Editorial: The New Labour Party. (1917)

Editorial from the November 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

The latest move of the capitalist politicians is an endeavour to extend the Labour Party so as to embrace all and sundry who come within the category of “wage-earners.” ‘The announcement meets with the pretty general approval of the capitalist Press, as might be expected. It is realised among the circles of the astute that there is going to be a pretty brisk business doing in the political way when the war is over, and that such business will not follow quite the same old lines. Men who have been dragged from their cricket and football fields and made to waste the years of their prime in the torture chamber of the modern field of war will come back thinking beings; they will have acquired the gravity of greybeards, and the respect for politics of the seasoned Socialist; they will have learned that since all their unforgettable and unforgivable miseries have been heaped upon them by the men they and theirs sent to the House of Commons, and that such men are in a position to do it all again, the vote is not a joke after all, but a weighty and serious matter, worthy of their most earnest consideration.

That the power those who have political control have over the lives of their subjects has been revealed with intense clearness by the events of the last three years is quite understood by our masters and their agents the labour leaders. They know that the mask is stripped from their faces, and that the hollow sham of the “objects” of the war, long since laid bare by their own lying lips, has discredited their parties. They see men turning away from them in myriads, groping with outstretched hands for a new passage to follow, a more hopeful path to tread. For this reason we are to be provided with a working class political party (!) on a very broad base, to the end that the war-awakened proletarians may be shepherded quietly along the road that provides fat paunches and triple chins for labour leaders and safety for their pay-masters.

Well, the change makes little difference to us. The new Labour Party will inherit two legacies from the old—their foul record and the bitter hostility of the Socialist Party. We shall show them no mercy.

50 Years Ago: G.B. Shaw – A few notes (2000)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The death of Bernard Shaw has been the instance of eulogies galore in all of which he is acclaimed as one of the great, if not of the greatest, intellectual giants of all time.

What we are concerned with here is the claim so often made that Shaw was a socialist who made an outstanding contribution to the socialist movement. This claim has been unceasingly made by the unblushing principal and his adherents during the past sixty odd years; on the part of the latter with an occasional tolerant and amused chuckle at his “crankiness.” The basis of the claim is his tilting at social abuses and at smug “respectability.” This tilting was really only the spearhead of his own smug worship of “men of ability,” in the front rank of whom he modestly placed himself.

In fact Shaw was not a socialist, never was one, and did not understand what Socialism implied. All his life he confused Socialism with State Capitalism and with a “business-like government.” He envisaged a state ruled by a self-elected few who, at the best, would exercise a kind of benevolent despotism over the ignorant mass in a system based upon property with the buying and selling of goods.

Whatever Shaw may have been as a dramatist and artist, as a writer on Socialism he was ignorant, incompetent and blown-up with the petty conceit of the self-styled intellectual. If we were asked what his outstanding contribution in this field was we would unhesitatingly reply that he was given considerable aid to that movement which has built up labour parties that have confused and beguiled multitudes of workers into a path leading to the blank alley of despair. In this field he will be remembered as a clever and witty decoy who helped to head off the march to revolutionary change.

[From editorial, Socialist Standard, December 1950]

Democracy and mad cows (2000)

From the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The fact that a privileged few can make decisions in secret that potentially affect the lives of thousands gives the lie to the notion of democracy under capitalism

“In March 1996, the Conservative Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell told the House of Commons that, despite the government’s many previous assertions to the contrary, there probably was a link between ‘mad cow disease’ and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).” So, rather dramatically, begins an article in the Economist that goes on to puzzle over just how much information governments should share with the public. The fact that the question needs to be asked at all makes a laughing stock of the notion, propagated so tirelessly by the Economist, that we live in a democracy. There is a name for the sort of system where a privileged few can decide what information is fit for public consumption. It is, effectively, a dictatorship.

The head scratching of the leader writers of the bourgeois press began when Lord Phillips recently released his 16-volume report. A report which took him two and a half years to complete, cost £27 million to produce, and all of a few seconds to conclude that nothing and no one was to blame: it was all just an unfortunate quirk of the normal functioning of the system. We could be forgiven for thinking that the only reason for publishing reports like these in the first place is, as the American comedian Bill Hicks once claimed, to put the country back to sleep and convince them that their government is in control.

But in a sense Lord Phillips is quite right. The BSE crisis was just an unfortunate accident arising from the normal functioning of the system. And although one might think that it would therefore be natural to challenge the system that accepts this lunacy as an unfortunate accident, nothing could be further from the minds of the authors of the press coverage that followed.

Although the report draws no real satisfactory conclusions, it does draw attention to the unwillingness of politicians and civil servants to “alarm the public”. For example, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) withheld for six months the publication in the scientific literature of the first report into BSE. Many of the papers made much of this government fear of panic, as if the state was an overanxious parent, concerned that its favourite child wasn’t yet ready for the news of the death of a pet rabbit. But “panic”, of course, would have been a quite reasonable response for the public to make if made aware of the fact that their food was lethal. The government knew full well that this panic would not just lead to tears at bedtime, but falling sales. As the Western Daily Press of 17 October put it, the pressure on the farming industry to increase profits had been “relentless”. “It was productivity which counted, not product safety … The crash in beef prices, when it came, was devastating, particularly when the gates closed on the export trade, then worth £500 million a year.”

The 4 November New Scientist criticises this lack of transparency, saying that “information [should] be made freely available to everyone as fast as possible” and concluding that “real changes are needed. We must continue to call for free access to information on every issue where science and technology affect the public.” What New Scientist fails to see is what might be called the obvious: all science and technology affects the public, and science and technology can have no neutrality as long as its decisions are ruled by the interests of capital. Is it any wonder that science and technology presents itself to many in present-day society as a hostile force to be opposed, when it could so easily be turned to the task of satisfying human needs? These conflicting calls for secrecy and openness can reflect the conflicts of interest between different sections of the capitalist class (see box), as well as between the capitalist and working classes.

But technology and the products of our own hands do not just appear as a hostile force. Under capitalism, they are in fact a hostile force. Modern farming technology on the one hand provides us with the means to feed the world. On the other, it feeds cows with dead cows in order to cut costs, and views the resulting loss of human life as a mild irritant to be reported on, and quickly forgotten. According to Department of Health figures, more than 80 people have already died after prolonged suffering with vCJD. Some models have estimated that thousands more could die. This might sound like a cause for concern for those of us who eat food, but for the capitalist class the “major economic concern was the loss of export markets,” as the BSE inquiry admits. This is only natural, the report adds. It says that “economic concerns naturally had an influence on both government and industry in their response to BSE”.

Indeed, the Daily Telegraph goes further and dismisses the Phillips report as a “fruitless and pointless search for someone to blame” when it was “clear” that the evidence available at the time was not sufficient to risk restricting beef sales or jeopardising an industry. This is the familiar line, taken by the government throughout the early days of the crisis, that the absence of “hard evidence” meant that no threat existed. Yet it was clear that there was a potential hazard to human health, which was kept secret. Even when dangers became more and more apparent, these were deliberately downplayed to protect the profits of the beef industry.

This is not covered up in Phillips’s report. Indeed, the report does not even censure Professor Richard Kimberlin, who was at the time a member of the government regulatory committee on BSE and a paid consultant to the meat and livestock commission—-in fact it supports the right of scientists who sit on government committees to have relevant commercial interests.

New Scientist has some reassuring news, however. “Can we be sure that a similar food and health disaster won’t happen again? The simple answer is no,” they tell us. Private Eye had already drawn our attention to the fact that hundreds of thousands of children have been injected with vaccines produced from bovine material which it was known could have been infected with BSE. The BSE inquiry confirms that this was the case. France is also currently considering measures to “control panic” amid fears that contaminated feed “is still finding its way into cattle troughs” (Reuters) and the Daily Telegraph recently reported that MAFF has just cut its research budget . . . .

Commenting on the report, Health Secretary Alan Milburn tries to reassure us that the “era of bland reassurances has come to an end.” And should anyone be tempted to believe that bland reassurance, we should remember what the priorities of government are. Peter Mandelson, when he was Trade and Industry Secretary, told the Confederation of British Industry that his brief from Blair was “to act as a vocal and tenacious advocate of the needs of wealth creation and business”. His replacement, Stephen Byers, told the House of Commons in March 1999 that he was “putting the interests of business first”. So forget the hypocritical cant of the politicians when they tell us that things are changing. Everything will stay the same until we organise to change it.

When our own food threatens to destroy us and appears to us as a force beyond our control, then there is a danger—-reflected in religion and idealism—-of doubting the ability of our thinking to distinguish truth. In a period of social decline, such as that we are now in, men and women are faced with two options: accept that there is no way out and resign themselves to their fate, or confront reality and fight to change it. We in the Socialist Party have taken the latter course of action.

Scientists, such as Professor Richard Lacey, a leading microbiologist, were ridiculed by the media, farmers, the food industry and politicians when they said at the time of the first cases of BSE that it represented a major human health risk. They became objects for fun, crackpots. As members of the working class aiming to come to a materialist understanding of the society we live in so that we can begin to change it, we look forward to the day when our “crackpot” position is vindicated.

Stuart Watkins

Obituary: Heather Ball (2000)

Obituary from the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Readers of her regular column will be saddened to hear of the death of Heather Ball last month. As they will have gathered from her recent articles, she had come to suffer from a degenerative disease which increasingly disabled her.

Heather was born in 1933 and brought up in London to where her father had moved from Scotland and before reaching pension age had worked in the various kinds of factory, office and cleaning jobs that was often the only choice for working class women of her generation. Her father was a member of the Communist Party and she was brought up to join first the YCL and then the party itself. However, she was one of the many who left after 1956 following Khrushchev’s secret speech about Stalin and the Hungarian uprising. She joined the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League—a case of out of the frying pan into the fire—from which she was expelled in 1960. This put her off vanguardist politics for good and she became active in the peace movement in East Anglia to where she and her family had moved. In 1994, tiring of single-issue politics too, she joined the Socialist Party. She was active in our Norwich Group and of course as a writer of a regular column in the Socialist Standard which many readers liked as a contrast to the other, more overtly political articles.

We extend our sympathy to her husband John, also a member, and family.

Editorial: Welfare cuts – the government’s austerity programme (1998)

Editorial from the February 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many people are worried about the welfare state–and so they should be. The Labour government, like so many governments around the world, is attempting to cut back on social spending because the capitalist class can no longer afford to pay for it at its previous levels. In times of economic difficulty welfare spending is always the first element of state expenditure for governments to look to cut back. For the last two decades in particular governments across much of the industrialised world have been trying to cut back social spending–indeed, this was a project of the Tories in Britain when they were elected in 1979.

Cutting welfare spending, however, hasn’t been easy. Restructuring of the economy to bolster a sagging rate of profit has taken place alongside an ever growing welfare budget which government after government has pledged itself to tackle. Within weeks of his election Tony Blair made it apparent that his government was in reality (despite the rhetoric) further to the right than both Thatcher and Major because it was this government which was prepared to “think the unthinkable” and make the necessary “hard choices”. From a materialist point of view this simply meant that as the economic difficulties of the period have progressed, the austerity measures required to deal with them have also progressed, and that Blair is aware of this.

This reality is already filtering home to many of the working class. If they are unemployed, disabled, a pensioner or a single parent (in other words, a huge swathe of the population) it is difficult for them to rest in their beds easily. Government talk of the “stakeholder society” and of the “new deal” fools few of them now–workers do not even have to be very interested in politics to appreciate that the government is embarked on a classic austerity programme.

In France recently there have been riots over unemployment, and in Germany a few months ago angry steelworkers clashed with the police. As France and Germany prepare for the Euro (which will be used as an excuse for more austerity cuts, that’s even if it doesn’t directly lead to any) we can expect such expressions of class struggle to increase. And it is indeed a class issue. For however the capitalists and their mouthpieces try to divide us–employed against unemployed, the nuclear family against single parents–a united class struggle within capitalism but against it is our only answer.

Cooking the Books: The Price of Everything (2018)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the end of August the Office for National Statistics published its annual ‘UK national balance sheet’ which it says is a measure of ‘the nation’s wealth’. More accurately it later explains that it’s an ‘estimate of the total value of land, housing, machinery and financial assets held in the UK by individuals and companies.’ What is being measured is the price that the assets held would fetch if notionally sold. The tables can be found here: [Link.]

The figure the ONS arrives at for the end of the year 2017 is £10.2 trillion (a million million, what used to be called a billion), adding that this is ‘an average of £155,000 per person.’ Relevant for comparison with other countries, this latter is completely misleading if taken to mean that every individual in Britain has net assets of that amount, if only because it doesn’t take into account how the £10.2 trillion is divided. As we know from other ONS statistics, it is very unevenly divided.

Wealth is something, either provided free by nature or fashioned from it by human work, that is useful to human life in a particular society. By this standard, financial assets are not wealth; they are merely claims on wealth. Counting them as wealth as well as the wealth they have claims on – for instance, the mortgage as well as the house – is double-counting.

Ignoring, then, financial assets, what’s left are two forms of real wealth, which the ONS calls ‘produced non-financial assets’ (buildings, structures, machinery, equipment, inventories) and ‘non-produced non-financial assets’ (land). The ONS emphasises just how much of their total figure for 2017 is represented by land:

‘UK net worth more than trebled between 1995 and 2017, but much of this was from growth in the value of land. Land accounts for 51% of the UK’s net worth, higher than in any other measured G7 country.’

In Germany in 2017 it was 26 percent. In the UK in 1995 it was 33.7 percent.

The Times (30 August) commented that this showed ‘that the economy is floating on a house price bubble.’ Actually, it’s a land price bubble as it is not the price of houses that has gone up (if anything this tends to go down) but that of the land on which they stand. The ONS statistics illustrate this very well. The total notional price of ‘dwellings’ owned by ‘households’ amounted at the end of 2017 to £1.57 trillion while the total notional price of the land on which they stood amounted to £4.1 trillion, over two-and-a half times as much.

The price of land, however, is as irrational as financial assets in that an increase in its total amount never represents an increase in total wealth. In both Marxian and pre-Marxian economics, land, being what the ONS itself describes as ‘non-produced’, i.e., not the product of human work, has no ‘value’ separate from its price. This is the capitalisation of the income the land is expected to bring as rent over a period of years. This is speculative in both senses of the term; that the rent will be the same for the period is a speculation and that it won’t be can be a subject for financial speculation.

It is not land price bubbles that drive the capitalist economy; that’s the pursuit of profits by ‘non-financial corporations’. Land price bubbles only make the system more unstable, more unequal – and more irrational.

Obituary: Ron Stone (2018)

Obituary from the October 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

We learn from comrades ‘Down Under’ of the death in Western Australia in June of Ron Stone. Originally from Dover in Britain, he was an active supporter of the World Socialist Movement in Australia. His cartoons, mocking politicians and royalty, appeared in the Socialist Comment which the World Socialist Party of Australia published in the 1980s as well as, later, in the Socialist Standard. He was also something of a poet:

Wage Restraint 

It was a crisis day in Parliament.
The House was hushed and still
As a Member rose with a Question:
‘Are we doomed to go downhill?’
‘I am confident of an upturn,’
The P.M. made reply.
‘If workers’ pay is held at bay
We’ll all be home and dry.’
‘How True ! How True!’ cried the workers,
‘Let’s end our silly strike.
We don’t want more money . . .
You can stick it where you like.’

‘Thank Heavens!’ yelled the bosses,
‘There’s faith on the factory floor
And now we have this extra loot
We’ll give it to the poor.’
They picked up all the money
And ran on eager feet
And pressed their surplus profits
On the people in the street.
They moved among the dole queues
And boarded every bus
With tear-filled eyes and heart-felt cries,
‘You need this more than us.’

Soon all the people prospered,
The Devil became a saint
Now that the wicked unions
Had exercised restraint.
The cities were filled with singing
And the sounds of laughter spread
As hand took hand in this golden land . . .
And pigs flew overhead.

The Car (1998)

A Short Story from the March 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

A year ago we sold our car. Nothing unusual in that of course, happens all the time. The buying and selling of second-hand cars is a common enough activity for those of us who cannot afford new cars. No, it was the way it happened and I’ve been thinking about it off and on ever since.

Our car was one of those Volkswagen Golfs, about 8 years old and pretty well dead on its feet. It was on its third engine and even that had a tendency to stall every twenty minutes or so—something about the mixture of the petrol in the engine. The only solution was to leave it for a quarter of an hour till it cleared itself. On top of that the electrics were dodgy and I had managed to burn the clutch a couple of times. In truth we were desperate to get rid of the vehicle. It had given us no end of trouble and we’d already spent too much money in cheating garages to keep it running. If the opportunity came to cut our losses and sell the car we would be only too glad.

Moreover, my partner and I had worked hard that year and we were keen to get away from our draughty flat for a holiday. We decided to do away with a car completely and rely on so-called public transport. We had a number of people interested in our advert and one by one they test drove our car. Funny how when you’re young and idealistic you can condemn others so easily for how they live and what they do. Then as you learn to survive on your own you begin to make compromises with how you live your life, often without realising it. I’m not even sure now how it happened. It just sort of seemed to follow from the position that we were in. I mean we didn’t tell any outright lies, just economical with the truth as civil servants say. I remember us being in the back seat as the two men who eventually bought the car took the car around the neighbourhood. I just wanted them to finish before the engine did.

When we came to the part where we haggled over the money we were nervous and unsure of ourselves, no Arthur Daley’s us. We managed to get a price of £1,300 and we quickly received the cash, anxious to finish the whole thing. Only later in the safety of our home did we discover that we had only been paid £1,200. Looking back I realised that the buyers had been aware of the shortfall and may even had planned it. I was initially relieved, as if the lack of honesty on their side somehow reduced the guilt on ours. Later I was depressed and since then, every time I’ve thought about the incident, I’ve been depressed again.

The motor trade is one of the best examples of how the buying and selling system reduces people into being less than they really are, or at least less than they could be. How often have we all been manipulated to manipulate others for some pathetic economic gain? Through a half-worthless car I had lost some of my own worth. Sometimes it seems that the material value that we accumulate is mirrored by a reduction in our own value as humans.

As I write this article my mind drifts forward to tomorrow when I shall go to the office, forced to work alongside a semi-racist colleague, and where we will all pretend to like an egotistical boss none of us respect. How did this all come about? How long can we tolerate an economic system that thrives on human dishonesty? And how long can we put up with the damage that this system does to us as people? Some people say that we live in something called society. Sorry, but I can’t, at least not a human one.

G. T.

Reformists never learn (1998)

Book Review from the March 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The State to Come by Will Hutton. Vintage Press, 1997. £4.99.

Reformists never learn. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Observer editor Will Hutton still claims that societies can shape capitalism “to meet their wider goals. Different ethical values apart from the market ethic must be protected . . . Human values need to be incorporated into the core of market processes . . . to produce a kinder, more tolerable society . . .” But if this is possible, why has it never happened up to now, at least not for any length of time?

The fact is that capitalism can’t be reshaped so as to put human values before market values. It has to put profits first and its economic mechanisms impose this on any government which may have other thoughts. Since 1973 it has been even worse for reformists. The end of the post-war boom and the period that has followed of slow growth, punctuated by recurring slumps, has meant that capitalist states have been in almost permanent fiscal crisis. They have not had the money to introduce any new social reforms and have been compelled to cut back on existing ones. The Blair government’s action against single mothers and their future plans against the sick and disabled is merely a continuation of this. They are acting as all governments of capitalism are forced to these days.

Hutton, who is a Labour supporter (this short book was written to urge people to vote Labour in the last election), is at the same time an open supporter of capitalism. He wants Britain to “develop its own specific capitalist model” and “to build a capitalist structure that can regulate itself better”. He realises that this is all that Labour aims at too but has his doubts as to whether it wants to go even that far. Labour, he says, “wishes to reshape British capitalism-a little” but the danger is that “Labour will find in office that it governs as a nicer group of Conservatives”. Whether Blair and his band of hypocrites (particularly the one who shopped his son to the police) are nicer than the other arrogant lot is a matter of opinion or remains to be seen but, in any event, is irrelevant in that it is not the personal attitudes of ministers that count but what the workings of the capitalist system forces them to do. It is capitalism that is the enemy and not the particular politicians who run it.

And capitalism can no more be reformed or reshaped so as to serve human rather than market values as Hutton deludedly imagines than a leopard can change its spots.

Adam Buick

Marx without Lenin (1998)

Book Review from the March 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx by Terry Eagleton. The Great Philosophers, Phoenix, 1997.

Inscribed on the headstone of Karl Marx’s grave in London is the assertion: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”. This was a criticism by Marx, not of philosophy in general, but rather of the German ideology prevalent in certain circles in early nineteenth century Germany. Criticism of the philosophy of that time was also a criticism of the society which gave rise to it. In much the same way as “post-modern” thought today tells us that subjective interpretation is all there is, this is symptomatic of a deeper social malaise. Marx’s action-orientated theory provides an understanding of, and contribution towards, human and social development.

An important feature of Marx’s social theory is the way freedom is conceived as self-realisation. Capitalism robs us of those things which make us truly human: socialism is the re-appropriation of those powers alienated from us under class society. Eagleton outlines the key relationships between production, labour and ownership in Marx’s thinking and offers us Marx’s vision of an alternative society:

 “If the means of production were to be commonly owned and democratically controlled, then the world we create together would belong to us in common, and the self-production of each could become part of the self-realisation of all.”

It is to Eagleton’s great credit that he looks at Marx without Leninist spectacles, even though at one point he repeats the Leninist distortion that for Marx socialism was a transitional society between capitalism and communism. At £2 for 53 pages you could look for yourself.

Lew Higgins

Who are the Mugs? (1961)

From the September 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

The stake in "our" Country

One of the themes on which our newspapers love to turn a spare column is the alleged laziness of the British worker. How often do we read blood-chilling articles about workers over here loafing about all day, whilst industrious foreign workers are putting in an enormous working week? Germans, for example, are said to take only one week’s holiday a year, to refuse to strike and to turn out such cheap, efficient goods that they easily outsell the products of their British counterparts. Why, we have even heard the same sort of thing about Russian workers, who were reported to have smiled superior, mystified smiles when they saw English workers knocking off for tea during the preparation of the recent Soviet Exhibition at Earl’s Court. Nothing like that, they said, happened in Russia! This, of course, is common stuff. Nobody need feel upset that he does not work hard enough to satisfy his employer. The ideal worker, from the capitalist viewpoint, would be somebody who stuck at it twenty-four hours a day without needing those irksome breaks for sleep, food and the rest of it.

However lazy the British worker is supposed to be the fact is that, like other workers all over the world, he turns out some pretty substantial profits for his master. And with it all he is loyal. In the midst of the worries of working for his living, paying off the H.P., the mortgage and the rest, he also finds time to fret about the fortunes of his ruling class. He will always get upset to hear that foreign capital has moved into the country and has taken over a British company. Remember the fuss about Tube Investments? And later on about Ford? In the 'bus queue, at the bench, around the canteen table, many workers expressed the opinion that this was alien investment with a sinister motive. Some of them thought that behind it all was a scheme to undermine British industry, to buy up a prosperous rival and then let it go bankrupt.

This is a strange idea. The capitalist class find it difficult at times to assure themselves of a profit from their business, let alone deliberately investing a few million into a loss. And we should remember that there are plenty of firms in this country which are offshoots of foreign companies, and which are thriving concerns. Some of them, in fact, have become larger and more prosperous than their foreign parent. And what about British investment abroad? Do British workers object to that?

They do not—although there is plenty of it. Mr. Heathcoat Amory, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, when questioned in the House about the Tube Investments deal, stated that this country is a nett exporter of capital. A few months back, for example, Courtaulds bought a four per cent. interest in the Koppers Company Inc., one of the largest American chemical and plastic concerns. At the same time, they put two men onto the board of the American company. There were, of course, no complaints from Fleet Street about this. No heat was generated under any white collar at this new example of one country investing in another. No British newspaper carried stem warnings about threats to prosperity. Presumably because British workers, like their brothers abroad, are nothing if not patriotic. They think that American ownership of Ford Dagenham must be a baleful influence, but that British investment overseas is an example of enterprise and anyway is all done for the benefit of the natives.

In fact, it is quite unimportant to the British worker whether the firm which employs him is owned by foreign shareholders or not. He can live only by persuading some firm or other to buy his working ability and wherever he works he will receive, on a broad average, the same wage. Every capitalist concern, whatever the nationality of its shareholders, is in business to make profit. It is, indeed, to make more profit that they take the risk of investing abroad. Courtaulds went into Koppers for what they called “. . . the exploitation of areas of mutual interest.” They were, in other words, trying to rebuild some of the investments in the United States which the British government compulsorily sold for them during the war. Nobody has yet found a certain way of making capitalist industry, anywhere in the world, able to rely upon its profits. That is why we have booms and depressions, and why some firms go out of business. All over the world, the interests of the worker must clash with his master’s. These are the common problems of capitalism, which cannot be wiped out by the change of a company's nationality.

Why, then, do workers bother about whether their employer is British or not? Why are they loyal? Because they think that they have some stake in the country of their living, which gives them a common cause with the British capitalist class. And what does this stake amount to?

About the biggest and most valuable thing that most workers are ever likely to own is a house. And what agonies they must go through, to get it! First they must take on a lifetime's mortgage or loan which, although in fact it deprives them of real ownership of the house, saddles them with the full legal responsibilities of ownership. If a slate falls o(f the roof onto somebody's head they—not the building society—must pay compensation. If the house is struck by lightning or damaged by flood water, they must suffer the consequences. The money for the house is often lent at such an interest rate that in the end the borrower will repay about twice as much as he originally borrowed. While he is repaying the loan, his occupation of the house can be hedged about by all manner of legal restrictions, which are imposed to make sure that if he defaults in the repayments the house will have a good resale value. And if in the end the worker has kept up his payments and done everything else that the building society wants, what has he got? A working class house which has cost him nearly twice as much as it would have done if he could have originally afforded to pay for it outright. And the tail end of his life in which to enjoy it.

So much for house ownership. Do the working class own anything else in this country? Over the years, there have been many investigations into relative ownership and incomes. They have always pointed to the same conclusion— that most people own very little and a few people own a great deal. One of the latest of these investigations was carried out by the Oxford University Institute of Statistics. They published the results in their Bulletin of February this year. Here are some extracts from it.

There are twenty thousand people in this country with over £100,000 each in capital, averaging £250,000 each. Ten per cent. of the population over 20 owns ninety-eight per cent. of company stocks and shares, and seventy-four per cent. of land, building and trade assets. One per cent. of the over 20 population own eighty-one per cent. of stocks and shares, and twenty-eight per cent, of land, building and trade assets. This does not leave much for the rest of the population, for the working class—the loyal, struggling mortgagors. The Bulletin tells us something about them. There are, it says, sixteen million people with what it calls a net capital of less than £100, and an average holding of £50.

These are the facts behind the great myth of working class ownership, patriotism and employer-loyalty. Perhaps, at times, a glimmering of the facts gets through to the workers and sets them realising that Britain does not belong to them. That a very small minority in the world own almost anything that is worth owning, whilst the rest spend their waking lives in work to keep things that way. That the majority scrape along with the shabby and tawdry whilst the few can have—literally—the best. The best clothes, houses, food, holidays. The best chance of living a worthwhile life. And—final irony—they can have all this without needing to work for it. They can leave that part to the lazy, loyal working class.

Who do you think has the better side of the bargain? And who are the mugs?

Ivan

Latin America (1961)

Book Review from the September 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Latin America—The Balance of Race Redressed, by Halcro Ferguson for the Institute of Race Relations. (Oxford University Press, 7s. 6d.)

With the exception of The Times and The Economist the only British newspaper that regularly covers Latin American affairs is The Observer, which has in Halcro Ferguson a highly informed student of what is going on "south of the border.” His first book is therefore a welcome addition to the limited literature available on the racial aspect of that part of the world.

It is regrettable that the author makes no attempt to define his meaning of the term race. It is far too “loaded” a word to leave to the reader's personal interpretation. Fortunately, there is nothing in present day Latin America to compare with the specific discrimination on grounds of colour to be found in the Southern States of America or the Republic of South Africa. It would be a mistake, however, to think this is due to some kind of moral superiority. Discrimination and indignity have many forms. From Mexico down to Paraguay the Spanish speaking descendants of the conquistadors have exerted a repressive social, religious and linguistic domination over their Indian subjects whose pre-Colombian culture was by no means inferior to that of their conquerors.

Mr. Ferguson likens the break-away of the Spanish colonies under the leadership of Bolivar and San Martin to the current White-Settler and “Colon" quarrels with the home country, although as he himself shows the social gap between the élite and the masses was not a principle of racial superiority. What it does mean is that as the countries of Central and South America undergo their national bourgeois revolutions we are likely to witness the rise of the Indian majority as a key political factor with the subsidiary demand for literacy and equal rights of language. A situation not unlike India once the English no longer held sway.

We must register a point of disagreement. Despite the fact that numerically the peasants were preponderant in both Mexico of 1910 and Russia of 1917 it is an error to equate the respective struggles of that period. In the words of Rudolf Sprenger, “The Russian Revolution was a bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie. Leadership: the intellectuals. Weapon of attack: the proletariat. Mass-basis: the peasantry.” In Mexico's case it was not a question of a fundamental change in the social basis of society, which is what we understand by the word revolution. Rather was it one of the last of the great peasant revolts so tragically doomed to failure by the inexorable laws of social development.

Eddie Grant

YHWH* (1961)

Book Review from the September 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Religion of Israel, by Yehezekel Kaufmann (translated by Moshe Greenberg.) Allen & Unwin, 42s.

This is an excellent book: not only the translation—which alone can make or mar any work, but also the abridgement of seven volumes.†  Despite this and the obvious drawbacks Dr. Greenberg has given us an eminently readable book. A must for biblical scholars and a mine of information for Socialists. Professor Kaufmann took the best part of thirty years to produce these seven volumes and in so doing has amassed a wealth of facts regarding the origins and the nature of Israelite religion—Judaism. Many of these facts are incorporated in this abridgement, which makes fascinating reading and one wonders at what was left out. This is the first time that any part of Professor Kaufmann’s major work on Judaism has been published in any other language but Hebrew.

For those concerned with Judaism as the first monotheistic religion from which sprang Christianity and Islam and the connecting links between Paganism, Pantheism, Polytheism, and Primitive Magic, there is a good argument in this book and much to cogitate over.

Socialists will value this book in much the same way as they do Fraser's Golden Bough, and Darwin's Origin of Species, as an explanation of mankind's activities and of his earlier inability to understand natural phenomena, such as the rising and setting of the Sun, the waxing and waning of the Moon, storms, floods, and so on. Primitive Magic was early man's way of endeavouring to deal with the things he did not understand, and as he became more sophisticated his superstitions hardened into religion. Pantheistic and polytheistic to start with and then Monotheistic, today we have variants all along the line, enough of them in fact to make the soup firms' varieties look sick. In the bargain, organised religion in the early days of propertied society— somewhere in the Middle East—gave rise to science, which is today busy burying religion beneath a mountain of facts.

All of this has been brought about by man endeavouring to come to grips with the problems that confronted him. Homo Sapiens has solved most of his problems, and we are confident that he will continue to do so. This volume is good ammunition for debunking the God idea. Not that Professor Kaufmann wrote his volumes with that intention—he is a devout Jew—but then neither did Darwin!

Jon Keys

* GOD.

† An eighth volume has been written, but is not dealt with in this book.

Buddha's tooth (1961)

From the September 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Chinese are a people without what we would call a religion; in its place they have the philosophy of Confucianism. This regulates the behaviour between older and younger brother and other members of the family and subjugates them all to the head of the household. The system of responsibilities goes all the way through society to the head of the State, who is compared to the father of a family.

The Chinese Communist Party who now manage capitalism have substituted a somewhat similar authoritarian ideology of their own, with Mao Tse-tung at the top of the social pyramid in the place formerly occupied by the Emperor.

This lack of religious belief, however, does not help them from pandering to even the most stupid of superstitious practices when it suits their interests. Witness the recent episode of Buddha's tooth.

For the first time in 2,500 years the right and the left tooth of the Lord Buddha have been brought together; at Kandy, the ancient capital of Ceylon, where hundreds of thousands of pilgrims saw the right tooth, in its 3 cwt. gilded casket studded with green and red gems, loaded on a specially built chariot for a four month's tour of the island's holy places. The relic itself has been provided by courtesy of Communist China. Its usual resting place is in a newly reconstructed 150 ft. high Pagoda in Peking's western hills whence it was brought to Colombo aboard an Ilyushin jet. Mrs. Bandaranaike, the Prime Minister, and members of her Cabinet took a prominent part in greeting it.

Ceylon has its own tooth — the left one — enshrined at Kandy’s Dalada Maligawa temple. It is about half the size of the Chinese relic but equally venerated in the Buddhist world.

The Chinese Government can very well understand the excitement and keenness of the Ceylonese ruling-class at the possession of this relic, for it is a help in the very important task of doping their workers’ minds. The Ceylonese ruling-class, no doubt. consider this acquisition very fortunate indeed. Buddha’s tooth helps to whip up religious fervour, and this is channelled into support of the Buddhist church, which, in Ceylon, is a pillar of the State.

What an auspicious atmosphere for the Chinese to start their negotiations to barter rice for rubber and what an edge on their Russian rivals too! How the sophisticated rulers of China, who so make use of a religious relic (useless to them for hoodwinking their agnostic workers) must be laughing up their sleeves at the Ceylonese workers who fall for such hocus pocus!

Frank Offord

50 Years Ago: The Limitations of Industrial Action (1961)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

In August 1911 their was a strike of railwaymen. The Liberal Government, with the support of the Tories called out the troops and there were many casualties when police were used to break up strikers meetings.

Among those hardest hit by the great events of August are the Industrial Unionists. They have witnessed a strike in the industry most able to paralyse society. That it could paralyse society has been amply demonstrated—but then, we have never denied that they could accomplish this. However, events have gone on to prove our claim that, considered as an instrument for ’taking and holding’ the means of life Industrial Unionism, with its most perfect weapon, the General Strike, can accomplish nothing more than general paralysis.

The ’riotous mob ’ of August 1911 were an appalling power for destruction—everybody knew that. Had they been sufficiently desperate, had they felt sufficiently inclined to suicide, they would have been irresistible for ruin. They could have laid London in ashes in a night: they could have made the country an inferno of blood and fire; they could have performed prodigies of destruction in spite of police and military. But when it comes to taking and holding and operating one shillings-worth of the productive wealth of the capitalist class, they are powerless. They can destroy and die, but to hold and operate they must live—and in the difference between these two, Industrialism finds its grave.

The final lesson, and the greatest of all, is to be found in the crushed hopes of the Industrialists, the Syndicalists, the Anarchists. These claim that the means of production must be seized in the teeth of the armed forces; the Socialists hold that the preliminary must be to get control of the armed forces by capturing the machinery of government.

[From the
 Socialist Standard, September 1911]