Young, homeless, hopeless (1991)

From the January 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is easy to pretend that the beggars on the street are not really destitute and desperate. They are crafty kids on the make. They claim to be homeless, hut they are making huge fortunes sitting on their arses conning the vulnerable British public. No, there is no need to beg in Britain. This is a civilised country. It says so in the Sun. It says that beggars are earning £200 a day. They earn more than you do; the undeserving swines. The pretence goes on all the time. It is part of the self-delusion which sustains capitalism. But it is a huge delusion. There are homeless kids in Britain. There are thousands and thousands of them. And they will not go away by pretending that they are not really there.

According to the Independent (1 October), there are now 50.000 workers under the age of 25 in London who are homeless. Nationally, there are over 200,000 homeless youths. Many are housed in temporary hostels or cheap rented accommodation. Others sleep rough. They are the inhabitants of Cardboard City, the squalid emblem of revived Victorian values which can be seen any night of the week on the streets of central London.

Why are the inhabitants of Cardboard City out on the streets? In most cases they have left home under pressure, not by choice. Either it was too expensive for their parents to pay to keep them at home (especially with the notorious poll tax to be paid) or they were forced to leave because of violent or sexual abuse by parents. Capitalism celebrates the family, but for thousands of young workers family life is a story of intense poverty, humiliating parental oppression or hideous incest. They were free to stay at home, just like the mouse is free to snuggle up and keep warm in the cat’s basket.

Under this system the majority of young people are not free to leave the family home (if the family has one) and make a life for themselves. Out in the world the first task is to become a wage slave: to find a boss to exploit you. Some young workers leave home and enter the world of wage slavery; they are the "lucky" ones who are legally robbed and offered enough of a wage to keep themselves in food, clothing and shelter—just enough to leave them poor enough to have to go back and be robbed again the next week.

Most workers under 25 are on the lowest wages. The average worker under 21 earns only 60 percent of the wages of the average 21-35 year-old worker. In 1987 the average 16-17 year-old earned only 39 percent of the average wage. Many such workers, though employed, are too poor to afford a home. They must either rent accommodation (in a market where there is very little cheap rented accommodation, and where landlords are amongst the most unscrupulous and thieving capitalists) or else apply for council housing which is almost never available for the single person.

Those workers who cannot find a job are in a far worse position. If they cannot sell themselves to a boss who can make a profit out of them they are on the scrapheap. According to the 1977 Housing Act. from which the current legal definition of homelessness is derived, there is no legal right for anyone to be given a place to live. If you cannot afford the rent or mortgage for a home you can apply to the local council. but it is more than likely that they will completely ignore you—though some councils have been known to tell young girls who are homeless to go away and get themselves pregnant so as to win a priority place on the housing waiting list. How the profit system cherishes human life!

Thieving landlords

The 1985 Housing act stated that special priority must be given by councils to homeless people who are “vulnerable”. This excludes most homeless youths on the grounds that they have “chosen” to leave home and are therefore "intentionally homeless". Last year Thatcher was asked in the House of Commons what she expected these homeless youths to do: "Stand on your own two feet or go home to mother” was the reply from the Empress of Callousness.

The Housing Act of 1988 rubbed the faces of the young homeless further in the mud, as the Tories made it legal for their friends, the parasitical landlords, to charge "premiums” or “key money" as advance payment before a homeless person can rent a home. This was previously illegal.

So, the prospects for the young homeless worker are grim. The benefits system makes it grimmer still. Before the 1988 social security reforms were introduced it was possible for homeless youths to apply for state money to pay rent in advance. This is now abolished. Under the current law young workers may apply for a so-called "crisis loan”, only if they can prove that (a) they are destitute and (b) they will be able to repay the loan. It does not require genius to see that most claimants will fall down on one or other of the qualifications. In the absence of such a loan the young homeless workers are on their own. No money, no shelter, no hope. They can go on the game if they are female and marketable. So do many of the destitute lads who end up working as rent-boys for assorted vicars and moralising MPs. Or they can beg.

Unemployed, homeless youths have little prospect of finding a job: no address, no job—no wage, no address. They are out in the cold. At best, there is the chance of super-exploited, non-unionised casual labour—for some. The others have no chance.

The dangers of living alone in a strange city are fearful and life-threatening. The temptation to seek easy refuge in drink and drugs is not to be condemned by those whose system has created the problem. Weeks and months on the streets causes physical damage to the bodies of the homeless workers and lasting psychological distress. Even if capitalism was brought to an end tomorrow, this would leave tens of thousands of profoundly emotionally-damaged people whose lives as social rejects has wounded them no less than the casualties of capitalism's wars.

Many workers like to pretend that the homeless young workers do not exist. In helplessness or self-deception, they look the other way when they see them. The pernicious tabloid rags tell lies about these modern paupers, claiming that they are con-merchants on the make. And the law punishes them. The police use the 1824 Vagrancy Act to fine homeless kids who are caught begging. It is a punishable offence to be so poor that you are forced to beg from other poor people.

Pathetically, the reformists seek their limited solutions within the capitalist system. There is a Campaign to End the Vagrancy Act which boasts that it has abolished the Act in Scotland in 1982. Well-meaning people in CHAR (the Campaign for the Homeless and Rootless) plead with the ruling class to offer a few pounds more to the unemployed, to build a few more council slums, to offer jobs for the poorest of the poor. None of this will solve the problem. In fact, if asked, those campaigning for these miserable little reforms will admit that the problem is further from being resolved now than when their campaigns began.

The problem of young workers who are homeless is only an extension of the problem of all workers who are too poor to live as well as society could allow us to live. For the truth is that we could all live in decent comfort and equality if only the madness of the profit system is cast aside and we begin to live without the social barriers of sale and profit.

In a world socialist society of production for need, where all goods and services would be available to all people on the simple basis of free access, the concept of begging would not exist. And children will ask how it was that once there were young men and women sleeping in cardboard boxes on cold and rainy nights, pleading for pennies from passers-by. They will, perhaps, pretend that this could never have been so. It was an illusion, surely, dreamed up by some awful creator of horror fantasies. Such forgetting is for the morrow; for now we have the Earth to take back from the thieves who have stolen it from us.

Steve Coleman

Propaganda from Iraq (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Last year we received, via the Iraq Embassy in London, the following circular letter signed "Comrade Latif Nasayyif Jassim, Member of the Regional Leadership of the Arab Ba'th Socialist Party. Baghdad. Iraq". Jassim is also the Iraqi Minister of Information.

The Foreign Relations Bureau of the Regional Leadership of the Arab Ba'th Socialist Party is pleased and honoured to extend its warmest greetings of friendship and solidarity, reaffirm its keenness to maintain our relations with you on the basis of our common principles, and present to you herewith a copy of the documented historical and legal paper recently published on the question of the relationship between Kuwait and Iraq.

The paper also offers a political review of the conspiratorial role played by the former Sheiks of Kuwait, in collaboration with the United States of America, in order to destroy the economy of Iraq, undermine its national security and impoverish its people to the benefit of imperialist and zionist interests.

We are confident that these facts will help you to understand the background of the events taking place in the Arab Gulf region and to follow their developments. We stress our categorical rejection of the USNATO invasion of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, along with our conviction of the ability of the Arab Nation to settle Arab problems without foreign intervention and on the basis of the initiative of H.E. President Saddam Hussein announced on 12 August 1990. We also reiterate our resolve to resist the military alliances with which Washington plans to fetter the Arab Nation in order to ensure its absolute hegemony over our oil and free will.

Comrades and Friends,

We call upon you to denounce the inhuman economic boycott and blockade aiming at starving our people, depriving us of our medical needs and our children of their milk.

We also call upon you to expose war mongers and aggressors, and to uphold the peace option as a means to resolve all problems in the Middle East on basis of uniform criteria and principles.

Our reply:

We are fully prepared to denounce all war-mongers in the area: Bush. Mitterrand, the unlamented Thatcher—and His Excellency President Saddam Hussein. As the Gulf Crisis reaches its flashpoint, we of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and our companion parties overseas, constituting the Movement for World Socialism, reaffirm our unequivocal opposition to all the belligerents, be they major powers defending the interests of their capitalists or despotic oil-producing states anxious to extend or maintain their arbitrarily-established frontiers and to raise the price of their oil on the world market.

We wish to make it absolutely clear that we have no “common principles” with the so-called Arab Ba’th “Socialist" Party find that they are no “comrades and friends" of ours. We have never had any relations with them and never will have. No doubt they have mistakenly assumed that we form part of the rag-bag of trotskyist and maoist organisations like the SWP. RCP, WRP. etc, etc which have taken up a pro-Iraq position in the Gulf conflict.

The Arab Ba’th “Socialist” Party is no more socialist than was Hitler's “National Socialist German Workers Party” in whose tradition of aggressive and totalitarian nationalism it is to be placed. As the governing party in Iraq and, under a rival faction, in Syria its record in both countries has been one of oppression, torture, assassination and mass murder. And its doctrine that all Arabs form a single nation with a common interest is mistaken and divisive. Like all cultural and language groups, the Arabs are divided into two classes with antagonistic interests: workers and their exploiters and rulers. Those who are workers form part of the world working class, not of some mythical “Arab Nation".

Regrettably, the notion of a unified Arab nation-state, however illusory, still holds great sway throughout much of the Arab world. It is to this public that Baathist propaganda is addressed, in the hope that they will see Iraq’s tyrant in a Napoleonic role challenging the no longer divine rights of the billionaire oil sheiks to rule and benefit from their statelets set up and protected by the Western powers.

Naturally, as Socialists, we have no sympathy whatsoever for the oil sheiks but, equally, we hold that national entities, actual or envisaged, offer no solution to the problems of the working class majority anywhere in the world.

While the horrors of war are about to be unleashed yet again, we re-iterate even more urgently our call for the World Working Class to take conscious democratic action for the creation of a world without markets, frontiers or classes in which the oil of the Middle East will belong, together with all other productive resources, not to this or that “nation" but to all the people of the world in common—a world free, at last, from the wars that result from the competitive struggle for profits that is built-in to the capitalist system.

Obituary: Fred Kenny (1991)

Obituary from the March 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Manchester Branch were saddened recently to learn of the death of Comrade Fred Kenny at the comparatively early age of 55. Fred, a building worker, joined the Socialist Party in 1983. and was a keen literature-seller and fly-poster. He had been ill for some time and unable to attend meetings, hut his enthusiasm for socialism never dimmed.

Money-worship (1991)

Book Review from the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hayek and the Market. By Jim Tomlinson, Pluto Press, £24.95.

Hayek has been a notorious life-long opponent of socialism, and not just of socialism but even of relatively mild reformist and trade union attempts to improve working class conditions within capitalism.

After the publication of his book The Road to Serfdom in 1944 nothing much more was heard of him until he re-emerged in the 1970s to provide intellectual ammunition for the Thatcherite wing of the Tory party. So Tomlinson’s short, readable but expensive book can serve a purpose on the principle of “know thine enemy".

An Austrian by birth. Hayek began his political life as a member of that country’s school of anti-socialism associated with the name of Ludwig Von Mises. Mises argued, that without buying and selling, money and prices it would be impossible to make rational decisions about what to produce and how to produce it; production solely for use and without monetary calculation was thus a mere pipe- dream. This was the argument against socialism. But the Mises school went on to argue that, even if buying and selling, money and prices exist, rational economic decisions would still not be able to be made unless prices were fixed by the free play of market forces. This was the argument against state capitalism and reformism (but which they also, either mistakenly or lyingly, called socialism).

Hayek’s main argument was directed at state capitalism and the concept of the central planning of all economic activity. He convincingly showed that the modern productive system was so complicated that it could not be planned from a single centre and that therefore some decentralization and autonomy for producers was a necessity. He went on to argue, however, that this made the market economically inevitable, an argument that is now accepted not only by open champions of capitalism like Thatcher but also by the likes of Kinnock and Gorbachev.

But this conclusion by no means follows, since why is it impossible to conceive of a system in which groups of producers would be responding not to market demand but to real demand as indicated by what people took under conditions of free access? Why could a system of production solely for use not be able to function on the same sort of self-regulating basis as the market is supposed to?

Hayek, however, ruled out this option in advance, arguing that there were only two choices: either free market capitalism or some form of statism. As he wrote in The Road to Serfdom:

The only alternative to submission to the impersonal and seemingly irrational forces of the market is submission to an equally uncontrollable and therefore arbitrary power of other men.

We deny this. The choice is not between the dictatorship of the market and the dictatorship of some state bureaucracy. A free, socialist society without either the market or the state is possible.

Adam Buick

Rise and Fall of a Pitboy (1991)

From the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A great future was once forecast for Michael Eaton, not least by himself. He might have made it to the top, to become a recognisable man of power and influence. Instead he is someone dominated by a feeling of “gloom and failure", of no longer being in charge of his life. Once he was a firm supporter of the professed free market principles of the Thatcher governments. a disciple of the creed that hard work, ingenuity and experience were enough to build a fortune. Now he complains bitterly about the government which undermined him. with policies which brought the recession and his own failure and which, he says, could and should have been changed a long time ago.

Eaton’s finest hour was during the coal strike of 1984-5, when he was called in to run the Coal Board’s public relations. His appointment was widely welcomed in those places where the defeat of the miners was seen as an urgent need. Eaton came of a family of colliers and he himself was a pit boy at the age of 15. He took a degree in mining engineering and, as he climbed the managerial ladder, was sent by the Coal Board to the Stanford Business School in California, where they aim to hone their students' techniques of worker exploitation. Only the highest of high flyers get that kind of schooling; at 50—seven years ago—Eaton was in the top flight, the youngest and longest serving Coal Board area director.

Rough—hewn

When the strike started Eaton was in charge of the mines in North Yorkshire. He soon showed his hand by stopping the pay of mine officials who declined to supervise the few miners who went in to work— a policy which, had it been applied nationally, would have been disastrous for the employers. But the blunder did not dent the Eaton reputation as Mr Fixit, a boss whose direct style and rough-hewn Yorkshire opinions ensured that he was "good at dealing with people”—which really meant cunning at screwing the maximum possible profit out of the labour of others.

When it became clear that Coal Board chairman Ian MacGregor was unable to put the case for making useful and productive workers redundant without threatening the Saatchi brothers with simultaneous heart attacks, Eaton was given the job of trying to repair the Board’s public relations. MacGregor, as we all remember, had been taken on by the government mainly to devitalise the unions, at first in the steel industry and then in the coal mines, and to slash the industries back to a size more in keeping with their profit-making capabilities.

He was very good at that, as Arthur Scargill will agree, and anyone who doubts his abilities need only consider what has happened to the mines since the strike. What MacGregor was not good at was putting himself across as other than someone imported to impose lower standards of poverty on selected groups of workers. His low point came when he appeared in public with his head in a carrier bag; it was never completely clear why he did this but what was clear was that it was conduct unbecoming the holder of a high public office in the midst of a savage struggle with his employees.

Eaton was very different. He had known Scargill, in one way or another, for over 12 years and had played a large part in working out the government’s strategy which eventually beat the miners. But things did not turn out as planned because he clashed with MacGregor on many issues and his presence was resented by the man whose job as communications chief he had taken. His career was more or less stopped in its tracks; he did not. as many people had expected. get to be chairman of the Coal Board and had to be content with the award of the QBE for his services to British capitalism. In 1986 he resigned from the Board and with his family bought a building firm which, as the economy boomed, grew into an employer of nearly 200 workers and a valuation of about £6 million.

Bankrupt

So far so good—at least for Eaton as he contemplated this apparent proof of the adage, which the striking miners had regarded with such scepticism, that hard work and initiative must bring success. Whatever Eaton had learned he had missed the fact that we live under a social system of economic rises and falls, a system which will not be controlled by any skill or industriousness and which takes no account of the predictions of the experts. Eaton’s business suddenly collapsed, with debts of about £2½ million and likely, when the receivers have chewed it over, to be left owing about £700,000.

This blow to Eaton’s self-esteem, and to all he believed in, has been worsened by the fact that he and his family may be made homeless by the crash. And he is not happy about it:

What most upset me was when I heard John Major as Chancellor say. "if it isn't hurting it isn’t working". People like him don't appreciate—they can’t appreciate—the abjectness of failure and the consequences on your family.

He seems to have forgotten that during the miners’ strike many miners were describing the effects of the pit closures in similar terms. They talked fearfully about the depression of unemployment, about the stress of getting by on the dole, about the feelings of being worthless when they could not find an employer to exploit their labour. They, like Eaton now, felt out of control of their own lives.

The official response, which Eaton was employed to announce, was that the miners must face economic reality—that if the pits were not profitable they had to be closed, whatever the effect on the miners, because only the profitable deserves to survive. And if the miners argued for changes in government policy to keep the pits open they met the kind of implacable opposition to subsidising the unprofitable which Eaton's company got from the firms it owed money to.

An idiot

There are probably quite a few miners, redundant or still in work, who are gloating at how things have turned out for Eaton. It would be more helpful if there was a better understanding of what happened to the miners, and to Eaton’s business. Capitalism does not operate from sentiment or from any obligation other than to produce wealth—like coal, like houses— for sale and profit. The market where goods are sold is neither predictable nor controllable but when it is booming people like Eaton, and millions of workers, misinterpret this as the results of their own skills and hard work. When it slumps they assume this is the fault of the government or the City or foreign financiers or whatever. Remembering how different he saw things during the strike, Eaton said:

If anyone had suggested then that the country would he in the position it is now, they would have sent you to the Tower as an idiot.

What is the "sanity” of capitalism worth, when a man who once personified it admits the idiots got it right after all?

Ivan

Utopia now (1991)

Book Review from the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

I Was Robot (Utopia Now Possible). By Ernest Mann. (Little Free Press, Rt 1. Box 102 Cushing, MN 56443, USA. $7.95.)

We have always argued that many workers would arrive at conclusions similar to those of Socialists on their own, without encountering Socialist speakers or publications. This is just what happened to Ernest Mann: twenty years ago, at the age of 42, he decided that he had had enough of wage slavery and "dropped out”. Since then, he has been propagating his ideas in his own newsletter, issued from Minnesota. Many of these newsletters are now collected together in this volume. Unfortunately, this format means the book is very repetitive, and there is little sense of an argument being developed. Nevertheless, the result is lively and well worth reading.

Mann argues that basic causes of problems should be attacked, not just the symptoms. For him, it is the pursuit of profit which is responsible for the ills of society—for gross inequalities, for the bloodshed of war, for the waste of production, for people's need to obey and conform. His alternative is what he calls the “Priceless Economic System" which is a system without money or the profit motive, based on co-operation not competition, with work done by volunteers. He deals with the “lazy person" argument by pointing out that there would still be plenty of motivation to work in a society where people would be cooperating to produce the best possible, free of stress and worries. Without useless jobs and the waste of wars and so on. it would be possible to produce an abundance of goods, for people to take as they wish.

There is no doubt that the Priceless Economic System is in its essentials Socialism. The only sour note is struck by a passage leading to the conclusion. "let's get rid of Profit and get our country back!”, which is based on the idea that the American economy has been in part sold out to billionaires from Asia and north Africa. The nationalism, indeed racism, of this argument, sits ill with the rest of this book.

The other problem in Mann’s discussion concerns how to establish the moneyless society. At one point he takes the elitist position that it will be enough to convince a few “movers and shakers” of its superiority, for then the rest of the population will follow them, apparently like sheep. At other times he suggests starting on an individual basis: give away your surplus possessions, set up a group of friends and neighbours who can donate labour and skills to each other for free. Then again he proposes that, once everyone is convinced of the need for the change, they can just set a date on which to stop using money. So he does (sometimes) see the necessity for majority support for a moneyless society, but he makes no reference to class struggle or the need to dispossess the capitalist class.

But the good points of the book far outweigh its shortcomings. There are some striking images, such as the opening one of workers all wearing helmets which somehow make them slaves of the bosses. Memorable too is the idea of the Warbucks family, who have ruled Earth for millennia but who eventually decide to leave for outer space, recommending to their slaves not to continue with the money system.

Paul Bennett

Banks and the Third World Elite (1991)

From the July 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the protestors march again into Trafalgar Square this month to demand an end to the massive debt repayments said to be causing Third World poverty, it will be left to Socialists, once again, to point out that you cannot expect the world capitalist system to behave any differently. What strikes the socialist most forcefully is the staggering naivety of the call for banks to be nicer to their Third World clients, to Stamp Out Their Debts, as if the bankers' greed alone is the root cause of the present misery into which the majority of the world's population is sunk.

When the great lending spree to Third World countries began in the early 1970s— taking their collective debt from about $130 billion in 1973 to $612 billion nine years later when the bubble burst—there was a clear and compelling logic driving them relentlessly on.

That was the logic of profit. There was a demand for capital—for grandiose construction projects like dams and new cities to glorify the names of upstart and insecure dictators, for the bribes necessary to bypass planning regulations and plunder forests and raw materials, and for the emerging, thrusting entrepreneurs in the Indias and Brazils anxious to set up their own refining and car businesses and muscle in on the exploitation of the local labour forces previously the sole preserve of foreign multinationals.

So let's have an end to the myths that the evil Western bankers forced their largesse down the throats of innocent and unwilling Third World victims—a typically easy way out for liberal supporters of capitalism, replete with obnoxious racist stereotypes of the cowering slave.

Logic of profit system
And now the banks continue to obey the rules of the profit system by trying to secure some sort of return for their directors and shareholders. Friends of the Earth complain particularly about Lloyds Bank, said to have the largest amount of money tied up in Third World debts:

Although Lloyds could reduce much of the debt using the reserves accumulated with the help of taxpayers, responsibility to shareholders and customers is still wheeled out as an excuse for lack of positive action. (Earth Matters, Summer 1991).

The limit of the reformers' dreams is to pressurise the grasping bankers into reducing “much'' of the helpless Third World's debt, and into the bargain getting Third World countries with any rainforest left to give some of this up to the wise and beneficent West—which has already destroyed its own virgin forests—in return for some further reduction of their debts.

Even assuming this could be achieved, and the banks could be persuaded to relinquish their claim to the money which they (and most of their shareholders) see as rightfully theirs, what effect would it have? Would the local ruling classes in Benin and Argentina immediately plough the money saved into social projects to ease poverty and increase healthcare provision—or into the preservation of those rainforests?

Well, there are two simple ways to answer this question. The first is to ask how they spent the last lot of capital poured into their laps in the great lending boom of the 1970s. And secondly, even if—against all the evidence of those years—they did feel disposed to invest in the well-being of their subjects, there are other tentacles of the world capitalist system which would rapidly smother them.

Local ruling classes

Take the main institutions of global economic management set up by the US and its European, and then Japanese, partners after the war and used to keep Third World ruling classes in their place: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT).

Loans from the IMF and World Bank are granted on the specific condition that countries cut expenditure on social welfare—in particular food subsidies—in favour of buying Western imports or developing an industrial infrastructure to buy Western know-how and technology. This is backed up by the current round of GATT negotiations which will compel governments to abandon subsidies for farmers and for protecting natural resources like forests. Farmers will be forced from their land, along with all the local knowledge so vital for developing a sustainable agriculture, to make way for giant transnational combines with their well-known concern for sensitive production for local needs in preference to exporting to the highest payer . . .

So even if Lloyds Bank can be persuaded to kindly ‘'reduce” the size of the Third World's tribute allowed it under the rules of the free market, and even if the rulers of Third World countries can be persuaded to kindly spend the proceeds on tackling poverty, and even if the IMF, the World Bank and the GATT negotiators would allow the money to be spent on these purposes, how much of a difference would it make to the millions of starving, homeless, exploited peoples of the world?

Socialists are often accused of being unrealistic in our demand for an end to the profit system as the only way of ending mass poverty. We are told that we must live in the Real World, where we must proceed One Step At A Time, and support causes like the Stamp Out the Debt campaign. But to support a movement which will not even acknowledge—let alone begin to think about challenging— the root cause of world poverty, is to make sure that the “real world” continues to be one in which human beings needlessly die and the Earth is systematically ravaged in the name of profit.

Andrew Thomas

Analysing an Economic System (2017)

From the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

One criticism of Marx’s Capital is that, written 150 years ago, it is describing conditions in mid-century Victorian Britain which have long since disappeared. It does do this, but this is to miss the point. Marx was analysing an economic system, not the particular political, sociological and historical conditions under which it happened to operate in his day. It was written not, or not just, as a criticism of conditions in mid-Victorian Britain but as an analysis of capitalism in general, of the capitalist economic system as such irrespective of the conditions in which it operated.

As Marx was writing in mid-19th century Britain, most of his concrete examples are drawn from the experience of capitalism in and up to that period. Then, the main industry was textiles whose products were exported throughout the world; the main source of energy was burning coal in steam engines; and the dominant form of ownership of means of production was a factory owned and managed by an individual capitalist family.

Marx’s examples are drawn from the 1860s but, even before he died in 1883, things had begun to change. The production of machines was becoming more important than textile production; coal was about to be used to raise steam to drive electricity-generating turbines; the joint stock company with limited liability was becoming the dominant form of capitalist ownership. But these developments did not alter how capitalism worked as an economic system. It continued to operate in the same basic way that Marx had analysed.

Technology and the political and sociological framework are even more changed today but capitalism as an economic system still works in the same way. The fact that Marx never saw a motor car or an aeroplane or radio, television, electronic computers or knew of nuclear power or genetic engineering does not affect his theory.

Political economy

The subtitle of Capital, when it was translated into English in 1887, was ‘A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production’. It was this, but a strict translation of the original German would have been ‘A Critique of Political Economy’, a subtitle used in more modern translations.

‘Political Economy’ was the name applied by David Ricardo, author of The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821), and others to the study that they were engaged in of the production and distribution of wealth in a market economy. They imagined that they were discovering a natural process just as other scientists were. Marx’s major criticism of them was that in reality they were analysing one historically-evolved, and ultimately passing, way of organising the production and distribution of wealth, which he called ‘the capitalist mode of production’.

Nevertheless, the ‘economic laws’ they posited still acted as if they were natural laws, even though they came into being only under specific social and historical conditions. The Political Economists saw the ‘natural’ way to organise the production and distribution of wealth, and which they regarded as being distorted by political interference, as: factories and other workplaces owned by capitalists; production carried out by wage-workers; and the capitalist owners aiming to make a profit by investing money in production and selling what was produced at prices established by the market.

On the basis of these assumptions (and policy recommendations) they sought to work out how wealth would be distributed between capitalists, wage-workers, and those who owned land and other natural resources. They also sought to work out how the prices of goods produced for sale (which they called ‘commodities’) were determined. They correctly identified this as having something to do with the time taken to produce them.

Marx made his own contribution to this analysis and in particular solved the mystery of how profit could arise if all commodities exchanged at their labour-time values. His solution was to make a distinction between what workers expended in production (‘labour’) and what they sold (their ‘labour power’) and for which they were paid a full price as their wages. He showed that profit arose not in circulation but in production, out of the difference between the value of what wage workers produced, which belonged to their capitalist employer, and the value of what they were paid for the sale of their labour-power, a difference he called ‘surplus value’.

The adepts of political economy didn’t like this any more than they liked being told that what they were studying was not the natural laws of production and distribution. Their successors, realising where a labour theory of value might lead, abandoned this approach and began to analyse the economic system in terms of how businesses experienced it.

Greed is irrelevant

The concept of ‘surplus value’ is key to Marx’s analysis of capitalism as an economic system. He saw the driving force behind production under capitalism as being to maximise the amount of surplus value. This was not because capitalists were greedy, but was something imposed on them by the economic laws of capitalism. These laws forced capitalists to re-invest in production as additional capital most of the profits they made.

Capitalists, he argued, were in competition with each other to sell their products and make a profit. To win what he called ‘the battle of competition’ firms had to reduce the unit cost of what they produced so as to be in a position to sell more cheaply than their rivals without impingeing on their own profits. A firm could achieve this by reducing the time needed to produce its product, or, what is the same thing, increasing the productivity of its workforce, but this involved equipping them with more efficient machines, bought out of previously made profits. The first firm to do this would make a temporary ‘super-profit’ but this would disappear as other firms, to stay in the race for profits, also bought more productive machines and the market price for the product fell, restoring profits to their ‘normal’ level.

Capitalist competition thus results in a race to reduce costs by increased productivity, mainly through the installation of more efficient machines. The tendency under capitalism is for most profits to be reinvested in production as further capital, for more and more capital to be accumulated by being invested in expanding the means of production and so both production and employment (though the first at a faster rate than the second). This economic ‘growth’ is built-in to capitalism and is not a free choice of those running capitalist enterprises, so it can’t be reversed. It’s a drive that will last as long as capitalism does.

Forms of enterprise

One consequence of Marx’s analysis of capitalism as an economic system operating according to its own economic laws is that the institutional form in which a capital is embodied and treated as a single unit – whether the individual capitalist owner of Marx’s day, a limited liability company (what in America is called a ‘corporation’), a state-owned enterprise, or even a worker-run cooperative – is incidental. What is decisive is that, whatever the institutional form, commodities are being produced for sale on a market with a view to profit; which means that the enterprises are subject to the economic laws of capitalism and have to keep on re-investing profits in more modern machinery in order to keep costs down and stay in the battle of competition.

Also incidental is the distribution of that part of profits that is not re-invested in production but is used for the consumption of those who manage units of capital. Those who 'personify capital' (Marx's term) can be individual capitalists, company directors, big shareholders, or government officials. They don’t have to be bloated men in top hats smoking a cigar. In the history of capitalism there has also been a wide variety of personal beneficiaries of capitalist production, from individual capitalist owners (an almost distinct breed these days) to top level state officials, civil and/or military. In fact the Britain of Marx's day was itself exceptional in having a landed aristocracy in a position to command a share, in the form of ground-rents and royalties, of the surplus value extracted from the workers by their immediate employers.

That Marx’s analysis of capitalism was not tied to conditions in mid-century Victorian Britain is shown by the fact that the same economic laws, the same economic drive to accumulate capital out of surplus value created by wage-labour, operated also in the former USSR. The institutional framework there – the absence of individual capitalist ownership and the almost total state ownership of the means of production, and the distribution of the consumption part of surplus value amongst various layers of state officials – was quite different from what obtained in the West. Yet capitalism existed there. Even the abolition of private capitalists and capitalist private property rights is compatible with the existence of capitalism.

Marx’s analysis of the way capitalism works is valid wherever there is sectional ownership and control of the means of wealth production and where production is carried out by wage-workers for sale on a market with a view to profit. As this is undoubtedly still the case today, Marx’s Capital remains valid and relevant.

Adam Buick

A Thought From George Jackson (1991)

From the August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

George Jackson (1941 - 1971).

Twenty years ago this month the militant American black nationalist George Jackson was murdered during a prison riot. Although his politics were generally confused—he was a Maoist and supporter of the late unlamented Albanian government—he did express the following view in one of his prison letters: 

"Consider the people's store, after full automation, the implementation of the theory of economic advantage. You dig. no waste makers, nor harnesses on production. There is no intermediary, no money. The store, it stocks everything that the body or home could possibly use. Why won’t the people hoard, how is an operation like that possible, how could the storing place keep its stores if its stock (merchandise) is free’’

Men hoard against want. need, don't they? Aren't they taught that tomorrow holds terror, pile up a surplus against this terror, be greedy and possessive if you want to succeed in this insecure world? Nuts hidden away for tomorrow's winter. 

Change the environment, educate the man. He'll change. The people’s store will work as long as people know that it will be there, and have in abundance the things they need and want (really want), when they are positive that the common effort has and will always produce an abundance, they won’t bother to take home more than they need. Water is free, do people drink more than they need?” (Letter of June 17th. 1970. in Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. Penguin. 1981)

Crazy World of Economics (1991)

Book Review from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Action for prosperity : a new direction for industrial solidarity By Robert Corfe (Collindist Press. 1990.)

The author of this booklet is a management consultant employed by engineering firms in the Eastern Counties. A year ago, after less than a month’s service, he was fired along with most of the labour force, from a small company which had been taken over. A privileged few of the staff had been kept on and transferred to another factory. These and other experiences have led him to draw a number of conclusions about the world we live in. particularly the world of economics, and to write a series of booklets, of which this is one.

He says that nowadays firms tend to be financed by “rentiers” or owned by multinationals. whose thinking is short-term and who are sufficiently remote to have no other thought than for the bottom line of the balance sheet. The consequence of all this, he argues, is the de-industrialisation of Britain (and the US). Businesses funded by rentiers tend to be bankrupted by the moneylenders at the least sign of trouble, and those taken over by multinationals are closed down in rationalisation programmes. The only sectors to expand are those peculiar to money-juggling such as banking. insurance and other such “services".

We cannot quarrel with much of this; the problem is what to do about it. His short-term prescription is for the workers and management to occupy the factory. His long-term solution is a new ethos based on proper long-term funding of wealth-producing industry, and protection against imports.

The occupation of factories, sit-ins. work-ins, and similar stratagems are tactics which have been used in many places and for a long time. I am not sure of their efficacy, but the privilege of judging does not belong to us, since we do not have to bear the responsibility that goes with the action. Workers in dispute are better off without armchair generals to advise them.They will know better than anybody the risk of encounters with bailiffs and their rottweilers, of truncheon-wielding policemen, of, in the last analysis, the armed forces, all of which have been used by governments against workers in occupation of factories.

What Corfe does not attempt to deal with is the cause or causes underlying these closures. We must, according to him, look forward to an infinite future of work-ins, lockouts, and similar industrial scenarios.

His alternative long-term solution is for finance to be made available to productive industry at much cheaper rates, as is the case in Germany and Japan where there is a much more rational attitude to wealth creation and a realisation that what are referred to as "service industries”, the objects of Corfe's ire don’t create wealth at all.

But let us assume that all his pleas were satisfied, that special interest rates were agreed for manufacturing. what would that do to prevent the system continuing to oscillate between slump and growth, as it has done for the last two centuries? We have experienced the whole spectrum of market economy operation, from command systems like those of Eastern European state capitalism, through various flavours of intervention, Keynesian and Fabian, for example, to the voodoo Free-Market Economics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The first lot finally collapsed last year, the Keynesian dream ended in the sleepwalk of the Carter and Callaghan administrations, and the last lot are just slipping down the toilet. Corfe would appear to favour the Keynesian interventionist option. But has he forgotten the 1970s?

The alternatives within this system are always a slump or growth. Too little or too much. A slump that threatens the majority of people with debt, in some cases denying them the bare necessities of life; and as an alternative the growth which is destroying the planet.

Now we have got a crazy idea. This is to let Mr Corfe and his fellow workers have all the food, clothing, housing, transport and entertainment, and the factory have all the plant and raw materials they need at a cost of nothing, nil. nix, no money. They can do the same for others. In this way we can get down to satisfying our needs directly without the need for finance or financiers. Too simple? But the truth is always simple. Understanding it is the hard bit. Entitia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, superbly translated by Ray Kroc, founder of the MacDonalds junk food empire, as: "Keep it simple, stupid!"

Ken Smith

Reaching where other propaganda can't (1991)

From the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Yesterday I was helping to wash my two-year old daughter in the bath. I picked up a toy boat and asked her what it was. “It's a big red boat", she replied.Then I held up a bottle. “And whats this?” I asked. She hesitated for a moment so I said “It’s shampoo, isn’t it?” “No!", she corrected me, and with her tone changing slightly to the undulating phrases of airport tannoy announcements, she told me that “'This is Wash and Go—not just shampoo, it’s shampoo and conditioner. Why bother to take two bottles into the shower. Just wash and go!”

I found this sudden fluent echo of a television advert quite funny, but then afterwards thought about the contempt that the manipulation and deceit of advertising deserves.

Building societies have repossessed more homes from "mortgage defaulters” than at any time on record. Families are ruthlessly evicted on to the streets. Lawyers and bailiffs are brought in to do the dirty work and then the Building Societies casually move on to pay Advertising Agencies to dream up a few slow-motion, black-and-white trendy adverts to portray them as the warm, beneficent friends of anyone who needs setting up with a loan for a home. A wolf in sheep’s clothing would, perhaps, be a more suitable image for such institutions.

As a source of ideas and prejudices about our society, advertising plays an important role. It has proliferated to such an extent that it now permeates every pore of social life. Today people are indoctrinated into the ways of the society into which they are born by a number of sources: their families, their schools, but predominantly the communications media. By the time most children leave school they will have spent more time watching television (10-15,000 hours) than in the classroom. During those hours they will have been exposed to approximately 20,000 commercials. They will have heard, perhaps more than 10,000 radio commercials and read thousands of adverts in newspapers and magazines.

Advertising has moved from the occasional bold and simple street poster to a continuously multiplying profusion of forms. Everywhere we go or look or listen we witness the selling game. From “Silk Cut Snooker” to “The Royal Shakespeare Company courtesy of Royal Assurance”.

Rat-race
The unavoidable message of advertising is to inculcate people with a frame of mind which is prone to regard the rat-race as a fundamentally unchangeable feature of society. Adverts do not directly advocate capitalism. Imagine one which did. The viewer might be addressed by a well-fed man or woman from the capitalist class, holding a glass of the finest Champagne. “Well now. you are a wage-slave. You have nothing to sell but your mental and physical energies. You have to keep working all your life just to get by. I am a member of a class who live in luxury as a result of your efforts. You fight my wars for me and sometimes pray to the skies for better things. Probably the best system in the world, for us. Support capitalism. You know it makes sense."

Party political broadcasts are adverts for capitalism whose claims about how the parties will improve our lives are about as meaningful as stating that a soap powder washes whiter than white. Advertising really imparts its social message by omission. It sets an agenda of “important" concerns, occasionally with wit and style, which project the basic way in which we live in a way which is forever out of focus. You should be thinking about what to rub into your legs, what to rub into your face, 20 good reasons to read The Sun. what toilet paper is best, which building society you should rent your home from, which music to plug into your cars, and whether the man and woman from the coffee advert saga will ever stir more than each other's coffee?

Within the context of the society we inhabit—a class-divided society working in the interests of a parasitical minority—there is a necessary role for advertising in its current form. As with all other problems generated by the profit system, it cannot be resolved by legislative reform. Socialists do not hold a brief for the Advertising Standards Authority. We do not want adverts to be "legal, decent, truthful and honest”, as these ideas are measured by the barbaric standards of the profit system. Soliciting men to join a violent gang and to use weapons to kill strangers is a criminal offence unless you are advertising for recruits to the army.

Selling game

Advertising and marketing are the glossy, glamorous facades on a society of starving children, the carnage of war, 35 million refugees and the menace of insecurity for everyone. Advertising aggravates the problems of workers by tempting people with merchandise which poverty precludes from our legal grasp. The society of the hard sell and the soft sell is also the society of the prison cell.

The only way to genuinely escape from the culture of commodities is to transform society from one based upon property to one based upon common ownership of the means for producing and distributing goods and services. Only when the means of communication have been put into the control of the community will they be operated in a way which can inform people about goods and services without the deceptions and trickery that flow from vested  interests.

The children's educational programme Sesame Street uses a skilful mixture of imaginative techniques to teach young children basic numeracy, literacy and points of nature and culture. The originator of the programme once said that she realised how powerful were repetition and short musical jingles as teaching aids when her child demonstrated the ability to sing lots of television adverts. It is a reflection of the disingenuous aims of the advertising agencies (and their paymasters/mistresses) that they attempt to shape our lifestyles and outlook by techniques that exist where nursery rhymes meet mantras.

George Orwell once described advertising as "the rattling of a stick in a bucket”. As the volume of those beats grows and the cacophony worsens, thundering and screaming to obliterate the noises of social misery, it becomes imperative to organise a society with a break from commercials.

Gary Jay

Socialist Definitions (1991)

From the November 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

CAPITALISM is the sort of society you live in now. It is a system of wage-slavery in which a small minority owns most of the world and (sometimes) employ the rest of us. In capitalism, most things are sold for a price — production is for profit rather than for use. The world is divided by frontiers into warring factions known as "nations". Symptoms of capitalism include war, hunger, boom-slump cycles, strikes, widespread loneliness and despair. Countries like Russia or China, whose governments claim to be "socialist" are, of course, capitalist like their western rivals.

COMMUNES (kibbutzim, and similar communities) are attempts by a few to get some shelter from the capitalist rat race. Whilst they may benefit their members, from the standpoint of abolishing capitalism they are a waste of time. Socialism in one country is not possible, let alone socialism in one farm. Socialism could, however, be described as a world-wide commune.

HUMAN NATURE is a most frequent objection to the idea of a socialist society. It is supposed that human beings have some fixed patterns of social behaviour which are especially conducive to capitalism. In fact, what is normally termed "human nature" is the result of social conditioning. Private property, leadership, aggressiveness and monogamy are no more congenial to human beings than alternative forms. A knowledge of different societies, historically and geographically, is sufficient to knock the human nature myth on the head.

LABOUR PARTY is often called "socialist" (less now than in the past, it's true) but in fact never has been. The Labour Party was formed to improve the conditions of workers by reforms within capitalism. It sought gradually to change capitalism; instead capitalism has gradually changed it. The Labour Party is now no more than an alternative team for the management of British capitalism.

PATRIOTISM is irrational from the point of view of humanity as a whole and runs counter to the interests of the working people. It is therefore opposed by socialists, who do not offer "policies for Britain" or for any other of the artificial political entities into which the world is now divided but demand a world community without frontiers.

POPULATION EXPLOSION is certainly a reality, but it is a myth that it is responsible for hunger, pollution or overcrowded living. The world can easily support many times its present population in comfort and plenty of room. Hysterical Malthusianism diverts attention from the real problem: production is geared to the market, rather than to the satisfaction of human needs.

REFORMS are basically attempts to solve problems within capitalism rather than by doing away with it. Capitalism never runs out of reforms. Socialists are not opposed to all reforms, but we don't think it is our job to propose them or campaign for them. Reforms are usually of negligible value to the working class, and often create new problems which require further reforms. Fundamental social problems are always untouched because these are rooted in capitalism.

RELIGION is opposed by all rational people, but especially by socialists who see it as compensation for social misery, and a diversion from the urgent problems of the real world. Happily, religion is steadily ebbing away in the most advanced areas of capitalism.

REVOLUTION is the process of changing from one social system to another. It is not necessarily a matter of barricades and bloodbaths, and not at all in the case of the socialist revolution, which requires mainly mass understanding and democratic organisation. It is part of the job of socialists to hasten this revolution by spreading socialist understanding.

SOCIALISM is the next stage in human social evolution — unless capitalism destroys us first by means of nuclear/chemical/ biological war, or ecological collapse. Socialism will mean the abolition of private property, money and the wages system; the introduction of voluntary work and free access to necessary goods and services. Socialism is a world-wide society of voluntary co-operation. It will put an end to wars, poverty and unemployment, enabling our species to concentrate on the less serious problems of everyday living.

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If you have any other questions about socialism you are welcome to write to us at:

The Socialist Party 

52 Clapham High Street 

London 

SW4 7UN 

We will be delighted to hear from you and can assure you of a prompt reply.

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What Do We Mean By Class? (1991)

From the December 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class is a redundant issue. Everyone's a worker now.

Class is still very much the basis of present-day society. In this society people are divided into those who own the workplaces in the form of capital, the employers or capitalist class, and those who do the work but do not own what they produce, the working class.

As a system of society which predominates throughout the world, capitalism is based on the extraction of surplus value through the wages system. Even if there has been some separation of ownership and control in capitalist enterprises, this does not affect the inherent class antagonism between those who own and those who produce. Ultimately, those who benefit are still those who don't need to work because they enjoy an unearned income derived from the exploitation of those who do.

Exploitation is a thing of the past. If you don't like your job you can always leave it.

Exploitation exists because of the very fact that people work for employers. Employers buy our capacity to work with a wage or a salary and then extract more work out of us than it cost them to pay us. This unpaid surplus work is the source of their profit. So there’s a conflict of interests at work: they want to get as much out of us for as little expenditure as possible, and we need the money in order to live. It's the only way this competitive organisation of society can work, since their success depends on our exploitation. It's nothing to do with morality or low wages. It's all about the employers owning the workplace and us earning our livelihood by being a wage slave. And it really is a form of slavery, because although we can leave our particular job we can't leave that class of people who are compelled to get a job.

As long as I get "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work" I don't mind if my employer makes a fair profit.

There can never be anything fair about the wages system for workers, since this is the mechanism of our exploitation. It pre-supposes that workers do not own or control the workplace. Wages and salaries are the price of the value-creating ability we sell to employers. We produce goods and services worth more than we receive in pay, whether the pay is high or low. This socially-produced surplus value is the source of the employers' profit. Employers operate in a competitive world economy and will, irrespective of the size of their profits, pay their workers only what they must. Without the resistance of workers, wages and salaries would be lower than they are. So we have a class struggle at work.

I work in an office. I don't produce anything physical, so how can I be exploited?

The life-blood of this economic system is the making of profits through the exploitation of the whole working class. This is a social process which involves the whole workforce in a complex division of labour in which some physically alter materials while others are involved in planning, design and organising. All of these roles are part of this economic system and all those who perform them are exploited as they all contribute in one way or another to the production of profits for the employing class as a whole. As a class we run society from top to bottom. We do not run it in our own interest, however. We run it for the profit of the employing class, a minority of people with most of the power and wealth and the freedom this gives them.

I am not working class: I earn a good salary, own a house and big car; I've been to university and take a Mediterranean holiday every year.

You may think of yourself as being a "professional" or "middle class" but this doesn’t affect your basic economic position. Because the property you own does not bring you in a regular income large enough for you to live on, like the rest of us you are compelled to sell your working abilities. Your pay may be called a salary but you still belong to that class of people forced to hire themselves to an employer. From this perspective, things like status, level of earnings, education, type of job or occupation are besides the point. They do not affect your exploited class position in society, even if you arc in some respects better off than most other workers. Salaried doctors, managers, teachers, scientists, and so on are comprised within the working class.

There will always be classes; there will always be rich and poor - it's only human nature.

It is class society which operates against human nature. Capitalist exploitation creates rich and poor people, with their opposing interests. But there is no reason why our rational desire for mutual aid should not allow us to establish a classless society. To end class exploitation requires class-conscious political action by the working class to establish common ownership and democratic control of the places of work. This will do away with the wage slavery of working for an employer and open the way for work based solely on human needs and abilities.

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If you agree with these views or have any questions, please write to us or come along to one of our meetings.

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Socialism and Materialism (1926)

From the April 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

Any person lacking previous knowledge of the subject can hardly fail to be confused by the contradictory pronouncements issued in the name of Socialism regarding the basis of society. A few days ago, for instance, Mr. Robert Young, M.P., speaking at a Brotherhood meeting, pleaded for a “new society based upon Christianity." This represents the prevailing attitude among the “Socialists” (so-called) of the Labour Party. On the other hand, we find supporters of that Party claiming to be atheists or materialists, and professing to derive their “Socialism" from some abstract ideal of “justice” or “brotherhood."

The Socialist Party is the only one in which a clear and consistent attitude on this question is to be found. This attitude frankly rejects any attempt to explain society in terms of “ideals,” whether Christian or otherwise. It points out that the necessity of obtaining a livelihood (and not mere opinions or sentiments) is the real foundation of social existence; and that, consequently, the conditions under which that livelihood is obtained determine, in the long run, the form taken by ideals of every kind.

This attitude is, of course, very frequently misunderstood. The average person, accustomed to look at matters metaphysically, jumps to the conclusion that the Socialist is only concerned with filling his belly, as a matter of philosophical principle, and he usually dishes out some would-be serious reflections upon the necessity for “ higher ” things, such as morals, etc. He fails entirely to see that his so-called “higher things," including morals, are themselves the outcome of a particular set of social conditions which depend in turn upon a certain stage of economic development.

The fact is, of course, that the Socialist has ceased to regard himself as an independent entity, in some way separate from the society of which he forms a molecule. He looks at the whole matter from the standpoint of the class to which he (as a rule) belongs, i.e., the working class. Even when this is pointed out, however, the bourgeois-minded objector invariably protests against what he calls  "class-selfishness”; as though this phenomenon was the cause instead of the effect of existing conditions.

The class-war is the basis of the Socialist movement. Does that mean that the Socialist creates the class-war? On the contrary, the Socialist merely perceives an already existing fact (to which his fellow-slave is either wholly or partially blind), and further realises that this war can terminate in only one way, i.e., the emancipation of the workers through the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of the common ownership of the means of life.

Thus, according to the Socialist, the ownership of the means of life is the central, basic factor in the matter, not some fantastic dream of a perfect social state which merely reflects the imperfections of that which exists at present. But why must the means of life be commonly owned? Whence arises this idea? Does it fall from the clouds? By no means! It is the logically inevitable product of the stage of development reached by those means of life, or, in other words, the instruments of production and distribution of wealth. It is technical advance, not mere speculation, which necessitates social change.

Still our opponent does not understand us. "Under your proposal,” he protests, “men and women will be exclusively greedy unless some sound ethical instruction is given to them.” Well, the answer is simple. We have had centuries of ethical instruction of various kinds. The ancient Greek philosophers ransacked their imaginations in vain for some ideal principle to inculcate into the minds of their followers which would lead to individual happiness and social harmony. The Christian Fathers saw in preparation for the hereafter the surest guide to the elimination of the pressing desires of the here and now. With what success? Greed is a more firmly entrenched social element than ever. Quite irrespective of what their opinions may be, men and women are compelled to look after “number one” ; and failure to do this spells annihilation.

Again, this is the result, not of philosophy but of the conditions arising from the private property basis of society. Frankly egotistic philosophies have, of course, been advanced, especially during the nineteenth century, but these are the outcome of the conditions rather than the cause of men’s attitude towards one another. Human history is, in fact, eloquent upon the poverty of philosophy. The mission of the Socialist is not merely to explain the world, but to change it. This, however, demands the practical application of the scientific method to the economic problem.

This problem may be stated thus. Why is it that, with greater powers of production than have ever existed in human history, numerous people exist in want, and that, broadly, the mass of the population who produce wealth receive in return a smaller proportion of that wealth than ever before? This problem cannot be solved by chloroform, whether administered by Tory Prime Ministers or Labour M.P.s. Christianity and the “spirit of goodwill” can avail us nothing. Their admonitions are addressed to the individual and ignore the social forces of which he is the product. They seek to mould his conduct, it is true, but in a reactionary direction. Only by understanding economic development and consciously co-operating with its established tendencies can we rise above it, thus mastering instead of being enslaved by it.

The politicians of all parties outside the Socialist Party trade upon the economic ignorance of the mass of the workers, but that does not prevent them from stimulating their blind greed. Every proposal which appears in their election addresses is calculated to obtain the support of those who do not realise the futility of such measures from the standpoint of working-class interests. Protection, Free Trade, Land Taxation, Nationalisation, the Capital Levy! "What have these measures to do with ethics?” we may ask. They are merely the means by which sections of the master-class seek both to serve their own interests and hoodwink their slaves. Some high-sounding phrase such as the "public interest” or the "welfare of the community” is used to camouflage their motives and blind the workers, who vainly look for some material gain from these measures.

The Socialist, therefore, has no need to apologise for appealing to the workers to use their intelligence in their own material interests. Our moralising masters have looked after theirs long enough. From the dawn of history society has rested upon the exploitation of the workers. This was inevitable so long as the limited powers of production only allowed of comfort and luxury for a few. To-day, however, those powers are so great that there is no longer any reason why anyone should lack all that is necessary to complete health and leisure for self-development. Our masters pretend to believe in sacrifice. Let them set us an example by forfeiting the privilege of living on our backs. We cannot sacrifice that which is not ours. Let the workers beware, however, from relying on the sincerity of their exploiters.

The increase in the powers of production is, of course, no miracle. It has been accomplished only by the application of science to industry, involving the co-operation of masses of workers on an unprecedented scale. From puny individual instruments such as the spade and hoe, we have advanced to the giant tractor-plough, which can only exist because millions of workers are busy in forges and mills throughout the world. And what applies to one industry applies to all that are of general importance. Here and there, maybe, technical difficulties or the existence of a cheaper supply of labour retard progress on mechanical lines, but the essential fact remains that, for society as a whole, the methods of industry have been revolutionised during the past century and a half.

The new powers of production, social though they are in character, remain in the hands of a class of private owners, who perform no useful function in return. Their only concern is to reap the fruits of the labours of society which are periodically disorganised through the conflict in the ranks of the parasites. For the so-called struggle for existence is a struggle not between individuals as such but between competing masses of capital, of which individuals are but the legal appendages. The survival of the fittest has nothing to do with the personal qualities of the capitalist who survives. It is merely the survival of the more efficient instruments of production of which he is the fortunate possessor. The ruined capitalist occasionally ends his existence as an individual upon his descent into the proletariat, but more frequently he re-adapts himself to his changed environment in which he finds an entirely different form of struggle in progress.

Among the workers the problem of the individual is not how to exploit, but how to secure the opportunity to be exploited; not how to amass wealthy but rather how to_find someone who is willing to purchase one’s power to produce it. The fruits of victory for the individual capitalist are more opportunities for ease and luxury than he can personally utilise. A successful hunt for a job, however, spells for the worker merely a ceaseless round of toil, for a wage which buys the bare necessities of existence.

For the workers, therefore, individualism is a bankrupt creed. They are constantly involved in a struggle against the effects of the whole system of private property. In this struggle the inexorable logic of facts convinced them of the necessity of co-operation long before the Socialist arrived upon the scene. The Trade Unions, for instance, originated, not from mere theorising, but from the practical pressure of events in the industrial sphere. They were the inevitable offspring of the industrial revolution. For a time they were successful in lessening the suffering of the workers, but the limits of their powers were soon reached, and to-day it is evident that a wider and deeper mode of co-operation between the workers is necessary to effect any improvement in their condition. The concentration of capital and the constant advance of machine industry makes anything less than class organisation practically futile.

Such organisation, however, involves the clear and definite object of expropriation of the possessing class. So long as production is carried on for profit, so long will the workers endure the effects of the ensuing anarchy in society. Every technical advance to-day is made as a result of competition for profit at the workers' expense. Every successful attempt at obtaining a higher wage-rate thus merely stimulates the scrapping of obsolete methods of robbing the workers, the increase of the unemployed, the intensification of the struggle for jobs, greater speeding up and insecurity.

The social character of the means of production indicates the solution, i.e., social ownership of those means, combined with production, for the use of all without distinction of race or sex. The conduct of production and distribution in accordance with a social plan will give mankind for the first time the conscious control of their means of living. Henceforward waste an dstagnation will be eliminated for the benefit of all. The resources of the world are barely scratched. Whole continents cry out for development, but capitalism cannot respond. To attempt to do so merely intensifies the antagonisms within itself. The quest for new markets and sources of raw material is speedily followed by war, resulting in widespread ruin and reaction. The international co-operation of the working class alone can make peaceful progress possible.

The recognition of the above facts is the materialism to which Socialists plead guilty. Only when the satisfaction of purely animal wants is definitely secured to all will the opportunity arise for the universal cultivation of distinctively human and social qualities. By conditions which allow for individual development and expression, and not by moral and legal repression, will social harmony be obtained.

Eric Boden