Lack of Momentum (2016)

From the September 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour leadership election between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith is a battle for the heart and soul of the Party; we examine what is really at stake.

A few years ago the idea that Jeremy Corbyn might be leader of the Labour Party would have been as likely as Lord Lucan appearing in Kensington High Street riding Shergar. But such is the disillusionment with much of what the Blair and Brown governments stood for – including the Iraq War – that the Labour Party seems to be a rather different place these days.

There are, of course, positives to this. Large numbers of Labour members and affiliated supporters are questioning the received wisdom of Labour’s role as one of being a more effective management team for UK PLC than the Conservatives – an effectiveness, it was argued, that would enable Labour governments to be more caring and generous to the poor. After 13 years of Labour government people rightly began questioning why this transparently didn’t happen, with inequality in Britain being at least as bad now on most measures than it was when the Blair landslide happened in 1997. Then there was the Iraq War and attempts at a potentially similar intervention in Syria, which left people disgusted with evidently spurious justifications of warmongering.

That people are questioning these things (and have been now for some time) is undoubtedly good. That many have now rallied around a hitherto highly marginal, left-wing Labour politician as the antidote to what has gone on before is rather more questionable, and herein lies much of Labour’s current woe.

Trade unions

Since its formation in 1906 out of the trade-union inspired Labour Representation Committee, the Labour Party has had one, clear overarching aim. This is to secure political office – by contesting elections for parliament and local councils – so that it can enact reform measures that are in the interest of wage and salary earners (‘labour’ in the broadest sense). As such it has largely been the political arm of the trade union movement and the trade unions have been historically its main financial backers, as well as providing a proportion of its elected MPs. In terms of its entire ethos and ideology (reflected in its internal constitution) Labour as a political party has no other purpose than this.

The main charge against Corbyn and his supporters from those challenging his leadership is precisely that this purpose is being disregarded. Corbyn has spent his entire political life as a serial rebel against successive Labour leaderships, mainly with a penchant for supporting single issue protest groups (CND, anti-apartheid, environmentalism, etc). The charge is that he is turning the Labour Party from being a potential government that can enact reforms to being a cheerleader for grassroots single-issue campaigns, drawing large numbers of members into the Party from these types of single-issue interest groups.

Corbyn denies this and claims – however unlikely it may sound – that his goal is to be the next Prime Minister. But if he really believes this, what we can say is that the evidence is not on his side.

Weathercocks and signposts

Corbyn’s political mentor, Tony Benn, always claimed that the main choice in politics is over whether you are a weathercock blowing with the political wind, or a signpost pointing towards a new direction. Genuine socialists, being interested in securing a fundamental change in the way society is organised, are obviously in the signpost category. The equally obvious problem is that this is a signpost most people cannot see and when on occasion they do see it, it points down a path they are not usually inclined to explore that far. This has been the dilemma at the heart of the broader labour movement in the UK and elsewhere for well over a century – what became known originally as the disagreement between the ‘possibilists’ and ‘impossibilists’. The possibilists argued that you can only put forward ideas and policies that are likely to be broadly acceptable to the working class given their current ideology, while the so-called impossibilists have advocated the maximum programme of ‘socialism and nothing but’ as a way to change people’s minds towards the need for a revolutionary alternative to capitalism.

The Labour Party is the ultimate possibilist political organisation and what Corbyn and his supporters are certainly not doing is advocating a turn instead to what the Labour Party has always derided as impossibilism (of the sort, for instance, advocated by us). They just want to advocate a form of possibilism through reform-campaigning that seems historically less likely to attract support and hence political power than the more conventional form advocated by more mainstream Labour – if you like, a form of utopian possibilism, a phrase which sounds like it should be a contradiction in terms.

Momentum

The pro-Corbyn activist organisation set up a month or so after his initial leadership victory in 2015 seems to grasp little of this. Momentum appears to be an amalgam of supporters of a variety of single-issue causes and is largely full of people who have joined Labour in only recent times – swelling the Party membership to over half a million. This is a significant increase on recent years but well below the peak of over a million Labour members achieved in 1952-3 and which was followed by two heavy successive election defeats (which just goes to illustrate that activist political membership and the wider popular vote are very different things).

Persistent rumours of Trotskyist infiltration notwithstanding, at Momentum’s core are a number of people (such as its main driving force, Jon Lansman) who have long been known on the hard-left Bennite wing of the Party. Some of them like Lansman himself had been part of the left-wing core of activists who set up the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and other groups in the 1980s supportive of Benn and his key positions – such as a massive programme of nationalisation of industry, radical Keynesian economics, import controls, unilateral nuclear disarmament, and opposition to membership of the then EEC. They had a significant influence on Labour policy under Michael Foot, culminating in the Alternative Economic Strategy that was at the heart of the Labour manifesto for the 1983 General Election (dubbed by then Shadow Cabinet member Gerald Kaufman as the ‘longest suicide note in political history’). This led to a 1983 Labour vote share of 28 percent, still the worst Labour performance in the post-war period, even worse than those since achieved by Brown and Miliband.

The electoral lessons learnt from this disastrous defeat in 1983 led over a period of years from Neil Kinnock and John Smith through to Tony Blair. This drift to the political centre was also in broad alignment with the significant economic changes that occurred over these decades that rendered the 1983 manifesto obsolete, including the free movement of capital across borders, the internationalisation of industry (which rendered direct state ownership of business difficult if not impossible), the collapse of Soviet Russia’s empire and the end of the Cold War, and so on.

What Corbyn and Momentum now want to do is effectively turn the tide back to the inglorious days of 1983 in the hope that the ‘anti-establishment’ feeling among sections of the electorate at present can give them the type of radical surge that failed to happen in the 80s. But there is little if any evidence that this is likely to happen.

Examining the record

To some, Corbyn has done better than expected in his electoral tests so far. This is actually true, though only because most people’s expectations have been so low to start with. In the local government elections this May the Labour lead over the Conservatives was 1 percent, the same as it was in 2011 one year into Miliband’s leadership, with the Labour share of the vote only slightly up on the 2015 General Election. In the parliamentary by-elections that have occurred under Corbyn’s leadership, where more volatile swings occur with often low turnouts, the average swings have tended to be around 8 percent to Labour, almost identical to those achieved by Miliband. This perhaps suggests that the ‘Corbyn effect’ is actually less than either his supporters or detractors maintain.

Either way, it is not indicative of a radical upsurge and there is no indication that the increase in Labour Party membership is mirrored by an increase in popular support for their ideas more generally. Labour is trailing badly in the opinion polls again too, despite recent turmoil in the governing Tory Party. And as Cowley and Kavanagh have recently pointed out in The British General Election of 2015 ‘Almost all psephological analysis of Labour’s support between 2010 and 2015, as well as what we know of non-voters, the UKIP vote or indeed the nature of support for the SNP, would indicate that the Corbyn strategy is a route to an electoral brick wall’ (p.384). It is for these reasons that the vast majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party – arguably more in touch with the wider electorate and their views than they are with the Party’s activist base – have said ‘enough is enough’ and are supporting Owen Smith in his leadership campaign.

Splitters

If Owen Smith doesn’t defeat Corbyn (or at least come close enough to justify another push next time) there is a real possibility of the Labour Party splitting. This is partly because the attitude to reforming capitalism from the PLP and much of the more long-standing membership is a rather different one to that of Corbyn and Momentum. It is also because – and this is partly the attraction of Corbyn to Momentum supporters – he is not a traditional political leader in either his utterances or demeanour (almost what marketing geeks would call a self-consciously ‘non-brand’ brand). To extend the analogy with 1983, the same could have been said of Michael Foot.

The Labour Party has split before of course, in 1981 when elements of the right-wing in the Party decamped under pressure from the left-wing activists then in the ascendancy, and founded the Social Democratic Party. This is what partly led to Labour achieving its lowest post-war vote in 1983, though today the portents are worse. The Labour vote in 1979 was 37 percent and then fell to 28 per cent. In 2015 it was under 32 percent and so is already at a lower base. And this time in terms of splitters it is unlikely to be as few as the 29 MPs who eventually threw in their lot with the SDP. On that occasion, the vast majority of the right and centre of the Party stayed (including heavyweights like Healey and Kaufman) whereas this time the vast bulk of the PLP is in rebellion, not a small minority of it.

If a split of this type occurs, it is difficult to see how the Labour Party in its current form can survive or what its purpose would be even if it did. People can join all sorts of single-issue groups and advocate particular reforms, but unless there is an electable political vehicle to put these reforms into action, it becomes a sterile and narrow form of campaigning around individual hobby-horses. And people can do this (and have done for decades) irrespective of whether they are in the Labour Party or not.

Socialist standards

This current confusion and division in the Labour Party – as well as a general political climate that seems more sceptical about political leaders – should be an opportunity for socialists. While there are concerned, decent and genuine people in all sections of the Labour Party (and other parties too for that matter) Labour as an organisation has repeatedly failed to defend the interests of wage and salary earners – hence the reason it repeatedly disappoints and gets kicked out of office. In truth, the ‘possibilism’ that has long characterised the Labour approach is really not so possibilist or realist at all in the sense that capitalism has never been fundamentally changed by reformist Labour governments elected into office (if anything, it has been changes within capitalism over decades that has helped change Labour instead).

Labour in government has sent troops in to break strikes, backed all of the major wars engaged in by the UK this last century (and has initiated a few of them), and has repeatedly attacked working class living standards to ensure the profitability of British industry. There is nothing to suggest that either Corbyn or Smith, despite their radical phrases, would behave any differently in office – all national governments are there to administer their particular section of world capitalism, and as Syriza in Greece found out soon enough, have very little control over the market economy as events unfold.

Momentum activists will no doubt argue that Corbyn is a decent man with a track record of opposing war. But this misses the point about how capitalism entraps those who seek to administer it. And while Corbyn may have opposed the senseless butchery of the Iraq War, he is a man (along with John McDonnell) who has sought to apologise repeatedly for the nationalism and terrorism of organisations like the Provisional IRA and Hamas. Men like these who commemorated IRA terrorists and who refused to condemn some of the most anti-working class atrocities in UK history (such as the Birmingham pub bombings and Enniskillen) are men whose peaceful and socialist credentials deserve to be viewed with quite some scepticism.

What is of importance now is that people who may identify with wanting to create a genuinely socialist society of common ownership, democratic control and free access to wealth, don’t get suckered in by a radical-sounding, ‘populist’ reform movement that has yet to prove its popularity anywhere beyond the already like-minded. The attempt to reform capitalism by so-called benevolent governments has always been a disaster and there’s nothing to suggest it would be any different next time under either Corbyn or Smith. Socialists have always been content to leave the Labour Party to the reformists – and the more we think about it, the more they are welcome to it.

Dave Perrin

Between the Lines: Death, hypocrisy and videotape (1992)

The Between the Lines column from the February 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Death, hypocrisy and videotape

Has nobody told Stormin' Norman about East Timor? Were we not told by the trigger-happy hypocrites who gave us the Gulf War that the invasion of one country by another was intolerable and must be defeated by force? First Tuesday (BBC2, 7 January, 10.45pm) told the hitherto unexposed story of the ruthless butchery of the Timorese people which has gone on for sixteen years.

In 1975 East Timor became independent from Portuguese control and elected its own government. That year Indonesia took over East Timor, outlawed the elected government and began a process of imposing control by means of brutal coercion. It is estimated that one in three of the population have been killed since the Indonesian take-over. In sixteen years as many as 250,000 Timorese workers are said to have been done away with. This is legalised terrorism on a mass scale. It is virtual genocide.

So, where are "our boys" whose task is to defend "the good" against "the evil”? (Remember all that "Free Kuwait" rubbish? The Kuwaiti dictatorship now presides over torture and mass deportations of its subjects.) The answer is that the only American and British arms being sent into the area are being sold to Indonesia.

The governments which claimed to have fought a war in the Gulf against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait are selling to Indonesia the means to unlawfully colonise East Timor. The alleged atrocities committed by Iraqis against Kuwaitis are being committed by Indonesian state thugs against the Timorese workers as a matter of course, but, despite several detailed reports by Amnesty International, the governments of Britain, the USA or Australia (the latter being a major trading partner with Indonesia) just stand by. Of course, hypocrisy is as attached to capitalist politics as fleas are to a dirty dog. How else can the cynical, anti-human policies of defending profit and damning need be justified?

The well-made First Tuesday documentary contained shocking footage of the 12 December 1991 funeral demonstration where Timorese workers were burying a man killed by the Indonesian army. At the funeral Indonesian troops fired on the crowd, killing one hundred mourners, others died on their way to and in hospital.

Indonesian brutality has given rise to an ill-equipped campaign of military resistance by desperate Timorese workers. Such counter-violence is futile: semi-armed guerrilla fighters will be no match for American-backed Indonesian state thugs, and anyway, killing Indonesian workers in uniform will not make anyone free, just a few more graves full.

The tragedy of East Timor reflects vividly the crass hypocrisy of Western celebrations about the coming of "Freedom" and the decency of King Capital's New World Order. It shows just how much the Gulf War was fought for oil profits and just how true it is that if Kuwait would have been as relatively poor as East Timor and if Iraq had been Indonesia things would have been different.

Aah, Freedom

The government has deregulated the law relating to TV, so now we are "free" - if we pay for it (in short, capitalist freedom) - to watch two new pom channels: After Midnight and Adult Channel. Behind the Headlines (BBC2, 8 January. 10.55pm) had a discussion on what such "freedom" will mean. In future viewers will be sold little plastic cards which they can slot into their TVs in order to watch sleazy movies made for sleazy men.

The programme also discussed the new 0898 sex lines on which consumers with such desires can pay 45p a minute listening to out-of-work actresses pretending to be naughty schoolgirls or busty nurses. There is even an 0898 number on which a genuine rape victim has been paid £3,000 to give a recorded account of her rape ordeal. Sweet freedom, eh? The poor woman is "free" to sell her pathetic story and men who are excited by rape (the stealing of the sexual commodity) can listen to her for just over a quid an orgasm.

Meanwhile Decca has announced that in February it is to release a video of the most salacious bits of the William Kennedy Smith rape trial - yours to enjoy in complete "freedom" for £10.99 a copy.

If this is freedom, then it is a lunatic's conception of what it is to be free. It is the freedom to sell, to exploit, to degrade, to abuse, to drag humanity through the dirt. Perhaps someone could market an 0898 number with recordings of children being tortured in East Timor; there might be a few bob to be made out of the screwballs who will get off on that.

Steve Coleman

Moscow Gold (1992)

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

From the January 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The late and unlamented British Communist Party— now renamed since its last Congress in November the "Democratic Left”—has recently opened its archives and revealed the extent of its subservience to Russia. George Matthews, a former Assistant General Secretary, wrote in the now defunct party’s now defunct journal Changes (14- 27 September 1991) that in June 1950 Pollitt was summoned by Stalin to draft a new programme for the British Party.

On 15 June 1950 Pollitt's report of his discussions with Stalin was put before the Party’s National Executive Committee who were reluctant to accept all of Stalin’s proposals because they were too controversial. During the next three months three drafts of a programme were prepared and on 20 October Pollitt took a few days’ holiday which in fact was a trip to Russia for further consultation with Stalin. A fourth draft was produced in December, and in January 1951 Pollitt paid another secret visit to Russia. After further consultations with Stalin The British Road to Socialism was published shortly after his return to London.

Secrecy was considered essential in the cold-war conditions of the early 1950s because of the risk of being linked too closely with Russian foreign policy or accused of being financed and manipulated by Stalin. George Matthews has shown moral courage in admitting his part in the secret negotiations between Pollitt and Stalin which occurred forty years ago:

The concealment of the role of Stalin by the party leadership, of which I was part, for so many years was indefensible.

Matthews takes the view that the Communist Party should have insisted that Stalin’s advice was acceptable only if it was public advice.

But he states:

It was inconceivable that in the conditions of 1950 the British party would have taken such a stand, and fruitless to speculate on what Stalin would have done if it had.

He who pays the piper calls the tune and the British Communist Party was too financially dependent on Russian money to resist Stalins demands. According to another former Assistant General Secretary, Rueben Falber, writing in the last issue of Changes (16/29 November 1991), the British Party continued to receive cash from Moscow right up until his retirement in 1979.

In stating "1 can only speak for myself in saying that 1 am not proud of the part I played in this affair". Matthews has publicly confessed his regret for being a party to the secret negotiations between Pollitt and Stalin and to relegating the Communist Party to a mere tool of Russian policy. But there seems to be little regret at the undemocratic and secret decisions made by the Communist Party on other occasions.

In 1947 a major policy change occurred with Pollitt’s pamphlet Looking Ahead in which he stated that it “is possible to see how the people will move towards Socialism without further revolution, without the dictatorship of the proletariat”. This change in Communist Party rules was made without debate of any kind. It is really beside the point whether this was all Pollitt’s own work of if, like The British Road to Socialism, it was dictated by Stalin. It revealed the sort of society the Communist Party wanted to see established in Britain: one where leaders would decide in secret the way it should be run.

Secret meetings

After Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin in 1956 Pollitt stated that "in condemning errors and abuses we must not forget that they occurred within the framework of socialist advance". But the rank and file were not to be given details of the “errors and abuses” because they were only discussed at a secret session of the British Communist Party in April 1956.

The history of the Communist Party was one that was dominated by secrecy; twists and turns of policy; decisions made by individuals or unrepresentative cliques; manipulation and financial control by Stalin; and a complete lack of understanding of socialist principles.

The rump of the old Communist Party may regret their past secrecy and subservience to Russia but they have yet to apologise for misleading workers or perverting socialist principles. And their recent pronouncements show that they still lack socialist understanding.

Carl Pinel

Decisions (1985)

A Short Story from the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The race is on for the Labour nomination at Northloft, a safe seat where the present MP, Fred Parcel, stands down at the next election. Northloft lies athwart a main line railway which in the nineteenth century changed it into a blackened industrial suburb. Some famous Victorian capitalists set down factories there, with terraced streets with workers' homes in red brick and grey slate. Between the wars council estates were laid out and then came wedges of speculatively-built, cherry-blossomed semis whence clerks set out each day to ride on the railway to the office.

Another effect of the railway was to bring a continuous stream of immigrants — the Welsh and Irish before the war, the Asians and West Indians afterwards. Always they went through the same ritual, living at first in the terraces and then, as they became more established, moving out to the semis, provoking panic about "falling property values" among the "owner-occupiers". The constituency joined the Labour landslide of 1945. then the Tories won it back again until 1964 when Fred Parcel, feverish with Wilson’s campaign about the white-hot technological revolution, was elected. Fred was always sure that this result came about through his own brilliance.

But brilliant is by no means the first adjective to spring to the lips when describing Fred. A child when his father was out during the General Strike, his political notions were thenceforth based on his comprehensive Theory of the Betrayal of the True Soul of the Labour Movement. Just before the war, this theory led him to join the Communist Party, under the impression that the secret police, labour camps and political massacres of Stalinist Russia offered democracy's doughtiest defenders against Nazism. Agilely, he followed the party line over the war, the Russo-German Pact and all other inconvenient issues.

Naively, he looked forward to a great Communist triumph in the 1945 election. The arithmetic of the actual result filled Fred with panic; he joined the Labour Party and eventually, through union sponsorship (he was a shunter on the railway) and a local councillorship, he got into parliament as the Honourable Member for Northloft.

His original policy was to transform the House with his brilliance into a humming workshop of revolution. What actually happened was that he found he enjoyed an MP's life — the congratulatory back-slaps from Tories after a speech, the saluting policeman, the photographs on the Terrace with Miss World contestants, entertaining (his word for what was really a painfully boring experience for them) constituents to tea in the Members' Common Room.

He became, in a word, doddery and more recently he has been plagued with the guilt-protective hallucinations of senility. He was a sitting target for the reselection zealots and when they became active Fred quickly and meekly surrendered. After months of lobbying, intriguing and personality assassination which have enlivened Northlofts ward meetings to an unprecedented degree, the short list has shaken down to just four hopefuls: 

Roosevelt Bustamente Alexander calls himself the Token Black, which is intended to shame people into supporting him; "positive discrimination" is a phrase never far from his lips. If that fails he will probably rely on packing the membership and for some time his supporters have been energetically recruiting blacks into the party regardless of their political ideas, on the offer of a cut-price subscription. Roosevelt's tactics have won him support among the more confused lefties, who refuse to recognise a black racist when they see one; in the rest of the party he is called a black bastard. He refers to socialism as "black and white living in harmony together", which may some day force him to ask himself why he is a member of the Labour Party.

Julian Chatwynd-Speke is a barrister, the effectiveness of whose advocacy may be measured by his numerous clients who. to the surprise of the police, have spent much time behind bars. On the proceeds of his family’s interests in the East Anglian retail trade Julian went to public school and then to Oxford. After a brief undergraduate dalliance with the Liberals, when "community politics" seemed to be the way to power, he chose the Labour Party. While industriously taking himself around many constituency selection meetings he was liable to make speeches in which he slowly enunciated the sacred names of dead Labour heroes — Cripps, Bevan, Gaitskell — but this won him neither the hoped-for rapturous applause nor the candidature. He lives in an expensively refurbished Regency house in Islington, where the word socialism is occasionally mentioned over the sherry glass.

Les Horn, because he is the trade union man, considers himself the favourite for the nomination. Les prides himself on his humble origins and the self-education which taught him negotiating phrases like "let us draw back from the edge of the precipice and see whether there is light at the end of the tunnel" (trade union code for "I am about to sell the workers down the river") but which did not prevent him becoming the crudest kind of racist. His great hero is Ernie Bevin, in whose memory he pedantically drops his aitches. Les toadies endlessly to anyone he considers his betters (mostly outside the Labour Party) and has been rewarded by appointment as a local magistrate, with a reputation as the harshest sentencer on the bench. His dearest, secret ambition is to become Earl Horn of Northloft; meanwhile his version of socialism is a sort of national factory where the state takes care of you (which, in Les' mouth, has more than one meaning) whether you like it or not.

Fiona Strang represents what she calls the Wimmin's Voice of Northloft. After two marriages and divorces, four children and countless affairs she is now a committed, castrating female. No protest, no demonstration, is safe from her presence; creches, nurseries, abortion clinics, are fertilised by the energy in which she seeks to hide her shameful (to her) past as a Roedean schoolgirl. She surges around Northloft s bewildered streets dressed in enormous tents of expensively tatty clothes and her poor children are kept deliberately scruffy and sticky-faced. Her socialism, whenever she has time to think about it, she describes as chipping away at capitalism when in fact she is only the smoother type of sandpaper to the system. Fred Parcel is openly terrified of her and so, when she verbally bludgeons them on their doorsteps, are the defenceless voters of Northloft.

The choice between these candidates will involve the output of much physical and mental energy, which will be gladly given by their supporters in the conviction that the end result is vital. Constituency activists would, however, do well to consider one curious fact. During the 1979 election a team of earnest sociology students descended on Northloft, as a typical English constituency, to assess the voters' attitudes. They asked questions about strikes, nationalisation, immigration and the like and concluded that, on the basis of their replies, Labour supporters should more logically have voted Tory and vice versa. Northloft. in other words, should have sent a Conservative, and not Fred Parcel, to Westminster. The students were puzzled by their findings and even now, after many learned papers and lengthy seminars back at the university, they have not been able to explain it all.

But they know only the half of it. After all, they are mere commentators on the great, deceiving game of politics; theirs is not to reason why nor to ask who really wins and who, most importantly, always loses.

Ivan

Letter From Europe: Mitterand organises poverty (1985)

The Letter from Europe column from the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

SOCIALISM = NEW POVERTY reads a poster stuck up all over Paris by a conservative students' association. Of course this has nothing to do with genuine socialism but concerns rather the false variety represented by Mitterrand and his "socialist party" who have been governing French capitalism since 1981. Since the number of destitute people has increased in France since Mitterrand came to power, and partly as a result of measures which running capitalism has obliged him and his government to adopt, this slogan is not entirely unjustified. Reformists masquerading as socialists have once again dragged the name of socialism through the mud.

One of the main electoral promises made by Mitterrand and the PS in 1981 was to reduce unemployment. In a televised debate Mitterrand declared that there would be two-and-a-half million unemployed by 1985 if the policy of the outgoing conservative President. Giscard. continued (Le Monde, 7 May 1981). Well, Mitterrand beat Giscard but unemployment continued to rise. The peak of 2.5 million was in fact reached in October 1984 . . . under Mitterrand. The only thing that the Mitterrand government has reduced has been unemployment benefit and the number of unemployed entitled to it.

Unemployment benefit was only introduced in France in 1959. Before then the unemployed had to rely on hand-outs from local councils. The scheme introduced in 1959 was not a state scheme but took the form of an agreement between the employers' organisation and the unions; both employers and workers paid contributions and the scheme (known as UNEDIC) was jointly administered by representatives of both sides of industry. The state also paid a subsidy to the scheme and a small allowance to some of those who exhausted their benefit rights under it.

In 1979 (under Giscard) this scheme was reformed. Basically the contributory scheme and the state dole were amalgamated under a single administration and both benefits and contributions were increased; in addition, a formula providing for an automatic state subsidy was agreed. By 1981. however, with the deepening of the economic crisis this new scheme turned out to be too generous by capitalism's standards. The task of rectifying this fell to the newly-elected Mitterrand government.

Their tactic was to try to push this unpopular task onto the employers and the unions who had negotiated the original agreement and the subsequent reforms. The employers were willing enough and they even went so far as to repudiate the 1958 agreement setting out the scheme but the unions, understandably, were more reluctant. In the event the government itself had to take a decision, by decree in November 1982. The effect of this decree was to worsen, except for certain cases of long-term unemployment, both benefits and the conditions for obtaining them while at the same time increasing contributions.

The employers and the unions subsequently negotiated a new scheme within the framework of this decree, which came into force in March 1984. Under double pressure from both the employers and the government the unions were compelled to accept a regression to the pre-1979 position — a reflection of their weakened bargaining position with two million unemployed. In addition to longer waiting periods, shorter benefit periods, harsher benefit conditions and reduced benefits, the previous dual system of contributory benefits followed by a means- tested state dole for some of those who had exhausted their contributory benefits was re-introduced.

The main way in which the November 1982 decree saved money for the government was by reducing the number of the unemployed in receipt of benefit. A surprisingly high number of the unemployed in France receive no unemployment benefit at all. According to a survey carried out by UNEDIC and released to the press last November, some 40 per cent of job-seekers in France receive no benefit. This represents nearly a million people. Some of these will be married women with husbands in work or young people still living at home so they won't be completely destitute (though the standard of living of the families concerned is of course drastically reduced). However a large proportion of them must rely on charities or, as before 1959, on any hand-outs they can get from their local council.

Clearly, if you have no job and receive no unemployment benefit of any kind then, unless someone else in your family is working or is in receipt of some other state benefit, you soon become completely destitute. Which is precisely what has happened: the ranks of the traditionally destitute — the handicapped, single mothers, ex-prisoners, ex-mental patients, old age pensioners - have been swelled by the benefitless unemployed, the "new poor”.

According to the UNEDIC study, of the 600,000 ejected from the contributory scheme since the November 1982 decree came into force "one out of three are today without resources" (Liberation, 6 November 1984); that is. some 200.000. To this must be added a similar, or perhaps larger, proportion of the 600,000 or so whose application for unemployment benefit was rejected over the previous 12 months. At least 400,000 people reduced to complete destitution and dependence on charity — a fine achievement for a caring, reforming government such as Mitterrand's claimed to be!

The appearance of these "new poor" has been highly embarrassing for the Mitterrand government which came to power on promises to improve workers' living standards rather than preside over the growth of destitution among the working class. In October last year they did announce a pathetic attempt to alleviate this problem, the main feature of which was to increase the wealth tax on the very rich to buy "surplus" food to give to the poor and to subsidise various charities operating in this field.

This appearance of the "new poor” represents not just a failure of the Mitterrand government to humanise capitalism for the workers but is even a direct consequence of measures they themselves took to cut back on the cost of the unemployment benefit scheme. Admittedly this was something forced on them by the logic of capitalism, but then resisting the logic of capitalism was one of the things they claimed to be able to do if they were elected to power.

We have consistently argued that this is not possible, at least not for any length of time. Any government of capitalism, whatever the intentions or background of its members, is sooner or later forced to apply the logic of capitalism. The growth of primary poverty in France is yet another proof of this.

Adam Buick

Floating To Nowhere — The currency chaos (1973)

From the August 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The cynic who said that the only lesson of history is that men never learn from history was knowingly exaggerating, but he also had it wrong, at least in regard to the history of capitalism. A few people have learned from past crises what kind of system it is and the economic laws on which it operates. And if the crisis is big enough memory of it will last for years among capitalists and workers alike as something they would like to avoid happening again.

However, two things undermine their fears in course of time. As, in the main, neither capitalists nor workers fully understand how capitalism works they are always ready to accept new quack remedies for capitalism’s ills. And governments, always with an eye on solving the immediate problem and winning the next election, will time and time again flout past experience and simply hope that something will turn up to save them. (The Daily Mail, 10th July, which solidly backs the Government over the currency crisis, frankly admits that the Tories are simply “gambling on prosperity”.)

An interesting case in point is the German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Like others of his generation he was for years committed to avoiding a recurrence of the great German inflation of the nineteen-twenties and similar events after the second world war, but has recently declared that he would "rather have inflation than unemployment”. He need only look up the records to see that he may get both. In the ’twenties, when inflation got out of hand, nearly 30 per cent, of the workers were unemployed.

Creating Weakness

Marx, the economist whom modern economists do not want to know, pointed out certain basic facts about capitalism. The capitalist, having acquired surplus value in the form of commodities, through the exploitation of his workers, needs to turn these commodities into money. Through long and hard experience it was appreciated that in the interests of capitalists as a whole there is great advantage in having it in a stable form — either gold or its equivalent, a paper currency convertible into gold at a fixed rate.

This was how the pound became a world-accepted currency in the nineteenth century, and the dollar in this century. The purpose of the gold link was to prevent the depreciation of the pound or the dollar, and consequent rise of prices, through the excess issue of an inconvertible currency. That is now all in the past. First the pound and then the dollar became inconvertible currencies issued in increasing quantities and losing their purchasing power month by month.

It is not speculators who make a currency "weak”, but its continuing loss of purchasing power which gives speculators their opportunity. And it is not only speculators. Capitalists all over the world who have sold goods for pounds or dollars do not want to hold them because their purchasing power goes on falling. The Chairman of the Arab countries’ Economic and Social Development Fund put the point in the course of a protest against the American Government’s refusal to allow dollars paid to the Arab countries for oil, to be converted into other currencies: "Why should we produce more and then be stuck with dollars we cannot make use of? It would be better to leave the oil underground.” (Financial Times, 10th July 1973).

Cheap Makes Dear

If of course the dollars were convertible into gold at $35 an ounce as they used to be, nobody would fear to hold dollars. At present the dollar and pound are described as “floating”. All this means is that instead of being devalued and immediately fixed at the lower level they were devalued and allowed to fluctuate about the lower level.

The pound was devalued in 1967 by the Wilson government and again in 1971 by the Heath Government — on the latter occasion with the enthusiastic support of Tories, Labour and the trade unions on the ground that it would make exports cheaper to foreign buyers and thus encourage production for export. The other side of the coin is that devaluation makes all imports correspondingly dearer. So the Labour Party and trade unions which protest against the higher prices of imported goods are protesting against the inevitable result of an action they approved of.

The governments and capitalists are becoming aware of the fact that while the depreciation of currencies may seem to be of short-term advantage, at least to exporters, the competitive depreciation of currencies such as the dollar and pound creates a chaotic situation which may make all international trading operations more difficult. This is leading some capitalists and economists to see that in the long run capitalism will have to re-learn the need to have stable currencies and that there is no better way than to restore gold convertibility at a fixed rate, in short the end of inflation.

And what does this offer to the workers? In nineteenth-century British capitalism there was no inflation. Prices in 1914 were actually slightly lower than in 1814. In between, prices rose moderately in booms and fell in depressions. And what the workers got was exploitation and poverty all the time, relieved somewhat in booms and worsened in depressions, with unemployment similarly.

Nobody has produced — or will produce — any policy which will change the nature of capitalism. Those who really do learn the lesson of history will concentrate on getting rid of capitalism.

Edgar Hardcastle

Branch News (1963)

Party News from the January 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Excellent work was done during October and November in the Glasgow Woodside By-Election. The campaign commenced with canvassing the Socialist Standard. This produced good results. Some members were disappointed that sales did not reach the results of the Municipal election in Kelvingrove last April. This was probably due to the time of year and bad weather. However, 307 Socialist Standards and 57 pamphlets were sold. When the election campaign really got going 18,500 manifestos were distributed also 500 leaflets introducing the Party. Six indoor meetings were held in addition to outdoor meetings. Glasgow Branch were pleased by the large amount of press publicity, although they regretted that the candidate's remarks were not always correctly reported. Radio and television reportage was good although the time allowed was very restricted. 83 votes were polled for the Socialist Party of Great Britain and a quote on the result from the Glasgow Herald (23/11/62) stated: "With 83 votes to his credit. Mr. Valler of the Socialist Party of Great Britain was not downhearted. 'There are,' he announced proudly '83 politically mature people in Woodside'".

Glasgow Branch learned much from the campaign and their experience will help them when they next contest an election in Glasgow. The Branch are grateful to comrades, other branches and the London members (who went up to help on the spot) for their financial and physical help.

Wembley Branch has continued with its steady and persistent efforts to spread the Socialist case. Regular canvasses of the Socialist Standard are still being conducted and members are kept busy following up the fresh sales.

Three film shows were held during 1962 and more are planned for the New Year. The Branch met the Wembley South Young Socialists (Labour Party Youth Section) on two occasions, and very worthwhile discussions took place. It is hoped to pay them a return visit. On the lighter side, this year's Xmas Social was held again at South Ealing with the usual get-together of members and friends.

Lewisham Branch is continuing with their winter propaganda. So far they have held eight indoor lectures. Literature sales totalled £2 14s. 4d. and collections

£17 2s. 10d., with an average audience of 20.

The challenge to opponents to put their case at Lewisham Town Hall drew an audience of 40. The meeting was well reported in the local press (Kentish Mercury) under the heading "Major parties steer clear of Political Challenge".

Final arrangements are being made for a debate with the Liberal Party on February 15th at Lewisham Town Hall at 8 p.m. A challenge has again been extended to the local CND to debate on January 16th, also at the Lewisham Town Hall, time 7.45 p.m.

The branch has so far made two new members as a direct result of the lectures.

Phyllis Howard

Room At The Top (1959)

Film Review from the March 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Room at the Top, directed by Jack Clayton

Those who doubt that contemporary society fails to satisfy the needs of the majority of people should look at the ways in which so many cherish remote hopes of escaping from their position in it. It is natural to want to break away from wage slavery. The chances are slim, but the likelihood that one’s subject position in the present order of things will continue without respite until one’s dying day, is a dismal contemplation. How many dreams, we wonder, are sealed down with the football coupon?

The new film Room at the Top, which is based on the best-selling novel by John Braine, portrays a young man who is fed up with the compromise and blows to his self-respect imposed in holding his Town Hall clerkship. Determined to get out of the rut of the grim northern industrial town he was born into, he goes to settle on the fringe of a world of big houses, spacious gardens, expensive cars. Once there, he pursues his aim of making the right social contacts in order to gain the highest rung of the ladder of success.

Lucky Break Story

“The Top” for him is really that no-man’s land where higher paid members of the working class mingle with the smaller industrialists and the like. But fortunately for our social climber, the daughter of one of the bigger fish is a member of the local dramatic society and this gives him his chance to break in.

This is another cherished notion for those who find it unpleasant to face dreary reality. Known as the "lucky break,” here it takes the form of marrying the boss’s daughter. Stories in popular magazines rely heavily on these situations, but some of today’s best-selling novels, widely acclaimed by the critics, fall back on them, too. The trend in this field is for boys of the working class, who have achieved grammar school education, to be recognised by employers as superior to the pampered products of their own class. Acceptance and promotion to executive positions soon follow and the boy moves up in the social scale.

The storm of praise that greeted Room at the Top when it was published in 1957 revealed the critics agreeing that this was the stuff of which contemporary dreams are made.

Signs of Success

The ambition to “get on” and achieve a higher status in life helps to give stories such as these their wide popularity. It is recognised that only money can bring this status in such an acquisitive world as we live in. The desire for recognition in this sense is reflected in the outward signs necessary to prove to the world and oneself that you are a success. The competitive nature of the Capitalist way of life breeds the feelings of insecurity and isolation that make people strive for this kind of success.

The process is endless. The same forces that make a £10-a-week person believe that he can only be contented on £15, will still make him, once he gets it. dissatisfied on less than £20. Not to mention the sacrifices that might have to be made in order to get it. This does not mean that we should not aim to get as much from Capitalism as we can. It does mean that this approach to the satisfying of human needs is a limited one. It cannot solve the predicament with which human beings are faced in Capitalist society.

Better Human Beings

For the fact is that the working class cannot opt out of the ill effects of Capitalism without deciding to get rid of it. Reformers in spite of good intentions and with the best will in the world and the support of electors, have made plain the futility of trying to obtain beneficial results from a system that is basically harmful. Success for a few at the expense of failure for most is all that this profit-motivated system can offer. In the long run the solution for the individual is the solution for mankind as a whole: to organise the world in accord with the needs of humanity.

What are these needs? To live in harmony and peace in a world where the interest of the individual is aligned to that of society as a whole. Socialists realise that only with a foundation of common ownership can society create the conditions for the betterment of human beings.

Anyone can sympathise with those like the character in the film who want to get away from the squalor of their childhood days. But if they do, let them remember that the system which causes their and other people’s problems will still be there. The economic structure that leads to slumps and wars and sets man against man in the struggle, not only to get to the top, but to avoid being shoved to the bottom, is unaltered. The competition for more things, higher status, greater power, will remain with its ill effects.

A positive alternative

Dreams of success today have their counterparts in the nightmares of failure. The evidence of mental ill- health indicates the high number of people unable to cope with modern modern life. The inability or reluctance to face the facts of life in a class-divided, money-collecting system indicates the failure of the social organisation. Let us see it for what it is and consider the positive alternative that Socialism offers.

It is obvious that room at the top is strictly limited. For the majority of people the lower portion of the social pyramid is where they must remain until society is changed. The important thing for workers is to recognise the need for such a change. To work for that end is the most worthwhile task of our time.

S. D.

Obituary: Clifford Groves (1959)

Obituary from the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a sad thought that, after several years of bad health, Clifford Groves is now dead at 52 years of age. Following the death of his wife, Ivy, also a member, he was taken into hospital with little hope of recovery. Comrade Groves’ family were Salvationists and during his boyhood he was taught the trumpet. As his mind matured he broke away from religion and, taking his trumpet with him, he used it to augment his wages by playing in a jazz band in good New Orleans style. Then he parted company with the trumpet for the mind-awakening blasts of Socialist propaganda. His experiences working in company offices and on the “road” as a firm’s representative (“high-class hawker,” to use his own description) made him more and more critical of the morality of the buying and selling of commodities until, in this frame of mind, he chanced to listen to Party speakers. Discussions with Party members ensued which not only did much for him but for the Party members also, for Groves possessed a very critical and ordered mind together with a somewhat caustic wit. Consequently Chiswick Branch members were soon polishing up and improving upon their own knowledge. He joined Chiswick in 1933 and shortly afterwards met Adolph Kohn, an outstandingly able propagandist and, in his own works, he “became Kohn’s pupil” and studied hard and long. He was soon speaking for the Party on the outdoor and indoor platforms and developed an excellent manner and clarity of expression that was a joy to hear. Some will recall his pre-war lectures on the “Popular Front” in France and, later, on the “Beveridge” Report and Family Allowances (the Party pamphlets on both these subjects were written by him).

As he developed, he became in demand as a Party representative in debate and was, at all times, calm and unruffled, even under the most trying conditions, giving of his best whether to a small audience in Cambridge or a “full house” at Kensington Town Hall. Later he became General Secretary and, in 1945, was nominated as our candidate at Paddington North in the General Election. Here, with many other Party members, he gave of his best in what, to many, was the best election campaign the Party has undertaken. (He also represented the Party in the by-election in 1946.) In 1949, signs of ill-health began to appear and, although he resigned as General Secretary, he continued on the Executive Committee for a few more years.

Few knew Groves well, but those of us who did, knew him to be a modest man and, in some ways, a shy one, who freely acknowledged the help that he had received from other Party members. To him the struggle for the establishment of Socialism was the only work worth while and represented his sole interest.

In concluding this salute to a very able propagandist for Socialism, it is appropriate to mention that, in large measure, his work was only made possible by the great help he received from Ivy, his wife, who, throughout the years took over practically all their domestic worries and responsibilities, leaving him free to carry out his Party work.

Phyllis Howard and Arthur George

A Drama of Hungary (1959)

Theatre Review from the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Shadow of Heroes by Robert Ardrey (Piccadilly Theatre)

It is not often that we see before us on the stage a re-enactment of events only recently cast into history, whose beam has lowered sufficiently to throw a “Shadow of Heroes” on to our vision; that of the people of Hungary, whose struggles formed the stuff of Robert Ardrey’s play at the Piccadilly Theatre in November.

Ardrey has given us an epic, or a document if you will; a play that points no finger, no moral, but simply shows us people playing the only parts they know, in a world not of their own making.

Lately familiar-sounding names: Kádár, Gerő and Rákosi, echo about the actors who present them to us— impersonally. Rajk, the idealist, and Kádár, the dedicated plodder; who fought in the Hungarian Communist underground; Gerő and Rákosi, the suave politicians, who, after due preparation in Moscow, were returned to Hungary in the wake of the Red Army to rule for the Kremlin. 

That which followed is what we have come to know as the Hungarian tragedy and the events that lead up to it; new events in an old pattern. We are soon aware that there is no common cause between those Hungarians from Moscow and those from the cellars of Budapest.

Rajk is hanged as a sacrifice to the needs of rotten political expediency, on a trumped-up charge of Titoist conspiracy, and resurrected as a public hero at the behest of another. As an attempt to line up with the new coformity, the Khrushchev ascendency after the death of Stalin, which went astray and, instead, exploded the keg of suppressed working-class hatred for the oppression of their “ liberators ” in October, 1956.

Through all this Kádár appears as little more than a pawn, a servant of the Communist Party, to be pulled up and pitched down as and when the interests of the ruling circle require it.

Finally, the intrigues of the Communist overlords for the perks and privileges of despotism, skulking from the wrath of Moscow, eventually invoke that wrath upon themselves and the unfortunate working class.

Ardrey knows little of politics and the motive forces of history (at least this is not apparent). Neither should we credit him with personal or political accuracy without verification.

But he pronounces no judgment that his narrative does not do for itself. He gives no causes; no profound analysis. Just people. This is both the strength and weakness of the play. We are free to draw our own conclusions (except for Mr. Emlyn Williams’ slight vocal insinuations). Some may draw the wrong ones, or none at all: but at least we are not told what they should be, which is refreshing and salutary.

There is an air of openness about the play: a “chorus,” or story teller, weaves in and out the action, the actors set their own scenery of broken outlines, around which the drama unfolds.

We are not involved: we sit and watch, listen and, maybe, think.

Ian Jones

To Boris Pasternak, And Others (1959)

From the January 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Think of those November days that shook the world in 1917,
When power was wrested from feudal czars and blood was spilled
"For freedom’s aim ” the news proclaimed 44 the workers' state.”
Where men were free to live with dignity and without fear.
Time has passed, how goes it now? Boris Pasternak,
You would speak out, but your masters did not wish to hear,
Or wish your fellow men to hear, your criticism of the state of things: In Russia your book was banned. 

No shortage in the Western Camp of crocodile tears.
(They only use the Nobel Prize to aim against their enemies).
We are not fooled, our masters, too. dearly love their status-quo,
Would ban and bomb, their wealth and power to maintain.
For all men must stir, man’s noblest cause to gain—
And everywhere this lesson must be taught for it to grow.
We know that the freedom and the dignity are still to come,
The state of things we share is still to go.

S. D.

The Hostage (1959)

Theatre Review from the January 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Hostage by Brendan Behan (The Theatre Royal, Stratford)

The Theatre Royal. Stratford are at present serving up an intriguing pot pourri of entertainment in the form of a new play by Brendan Behan. The theme of “The Hostage” is the Irish Republican Army, and its action takes place in a dingy boarding house in Dublin. The "Hostage” himself is a young cockney soldier, kidnapped and held captive, with the probability of being shot if an I.R.A. prisoner under sentence of death is not reprieved. The Theatre Royal company put it across with vigour and exuberance. They have that rare quality of acting with the audience rather to it.

A tragedy? Well, hardly. The play is a bawdy, noisy piece of cynicism, often chaotic, even more often extremely funny. Characters are crowded onto the stage without ever overcrowding it. The boarding house and its colourful and at times macabre inhabitants are presided over by a veteran from the playing fields of old England, who at some stage in his career caught a violent aversion to all things English. His caretaker is a survival from the more vigorous bomb-throwing campaigns of yesteryear. Morosely humped over a table of Guinness bottles he bemoans that the I.R.A. has lost its excitement now it has become serious and dedicated. Many of the scenes between him and his wife bring an atmosphere of the music hall into the production. There are several gay. ribald songs, sung with great enthusiasm by various members of the cast. The play ends in a babble of noise and frenzied confusion, during which the hostage is accidently killed by one of the boarders.

Mr. Behan really hits out at the I.R.A. and for good measure takes a sideways swipe at practically everything in his path. He rarely misses. Perhaps that is the trouble with the play. It is easy enough to make fun of peoples’ misguided activities, and if that is his motive he does it entertainingly. But his gibing never probes below the surface. Mr. Behan takes his people at face value and holds them before us for our ridicule. Never does he enquire into the emotional feelings that inspire people to join such organisations. Never does he enquire into the reasons for such feelings. He should know them. As a member he once shared their hardships, and presumably their beliefs. The play is no doubt an expression of his disillusionment with the I.R.A.

Brendan Behan may believe that underneath our various national labels we are all just human beings. No one in the boarding house really wants the cockney to be murdered in reprisal for the I.R.A. prisoner. The hostage even finds the opportunity for a fleeting love affair with the young Irish maid of all work. Nevertheless, we are left with the impression that Nationalism is all great fun as long as it does not get out of hand and lead to armed violence and murder. But this is the usual result of intense Nationalism, and the I.R.A., as well as Cyprus. Malaya and other places, is a grim reminder.

Brendan Behan may have realised the dangerous futility of Nationalistic organisations, but what of the people he writes about? They do not appear to share his disillusionment, and here lies the real tragedy. Nationalism is one of the greatest barriers to the establishment of a society based upon common humanity. It is a pity this side of the subject was excluded from the play. The characters are really caricatures, both tragic and comic, but only the latter side is shown.

On the whole it is rather naive and one wonders what Mr. Behan for all his fiery Nationalistic activities has really learned himself.

John Higgins

Running Commentary: Grimethorpe again (1984)

The Running Commentary column from the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Grimethorpe again

The Yorkshire village of Grimethorpe, scene of one of the fiercest clashes between police and striking miners, is no stranger to class war. It was here, in 1947, that the miners were forced to use the strike weapon in defence of their living standards in an incident which revealed the true nature of the recently nationalised coal mines.

At that time the industry generally was still congratulating itself on having got rid of the greedy, complacent and inefficient private coal owners; there was a Labour government presiding over "socialist” Britain. with their propaganda that workers should work harder and restrain their wage demands so as to help rebuild the export trade of the British capitalist class.

It was in that cause that the National Coal Board tried to tighten the exploitative screw on the miners of Grimethorpe by requiring them to produce more coal during each shift — by increasing their "stint". But unfortunately for the NCB and the Labour government the miners would not agree to this lowering of their standards and they came out on strike, in which they were soon the victors.

Unfortunately too for the NUM, whose general secretary was prominent in his denunciation of the strike. This remarkable fact is made even more so — in view of recent events in the coalfields — because the secretary was a member of the Communist Party, Arthur Horner. The Communist Party were then following the tactic of supporting the Attlee government’s attempts to get British capitalism back on its feet. It was consistent with this that the CP opposed strikes, even those like Grimethorpe where the workers were up against an antagonistic government, as they are today. This attitude was soon to be reversed when, as the Labour government’s foreign policy became more settled in opposition to that of the Russian ruling class, the CP turned to opposing them and so to supporting strikes.

Workers have every reason to remember Grimethorpe 1947. They should remember it for the lesson it carried about the nature of capitalist society and about the futility and motivation of reforms like nationalisation. They should remember it when "communists” like Scargill and McGahey vow that they will never betray working class interests.

The lesson is clear: as long as capitalism lasts the working class must always struggle to protect their interests, without compromise, and they must make this their own, conscious struggle instead of trusting leaders.


Plus ça change . . .

At least Margaret Thatcher has never made any secret of the fact that she and her government stand without hesitation for the interest of the British capitalist class. When they support a programme like cutting back the coal industry and sacking thousands of miners they do not pretend that this has anything to do with socialism.

What then of France, where there is of course a “socialist” President whose election was greeted with such enthusiasm as the dawn of a new age of equality and freedom for the workers? In 1981 Mitterrand was promising, in an election speech, that his government would "end years of neglect” of the coal mines there and increase production from 19 million tons to 30 million. No wonder the French workers were so enthusiastic; it is usually attractive, to someone dependent on employment for a living, to assure them that their exploitation is secure for the foreseeable future.

But as it has turned out that has been yet another of Mitterrand's pledges to have been dishonoured. The future for the French miners is, if anything, blacker than that for the British. For example in the case of the coal field of the Nord-Pas dc Calais region, the French equivalent of the National Coal Board would like to shut down production completely by 1990 — and this in what was once the heart of French coal mining. The famous target of 30 million tons has been gently dropped, and even the present target of 18.5 million tons is being reduced to 12 million by 1988, which means that about 28,000 miners will be lopped off the industry’s workforce.

The reason for this drive, which must be the envy of Ian McGregor, is that the French industry operates at a deficit of over £730 million a year. Like the British mines, this is a burden which the capitalist class as a whole are not prepared to carry indefinitely.

One difference between the two countries, however, is that the French miners are not struggling against these demands.

What protest there is is desultory and disjointed. Perhaps their reaction to this latest exposure of left wing political heroes makes them cynical and apathetic. In fact it should persuade them of the futility of all leaders and of all promises to make capitalism work against its nature. The failure of Mitterrand was inevitable; a careless response to it by the workers is not.


Blow-up at Dunlop

Michael Edwardes got his knighthood because of the sterling work he has done in rescuing several large industrial concerns which, before he took over, were apparently due to go out of business. The list of these firms is impressive in its length and in the prestige involved; it includes names like British Leyland and ICL. When Edwardes had finished his work with them, they were usually a lot more profitable than when he began (which is what he means by “rescue") and quite a few productive units had been shut down with a lot of workers thrown out of work.

There was simple justification for this. If something didn’t pay Edwardes did his best to make sure it didn't operate any more. He also took on the unions, most famously at British Leyland, so that they ceased to present so large an obstacle in his drive for the maximum of exploitation, the maximum of profitability.

So it was not surprising that when the great Dunlop tyre company also dropped into danger the 46 banks who are owed something like £385 million by the firm cast wistful eyes in Edwardes’ direction. Any money they had sunk in keeping this ailing giant on its feet, the banks reasoned, would be that much more secure under the control of the diminutive, ruthless, profit-preoccupied supremo. So one of those commercial assassinations was arranged, in which Edwardes took over at Dunlop, bringing some of his henchmen from ICL and firmly removing eight of the existing directors.

The outgoing chairman left with a barely coded warning of Edwardes’ “. . .methodology, his way of dealing with people, which in this way removes the continuity of the business". But of course Edwardes “deals with" people in exactly the correct way for this social system. Capitalism’s basis of private ownership of the means of life puts people on the same level as everything else which goes into the productive process. If they make money they will be employed; if not they will be discarded.

Of course people are a bit different from machines; for one thing they have feelings, which can sometimes be inconvenient to 24 hours a day, seven days a week exploitation. Such considerations may convince Edwardes that this is a less than perfect world. What it tells the workers, to judge from their reactions, is anyone’s guess.

Running Commentary: Forgotten heroes (1984)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Forgotten heroes

The propaganda advantage which the Tories undoubtedly gained from the Falklands war was partly derived from the notion that war can be a glorious, cleansing experience and that British workers are better at going through it than the Argentinians. Naturally this has to be put across with some subtlety and care; for example photographs of British troops had always to show them as tough, confident and, whatever the difficulties, in control. Pictures of Argentinian troops had to show them as ragged, starving and demoralised.

Even the wounds suffered by British soldiers were used in this exercise, as they have been in previous wars. Some can be made to appear positively romantic — a bandaged head, a crutched foot — and always there is the reassurance that soon it will all be better. So we were treated to lots of photographs of men in that condition, bravely smiling their way back to the strains of Rule Britannia.

But behind the propaganda the reality was a lot less attractive, for there were some fearsome incidents, like the bombing of the landing crafts, in which men sustained terrible burns and other injuries. These were not so enthusiastically publicised as the dashingly bandaged heroes from less frightening occasions.

One example of this was recently given some belated publicity in the Guardian. Lieutenant Robert Lawrence was shot in the back of the head by a sniper on Tumbledown Mountain. The bullet tore through his brain, leaving him paralysed down one side, sometimes incontinent and subject to bouts of intense pain. He has lost nearly half of his brain and has a skull made partly of plastic.

When Robert Lawrence came back to Britain he was not. unlike those other wounded men, treated like a hero but more like an embarrassment. The aircraft he travelled in was full of similarly damaged people; the press were kept away from it at the airport and when it landed it was hidden by a large tent. The men were driven away from this by ambulances which were loaded with their pathetic cargoes inside the tent. Later, they were kept out of the remembrance service at St. Pauls and, of course, the victory parade. In that welter of patriotic hysteria, the sight of what war really means would not have been welcome. It might also have caused some onlookers to question whether it had been worthwhile.

War is not glorious nor is it productive except of human misery. It is useful only to the ruling classes of the world, in whose interests wars are fought. The interests of the working class — who do all the fighting — are in refusing to take part in their masters’ wars and it is precisely to discourage such social insight that people like Robert Lawrence are treated in so ruthless and cynical a manner.

Faulty line

Ordinary working class folk are not accustomed to getting messages from a plush merchant bank like Kleinwort Benson, so their recent campaign of full page ads in the dailies has been a bit of a shocker to us. What’s this, we asked:

  Soon you will have the chance to be an owner of a company that plays a large part in our everyday lives.
  An Act of Parliament has made it possible for each one of us to buy British Telecom shares.
 For everyone it is an historic opportunity to share in the fortunes of one of Britain's leading companies . . .
  You may invest thousands, or even millions. The minimum, however, is about £250. . .

Naturally enough this got a lot of people very excited, at any rate they seemed to be in the ads because they were all smiling broadly, well satisfied with their investment. But quite a few must have been puzzled as well.

It is not so long ago that what is now called British Telecom was part of the Post Office and that, as we all know, was one of the first nationalised industries with a minister called the Postmaster General responsible for it in the government. Now we are always being told by all sorts of politicians that a nationalised industry is owned by the people — the sort who have been grinning out at us from those ads. So how can we buy something which we already own? What’s this about this Act of Parliament? Did someone take the company away from us without our knowing about it?

It is possible, but not helpful, to evade the answers to these questions by putting the Labour Party case, that the Thatcher government has filched British Telecom from the people of this country who once owned it in common. That argument should not appeal to anyone who has had their telephone cut off because they have not paid their bill — which would hardly happen if they owned the telephone company.

The straightforward way out of this seemingly complicated matter is in the realisation that we do not, and never did, own the Post Office or any part of it like that which is now British Telecom. Nationalisation is not ownership of an industry by the people but ownership on behalf of the capitalist class as a whole, in their overall interests. That is why the state usually takes over only vital industries like coal and steed or those which interlink industry such as communication concerns — the airlines, railways, the Post Office.

Nationalisation does not change the basic relationships between employee and employer nor does it change the essential nature of wealth under capitalism, that it is produced as commodities for profitable sale. As the steelworkers, the railwaymen and the miners know, if production cannot be carried on with the prospect of a profit. it will cease.

Ownership by the people of one industry can only happen when there is social ownership, world wide, of all the means of production and distribution. When that happens we shall not need any big advertisements to tell us about it.

Long odds

Fleet Street will not be surprised to learn that the Socialist Standard does not intend to intervene in its circulation battle, which has now developed into a search for Britain’s greatest bingo player, or perhaps it should be Britain’s most gullible worker.

These undemanding games, and the huge prizes which are promised to result from them, are designed to boost the sales figures of papers whose interest in the news, let alone putting that news into some sort of perspective, takes second place to their obsession with sensation. This was the explanation for the cheap and exceptionally nasty campaign in the Sun during the Falklands war. It also explains the acres of mush devoted to such inconsequential events as the death, funeral, commemoration and mourning of someone like the ex-Mr. Elizabeth Taylor.

The popular press has long absorbed the lesson that under capitalism it’s what sells that counts, never mind the quality. Anyone who has any doubts on this score need only look around at the mountain of trash which is turned out everywhere, day in, day out. to feed the market rather than to satisfy human needs.

Big, expensive, well publicised games like newspaper bingo thrive on the enticing theory of instant riches, on the miniscule hope that by some simple action — putting crosses on a pools coupon, filling squares on a numbered card — a worker can wash away every aspect of poverty and enter into the graceful state of lifelong abundance. It says a lot about the miseries of working class existence, which is relentlessly praised by those same newspapers, that so many of their readers should be so anxious to escape from it.

For a few, of course, the theory works. Their pools selection luckily comes out right, they complete all the spaces on their bingo card. They can stop being dependent on selling their working abilities to an employer and can instead use what is left of their life in finding out what they can really do, what they really enjoy. They leave behind the rest, a vast mass of human suffering and discontent.

No worker could be criticised for trying to win such a way out of poverty, even though the chances against it happening to any one of them are so cosmically high. The tragedy is that the gamble monopolises the workers’ horizons; they see it as the only way out. So misled are they, that they prefer to take their chance on a game before they will consider, and work for, a real and permanent escape from all the problems of capitalist society — one which is a dead cert and in which everyone is a winner.