A Scotch Broth of Peculiar Composition (1944)

From the August 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the war nears its climax, the capitalist political representatives—and their sidekicks—are doing a lot of jockeying for place and power in what they consider will be the political set-up. In Scotland, as in England, recent events in Parliamentary by-elections have indicated clearly that the working-class electorate are not whole-heartedly enamoured of the National-cum-Labour Government. A definite swing of the pendulum "leftwards" has been observed, and a post-war continuation of that process has been envisaged. The "Commonwealth" movement has had some measure of success in stealing the thunder of the Labour and Communist Parties. This organisation, which receives the financial backing of Sir Richard Acland and other rich men, has made attempts—with varying degrees of success—to take united Parliamentary action with the other reformist organisations, the Labour Party, Communist Party and I.L.P. "Commonwealth" spokesmen have, of course, demonstrated their confusion and invincible ignorance of what the term "commonwealth" means. To them it means anything and everything, from State ownership to public utility corporations—in a word, anything but the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life.

Enchanted, apparently, by the measure of success which has attended the efforts of Acland and Co. yet again to beguile the workers, a "Scotch broth" of various "lairds," "literary men, Communist gents and Labour politicians have arisen in Scotland in the form of a "Declaration on Scottish Affairs," in which various problems are discussed and palliatives set forth. The ancient slogan, "Scottish Home Rule," is revived from its centuries-old semi-torpor, and blazoned forth to an —as yet—incredulous working class. This specious document contends initially that "Scottish conditions are not identical with English conditions," a masterly and illuminating observation! In support of this, various evidence is adduced: "Hill farming, forestry and fishing are more important than in the South"; "depopulation of the Highlands is an entirely Scottish question"; "The Scottish housing question is different in scale." The solution to these perplexing anomalies is modestly claimed to be: "A Scottish legislature and Government should be established to deal with Scottish affairs, and that Scottish representation in the Parliament of the United Kingdom should be retained."

We have heard all this before, in varying guises. Yes, my Lords and Ladies and inspired Commoners, your "fresh" Scottish fish stinks of crumbling antiquity! It was also claimed by the Irish Nationalists over long years, that the problems of the Irish workers were uniquely different from the other workers of the world. After years of bloody struggle the Irish Nationalists—to some extent—had their way, with what results? Are not poverty and unemployment inevitable accompaniments of wealth and leisure in the "Emerald Isle"? Are slums, poorhouses, pawnshops, diseases, malnutrition and the other horrible characteristics of modern society the exclusive product of Scotland, Ireland or any other country in the world?

An amusing reflection that strikes me on examining the "Home Rule" claims is the one that arises when they claim that Home Rule for Scotland will result in more work. More work for whom?—for the Lords, Dukes, ladies, authors and Labour politicians who modestly sign the declaration? No! As is usual, for the already over-worked working class of Scotland! It could be thought that, at least, it had occurred to John S. Clarke (one of the signatories) that what is wrong with the working class is not lack of work, but their divorcement from the means of wealth-production. To talk of Scottish, as opposed to English, interests is to gloss over, to ignore the basic conflict of interests that inevitably arises from the structure of capitalism. The defenders of capitalism adopt sundry devices to hide this fundamental class-antagonism, and one of the handiest ones has been for years to play on the difference of nationality and seat of government. The defence against this stratagem is, as always. the re-statement of the Socialist case and an iron confidence in the working-class ability eventually to solve their own problems without the assistance of Lairds and Lords, or leaders.

Thomas Anthony.

Plight of the old (1980)

From the July 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once we reach the age of 65 (if we are a man) or 60 (if we are a women), we are officially classified as being "old". Old means no longer considered able to contribute brain power or physical power to enable our employers to make a profit out of us. When a horse is past its best, it is retired or "put out to grass", where it spends the rest of its days sleeping, eating and, presumably, having an enjoyable time. But this picture of retirement is far from accurate where workers are concerned.

Many people of retirement age are still capable of doing full-time work—but they are usually not allowed to continue in the work for which they were trained. The excuses for this are obvious—supposedly failing health and strength, the need to make way for younger men because of high unemployment and that we have "earned" a rest after a lifetime of working. But what if the "right to rest" is not wanted? In capitalist society we are trained and conditioned to use our time for working, with little or no education on how to use our leisure time, with the result that many retired people do not know what to do with all that time on their hands.

However, it is much more likely that the "right to rest" is not possible. People need to continue working in order to survive, or to try and maintain the already very low standard of living they have had all their working lives. Unfortunately, even though someone in their sixties may have as much to give in the way of experience or knowledge as a younger person, they will have to settle, if they can find any, for low paid, boring work. An "old age pensioner" or, as the Americans coyly put it, a "senior citizen", falls into the same category as a school leaver or an unqualified woman with children—dirt cheap labour. So, in order to supplement the pittance the government or our ex-employers kindly give us a reward for a lifetime of wage slavery, a pensioner has to spend more years, sometimes literally until they die, doing badly paid, tedious work. On top of this any money earned will be added to the pension, and tax will be taken off if the resultant amount exceeds the personal allowance.

These, however, are the lucky ones. Some people, through ill-health or the ability to find even the most badly paid employment, cannot work and have to live on their old age pension. Out of this miserly sum people still have to pay for food, rent, rates, heating, lighting and all the other expenses of modern living. This is particularly difficult in winter, when many old people die of hypothermia (literally die of cold) because they cannot afford to turn on a fire.

Even if people have planned for their retirement and have managed to save a small amount of money, this is soon eaten away by depreciation and bills and, if they have the misfortune to live longer than their savings, they are then as badly off as the rest.

At present a single person on a state pension receives £23.30 a week. For a married couple, the man receives this £23.30 and is given an extra £14.00 for his wife, making a grand (or not so very grand) total of £37.30 a week. The state obviously believe that two can live very much cheaper than one. Before November 1979 these figures were £19.50 for a single person and £31.20 for a married couple, the wife receiving just £11.70 a week. Obviously a woman is considered to have less needs that a man. If her husband were to die, she would receive the single's person's pension plus a widow's pension and would be much better off.

The November 1979 increase in pensions amounted to 19.87 per cent. As inflation at the time was running at something like 17 per cent, for a short time they didn't get any poorer. However since then inflation has risen to over 20 per cent, so old age pensioners are significantly worse off than six months ago, To add insult to injury, the November 1980 increase in pensions is to be a derisory 16.5 per cent, being an increase to £27.15 for a single person and £43.45 for a married couple. This time the lucky wife of our old age pensioner receives £16.30 a week.

Peter Townsend in his book Poverty in the UK states that 14 million people in Britain are living on or below the poverty line. By far the largest proportion of these people are made up of the disabled, the long-term unemployed and, of course, the old. Some reward for a lifetime of working.

Capitalism's nuclear family—with one man, one woman and their children—isolates people into small, tight-knit groups. When a person becomes old, if they have no children, or children who are not prepared or not able to take care of them, they are obviously very vulnerable. If they have no partner and no family they will be totally isolated, having to fend for themselves, which becomes increasingly difficult as age takes its toll on their health and mobility.

An old person who loses their partner, usually someone they have spent the major part of their adult life with, obviously has to face not only that loss but the fact that they will very likely either be a burden on their families or have to go into strange surroundings in an old people's home or a hospital. To lose a partner is hard to bear at the best of times, but when a person is old and faces these options they are often driven to despair. Left on their own they will neglect themselves and not eat properly. The press constantly carries stories of old people dying of hypothermia, malnutrition and other treatable conditions and not being discovered for weeks; or an old person who is no longer able to look after himself can be put into an old people's home, where he is fed, kept clean and warm and left to vegetate. The only pleasure he has to look forward to is a possible visit from a family member—if he has a family.

Many, more unlucky (if lucky is a word that can be used in this context) old people end up in hospital wards or in mental homes where they lie in bed all day with no stimulation to keep them in any way active or interested in life, just waiting to die.

It is typical of capitalism, that as we reach old age we do not have a great deal to look forward to. A system whose purpose is profit can have no place for anyone unable to contribute towards this aim.

Lynne Homan

All That Glistens (2001)

Book Review from the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession . By Peter L. Bernstein. John Wiley & Sons, New York.

The author is president of his own economic consulting firm and author of seven books on economics and finance. He is also well-connected with powerful establishment figures, citing for example in his foreword the "significant assistance" of such as Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman. In addition he also acknowledges the assistance of half-a-dozen researchers. So what is the outcome of such an undertaking into a fascinating subject? There is an astounding collection of stories, anecdotes and speculations on the subject of gold that embraces Biblical legends, Greek mythology, medieval nonsense and modern received wisdom, but nowhere will you find an explanation of what determines the value of gold.

The researchers have obviously been assiduous in their set tasks of tracking down just about every reference to gold they could find in Ancient and Modern History. No expense has been spared in tracing what Moses, Job, Herodotus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Pizzo or Newton had to say on the subject. But nowhere a mention of what determines the value of gold. We can understand that Bernstein and his team of researchers would ignore the ideas of Karl Marx, because of their background and aspirations, but it is a pity one of them hadn't taken a day off from his research and spent an afternoon in a local cinema watching a rerun of The Treasure of Sierra Madre.

He would have seen the Humphrey Bogart character bemoan to the old prospector in the flophouse about how it was a pity gold was so difficult to find, and the Walter Houston character reply, "Many men search for gold, very few find it. Therein is the value of gold." It's as simple as that. The value of gold is determined, like all other commodities, by the amount of socially-necessary labour time spent in its production.

If you want a lot of colourful anecdotes about some of the crazy things people have said and done about gold, then this is the book for you. If you want to know something about the value of gold, and how is determined you would be much better employed reading the 100 or so pages of Part 1 of Marx's Capital, Volume 1. Alternatively look out for the next TV rerun of The Treasure of Sierra Madre.

Richard Donnelly

Socialist activity in New Zealand (1970)

From the May 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Auckland Branch of the Socialist Party of New Zealand are active selling the Socialist Standard and distributing leaflets as well as holding regular Sunday afternoon meetings in the local Albert Park. Some of these meetings have been disrupted by members of the Progressive Youth Movement, a Maoist group which gained some publicity recently be threatening to stage anti-royalist incidents during the recent visit of Mrs. Elizabeth Wettin. Somewhat inconsistently the PYM complain of police brutality while at the same time using physical force to try to prevent the Socialist case, including criticism of state capitalist China from being heard.

A comrade from the Socialist Party of Great Britain, visiting Auckland on a ship, was interviewed on NZTV about outdoor speaking during which we managed to explain that the world socialist movement stood for the abolition of the wages system and production for use with free access.

Finally, we regret to report the death of our comrade Tom Jackson at the age of 80. Tom Jackson joined the NZ Marxian Association in 1918 when he was working as a miner of the west coast of South Island. He later joined the SPNZ after it was formed in the 1930s and remained a staunch Socialist devoting his efforts, as comrades put it, "to help hasten the abolition of the profit system and establish a system fit for human beings".

Lenin and the 'Socialist Standard' (1970)

From the April 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

On February 14, 1915, a Conference of so-called "Allied Socialists" opened in London. At this conference Maxim Litvinov (Maximovitch), the Bolshevik representative to the International Bureau of the Second International attempted to read a declaration sent by his section of Russian Social Democracy.

The conference chairman, Keir Hardie, twice prevented the reading of this declaration, whereupon Litvinov left the conference. This London Conference became an important landmark for the Bolsheviks who considered that they had made clear the differences between their anti-war stand and the "social chauvinist" approach of the Second International. At the time the conference was held the actions and resolutions of the participants were reported and commented on in the Zurich organ of the Bolsheviks, the Sotsial-Demokrat.

Later the conference was dealt with in detail in a number of works such as Lenin's Collected Works Vol. XVIII, Lenin on Britain and A. U. Pope's Maxim Litvinoff. But nowhere is it recorded that the declaration supplied to Litvinov and refused a hearing at the conference was in fact printed under his name in the March 1915 issue of the SOCIALIST STANDARD and the whole of the front page was given over to its presentation.

Since the declaration was in fact written by Lenin himself (and more than likely translated into English by him) this is indeed strange, for in Leninist circles even a doodle by the late master would be sought after and noted! In fact this seems to be the first known article by Lenin to have been published in English.

Is there an explanation for this odd silence? Let us look a little closer at the events of 1915.

After making a verbal and written protest Litvinov left the conference hall in disgust. For some days afterwards he attempted to get his Party's declaration printed in the "Labour" and "Socialist" press but every journal approached refused to print it. He then asked the Socialist Party of Great Britain to publish it. The Minutes of our Executive Committee for February 23, 1915 read:

“Russian Letter on War: M. Maximovitch stating that certain Russian Political Parties had been excluded from the arrangements made by Socialist Bureau although members of the Bureau, and also protesting against the action of the European Socialists in the supporting the War.
Lobb and Anderson moved "That the letter of M. Maximovitch be inserted in the next issue of the S.S. as a front page article". Cd.”

If we compare this declaration (also reproduced in our pamphlet Russia Since 1917) printed exactly as received, with the version later published in the Sotsial-Demokrat (March 29, 1915), we find that the Russian version differs from the English printing. The Russian version concludes with two sentences not found in the copy submitted to us by Litvinov. These sentences read

“the workers of Russia extend their comradely hand to the Socialists who act like Karl Leibknecht, like the Socialists of Serbia and Italy, like the British comrades from the Independent Labour Party and some members of the British Socialist Party, like our imprisoned comrades of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
It is to this road that we call you the road of Socialism. Down with chauvinism which destroys the proletarian cause! Long live International Socialism.”

And here we have the solution to the mystery. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had for long held the traditional Social-Democratic illusions concerning the strength of the anti-war forces. Before the war they believed that the anti-war resolutions of the International, would lead, in the event of a crisis, to antiwar action, even though the reform-minded masses were clearly patriotic, and the German Party itself had repeatedly in the Reichstag and in its press, sworn itself to stand by the Fatherland. After the war began they still continued to see pockets of socialist internationalism in places where they did not exist and never had existed. For the Bolshevik theories were based on a belief in the need to manipulate socialistically-ignorant masses, therefore they could not reject the mass-based reformist labour parties but tried to find allies within them, Lenin up to the date of the London Conference was quite ignorant of the real activities of the ILP for example. Since he relied on Litvinov for his information about English political affairs it is clear that Litvinov was playing the old opportunist game of concealing the defects of those he wished to ally himself with. The extent of Lenin's illusion can be gauged from his comments on the London Conference:

“On the other hand, the Journal de Débats laid the cards on the table in declaring that the major achievement was the vote of the English Socialists with Keir Hardie at their head, who had hitherto been against the war and against recruiting, and who at the conference cast their vote in favour of the war until victory is won over Germany.” (Sotsial-Demokrat March 29, 1915.)

Litvinov on the other hand, living in England, knew the real nature of the so-called anti-war forces. He knew that the ILP leaders though regretting the outbreak of war (in common with many Tories and Liberals) had not in fact opposed it. He knew that Keir Hardie, MacDonald and the others had in fact supported the war long before the London Conference. He knew that these gentlemen had in fact boosted recruitment to the forces even if they opposed the official recruiting platforms. So he deleted the final part of the declaration knowing that part to be riddled with illusions and knowing the Socialists Party had consistently exposed these illusions. After the date of publication he presumably regretted his action since it reflected on the accuracy of the information he had supplied to Lenin. The fact that Lenin's statement had been published and distributed widely in this country was never mentioned by Litvinov in any of his writings on the London Conference.

Melvin Harris

Editorial: Making Capitalism History (2005)

Editorial from the March 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Staggering numbers of the world’s people live lives of abject poverty, on one dollar a day or less. They lack access to housing, health care, education, even to clean water, things taken for granted in the ‘developed’ world. Their lives are nasty, brutish and short, brought down by malnutrition and diseases which could be easily treated with simple medicines were these available. They may be victims of wars and expulsions, living in refugee camps or prey to thuggery and violence from governments and other rulers.

It’s not as if nobody knows or cares about their plight. Charities and international aid organisations devote their considerable resources and expertise to valiant efforts to improve the lot of the world’s poorest. Workers in developed capitalist countries willingly make donations to such as Oxfam, believing that they are doing some good in alleviating destitution. Celebrity concerts and fund-raising activities further provide opportunities for collecting money for such good causes.

Yet it all seems to have little effect. Despite the efforts of both the poor themselves and of the aid and charity workers, the conditions of people at rock bottom hardly improve. Indeed more join them as violence, disruptions and natural disasters add to the stock of people with little of their own except their lives. Whole generations are doomed to hunger and squalor until premature death cuts short their misery.

All this is unconscionable. That our fellow human beings are forced to survive in this state is an affront to us all, a vivid demonstration that all is not right with a world where such things happen, alongside billionaires and vastly-expensive military programmes. Nobody surveying the extent of poverty and inequality can be content with such a set-up.

And it is made worse by the fact that it is utterly unnecessary. The world can produce enough food, water and housing materials to provide the basic needs (and more) of all the Earth’s people. The poor simply do not constitute a market — there is no profit to be made out of selling food to the destitute, or from growing food for them. If the one dollar a day will not stretch to buying food, then too bad. Countries supposedly in the grip of famine hardly ever have an absolute food shortage, it’s just that the food available is sold to those who can afford to buy it or exported for consumption elsewhere.

So the solution is not more charity, more fund-raising, more flag days in the local high street. The solution is a world where food —  like all goods — is produced to satisfy need, not to make a profit. Starvation amid plenty would be quite impossible in a socialist society run along the lines of production for use, where there are no poor people and everyone has free access to what has been produced. The knowledge and commitment of farmers, scientists and others would be put towards producing enough food for all. This is technically possible now, but capitalism’s profit motive, its wars and rivalries, do not permit abundance to be realised. A society where all work together will have no problem in achieving the potential that humanity has brought about.

Coroner's Court (1960)

From the February 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Court Room was small and unimpressive, rather like the old type of school class room, with varnished pine wood and green paint. One hears continually about officialdom being impersonal and flinty in its dealings. That was not apparent here, however. The atmosphere was kindly and unruffled, but the business was conducted with an air of efficient deliberation.

This day was one of the many normal routine sessions. No ghastly murder to attract the press, nor mysterious death of a famous personality to pack the small room with prominent names. In that room the unknown personal tragedies of our society for a brief while became picked out of the mass and enlarged as on a screen. It soon became clear that this kind of thing went on session after session, year upon year. The accidents, the suicides, the medical evidence, the autopsy reports couched in precise medical terms. made the mind reel at the variety and immensity of the social problems they revealed.

On leaving the Court Room and coming into the bustle of everyday life, one's thoughts dwelt over and over again on what had been heard. There was the down-and-out misfit, practically unknown in life, who at death had acquired a dossier that would be the envy of a pop singer's publicity manager. The tramp was one of those unhappy few who have somehow locked themselves away from society, defying all the meagre efforts of the welfare workers to become "rehabilitated." Yes, meagre. After all, why should our Capitalist society spend large sums on reclaiming odd members of the working class? There are always plenty of active, healthy ones available for exploitation.

Then there was the teen-age boy and his pillion passenger girl friend out for a trial run on a new motor-bike. It took days to get the list of injuries and causes of death out of the mind. One of the lad's friends gave evidence (he was following behind on another bike). His statements were delivered in a seemingly disinterested fashion, as though everyone expected youth to sacrifice themselves for speed because life had nothing else to offer except to "knock up a ton (100 m.p.h.) on the by-pass."

Other cases followed. There was the small child who unthinkingly dashed into the road and was killed by a passing car. A common enough accident, so common in fact that we now almost accept it as a necessary evil. The elderly woman subject to falls, but who had nobody to watch over her in her lonely back room.

On reflection one realised that all of these personal problems were bound up with our social pattern of living. What is wrong with our society that has its children condemned to play alongside lethal metal juggernauts? That cannot look after its old ones, or find a place for its misfits? Just think about these problems that continually confront us, and observe that—no matter how varied—they are all linked to our basic social system. A society based on property, with profits, wars, poverty and privilege, will always throw up its human wrecks. The coroner's court is only one of the many places where they are inspected.

Jack Law

If Man Friday — (1920)

From the January 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

If Man Friday could be suddenly introduced to our industrial life, taken into the factories and shown the wonderful processes by which we pour out society's dazzling stream of wealth, have explained to him the astonishing contrivances by which we have conquered space and time and the forces of nature, what would surprise him most? Would it be the wonderful looms reeling off miles of fine cloth, or the carpet looms weaving a double fabric to be split into two as it is woven, or the railway trains flying over the land at a mile a minute, or the 50,000 horse power engines of the giant ships, or the mighty mills grinding a nations' corn, or the newspaper machines turning out their scores of thousands of papers per hour, or the airmen climbing up into the clouds, or what?

No, it would not be any of these things that would give Robinson Crusoe's batman his greatest or most lasting surprise. When he had seen all our technical marvels he would naturally ask to be shown the results, and then he would get a jolt. He would find that in spite of the prodigious wealth that could be produced, people were in want; then he would discover that, contrary to all his previous experience, people were most in want when there was most wealth in the land, and finally he would see that it was not those who did not produce the wealth that were in want, but those who did, and—the knockout—the more they produced the deeper their want. And then he would laugh!

He would laugh because he had tumbled to the secret of the whole thing. His mind would go back to the time when he lay on the beach, the prospective joint of his hungry brethren, before Robinson robbed them of their dinner. He would recognise in our productive system only another form of cannibalism. All our marvels of science and ingenuity he would recognise only as adjuncts of an elaborate scheme of cannibalism, in which men ate other men piecemeal, instead of at a sitting.

Yes, he would see men's and women's sinews being, through these wonderful instruments of labour, worn into wealth for their masters appropriation, their flesh ground into profit for their master's pocketing; and he would marvel not so much at the development of our industrial devices as at the surprising way in which cannibalism has been elaborated through ages of development, to convert the unconscious victim of an hour's feast into sentient flesh quivering for a lifetime under wheels that pinch and peel.

A. E. Jacomb  

Here we go again (1987)

From the December 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The "socialist" conference in Chesterfield attracted considerable media attention. Tony Benn called it a gathering of the widest range of socialists since the First World War. 1,800 delegates were at the conference, including members of the SWP, WRP. RCP. Militant and the Labour Party. Convened by people from the Conference of Socialist Economists and the Socialist Society, described by one newspaper as "intellectuals", its aim - that discussion would take place on papers prepared for the conference - was unfulfilled. The reason was largely the determination of Trotskyist groups to use the occasion to state their own position and to indulge in a recruitment drive. The leader column of the Guardian described the conference as "a collection of attitude takers, discredited failures and sectarian anti-Labour activists".

Ron Todd's docker is hardly likely to have been impressed by the petty squabbling and misleading drivel emanating from Chesterfield. Whilst the conference may have fed the already fevered minds of Sun and Daily Express leader writers, this circus had nothing to do with furthering socialism. Ken Livingstone delivered what passed for an intelligent analysis of the crisis in capitalism and its imminent collapse - to be replaced by state capitalism with guess who in charge of it. His stand-up comic routine may have appealed to those who still believe that a socialist revolution occurred in Russia in 1917 but not even a newt would believe in his version of a "new socialist order". 

The Guardian report stated, "Notably absent, however, were the Euro-Communists and, of course, the Labour soft left". There was a more notable absence from Chesterfield: The Socialist Party of Great Britain: the only socialist party in this country which has eschewed deluding the working class into believing that capitalism can reformed in their interest. We were absent because we have no common cause with futile reformists, gathered together in earnest discussion of how to re-arrange capitalism while telling the workers that it is socialism.

Editorial: Why politicians tell lies (1994)

Editorial from the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

It appears that politicians have never been so distrusted. Their reputation for integrity is zero. Sincerity was never a virtue of that occupation but now, what was once seen as a possible credibility gap has become a great gulf between what they say and the truth. According to a recent Gallup Poll 90 percent of the electorate think that politicians cannot open their mouths without telling lies.

Of course, there is nothing new about politicians making promises which they know they cannot deliver. There is nothing new about governments lying to the public. As lying goes, the present government is only an average performer yet another recent poll shows that John Major, as Prime Minister, has the lowest ratings since polls began. Why is he, and politicians generally, attracting this special contempt?

The Tory government has certainly lost contact with reality. With the social fabric crumbling around them they still think they are building a better society. After 14 years in office, having been driven by a latter-day fervour for the free market, they are now exhausted. They have run out of ideas, are in the grip of failure and have nowhere to go. They cannot see the truth let alone tell it.

Neither does the Labour Party present an alternative. Having abandoned its traditional but illusory claim to be the party of change and having openly dedicated itself to the running of capitalism, it is now speaking the same jaded language as the Tories.

These things are true but they are not an explanation for the apparent dishonesty of politicians. We need to ask further questions about more deeply-rooted causes. The answers show that the public should never have trusted politicians in the first place. The lesson is, trust a capitalist politician and you deserve all you get. Unfortunately, when naive trust turns to disillusion and contempt, by itself this is not enough.

It should always be obvious that politicians want power, which they never get by telling the truth. They function in a world of make-believe in which what they say they can do has almost no connection with real possibilities. In this world of political illusions they pretend that in power they can control events. The reality is that governments spend most of their time reacting to events which they cannot control. No government has ever been able to control the economic conditions of the market system but at the same time no politician has ever gained power by declaring the truth of that fact.

Politicians run the profit system for the benefit of a minority but they do it amidst the widespread belief that they run it in the interests of the whole community. This is the great deception which is the main source of the lies of politicians and governments. Is it not surprising them that the majority of people are alienated not just from politicians but the entire political process.

So, what must be done? As voters we must clean up our own act. We must take on our own powers of responsibility and action. We must stop electing career politicians to run a system which is against our interests. This means using our powers to establish a society which is organized solely and directly for the needs of the whole community through common ownership, democratic control and voluntary cooperation. This will provide an open democracy in which we will be free to make decisions about what must be done whilst at the same time having the powers of action to carry out those decisions. It is only on this basis that a truly democratic administration can work with integrity of purpose simply as one part of the different functions of society.

This will replace the tawdry operation of the capitalist state with its false hopes and broken promises, and its secrecy, deceptions and lies masking its real role as the enforcer of privileged class interests.

Material World: Stateless in Capitalism (2015)

The Material World Column from the July 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Having a nationality is something so natural that people rarely stop to think about what life would be like without it. Stateless people have no nationality and are not accepted as citizens by any country. With no ID, they are deprived of basic rights and vulnerable to exploitation and human traffickers. Stateless people have no rights to the basics most people take for granted such as health-care, education and employment. They cannot travel, open bank accounts, buy a house or car, or even get married. The current tragedy taking place with the Rohingya refugees has at its root cause with the Burmese government’s refusal to acknowledge the Rohingya as citizens (they even dispute the actual term, insisting they be called Bengali).

A stateless person is someone who is not considered as a national by any state. Being stateless means individuals have no legal identity, no passport, no vote, and few or no opportunities to get an education. Without documents, it is impossible to register marriage, so family life is affected. Travelling is difficult, and simple things like opening a bank account or getting a driving licence are impossible. Many find themselves stuck in a legal limbo, and can find themselves facing detention and destitution, unable to work formally, living at the margins of society. The stateless often face insoluble problems over property rights or the custody of children. They live in constant fear of being expelled from a country or sometimes resort to fleeing and split up their families in a desperate attempt to resolve their children’s statelessness. In 27 countries women are denied the right to pass on their nationality to their children on an equal basis as men.

At least 10 million people worldwide have no nationality. Thailand is home to more than 500,000 stateless people in its population of nearly 70 million. The Dominican Republic in 2013 applied new nationality criteria retroactively and affected the nationality status of tens of thousands of people of Haitian descent born in the Dominican Republic. While in Europe, Estonia and Latvia, ex-Soviet Union republics, have some 91,000 and 267,000 stateless people respectively.

For generations, Roma families living in mahalas (neighbourhoods) in the Balkans have passed down their houses to relatives through informal means. It is uncommon for these inheritances to be properly registered or to have official legal titles. These same families often forgo registering the birth of a child with local authorities, as the cost of obtaining a birth certificate can be prohibitive. Without official identification documents or legal claims to their property, Roma families in the region are at increased risk of statelessness. The problem only worsened with the decades of conflict that have plagued the Balkans. The Roma now living in refugee camps can neither prove their previous legal residence in Kosovo nor meet the necessary requirements to obtain citizenship in Montenegro.

The UNHCR believes a stateless baby is born every 10 minutes.

We should contrast the persecution of the poor stateless person with the luxury and liberty of the elite group of the world’s voluntary stateless super-rich. They transcend geographical boundaries to purchase properties in major cities across the globe. With few ties to specific countries, these individuals lead nomadic, season-driven lives. Their choice of where to live at any one time is based on climate, their children’s education, tax constraints or which of their friends they want to lunch with on any particular day. This global lifestyle has led to the stateless super-rich buying a larger portion of the world’s most expensive homes as they look to park their wealth in perceived havens. They own multiple properties, usually consisting of two in their country of principal residence, one in a global city such as London, Paris or New York, and a holiday home by the beach or perhaps in the mountains.

‘The more money you have, the more rootless you become because everything is possible,’ says Jeremy Davidson, a property consultant. ‘I have clients who wake up in the morning and say, ‘Let’s go to Venice for lunch.’ If you’ve got that sort of money the world becomes a very small place. They tend to have a diminished sense of place, of where their roots are,’ he told the Financial Times (28 April, 2012).

The World Socialist Movement stands opposed to the nation-state and advocates a world in which everyone will be ‘stateless’ but that has nothing in common with statelessness under capitalism as described above. While states exist all workers living in one, whether citizens, stateless or citizens of another state, are fellow workers who should treat each other and be treated as the same.

To emancipate ourselves, we, the working class must come to realise that we have no country and come together to engage in a world-wide class struggle against the capitalist class.

ALJO

Heroine and Victim (1975)

Book Review from the April 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Before and After Stalin, by Aino Kuusinen. Michael Joseph, £3.50

The days of my youth were spent mainly in Moscow, the throbbing heart of Revolutionary Russia.

In those days, a few years after the revolution, we frequently saw, though always in the background, at the huge "Comintern" building, or more often at the notorious "Lux" hotel (where we all lived) a stunningly beautiful young woman, who made most of the film stars and sex-symbols look like catsmeat; ash-blond hair, blue eyes, cream-and-roses complexion. "Who's that?" we would enquire, eagerly agog with male curiosity. "Oh! that!" was the reply. "That's Otto Kuusinen's wife." And who, you may well ask, is Otto Kuusinen?

Otto Kuusinen, dear reader, was the supreme Stalinist toady. General Secretary of the Executive of the Communist International from its inception in 1919 till Stalin killed it in 1936. The shadow behind every intrigue and plot to destroy rivals, whether Trotsky or his own native erstwhile comrade Karl Manner; who never put his own signature to a document but always had a front-man to carry the can. Indeed the ultimate intriguer, who watches his wife endure eighteen years in Stalin's labour camps, who refused to utter a word when his own son was imprisoned and shot, and whose daughter only escaped Dracula Stalin by luck; during all of which he kept dead silent. The only "foreign communist" who made it to the Vice-Presidency of the Soviet Union and the eventual membership of the holy of holies, the Polit-Bureau of the Party: after all the others had been shot.

This book Before and After Stalin by Aina Kuusinen his life unwittingly tells his story.

In 1930 she was sent by her old man (as secretary of the Comintern) to America to help the gang at the head of the American Communist Party to nobble the funds and buildings of the Finnish Immigrant Workers' Clubs. It never succeeded and she eventually refused to do it. Returning to Moscow she was amazed to be ordered to Tokyo to establish herself as a Soviet agent.

There she encountered the most notorious double agent of all time, Richard Sorge, the villain who worked for Stalin while reporting to Hitler as Tokyo correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Sorge actually telegraphed advance information of the German invasion to Stalin, who in his conceit ignored it.

Her book is all the more impressive for its forbearance and toleration. So far from denouncing, she tries to "explain" him and his actions, by references to the political environment in which he worked. She calmly records endless interrogation and indignities. She was slung in a cell in the dreaded Lubyanka prison; the top torturers of the NKVD gave up after long interrogations [failed] to make her sign phoney "confessions".

At the age of seventy, she describes how she was finally "rehabilitated" after Stalin's death, released and arrived back in Moscow without money, adequate clothing, identity cards, job, food or shelter. She wrote to the General Secretary of the Communist Party walked into the office with the letter and was told to wait outside on the pavement, in the depths of a Moscow winter.

Her book carries the ring of truth. It is an inspiration for generations to come, who will one day break the chains of the foul Russian Bolsheviks' dictatorship.

Horatio

Necessity and Freedom (1959)

From the October 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

THE ETHICS OF MARXISM (5) (See Parts 1, 2, 3 & 4)

The bourgeois prejudice sees Marxism as a philosophy of iron necessitarianism; hence as a negation of freedom. The bourgeois prejudice prizes freedom and holds it to be among the rarest blooms of civilization. Asked to define freedom it may feel that such technical matters can be taken care of by the pundits and philosophers. From its own empirical standpoint, freedom is not so much something to be abstractly defined but concretely enjoyed.

Freedom and Society

The bourgeois prejudice, while it may talk of the need of social organisation, sees it nevertheless as a restraint upon the freedom of the individual, i.e., the bourgeois individual. Not being a Marxist the bourgeois individual fails to comprehend that the very social organisation which he regards as a restriction of free activity is the sole source of the freedom he possesses.

"Man is not born free" even though Rousseau has told him so. Freedom is something which men acquire and they only acquire it in and through there human organisation—society. Such freedom may not be absolute freedom—whatever philosophers mean by that—but within the context of human organisation it has inexhaustible possibilities for further development. For man there is no other freedom but through society—but it is enough.

If freedom means—and this is the only valid meaning once can give to freedom—the ability to bring about the ends man desires, what as distinct from the animal world enables them to effect this? The answer lies in their economic production. An economic production, quantitatively and qualitatively different from any animal economy. It is not the case that man is merely a productive animal among other productive animals, but that his production is social production, i.e., his labour has always involved cooperation with others of his kind.

Human labour is the fundamental condition for human existence. As Marx has it, it is: —

A process going on between man and nature, a process in which man through his own activities, initiates, regulates and controls the material reaction between himself and nature. He confronts nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, heads and hands, the natural forces of the body, in order to appropriate nature's production in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops the powers that slumber within him, and subjects them to his own control.

It is not merely that man's labour is collective labour, but a special co-ordinated labour carried out in cooperation with others of his kind. It is an activity both premeditated and planned. Thus man is able to produce his own conditions of life, and so produce his own history. Man, then, is different from other animals because he produces differently.

It was through this collective and coordinated labour process that speech—the practical form of human consciousness—developed as a means of communication in answer to the growing complexities of economic production. It was through this process of social labour that there came into being the rules of social organisation—ethics. Just as it was the need of greater manipulation of the material environment, in order to achieve greater advances in social organsation and production that science became an essential department of human activity. It is then through his economic production that man has been able to extend his inherited social knowledge, widen his social horizon, and produce the facilities for so doing. Herein lies man's freedom. The price of freedom has not been "unceasing vigilance" but unceasing economic production.

It is through his economic production that man has come to understand the nature of causality, i.e., in order to bring about certain consequences, he must know the conditions necessary for their successful fulfilment. Hence it is only by his greater understanding of the interconnection of processes and the laws which regulate them that he is able to more freely bring about the ends he desires. Causality is the consciousness of necessity, and the greater his grasp of the nature of necessity the greater is man's freedom to act in a planned and purposeful way. Had man been a creature passively reacting to his external environment he could never have grasped the nature of causality—necessity—nor freedom. Freedom is not as the bourgeois prejudice see it, the progressive realisation of an abstract idea but the progressive development of the means of life and socialisation of production.

The Bourgeois Prejudice and Freedom

But how does the bourgeois prejudice understand freedom? Through a knowledge of necessity? The answer is no. While the bourgeois prejudice may admit that the operation of the forces of production is subject to law and organisation, it confines it to the mere technological level. The bourgeois prejudice fails to see that the bourgeois economy is subject to laws and a determinative organisation. And that right across its version of freedom, necessity is writ large. Its philosophers and pundits may discuss the nature of freedom till the cows come home, but they never seriously attempt to locate the source from which bourgeois freedom, in fact all freedom stems—society. They may talk about the need of human values, but never see that bourgeois freedom is a class-conditioned freedom which falls far short of a truly human freedom. This is because its own social organisation is rooted in the class ownership of the productive forces and it is this which determines the level of existence both quantitatively and qualitatively for the vast mass of non-owners.

The crux of bourgeois freedom is its power to exploit and secure the unpaid labour by its ownership of the agencies of production. From this freedom all other freedom flow.

Bourgeois freedom exists in a system subject to laws and compulsions. Its own class conditioned character makes it necessary to produce not for the purpose of satisfying human needs but for securing the production and reproduction of surplus value on an over-expanding scale. This is the basic law of present production, the overriding necessity which must be obeyed if bourgeois freedom and privilege is to continue. Thus the class character of freedom means the freedom of the few and the unfreedom of the many.

The Limits of Bourgeois Freedom
But is the bourgeois himself really free? The answer is that he cannot be, because he himself lives in an unfree world. He cannot escape the consequences of the social set up which gives him his freedom. What is more, as the present order moves on, his own freedom becomes more restricted. More and more he is controlled by the world market, more and more does the need of ever-greater capital accumulation become more urgent. And across his world ever lies the shadow of future slumps, future war, and universal slaughter. Thus in a world of class antagonism, national and racial hatreds, "freedom" is forced to seek strange bed fellows. No doubt the bourgeois individual would like freedom from these things. But because he is unaware of the nature of the necessity from which his freedom stems he does not know where such freedom may be found. He thus, remains imprisoned in his narrow cell of class liberty.

The very necessity of the social system which produces the class freedom for the few produces at the same time the class unfreedom of the many. But the iron compulsion of capitalism which give freedom of a sort to the bourgeois deny access to a fuller life for the proletariat. Men, because they are men and not automatons, will chafe against the restrictions which prevent a fuller and freer life. And it is in their struggle and desire for a free and fuller life that the vast majority discover bourgeois freedom and a truly human freedom to be irreconcilable. But this will mean the abolition of private property institutions and free access by all to the productive forces. A social state of affairs in which man is no longer a mere unit carrying out the orders of others, but where each one has an equal role in furthering the common aim which he himself takes part in forming. But it is not enough for the many to desire freedom. They will have to grasp the nature of necessity wherein their unfreedom lies. Not to know this means that their desire for freedom will remain unfulfilled.

Marxism a Denial of Fatalism
Contrary to the bourgeois notion of freedom which sees it as personal liberty inhibited by social structures, the Marxist sees freedom as a choice based upon an objective appraisal of the data of a given situation. Only when events and processes are not known are we subject to iron determinism. Where knowledge of these matters is available then and only then are we free to follow a course of action dependent on the relevant information. To successfully carry out what one can do one must also know what one cannot do. It is when we know what is necessary that our purpose becomes effective and that is freedom. Not to know what is necessary in a given situation is unfreedom. When we think correctly we act correctly and only to that extent is man free. Thus in a scientific experiment or a surgical operation one cannot choose willy-nilly what to do. There are things that must be done and must not be done. In fact, if both are to be successful they must be governed by the objective facts of the situation. It is only by strictly conforming to what is necessary to be done can the aim and purpose in either case become effective. The more ignorant one is of the nature of causality, i.e., the necessity, the more important and determined one is. Effective action means then that we must have knowledge of the laws which operate in a given plane of reference. This does not mean we are independent of the determining circumstances out of which ideas and action arise, but it does mean that unless we understand the objective pattern of what is determined our thought and action will be non-effective.

The bourgeois prejudice does at times liken freedom to the jungle. Everybody does what is best for himself, although the bourgeois economy has government, bureaucracy and the armed forces to see that the jungle does not get out of hand. But the inhabitants of the jungle are not free. They know nothing of causality—necessity—and hence nothing of freedom. They cannot mutually cooperate and reap the advantages of a division of labour. They can only instinctively conform to the law of the jungle if they are to survive.

Only men can be free, And only the class which is now unfree can establish a freedom which is truly human — even though bourgeois individuals may come to associate themselves with the aims of the working class. But this unfree class must free itself from the ideology of bourgeois freedom and see the necessity of establishing a classless society and with it a classless freedom.

Man the measure of all things
Marxism does not believe in absolute free will or absolute determinism. Free will versus determinism is a bourgeois metaphysic it can dispense with. Neither does it hold to some simple, cause-effect relation. It sees nature—men's needs—society as a process of causal interaction. Along with Marx and Engels they hold the view that man is the responsible agent in all social change. It is man that wills even though he is born into a situation which is unwilled by him. But he must be informed of the objective milieu in which he finds himself. Only then can he act effectively on events and by changing them, change himself.

Men are not mere creatures of determinism, economic or otherwise. Because the only permanent thing about morality is man's demand for the better which itself is redetermined according to time and place. Man—and here we refer to unfree "class man" in the given social context—will always make fresh demands in the world and upon himself and thus produce the conditions necessary for his human needs. Men and ideas as we have said are the sole instrument for initiating social change. For any change to be effective, however, relevant knowledge of events is indispensable. The "must" and the "ought"—necessity and freedom—do not exist in a polarised anatagonism, but are indissoluble aspects of social reality. The charge against Marxism, posed by its critics, of fatalism and termed by them the "inevitability dilemma" thus falls to the ground.

Both in belief and action Marxism is a humanism. And it is the Marxist who seeks a world where truly human values prevail. Marxism sees man as a product of a social complex and at the same time as the producer of a more conscious society. This is the heart and essence of the Marxist ethic. In religious fantasy God made man the centre of the universe. In material fact capitalism has alienated him from it. Marxism shows how in a truly human sense man can yet become that.

We would remind Mr. Taylor, the author of the pamphlet Is Marxism a Humanism? that Marxism is not merely a method of expounding humanism. but a way of achieving it. As such it challenges more than favourable comparison with any other set of contemporary values.

Ted Wilmott

Big Brother (2011)

Book Review from the December 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Surveillance. By Robin Tudge. New Internationalist.

My first thoughts on finishing this book were: not for the paranoid.  Although this journal has covered the issue of global surveillance in the past, Trudge takes us deeper, and into a world in which our every movement is monitored, if not via CCTVs, then via our online activity, whether it be on Facebook or Google (where every word searched is stored and matched to the searcher’s ISP address), or our shopping, banking and travelling preferences and our activity in the workplace. Moreover, this information, whether in private hands, gleaned by the state, by social networks or by social welfare, is shared and converged between corporations and other states on a  scale that beggars belief, and all ostensibly rationalised on the grounds that it is in all our interests.

Our governments, corporations and even social network sites such as Facebook are unremittingly urging us to pass on to them ever more information about us. They simply can’t get enough on us. Tudge informs us that data about the average Briton, for example, is on about 700 databases – and asks “who can name even ten of those databases?”.

For some time, just to take one example of the problem,  there has existed ECHELON, a global communications network, spying on us from land, sea, air and space, “intercepting every phone call, email, fax, telex or message sent…and fed through computers for keywords, and supercomputers for converting speech into text…sifting text for keywords that are flagged up.”  

ECHELON, however, is not just about monitoring us, the potentially revolutionary masses. It is “also used for commercial interest, to earn its way in the world and to profit its backers.” Tudge reports how one Euro MP has claimed: “European businesses have lost over 20 billion Euros due to ECHELON’s interceptions being used to pip the competition – as when McDonnell-Douglas scooped a $6 billion deal with the Saudis over the French and Airbus, while Raytheon muscled in with a share of a £1.3 billion radar deal between Brazil and a French radar company.”

It is, however, in the post-9/11 era that we have seen a huge growth in surveillance. In a  world in which governments are wont to tell us they are fighting for our freedoms, the most effective means of winning consent for repressive laws, the suspension of human rights (eg, habeas corpus) and increased surveillance, is to scare us into acceptance, to create a global society in which we are all under suspicion from boyfriends, men in beards and absolutely anyone boarding an aeroplane.

Indeed, former MI5 chief, Stella Rimington, accused MPs of  “frightening people” so as to pass laws to interfere with their privacy and civil liberties, achieving “precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a  police state.”  An example of this was when the British government used its presidency of the EU to produce a report entitled Liberty and Security: Striking The Right Balance, effectively a manifesto demanding a range of new EU-wide surveillance measures.

There is a lot of ground covering the technology of control in this short book, from the first use of fingerprints in ancient Babylon and by Chinese bureaucrats to authenticate clay tablets and seals on documents, right up to the present and ongoing debate about the need for biometric ID cards. The author is not hesitant in pointing out just whose interests are really at stake. As he observes: “Progress in this field [biometrics] as in many others is not defined by proficiency, but by profit. Despite the economic downturn, the global biometric market is expected to grow at an annual rate of  18% between 2010 and 2012”. So, not only do our masters get to monitor us, but the very practice brings them profit.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has patented wireless sensors which, when linked to computers, monitor workers’ heart rate, respiration rate, temperature, facial movements and brain signals. “When conjoined with workers’ psychological profiles and data on their weight, age and health, managers could be remotely informed of levels of frustration or stress and help or dismiss accordingly.”

The desire of an elite to make a profit at the expense of the majority and the need to make sure the workers do not get in the way of those profits, is really at the heart of the global surveillance society,  and this the author continually draws our attention to. Our governments, and the corporations they serve as the executive for, are indeed very much concerned about security – but it’s theirs not ours, the continuing security of a elite whose power is derived from their class position. They do not see advances in technology as a means to benefit humanity, but as a means to tighten their control over us.

John Bissett

Production for use (1983)

From the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

What determines the nature of work is its social context. With the change from capitalism to socialism, the social form of labour will change. Under capitalism labour functions within an exchange relationship of economic values — labour time for wages. With socialism, labour will simply be carried on as an expression of cooperation within a direct relationship between productive activity and needs.

Work itself is an important human need, and by reducing it to a mechanical function and an economic category within an exchange economy, capitalism destroys this vital aspect of work. It makes it a time serving activity, drained of human meaning. As a result, people wish to avoid it.

Capitalist production is enclosed within an exchange economy. It does expand, but only as the self-expansion of capital takes place through the exploitation of the working class—through the use of wage labour. The capitalist's use of labour power results from an exchange of wages with the worker's labour time. This is the investment of portions of capital as variable capital. It is this portion of total capital which is "self-expanding". Labour power is variable capital because, when it is put to use by an employer, it creates values over and above its own value (surplus value). These surplus products of labour power, commodities, then enter into a general relationship of value on the markets, where, as a result of sales, these values have realised in money form. Thus we have an enclosed system of exchange, the key element of which is the self-expansion of variable capital, which is the worker put to work through the exchange of wages for labour time.

With socialism, on the basis of common ownership, the producers are elevated to a social existence which is formed by direct relationships of co-operative activity about mutual needs. In breaking out of the capitalist relationships of value, labour will express a direct productive relationship between people, and will be released for human need. Socialism will abolish all economic relationships of exchange. With production for human need no significant economic relationship will exist between items of wealth, and there will therefore be no need to compare or measure their methods of production in terms of any common factor such as labour time.

The capitalist exchange relationships between commodities themselves, including the human commodity, labour power, will be replaced by a direct relationship in the line of productive activity; items of wealth, and human need. This direct relationship of wealth to need replaces the capitalist relationship between things. The price mechanism which transmits an economic message throughout capitalist production, to do with cheapness and competitive, profit-making success, will be replaced in socialism with a direct relationship of production to human needs.

Production of use will be the organisation of necessary production in line with consciously chosen levels of consumption with no intervening economic factors between the two activities. The organisation of production therefore will resolve itself as a problem of quantity analysis. These will be absolute quantities of things in relation to need, not relative quantities of labour time in the things themselves. Socialism will quantify its needs and then organise production in direct response.

The choice of production methods would not resolve itself simply as the selection of the most efficient method of production, that is, the method which embodies the least amount of labour time. The capitalist market pressure to embody the least amount of labour time. The capitalist market pressure to embody the least amount of labour time in production will be replaced in socialism by all the requirements of need. These will include material necessity, work itself as a human need, social safety, care of the environment, conservation, animal welfare, and so on.

For example, the massive release of pollutants into the atmosphere may be part of the cheapest and most efficient way of converting fossil fuels into electricity, but socialism would not do it. The confinement of animals for long periods in cramped spaces may be part of the cheapest and most efficient method of converting cereals into animal protein, but socialism would not do it.

Paradoxically, socialism will make more economical use of resources and labour, because it will strip away all functions which are irrelevant to the direct relationship of activity to need. This fact was recognised by Marx. "The capitalist mode of production, while on the one hand, enforcing economy in each individual business, on the other hand, begets. by its anarchical system of competition, the most outrageous squandering of labour power and of the social means of production, not to mention the creation of a vast number of employments, at present indispensable, but in themselves superfluous." (Capital, Vol. 1, p.540, Allen & Unwin.)

Socialism will enjoy the latitude to combine different methods of production where this might be considered necessary by the community. It will deploy all its resources more freely according to practicality and desirability regardless of possibly different rates of working efficiency.

Socialism will enjoy more people available for the production of useful wealth; without the limits of market capacity it will enjoy greater use of production methods; without price competition it will enjoy wider selection of production methods; with the ending of national barriers it will enjoy a more rational deployment of world resources; and without capital investment it will enjoy greater adaptability of social production.

Socialism will combine all these practical advantages with all the criteria for the selection of production methods according to need, such as material necessity, the enjoyment of work, safety, care of the environment, conservation.

In this context work is no longer a mechanical function but the satisfaction of vital human need.

Pieter Lawrence