Ireland, the Labour Party and the Empire (1921)

From the December 1921 issue of the Socialist Standard

After a long and bitter struggle, there is at last the prospect of peace in Ireland. The workers of Ulster and the South have fought with a fervour only equalled by the frenzy of the late world war, and are now to be able to see what it really was they fought for. If they hope for anything better than the fate common to ex-soldiers in all the countries of Europe—victors and vanquished alike—then disappointment awaits them.

Sinn Fein, behind a screen of fine-sounding no-surrender proclamations, appears to be preparing to forego the demand for full recognition of Ireland’s status as an independent Republic; while the English Government, under the pressure of a variety of political and financial factors, considers the cost of continued refusal of concessions prohibitive, and offers a form of Dominion Home Rule.

The chief, the economic, causes of the dispute are not far to seek. The northern Capitalists, whose prosperity lies in their easy access to markets within or protected by the British Empire, could never submit to being cut off from the source of their wealth. Similarly, the numerically strong body of farmers and traders in the South, plundered and thwarted for centuries by successive English Governments, and seeing themselves, for the benefit of their competitors, denied the right of freely developing commercial relations abroad, looked to the victory of Sinn Fein as the precursor of a new era of expansion for their trade. Add to this the hopes of the younger generation for satisfaction of their hunger for land, hitherto inaccessible to them owing to foreign ownership and profitable use for non-agricultural purposes, and we have some idea of the material basis for the Irish war.

The workers were called upon to take up arms for objects far enough removed from these, “Protestantism and the Flag” or “Catholicism and Liberty,” as geographical accident ordained: it was always the trade of the politician to provide plausible excuses. They responded with the usual disastrous results for themselves. Under the pretext of the necessity for presenting a united front to the external enemy, robbed and robbers, workers and employers, closed up their ranks to the manifest advantage of the latter.

Trade Union organisation was wrecked by internal dissension, or rendered innocuous in the larger interest of patriotism, that is, of the employers, whether Belfast shipbuilders or Southern farmers. Now, with the coming of peace, the class struggle will once more be forced to the front, and whether the wage-earners are in a position to resist attempts to lower their standard of living or not, they can at least learn the lesson of their recent folly. In Erin, no more than in this or any other Capitalist country, do war slogans or the sentiments of national brotherhood weight heavily where they conflict with profit-making.

The cessation of guerrilla warfare and the raising of martial law will provide a welcome removal of political and mental obstacles to our propaganda, but it must always be remembered that the form, the time, and the terms of the peace are in the hands of the Ruling Class. Theirs is the political control, and the accompanying military power enables them to give or withhold, and to bargain as they think fit. On neither side have the workers the deciding voice.

As might be expected, the Labour Party, which has long put at the forefront of its programme the solution of the Irish problem, has something to say at this juncture which incidentally is of interest to us. The Labour Party, as also might have been expected by those who know that body, puts the case for the English Capitalist Class.

At the height of the conflict, when there was no sign of a weakening on either side, of or any kind of rapprochement, the Labour Party, somewhat vaguely it is true, stood for Ireland’s right to Independence with but two qualifications: guarantees for the protection of minorities and against the possibility of future military or naval menace to this country. Now, however, that changed circumstances or changed feeling in the constituencies lead the Government to negotiate, the Labour Party withdraws from the attitude it had taken up. When war is the order of the day, it is useful but harmless in bye-election tactics to promise Independence, but when Capital decides to have peace and the actual terms are to be settled, the Labour Party is called to heel and must follow its masters.

Thus we have Mr. J. H. Thomas declaring (Daily Herald, September 2nd) that “no political party in England can hold out any hope of an Irish Republic.” The Herald, commented adversely on this “astounding” remark, and dismissed it as a private opinion only, not representative of the Labour Party.

Curiously enough, a week before H. N. Brailsford has written in the Herald, under the title “Ireland and Sea-Power,” expressing the same opinion in even more vigorous language, and it is with this that I propose to deal. The Daily Herald, did not comment on Brailsford’s article!

Brailsford is a Labour candidate, and in the Labour Daily which in this instance claims that it represents the real attitude of the Labour Party, he writes as follows (August 30th):

  The British Government (with the nation behind it) is, I believe, sincere in its readiness to yield everything except naval control . . . In plain words the issue for the British people is our world power. That is the only issue for which we ever fight . . . but it is an issue for which we always fight, and will fight. It was the issue in the world war; first, because the German navy challenged ours, and, secondly, because a German occupation of the Belgian coast must have interfered with our control of Dover Straits . . . For sea-power is the instrument of our economic expansion. Upon it rests our possession of half Africa and all India, and our ability to expand at will in China or elsewhere.

This is somewhat staggering, and one cannot help wondering whether the hundreds of thousands of out-of-work ex-soldiers are fully appreciative of the advantages that accrue to the through their “possession” of “half Africa and all India.” To continue with the quotation:

   No instinct is so deeply rooted in us all (the exceptions are negligible) as the instinct which teaches us without talk or exhortation, or reflection, to guard our naval ascendancy against any risk. None even of the sincerest advocates of the League of Nations (not even Lord Robert Cecil) had a word to say in support of Mr. Wilson’s proposals for the freedom of the seas. No one criticises (I except the eccentrics) the virtual British seizure of Constantinople.
  One may feel sure in advance that while we may accept, or even propose at Washington, a limitation in shipbuilding, we shall not agree to abate by a single vital concession our unlimited and uncontrolled right to blockade.

Incidentally this throws an interesting light on the bona-fides of the League of Nations and on the use to the workers of it and its Labour Party backers. We notice, too, that the “eccentrics” are excluded from those Labour Party claims to represent. For my part, I must confess to being one of them: the deep-rooted instinct of guarding “our naval ascendancy” seems to have passed me by, and I simply never froth at the mouth at the mention of this bloody old Empire.

  We are ready to concede much . . . , but we will no more give up our naval stations on the Irish coast than we will give up Gibraltar or Malta or the Suez Canal. To do so would be to begin to give up world-power.
   On the ordinary level of thought (Tolstoyans, Quakers and Communists are the only exceptions) we are acting rationally. An independent Ireland would be a danger. Our next enemy at sea would assuredly occupy, or try to occupy, it. Belgium was not the only violated neutral in the last war. China, Greece, Persia and Albania were all used or over run. There will be no yielding here . . . and Irishmen who expect us to yield eventually will have to wait till our Empire is overthrown and our sea-power vanished like Germany’s.

Have you grasped the full import of this frank statement of what the Labour Party stands for? The class privileges of the Capitalists are in question, and the Labour Party is forced into the open to defend them.

Of course, the Ruling Class will not allow the Empire to be endangered by an independent Ireland. The Empire is theirs, and they won’t see their private property damaged, unless superior force compels. That is simple enough. They have the power, and use it to protect and further their interests against opposition from workers and other States alike. But what is the Labour Party doing in this?

They offer themselves as an alternative to the Coalition and are in great hopes of early success. We consider them worthy of condemnation for their past record alone, but are told we should give them a chance, and wait and judge by results. Well, here is their own promise of their intentions. The fulfilment may be worse; it can hardly be better. Not only Ireland is touched upon:

  The (Washington) Conference may then be futile, and, over the issue of Imperialist exploitation in the Far East, the naval rivalry will begin in earnest, and ultimately we may find ourselves involved even in war.

What does this mean in brief? Just this: The wealth of the Empire, built up by the toil and sacrifice of generations of British workers, is to remain what it now is, the exclusive possession of our exploiters, and for their acquiescence in this the Labour Party is to be graciously permitted to take over the Government. Only nominally in power, they will be, in reality, as helpless as the Labour Governments in Australia, and will serve, as they are intended to serve, as the last defence of the Capitalist system.

Hoodwinked by a repetition from the mouths of their leaders, of the old fiction of the alleged community of interest between themselves and the employers, the workers are again to be privileged to defend the country they do not own, against all comers, from the Capitalists of USA to the Irish Republicans. Their reward will be the reward the unemployed are reaping now.

Did the last war concern the workers, or will the next? Does it matter to them that “our” naval supremacy should remain intact, any more than it matters whether Sinn Fein colours or the Union Jack fly over Dublin, or whether the German Black, Red and Gold, or the flag of Poland mocks their poverty in Silesia?

While the Capitalist Class dominates the civilised world, and owns and controls all the means of wealth production, the disposal of nations in this or that empire or sphere of economic interest is not the business of the Working Class. If you think the choice of war ministers as between, say, Churchill and Col. Will Thorne, to direct you to the slaughter-house, is worthy worrying about, then, of course, you will select your respective champions in the Coalition or the Labour Party.

If you don’t, and if you consider it time that any fighting the workers may have to do, be done for their own emancipation from the system which makes wars inevitable, you will be well repaid for the devotion of a few hours to the study of Socialism. There is urgent need for you inside The Socialist Party.

Edgar Hardcastle

"I am going to have breakfast in bed" (1957)

Book Review from the December 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

One day in November at the Royal Albert Hall 1,250,000 poppy petals were dropped from the roof at a ceremony attended by the Queen.

"One for every British serviceman killed in action from August, 1914 till today,” says the Sunday paper.

Twelve years have passed since the end of World War II. This allows fair time for Generals and “Statesmen” to retire to the safe security of their generous pensions, and eventually “die in bed,” as Sassoon wrote in the first lot.

Those holding top-jobs then, can now blow the gaff, give the game away, always providing, of course, that it exonerates them and incriminates the others.

Despite the shocking straits to which inflation is supposed to have reduced the rich, there are still a few with 25s., 35s. or 45s. to chuck away on some bag of tripe purporting to reveal war time secrets.

This makes it quite a tasty racket, especially if you’ve nothing much else to do except fish salmon or grow cacti.

More than one ex-general has turned to tales out of the War Cabinet school, for a little bit of extra.

Actually, they’ve really nothing much to say. It may have taken a little longer, but the pattern of recrimination after the Second approximates to those of the First.

Then it was Lloyd George sacking Douglas Haig, this time Churchill doing Wavell. (Threatening “to have him shot”). After Churchill himself had saturated the market with whitewash, there was a chance for smaller fry to lick up a crumb or two.

Lord Alanbrooke and Sir John Kennedy (Director of Military Operations 1940-43) are among those for whom the pen is now meatier than the sword.

Kennedy, in his book The Business of War, 25s. (was ever a book better named?), reveals what took place at the week-end parties at Chequers, the P.M.’s country residence from which the War was actually run.

If his tale is to be believed, the dining and wining
 was usually accompanied by sundry angry outbursts by Churchill denouncing and upbraiding the daft generals in charge of the British Armies.

His chagrin at Wavell's inability to deal with Rommel did not prevent him, it seems, from doing justice to the liquor. “Churchill continuously called for more champagne” (while the men in the Western Desert were drinking their shaving water). “He remarked that it was very good stuff—he said he had thought of giving up cigars until the Germans were out of Cyrenaica—but changed his mind a few days later. Why should he give up cigars or snuff for any German.” (Evening Standard, November 4th, 1957.)

On May 26th the Prime Minister sent Wavell a stream of telegrams urging “active measures,” read headlong attacks.

“Victory in Crete is essential,” “Hurl reinforcements into Crete.” “What about a stroke in the Western Desert,” etc.

According to this General, the Prime Minister was in the habit of telephoning junior officers at M.I.5, or some other secret war department and enquiring, behind the back of those in charge, how things were going. It was somewhat after the manner in which the late Mr. A. W. Gamage used to snoop on his staff at his store.

“At the evening at Chequers,” Kennedy says “After dinner Churchill walked up and down.”

“My plan for winning the war is this,” he said a little later, “One thousand tons of bombs a night on Germany—we are only averaging 50 now—and 20,000 tanks or so ready to land all along the coasts of Europe.”

“At about 3 a.m. Churchill announced that it was time for bed, and coming up to me, he said, “I am going to have breakfast in bed—I advise you to do the same.”

“I certainly came out of this evening very badly,” says General Kennedy.

Eventually Churchill did sack Wavell and placed Auchinleck in charge.

When the tumult and the shouting dies, a little bit of the truth comes out. We are afforded a glimpse of what went on behind the scenes, through the cracks.

That great military strategist Churchill, like his Russian counterpart the self-appointed military genius Stalin (not to mention Zhukov) has been debunked by the generals. The same thing went on in Germany with Hitler and his generals. Churchill’s empty threats to have Wavell shot were obviously inspired by German practice and Nazi usage. Churchill was the more fortunate because generals who know that they are to be shot as political scapegoats, try to blow Fuhrers up with bombs.

Even appreciating attempts by wartime generals to do a Mark Antony on Winston Ceasar Churchill, our knowledge of the intrigues of the First World War, and the events in the enemy camp during the Second bear out the substance of the case.

While Hitler, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt were sacking generals in their blind fumblings to find a winner, like an old lady doing football pools with a darning needle, thousands of ordinary working folk were enduring the unspeakable horrors of modern war.

What are the qualifications for these “great men” except cold calculation, tireless loquacity, and a supreme egotism based on endless contempt for those who produce the wealth they so wantonly squander.

Like Napolean, who is supposed to have exclaimed as his heavily loaded Guardsmen sank into the icy Beresina, “Look how these toads struggle for their miserable lives,” he rates the working man at his own evaluation.

The spectacle of this phrase-monger, with his old brandy and choice cigars, at a time when his own experts declared that the war time ration of those doing the work had reached the limit; uttering wild statements at his dinner parties at Chequers, like his—

“My plan is to drop 1,000 tons of bombs a night on Germany.”

“I am going to have breakfast in bed.” Sixteen years later, when it has now got to the stage where some “Leader-Genius” or the other can exterminate an entire community by pressing a button, there are still far too many working people supporting poppy dropping and Remembrance days. Although they may have the very best motives, they unwittingly support Capitalist-Nationalism and the system which keeps them in Poverty and Peril, while generals denounce and expose politicians in past wars but not future ones.

Small comfort to the widow, great consolation to those children whose father happened to be one of the pawns (they call them “the prices”) that we paid a penny or two for a paper poppy, or stood still for two minutes on Sunday, when most of us are off work, so that the guv'nor doesn't lose the time.

The folly is to continue, after all this, one and a quarter million dead, plus all the illness, disease, and aftermath of war to go on supporting capitalism whether Churchill’s, Eisenhower’s or Khruschev’s.

In the world Socialist society people will not kill each other—they will help each other.

Until that day the sacrifice of those killed in wars will be futile.

Horatio.

Wake Up! And Live (1957)

From the December 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “Soviet scientists who claim to have found a Rip Van Winkle deep method of prolonging animal life far beyond normal expectation, are to start experimenting on humans.
  Their biggest success in experiments so far is a small white lapdog called Mika. He was brought to them in 1950. aged 16, with all the symptoms of advanced senility, and was expected to die at any moment. 

Long sleep.  

Mika was immediately put to sleep with drugs and not awakened for three months. The dog lived until April 1957, claim the Russians, nearly seven years above his normal life expectation.

  The Soviet scientists stumbled on the method while carrying out experiments investigating the devastating effect of lack of sleep on the living organism. So far experiments have been on animals only. Work on humans is to be carried out at the Longevity Institute of the Moscow Medical Academy.” (Sunday Express, 23/6/57).

The writer has long been aware of the devastating effect on his own and other people’s health of the vicious scream of the alarm clock, forcing one out of a nice comfortable bed, blinded with sleep; to stumble downstairs, snatch a hurried “cuppa” and race for the bus; to arrive exhausted at the place of work, to do another “stint” of profit-making for the boss. What a lousy life!

Spare a thought, however, for the poor capitalist. Maybe he has been making a mistake. Perhaps if these experiments prove successful he may realise it. Indeed, he may campaign for a shorter working day so that wage-slaves may get more sleep, live longer and produce more profits. They may even raise the retirement age to ninety—that would save them millions! “A delightful thought, eh! Ponsonby? ” “Why yes, my dear feller!” On the other hand, the workers, given more time to think, may get wise to the swindle of Capitalism and decide to put an end to “Wage Slavery,” and to live long and happy lives in a Socialist society. They may, indeed, WAKE UP AND LIVE. 

Phil Mellor

Abundance and Poverty (1961)

From the May 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some time ago, under the above caption, the now defunct News Chronicle, in a leading article, asked “is it really beyond the wit of man to devise a means of sharing out more fairly the world's bounty?" This was by no means the first challenge to society to meet the paradox of want in the midst of plenty, and the report that to-day, in Toronto, thousands of children are starving, provides ample evidence that the challenge has not been met

The statement comes from Dr. Morris Zeidman, a Presbyterian minister who runs the Scott Mission, which has “opened its doors to feed the hungry children of the city’s unemployed.” Referring to a woman who could not drink the soup provided, a mission worker said, “Some of these people have been subsisting on so little that they now find it hard to stomach ordinary food ” (The Guardian 10/3/61).

Is this, we may ask, part of the heritage of freedom for which members of the working class fought and died in two of the bloodiest wars in history? Must people go without the basic essentials of life at a time when productivity has increased to heights never known before? When man was the slave of nature, shortage and want could be explained in something like intelligent terms, but to-day, when his productive capacities are virtually unlimited, he must find some other answer.

Thirteen years ago, Lord Boyd Orr, then Director-General of the World Food and Agriculture Organisation, could say “There was no difficulty about producing food for the present population of the world, or even twice that number, but the problem was, could politics and economics arrange that the food that was produced was dispersed in the countries that needed it?’’. Seven years later, the Oxford economist, Mr. Colin Clark, remarked that in two years no authority had disagreed with Professor Dudley Stamp, who pointed out that if Danish agricultural standards were to be practised on the available cultivable land, there would be enough food produced to give an excellent diet to probably seven times the world’s present population.

What Lord Boyd Orr and Mr. Colin Clark failed to recognise, or at least make no mention of, is the fact that however capable man may be of producing wealth, it is ultimately the question of ownership which decides whether or not he will partake of that wealth. Food, like every other commodity in our modern world, is produced primarily for profit, and the fact that it eventually may satisfy hungry children in Toronto or elsewhere is incidental and of secondary importance.

The answer to the News Chronicle’s question will not be found in the speeches of politicians and economists; if it could, the question would not be asked after a century of Parliamentary Statutes and fact-finding Commissions, designed to reform capitalist society in the interest of those who make it tick.

A. F.

Branch News (1961)

Party News from the May 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

May Day, 1961

May Day is being held on Sunday, May 7th. and the Party is arranging to hold as many meetings as possible to make more well known the case for Socialism. In London, at Hyde Park, in the afternoon Party members will gather to support the meeting and there will be three speakers. The platform will be in a prominent position on the grass. At 7.30 p.m. there will be an indoor rally at Denison House, Vauxhall Bridge Road (near Victoria Station). At both these meetings, the support of as many comrades and sympathisers as possible will add to the success of the demonstration.

In Glasgow, at Queen’s Park, meetings will be held, followed by an indoor Rally at St. Andrews Halls, Berkeley Street. So, Glasgow Comrades, turn out to support the meetings as the London Comrades will be doing—rain or shine. See that every effort is made to Demonstrate For Socialism.

Trafalgar Square, Easter Monday

Despite drenching rain and cold, grey skies, comrades of the Socialist Party of Great Britain dauntlessly and enthusiastically rallied round and showed their worth by turning out—at least fifty in number, to sell literature at the termination of the C.N.D. Easter march in Trafalgar Square. Some comrades were at the Albert Memorial and others at the Square. Their efforts resulted in the sale of literature to the extent of £13 14s. 44—350 Socialist Standards and 89 War pamphlets. In addition 5,000 Nuclear leaflets were distributed, resulting (up to the time of going to press) in ten enquiries for more information about the Party, and five requests, with Postal orders for War pamphlets. Among these enquiries were requests from Montrose in Scotland and Aberdare in Wales. This was a first-class effort on the part of Party comrades and proves that with enthusiasm and organisation—even the worst weather is not a bar to getting on with the job! One of the Paddington Comrades, in an effort to preserve the literature, wrapped individual copies in cellophane for protection. It is hoped also that the handbills (which were also distributed) advertising the April 19th meeting at St. Pancras Town Hall, will prove equally successful.


Coventry Group

Coventry members are still very active and are in contact with Birmingham Branch with a view to holding some joint outdoor meetings in Birmingham during the summer. The Group members regularly attend political meetings, take part in discussion and then sell Socialist Standards outside the meeting places. For a small group this is very good work and the Group members are hoping that their various contacts will, in the not too far distant future, enable them to form a Coventry Branch.


Central Branch

The Central Branch Secretary would very much like to hear from Comrades A. Bowley and C. J. Hutton. Correspondence has been returned from their addresses, without details of change.


Demonstration For Socialism

A full report of our successful meeting in St. Pancras will unfortunately have to beheld over until next month. We can nevertheless give the essential details. An audience of 400, plenty of questions and lively discussion, and a collection of over £25. All concerned have good reason to be pleased with such a fine result to their efforts — on such a miserably wet night too!

Phyllis Howard

Monkeys of the World, Unite! (1961)

A Short Story from the June 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Monkeys, trained to operate controls at given signals, are being used to pilot American space ships! Newspapers show front-page photographs of the new astronauts, their apish chins thrust forward with Mussolini arrogance. It's all very interesting, but what about the social effects of such new developments?

Human astronauts are too few and disorganised at the moment to insist on union membership. And if an Astronaut Union meeting was held to discuss the matter, it’s likely that there would be more chimps there than men. The result could be a union dominated by chimpanzees.

Now everyone knows chimps are reactionary. They accept the truck system of payment, fully satisfied with a weekly wage of bananas. They demand no danger money and can easily be bribed with a full length cover story in Life magazine. What will happen when the characteristics of monkey labour are noticed by industrial employers?

An American factory has already tried using chimps as labour. Mechanisation and mass production have reduced most factory jobs to a simple routine. The monkey could become a serious threat to the working class. Their food, clothing and shelter requirements are few: so are their notions of freedom. They could be farmed in colonies and crossbred to produce strains suitable for all conditions.

Naturally they'd have to be kept happy but industrial psychology is already a science. How about a few rousing songs like. "The British Chimpanzee, is the salt of our Count-err-ree ”?

Laws could be passed making it a capital offence to murder a chimp and a National Veterinary Service could be set up to make sure a sick chimp could go back to work as soon as possible. British law would have to be extended to cover the chimpanzee; he should be able to sue his master for the loss of five bananas at the cost of only a hundred bananas.

Religion would have to be adapted for him. As a reward for work, patience and obedience, he would look forward to a life after death in which he would be introduced to a Gorilla father image who presided over a banana plantation. He would learn modesty and cover up his bottom, read good books and be prevented from reading bad books about his promiscuous ancestors.

None of these things is impossible with careful scientific breeding and conditioning, and our modern age would he far better served by chimp workers. For it’s becoming increasingly obvious that in our modern age. human beings simply don't belong.

P. McHale

Finance and Industry: The Manufacturer’s Dream (1961)

The Finance and Industry Column from the June 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Manufacturer’s Dream

Stock Exchange speculators and the financiers who manoeuvre take-overs can, within limits, accommodate themselves to the fluctuations of markets and production but the manufacturer has them always on his mind. When demand leaps he may suffer the anguish of knowing that if he had expanded more he could sell more and make more profit; and when demand drops he may find he has stocks of unsaleable goods. The manufacturers' dream of heaven is a market that steadily grows and never catches him unprepared.

After last year's collapse of the motor industry this thought has recurred to the export director of the British Motor Corporation, Mr. J. F. Bramley. In an interview in the Sunday Express (12/3/61) he told how he feels about it:

  People just don’t understand the problems that a sudden boom and an equally sudden slump bring to the industry. As long as the demand is there the overseas dealers keep clamouring for cars and you have to keep supplying them. At any moment there may be thousands of vehicles in ships or on railway sidings awaiting shipment and your factories are in top gear. Then overnight the market goes "soft" and the pipelines are choked with cars nobody wants any more. We would much rather see a steady demand at a gradually rising level.

The motor firms and other manufacturers may go on hoping, but there isn't anything they can do about it, for the "trade cycle” of alternate expansion and contraction is how capitalism has always operated. Already there is talk of another set-back for motor cars later this year, and now the cotton industry is facing trouble again, as well as the furniture industry and the clothing trade.

For many years politicians and economists claimed that, with the lessons learned from the depression of the 'thirties, governments could handle the problem, but fewer now confidently hold that view.

One popular business theory was that firms could gain stability by extending their activities into several different fields, but the experience of the oil companies shows the flaw in this remedy.

For some years now the oil companies have been hit by overproduction of oil, recently aggravated by the Russian drive to invade Western markets and by the opening of the Sahara oil fields. There have also been too many oil tankers, in spite of which the Shell Company reports that "in recent months there has been increased placing of new orders and this must inevitably tend to prolong the world tanker surplus, now in its fifth year."

The Royal Dutch-Shell group of companies found new outlets by developing methods of producing chemicals from oil, including fertilisers, industrial chemicals, plastics and resins, which, of course, meant competition with the chemical industry.

They now report that others are moving into the chemical-from-oil activity, "strong competitors formidably equipped with capital and technological skills." Consequently, "there is some danger of surplus manufacturing capacity being created as the result of investments based on an over-optimistic assessment of profitability.

Perhaps when there are too many chemicals the research chemists will develop another new industry, to turn the surplus chemicals back into oil.

Concentration of Ownership

Writing in the February Bulletin of the Oxford University Institute of Statistics, H. F. Lydall and D. J. Tipping publish the results of a new attempt to estimate how the wealth of the country is distributed. They write:—

  In broad outline these figures suggest that total personal net capital in early 1954 was about £40,000 million. Of this, nearly £31,000 million was owned by three million persons possessing over £2,000 each; and the remaining £9,000 million was owned by the other 32 million persons aged 20 or over. In the top capital group there are 20,000 persons with more than £100,000 each and an average holding of over £250,000; in the bottom group are 16 million persons with less than £100 each and an average holding of less than £50.

So the 20,000 persons who own over £100,000 each have £5,000 million between them; while the 16 million people who have less than £100 each have a total holding of less than £800 million.

In between are nearly 19 million people whose total is about £34,000 million, which makes their average about £1,800.

They warn that their figures are very rough owing to the difficulties of handling the available material. They think that there has been some redistribution during the past twenty years but have not found it possible to give even a rough estimate of its extent.


Views of Inflation

In the past, inflation had a precise meaning. Mr. Frank Bower, M.A., Lecturer on Political Economy, gave a definition in 1908 which was in harmony with that given by Marx half a century earlier. Bower wrote:

  A fall in the value of. money, with a rise in the cost of living, caused by a comparatively permanent excess in the amount of money in circulation over that which is needed to perform the transactions of the community. Inflation usually means the artificially high prices caused by an over-issue of inconvertible paper money.

Marx deal with this in Capital (Vol. I, Ch. III), when he wrote: “stated simply, it is as follows: the issue of paper money must not exceed in amount the gold (or silver as the case may be) which would actually circulate if not replaced by symbols.”

Bower and Marx were both writing when gold coins, and Bank of England notes that were convertible into gold, were circulating in this country. They were describing what would happen if an inconvertible paper currency replaced the gold and convertible notes, and if notes were issued in excessive amounts.

Later on, some economists abandoned that specific meaning of inflation and replaced it by the looser conception indicated by the definition given by Nuttall's Dictionary in 1931: "increase of the quantity of money and/or credit relative to the volume of exchange transactions.”

Then came Keynes, who used the term to mean something different again. For him it was a question neither of currency nor credit, but of whether there are unemployed workers, idle factories, and reserves of materials. With very low unemployment and fully occupied factories he argued that increased demand could not lead to increased production but only to higher prices and wages, a condition he defined as “ true inflation.”

His biographer, Sir Roy Harrod, wrote of Keynes: “He had indeed the right to claim that his theoretical work between the wars had revolutionised the modes of thinking of economists upon inflation. They had long ceased to regard inflation primarily as an over-issue of notes or even as an over-expansion of bank credits.” This disregard of the over-issue of notes reached its culmination in the remark of the Committee on the Monetary System in 1959, that ”bank notes are in effect the small change of the monetary system,” and that the Government’s action in expanding the note issue is merely the passive one of seeing that sufficient notes are available for the practical convenience of the public.

As the total volume of production in this country is about 50 per cent. above the level of 1938, those who hold such views have yet to explain why it has been "convenient” for the government now to have in issue over four times the amount of notes then in circulation from £530 million to £2,250 million. And if the over-issue of notes has not been the main factor in causing the price level to be three or four times what it then was they might explain what the cause has been.

Which Horse Won the Race?

Early each April the financial columnists go in for the sport of guessing what sort of budget it is going to be. It is like backing horses, but with a difference; for after a race you do know which horse won. Not so with the columnists, who, when the budget comes out, can rarely agree what kind of budget it is. The reader can take his choice according to the paper he reads.

This year on the 11th April the Telegraph headed its column "Chancellor puts Checks on Inflation but the Mail found the budget “inflationary,” as also did the Express. The Financial Times hedged and would only concede that on paper it was "a substantially disinflationary budget." The Guardian, less cautious, decided that "the total effect . . .  is disinflationary"; while The Times, coming up a day later, thought it "at least mildly disinflationary."

The confusion is partly the result of the “experts” not being able to make up their minds what effect, if any, particular governmental policies for managing production and trade will have, but it is also a by-product of conflicting views as to the meaning of the term inflation.

Edgar Hardcastle

50 Years Ago: King Capital's Coronation (1961)

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

A king is to be crowned. In the presence of Our Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Premiers of the five Dominions of “our" Mighty Empire, and the assembled Monarchs of many lands, and the Lord God of Israel and the Stock Exchange himself.

•

It is commonly believed that “royal" power is the attribute of the monarch of a constitutional country, but nothing could be further from the truth. That question our capitalist masters fought out many years ago. They have left the King his name and his robes, his crown and his palaces, but they have stripped him of every vestige of power. The “Crown" is not the King, in any capacity, but the capitalist State. The King's Speech to Parliament is written by his Ministers, even the prerogative of mercy is not the King's but belongs to the capitalist Cabinet.

•

Even the swearing to uphold the institutions of capitalism is all bunkum and make-believe. There is today, in this country at all events, no institution of capitalism that the capitalists themselves are not fully able to maintain, or that they trust to other hands than their own.

•

This is the real use of Monarchs in capitalist States. Behind the person of the King the capitalists can hide the fact that it is they in reality who rule. By parading their kings before the workers at every possible opportunity, and with every circumstance of pomp and display that their ingenuity can invent, by investing them with divine right and something of divinity itself, the capitalists awaken and simulate and nurture that spirit of reverence, which is so deadly an enemy to the growth of revolutionary ideas, and so detract attention from themselves.

[From the 
Socialist Standard,  June, 1911.]

The Materialist Conception of History (1934)

From the April 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Further Letter on the Subject 

By Frederick Engels.

Translated for the “Proletarian" by Prof. J. I. Cheskis, of the University of Michigan.

A young student addressed to Engels the following questions:

1. How is it that, after the consanguineous family ceased to exist, marriage between brothers and sisters was still permitted by the Greeks, as Cornelius Nepos attests?
2. How was the fundamental principle of historical materialism understood by Marx and Engels themselves; are the production and reproduction of actual life alone the determining factors, or are they only the basis of all the other conditions acting by themselves?

Frederick Engels replied:

London, Sept. 21, 1890.

Dear Sir,

Your letter of the 3rd inst. was forwarded to me at Folkestone; but not having the book I needed I could not reply. Having returned on the 12th of the same month, I found such an amount of pressing work that only to-day am I able to write a few lines. Please excuse my delay.

To your first question:— First of all you can see on p. 19 of my “Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State," the Punalua family is represented as developing so slowly that even in this century in the royal family there have been marriages between brothers and sisters. In antiquity we find examples of marriages between brothers and sisters, for instance, the Ptolemies. We must make a distinction between brothers and sisters on the mothers' side and brothers and sisters on the fathers' side. The Greek Adelphos (brother) and Adelphon (sister) are both derived from Delphos (mother), indicating thus the origin of brother and sister on the mother’s side. And from the period of the Matriarchate there has been preserved for a long time the feeling that the children of one mother but of different fathers are more closely related than the children of one father but by different mothers. The Punalua form of the family excludes only marriages among the first, not among the second, since the latter, while the Matriarchate lasted, were not even considered relatives. Cases of matrimony between brothers and sisters in Ancient Greece are limited to those in which the contracting parties are descended from different mothers, or to those of whom the parental relationship was unknown, and hence the marriage was not forbidden. This, therefore, is not absolutely in contrast with the Punalua custom. You have noticed, then, that between the Punalua period and Greek monogamy there is a jump from the Matriarchate to the Patriarchate, which changes things considerably.

According to the “Greek Antiquities" of Wachsmuth, one finds in the heroic period of Greece “no trace of scruples due to a too close relationship of the contracting parties independently of the relationship between the parents and children." (P. 156.) “ Marriage with a carnal sister was not at all scandalous in Crete." (Ibid., p. 170.) This last affirmation is based on Strabone (X) but at the present moment I cannot find this passage because of faulty division of chapters. Under the expression “carnal sister" I understand, until proof to the contrary is furnished, a sister on the part of the father.

To the second question: — I have interpreted your first main phrase in the following way: According to the Materialist Conception of History, the factor which is in the last instance decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this neither Marx nor myself ever claimed. If now someone has distorted the meaning in such a way that the economic factor is the only decisive one, this man has changed the above proposition into an abstract, absurd phrase which says nothing. The economic situation is the base, but the different parts of the structure—the political forms of the class struggle and its results, the constitutions established by the victorious class after the battle is won, forms of law and even the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political theories, juridical, philosophical, religious opinions, and their further development into dogmatic systems—all this exercises also its influence on the development of the historical struggles and in cases determines their form. It is under the mutual influence of all these factors that, rejecting the infinitesimal number of accidental occurrences (that is, things and happenings whose intimate sense is so far removed and of so little probability that we can consider them non-existent, and can ignore them), that the economical movement is ultimately carried out. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of any simple equation. We ourselves make our history, but, primarily, under pre-suppositions and conditions which are very well determined. But even the political tradition, nay, even the tradition that man creates in his head, plays an important part even if not the decisive one. The Prussian State has itself been born and developed because of certain historical reasons, and, in the last instance, economic reasons. But it is very difficult to determine without pedantry that, among the many small States of northern Germany, precisely Brandenburg has been destined by economic necessity and not also by other factors (above all its complications with Poland after the Prussian conquest and hence, also, with international politics —which, besides has also been decisive in the formation of the power of the Austrian ruling family), to become that great power in which are personified the economic, linguistic, and—after the Reformation—also the religious difference between the North and South. It would be mighty difficult for one who does not want to make himself ridiculous to explain from the economic point of view the existence of each small German State of the past and present, or even the phonetic differentiation of High German which extended the geographic division formed already by the Sudetti mountains as far as the Faunus.

In the second place history forms itself in such a way that the ultimate result springs always from the conflicts of many individual wills, each of which in its turn is produced by a quantity of special conditions of life; there are thus innumerable forces which cross each other, an infinite group of parallelograms of forces, from which is derived one resultant—the historical event —which in its turn again can be considered as the product of an active power, as a whole unconsciously and involuntarily, because that which each individual wishes is prevented by every other, and that which results from it is a thing which no one has wished. In this way history runs its course like a natural process, and has substantially the same laws of motion. But, because of the fact that the individual wills—each of which wishes that to which it is impelled by its own physical constitution or exterior circumstances, i.e., in the last analysis, all economic circumstances (either its own personal circumstances or the general conditions of society)—do not reach that which they seek but are fused in one general media in a common resultant, by this fact one cannot conclude that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to produce the resultant, and is contained in it.

I would further ask you to study the theory from its original sources and not from secondhand works; it is really much easier. One can say that Marx has written nothing in which some part of the theory is not found. An excellent example of its application in a specific way is the “Eighteenth Brumaire of L. Bonaparte." Also in “Capital" (III) are many illustrations. And also permit me to recommend to you my writings, Herr E. Duehring’s “Umwalzung der Wissenchaft," and "Feuerbach und der Ausgang der Klassischen deutschen Philosophie," in which I have given the most ample illustrations of Historical Materialism which to my knowledge exists. That the young people give to the economic factor more importance than belongs to it is in part the fault of Marx and myself. Facing our adversaries we had to lay especial stress on the essential principle denied by them, and, besides, we had not always the time, place, or occasion to assign to the other factors which participate in producing the reciprocal effect, the part which belongs to them. But scarcely has one come to the representation of a particular historical period, that is, to a practical application of the theory, when things changed their aspect, and such an error was no longer permissible. It happens too often that one believes he has perfectly understood a new theory, and is able to manage it without any aid, when he has scarcely learned the first principles, and not even those correctly. This reproof I cannot spare to some of our new Marxists; and in truth it has been written by the wearer of the marvellous robe himself. [That is, by Marx.—Editor.]

To the first question:—Yesterday (I am writing these words on the 22nd of Sept.) I also found in Schomann, “Greek Antiquities," Berlin, 1855, Vol. I, p. 52, the following words, which confirm definitely the explanation given by me. “It is noteworthy that in later Greece marriages between brothers and sisters of different mothers were not considered incest."

I hope you will not be dismayed by the terrible parentheses which for the sake of brevity overflow from my pen. And I subscribe myself .

Your devoted,

F. Engels

Blogger's Note:

The second part of this letter - with a different translation - is already on the Marxist Internet Archive site. According to MIA, the letter was addressed to J. Bloch.

Cooking the Books: Unpaid Work (2018)

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

‘British people do more than £1tn of housework each year – unpaid’, read the headline in the Guardian (3 October) reporting on a study by the Office for National Statistics, and went on: ‘Unpaid household work, such as looking after children, doing laundry and cooking, is worth £1.24tn per year.’

Many, including socialists, have pointed out that, in only measuring paid work, GDP omits whole swathes of work as the exercise of mental and physical energy. Not all work is employment.

The ONS arrived at its figure by calculating what people would have to pay if they got someone to do the work, not just of looking after the children, cooking and doing the laundry, but also of cleaning, repairing and maintaining the home (and garden), caring for an adult at home, and driving to and from work, the supermarket and school. Also included was voluntary activity outside the home.

To make the figures more understandable to the general public, the ONS divided the total figure of £1.24 trillion by the total UK population of some 65.7 million, to arrive at the figure of £18,932 literally per every person including children. This can be broken down by activity. Perhaps surprisingly the largest is transport at £5459 (29 percent). Next is child care at £5358 (28 percent). housing services (cleaning, etc) is £3037 (16 percent); food preparation £2400 (13 percent), laundering £1355 (7 percent), adult care £898 and voluntary activity £365.

The Times reported the survey under the headline ‘Washing Up? That’ll be £12,000, darling’, with this as what a ‘stay-at-home spouse’ could claim for household chores. But it is not just women who do this unpaid work as is obvious in the case of people living on their own; all the work will be done by them, whether a man or a woman.

Apart from adult care and voluntary activity outside the home, the work covered by the ONS survey is work in connection with recreating the mental and physical energies people sell to their employer and with bringing up a future generation of wage workers. This means that, strictly speaking, it is not really unpaid. The work itself is unpaid, but not what the person doing the work has to consume to be in a position to do it. This has to be paid for, and is out of wages or state payments such as child benefit and carer’s allowance. This is most obvious in the case of the stay-at-home partner; the food, clothes, etc they consume has to be paid for out of the wage of the working partner. The same applies to everyone carrying out the unpaid work, including those in paid work. Provision for them to create the mental and physical energy to carry out the unpaid work is included in wages.

This brings out the fallacy of the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign. If the Times’ £12,000 were paid to the stay-at-home partner then the working partner’s wage would come to be reduced by the same amount. In fact if all this work were paid then wages would tend towards 16.2 percent of their current level as the percentage of consumer spending that the ONS says ‘was spent on direct costs for providing unpaid work services, mainly spent on fuel, renting and food.’ This means that in the ONS’s figure there’s double-counting with the greater part of people’s income from work and state payments. This does not make the statistics invalid or useless. They are interesting in revealing what goes into recreating labour-power – which when used by capitalist employers provides them with the unpaid labour that is the source of their profits.

Human relationships in socialism (2018)

From the November 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

By nature ‘human nature’ is gregarious and co-operative. It is the class division of society that has produced the ongoing alienation, competition and anti-natural behaviour we see. It has criminalised society. Socialism is the negation of capitalism which will be the last class society in history.

With socialism, gangsters’ cliques will lose their socio-economic breeding grounds. Their anti-social and anti-natural survivalist tricks – ‘the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest’ (Karl Marx) will fall into oblivion. Competition for possessions will give way to cooperation for life. Humans will regain their lost original nature once again by demolishing their ‘fear of freedom’ in a knowledgeable coherent relationship among themselves and with their surrounding nature, moving on to a higher phase of social progress, reaffirming equality, freedom, peace and happiness in unison, in harmony. ‘The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism’ (Karl Marx). According to him, with the dissolution of the power of money, private exchange and private property will cease to exist; ‘then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc …’ (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844).

Marx and Engels held genuine socialism to be ‘Communismus, Socialismus, Humanismus’ (German Ideology, Chapter 4).

Engels clearly set out the progression: ‘State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous and then dies of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of the processes of production. The state is not ‘abolished’, it withers away’ (Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific).

World socialist society will do away with classes and could be organised on a three-tier system of Local, Regional and Global Councils to deal with the administration of all their respective specific responsibilities relating to life, things, relations and problems. Money will go to the museums beside bronze axes. Private property and all its paraphernalia relating to money, wages, profits, private, joint-stock, state, multi-national, transnational and corporate et al. ownerships, and all selfish private interests as against social well-being, will be things of the past. Under such a global arrangement of things and affairs of life, the crimes of today will also generally be a thing of the past. In the event of any rarely occurring aberrations on the part of an individual member of society, the response could be educative and social correctional and compassionate counselling. Humans will have elevated themselves to a higher stage in history as a new-born humane species, leaving behind their prehistory of competition and conflict.

Binay Sarkar

Editorial: How Shall We Vote? (1989)

Editorial from the November 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

All the parties, except the Tories, discussed electoral reform at their autumn Conferences. Labour rejected it, but the minor parties—the Liberals, the SDP and the Greens—came out in favour as the only way of getting more of their members into the House of Commons. They also floated the idea of a pact with Labour to oust Thatcher in return for the introduction of proportional representation. Electoral arithmetic is on the side of the anti-Tory parties since at the last election, as indeed in the two previous ones, Thatcher and the Tories were returned even though four out of every seven voters rejected them. So is there a need for electoral reform?

We might as well give our answer straightaway: No, there isn’t. A majority seeking to replace capitalism by socialism only requires one thing of an electoral system under capitalism—that it should allow a majority opinion to reflect itself as a majority of seats in parliament. We are not interested in whether the system ensures a strong and stable government of capitalism nor in whether it ensures a fair representation of capitalist political parties. As the existing electoral system in Britain does allow a majority viewpoint to be translated into a majority of seats, we see no point in diverting our energies from our task of working towards the emergence of a socialist majority towards working for electoral reform within capitalism.

However, since socialism will be a fully democratic society we do have an interest in what is and what is not a fair electoral system since such a system will be an essential part of the democratic decision-making and administrative structure of socialist society.

From the point of view of democratic theory, an electoral system should ensure that the persons elected really are representative. The case against the first-past-the-post system that applies in Britain is that it does not necessarily do this when there are more than two candidates. This is because it allows a candidate to be elected with less than 50 per cent of the votes (that is to say, against the will of a majority of the voters), as were 45 per cent of MPs, of all parties, at the last general election.

There are various ways of avoiding this. Organising a run-off between the top two candidates in a second ballot (as in France) or, what amounts to the same thing, allowing voters to place the candidates in order of preference (as in Australia) and, if no candidate gets 50 per cent, to eliminate the bottom candidates and redistribute their votes amongst the others until one of them does reach this figure. This system, known as the alternative vote, is widely used in trade unions for the election of their officials and is favoured for parliamentary elections by some in Labour Party and even by some Tories. A variant of it, known as the Single Transferable Vote (STV) is applied in Ireland, both North (except for Westminster MPs) and South. Under it voters again place the candidates in order of preference but in a multi-member rather than a single-member constituency. A candidate is not elected unless, and until, after successive redistributions of the votes of the bottom candidates, they obtain a certain quota of votes. This is the system favoured by the Liberals, the SDP and some in the Labour Party. It is frequently described as a system of proportional representation even by its partisans but in fact it is not. It is essentially a system, like the second ballot and the Australian alternative vote, for ensuring that those elected attain a minimum level of representativity. It is only incidentally that, in a context of competing political parties, it ensures the representation of minority parties enjoying a certain minimum, but not necessarily low, level of support amongst voters.

As all these systems are compatible with democratic theory, no doubt they will continue into socialist society for the various delegate bodies that will form part of its democratic decision-making structure. Proportional representation, properly so-called, is a different matter as it presupposes the existence of competing political parties and was in fact devised precisely for such parties. It requires multi-member constituencies (which can be the whole country, as in Holland and Israel) and party lists rather than individual candidates. A great variety of PR systems exist in the various countries which practise it but these are all based on the principle that the seats should be allocated to the party lists in more or less strict proportion to the number of votes obtained.

The essence of democracy is popular participation not competing parties. In Socialism elections will not be about deciding which particular party is to come to “power” and form the government. Politics in socialism will not be about coercive power and its exercise and so won’t really be politics at all in its present-day sense of the “art and practice of government” or “the conduct of state affairs”. Being a classless society of free and equal men and women, socialism will not have a coercive state machine nor a government to control it. The conduct of public affairs in socialism will be about people participating in the running of their lives in a non-antagonistic context of co-operation to further the common good.

Socialist democracy will be a participatory democracy rather than the choice every four or five years, with or without proportional representation, between rival gangs of professional politicians that passes for democracy today.

Modern Technology and Socialism (1989)

From the December 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

In spite of its catastrophes and its social idiocies, industrial capitalism goes on from strength to strength. It establishes itself in new countries, turning more and more of the world’s population into members of the working class. It exploits increasing amounts of the Earth’s resources for commodity production. It turns out a growing mass and range of products to throw on to the market. It harnesses new discoveries, inventions, techniques and systems to expand and speed up production, distribution, travel, and communication. At the same time, of course, it pollutes and wastes and kills and oppresses on an ever-increasing scale.

Modifying Socialism

So far from casting doubt upon the socialist analysis of historical development, this accelerating and expanding progress provides daily confirmation of the inevitability of social change and the powerful impact of technology upon social structures and individual lives. The driver of a JCB is a different man from the navvy with his pick and shovel, not only in the way he does his job, but also in the way he views society and his place in it.

What is of particular interest to socialists is the way in which developments in capitalism modify ideas of socialism. Marx, and to a lesser extent Engels, was especially cautious about envisaging socialist society; and the wisdom of this is borne out by the fact that, in spite of their careful historical perspective, it is clear to us that even they could not help seeing the post-capitalist world broadly in terms of the conditions of their own times.

This applies just as surely to us today. We need to exercise the same caution when we allow ourselves to speculate upon the changes that the abolition of capitalism will bring about. Nevertheless, I do not believe that it is illegitimate to do this. What we must do, however, is acknowledge the relativity of our views. If each generation of socialists, then, sees the new society in a slightly different way because of changes that have taken place in capitalism, we shall be able to sustain a dynamic, rather than a static, conception of the liberated world for which we are all working.

The Dynamic of Technology

The underlying dynamic of social development is that of technology. While the relations of production, the class structure, within a social system are fairly rigidly maintained by the ruling class, the means of production are in a process of continual development, undermining that social structure.

In capitalism the rate of change has been incomparably greater than anything before in human history. In the hundred years since Marx’s death, the technological developments have been, if anything, more far-reaching in their social implications than those of the previous hundred years. In Marx’s day there were no motor cars or lorries and no road system which could have supported today’s mass of high-speed traffic. There were no aeroplanes or helicopters. There were no farm tractors, combine harvesters, milking machines or tuberculosis-free cattle. There was little domestic gas and virtually no domestic electricity so that there were no household machines such as vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, or food mixers. Electronic engineering, with its wide range of applications from radio and television to computers, microwave ovens and automatic control systems, had not yet begun. There was no automation, no laser and fibre optics, no space engineering, no biological engineering, no atomic engineering, no man-made fibres or plastics, no stainless steel or even aluminium. It was a society of horse drawn vehicles, domestic servants, heavy manual work, cast iron and steam power.

Change in Perspective

The sort of socialist society which could have been erected upon such a technological base would, it has been argued, have had a relatively inflexible monolithic structure, with centralised units of mass production, centralised planning, limited consumption and ease of movement, and still a great deal of hard work. The changes that the working class of the world has developed since those days, under the whip of capital, have modified conditions of living and working, and particularly the prospects for future society, in a fundamental way. They have made the production of abundance a real and obvious social possibility. At the same time, of course, they have introduced the possibilities of obliterating all civilisation on Earth or making the planet itself uninhabitable. There is now very little that modern science and technology can not do, given sufficient resources and effort.

Small Dispersed Production

The technological progress that has been made in the last hundred years has, as is always the case, been the result of improvements, not only in devices or machines, but in materials, techniques and systems as well. One of the principal factors which made Victorian textile mills and engineering machine shops so large and noisy was their dependence upon single huge power sources such as steam engines or the early electric motors driving miles of overhead shafting and belting. Steady improvements in design, materials and precision engineering made the production of small electric motors easy and relatively cheap, so that every machine can now have its own—often a number of them—performing different functions.

Similar improvements in steel alloys, welded fabrication design and techniques have made massive cast iron frames for machines obsolete. Indeed, almost every process of production and distribution today uses less energy and a smaller quantity of materials than a comparable process did a hundred years ago, and, apart from the logistics of transporting materials to, and products from, a machine, it can now be sited almost anywhere within reach of a three-phase electricity supply.

Except for large products, such as ships or rolled steel girders, enormous manufacturing plants are no longer technically necessary. Capital may be able to obtain a few remaining economies in management and administration in large industrial agglomerations, although modern communications systems have overtaken most of these, but otherwise the trend is towards smaller and more dispersed factories. Capital resists this process at every step, striving to achieve economies of scale, but technology is pointing the way to a pattern of industry very different from the dark satanic mills of Victorian England.

Machinery and Profitability

One of the things that Marx draws attention to in Vol. III of Capital is that particular inefficiency of the capitalist mode of production which is caused by capitalists’ reluctance to install superior machinery. No surplus value is extracted from constant capital itself—this dead labour embodied in means of production. The fixed portion of it, represented by plant and machinery, is imparted to the commodities, little by little, as these items wear out. Even under the pressure of competition, therefore, the capitalist tries to extract the last penny of value out of his fixed capital before replacing it.

What improved machinery must do for the capitalist, if it is to justify its cost, is to increase the productivity of his workers (his rate of extraction of surplus value from them) to give a rate of profit equal to, or above, the average. The greater the outlay on fixed capital, however, the more dependent such profitability is upon the continuing buoyancy of the economy. But, of course, capitalism is incorrigibly cyclical and unpredictable. Expensive machinery lying idle in a slump represents growing losses for capital, to be set against the profits made in better times. In slumps, too, the real price of labour power is driven down—as we have seen in the first half of the 1980s. This makes more labour-intensive processes relatively cheaper and more profitable, offsetting the advantages of capital-intensive methods. Moreover, labour can be dismissed with a week’s notice. Machinery can not.

Automation

These considerations have made capital particularly slow to introduce automation, especially when wages are low, because automation is a highly capital-intensive way of using machinery. But this is only the distorted capitalist measure of its cost, in which, to survive, every individual company must extract its measure of surplus value from its workers. In social terms, as a means of using crystallised past labour to supplement and ease the toil of living labour, it is not much more expensive than other ways of using machinery. The potential of automation for post-capitalist, democratic society is enormous. When used in conjunction with computers it is virtually limitless in its possibilities.

The principle behind the wide range of devices and techniques used in automation is not a new one. Whereas tools, instruments and devices like wheels and levers may be said to supplement human limbs, and machines—themselves using tools—can be thought of as amplifying human energy and speed, automation represents an extension, an amplification, of the human nervous system and, with computers, the brain. Automation makes decisions and gives instructions for them to be carried out.

One of the famous examples of early industrial automation was James Watts’ steam engine governor. He used two iron balls attached to linkage to control the speed of his steam engines. Rotating with the engine shaft, the balls were spun outwards with centrifugal force. At a pre-set speed their outward movement, through the linkage, began to close the valve which fed steam to the engine and so reduced the power, and consequently the speed, again. The principle involved here is that of using error, and the extent of that error, to correct the error. Whether mechanical, electrical, electronic or optical devices are used, that underlying principle remains the same. The essential components are suitable sensing or measuring devices to monitor the behaviour of a particular aspect of the machine or process, communication links from those devices leading to servo mechanisms which control what is going on.

Computers used in situations like this add another dimension of sophistication. Instead of a number of monitoring devices feeding their quite independent instructions to the overall process—as, for example, in multiple domestic central heating thermostat—the computer receives these various inputs and makes a programmed decision based upon the information from all of them. Modern motor cars have computer fuel and ignition control systems like this.

Information

A point worth noticing about this sort of technological development is that the new element in the employment of machines is information. The information revolution, as it has been loosely called, is not just a matter of improved means of communication and recording systems amongst people. We now control an increasing number of machines purely by information. There is, for example, hardly a heavy lorry left on today’s roads in which the driver turns the front wheels for steering through direct gearing from the steering wheel. The size and weight involved is far too exhausting. Instead, his movements of the steering wheel are transmitted as instructions to the servomechanism which does the actual work. Of course, this is not an example of automation. Here, it is the driver who is sensing and making decisions upon the conditions of the road and his vehicle.

Guided missiles, on the other hand, do use automation principles of self-correction. By a process of constant checking they seek out the destination with which they, have been programmed and deliver their warhead to it. Bizarre as it might now seem, a socialist society, with no need for weapons, might well find this expensive method of transport appropriate for delivering some types of urgent supplies.

Remote Control

Operating machines by giving them information opens up other possibilities too. Information can be sent over almost any distance, as the control of the various exploratory space vehicles demonstrates. There are also a number of methods of ensuring that imperfect transmission systems do not allow garbled information to get through. Remote control of machines in dangerous or humanly inaccessible locations is now, therefore, becoming common practice—but only where capital finds it profitable to use it.

Remote control of more mundane machines, however, has a very low priority in capitalism. Except for control rooms in things like power stations or ships, capitalism tends to keep workers as close to their machines as possible so that they, themselves, can be under control. At the moment, the few applications of this facility involve peripheral uses such as telephone instructions to domestic machines at home by a few highly paid workers with not enough free time to get home themselves. The potentialities of remote control for the free society of the future are, in contrast, rich and liberating. A person who had taken on responsibility for a particular production process or service could monitor its progress and make adjustments from wherever he or she happened to be. With good satellite radio links, machines and equipment in isolated stations, performing a variety of environmental control or supply functions, could be supervised from almost any distance.

Memory

Immediate instructions to machines, however, become less and less necessary with the development of memory devices. From the punched card system of the Jacquard loom at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present generation of computers capable of recording and storing immensely complicated programmes of instructions, the development of information storage in a form suitable for controlling machines has turned a quantitative difference into a qualitative one. Even the common computer programmes which can play chess against a human opponent have so many thousands of possible moves and countermoves stored in their memories that playing against them can seem like playing against another human being. In the same way, immensely complicated and subtle programmes of instructions for machines—programmes which learn from experience—can be devised to do almost everything that human operators can do.

Robots

The microminiaturisation and mass production of computer circuits on tiny silicon chips has made it possible to incorporate millions of small computers into everyday machines, just as we now use millions of small electric motors. Now all the human working functions have been simulated in machines. The skills of craftsmen and the diagnostic knowledge of doctors and other experts can now be fed into computerised machines which then operate like craftsmen and experts. Even speaking and understanding speech is in the rudimentary stages of development.

While most people are hardly aware of it, therefore: they are living in a world containing a rapidly multiplying number of increasingly sophisticated robots. Of course, the robot of early science fiction, walking on legs, using fingers, and even looking like a human being is a rather pointless product. It has all the limitations of the human being and none of its advantages. Real robots are purpose designed and greatly exceed human capabilities for each particular purpose.

One way of looking at this trend is to consider the modern generations of machines as an evolving population of slaves. As far as the technology is concerned, there is now no reason why human beings should do any of the dull, dreary or dirty jobs that are necessary to provide the wealth and services of an advanced, affluent society. Machines can—could if they were under the control of a free democratic society—do all of these tasks for us.

The Social Structure

Even to speak in these terms, however, points up the enormous disparity between what is possible and what capitalism is actually doing with these technological advances. There are already, for example, many millions of small personal computers in the world. But the vast majority of them are dedicated to playing games, mostly of the “shoot-em-up” or “shoot-em-down” variety. Escapism, which has made so many billions of pounds profit for the record industry and the film, television and videotape market, has now moved beyond the passive entertainment phase and is opening up a vast new field of interactive pseudo-experiences.

The other area in which all the sophistications of modern technology are being given almost unrestrained freedom to develop is very closely linked to the computer games market. It is that of fighting wars. Modern weapons and fighting equipment not only enhance human capabilities to an almost unlimited extent with their destructiveness, speed, accuracy, infrared vision, radar and laser location, and so on, but they can also “think” for themselves with the computers they incorporate. Capitalism is therefore distorting and diverting a very large part of technological potential away from the satisfying of human needs.

Paramount amongst those needs, once nourishment and health have been obtained, is that of freedom. But this is precisely what capitalism will not and can not provide, since it is only through restriction, repression and deception that the ruling class is able to continue to exploit the labour of the great majority of the population. As a substitute for freedom, capitalism offers commodities—or at least the chance to earn them—an ever-increasing mass and diversity of gadgets and thrills and sweets.

Socialism Now

The sort of socialist society that has become possible with these developments is already a very different one from that which was feasible in Marx’s day. But, also, the urgent necessity of removing capitalism before it removes us has become far more pressing.

The overall effect of the technological. developments of .the last hundred years, and particularly of the last fifty years, has been the increased potential for flexibility and freedom. Although centralised world-wide planning of production and distribution has become more and more possible with the evolution of electronic and satellite communication systems and the information-handling capabilities of computers, it has, at the same time, become less and less necessary or desirable.

There are bound to be democratic decisions taken about certain aspects of production and distribution from time to time, at local, regional, continental and even global level. But, for the great mass of adjustments and controls, ordinary channels of supply arid demand (real demand) will provide the most flexible and responsive basic system for regulating socialist society’s production and distribution. The almost infinitely complex network of manufacturers, growers, distributors and suppliers will, however, need well-organised communication and co-operation amongst themselves, as well as ready access to a richness of information about research, designs, methods, output, capacity, local preferences, etc. etc., which is simply impossible in capitalism.

The electronic stock control systems now in use in many major stores and the computer-controlled warehousing gradually being installed by large distributors already permit the constant monitoring of consumption of goods to be carried on, future demand to be predicted within quite fine limits and automatic, and almost instantaneous, re-ordering to be carried out. However, the anarchy of the market, the restricted and biased consumption enforced by the money qualification, and the jealous guarding and suppression of information carried on by nation states and almost every type of capitalist company that exists make it impossible to realise the enormous social benefits that could be derived from this information revolution.

Modern information systems make it feasible for anyone, anywhere in the world, who has access to a telephone-linked computer to find out all the specifications and quantities of goods or services that are available or in demand. Instead, today, thousands of programmer hours a year are being devoted to devising blocks to prevent such information being accessed.

In the post-capitalist world it is this greatly enhanced information network which will replace and supersede the market and the price mechanism. The immense volume of information about the daily facts and figures of all production, distribution and services which is in the possession of the working class—and which is today barely used, except to total output figures and compile balance sheets—will be accorded its true value in socialist society as the data for conscious social control of the means of life by every member of society. “Democratic control” will be far more than a matter of voting when contentious issues arise. It will be the continual exercise of informed individual power in the co-operative processes of sustaining and enhancing social life.

Ron Cook

The above article is the text of the Conference Lecture delivered at the Annual Conference of the Socialist Party in March 1989.