Bazaar (1938)

 Party News from the November 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Bazaar will be held in December in aid of Party funds. We are to-day spending more money on propaganda and the distribution of literature than ever before and in order to meet the demands on Party funds we aim at increasing the sum raised last year.

Start sending in your gifts immediately. Having seen last year’s bazaar you know the kind of thing that is needed. If you cannot send in goods, money is an acceptable gift. Branches are asked to co-operate by appointing a member (or members) to organise the collection of suitable articles from members and sympathisers.

Time is short, but with the right effort we can surpass the sum raised last year.

Bazaar Committee.

SPGB Meetings (1938)

Party News from the November 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

Answers to Correspondents: Trade Union Action and Political Action (1938)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trade Union Action and Political Action

A correspondent (R. J., Spalding) asks the following question: —

When the Trade Unions approach employers with demands for, say, increased pay, longer holidays, shorter hours, improved pension arrangements, you support their efforts. When, to supplement that approach, they take parliamentary action, either by trying to influence M.P.s of all parties, or through their representatives (invariably in the Labour Party) I gather that it is your policy to oppose them.

Please define the point at which your support for working-class efforts at improved conditions under capitalism ceases, and say how I, as a Trade Union secretary, can justify this attitude to my own members if I accept your point of view.

The Railway Clerks’ Association has done quite a lot for its members at one time or another by parliamentary means. For instance, only during February this year action was taken through Labour members . . . . .  who, by threatening to block the L.N E. Railway’s General Powers Bill, to draw attention to the lack of a proper Superannuation Fund on the L.N.E., were successful in forcing the Company to begin negotiations, that have every appearance of being satisfactory. Again, through action in Parliament, a schedule was included in the Railway Grouping Bill, which had the effect of preventing wholesale dismissals. This action was definitely of benefit to the workers, including myself, concerned.

Reply.

In order to clear the way for our reply it is necessary to correct one statement in our correspondent’s question. He says that when trade unions support the candidature of Members of Parliament they are “invariably in the Labour Party.” Though generally true of Great Britain, it is not invariably so. The National Union of Teachers, for example, has candidates in the other parties also. Going outside this country we see the American unions openly bargaining to support candidates, irrespective of their party.

The next point to notice is, that until Socialists become a majority of the electorates, a man can only become a Member of Parliament by standing for capitalism; while promising at the same time to press for certain reforms. If, therefore, a miners’ union or railwaymen’s union finances a successful Parliamentary candidature, it means helping to delude the workers into the belief that it is in their interest to reform capitalism instead of abolishing it. Similarly, what our correspondent calls “trying to influence M.P.s of all parties” means, in fact, striking a bargain with them. M.P.s want votes, and that is the only kind of “influence” they are interested in. The union, therefore, goes to the M.P. and offers—even if it is not put so bluntly as this, both parties know what is meant—to provide votes in the constituency in exchange for support in the House of Commons. In America the bargaining is quite openly admitted and defended by the unions.

What is the attitude of the Socialist to these practices? What attitude can it be except opposition? The Socialist holds, and preaches to the workers, that capitalism must be abolished, not reformed, and that the abolition can only be achieved by the conscious action of the workers organised together on a Socialist basis. How could a Socialist at one and the same time teach these elementary Socialist truths and make nonsense of them by helping to return to Parliament men whose mandate is to retain capitalism and reform it? ;

There are other aspects also to be considered, The achievement of Socialism requires that the workers should organise together on the basis of recognising that they have a common class interest against the capitalists. On no account can Socialists foster sectional rivalries among the workers. But when the Railwaymen try to get the support of M.P.s of all parties in the House of Commons, it frequently means, in fact, helping the Railway Companies to resist the encroachment of the road transport industry, and hoping, in return, to get some concessions from the M.P.s who represent Railway Company interests. Thus it divides the working class instead of uniting them. In the long run the class interest of the workers is more important, even to the sections which hope to gain small concessions by taking action on their own.

Also it should be remembered that when the capitalists feel that something vital to them as a class is at stake, all the Parliamentary lobbying and Labour candidatures count for nothing at all. A case in point was the 1927 Trade Union Act. The Baldwin Government wanted the Act and got it without paying the slightest attention to the opposition demands. In other words, if the united trade union movement cannot get something out of the employing class it is an illusion to think that political "influence” in the House of Commons will make any difference.

Lastly, it should not be forgotten that the final aim of the Labour Party is to get into office. When it does, that is when it takes on the administration of capitalism, the trade unions find themselves face to face with a Government of the people it had been supporting, only to discover, as did the miners in 1924, that the Labour Government tells them not to make “embarrassing” demands. Or it finds, as did the railwaymen, that the Labour Government is prepared to use Emergency Powers against strikers.

Workers should not forget, too, that after giving their support to the Labour Party in order to get petty concessions they found that Party in 1914 urging them into the trenches in capitalism’s war.

The outcome of it all is that many workers in their disappointment jump to the conclusion that a Labour Government is even worse than a Tory Government, and this enables Tories or Fascists, or some other supporters of capitalism, to gain adherents.

The time to avoid these evils is right at the start, and the way is to stick to Socialist political action, even if it appears to involve occasionally some loss of a minor advantage to some section of the workers.

Ed. Comm.

Answers to Correspondents: The Trade Union Political Levy (1938)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Trade Union Political Levy

A correspondent (R. J., Spalding), who is a trade union branch secretary, says that he “strongly criticises the Labour Party from the Socialist point of view,” and is in doubt whether or not he ought to go on paying the political levy to his union. The money, he says, “ is at present utilised mainly to support such of our colleagues as have entered Parliament as Labour Members, in general parliamentary action and to provide loans to local parties in accordance with the decisions of local branch members; again almost exclusively the Labour Party benefits.”

He goes on to suggest two alternative courses of action, either not to pay the levy, or, alternatively, pay it but oppose its use to support the Labour Party.

The S.P.G.B.’s view is that the levy should not be paid, because only in that way can the Socialist’s opposition to reformist political parties be made clear and unambiguous. 

Ed. Comm.

Answers to Correspondents: The Busmen’s Problem : A Correction (1938)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Busmen’s Problem : A Correction

Our attention has been drawn by Mr. F. Snelling, National Officer of the National Passenger Workers’ Union, to a misstatement in the article which appeared in the August The Socialist Standard under the title “The Busmen’s Problem.” The statement referred to was as follows : — 

“Following the strike, an enquiry was held by the union into the activities of certain of the more prominent members of the section, with the consequence that a number of the leading rank and file members were suspended from office and others expelled from the union. The suspensions and expulsions were subsequently endorsed by the 1937 Biennial Conference of the T. & G.W.U.”

Mr. Snelling informs us that the decision to suspend and expel members was not taken until after the 1937 Biennial Conference, and although the enquiry was held and completed before the end of the Conference, no statement was before the Conference on the result of the enquiry.

The Committee of Inquiry which was set up issued an interim report which made no reference to the suspensions and expulsions. This was the report that was accepted by the Conference.

W. E. W. & F. W. J.

The Prison Riots (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a world full of desperately eager advertising men, the prisons are notable for their desire to avoid publicity. In the limelight, they are positively uncomfortable; the recent demonstrations by the prisoners, attracting all the news media, have caused them a lot of embarrassment.

Responsibility for the demonstrations was claimed by an organisation going under the ambitious name of Preservation of the Rights of Prisoners (PROP). The first protests came in the form of sit-downs by men on remand. The Home Office advised the prisons to play this one cool; the demonstrations never got out of hand and it was deemed safe enough to allow some minor improvements in the remand men’s conditions. The next stage was the demonstrations by convicted prisoners. It seemed the same cool policy might have been applied, except that the prison officers reacted against the official “soft” line. They too got their publicity and Home Secretary Carr could hardly refuse to back them. Anyone who now breaks prison rules (in other words anyone who takes part in a demonstration inside) will be punished. PROP huffed and puffed and threatened to step up their campaign but the punishments went ahead with some men losing as much as a year’s remission, which amounts to being sentenced to another year in gaol. As PROP contemplates its next move and tries to deal with its own internal revolt, the prisons are very likely praying that for a while they will be out of the headlines.

Crisis

The demonstrations were a stage in the long-standing state of crisis in British prisons. To begin with they are desperately overcrowded, in spite of all the official attempts to reduce their population. Overcrowding can mean three men locked up in a room designed for only one, for twenty-three hours a day. The tensions built up among prisoners in an overcrowded prison are also felt by the warders — and under tension they are unlikely to handle a demonstration with much delicacy or sympathy.

In 1969 the government announced a big programme of building new prisons and renovating the old ones. Holloway, for example, is now slowly being replaced by a new prison which is being built on its existing site. The plans for this new prison impressed, not to say excited, many penal reformers but disappointed many others who think that most of the tragic women who get sent to prison should really be in hospital. In many ways the building plans have been overtaken by the rise in prison population and by the increased emphasis on security—on stopping the prisoners escaping—which came after the Mountbatten Report of 1968.

Mountbatten, one of the blue-blooded war heroes and dirty-work performers of British capitalism, was put to investigating prison security after George Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs. This was only the latest in a series of escapes by men like train-robber Charles Wilson and gunman John McVicar, who had earned himself a number of dramatic titles like the Most Wanted Crook in England. As a result of Mountbatten great cliffs of wire were erected within the outer brick walls, backed up with more sophisticated devices like closed circuit TV and geophonic zones.

The report recommended that prisoners should be graded according to the necessity of preventing their escape and that those in the top Category A—men like Blake, Wilson, McVicar—should be concentrated in a single, fortress-like prison on the Isle of Wight. Such a prison would have been a place of tremendous tensions, which was the main reason for the government rejecting the idea in favour of dispersing some of the Category A men among those of a lower category.

Empires

Dispersal has produced tensions of its own, with the warders complaining that some of the “hard nuts” have terrorised other prisoners into supporting their empires of prison rackets. In fact this has nothing to do with the dispersal policy; the prisons have always had their underworld and the barons are well-established figures who operate although their identity is well known to the prison authorities. It is very often only by such compromises and “blind-eye” tactics that prisons are able to be run.

As the demonstrations spread and grew, with men sitting it out on the roof at Parkhurst and other places, and as the warders’ anger mounted, the government were heard to regret that the prisoners were fomenting an emergency which was delaying the “rehabilitation” which is the prisons’ proper work. Leaving aside for the moment what they mean by “rehabilitation”, it should be said that the official picture of a prison, where work to rehabilitate the prisoners is busily going on all the time, is one which would not be recognised by anyone who had spent any time inside the places. In prison people who are sick—physically, mentally, socially—are left to while away long stretches of their life until early one morning they are pushed out of the gate (it is officially known as “release”) into the unwelcoming world outside.

PROP burst onto the tense, overcrowded prison scene a few months ago, with a Charter of Prisoners’ Rights running to several sheets of foolscap. At first the organisation declared itself to be exclusively in the hands of ex-prisoners (anyone who has not been inside can be at best an associate member) but after recent events it would be no surprise to see PROP subjected to the familiar process of being infiltrated, then taken over, by elements whose interest in prisoners’ rights is at best passing.

Most of the “rights” demanded by PROP would need too large an adjustment in the assumptions of the prison institution to have much of a chance of being realised. This is illustrated by the example of one of the demands which has in fact in some cases been granted — the “right” to have a prisoners’ representative on the managing board of the prison. In quite a few places this has happened but with little effect apart from allowing the authorities to claim that the inmates have a say in running the prison.

Rules

The important fact which PROP is trying to ignore is that capitalism is a system which gives few rights even to its “free” people, so that prisoners have even fewer. Those they do have often exist more in theory than in reality; the Prison Rules exist to define and protect certain rights but the particular nature of the prison institution can ensure that they are not applied. One rule says that food should be varied, well cooked, nutritious and so on, as if the prison were a swell hotel. People who have been inside know the truth about that.

Prison is a complete, restrictive institution, with all that implies. When a person is gaoled he can be said to lose his self-awareness; he is stripped of most of the identity symbols which even life as a worker under capitalism allows him and he is degraded to the level of a surname and a number. His life is entirely organised to meet the demands of the institution and he is under great pressure not to disrupt the institution by resisting those demands. Ironically, some of the most hardened prisoners surrender most completely; they are “model prisoners” who serve their time without causing any trouble. One of the warders at Albany prison was reported as describing a Kray as one of these prisoners—”a proper toff” he called him and from such lips there can be no higher praise.

But prisons exist for punishment (indeed the official line is that the confinement is itself punishment enough and that once through the gates there should be no more) which means that there must be continual conflict between the punished and the punishers. The punished—the prisoners—react defensively to the demands of the institution. Notably, they fashion their own code of conduct, what is sometimes called their own culture, by which they can unite to ease the problems of their confinement. Many of them see themselves as being outcasts and the unity of their code helps them to cling to some self-esteem by rejecting their rejecters. Together they can regard the rest with an aggressive cynicism.

Rehabilitation

Since the overwhelming majority of what are called offences are committed against property, it follows that most of the people in prison are there because in some way or another they have broken the property laws of capitalism by stealing something. Prisons developed almost by accident, as places where convicts were held before being transported, but then the theory was that they could be places where behaviour and attitudes might be changed, where people could be “rehabilitated” to lives in keeping with the inequalities of capitalism.

Pentonville, which was opened in 1842, was one of the first to be run on this theory. The prisoners were confined to their cells for their entire sentence; association with other prisoners was kept to the irreducible minimum and talking absolutely forbidden. In the solicitude of their cells, it was presumed, the inmates would reflect upon their past life and emerge determined to change. It is hardly necessary to add that this experiment was religiously inspired, on the theory enforced meditation would bring the prisoner to religion. What it frequently did was to drive them mad.

Nevertheless, in spite of all its setbacks, mainly due to all current theories being overwhelmed by facts, the idea of reform and rehabilitation has hung on, sprouting anew in a variety of forms. Coldingley prison is one of the latest examples, the pride of the Home Office. This is a prison run like a modern factory, with the overriding object of teaching the prisoners the disciplines and repressions of getting up and going to work, which are accepted and absorbed by most of the workers on the other side of the walls. Prison Rule No. 1 says that “the purpose of the training and treatment of convicted prisoners shall be to encourage and assist them to lead a good and useful life” and it is a fact that few of the prisoners would ask for more than that. They too want to conform to the ambitions of the prison system, to be drawn in at one end as a criminal and spat out at the other as a docile, conforming, wage-earning, mortgage-paying, member of the working class. That is what is really meant by “rehabilitation”.

Warders

The people who are supposed to be actively engaged in this process are the prison officers, whose protests have been in the news. Here again, theory does not match with reality. The warders are not able to immunise themselves against the effects of the institution and many of them bear as many of its marks as do the prisoners. It is not so long ago that a new prison officer, on asking for instructions in his job, was likely to be told with a snarl “Do as I did, mister—find out for yourself”. Many of them take the job after a long time in the Forces, which as institutions bear many similarities to prisons; it is not overstating the case to say that they are often lost without the comfort  of  an  institution,  with  its  rigidity, its rules, its security. If “rehabilitation” were a possibility inside prison, men as committed to the institution as the warders are most unlikely to be able to do it.

In reality prisons, like so many of capitalism’s prized organisations, fail because they are based upon an ignorance of facts. Many prisoners are in gaol as simply another episode in a lifetime of social and personal crisis. They are victims of slumdom, of grinding poverty, of a human inability to cope with inhuman social pressures. People are interdependent to a great extent—they need each other for support, for security, for self-esteem, for simple existence. But capitalism’s demands at best distort human contact, at worst deny it altogether. In a social system based upon property rights, we do not relate to one another as human beings but as other cogs in the machinery of profit production, as fellow rats in the mindless, destructive race.

Most workers cope with these demands by dint of absorbing a lot of punishment and adapting to some crippling personality damage. After a lifetime of repressed misery they go unfulfilled to their graves. A minority deal with the pressures by reacting; however unconsciously, they protest—take drugs, commit crimes, go mad. Somewhere along this line the discipline machinery of capitalism is liable to pick them up and give them “treatment”, which as like as not will be a spell in prison.

The basic point is that capitalism cannot deal with its problem of crime any more than it can with bad housing, mental sickness, war, destitution. These are all part of one great problem, which can be solved only by a conscious action to end the society which imprisons us all.

Ivan

Unemployment – profits first! (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The first thing to note about unemployment is that it is a working class problem. A problem which only afflicts those who normally function as wage workers or employees.

The permanent non-producing existence of the capitalist class is not regarded as unemployment. They are a class which either privately, or through the State, function as an exploiting class. Their dominance over the means of production gives them a privileged position as wealth controllers, they have access to surplus value, and since as a class they are employers they never suffer from unemployment.

For unemployment to arise and be regarded as a dire social problem, a class must exist in society whose condition of life is mean and degrading. To be able to sell their working abilities for wages, to find an employer who will harness them like beasts of burden to his machinery of production, so that their lives may be spent producing wealth they do not own, is far preferable to being unused in a state of forced idleness.

Further, this alienated and dehumanised mode of existence must be their only means of gaining a livelihood. Such a class must depend on its income from wages or salaries, must have no property that would relieve them of the need to toil—no means of living save through prostituting their physical and mental energies on the labour market as employees.

Such a class exists all over the world. They are the working class.

Ideally they should be so conditioned to their slave position in life as to aspire only to demanding “the right to work”. To deny the slave his toil and his pittance is the last straw, the final insult. Capitalism for all its ills and woes can be tolerated with the occasional groan so long as there is work. Deny him his humanity. Deny him his personality. Deny him his freedom. This he can accept. But to deny him work is to affront him. He will produce all the wonders of modern science and technology. He will fashion and erect the most lavish hotels and luxury mansions, design and produce the most expensive jewellery and beautiful yachts, fine clothing and costly furs, wonderful ocean liners and a vast variety of delicate foods, and he will be content to live in squalid slums, wear inferior clothing, and eat adulterated food while “bargaining” only over the price at which he sells himself.

He will make do with the sham, the shoddy and the make-believe, so long as he is permitted to work. Work itself comes to equate with employment. And employment comes to equate with life.

This is the background against which unemployment must be understood. If unemployment means hardship, misery and deprivation, it is because poverty and insecurity are always with the worker.

Work is vital to the class of employees, not because they are docile, but because they depend upon wages to live. Their behaviour is determined by their position in the private property relationships of capitalism. They accept this position from want of an understanding of any alternative.

With this in mind, let us look at the current situation.

Shaking Out

Just a year ago the Sunday Times Business News published a report from Nicholas Faith. Unemployment was then 929,000 and it was thought “the gloom is not a temporary one”. It was pointed out that the present decline started in the mid-1960s, under the Labour government. The present government hoped for another upward turn, but it was feared that the investments boom of the 1960s was not sufficient to produce a big enough growth rate, i.e. more than 3 per cent, to take up the slack. The report blamed decades of neglect of capital stock for the low productivity rise, not (be it noted) the laziness of the workers. Capitalism is a system full of contradictions. Not least of its absurdities is the fact that those who run this system are forever screaming about insufficient growth rate, while at the same time nearly a million workers (in Britain alone) are thrown on the scrap heap and industrial resources grossly underused. All this while millions live in slums and many more millions in other countries starve.

In September 1971 Coventry had over 4 per cent unemployed; the figure still stood at 4.4 per cent in July 1972. For forty years Coventry was a boom town, with unemployment below the national average. The average for Great Britain in July was 3.6 per cent. The actual figure for the whole of Britain (early September 1972) was 930,123. Over a thousand more than a year ago, and the highest August figure for 33 years.

In Faith’s report the great “shake out” of 1966/67 is referred to. It is stated that the whole geography of post-war unemployment altered from that period and that “the whole of England outside the South East is now, by historic standards, a depressed area”. The Labour government was of course in power when the “shake out” began. It was in fact Wilson as Prime Minister who coined the phrase “shake out” in arguing that 400,000 was an “acceptable level” of unemployment.

The nationalised industries have been among the worst casualties. It will be recalled that the Labour Party sold nationalisation to the working class as a cure for various social problems, among them profiteering and unemployment.

Now, those mines and rail services which are unprofitable are ruthlessly closed. The process of “shaking out” many tens of thousands of miners and railway workers was at full tilt during Wilson’s Labour government. In Durham for example, miners have been redundant for ten years or more and “retired” whilst still unemployed, and therefore no longer figure in the unemployment statistics.

The changing pattern seems to indicate, according to the Sunday Times, a long-term change in the actual number employed, with unskilled workers over 40 years of age remaining virtually unemployable until they retire. There are 120,000 in this category.

Hopes Deferred

The National Institute for Economic and Social Research was said to be vaguely looking to 1973 and entry into the Common Market, for an investment boom. How vaguely might be seen from the fact that all the major European countries have unemployment problems of their own, with figures up on last year. They too could do with an “investment boom”. Unemployment is also up in the United States over last year, standing at 4,697,000 in April 1972, an increase of 203,000. Russia discreetly refrains from publishing any figures.

Those workers who trusted capitalism and thought they had secure jobs for life, among them the Upper Clyde shipworkers, those at Rolls Royce and in the mining and railway industries, not to mention the docks and many others, have been sadly disillusioned. Capitalism defies all attempts to control it. The Keyensian disciples of the Labour and Tory parties have had to stand powerlessly aside while the tidal wave of depression rises. All they are able to do is advocate more of the same futile policies and hope for the best.

Ramsey MacDonald in 1929/31 had his “economic blizzard”. Attlee did not plan the half-million unemployed of 1947. Wilson was “blown off course” with unemployment averaging over 600,000 during his last year of power.

The so called extreme “left” can demand nothing better than more work, better leadership, reforms and nationalisation. All the same old fallacies they were trotting out forty years ago. The Trotskyists and the “Communist” Party have helped spread the lie that the Labour Party is better for the workers than the Tories, and fostered the illusion that State capitalism can solve unemployment and other working-class problems.

Unemployment has always been a feature of capitalism. An industrial reserve army is the capitalists’ ultimate weapon against wage demands.

When wages reach a level where machinery becomes a better investment, the composition of capital will tend to favour the machine over the worker. Also, intensified world competition for markets produces the same result, namely relatively fewer workers to increasing technology. No major capitalist country can afford to lag too far behind the techniques employed by the fastest. This is the significance of what the Sunday Times calls “decades of neglect” of capital stock.

That’s What it’s All About

Capitalism inevitably creates situations where it chokes on its own surplus products, simply because of its market economy. Expanding industry means that ever wider markets must be found as profitable outlets for the sale of goods. As the whole world is drawn more and more into the orbit of capitalism, so the number of rivals grows and a stage is reached where it is no longer profitable to maintain production of goods which cannot be sold. The costly plant of modern industry demands the mass market. When markets begin to contract or fall to rivals, then unemployment starts to reappear.

The Daily Telegraph (1 October 1971) put it in a nutshell:

“Industry does not function, as some seem to think, to provide jobs. It functions to make profits. And if profits are unduly low as they have been now for at least five years the inevitable result is low investment. New finance becomes hard to get, adaptation and renewal slow down and the decline of jobs in the old industries remains unmatched by a growth of jobs in new industries. No priority, therefore, should rank higher than the restoration of British industry to a proper level of profitability.”

Capitalism can have no higher priority than profits.

The recurring cycle of boom and depression, at ever higher levels of technology, demonstrates more than anything the total inability of capitalism to harness its productive resources to the satisfaction of human needs. It further proves the complete obsolescence of the market economy.

What is really redundant, in terms of social welfare and human happiness, is the private and state ownership of the means of production.

Harry Baldwin

How much do strikes achieve? (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The view is held by some trade unionists and by so-called militant organisations that militancy is the key that opens all doors for the working class. The argument is deceptively simple: as strikes can gain wage increases more and larger strikes will gain more increases, seemingly without limit. How far is this true? There is plenty of past and current evidence though, as will be seen, some of it is open to misinterpretation. When Marx wrote about this more than a century ago he did not share the “militant” view about the extent to which trade-union pressure could raise wages. In his Value, Price and Profit for example (Chapters IV and XIV) and in Wage-Labour and Capital (p. 35 in the Whitehead edition) he took a somewhat pessimistic line based on his understanding of how capitalism works. While urging resistance to the efforts of employers to depress wages he thought it was largely a defensive struggle, with only occasional opportunities for the workers to secure “temporary improvement”. His view was that the times when the workers can hope to gain an improvement were when the capitalists were doing well, expanding production and accumulating capital. In the reverse phase of the “trade cycle”, with sales and profits falling and unemployment rising, he thought the workers could do little.

“The relations between the supply and demand of labour-power undergo perpetual change, and with them the market price of labour-power. If the supply overshoots the demand wages sink, although it might in such circumstances be necessary to test the real state of demand and supply by a strike, for example, or any other method.”

(To bring this into harmony with the present period of fast-rising prices it has to be remembered that though money wages do not now sink, a pay increase which does not keep up with the cost of living represents a fall of “real” wages, i.e. purchasing power.)

Nothing Gained

It will be noticed that Marx talked of “testing” the situation when trade is bad. The militants reject this. They think that if enough workers strike they can make big gains in spite of adverse conditions. As regards past experience the evidence is all against the militants’ case. Apart from 1921 and 1926, the record number of days lost through strikes in any year was in 1893, when the total was over 30 million. This included Lancashire cotton workers who were out for five months, and 400,000 miners. Both strikes failed and wages generally did not rise.

Another outstanding example was the ten years 1921-1930. Unemployment was high, trade was bad and prices were falling—in all by 30 per cent. In those years, which included the General Strike of 1926, the number of days lost by strikes and lockouts averaged 31 million a year, but the strikes completely failed to prevent wages also falling by about 30 per cent.

Discontent & Resistance

The question arises to what extent recent experience differs from the past. Various changes have taken place. There are many more trade unionists, though still only a minority of the workers, and workers on strike instead of depending entirely on their own resources and trade-union and benefit-society funds can now get Social Security payments for their families. British capitalism in the past six years has been in depression with unemployment at one point topping the million mark. And strikes have been building up, from 2,400,000 days lost in 1966 to 13,600,000 days in 1971 and a likely total of 20 or 21 million in 1972. The fact that strikes have become more numerous and last longer is not simply a reflection of workers’ discontent but is also a reflection of stronger and better-organised resistance by employers. It is a truism that the most successful strike is the one that never happens because when trade is brisk employers may yield to the mere threat of a strike interrupting production.

In recent years, with sales falling off, employers have taken a tougher line because they stand to lose less when trade is slack than when they have full order-books and are hard pressed to meet delivery dates. Also, as in engineering and the building industry where the recent strikes were not general, employers with strikes on their hands received financial help from the other employers.

Keeping Pace

What then has been the outcome of the big increase in strikes? On the basis of the rise of the cost of living and the estimated increase of wage rates (not including overtime and bonuses etc.) and of average earnings (including overtime and bonuses) it would seem that real wages have been rising at about 2 per cent a year since 1966; but some complications have to be taken into account. The first is that what matters is not gross pay but “take-home pay” after deduction of tax, and owing to the way this operates take-home pay increases by a smaller percentage than gross pay. If for example a single man on pay of about £25 obtained an increase of £5 a week (20 per cent) his increase of take-home pay would be just under 19 per cent (£4.10).

And owing to the rules governing family income supplements and free school meals it can happen that some workers can be worse off through a pay increase. For a married man with two children a pay increase of £2 from £28 to £30 a week would leave him 95p. a week worse off. (The Times, 8 September 1972).

It is obvious that the past six years, in spite of more strikes, has left the mass of workers in Britain doing little more than keep pace with prices.

Some Do Not

An enquiry by the Economic Research Council (Financial Times, 18 August 1972) indicated that between 1962 and 1970 average take-home pay did not even keep up with the cost of living, though some improvement may have been made since 1970. Another factor that should be borne in mind is that the past few years have seen a widespread tightening-up of jobs through labour-displacing productivity schemes linked with pay increases. Take-home pay in terms of purchasing power has certainly not fully reflected increased output.

Some confirmation of Marx’s general argument is given by a comparison of Germany and some other continental countries with Britain. While British capitalism has been in depression, production has been expanding fast in Germany—the condition in which Marx expected the workers to be able to increase wages. Though strikes in Germany have been much fewer than in Britain, in recent years real wages have risen much more in Germany. Indeed, according to a document submitted to the TUC (The Times, 5 October 1972): “In recent years Britain’s wage increases have been the lowest in Europe.”

Edgar Hardcastle

Quote [Property boom] (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

THE FOLLOWING IS PART OF THE INTRODUCTION TO A CIRCULAR ADVERTISING THE LONDON PROPERTY LETTER, SENT TO PROPERTY COMPANIES AND LANDLORDS IN OCTOBER THIS YEAR. THE LPL IS PUBLISHED BY STONEHART [!] PUBLICATIONS LTD., 2 JARROW ROAD, ROMFORD, ESSEX, AT AN ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION OF £9. THE EDITOR IS ROBERT TROOP, PROPERTY CORRESPONDENT OF THE “SUNDAY TIMES”.

For the first time since the early sixties it’s possible to make real money out of property. Both for the expert developer and for the small man who wants to get in now and produce a useful private income for himself.

Since the Tories returned to power:

1. House prices have boomed as never before, giving dealers a rising market to profit from. What’s more, loans for once are readily forthcoming.

2. Office development restrictions have been shot away. Birmingham has become a capital place to operate in. (Rents have gone up from £1 to £1.25 per s.f. in a year). And Leeds and Bristol are following fast.

3. Landlords have started to cash in on the new bedsitter boom.

4. Converting properties of every type to flats for sale has become a big business. The Government is exceedingly generous with improvement grants, which makes this operation very profitable.

5. Many other factors are benefiting property, not least inflation, which is making bricks-and-mortar a safer hedge than ever for the investor. And the biggest bonanza of all may well be our entry into Europe. Already British developers are active in Brussels and Paris, and there will be equal scope in catering for Continental firms needing office and industrial accommodation in the U.K.

Someone is going to make a killing out of all this, and it might as well be you. Thousands of investors did so in the last property boom — most of them were armed with the shrewd inside information provided by the London Property Letter.

Too many eggs (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

A huge surplus of unsaleable eggs has recently been causing much concern to producers in Australia and Britain. A few years ago in Great Britain it was recommended that 2 million laying hens be slaughtered in an effort to curtail egg production and to push prices up so as to stabilise profitability of egg production. Research has also been conducted into ascertaining whether eggs could be used in producing cosmetics. Now it is reported from Uruguay (Time magazine, 27 March 1972), that a huge surplus of eggs is causing a headache to the American government. This has led to the Senate Agriculture Committee passing an Act which would require each producer to slaughter a percentage of his hens, subject to the eggs selling below their cost of production for three consecutive months and only upon approval by two-thirds of the egg producers in a referendum. This is a good example how governments are forced by economic circumstances to repudiate a policy of non-intervention, or less intervention, which is what President Nixon promised. As did Heath when his Minister, John Davies declared that industrial lame ducks would be allowed to go to slaughter. The American Act amounts to a concerted and deliberate attempt to force up the price of eggs to avoid too many bankruptcies which might disrupt their egg industry too severely.

It might be thought that in a world where so many are undernourished, being able to produce so much of this particular kind of food is a benefit rather than a problem, especially in view of the dire warnings of certain ecologists that the world is facing a problem of over-population. But it is a problem simply because food is produced for sale, not because people need it. No sale means no profit and no profit means no production, no matter how desperate people are for food. Once this simple fact of life of capitalism is understood, it should be obvious that food surpluses which cannot be sold at a profitable price are a problem and that this can only be cured by cutting back on production. Even today there are a lot of neo-Malthusians who attribute many of the ills of the world to overpopulation, but who conveniently overlook the persistent overproduction of a large variety of foodstuffs which are very often wantonly destroyed simply because the capitalist system is not geared to handling surpluses. Again it must be repeated that only Socialism can realise the potential that is there for solving world problems, especially the problem of providing sufficient food for every man, woman and child on the Earth.

Spectator

East Europe “State Capitalist” says ex-bureaucrat (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Referring to Russia and Eastern Europe in a recent article in The Times, Dr. Ota Šik, a Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia under Dubcek now in exile in Switzerland, wrote: “The system has become state capitalist, or state monopolistic, not socialist” (October 4).

Šik joins the former Vice-President of Yugoslavia, Milovan Djilas, in being an ex-State-capitalist bureaucrat who has come to recognise the class character of the regime of which he was once a privileged member.

Šik is no Socialist, however. Quite the contrary. He is the leading theorist of “market socialism” and so a leading distorter of Marxian economics. An opponent of bureaucratic state capitalism, he advocates instead competition between independent enterprises run by “elected supervisory councils”, a kind of “workers-controlled capitalism”. Marx would have regarded such a system as absurd since he was well aware that Socialism necessarily involved the complete abolition of the market and its replacement by democratic planning solely for use.

All the same, Šik (admittedly somewhat confused) recognition of the state-capitalist nature of Russia and Eastern Europe is a step in the right direction, and a sign that there will be others still in these countries who realise this too.

North West Propaganda Tour (1972)

 Party News from the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

I'm presuming that Harry Young was the main speaker at all the meetings, both indoors and outdoors.  

"Sundays at 52, Clapham High Street (1972)

Party News from the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lectures, meetings and outdoor meetings (1972)

Party News from the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Where to buy the Socialist Standard (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

I don't usually make a point of posting the 'Where to buy the Socialist Standard' column on the blog, but I thought I would make an exception this time because of the fact there were seven listings alone for Aberdeen. And that was at a time when there wasn't even a SPGB group in the city listed in the Socialist Standard. Just a 'For Information' listing for Carole Duncan. Within the next 18 months there was a very active SPGB group in the city, mainly made up of students from Aberdeen University. According to Barltrop's book, The Monument, a number of them eventually broke from the Party in the mid-70s to form the Libertarian Communism Group.