversely wrong in its choice of governments. Indeed, there is nothing else rulers can tell people — the only alternative would be the truth, that they and their system are incapable of running the world decently. And people are aggressive, full of desire to oust and hurt. The point was bitterly made by the cartoonist Low before the war, in a drawing of crocodile-headed rulers on the steps of their Peace Palace saying to blank-faced masses: "Friends, we have failed. We couldn't control your war-like instincts."

The violence of the past is not proof that aggression is always ready to burst out when it gets a chance. What it proves is the degrading effect of extreme poverty and squalor: two starving men will fight for a crust, or kill another who comes along. That is not their pleasure but their necessity — given enough to eat, they will all live in amity. The over-riding fact is that despite the necessities history has imposed, if man had not a fundamental tendency to co-operation and order we should not be here today.

The class division in society opposes that tendency, and by forcing appalling lives on huge numbers of people promotes ferocity. As soon as people's circumstances improve only a little, this is something they want to be without. (The decay of boxing as a sport is an interesting pointer. Its star performers have always come from specially victimized sections of society: in the past Jews and Irishmen, now black men.)  But while social violence declines, rulers will have none of that. Like hellfire preachers whose bread-and-butter is sin, they denounce our innate aggression and frame laws to check it.

*     *     *

Curiously enough, those who believe violence is rife never see the outstanding things about it. One is that while the classic cure for misbehaviour is Christian "love", the areas in Britain where violence remains strongest are those with large Catholic populations — simply because those are also the areas of poverty at its old-fashioned worst.

The other is that war preparation and the development of incredibly horrifying weapons are carried on all the time by awfully respectable people. This is violence which makes a mugger or fist-fighter look puny. Why do they never notice that?

Robert Barltrop

Who’s Afraid of Charlie Hebdo? (2015)

The Halo Halo! Column from the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

As this is being typed out the dust is just beginning to settle on the events following the slaughter of the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ staff, the killing of the Jewish supermarket hostages and their attackers. The newspaper and TV reporters covering the atrocity - carried out apparently to avenge a long dead ‘prophet’ who has become prone to the gags of mickey-takers and critics due to the absurdities of his followers - all emphasise the point that the right to free speech is not negotiable, and is the very essence of democracy.

And they are right of course. Ridiculous people and ridiculous ideas inevitably attract ridicule. And the most absurd idea still being bandied about in the 21^st century as an answer to modern day capitalism and its problems is religion. Despite the claims from its various apologists of their moral superiority, and the insistence that they should be accepted, unchallenged and unquestioned, as examples of how we are to live our lives, they are, in fact, the socially useless remnants of a long-gone world, a world of ancient social conditions and ideas, mass ignorance and superstition. And far from providing answers to today’s problems they have nothing say, other than to tell us to put our faith in the imaginary gods and their magical powers, of an ancient era.

The fact that believers in such gods obviously consider their deities to be so weak and helpless, however, as to need their critics to be silenced by Kalashnikovs says as much about the god’s impotence as does any Charlie Hebdo cartoon.

And, while it seems clear that the intention of the attackers was to silence the critics, this has backfired. Already gatherings of outraged people protesting at the barbarity are taking place all over Europe. More moderate Muslims too, this time more than ever before, are expressing their outrage.   

‘Everyone should be offended three times a week’ someone once said, ‘and twice on Sundays’. And that seems about right. There’s nothing like a bit straight talking, and a bit of offence to remind us that not everyone shares the same views. And while believers in ancient myths have every right to feel offended that their ideas are sometimes ridiculed, the rest of us reserve the right to be equally offended at religious stupidity and barbarity.

Socialists, too, feel quite offended at the way in which the working class are recruited, hoodwinked and persuaded to fight the wars of others in which they have no personal interests. ‘We’ve been sent from al-Qaida in Yemen’ claimed the Charlie Hebdo killers (who were born and raised in a poor neighbourhood of Paris).

But while the killer’s intention to stifle criticism and free speech will come to nothing, there is a different threat to our freedom. On the day after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo’s office, despite the fact that the killers were already known to the French intelligence agencies, and the Woolwich killers were already known to MI5, Andrew Parker, the head of MI5 wasted no time in asking for more surveillance powers for the intelligence agencies. Because terrorists used the internet, email and social messaging, he said, so intelligence agencies ‘have to have the power to intercept, particularly, international communications’. George Osborne readily agreed saying MI5, MI6 and GCHQ would receive the resources they need. (Guardian 10 January 2015).

Let’s hope that makes you feel more secure.

NW

Materialism vindicated (1972)

From the April 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Looked at from two points of view—how mankind acquires knowledge and how life has evolved—there is no room for religion or the existence of a supernatural power in the development of mankind. Religion has simply been the expression of man's ignorance of, and his blind defence against, the operation of natural forces which he did not yet understand.

Thinking is a function of the brain, just as grasping is a function of the hand and walking a function of the feet; each function acquiring competence by training and experience. In order to think the brain must have something to think about; the material the brain thinks about is drawn from the world around through the medium of the senses—seeing; hearing; tasting; feeling and smelling. The thought material thus acquired, compared and generalised upon, determines the outlook of the individual, and the nature of this thought material is itself limited by the individual's contact with the world; his own experience and the passed on experience of others through reading and talking. The most important contact a person has with the world is that concerned with the satisfaction of his fundamental needs—food, clothing, shelter and the reproduction of his kind—and, therefore, these are the contacts that dominate his life, bring him into social relations with his kind, and, in general, shape his outlook.

We can only think of things that actually exist, but, we can put pieces of actual existence into fantastic forms. We can, in imagination, take a female form, attach a fish tail to it and produce and imaginary mermaid. We can also, in imagination, put wings on elephants and picture them flying through the air. But we cannot produce anything in imagination that does not already exist in some form in the world. Thus the religious imagine God as some kind of man. The brain has the faculty of working up the material drawn from the environment, just as the digestive apparatus has the faculty of digesting food that comes to it—and both can suffer from indigestion! The brain is that part of the world which pictures and thinks about the rest of the world. There is no mystery, no unknowable, only that which is not yet known but will be in the course of time. However, as things are always evolving there will always be something not yet known.

The study of evolution has shown that all living things have evolved from relatively simple inorganic molecules to complex organisms as the result of small changes over countless ages. Carbon is a basis of life on earth because it can build exceedingly complicated molecules. Scientists have now shown very reasonably that there has been a transition without a break between non-life and life in the chain that runs; hydrogen—elements—chemical compounds—nuclear acids—proteins—viruses—bacteria—higher organisms. From which it appears that there is no boundary between life and non-life in the evolutionary chain. Thus there is no room for religious explorations in the chemical evolution up to modern man. Man, including the brain, is simply a particular undesigned arrangement of chemicals—mainly hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulphur.

The nucleic acids in the above chain have a unique property. Once made they can go on indefinitely initiating copies of themselves. They alone of all molecules posses this ability, which made them the foundation of all life on earth and the raw material of its evolution. They are the stuff the genes are made of, and genes are the carriers of heriditary characteristics. In this sense also the chemical variations of past generations weigh heavily on the body and brain of the living.

Gilmac

Report on Clydeside (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the time of writing the UCS situation is still unresolved. It would appear that the government's plans for Govan and Linthouse may be extended to include Scotstoun with the remaining division, Clydebank, possibly being sold to a private buyer encouraged by favourable government terms. This would give the workers concerned a respite, however temporary, and leave them still hoping—and we shall return to this—that a future Labour government will nationalise the whole Upper Clyde shipbuilding complex. Whatever happens it seems unlikely that the original proposals which meant a reduction of another 6,000 jobs and the closure of the Scotstoun and Clydebank yards will go through. It looks, then, as if the resistance put up by the men has been at least partially successful. Of course their actions have nothing to do with Socialism and fall within the confines of trade union activity, an activity which is and only can be defensive in nature.

Much ink has been spilled over these events and many opinions have been expressed on the "work-in" tactics employed in the struggle. Several alternative courses of action have been suggested, the most popular one being that a "sit-in" would be more productive. This would entail occupation of the yards with no work being done on the ships already under construction in the hope that the delay would force the government to capitulate. However, this would mean finding money to pay the entire workforce instead of, as at present, only the several hundred made redundant. As the weekly wage-bill for UCS amounts to £¼ million then it can be seen that the task of providing even half this sum each week would be a monumental one. Also, it is unlikely that such a tactic would have secured as much popular support as the work-in and doubtless the shop stewards' committee took these and other considerations into account. Then there is the possibility that a non-working sit-in would present the government with an excuse to clear the yards on the grounds that the men had no legitimate reason for being there.

It is heartening to see a group of workers refusing to passively accept the sack, but we deplore the repeated promises to work harder and give the fullest cooperation to their employers in future. Of course these promises may only be so many words and were, after all, the product of having had the unemployment gun held to their heads. At least they didn't meekly accept their fate or rely solely on appeals to Labourite and trade union leaders to save them. They took positive action on their own account.

It could be argued that since shipbuilding is, at least at present, unprofitable and is bound to be run-down anyway, then the redundant workers should bow to the inevitable, take their redundancy payments, if any, and get out. This view could be supported by pointing out that even if the UCS workforce could be maintained at its present level then this would probably be at the expense of shipyard workers elsewhere: more orders coming to the Clyde means less orders for Tyneside or Belfast. This, of course, is true but because the industry is declining there is already a high level of unemployment in shipbuilding on Clydeside, so the chances of finding work locally are poor.

For many it would mean uprooting their families to seek work in England or overseas. And it is unreasonable to expect workers who generally think production for sale at a profit (capitalism) is the only way to run society, to put first the interests of the whole working class—that will come when they are socialist minded and not before. They joined a trade union for the limited purpose of combining with their fellow members on a craft basis to protect their own interests. We recognise this and accordingly don't expect revolutionary policies from non-socialist trade unionists.

We also recognise that before men can have any views at all, political or otherwise, they must have access to the necessities of life. They must have sufficient food, clothing, shelter, and all the other things which have come to be regarded as making life tolerable. For most workers nowadays "necessities", or their current standard of living, aren't acquired by dole money. Living standards should rightly be measured in relation to the wealth of society. Despite all the talk about how well-off to-day's workers are, their wages only enable them to live in a state of relative poverty. Nevertheless, these wages at least prevent them sliding into destitution which for many is what dole money means. Besides, there is either the personal experience or the handed-down knowledge of what large scale unemployment can do to men, so they feel that their backs are to the wall and that they must unite to save their jobs.

In their fight to change the government's mind the men have an unrecognised ally—the fact that governments cannot simply ignore political, economic and social pressures. For example, the Tories must have been dismayed at the general response to the proposed sackings and closures; they cannot afford to lose too many votes between now and the next general election. Also, the consequences of such severe unemployment might well result in increased social problems like the break-up of families or a steep increase in the crime rate, and there have been local warnings to this effect. So factors like these could account in part for the softening of the government's attitude.

The whole UCS episode has once more thrown into relief the utter hopelessness of the "left-wing". They have offered every solution under the sun but the real one; they will talk about absolutely anything except production for use and the abolition of exchange relationships. Some of their utterances have been simply ridiculous. The Communist Party actually called for an "end to redundancies and the nationalisation of shipbuilding". As if nationalisation ever meant anything less than the rationalisation of the labour force involving, as with British Rail and the Coal Board, large scale redundancies. Hugh Scanlon of the Engineers claimed that success for the UCS could mean the abolition of unemployment in Britain. Small wonder if workers remain convinced that their problems can be solved within capitalism. Scanlon should know that while production for profit remains, then so must unemployment in one degree or another. The "Militant" Trotskyists were outraged that the government should grant Yarrow's, which is outside the UCS, £4½ million of "taxpayer's money". Apparently the taxes which are a burden on the capitalist class alone should be spent in a way Trotskyists approve of. We also bad the usual "appeals" for "soviets" plus howls that the imagined revolutionary situation was being betrayed by traitors, etc., etc.

Whatever the outcome on Clydeside the unpleasant fact remains that the production for profit system will still be with us. Even if the UCS workers realised their dearest wish to see the four yards remain as an integrated whole, production there as elsewhere must be subject to capitalism's economic laws—it must be profitable or, if under nationalisation, at least make the minimum of loss. This means that the process of removing as much unnecessary labour as possible must continue. Indeed, J. Reid, the men's spokesman, recognises this when he argues that by remaining together the yards would be "more viable" through a "lack of duplication in terms of marketing, design, research and many other factors" (Glasgow News 11 October). The avoidance of duplication is only achieved by sacking some of the workers concerned. So in order to be "more viable" the realities of capitalism—the need to produce cheaper ships to meet competition—must result in future sackings whether by the hand of the government or even by a shop steward's committee.

There is no way out of this. The fact is that in shipbuilding, just as in every other industry, the productive forces have outstripped the demand. True, there will be a continuing growth in the amount of tonnage required to meet the increasing volume of world trade, but even a considerable increase in the demand for ships could not satisfy the present world capacity to produce them, so the contenders will still have to fight for a share in the market.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain will continue to urge workers everywhere to resist attacks made on their living standards by their employers. This is a basic necessity so long as capitalism lasts. At the same time we recognise such action to be purely defensive, besides never-ending, and which still leaves the factories, mines, shipyards, land, transportation systems, and the other places where wealth is produced, in the hands of the owning class. We therefore have organised politically to work to bring nearer the day when capitalism's inhumanity, waste and chaos will be swept away by the democratic action of the majority of the world's working class—the useful people.

Vic Vanni

Obituaries: Joyce Millen and Frank Offord (1984)

Obituaries from the March 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to report the death of these two comrades who served us over many years. Both were originally members of the Bloomsbury Branch before and during the War years of 1939-45.

Joyce was the secretary of the branch, in addition to her work at Head Office which was situated at that time at Rugby Chambers, Holborn. She served on the Propaganda Committee for some considerable time, and was jointly responsible for the organisation of the 1945 General Election meetings in North Paddington, the main feature of which were two large meetings at the Metropolitan Music Hall, Edgware Road, which were the largest ever held by the Party. There was an attendance of 1,700 at each meeting, and a number of people were unable to get in. She spoke both indoors and outdoors. Her lecture on "Anti-Semitism", given in 1943 at the Trade Union Club, was a classic which in the opinion of the writer has never been bettered. She was a woman of caustic wit and a very sharp tongue but beneath this facade was a very generous person, and absolutely dedicated to the socialist cause. Latterly, her domestic life, and the bringing up of a family, caused her to drop out of the mainstream of activity but she retained her membership which covered a period of nearly 45 years. Her sudden death at the early age of 67 came as a shock — we had the best of her.

Frank Offord was Party auditor for a number of years, and was one of the back room boys of the Party. Some of his early life had been spent in China, and he wrote and spoke on various aspects of the conditions there. Together with the late Ted Kersley, he was the mainspring of the New Premises Committee, and it was he who discovered our present Head Office at 52 Clapham High Street. When the lease at Rugby Chambers expired it was this Committee that organised the move, much of the expense of which was paid by Frank out of his own pocket. It was he who introduced films to be used in conjunction with socialist lectures. Ill-health prevented him in the last few years from carrying on any Party activity.

Jim D'Arcy

When Labour ruled (1) (1991)

From the November 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 3 September, the Rt Hon Baroness Castle of Blackburn appeared on the Channel Four "Opinions" programme to urge us not to let that marvellous achievement, The Welfare State, be taken away from us. She reminisced for half-an-hour upon the setting up of the National Health Service and how the post-war Labour governments engaged experts to explain to them what poverty was, so that they could devise schemes like Family Allowances in an attempt to combat it.

While fondly remembering her own part as plain Barbara Castle in all the this, she seemed to forget her part in Labour's other record on poverty: its consistent and often vicious efforts to hold down wages—at the same time as inflating the currency to make them worth less.

The Welfare State was only ever a collection of schemes for regulating poverty. Full-scale war had brought out clearly again, as in 1914, what a sorry state the British working class was in. Armed forces medical staff found that a large proportion of the conscripts were undernourished and unhealthy—not the stuff of which efficient, ruthless fighting machines are made. The Liberal, Sir William (later Lord) Beveridge was commissioned by the wartime coalition government to produce a report suggesting practical means by which British capitalism could ensure that it had a healthy and efficient workforce for the economic war that would follow the bombing war.

The war was a crisis for British capitalism. No-one knew how it would end. Like the economist Keynes, some years before, many of the British capitalist class feared that a social system which could produce a slump like that of the 1930s and then a war like that of the 1940s might well be overthrown, particularly as Russia (which they thought of as socialist) was one of the main allies against Germany, Italy and Japan. Many politicians, particularly Labour and Liberal, felt that the state must intervene to ameliorate the worst effects of unemployment, dire poverty and the poor health that resulted from them. Keynes had assured them that it was possible for governments to prevent slumps and unemployment through applying appropriate fiscal controls.

Discussion about post-war society and what it should be like began quite early on in the war. Propaganda films and radio broadcasts for civilians as well as the armed forces placed considerable emphasis upon "what we were fighting for" as well as what the war was supposed to be against.

The wartime conditions in which this discussion took place was those of extensive state control. Political parties had been been largely submerged in the coalition government and almost every aspect of civilian life was controlled, as it was for soldiers, sailors and airmen. By the time the war ended, state control of the economy and of a great part of people's lives had come to seem normal and inevitable to the British working class.

Labour takes charge

The Second World War gave the Labour Party its greatest opportunity. But it also exposed its fundamental impotence as a party to represent the British working class. The editorial in the March 1943 Socialist Standard put it like this:

The latest tragi-comedy is the complete outmanoeuvring of the Labour Party on the Beveridge Report. They have demanded for years (as a stepping stone to something or other) a much improved system of unemployment and sickness benefits and old-age pensions. One familiar demand put forward at Labour Party (e.g., in 1923) was that unemployment pay should be at trade union rates. Along comes the capitalist politician Beveridge with a much less favourable scheme, and the Labour Party, fearful lest this second-best scheme should be endangered, gives it their qualified approval. Now the Government announces that it too approves of the scheme, but with modifications and postponements. The Labour Party, now fearful of "diehard" opposition, finds itself hesitant about endangering the modified scheme, which is, in itself, two steps backward from its own. But how can it deny its own doctrine that "anything is better than nothing"?

The Family Allowances  Act, as a first stage in a comprehensive social security scheme, was introduced by the coalition government in 1945. The Labour government, elected with an overwhelming majority in July of that year, seized upon the whole Beveridge scheme as its own and introduced the National Insurance Act in 1946.  

Austerity

A great deal of rationing and many wartime controls were continued under the post-war Labour government. Like a good, capitalist government, they were concerned in case workers should force up wages under conditions of expanding production and full employment, so reducing profits, and they imposed a wage freeze.

The level of optimism in the country was high and the Labour Party was able to plead for tolerance from the workers towards the austerity regime the government was maintaining, on the grounds that it would only be a temporary state of affairs until expanding industrial output brought full prosperity. The absolutely vital thing, they insisted, was for workers to work harder and produce more for export. However, in spite of assurances by the Deputy Prime Minister, Herbert Morrison, to a meeting of cotton workers in Manchester in April 1948, the British textile industry was already meeting intense competition and protectionism from the USA and Japan. The confident assurances of full employment  upon which the whole plan rested were already beginning to look unrealistic in the competitive post-war world.

In 1949, the Labour government suffered its first financial crisis and the pound fell sharply in value. The government devalued it by 30 percent, after denying that it would do so. In October, the government passed the National Health Service (Amendment) Act, taking the power to impose a charge on prescriptions, although they did not impose one. In 1951, a further Act did impose charges for false teeth and glasses. After two elections in that year a sufficient number of the British working class voted Conservative to throw Labour out.

It was not simply the long succession of increases in health charges that followed which eroded British workers' faith in the Welfare State: the state itself had repeatedly even under Labour revealed its true colours as the agent of the employing class. It used laws and the courts to hold down wages, and it used troops to break strikes. Above all, however, the lie that governments could control the economy was exposed so often that hardly anyone could go on believing it.

For socialists, the trouble has been that this hotch-potch of poor relief and incomes control, together with the nationalisation of major industries, was called "socialism" by the Labour Party themselves as well by other politicians such as Margaret Thatcher. The result has been that, as well as becoming rightly sceptical about politicians' promises, many of our fellow workers gave become completely cynical about all political action. We have a lot of work to do.

Ron Cook

Next month we look at the anti-working-class record of the Wilson government which managed the affairs of British capitalism between 1964 and 1970.

All In Pictures (1977)

Book Review from the April 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx For Beginners by Rius. Writers & Readers Publishing Co-operative (London), £1.

It had to come! Marx in comic-strip form! Friend Rius's amusing booklet has already achieved a high circulation in many countries. As a way of popularising Marx's teachings it has much to commend it, and is not to be despised.

Despite a certain number of flaws (one-third of the world is not Communist) in keeping with common misconceptions, some of it is quite impressive. The potted review of the History of Philosophic Thought is heroic; and, despite the author's protestations to the contrary, shows considerably more than a nodding acquaintance with the subject.

The idea of sprinkling his cartoons and text with the actual writings of Marx (and Engels) is inspired, and the exposition of surplus-value novel. Marx's himself expressed the view that unlettered working men frequently understood his stuff much better than erudite Prussian professors; so that our author's modest claim not to have yet unravelled all of Marx need not detain us.

The flaws? First, there is not Communism in Russia. The conclusion of the book, which attributes a synthesis of Marx's ideas to Lenin, is throughly misleading. Second, Marx did not say anywhere that "Capitalism was on the road to final collapse". In fact Rius himself refutes this in another place by exploding the notion that Socialism comes about automatically. The so-called "immediate measures" in The Communist Manifesto were not Socialist measures—and, lastly, Marx was not "a tough guy who knew how to command". In his personal life he relied entirely in reasoned discussion, as every Socialist is bound to do.

Apart from these things—very readable; most amusing; to be read with the critical appraisal characteristic of the modern Socialist.

Horatio

Turning the screw (1984)

From the February 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Three years ago the company I worked for announced it was closing. It was part of an ailing industrial giant which was itself finally sunk soon after when the banks withdrew their support. During the three month run-down period rumours that a "consortium" of managerial staff was trying to buy the place kept our hopes alive. Those of us who had been kept on to finish outstanding work knew that if the consortium didn't employ us then we would have little chance of a job anywhere else so we worked like we've never worked before. That deal fell through but an American multi-national moved in and bought the company. We soon learned that not everyone still working there would be employed by the new owners so each of us redoubled his efforts in the hope of being offered one of the available jobs.

A week after the old company finally closed some of us, the lucky ones, started work for the new company. A few days earlier we had been interviewed and the terms of employment had been spelled out to us. The wages would be increased by a few pounds but there would have to be "flexibility" which meant doing work previously done by other workers, and although there was to be no anti-trade union policy there would be no closed shop either. This last part didn't bother me, for workers who have to be forced to join a union are no asset to it and may actually be a source of weakness.

None of us will ever forget the first few months of working for the new owners. If we had been going like the hammers of hell before then it was nothing compared to what we now had to go through. The management, obviously wishing to impress their bosses, hounded us from clocking on till clocking off. No longer did we dare linger over our newspapers for another minute after starting time, take an unofficial cup of tea in the afternoon or wash up five minutes early. Some of us, even though we had a job, were applying for every job we saw advertised in the press, even if it meant working away from home. Nothing, we felt , could be worse than this.

Around this time government ministers were crowing about how the growth of unemployment had produced a different climate in industrial relations. "There is a new sense of realism among workers today" they said, and added that because of this productivity in Britain was rising. If what was happening to us was typical of the rest of the country then no wonder!

Frequent reminders of what job prospects were like outside were provided by former workmates whenever we met them. "It's hopeless" they told us. "I've been everywhere and there's nothing doing". On top of this we were hearing of other places in our line of work having redundancies or even closing and so increasing the supply of labour on an already glutted market. In the circumstances the management could walk all over us and we just had to take it, even when the heating was left off as an "economy measure" during the bitter cold at the end of 1981.

As time passed the pace became less frantic and gradually conditions changed to something approaching sanity, although we still had to work harder than any of us had been used to. At the end of the first year we had a 10 per cent rise without any haggling and the order book, we were told, was full enough. More men were being taken on and extra machinery installed, so the future was looking more secure. We should have known better.

Then last month came the visit from "the Yanks". The place was spruced up for these representatives of the parent company and they duly paraded through the factory wearing safety helmets, protective ear-muffs and big smiles. It was noticeable that the works management who accompanied them weren't smiling. All week we heard stories that the visitors were less than impressed with how things were going and that harsh words were being spoken.

On the following Monday afternoon the shop stewards were sent for. When they returned they called a meeting of all the hourly-paid employees and broke the news that there would be ten redundancies. The men were stunned. How could this be?, they asked. There was plenty of work now and for some time in the future. No matter, the visitors had decreed that the work must be done with less employees. The factory, they had said, was still only breaking even and would have to become profitable by mid-1984 when the situation would be reviewed. The ten men to go (plus one from the office) would be told next day and everyone at the meeting began to look around and calculate how much better or worse his chances were compared to the others.

Inevitably, the usual divisions between the workers emerged. The factory personnel raged because only one office staff was to go. "Bloody ridiculous" they said, "we're producers, not them". National prejudices also had an airing. It was the greed of those "Yankee bastards" that was to blame, as if British employers would have acted any differently in the same situation. My workmates, like most other workers, haven't begun to understand that their jobs are only provided on the basis that they will produce a surplus over and above their wages. Some of them even claimed that they have "a right to a job" which also must mean that employers have a duty to employ them whether they need them or not. Investors put their cash in order to make a profit, not to keep workers in jobs. There is no other way in which capitalism can operate. Next day at two o'clock the foremen broke the news to the chosen ten and told them to collect their money and go. Within twenty minutes they had gone with two weeks plus two days pay. The rest of us were shocked at this treatment but there wasn't a lot we could do about it.

Next day our foreman gave us a little talk. What it boiled down to was that the arm and leg we had given the new owners still wasn't enough and we would have to do even better in future. Apparently, the company have a factory in America which makes the same product as ourselves and the visitors claimed that the American workers are making it faster than we do. The implication was obvious enough but it doesn't stretch the imagination too much to picture those American workers being told that it is we who are the danger to their jobs because we get paid a lot less.

What about my workmates, what are their ideas and how have they been affected by all these experiences? Like most other workers they aren't in the least interested in politics. In fact some of them don't even have a reasonable trade union consciousness and blame nearly all their problems not on the capitalist system, but on other workers. A few weeks before the redundancy I overheard one of them saying "What I'd like to see is a wee bit more money for us and a wee bit less for them". Curious, I asked him who "them" was. "The unemployed" he said. When I asked him why, he replied "because there's not a big enough differential between what I get and what they get". He shared the widely-heard belief that people on the dole receive huge payments, although this didn't prevent him being terrified later on when he thought he was to be one of the ten. Luckily for him he wasn't.

Almost all of my workmates buy tabloid newspapers like the Sun which reflect, rather than mould their generally reactionary ideas. The talk at tea and lunch breaks, besides being about the usual subjects like football and gambling, often resolves around pet hates like the English, "poofs" and blacks. Our shop steward even refers to the latter as "jungle bunnies". They have experienced living under Labour governments and they know what life is like in the "communist" countries, so none of them sees any hope that things could ever be different. They imagine that the present social order has always been and always must be. I do my best, but where else do they ever hear anyone arguing the case for a world of production for use, without wages, prices, pensions, privileges and bosses? Because I am on my own I can be dismissed as a political flat-earther.

And yet, I know that they, like me, felt anger and humiliation at having to scramble for a job. Nor do they enjoy the feat of the sack whenever we hit a "quiet patch" or having to jump if the foreman or one of the "big shots" appears. And they worry, not only about their own futures, but of those of their children. The only thing wrong with the socialist case is that is has too few adherents and because is this socialists are unable to take advantage of the massive working-class discontent which exists.

Vic Vanni

England as Marx's Model (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

"In this work", wrote Marx in the 1867 Preface to the first German edition of Capital, "I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England. This is the reason why England is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas".

In fact, the last part of Volume I of Capital, on "so-called primitive accumulation", is virtually a short history of the economic and social development of England from the middle of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th century, Marx explains again:

"The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process . . .In England alone, which we take as our example, has it the classic form" (last paragraph of Chapter XXVI on "The Secret of Primitive Accumulation").

Only in England had society come to be divided into three distinct classes, each with its own particular relationship to the means of wealth production:

— the landlord class which monopolised the land and other natural resources;

— the capitalist class which owned the man-made buildings, instruments and machines with which production was carried out; and

— the working class which owned nothing but its ability to work, which it sold for wages and who carried out the actual work of producing wealth.

Marx inherited this three-class analysis of society from the classical political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, but gave it a working-class interpretation by showing that the source of both the profits of the capitalists and the rents of the landlords was the unpaid labour of the workers. In actual fact, even with Ricardo, who wrote his On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation as late as 1817, farming is taken as the typical "industry", the capitalist being a tenant farmer renting the land from a landlord and employing agricultural wage labourers. With Marx, however, the emphasis shifts to manufacturing industry, in particular the spinning of raw cotton into yarn.

Marx took the cotton spinning industry as his model because it was the industry in which the "factory system" had first been introduced and where it was still most widespread at the time he was writing (first half of the 1860s). At that time machines were still made by artisan methods, not by other machines, nor by factory production. Afterwards of course the factory system spread to other industries, including the making of machines and soon after Marx's death in 1883 the Cotton Age was to give way to the Age of Steel, to metal-working replacing cotton-spinning as the key capitalist industry.

So Marx was studying factory production, rather than cotton-spinning as such. With the cotton industry he was studying the future of other industries, just as in studying England he was also considering the future of other countries. Marx was very careful to define precisely what he meant by a factory: a workplace where production was carried out by power-operated machines and where the workforce was reduced to the status of machine-minders (and of machine maintainers and repairers). Thus, when he chose a typical example of a factory, it was one in which cotton was spun into yarn by self-acting mules powered by a coal-fired steam engine. Others, especially at the beginning, were powered by water wheels.

Factory production spread rapidly in the cotton industry in the period 1815 to 1840. The uncontrolled and ruthless exploitation of the workers during this period — this was the time of the prolongation of the working day and of children down the ones, denounced with such vehemence by Marx in Capital — provoked a reaction, both from the working class and from a section of the landlord class. It also led to the curbing, through the Factory Acts, of the freedom of action of the "cotton lords" and "millocracy", as the new factory-owning capitalist class were known in working class circles.

The repeal of the Corn Laws from 1848 opened up a new period of capitalist expansion. Writing of the period 1846-66, Marx remarked:

"No period of modern society is so favourable for the study of capitalist accumulation as the period of the last 20 years. It is as if this period had found Fortunatus' purse. But of all countries England again furnishes the classical example, because it holds the foremost place in the world-market, because capitalist production is here alone completely developed, and lastly, because the introduction of the Free-trade millennium since 1846 has cut off the last retreat of vulgar economy." (Chapter XXV "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation", Section 5(a))

Marx went on to show, as he had already done in the Inaugural Address he had written for the IWMA in 1864, that the majority of the working class had not benefited from the enormous growth of wealth during this period. The agricultural workers (1) certainly had not, nor had those employed in the "sweated trades" whose plight Marx described in detail on the basis of official documents.

The census of 1851 revealed that for the first time the town population in Britain exceeded that of the country. Agriculture, in other words, had become a minority interest. In any event, most of those working in agriculture were wage workers so that even before this time the bulk of the active population were propertyless wage earners. With the progress of industry and the factory system, the proportion of wage workers in the population grew ever larger. Britain in Marx's time was already a capitalist country with a working class, majority, as Marx himself was well aware. England, he wrote in a letter in 1870:

"is the only country where there are no longer any peasants, and where land ownership is concentrated in very few hands. It is the only country where almost all production has been taken over by the capitalist form, in other words with work combined on a vast scale under capitalist bosses. It is the only country where the large majority of the population consists of wage-labourers. It is the only country where the class struggle and the organisation of the working class into trade unions have actually reached a considerable degree of maturity and universality. Because of its domination of the world market, it is the only country where any revolution in the economic system will have immediate repercussions on the rest of the world. Though landlordism and capitalism are most traditionally established in this country, on the other hand the material conditions for getting rid of them are also most ripe here."

Marx attached great importance to the fact that the working class made up the vast majority of the population in Britain. For it meant that the extension of the right to vote there would put political power potentially in their hands.

As early as February 1848 Marx had realised that universal suffrage in Britain (with its working class majority) would have a quite different social significance than on the Continent (where it was one of the slogans of those who merely wanted to see established a bourgeois democratic Republic). As he wrote in a German-language paper published in Brussels where he was then living:

"We believe . . . that the English Charter, if it were to be put forward not by individual enthusiasts for universal suffrage but by a great national party, presupposed a long and arduous unification of the English workers into a class, and that this Charter is being striven for with quite another purpose and must bring about quite different social consequences than the Constitution of America or of Switzerland ever strove for or brought about" (Deutsche-Brüsseler Zeitung, 13 February 1848).

At this time, as the article he published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung at the beginning of 1849 illustrates, Marx did not believe that the Chartists would be able to win universal suffrage without an armed insurrection, a view shared by a minority of the Chartist leaders themselves (Julian Harney, Ernest Jones and others) with whom Marx and Engels were in contact.

After coming to England Marx did not change his mind about the social significance of the Chartist demand for universal suffrage in a country where the working class were the majority of the population, even if he had now come to believe that this could now be achieved by peaceful mass agitation. In an article he wrote on the Chartists in August 1852, he wrote:

". . . Universal Suffrage is the equivalent for political power for the working class of England, where the proletariat forms the large majority of the population, where, in a long, though underground civil war, it has gained a clear consciousness of its position as a class, and where even the rural districts know no longer any peasants, but only landlords, industrial capitalists (farmers) and hired labourers. The carrying of Universal Suffrage in England would, therefore, be a far more socialist measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the Continent. Its inevitable result, here, is the political supremacy of the working class."

Marx returned to this question of the different significance of universal suffrage in Britain as compared with on the Continent in an article published in the Neue Oder-Zeitung on 5 June 1855:

"After the experiments which destroyed faith in the universal suffrage of 1848 in France, the continentals are prone to underrate the importance and meaning of the English Charter. They overlook the fact that two-thirds of French society are peasants and over one-third townspeople, while in England more than two-thirds live in the towns and less than one-third in the countryside. In England the results of universal suffrage must thus be in the same inverse proportion to its results in France as town and country are in two empires."

Since 1842, when "a last but futile attempt to formulate universal suffrage as a common demand of the so-called Radicals and the masses of the people" was made, Marx went on

"there has no longer been any doubt as to the meaning of universal suffrage. Nor as to its name. It is the Charter of the classes of the people and implies the assumption of political power as a means of meeting their social requirements. That is why universal suffrage, a watchword of universal fraternisation in the France of 1848, is taken as a war slogan in England. There the immediate content of the revolution was universal suffrage; here, the immediate content of universal suffrage is the revolution."

Universal suffrage, in other words, would place political power in the hands of the working class who Marx expected (somewhat over-optimistically, as it turned out) would soon use it to carry out the communist revolution, dispossessing the capitalist and landlord classes and instituting a classless society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production. Marx not only supported, through Ernest Jones and thePeople's Paper, the campaign of the Chartist rump in the 1850s for universal suffrage, but also, through the IWMA, the similar campaign of the Reform league in the 1860s.

The Second Reform Act of 1867 by no means provided for universal suffrage, but it did create a situation where the majority of voters in the towns were members of the working class. The experience of the 1868 election — which returned a Liberal government and in which no working class candidate, even those standing for the Liberal Party, was elected — no doubt tempered Marx's earlier optimism about the "immediate" content of universal suffrage being "the revolution". But if it was no longer the immediate content, it was nevertheless still a longer term one. Now that the working class was a majority of the electorate it could, if it chose, use the vote to gain control of political power peacefully, by sending to Parliament socialist MPs mandated to institute the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In a speech in the Hague after the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association in September 1872 Marx declared, according to a report in the French paper La Liberté:

"The workers will have to seize political power one day in order to construct the new organisation of labour . . .We do not claim, however, that the road leading to this goal is the same everywhere. We know that heed must be paid to the institutions, customs and traditions of the various countries, and we do not deny that there are countries, such as America and England, and if I was familiar with its institutions, I might include Holland, where the workers may attain their goals by peaceful means. That being the case, we must recognise that in most continental countries the lever of the revolution will have to be force; a resort to force will be necessary one day in order to set up the rule of labour."

That a peaceful capture of political power was a possibility under certain circumstances remained Marx's view for the rest of his life (2). It was not Marx's view, however, that the conversion of the means of production into the common property of the whole of society would necessarily be carried out without any violence whatsoever, even in Britain. Although he believed that the extension of the franchise had given the working class the possibility of winning political power legally and peacefully, he still expected that they were likely to meet resistance as soon as they began to use this political power against the capitalist and landlord class. In Capital Marx had carefully recorded how the capitalist class had resisted the implementation of the Ten Hours Act passed by Parliament in 1847. and he had observed how the slave-owners of the Southern States of America had preferred armed resistance to the possibility of Congress voting a Bill to emancipate their slaves. Marx expected a similar "slaveholders revolt" once the working class began to use the political power they had captured peacefully to legally dispossess the capitalists and landlords. In other words, it was Marx's view that, in the end. the working class would have to use the full power of the state machine, including actual physical force, against a recalcitrant capitalist minority, in order to establish socialism. This employment of force would, of course, be quite legal, as it would be employed by a state which had come to be controlled, after democratic elections, by a socialist working class majority. It would be the recalcitrant capitalist minority that would be acting illegally in resisting the democratically-expressed will of the majority for a classless society to be established.

1. Marx welcomed the formation of a trade union by agricultural workers in Scotland in 1865 as "a historical event" (Capital, Chapter X "The Working Day", Section 3, footnote). He saw it as a sign that even this downtrodden section of the working class was preparing to fight back.

2. In 1880, less than ten years after the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune by the French Third Republic, we even find him talking of converting universal suffrage in France "from the instrument of fraud it has been up till now into an instrument of emancipation" (Preamble to the Programme of the "Federation of the Party of Socialist Workers in France").

Adam Buick

A Future With No Future (1975)

Book Review from the February 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Iron Heel by Jack London. Journeyman Press; paperback 75p., hardback £2.50.

This is the first of a series of reissues of working-class and radical "classics". The Iron Heel was last published in Britain in 1947 and — apart from more sumptuous American editions — is generally available only in second-hand copies from the old Mills & Boon shilling edition of all Jack London's works. A new French edition (Le Talon de Fer) appeared in 1972.

Jack London wrote over fifty books in a short life. The majority were written in haste; they include childish trash, four or five first-rate novels, and a number of outstanding short stories. In most of his writing the chief idea in one form or another comes from a crude version of Darwinism. It is either the survival of the fittest under savage conditions, or the depiction of a physical and intellectual superman who overshadows his fellows.

The Iron Heel was written in 1906 and published in 1907. It was received with misgivings by London's fellow-members of the American Socialist Party. In the International Socialist Review John Spargo called it "an unfortunate book" whose tendency was

to weaken the political Socialist movement by discrediting the ballot and to encourage the chimerical and reactionary notion of physical force, so alluring to a certain type of mind  . . . 

It describes a "revolution", i.e. a large-scale working-class revolt led by "socialists", breaking out in the United States and being crushed by the totalitarian methods. Following that, society is ruled by a class of tyrants called the Oligarchs, while the socialists carry on an underground struggle in which Fighting Groups of terrorists play a heroic part. The dominant figure is Ernest Everhard, the revolutionary leader, and the book is written by his wife after this presumed death. Everhard is presented as a paragon of physical strength, learning, foresight and bravery. He was, London's daughter wrote, "the revolutionist Jack would have liked to be if he had not, unfortunately, also desired to be several other kinds of men" (Jack London and his Times by Joan London, 1939).

The place of The Iron Heel in the literature of the working-class movement is due mainly to the early chapters in which the need to overthrow capitalism is vigorously stated and exemplified, with Everhard expounding Marx's theory of value. But in all the ensuing action, what should be understood is that London was consciously rejecting ideas of Socialism when he wrote it. Much of it was intended to express his disillusionment with political activity and his disbelief that the masses were capable of helping themselves.

The book's immediate impulse came from the Russian upheaval of 1905; the guerrilla groups were "modelled somewhat after the Fighting Organization of the Russian Revolution". However, London was alsu strongly influenced by W. J. Ghent's Our Benevolent Feudalism, published in 1902. Ghent predicted the growth of monopolies into a single monolith: "A gigantic merger of all interests, governed by a council of ten, may supplant the individual dukedoms and baronies in the different industries." This appealed to London's imagination and his conviction that the revolution could only be a contest between the fittest and strongest.

Other fragments of ideas are incorporated in The Iron Heel. The earliest economic thought which London met was that of "General" Coxey, whose "army" of tramps features in London's novel of his own hobo experiences, The Road. Coxey's "good roads" theory was a primitive Keynesism: setting the tramps and the other unemployed to build better roads, financed by openly inflationary budgets, would solve the economic problems of America. For comparison, Keynes in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money wrote:

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again  . . . there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.

This is the economics of the Oligarchy's pyramid age of "magnificent roads" and "wonder cities" in The Iron Heel. Jack London may have tasted Marx, but the doctrine he swallowed was Coxey's. Thus, his hero's indictment of the capitalists is not that their system is incapable of working for the majority, but that they have failed to make it work:

You have made a shambles of civilization. Yo have been blind and greedy . . . You have failed in your management of society, and your management is to be taken away from you.

One other curiosity is that the chapter "The Bishop's Vision" was plagiarized word for word from an article by Frank Harris in a British publication. Many people, including Trotsky, A. M. Lewis, Anatole France and Orwell, have seen The Iron Heel as prophetic, but it is not. The best thing is not to take the contradictory borrowed ideas at all seriously, and read it as a strongly-written fantasy in the manner of H. G. Wells (whom London admired) with a political setting.

The present edition is well produced (though the cover design strives overmuch for an up-to-date message), and many people will be glad of the chance to get a new copy at a reasonable price.

Robert Barltrop