The Demise of Thatcher (1990)

Editorial from the December 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who the hell cares which political dinosaur will lead the Conservative Party? What possible difference does the conclusion of this thieves' quarrel make to the vast majority of people living in Britain? 

The Tories represent the interests of the parasite class which lives on the profits which are legally robbed from the wealth-producing majority. The workers, who are the overwhelming majority, have nothing to be gained by supporting the sordid ambitions of politicians. The Prime Minister is not the workers' representative, but the chief mouthpiece of the profit-protecting government. 

The function of government is to rule over those who are the productive majority. The system in which the majority allows itself to be ruled - governed - oppressed by leaders is not democracy. Democracy means the rule of the people by the people. It means the administration of things, not the government over people. In a democracy there can be no leaders or led, for all people will co-operate to make the decisions which affect the life of the human community. 

The irrelevant leadership battle is a sordid fight between defenders of capitalism who think that it is their role to govern and ours to be governed. We are not invited to vote in their election; all we are asked to do is to sit in front of our TV screens and gaze at the cynical tactics of a gang of political tricksters. 

The Tory contestants were united by one policy; their complete and unequivocal support for world capitalism. In this they are at one with Kinnock and Ashdown. All of the politicians and parties of the profit system are solid in their rejection of any alternative to the way the world is run now. We live in a society where needs come second to profit and where those who possess do not produce while those who produce all goods and services do not possess the resources of the earth. 

The real political contest is not about who will lead the Tory party and draw the prime ministerial salary. It is a battle of ideas about whether the working class majority will support and vote for production for profit or production for use. If workers vote for the profit system, then it matters not a jot which of the con men leads which party of fakers. If workers opt for socialism, as historical necessity demands that we should, then the question of leadership is irrelevant. No socialist would ever follow a leader; no socialist seeks to lead anyone else. 

To the Tory tricksters we say "A plague on both your houses!". Socialists have better things to think about than the dirty fighting of those who run this dirty social system. 

In 1979 Mrs Thatcher came to power heralded as the saviour of British capitalism. She now quits the stage with British capitalism in economic decline. Far from realising her boast "to bury socialism", her political career has been buried by capitalism. 

Additive eating (1989)

From the March 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

The addition of foreign substances to food for profit is as old as capitalism. In medieval times the production of food was subject to quality control by the guilds who regulated their members' trade practices. Food inspectors spent a good deal of time making sure wine, ale, flour and oil were of an acceptable standard and quality. The fourteenth century German "pure beer" laws are an example of this. 

The development of industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century led to increasing numbers of people crowding into towns and cities. The adulteration of their food and drink was accepted as a matter of course and practiced with impunity. Like other wealth creating activities food production took on its modern mass-production character — that of a commodity to be produced for sale on the market with a view to making a profit.

Controls were swept away to such an extent that by the 1850s a Member of the Royal College of Physicians, called upon to give evidence before a Parliamentary Committee, could report that he had found adulteration of food "very prevalent". It occurred, he said 

". . . in nearly all articles which it will pay to adulterate, whether of food, drink, or drugs. There are but few exceptions to this rule . . . The adulterations practised are very numerous . . . The majority consists in the addition of substances of greatly inferior nature, for the sake of weight or bulk. Other adulterations consist in the addition of various colouring matters; these are employed either to conceal other adulterations, or to heighten, and, as it is considered, to improve the appearance of articles. Lastly, a few adulterations are practised for the purpose of imparting smell, pungency, or taste to certain articles ..."
(Quoted in Royston Pike, Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age, 1974, page 295.) 

That this steady stream of adulterants had a debilitating effect on the health of the working class can hardly be doubted. It must have been in part responsible for the fact that during the first world war 41 percent of workers conscripted to defend their masters interests had to be rejected as unfit. Seventy years later government reports still point to the inadequate nutritional levels of the poorest members of the working class, except that adulterants have been up-graded — they are now called additives and have pretentions to respectability. 

Researchers from the DHSS found in 1986 that children were eating more crisps, chips and potato products than any other single food. Biscuits and cakes were the second most popular item, being eaten more by weight than vegetables. Little fresh fruit was eaten. Commenting on the report Andrew Veitch, medical correspondent of The Guardian, noted:

"Children of families on Family Income Supplement and Supplementary Benefit had the lowest nutrient intake and were significantly shorter than others. (4 April 1986, emphasis added.)

The "state of the nation's health" is still a subject of concern. The employing class clearly does not want a clapped-out working class suffering ill health because of their diet. On the other hand, there is a great deal of money to be made peddling food given an added value and therefore a bigger margin of potential profitability. 

Increasingly too consumers — workers who stump up at the cash register — are asking the question, What is it that we are really eating? Complacency is being replaced by concern. Worried families pressurised by advertising and lack of time and money into buying the cheaper processed foods are questioning the need for additives, as the campaign to remove artificial colouring matter demonstrates. With limited money to spend it does not need a degree in economics to work out that a shopping basket of products less likely to contain processed, additive-rich food, will cost more than one including a preponderance of beef-burgers, pot-noodle and fruit squash. The outlay for a family of four eating a "healthy" as opposed to a typical diet was compared recently by Isobel Cole-Hamilton, a dietician working for the London Food Commission, and Anita MacDonald from the University Hospital Leeds. Not surprisingly the healthy diet costs a great deal more — £48.04 as compared to £37.09 (more than 25 per cent.) MacDonald also pointed out that:

" . . . it would be impossible for a child to obtain the minimum nutritional requirements laid down by the DHSS from the amount of money available for food from supplementary benefit — the allowance simply isn't large enough." (The Guardian, 18 October 1986.) 

Food and drink manufacturers have an annual turnover of £6bn and account for 10 per cent of all manufactured output. They spend an estimated £231 in a year on food additives. Seventy per cent of what is spent on food buys processed products. There are no exact figures for the amount of additives consumed per head but Erik Millstone of Sussex University estimates it to be between 3 and 7 kilogrammes annually. It could be considerably higher in some cases — 10 or 15 kg per head a year because not all people consume the same quantity of processed food. As The Guardian survey quoted above showed, food purchases of those with less money to spend will almost invariably be made up of processed food because it is cheaper. 

Why are additives used in such vast and increasing quantities? As far as food manufacturers and processors are concerned they fulfill a number of important technical needs. They improve the look of food products, they modify their texture to increase acceptability, they inhibit mould and bacteria and extend "shelf life" (which means the product can be kept in circulation from machine to mouth longer before it decays and loses its value). Flavours lost in the manufacturing process can be regained or reinforced. These needs are real in a system where increasing amounts of food are industrially processed before consumption. For example, Erik Millstone estimates that 45 major food distribution centres handle some 80 per cent of all the food marketed in Britain, "Hence the ability of preservatives to give food a long shelf life is of enormous economic value to the food industry . . ." (New Scientist, 18 October 1984). 

The Consumer Association have looked into the use and need for additives in food, and as far as flavours are concerned state that:

"In a highly competitive industry, keeping down costs while maintaining sales is essential for survival. Even though manufacturers might acknowledge that the most wholesome products would include natural ingredients . . . substitution of flavours for ingredients is one of the easiest ways for them to reduce costs . . .  Undoubtedly when raw material costs increase, manufacturers may feel under pressure to lower the quality of some products in order to maintain their position in the market." (Understanding Additives, Which? Books-Consumers Association/Hodder and Stoughton, £6.95.) 

In the case of preservatives they admit that:

"Hygiene in factories is not always as high as modem standards would demand. Bacterial spores are commonly found in food processing plants, and preservatives may need to be added to food to prevent contamination during processing . . .  The financial benefit of extending the shelf-life of products is likely to be greater than the cost of adding individual preservatives."

Scientific research coupled with public pressure have led in recent years to the abandoning of some artificial colouring matter in food. This was almost always added to make the product look attractive. But according to the CA: 

"Manufacturers would not have replaced synthetic colours with more expensive natural ones unless they were able to recoup or absorb the additional cost. Companies which felt that there was a commercial risk in excluding colours have, on the whole, retained them . . ."

As far as additives as a whole are concerned an anonymous representative of the food manufacturing industry is quoted as saying that "We do produce some products with fewer artificial additives. This is purely for marketing purposes" (emphasis added). This puts into true perspective what the CA identifies as the consumer's overriding need " . . .  to be able to obtain a nutritious and balanced diet, at prices they can afford . . . " (emphasis added). To which it is reasonable to retort — "It may be cheap, but is it safe?". 

Another response to criticism has been the provision of more "information" on food packaging. However this sop to public opinion still fails to give relative quantities, excludes flavourings, and often does not specify additives used in production prior to the final processing. For example museli, that prime example of health conscious eating, may contain fruit treated with mineral oil or preserved with sulphur dioxide, the presence of which is not indicated on the label! 

Of the use of sulphur dioxide, the most widely used antimicrobial preservative, Erik Millstone and John Abraham say: 

".. it is of enormous technological, industrial and commercial value, but we know that it is harmful to at least a few people, and that it may be harmful to many people." (Additives: a Guide for Everyone, Erik Millstone and John Abraham, Penguin Books, £3.95.) 

Other entries in this "dictionary" of chemicals used in food manufacturing make grim reading. In their assessment of the supposed safety of over 200 additives the phrase "presumed safe" occurs with frightening regularity. The possible long term effect of the continuous intake of small doses and the consequences of taking combinations of chemicals (the so-called "cocktail" effect) will be costly and time consuming to ascertain. The Food Additives Council (a body which regulates the use of additives) has no funds of its own and has to rely mainly on research carried out by the food industry itself £ a bit like a gamekeeper trusting the poachers.

The results of research are secret or difficult to verily. Experiments on animals do not produce results which can be readily transferred to humans primarily because the methods are imprecise. Millstone and Adams, summing up this state of affairs, say: 

". . .  the entire regulatory system rests on an undisclosed base . . . Secrecy is defended by industry and government on the grounds that disclosure might adversely affect the commercial interests of companies."

Indignant as one may feel at being poisoned for profit — at being forced by economic circumstances to consume inferior food — it must be realised that this is simply part and parcel of the production for sale and profit system. In a society of production for use the incentive to adulterate food would disappear. 

Gwynn Thomas

Between the Lines: 1968, the BBC & Tabloid Journalism (1988)

The Between the Lines column from the February 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

1968 and all that

Back in the late sixties, while thuggish cops kicked hell out of anti-Vietnam war demonstrators in Grosvenor Square and the Beatles sang "you say you wanna revolution", your reviewer was quietly tripping out on Junior Disprins, listening to John Peel on pirate Radio London and occasionally paying attention to my old man who told me that Harold Wilson was no more a socialist than Bob Dylan could sing. He was right about (Lord) Wilson, wrong about Dylan and now a lot of the Grosvenor Square victims are members of the SDP and like to recall their youthful rebel days.

World In Action (8:30 pm, ITV, January 4) was all about three of those rebels of 1968. Using film clips of the heady days when lads with duffel coats and earnest expressions were going to change the world, the programme jumped on to 1988 when Thatcher reigns supreme and young trendy lefties have turned into middle-aged, compromising bores. The first was Mike Tomkinson, then President of the LSE students' union, now a man who writes for the Digger and believes that the establishment is here to stay. Second bore was Dave Clarke (no, not the one who made bad records then and no records now) who owns his own business in Docklands publishing a local newspaper. Clarke, whose line in cliches has not changed much in twenty years, is shown in 1968 declaring that violent revolution is what we must prepare for and in 1988 admitting that Thatcher's put some good old life back into the profit system and — I bet you've never heard this one - if you're not a socialist before you're twenty you have no heart but if you're a socialist after you're forty you have no brain. Dave did not explain what you are supposed to be between twenty and forty, although he seems to have maintained a sort of permanent mindless dullness throughout the whole process.

Dave looks into the camera and declares that his heart is on the left, but his wallet is on the right. The fact is, of course, that back in 1968 Dave Clarke, then President of Manchester Student's Union, was a moralising trendy with nothing to do except sloganise in accordance with the then fashionable dogma which insisted that Vietnam should win its war. Now that Vietnam has won and millions of Vietnamese workers are living under an obscene dictatorship (just as they would have done if America had won the war) Clarke is trotting out the latest fashionable tripe about Thatcher being good for "our" industry. The false message of the programme was that Clarke had changed in twenty years; the reality is that he was a capitalism-supporting fool then and he appears to be no better now.

The third rebel chosen for ridicule by World In Action was Tariq Ali, a r-r-r-revolutionary then and an oh-so-constitutional Labourite with his own TV programme on Channel Four now. Ali is at least consistent: in 1968 he was struggling for state capitalism in Vietnam, now we are able to see from the programme that he is struggling for state capitalism in Nicaragua.

The purpose of this programme (if TV reviewers may be so arrogant as to seek such a factor) was to show that times have changed in twenty years. For conservatives this is supposed to be a reason for good cheer: all them lefty radicals have grown up at last, what!; for leftists it is supposed to show that the good old days of the late sixties, when you could start a demo faster than Harold Wilson could light his pipe, have gone and we are now in the miserable age of Thatcherism. Socialists accept neither view. The Left in 1968 never was a threat to the system. We do not doubt that many workers matured a little politically through the struggles of those active years but that maturity came from seeing through the illusions of futile reformism, not pursuing them. What is sad - very sad, in fact — is that students in 1988 who mouth the platitudes of pseudo-revolutionary leftism have not moved beyond the moralising confusion of 1968. Twenty years ago they were rolling joints and wasting their hopes in the political haze of reformism; today the dope costs more and it's mainly young Tories who smoke it. Apart from that, the task of changing society has still to be carried out

Marmaduke exposes himself

See For Yourself (8pm, BBC1, January 3) was all about how the BBC works. It was a two-hour programme which is probably like the kind of thing they show about collective farms on Bulgarian TV. "This is the BBC making a play - this is us making the news - did you know that it takes fifteen cameras to film the golf coverage?" Well, thanks for telling us, but does it really matter to the old workers who can't afford to pay the TV licence fee out of their pension?

After the programme we were invited to phone in questions to the two men who run the BBC. One was Michael Checkland, a man who looks and sounds like a banker and seems to think that the BBC would have been better off if it went into banking. The other was Marmaduke Hussey - a man who, as if not foolishly enough named already, kept on being referred to as Dukey by Checkland. Before the calls came in Marmaduke answered a question or two from the interviewer. Had he watched the two hour programme? No - well, he'd seen a bit of it. Wise man: he was probably watching ITV at the time. But what sort of Chairman of the BBC goes on TV to answer questions on a programme most of which he has never seen? Does he watch EastEnders, the BBC's most watched programme? He had seen it a few times, said Marmaduke — and then proceeded to ask a caller from Bristol what the weather was like there because he had one of his houses round that way.

One of his houses? Marmaduke probably spends so much time travelling from one home to the next that he has precious little time to watch the telly like the rest of us. I was thinking on 'phoning up and asking why BBC news tells so many lies about "Marxist" countries — or asking why EastEnders is such insulting, anti-working-class drivel, or when it was that Marmaduke was actually elected by the viewers of the BBC to be its Chairman.


The People caves in

Readers who have been following our own little soap opera about the People newspaper's published lies about comments made in this column about soap operas will be pleased to know that the People admitted in a written reply to the Press Council that it was wrong to claim that The Socialist Party was in any way connected with the Labour Party or that we stand for socialism in one country. They have published a letter from a member of the Socialist Standard Production Committee correcting their distortion. However, as their correction was several months after the original lies had been published and as our reply was given about a tenth of the space which was given to their original article, you can draw your own conclusions about so-called press freedom. One thing can be said about the BBC: they can't be accused of twisting what The Socialist Party says — they just maintain a conspiracy of silence which began in Reith's day and shows no sign of changing in the Era of old Marmaduke.

Steve Coleman

Out of Step . . . What Is 'Normality' In Capitalism? (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The governor of a large London prison is reputed on good authority to have said that if he were to unlock all the gates most of his prisoners would prefer not to walk out. This was of course a comment not so much on the prison as on the world outside. For one thing a prison accepts, or at any rate contains, attitudes and behaviour which are unlikely to be tolerated elsewhere. Prisoners are classed as among society's deviants; while they are inside they are subject to a social code which is geared to the needs of the prison and to what is required to survive there. Any prisoner who deviates from that code (for example the "grasses" — men who inform on others) act in ways which conform more closely to the requirements of the world outside the walls. 

This typically many-sided example serves as well as any as an introduction to the subject of deviance which in the time of drug use, homosexual reform, Women's Lib and so on is painfully exercising the minds of many workers who would probably feel more secure in unquestioning conformity. There are of course many fields in which deviance can show itself, not all of them connected with crime; madness for example. What they all have in common is an ability to provoke a general rejection of the deviants, which may lead to them being shut away — in prison, mental hospitals — or in them shutting themselves away (which may amount to the same thing) in their own circles of social contact. 

Deviance, the mainstream agrees, is bad — which means that normality is good. It is possible to spend a great deal of time in argument over a definition of normality, tossing about evidence from many fields — anthropology, history, sociology and so on. A psychiatrist may well have a definition substantially different from that of, say, a lawyer. There is no agreement about where normality is to be found — is it in an individual, a family, a community? Can prisoners really be classed as abnormal, when they themselves fit into a community with its own culture and morals? There is clearly more to this question than is to be found in the hysteria of the get-tough-with-criminals lobby. 

One solid fact we can deal with is that normality is socially defined and therefore socially violable. In other words, deviance is not a matter of scientific theory but of social pressures and expectancies; society at any one time decides who are the outsiders, not the other way round. Like any other social factor, the quality of normality — and therefore of deviance — changes in accordance with differing conditions and demands. For example, homosexuality was not so long ago considered one of the most abhorrent and threatening of deviances but now there is the beginning of a reaction against such bigotry. The result has been that there have been same minor changes in the law but, more importantly, there is a greater readiness among homosexuals to declare themselves and to organize in an effort to resist the special type of repression which is applied to them. There are stories that the true extent of homosexuality would be shocking news to Mary Whitehouse; that if it were revealed it would be seen to be common enough to cease to be deviant behaviour and, by sheer weight of popularity, almost to become normality (which would presumably transform our great stud heroes like James Bond into super deviants.) 

It would be useful here to give same attention to the norms — the social expectancies — which are imposed upon us today and which determine who and what is deviant. We must accept that in any social system minimum demands are imposed, which generally have to be met in order to survive. How does this apply to the capitalist society we live under today and what effect does this have upon us as social creatures? 

One of the first things we have impressed upon us is that our place in the economic order is to be employed for our living. As we grow up we are persistently cajoled into thinking about what we will do for a job when we leave school; to regard a top job with a desk and an office and a secretary and a company car as the climax of achievement. Our childhood, which is so crucial to our growth into adults, is cruelly distorted in the drive to turn us out as schooled and disciplined wage slaves, ready to do our part in capitalism's commodity production and to be driven slowly out of our minds in the boredom of an office or the drudgery of a production line. To deviate from these norms — to question the usefulness of wage slavery, to assert that work should be pleasure or nothing — is an offence against normality for which one of the lesser penalties is to be stigmatised as slothful. 

What is Required 

From our economic standing under capitalism we absorb social norms which are partly expressed in our family life and in the relationships between men and women. It is within the family that a significant part of the socializing of the child, adapting it to the requirements of capitalism, takes place, The family has its own expectancies — an invariably monogamous marriage, at its most fabulous a pre-ordained union of boy and girl to complete part of a great romantic jigsaw puzzle and go on to live happily ever after despite the Bomb and slumps and famine and the general rottenness of capitalism. Outside of the poorer magazines it never happens - and even if it did it would not be healthy. 

In marriage the expectancy is that the husband operates to a tolerance and to ambitions a lot higher than those of the wife. At its worst she is allowed the drab, unhistoric tasks at home, perhaps relieved by a teatime chat with another, equally confined, woman, or by a session of bingo, while he is away at heroic, vital deeds in the fierce world of commerce and industry. The family needed by capitalism is private, defensive; it denies free human contact and obstructs full living. And with all this, the family today is extremely fragile, with inadequate safety nets to catch those under whose weight the bough breaks. Yet so powerful is the conditioning of family dependence that to rebel against it may need to be an act of heroism — and capitalism can exact a high price for such courage.

These norms converge into the political expectancies of capitalism — the massive confidence trick by which millions of workers are persuaded that property society is normal and must go on for ever because it is based upon an eternal morality. Thus they continually opt for their own exploitation and repression, trusting in their leaders as wise, courageous men who will guide them through all their troubles to a safe and comfortable grave. They react derisively towards political deviants who insist that capitalism is no more than an historical phase, that it fails to meet the needs of its peoples, that leaders are an obstacle to our progress. Socialists are stigmatised, like any other deviants; we are dubbed agitators, cranks, impossibilists and we would not have it any other way. 

The concentrated personification of capitalism's norms is the smart young executive in his new town house, keeping a prudent eye on his stake in unit trusts, watching for the right moment to trade in his Ford for the latest model, paying all his bills, mowing the lawn whenever it is time and generally behaving as if he were only part-alive. This person can be seen in advertisments, in statistical returns and in some popular stories and plays. He may even, somewhere, exist for real. It is a relief to turn our attention to the deviant. 

Deviant from the Norm 

It is the lot of deviants to be rejected, which may conceal the fact that they are reacting in a way which is basically healthy, as a protest against intolerable conditions. The response to their protest is often anything but healthy, of which more later. For example a child who refuses to go to school may be tucked away under the deviant label, as "school-phobic". Yet it is often the case that such children are fearful not so much of what may happen to them at school as of what is actually happening to them at home. Nobody labels the family as "child-phobic", Drug addicts are often trying to block off the bleakness of capitalism yet they are dealt with as if they are the sickness in themselves. Many criminals are like those men who would prefer to stay in prison — capitalism offers them little in terms of concern, acceptance, esteem. Many of them bear the marks of a lifetime of social rejection, which has been intensified as they have kicked against it. At the end they are isolates, with little ability to form a relationship with even one human being, let alone with enough to enable them to win a place in the ranks of capitalism's wage slaves.

This is a process which has been expressed in a theory of primary and secondary deviance, which suggests that a first deviant act may provoke a response liable to produce another such act. A logical extension of this is that the agencies which set out to oppose deviance and to impose norms have the end effect of stimulating deviance. From this point of view the police, say, are seen as doing more, in a broad social sense, to promote crime than to contain it. At the same' time, by labelling a deviant as such society may be setting up the preconditions for repeat deviance — for example to stigmatize a person as mentally sick may induce fear in him and about him which can be expressed in disturbed behaviour — which reinforce the original labelling and so on. 

Can Society Care? 

The point at which this process might conveniently be said to start is often determined by the prejudices of stereotyping, by which one aspect of behaviour is presumed to determine another. Men with shoulder length hair, for example, are presumed to be on drugs; negroes all to live in ghetto conditions. There are elements of defensiveness in such labelling; anyone who feels the need to prove that he is not on drugs need only keep his hair short, and "while" people can wear their skin colour as if it were a badge guaranteeing civilized living. But another way, the normal actually needs its deviants, not just as the opposite side of a relationship but for the norm's protection, to define its position and to assert its acceptability. Deviance is insecurity and society at large can feel safer when it is reacting against it. By stigmatizing and shutting away its criminals and its mental patients society can take comfort from the fact that they are out of the way — and even call it treatment. 

An important point about capitalism is that its norms do not coincide with majority interests. Normality as far as capitalism goes is set and defined to assert and protect the superior standing and the privileges of the dominant, property-owning minority. It follows from this that it is virtually impossible to conform to the expectancies of capitalism; most people at some time have stolen, or slacked on the job, or breached the sexual assumption of the capitalist family. Capitalism's deviants are in the majority, which is evidence of the system's basic inability to organize itself to the advantage of its people. 

What, then, of the alternative society? Socialism will have its norms and so, it must be agreed, also its deviants. But those norms will be acceptable in that they will be laid down by the interests of the majority. Human beings will respond to the incentives of a co-operative, socially supportive system; even under capitalism, with the drive all the other way, deviants make pathetic attempts at winning acceptance. Socialism will be a society which will care. Anyone who then remembers the banished miseries of capitalism may end up by asking: where have all the deviants gone? 

Ivan

The Peterloo Massacre (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

One hundred and seventy-five years ago, on 16 August 1819, troops attacked a radical meeting held on St Peter's Field in Manchester. At least eleven of the crowd were killed, and over 600 injured. Within a few days the massacre was being ironically styled 'Peterloo'. It was an event of enormous significance, not just for the north west area but for the history of working class struggle in Britain.

The back-ground to Peterloo can be traced within the development of industrial capitalism and workers' response. Trade unions, though strictly illegal, were active during the second half of the eighteenth century (primarily among skilled workers and organised on a purely local basis), and were often reasonably successful in defending wages. Political activity among artisans and other workers grew in the 1790s, mainly aimed at reforming the antiquated electoral system by introducing manhood suffrage and annual elections. Despite the mildness of the measures proposed, the government and ruling class were unable to countenance any independent political action by workers, and they reacted with vicious repression, including charges of treason ( England being at war with France). By 1799 all the most prominent activists were in prison or in exile.

The economic depression which followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars led to a growth of unrest and the passing of the Corn Laws to benefit the landowners by keeping up the price of wheat. From 1816 mass meetings of workers resumed for the first time since the repression of the 1790s. The government fought back with spies, agent provocateurs, and prosecutions; Habeas Corpus was suspended for a while. By 1819 there were many outdoor meetings for parliamentary reform: this was seen, even by working class radicals, as a necessary means to the economic end of a more equitable taxation system.

The new industrial cities were the centres for much of the protest. The economy of the Manchester area was based on cotton, and there was particular support for radicalism from the handloom weavers, who worked in their own homes (unlike the industry's other workers, the spinners, who worked in the mills operating spinning machines). As early as 1808, a weaver was killed by troops, at a Manchester meeting for a minimum wage bill. The depression hit the cotton trade especially hard, and by 1819 weavers could only earn half the wages of a few years before. 'Passages in the life of A Radical', by the Middleton weaver Samuel Bamford, gives a vivid account of working class political activity during this period; the clandestine meetings, the constant fear of informers, the effects of government repression. The 1817 Blanketeers' March intended to be from Manchester to London to petition for the relief of distress, was broken up by troops within a few miles of Manchester. By 1819 mass meetings were being held in Manchester as in other large Towns, and the city's magistrates were becoming alarmed, and making military preparations against what they feared might befall.  

The 16 August meeting on St Peter's Field was intended to be the largest gathering of all, and men and women and children came from the cotton towns around Manchester, eventually forming a crowd of around sixty thousand. The magistrates assembled in a house overlooking the site, and had fifteen hundred troops, both hussars (regular soldiers) and yeomanry (part-time force of local merchants and factory-owners), waiting on horse back in nearby streets, even though the meeting itself was illegal. When Henry Hunt, one of the prominent radical organisers, was speaking, the magistrates decided Manchester was in danger and ordered Hunt's arrest. Troops were summoned to effect this, and the yeomanry began to ride through the packed crowd, striking out with their swords when they could not make their way forward. The hussars were then called in to disperse the crowd. In ten minutes, among scenes of unbelievable chaos and carnage, St Peter's Field were cleared, leaving the dead and injured to be taken away as best could be arranged. Bamford provides a dramatic eye-witness description of the scene:

"Over the whole field, were strewed caps, bonnets, hats, and shoes, and other parts of male and female dress; trampled, torn, and bloody. . . . Several mounds of human beings still remained where they had fallen, crushed down and smothered. Some of these still groaning, - others with staring eyes, were gasping for breath, and others never breathe more. . . . Person might sometimes be noticed peeping from attics and over the tall ridgings of houses, but they quickly withdrew, as if fearful of being observed, or unable to sustain the full gaze, of a scene so hideous and abhorrent." 

The rulers had replied as decisively as they knew to working class demands.

Eleven of the main radical leaders were arrested by the troops. They were originally charged with high treason, though this was later amended to conspiracy and illegal assembly. Hunt was sentenced to two and half years in prison, Bamford and others to one year. Further repressive legislation was passed, and by 1820 working class resistance was greatly reduced. Many radicals rejected the policy of peaceful agitation promoted by Hunt and turned to violent action; the same year, five men were executed for high treason in the Cato Street Conspiracy, when they plotted to assassinate members of the Cabinet. The Government supported the actions of the magistrates at Peterloo, and refused to hold an inquiry into their conduct. Some were even given financial rewards; William Hay was a clergyman and magistrate in Salford, he was awarded a sinecure worth £1730 a year (at a time when weavers earned perhaps £25 a year).

It is impossible to believe, as has sometimes been suggested, that the events of 16 August were a chapter of accidents, leading to an outcome that nobody wanted. In an atmosphere of government repression and provocation stretching back a quarter of a century, there can be no doubt that the massacre fitted in with the strategy of the ruling class. The use of state power against those who were unprepared simply to accept their lot continued: in 1831; at least two dozen workers were killed by troops after the uprising in Merthyr Tydfil, and in 1834 six trade unionists were transported from Tolpuddle, this even after the 'reform' of the House of Commons in 1832 (which still left the vast majority of workers without a vote).

But Peterloo is probably the clearest demonstration of the viciousness of ruling class politics in the nineteenth century, of the fact that the vote and trade unions' rights were not handed to workers on a plate but had to be fought for against savage repression. The courage and commitment of those in the early working class movement remains astonishing and humbling even now.

Paul Bennett

News In Review: The Space Race (1961)

The  News in Review from the June 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Man in Space

Russia's daring young man did all the right things, at the right time.

Sent looping round the Earth, he sang a patriotic song: ("The motherland hears, the motherland sees, the motherland knows . . . ") On the rostrum beside Mr. Khruschev, he was the star turn at this year's Moscow May Day parade.

Gagarin's exploit, Commander Shepard's flight, and the arrival of the Russian Venus rocket shot, have put spaceships right back in the news. Such things are interesting, not to say exciting—but have they been worth anything?

We all know that Russia and the United States are feverishly applying the knowledge which their space probes give them to the production of more accurate missiles. Some of these were paraded before Gagarin in the Red Square on May.

Without a doubt, the quest for more accurate and more powerful weapons is the main incentive in the space programmes of the great powers.

Incidentally, they may also gain knowledge which has little or no military value. But there is no guarantee that even this will not one day be misused.

There is one thing the space shots have to teach everybody. Capitalist society is bound to distort human knowledge for inhuman ends. Scientific investigation can only come into its own when this world is sanely organised.

Golden Boys

80,000 pounds is an awful lot of money.

We may think that the Milan Football Club, who paid that amount to Chelsea for Jimmy Greaves have a millionaire somewhere behind them.

They have. So have Juventus, Naples and other Italian clubs. This is why they can afford such enormous wage bills, and can offer irresistible financial bait to British footballers.

Greaves put it in record that he did not want to leave England, but Milan were offering him such a high signing-on fee that he really had no choice in the matter.

Helpless, the English fans moan as their golden boys take off for sunnier lands. They blame the clubs, the Football League, the Italians, for being a lot of poachers.

But the millions who weekly cheer their favourite club, support, almost to a man, the social system in which whoever pays the most money takes the best choice. They can hardly complain when that principle is extended to football.

Because, whatever the match programme may say, football is not a sport. When we hear it discussed in terms of transfer fees, gate money and the rest, we know that it is as much a business as any gas works or marmalade factory.

Cuban Failure

Whatever happened to that nice, level-headed young man Mr. Kennedy?

When he was campaigning for the United States Presidency he seemed so calm, so cool tempered. He sounded so peaceable. Lots of Republicans, in fact, thought that he might want to be too soft on the Russians.

The invasion of Cuba changed all that.

President Kennedy inherited the plans for the landing which the Eisenhower administration had laid. He chose to go ahead with them—and when the invasion failed, with typical acumen, he pointed out that his predecessor must take part of the blame.

This is the sort of ruthlessness and cynicism which we have come to expect from capitalism's leaders. And we have grown familiar with the assurances, as they are climbing to power, that they are anything but ruthless and cynical men.

Each time, the working class fall for it. Kennedy promised an era of sanity and calm judgement in foreign policy. In their millions, American workers voted for him.

Will they profit from the lessons of reality? Probably not. The signs are that Kennedy will be reviled not so much for agreeing to the Cuban expedition, as for the fact that the whole thing was a flop.

Ignorantly patriotic, the working class will forgive almost anything but that.

Stags Rampant

How did the strait-laced City Editors of Fleet Street come to be making jokes about Lady Chatterley?

Penguin Books recently announced a record profit, for which the trial—and the sales—of Lady C. can take much of the credit. At the same time, Penguin offered £450,000 worth of shares to the public, the more prosperous of whom applied for them to the tune of £67 million.

Now a lot of the people who tried to get Penguin shares are known, in Stock Exchange jargon, as stages. Hence the little jokes about gamekeepers, and Lady C. in the City columns.

The stags have been rampant lately, in shares other than the Penguin issue. They specialise in going for shares which can be easily applied for—sometimes by completing a newspaper coupon—and which are likely to rise quickly on the Stock Exchange. Some of them apply many times over for the same shares.

The snag is that the stags often pay up with bouncy cheques. The idea is to sell the shares at a profit before the cheques have had time to be cashed.

This is the sort of speculative boom which preceded the 1929 crash. Many sage economists have since told us that it aggravated matters in 1929—and that it could never happen again.

But whoever heard of investors refusing the chance of a profit? The stags have shown that capitalism is the same old animal as it ever was.

Venal system under scrutiny (1997)

Theatre Review from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, National Theatre.

In the best television, cinema and theatre we can often observe people living out their lives in contemporary capitalist society, and sometimes we can learn lessons, vicariously, from their experiences. Nowhere can we see the process at work better than in the great plays of Arthur Miller, of which Death of a Salesman is perhaps the peerless classic.

Willy Loman is a salesman possessed of "the American Dream'. While some of the early settlers may well have had a heroic vision of a free and just society, "the American Dream" has, for most citizens, become a tarnished nightmare. But Willy is still a subscriber. Intent on becoming "number one", his vision infects not only his relations with his clients but also those with his family and friends, perhaps especially his two sons. The two acts of Death of a Salesman chart his fall and register its impact on those around him.

There is not a single explicit reference to capitalism in the play but everywhere the venal system is under scrutiny, and its dehumanising impact registered. Miller recalls in his autobiography Timebends that at the first night in 1949 an outraged woman called it "a time bomb under capitalism". And Miller adds, "I hope it was, or at least under the bullshit of capitalism, this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last."

The play's greatness lies in its ability to present us with real people with whom we can identify, not to say emphasise. Willy's collapse envelops others in its wake, and we are all engulfed in the tragedy. Capitalism has claimed yet more victims.

There are some memorable lines—lines which bear witness both to the viciousness of contemporary capitalism and the triumphant ability of humanitarian feelings to survive and flourish, come what may. Willy's friend, Charley, remarks icily, "All you've got is what you can sell", and yet it is the self-same Charley who gives Willy money each week and observes on another occasion, "No man just wants a small salary on which to survive", the implication being that money is a counterfeit coinage for things that really matter.

The present production at the National is excellent. It is difficult to imagine anything better. At the end I cheered through my tears.

Michael Gill  

Proceeds to charity (1974)

Film Review from the December 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent in South Africa has sent us this account of the screening of a film based on life there.

"Gold" has well-known actors in the leading parts, and several hundred Africans — of whom two are named in the printed programme. This film, recently screened in Johannesburg, was made in and around this city and London. It was produced with the co-operation of a major South African gold-mining corporation, so it would be safe to assume that it does not misrepresent the gold mining industry — adversely, at least. 

The plot revolves round (apart from the cuckolding of the villain by the hero) the machinations of an international syndicate of investors led by the grandson-in-law of and heir to the good-natured, scrupulously honest, uninvolved big boss of the Mining House. Their aim is to flood the mine secretly (with the loss perhaps of a hundred or so miners' lives — "but then there's a price on everything") in order to cause a sudden rise in the price of gold and a drop in the share prices for this particular mine. With their foreknowledge of the event they hope to make a "killing" on the Stock Exchanges of the world.

Near the beginning of the film a "normal" mine disaster occurs with the usual fatalities and injuries among the miners, of course, though this time the underground mine manager is also killed. At a ceremony in an open-air stadium, to signify the company's appreciation of the sacrifices of the miners, a black hero is presented with a "gold" helmet and the widow of another African miner is awarded a pension for life of R120 — about £80 — per annum. (The pension of the mine manager's widow is not mentioned.)

I noticed that the sleek preview audience made no audible response; maybe they were asleep. Later, I looked at my seat-ticket (a complimentary one, I hasten to add!) and saw that the price stamped on it was R20, about £13.50; and it was not for one of the best seats by any means. This "Gala Première" was in aid of charity — oddly, not for silicosis or other mining diseases but for teaching aids for dyslexic pupils. Either way, the need for charity from the wealthy springs from the very social system which maintains them in economic supremacy.

Scenes of magnificent homes with high living and conspicuous consumption for the mine-owning minority and their scenic playgrounds in the bush-covered mountains alternate with shots of working conditions underground — though we are not shown the barrack-life living conditions for black miners in the mine compounds.

I can recommend the film for its scenes of how some of the rich live in South Africa and for shots of (typical ?) underground working conditions here. Also, for those interested, some fine aerial views of the Highveld bush and mountain scenery in the Transvaal. Mainly, however, one sees how false issues — a "moral conflict" — are made from different evaluations of human beings in the search for gold and profits.

Alec Hart

Mattick V. Marcuse (1972)

Book Review from the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Critique of Marcuse by Paul Mattick. Merlin Press. £1.

This short—and expensive—booklet is a criticism of Marcuse's assumption, in his One-Dimensional Man and other writings, that nowadays the capitalist class is able to manage the capitalist economy so as to avoid big slumps and at the same time to gradually increase working class living standards. Mattick repeats the arguments of his Marx and Keynes (reviewed in The Western Socialist, No. 2 1972) to the effect the government intervention can only temporarily postpone the crisis of capitalism.

On the political side, Mattick speaks of the working class as having ceased to be revolutionary; but when have the mass of workers ever consciously wanted Socialism as opposed to being merely greatly discontented with capitalism (as they were just after the first world war)? And he mistakenly restricts the working class to industrial workers only; other kinds of wage-worker, apparently, are to play only a secondary and subordinate role in the socialist revolution.

Nevertheless Mattick knows what Socialism is (a world, moneyless, Stateless society) and is one of the few besides ourselves who realises that free access is now technologically possible. He writes here:

Under conditions of abundance, such as characterise the industrially-advanced society, distribution could be free of all value considerations . . .

This places him well in advance of others in his political tendency, who have not yet abandoned the outdated suggestion for labour-time vouchers Marx mentioned nearly a hundred years ago. But then he has had the advantage of meeting our comrades of the World Socialist Party of the United States.

Adam Buick

To a Patriot. (1915)

From the October 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

TO A PATRIOT

Who told the writer "Socialists won't fight because they are cowards."

Not that we fear to die, for why should we,
Who face a living death from day to day.
Fear what we know "eternal rest" to be—
A speedy end rather than slow decay?
No, what we fear is that we should be brought
To suffer wounds, disease and lingering pain
In aiding those of brute-like cunning wrought,
Who maim the body, crush and starve the brain.
Maybe the time is nearer than we know
When we the disinherited, the spurned,
Shall face our masters in the last great fight;
Shall wade through waste and desolating woe
Toward the splendour of a death well earned
If only life be won in death's despite.

F. J. Webb

Are we armchair socialists? (1966)

From the September 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

The charge is one of indifference, of detachment, of sectarianism. of refusing to join the blood-and-earth struggles for the betterment, the dignity and the survival of the human race. It is, in other words, a charge of being talkers, theorists—armchair Socialists.

We plead not guilty.

We have only one witness to call and that is History, whether it is the history of our early days or of more recent times.

During our sixty-odd years of life, the Socialist Party of Great Britain has seen two World Wars and many other periods when politics was a violent business. At such times, if we had truly been armchair theorists, we could have packed up our platforms, forgotten all had we ever said about capitalism and Socialism and quietly slunk away.

In fact, we intensified our activity. In wartime we stood out against the official propaganda. We exposed the lies which were being used to persuade British workers to take arms against their brothers abroad. Our members went to gaol rather than join in the slaughter. More than once our speakers were assaulted, our meetings broken up. In London's Hyde Park, during the Second World War, we spoke out for Socialism with anti-aircraft guns banging away across the grass; often ours was the only meeting there at such times.

In fact, whatever restriction—official or unofficial—we have met we have persisted in our propaganda and our attitude has never wavered. This can hardly be described as politics from the armchair; there were no soft seats in Wormwood Scrubs, nor in the Serpentine.

If there is any excitement in the politics of the power-hungry parties, then we have none of it. There are no throngs, no massive marches for us. If we ever came out on to a balcony the only living things to mark our presence there would be the pigeons. As far as excitement and glamour of that sort is concerned, we live a politically abstemious life.

In case anyone is looking for it, there is a massive compensation for this. The politicians who feed on glamour and public acclaim may find it an agreeable diet, but there is a bill to pay for it: they must have a hard time convincing themselves that their theories are in any way relevant to modern society. Perhaps there is glamour in appearing at the door of Number Ten to announce that your policy is in ruins. Perhaps there is excitement in getting up in the House and promoting something which is in direct contradiction to what you have always said you stood for. This may suit some all-too-famous temperaments. But even they must wonder, in the wee small hours, at the meaning of self-respect.

This is a problem which Socialists do not have. We have never had to go back on our policy, we have never had to betray our principles, we have never had to compromise. Our analysis of capitalism remains valid. The capitalist social system still produces a mass of terrible problems; human beings still suffer, are still deprived, suppressed, degraded and killed—because of capitalism. And the solution to it all is, still, the setting up of a Socialist commonwealth.

To this, to say it, to read it or hear it, may not quicken the heart beat. But the facts, the facts of History and the evidence of the world we live, say that it is correct and in that there is more satisfaction—more inspiration even—than all the mass rallies and the demonstrations of the vote-catching political parties.

Perhaps this seems smug. There are many protest movements which have no formal connection with the big parties. although in fact most of them in the end come down to an attempt at influencing the policies of one of the two parties which are likely to get into power. We have no part in these protests. Although we refused to fight in the 1914/18 War, we did not join the demonstrations against the war. (Apart from anything else, we knew that many of the demonstrators would soon be enthusiastically rolling on their puttees. And in 1939 the political descendants of those 1914 demonstrators were gathering again in Trafalgar Square—but this time they were in favour of war.)

We did not join the Hunger Marchers, nor the anti-fascists, nor the CND, nor the Freedom From Hunger demonstrators. Of course, we have left out a lot of other protests which are, or have been, popular—Second Front Now, Movement For Colonial Freedom, Victory for the Vietcong. If we brought them into the argument we might be facing another charge; of selecting our evidence.

Why didn't we join? First, we must be clear that we do not stand aloof from lack of sympathy with the motives which may lurk somewhere in the depths of the protests. We, too, are affected by capitalism, and we do not like it. Our members were out of work and hungry in the Thirties. We didn't relish the prospect of a dictatorship. The Bomb would wipe us out along with the rest. We are moved and indignant when we see photographs of starving children.

We don't join for the simple reason that the demonstrations are a waste of time. The first thing which is clear is that, after decades of protest about the effects of capitalism, the system goes on throwing up the very problems which the protest industry exists on. In all this time, a few problems may have been suppressed—although the demonstrators would have a hard job to prove that they were responsible for this—but in their place more have appeared.

Anti-Fascist protests have not made democracy any more secure—especially as many of the protesters were themselves anything but democrats. Pacifist marches have not removed war. After some ten years of CND, nuclear weapons are spreading all over the world and in this country the government of which unilateralists once had such high hopes has cooly gone back on all it ever said about abandoning the independent British Bomb.

Hunger, disease, poverty, fear, crime—capitalism, which can produce scarcity in the essentials of life, has them all in abundance. The demonstrators have marched and shouted, scuffled with the police, shown up in court and paid their fines. The things they protested about are still there, waiting for the next outburst. These problems have seen off many generations of protesters, some of whom have grown old and become part of the Establishment against which the protests break their fists.

It is impossible to separate the problems of capitalism from the system itself. Capitalism cannot exist without war. It cannot function unless the mass of its people are condemned to live in poverty. It is a system without a system—an anarchic society which will not be planned or controlled. It inexorably produces glaring anomalies and contradictions. It has millions of people starving while it destroys the food which would keep them alive. It wastes a huge part of its knowledge and resources on destruction, while it admits that it desperately needs to create and construct. It condemns its people to compete against each other when they need, and long, to co-operate.

The only effective protest against the effects of capitalism is to protest against the system itself. How to do this? What keeps capitalism there? The fact is that capitalism's people themselves keep the system in existence. Although they may hate and fear what it does to their lives, they give it their unwavering support. When they think about it, they decide that capitalism is the best of all possible societies; they work for it year in and year out and every so often, when called upon to do so, they give capitalism's political figure-heads another lease of power to continue running society in the interests of a small minority of parasites.

There is only one way in which this can be changed. To strike at the ideas which keep capitalism in existence is to strike at its heart. But we cannot strike at those ideas by suggesting that capitalism can be altered so that it need not produce the problems which are in fact inherent in it. We do not, for example, strike at them by complaining about nuclear weapons while we support a political party standing for the social system which has bred those weapons. We do not, in other words, strike at capitalism's heart by compromising and by confusing the issue.

For the issue is plain. We can have capitalism, with its problems and its never-ending parade of protests. Or we can build a new society in which men stand equally about the world's wealth—a society of freedom and dignity. We can have capitalism or Socialism.

But we won't have Socialism by urging people to keep up their support for capitalism. We won't have it by protesting that capitalism can be tamed by the right reforms, or by the right leaders, or by the right sort of demonstration. All of these have been tried and in the end it has been capitalism which has done the taming.

It is because the demonstrators are confused and contradictory that Socialists will not join them. This does not remove us from the struggle; we are committed to attack capitalism at its roots—to attack the ideas which feed and nurture the system. We stand—and we protest and we demonstrate—for the new, better, saner world.

And we who are called Armchair Socialists will not rest until we have got it.

Ivan 

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