The Changing Public House (1954)

From the November 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom drank twelve and a half gallons of beer, statistically speaking. In addition, we disposed of a pint and a half of spirits and a quart of wine each. The only thing to be said in our favour is that our fathers, 60 years ago, drank nearly three times as much on paper and, the child population being larger then, probably four times as much in practice.

Figures are hardly needed to show that people drink less nowadays. A drunk in the street or a man with a grog-blossom is a rare sight; the pubs are empty—not literally, of course, but certainly by comparison with other, quite recent times. The local that was once the Pantheon of the neighbourhood, with knees-up in the bar, a Saturday night overflow on the pavement and a fight now and again, is now a comparatively quiet place where people drop in for a glass and not much more. And in the more newly built suburban areas, pubs generally are few and far between. Today in Britain there is roughly one public house to every 600 people: 50 years ago it was one to 350, and a century ago one to every 100-odd.

It might look as if the two centuries campaign against the horrors of drink has worn resistance down. In fact, there is probably less “temperance’’—the word should mean moderation, but has come to stand for a dogmatic extreme—less temperance today than there was in the 19th century, when its disciples wore blue ribbons and had every child sign the pledge whom they could lay their hands on. Most men and women drink, but not so much and not so often, and they do quite a lot of it at home. Those who visit pubs daily—ask for “the usual” and call the barmaid by her first name—are mainly older men. People under 40 go to pubs, but not as a habit. Their lives have different rhythms. That is what really has happened. Public houses and peoples’ drinking habits have changed: the real change has been in the pattern of social life, to which institutions and attitudes are shaped and fused.

The true significance of the public house is a communal one. Every well-knit community has its centres, places where people of all sorts go to do business, hear news, form opinions and enjoy one another’s company: the market place, the church and, since the Middle Ages in Britain, the inn. There have been and are others, like the coffee-house in the 18th century and the caff in our own generation, but each of them limited to particular social groups (the cafes in fact have a stratification of their own from arty haunts to good pull-ups for carmen). The pub accommodates many groups. Public bar, saloon, private bar and lounge, separate only by wooden partitions, are distinct milieus under the same roof.

The fact of modern counter-attractions to public houses is obvious. Fifty years ago there were no pictures, no radio, no speedways and so on; a good many people nowadays drink bottled beer at home while they watch the television. Something more than mere counter-attraction has caused the decline in public house life, however. It is worth remembering that music halls, the great entertainment at the beginning of the centuty, were also places for drinking. Their successors, the cinemas, have no facilities for it.

A great deal of everyday social activity has taken place in pubs. Workmen ate and were paid in them— farther back, trade unions and friendly societies met in them. Shopkeepers and small businessmen went to private bars for transactions. Less obvious things, too: not so many years ago, housewives took bowls of vegetables into the locals and sat shelling peas or peeling potatoes with glasses of stout beside them. Public houses had their own football teams, with a pitch behind the premises and several hundred habituees to give support (the writer played for one, and a very good team it was). There are not many such teams now, simply because few pubs can raise them from the regulars.

Industrial and political developments have eliminated much of this activity. There usually is a canteen wherever more than a few people are employed, and a wages office as well. The late 19th-century war between the Conservative brewers and the temperance Liberals linked anti-Conservatism with disapproval of drink; the growing Labour movement set up Trades Halls and Committee Rooms, taking the meetings out of the pubs. The small tradesmen, forced into political participation by the near omnipotence of combines and multiple shops, met in Conservative Clubs instead of public houses. Both ways, political parties helped to clear the bars. It is true also that the quality and amenities of everyday life have altered since those days when the pub exuded, to quote Trevelyan, “ its promise of warmth and welcome on to the wet inhospitable street.”

More than anything, however, there has been a falling-off in communal living and thinking. In modern industrial society, any sort of local community is exceptional. Apart from the family, which has disintegrated visibly in this century, and such exceptional cases as racial and political minorities, the only coherent groups are occupational and technical ones; possibly that is why the cafe, the small-group meeting place, flourishes now instead of the pub. The division of labour and the growth of cities where functions must largely be delegated and depersonalized have taken away much of the basis for communal activity. Law and order, education, charitableness, recreation, all are in the hands of professional specialists. The variety of experience that urban civilization apparently offers is too often variety only of vicarious experience. A man who says he is keen on sport nowadays is quite likely to mean that he does the pools or watches all the Arsenal’s home matches.

One of the best literary pictures of the status of the pub in pre-urban communities is contained in George Eliot’s “Silas Marner.” Marner’s appearance in the “Rainbow” is dramatic because he has never been there before, and so—nothing else is needed—lived in isolation. Discovering the theft of his gold, there is nowhere else to announce it but in the inn. The incident is the real climax of the story, the point where the recluse enters and is accepted by the community, and the inn is its symbol. Nowadays, of course, he would go to the police station.

Certainly some unpleasant things have largely disappeared from social life with the decrease in drinking. Sottishness has not much charm; nor has the sight of children dawdling for hours on public-house doorsteps while their parents are inside. The fading of these unedifying spectacles is usually put down to a change in peoples’ outlook, as if outlook meant a kind of communal revelation. It is true that social attitudes about drinking have changed, but the change is effect, not cause. Given the growth of town life, the diminished need for community centres, and a hundred and one facilities for solving the “problem’’ of leisure, there is less drinking in public houses: consequently there are fewer drunkards and waiting children and, in time, a feeling that there is actually something disgraceful about both. Go to a village where life is still centred in the pub, and you will find the same attitude in reverse—i.e., that the amenities of town life are not just frivolous but wicked too. In this connection, it is worth mentioning that much of the anti-drink propaganda of a century or two ago was directed not against public houses but against gin shops. Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” and “Beer Alley” series, commonly supposed to depict the horrors of drink, in fact aimed to show that beer was better in every way than gin.

The modern public house is more and more a shop where beer is sold, with perhaps some provision for amusement. The only places, apart from rural areas, where it retains something of its former character, are where there is a single industry and so a community is formed by an occupational group—docklands, shipbuilding, mill and mining towns and so on. In those areas the pub has not changed very much, even in its architecture, fittings and compartments—figured glass, rococo partitions, horsehair settees and sporting prints, in contrast with the aseptic, tiles-and-chromium, one- or two-room buildings of the modern metropolis and its suburbs.

Our society is less and less a community, more and more an agglomeration of individuals. Reference has already been made to the handing-over of former communal functions to trained, authority-bearing specialists: the more important point is that responsibility has been handed over too. It is not only that impersonal powers manage, instruct, entertain and generally provide for people—the more vital aspect is that people no longer have much to do in any of those matters. That is why a happening like a flood or a railway disaster makes news by bringing out men and women spontaneously to help, nurse and clothe the victims: ordinarily those are services provided by institutions. The war produced a good deal of such communality and showed that, far from being dead, it is always ready to come through the surface of urban civilization.

The public house is what its name implies—a house for the publicum, the community; and a community is no more to be found in it than a fifty-shilling suit in the Fifty Shilling Tailors’. Is that a bad thing? It is nice to feel superior and think that people nowadays have better things to do than go to pubs; balance the rise of aspirin-taking against the fall of beer-drinking, and you may wonder what the better things are. The pub in itself does not matter very much, but the social circumstances which have changed its character do. Historians of the future will record ours as an era of amenity and progress. Perhaps, too, they will record it as the age of insecurity, personal as well as economic: an age of crowded but lonely people, knowing little communal obligation or sanction for behaviour. Advice bureaux, help pages, marriage guidance councils, huge unseen audiences for the opinions on everything of petty oracles . . .  all these—and the aspirin-bottles—are the true monuments to today.

Robert Barltrop

Capitalism in Australia (1974)

From the July 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the end of the second world war two-and-a-half million workers from Europe, including a million from Britain, have gone to Australia. The majority go in the hope that they are going to make a fresh start and are leaving their problems behind them. They have been attracted by advertizing. (One slogan declares “We are making Australia a better place to live in”.) The emigrants are going there to work. To be more accurate they will be “getting a living”, but as they will be doing the bidding of some employer they are not free men and women.

Australia is a one-country Island-Continent. Its recorded history did not start until 1788 when the first Europeans arrived. Prior to that this huge land mass was an unknown land and, when discovered, was inhabited only by a handful of Aborigines. It was occupied without opposition, never knew feudalism, and has not known revolution or civil war. The early settlers “brought” capitalism with them and set in motion all the paraphernalia. The capitalist system was therefore imported into Australia.

Australia has vast prairies, formidable deserts, rich grazing lands, plentiful minerals, beautiful beaches. Its population has grown to 13,000,000, most of whom live in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra and small towns along the east coast. With Darwin, Adelaide and Perth, these cities are the major centres of commerce. World capitalism has booms and slumps, and Australia in its short history has experienced both. In the 19th century there were two slumps, in 1842 and 1892, but recovery was stimulated each time because of gold discoveries. Gold rushes always attract fresh emigrants with tradesmen, shopkeepers and so forth in their wake. By the turn of the century, capitalist development was again on the upgrade. After the first world war there was a boom which encouraged still more migrants but it was short-lived, for Australia did not escape the effects of the 1929 world depression. The older generation of the working class remember those years: the unemployment, the Labour Exchanges and the grinding poverty.

Today, Australia is called an “Awakening Giant”. It presents itself as an expanding capitalist country making the most of the “Winds of Change”. Its agricultural and mineral wealth are being exploited to the full. Exports in minerals alone (iron ore, zinc, lead, coal, copper) bring in millions of dollars annually. Vast amounts of capital, Australian and foreign, is invested to develop industry of every kind. The cities of Sydney and Melbourne with their teeming freeways, their busy dock areas and airports, their skyscraper office blocks, are the outward symbols of Australian capitalism. At the same time they testify where some of the surplus-value extracted by the exploitation of the working class has gone.

Propagandists describe Australia today as “the country of the future”, "young and vigorous”, and so on. But such words are idle chatter as far as workers are concerned. In Australia, as in all capitalist countries, the working class does not share in profits: those go to the capitalist class, the owners. During the boom period in Australia, for the capitalist it means full order-books, profit and prosperity. For the working class it means “full employment” and “regular wages” — which means rushing to and from work and the usual struggle to make ends meet.

In Australia wages appear to be high, but appearances are deceptive. The workers have to fight to maintain their wage levels in relation to increasing prices. A recent report in the Daily Mail said (9 May 1974):

A new campaign is being launched to lure Britons to well paid jobs in Australia. Miners will be offered about £100 per week and Electrical Fitters about £60 per week. The booming Kalgoorlie gold and nickel mines are hoping to take on 400 Britons in the next three years.

Like every other commodity, the price for labour-power fluctuates around its value according to supply and demand. There is an urgent demand for miners but in other trades £50 a week would be considered average. A trip around the shopping precincts, the big stores and the car showrooms makes clear the workers have access to little when the prices of goods are considered. Much in evidence are signs advertizing Easy Terms, Weekly Accounts and “Lay- By”, in other words workers have to mortgage their wages to get things they need. If they were receiving half as much as the propagandists imply, none of these tricks would have to be employed. In addition to food, clothing and the running of a car to get them to work, are their mortgages and rents. Many workers live out their lives in blocks of flats and others in Commission (Council) Houses. It is true they have access to the beautiful beaches and can go surfing or swimming. Sport is encouraged and Australian Rules football and cricket are popular, but what fundamental difference is there between the lives of the workers of Australia and those in Europe or USA? In the final analysis there is no difference. In the article in the Daily Mail appeared also the words of an Australian Government spokesman: “The money for Miners is good but it’s bloody hard work”.

About 2¼ million are organized in the trade-union movement; strikes are quite frequent. There is “National Arbitration Machinery” to cover the whole country in the event of strikes overlapping from one State to another. Each State has its own Industrial Tribune to intervene in strikes, make binding agreements and fix minimum wage rates. These bodies pretend the class struggle does not exist and are anti-working class as they uphold the whole structure of the wages system. Their existence and functions will end when the wages system itself is abolished by a Socialist working class.

To go to the polling booth in Australia is compulsory, but workers do not show much interest in politics. This is probably the result of conditions since the war for the younger generation especially. For 23 years there was a coalition Government of Liberals (read Tories) and Country Party but a year ago this was replaced by the Australian Labour Party. Not that it will make any difference. All are reformist parties. They act in the interest of the capitalist class, and the working class will have to learn this.

A small Socialist Party of Australia was formed nearly fifty years ago and groups exist in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. These groups are endeavouring, as do Socialists everywhere, to gain the ear of their fellow workers. The distances are vast, but nevertheless they keep in touch, distribute Socialist literature and use every opportunity to explain the cause of poverty, insecurity and war. The movement will grow. They are conscious of the fact that they are the only Party of Socialism and of the working class in Australia. They are indeed worthy of being one of the Companion Parties of Socialism. What more fitting phrase can be used to summarize their efforts other than “Good on You!”

J. C. Gormley

Making the grade (1985)

From the August 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

In early summer notices appeared in schools, colleges, and universities reading: "Silence: Exams in Progress". Inside, rows of anxious students sat behind desks carefully arranged to prevent them "cheating". It was all part of the mysterious examination ritual, a competitive game which offers a bewildering assortment of GCEs, CSEs. BE-TECs and BAs to the "winners" and sweet FAs to the "losers". The belief that these certificates have some intrinsic educational value is of course a myth.

Capitalist education is dominated by exams, grades and assessment for two main reasons. Firstly, they are a mechanism for selecting and grading the future workforce — employers need an efficient and standardised method of finding the right person for the right job. Some people are trained as accountants and doctors, while others are required for the docks and cash registers. Schools are rather like factories which process both people and knowledge: children are fed in at one end and come out the other neatly packaged, assessed and labelled, ready for wage slavery. This is why money is spent each year on setting, marking and administering exams.

Sir Keith Joseph, the Education Secretary, plans to "improve" school standards and introduce yet another exam, the General Certificate of Secondary Education, to be taken at the age of sixteen. This shake-up is partly explained by the fact that only 25 per cent of school leavers achieve what many employers consider the bare minimum of five ‘O' levels. Presented as a new way of broadening children's education and helping the less academic pupil, the ideas have rather more to do with the interests of the British capitalist class and their need to compete internationally for profits. Keith Joseph could not be unaware of the 1983 report of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, which showed that West German school leavers achieve much higher standards than the British, especially in maths.

Secondly, exams create the illusion of equality of opportunity. According to popular myth, people generally get what they deserve in life. So if you work hard at school, keep out of trouble and pass your exams, the world is your oyster. Were this the case, you would expect someone like the Duke of Westminster, who owns 200,000 acres of land across the world, and has a reported income of £10,800 an hour, to have been very successful at school. In fact, he left Harrow with only two 'O' levels. Any feelings of anxiety he may have felt about his future were eased when he inherited 500 million pounds on his twenty-first birthday.

The sons and daughters of the capitalist class do not have to worry about poor exam results and career prospects as their future is comfortable and secure. These sorts of problems are reserved exclusively for the working class, who are forced by economic necessity to compete with each other in the humiliating examination race. Their prize—a college place, a dead end job. a place in the dole queue. This is something they do not teach you in school.

Brian Rubin

Questions from a reader (1986)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors.

I have read the literature you sent me, after my response to your advert in the New Musical Express, and have a few questions to ask. It would be helpful if your answers were numbered as I have listed them.

        Thank you.

Nicky Wiy

Slough, Berks

If world socialism is to come about democratically, must you wait until every country allows the vote?

If you mean literally "every country", then the answer is "no". We certainly don't envisage waiting about for the very last person to catch up. Since the impetus towards socialism would already be having a tremendous impact on the world political stage and, in particular, in countries still without the necessary democratic processes (if any), we don't think there will be anything causing us to wait around. The rapid and widespread adoption of socialist ideas would alter fundamentally the nature and quality of world politics and impart the necessary impetus towards the transformation. The wheel of history would then rotate to the critical point-of-no-return. A socialist majority of the world's population would have sufficient confidence and political power to be able to announce the count down of the lift-off for socialist revolution.

The needs and inner dynamics of modem capitalism, whether the free enterprise or state capitalist kind, make unavoidable the eventual global extension of the limited forms of political democracy sufficient for our purpose. The real problem is here and now — how best to reach the point at which we who have access to the seats of power start exercising this enormous influence around the world. And that requires all of us to work unstintingly to achieve socialist majorities whenever we can — right now!

If there is no police force after socialism is established, who will enforce any laws that remain after those relating to property are repealed — e.g. those relating to assault, GBH, murder, etc?

There will be no laws remaining to deal with socially unacceptable acts of violence such as those to which you refer. All law and jurisprudence now arise from, and are geared to. the needs of the present acquisitive, aggressive, anxiety-ridden system; they are primarily protective of property. "Good public order" serves to keep the dispossessed in their place, their hands off the property of the owning class and their understandable outbursts of anger, violence and frustration under control by the state.

There may be anti-social acts of violence after the establishment of socialism; neither we nor future communities would want to shirk the issue. But each will have to be considered on its merits (or demerits) by each community — no longer motivated by concepts of retribution, revenge or fear of a break down of "law and order". There may well be cases where society's expressed revulsion may not be enough or appropriate — in which case the democratically arrived at decision to apply the ultimate sanction of the minimum necessary restraint, or enforced isolation from those thought to be at risk, may have to be made by that community.

Although the fundamental changes in relationships and attitudes and the quite different social milieu of free access and equality will remove the cause of most violent acts, the members of a community could not be expected to stand idly by on the rare occasions when a member of that community behaves irresponsibly. Socialist mores, common sense and self-discipline would determine what was acceptable and what was unacceptable, rather than invoking the concept of laws, crimes and punishments or commanding obedience by coercion.

When socialism is established, will those people who are in prison as a result of breaking property laws during capitalism be released?

Yes.

On the back page of the August 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard, the article gives me the impression that examinations have no value. If doctors, medical students, etc. were not tested theoretically and practically, how would we know if they were competent enough to do operations or to carry out experiments which would yield meaningful results?

This article. "Making the grade", was not intended to give the impression that all examinations are valueless and would be dispensed with in socialism. But certainly the experience of most people would suggest that, though the possession of an educational or professional certificate may serve as an entree to some jobs, it alone is not necessarily an indicator of real ability or comprehension. Indeed the concentration of tunnel-visioned parents, pupils and teachers on "achievement" —memorising fragmented, unrelated facts to meet the challenge of the exam paper — can lead to bizarre, not to say horrifying results.

The author was also emphasising the nature of the examination rat-race (Japan provides a good example) and the need for schooling to be tailored to meet employers' demands for efficient, standardised workers, graded appropriately to ensure value for money.

Within socialism aptitudes, mental and physical dexterity, skills, courage, ingenuity and inventiveness will be encouraged and developed in all. Of course, if someone is called on to perform a complicated operation on a patient or on a computer. there will be experienced persons in attendance who will have been delegated to ensure that all goes well. Those individuals will be the contemporary beneficiaries of socially transmitted knowledge and experience — none of whom would think of themself as exalted, as some consultants do today. In socialism no one could be motivated by the prospect of status or material advantage.

In your yellow leaflet Questions and Answers about Socialism, you say that thousands of people in this country die each winter of hypothermia. I would like to know from what source you obtained these vague statistics. In the book Consuming Secrets (page 224) there is listed official Government figures on deaths from hypothermia. They are: for 1970 - 16 deaths; 1971 - 15; 1972 - 21; 1973 - 22; and for 1974 - 17. I admit these are old figures and give no indication of those who suffer from hypothermia but do not die. The number who so suffer is about 5 per 1.000 OAPs. However, I do not see how the number of deaths has risen by approximately 8,000 per cent in eleven years.

Government figures on the number of people dying of cold each year in Britain are not dependable. But even if their very low figures are accepted. that still leaves large numbers of people (hundreds) dying of cold every winter. That would be bad enough, but there are reasons for believing that the real figure is in thousands rather than hundreds.

Each year tens of thousands more people die in the winter than in the summer; 80 per cent of these are over 65. In the ten years before 1980 the death rate was 17 per cent higher in winter than in summer for those aged 60-69; 20 per cent higher for those aged in their 70s and 25 per cent higher for those over 80. On average, approximately 45,000 more old people died each winter than each summer. In 1982, when government figures put the number of deaths from the cold in the 600s. 42,500 more people aged over 65 died in the winter months than the summer ones. We accept that not all of them died of hypothermia (some died of other conditions made worse by the cold) but it is highly unlikely that of 40,000 plus extra deaths, less than 1.000 can be attributable to lack of protection against the cold. In Sweden, where the sharp contrasts between summer and winter temperatures do not affect some areas, there is no equivalent rise in winter deaths among the old.

Many old people are not found until some time after they die. As a result, doctors do not know their body temperatures near to the time of death and hypothermia can neither be proved nor disproved. Geriatric specialists do not give a figure, but suggest that large numbers of deaths caused by the cold are undiagnosed because of this delay in examining the body.

Many doctors are reluctant to write on a death certificate that a person has died of the cold because of the stigma attached to this way of dying. Pressure is put on doctors by families, anxious to hide the fact that they have neglected an elderly relative and by local authorities, whose Social Service Departments fear that a large number of deaths in their area caused by the cold will reflect on them. Doctors involved in the study of death resulting from the cold acknowledge the existence of these strong pressures.

A very important reason for the false picture given by the government figures is that the BMA has quite arbitrarily fixed a body temperature above which a person is said not to be suffering from hypothermia - 95°F. The official measurement of normal body temperature is 98.4°F. So, according to the BMA. a person in their 70s, 80s or 90s can be found dead with an internal body temperature which is 3.8°F lower than that considered healthy for an active, young person and a doctor is not permitted to state that they have died of the cold.

In a survey carried out by the Medical Research Council in 1972 (findings published in the British Medical Journal, January 1973) it was discovered that one in ten old people examined were suffering discomfort or illness as a result of their body temperatures being under 98.4°F. If that figure is applied to the 65+ population in 1986 we can say that 900,000 old people are now living in what the MRC defined as hypothermic conditions. Of course, not all of these will die of the cold, but it is probable that tens of thousands will and likely that hundreds of thousands will die earlier than they might due to the cold. Clearly, the energy exists to provide warmth for all of these people.

Malcolm Wicks, one of the researchers involved in the above-mentioned MRC survey and report, has stated that "We know that there are tens of thousands of deaths each winter caused by the cold". Most medical and geriatric specialists accept Wicks as the leading authority on this subject (see his book. Old and Cold). The question is,  do we believe Wicks and the medical profession or the government?

Please also see the January 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard for the article "Hypothermia in the old".

How seriously does the SPGB take conservation?

The Socialist Party has frequently expressed its anger at the waste and the despoliation which capitalism generates. We are fully aware that the profit system poses a serious threat to the environment and have been sounding the alarm about the state and future of the world's ecology for decades. We contend that it demonstrates the urgent need to establish world-wide socialism. Then, attention to need would take its proper place alongside unjaundiced consideration of the health of the world's population, biosphere and resources. The conservation lobby, though deserving credit for exposing the details of this threat, would do well to bear in mind that what enrages them are symptoms of a sick world economic system; a cure can only be obtained by removing the cause of the sickness.

I have only been eligible to vote since last March, but I have never seen any candidates for the SPGB. If socialism is to be brought about democratically, candidates should be in every constituency in the country. This does not seem to be happening and I wonder how high this issue is on the Party's list of priorities?

The Socialist Party gives electoral activity a high priority and seeks to put up candidates in every constituency, national and local, whenever it can. That we at present only manage to contest a few constituencies is simply a reflection of lack of financial and political support. Meanwhile, we work energetically in all avenues open to us to inform and persuade workers as to what is in their best interests.

Editors.

Of every colour and country (1982)

From the July 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nine-tenths of the people in this and other industrialised countries are workers, in possession of less than half of the wealth we produce. The international capitalist class, on the other hand, own most of the land, factories and other resources. They receive an unearned income of rent, interest or profit and do not have to work for a living. The struggle between these two main classes, over ownership and control, carries on regardless of race or sex. In every country, including Russia and China, production takes place for the profit of a minority. Capitalists of every religion and nationality invest in whatever areas they find most profitable. Capitalism can only be run in their interest. They take the fruits of our labour and pay us wages and salaries to keep us in working order, fit for further use. This system of legalised robbery continues whether the government is Tory, Labour or Liberal-SDP. Workers are forced to compete over jobs and the limited housing and services available to us. This has led to racial hatred as well as prejudice about sex or age. Division between workers has so far prevented our class from taking political power to end capitalism. The British ruling class has been prepared to use racism to strengthen its position ever since slavery was justified by referring to the Africans as “subhuman”.

Racist theories

Capitalism is a system of competition rather than co-operation. The world is divided into rival nations. Through education and the media, those who own and control the capital persuade their workers to be loyal to “the nation” (its owners) in war and “peace”. Racist theories have supported this blind loyalty to our masters’ interests. But there is no “British race”. All humans belong to one species: we have the same blood, and we can interbreed to produce offspring. Those who have tried to divide the species into races, based on inherited physical features, have disagreed about how many races there are. But their scientific investigations have shown that there are no “pure” races and no inherently “superior” races. The advances made by humanity in organising society have depended on increased intermingling and co-operation rather than division and competition among people. Even if there were separate races it would not affect the case for socialism. Some racial theorists have spread the myth that workers are biologically inferior to their capitalist rulers and unable to work together, without leaders, to create a democratic society. But the special feature of humans compared to other animals is our great adaptability. If there is a need to cooperate to change society, we can do so. A United Nations statement on race drawn up in 1950 by professors from across the world, concludes that all humans “are capable of learning to share in a common life, to understand the nature of mutual service and reciprocity, and to respect social obligations and contracts”.

The roots of racism

Capitalism is based on profits made by exploiting the labour power of wage and salary-earners, realised by selling their produce on the market. Because the competition of the market place is anarchic and chaotic, the number of people who can be profitably employed fluctuates unpredictably. In the boom of the 1950s, there was a labour shortage in Britain and workers were recruited from India, Pakistan and the West Indies. When the recession set in, they were the first to lose their jobs, which were in any case the lowest paid. Black workers suffer discrimination in jobs and housing, and are then accused by racists of causing those problems. But areas like Northern Ireland, with the highest unemployment, have the lowest immigration rates. Capitalists are pleased to see the newspapers which they own blaming such problems on sections of the working class. The result is to divide workers against one another and hide the real cause of the problems. Racist organisations like the National Front and the British Movement (and racists in the Tory and Labour Parties) want “white Britons” to defend “their” nation. But the people in Britain do not share a common interest. One percent of the British people own four-fifths of the stocks and shares. An English-speaking carpenter, designer or doctor has more in common with a Russian or African accountant or engineer than with the Duke of Westminster or “Tiny” Rowland. Those without substantial property are forced to work for its owners, and suffer the insecurity this causes, regardless of the skin-colour of worker or capitalist.

The political response 

The parties which offer to run capitalism are all racist, including the Labour Party, which, despite its rhetoric about “brotherhood”, passed the racist Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1968. The 1977 Labour Government Green Paper on Nationality competed with the overt racism of the Tories in its pleas for tighter control. Meanwhile, the so-called Communist Party has supported nationalist import controls, also supported by the National Front. And Roy Jenkins of the SDP has spoken of the need for “a strict limit on the amount and rate of inward immigration for settlement” (House of Commons, 5 July 1976), encouraging the spread of the myth of “overcrowding”. (From 1968 to 1977 over half a million more people left than entered Britain, according to the Office of Population Census and Surveys, and the United Nations has shown that the world could support several times its present population.)

The way to defeat racism and fascism is not to “fight the fascists on the streets”, as some on the Left have suggested. You cannot clear up confused ideas by fighting confused people. The divisive lies of racism must be constantly exposed. Old ideas must be challenged by new realities. The only way to get rid of racism is to get rid of the out-dated social system which keeps producing it. A socialist society, based on common ownership and democratic control of all productive resources, must be established by democratic political action. One of the first steps in that direction Is to recognise the class struggle as a fact of life under capitalism. Workers of every colour and country can unite to establish a society where production will be for the needs of all, not for the profit of a few. Racism divides the working class; socialism will unite the human race.

Clifford Slapper

Top, Middle and Bottom (2016)

Book Review from the February 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Social Class in the 21st Century', by Mike Savage et al. Penguin £8.99

This book is based on the findings of the Great British Class Survey (see www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22000973), previously discussed in the Socialist Standard in May 2013. This was launched on the BBC website in 2011, and the analysis here derives from an impressive first round of 161,000 responses, supplemented by further face-to-face interviews, as those who took part in the online survey were disproportionately higher up in the social scale and living in England.

The authors distinguish three kinds of capital (this term is not used in the Marxist sense of means of production used to employ wage labour for the sake of profit). Economic capital is a person’s income and wealth (savings and the value of their home). Cultural capital, a concept taken from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, is a matter of a person’s tastes and interests, and is divided into two kinds: highbrow (going to art galleries, eating in French restaurants, liking jazz, etc) or emerging (using the internet, going to the gym, spending time with friends and so on). Social capital relates to your social networks, the kinds of people you know and how well you know them (knowing ‘the right people’ may help you get a job with a law firm but won’t help with a job in IT).

Based on these criteria, no fewer than seven social classes are identified: elite, established middle class, technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional working class, emerging service workers and precariat. A person’s place in this is determined by their income and savings, their ‘score’ for the range of people in different occupations they know (boosted by knowing those in higher status jobs), and their cultural capital. For instance, new affluent workers will have on average household income of £29,000 and little in savings (so ‘affluent’ is something of a misnomer), and be roughly in the middle in terms of the value of their house. But they score quite highly for their range of social contacts and they have rather more emerging than highbrow cultural capital. Though social class in the way used here is not directly linked to occupation, the authors have stated elsewhere that members of this class might well work as electricians, postal workers and catering assistants, among others.

The classes falling between the elite and the precariat do not form a simple hierarchy, but are clearly distinguished from those at the top and bottom. The precariat, forming about 15% of the population, have an average household income of just £8,000 and very little in savings, and get low scores for cultural and social capital. They are often stigmatised, and women in this class were well aware that they were at the bottom of the heap, while men were ‘more resistant’ to consideration of class.

In contrast, the elite had average household income of £89,000, with sizeable savings and valuable houses; they had extensive social contacts and scored particularly highly for highbrow cultural capital. They form about 6 percent of the population, so they are far more than just the top 1 percent (compare Thomas Piketty’s discussion of the ‘9 percent’, those in the top 10 percent but not in the top 1 percent, who they are clearly distinguished from). This income (which is for the household and so may include more than one wage) is well above the average but of course is very small when compared to the really top incomes, of millions a year, for those who may have billions in wealth and several large mansions. And assets accumulated from the past (whether savings or houses) are far more important than current income. There is relatively little mobility into this elite, and also little down from it. As the richest get even richer and pull away from the rest of the population, so those lower down have much farther to go to get to the top (a larger hill to climb, in the metaphor used here).

The volume contains a lot of other interesting points, some related to changes in society. Highbrow cultural capital is increasingly confined to an older age group, and there are links between class and age: new affluent workers and emerging service workers are much younger on average than those in the traditional working class. Attending a prestigious university such as Oxford, Cambridge or the LSE is still a real help in joining the elite and so amassing large savings. Most people have more wide-ranging social ties than fifty years ago. Less than a third of respondents thought of themselves as belonging to a social class, though when pressed 62 percent ‘gave themselves some kind of working class identity’.

But the classes identified here do not have shared interests as against the rest: nobody is ever going to say ‘New affluent workers of the world, unite!’, nor will they ever form a class for itself (Marx’s term for a class conscious of its status and interests, mentioned in the Introduction). And, when all is said and done, an approach which puts dentists in the elite alongside multi-millionaires is missing quite a lot. 

Paul Bennett

The Labour Theory of Value Before Karl Marx (1934)

From the July 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard

The labour theory of value is the view that the value of an article is determined by its cost of production in human labour power—according to the conditions of the time. In its fully developed form it was analysed and explained in detail by Karl Marx in “Capital.” We are not concerned at the moment with the theory as it was finally worked out. We are only concerned with the forerunners of Marx, who contributed something to the view. Owing to limits of space we can only consider briefly the most outstanding of these forerunners.

Value presented an insoluble problem for over two thousand years. The first glimmerings of a solution did not appear until the middle of the seventeenth century, when a society mainly concerned with the buying and selling of goods began to take definite shape in this country and was in process of taking shape on the Continent.

As far back as the time of Aristotle—two thousand three hundred years ago—the problem was in the air. Aristotle himself, in his “Politics,” and in his “Ethics,” had something to say about it. He knew that there must be some property common to objects as unlike as bread and shoes that made it possible to measure them against each other. He knew that the common property was not their usefulness, but he was unable to find out what it really was. He ends his examination rather lamely with the remark that people have agreed to estimate value in money. And this after he had already pointed out that exchange existed before money. He makes the illuminating remark, however, that profit-making originated with coin.

For hundreds of years this formed the limit of knowledge on the subject.

As commerce spread over society and accumulating money became increasingly the aim in social dealings, the question of the value of money came more and more to the front, particularly when succeeding representatives of the royal treasury sought to build up waning funds by debasing the coinage. Consequently, during the later middle ages, a considerable literature grew up around monetary matters. With the dawn of capitalist society, in the 17th century, the question became acute. The problem before the writers was: How did wealth originate? Or, as we would put, it: What was the source of surplus-value?

Out of these discussions two main schools of thought developed. The Mercantilists and the Physiocrats, one English and the other French. The Mercantilists claimed that wealth accumulated by means of trade, through buying from the foreigner cheap and selling to him dear. In other words, by having a favourable balance of trade,” an idea that still persists, as witness the nature of the discussions during the recent financial crisis. The Mercantilists, consequently, propagated the view that the traders were the most important group in the nation and were the builders of the nation’s wealth. An idea quite in harmony with conditions that were raising the trader to the most influential position in society.

Thomas Mun, a leading merchant of the time and a director of the East India Company, wrote a book that was published in 1664 entitled “England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade,” which puts forward the Mercantilist view very clearly and vigorously.

The Physiocrats, a group that originated nearly a hundred years later in France, a country whose main prop at the time was agriculture, held an entirely different view. According to them, wealth originated solely in agricultural production, as it was only by farming that a man received back for his work more than it cost to keep him, and, out of the surplus, the trader and the rest of the population lived. Turgot, a prominent Physiocratic writer, who appeared towards the end of their influence, puts their outlook very clearly in his book, “Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches,” published in 1766.. The Physiocratic doctrines were an expression of the interests and outlook of the capitalist farmer, and Mirabeau, one of their leading political representatives, took a prominent part in the French Revolution.

Turgot was a very clear thinker. He had a considerable knowledge of history and had travelled far enough intellectually to point out that the labourer’s wage was determined by his cost of subsistence.

Sir William Petty, an important member of the Mercantilist school of thought, was the first to make a real contribution to the labour theory of value. In a book he wrote that was published in 1662 and entitled “A Treatise on Taxes,” he states quite plainly that it is labour that gives value to things, but, under the influence of his trading outlook, he defines exchange-value as money, and the particular labour employed in the production of gold and silver as the value-producing labour. Hence he was led into confusion.

He wrote a series of essays in "Political Arithmetic,” which represents the first form in which economics is treated as a separate department of knowledge. These essays are remarkable for brevity and clarity. In one of them he explains in a paragraph the significance of the division of labour as illustrated by a watch, and he does it in a manner that showed he had a clearer grasp of the point than Adam Smith, although, writing a hundred years earlier. Adam Smith confused the social division of labour with the division of labour inside a single workshop, but Petty made no such mistake.

In 1733, Richard Cantillon, another merchant, wrote his book “On the Nature of Commerce in General." In it he stated that the value of a thing was nothing more than the measure of the land and the labour which enters into its production. He was influenced by the Physiocratic idea of the importance of agriculture, as also to some extent was Adam Smith. Cantillon held the view that the daily work of the humblest slave corresponded in value to twice the produce of the land on which he subsisted.

After Petty there was another thinker, probably the clearest thinker of his age, who put forward the labour theory of value in a broad form. This man was Benjamin Franklin, who, in 1729, when barely twenty-three years of age, wrote an essay entitled “A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency." In this essay he argues that the value of articles is measured by the time taken to produce them, but he considers that money has an extra value on account of the way in which it facilitates exchanges. In spite of his clearness of thought he, like his predecessors, was lost in the mystery of money. In fact, all those who preceded Marx got into difficulties when they came to treat of money. In their efforts to analyse money they frequently contradicted the sound views they had previously put forward on value in general.

Another youthful writer, an Italian named Ferdinando Galiani, published a book, in 1750, entitled, “Dell Moneta." He was only twenty-two years old when he wrote it. In this book he pointed out that labour was the sole source of value, but he confused the wages of the worker with the value of the article produced. For instance, he contended that the value of a woollen article was equal to the cost of the raw wool plus the cost of supporting the men who produced the woollen article.

In 1777, Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations" appeared. In it he attributed the accumulation of wealth to the division of labour. He made a considerable advance in the analysis of questions concerning economics, but he was still far from understanding the real nature of value. He held that the determination of the value of an article by the labour-time taken to produce it was true of earlier times, but not of the developed capitalism of his day. He also fell into the same error as Galiani, confusing the value of what a man produces with the value of what he gets—his wages. If this view were accepted, then the value of all the articles produced would only be equal to the total wages paid to the workers who produced them.. This was the state of affairs the later Utopians yearned for and what they would have called “fair exchanges." Adam Smith also failed to see that the labour of an engineer and the labour of a bootmaker could not be compared as such—they had both to be reduced to a common basis, the simple expenditure of human energy.

How weak Adam Smith’s grasp of the problem was may be gathered from the fact that he put “labouring cattle" under the heading of productive labourers, and also attributed value-creating properties to “profits of stock” and to the forces of nature.

The progress in knowledge of the labour theory before Marx really ended with David Ricardo, a stockbroker, who made the final contribution in his book, "On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation,” published in 1817. His fundamental proposition is that the values of all articles, including the value of labour-power, is determined by the labour required to produce them with the prevailing skill and methods. But, as Frederick Engels has pointed out, Ricardo did not see that it was labour-power and not labour that was the value-producing quality, and hence, that the transformation of money into capital was based upon the buying and selling of labour-power. It was the discovery of this fact that gave Marx the key to the problem, and it was Ricardo’s failure to see it that landed him into difficulties when he came to treat of the more complex forms of money.

As a capitalist himself, and one who made a fortune on the stock exchange, Ricardo was quite clear, in fact brutally clear, about the basis of the present social system and its aim, which, he pointed out, was production for profit. He was against State interference in industry, and contended that wages should be left to free competition. He also held the view that the prevailing economic tendency was for wages and rent mutually to increase until they swallowed profit, and he foresaw a time when all property would belong to owners of land and receivers of tithes and taxes. He was quite clear, however, about the fact that neither wages nor profit, nor rent, entered into the determination of the value of an article. Surplus-value, he showed, was the portion of value left after deducting the wages of the producer from the value he added, but he was inclined to confound surplus-value with profit.

As already mentioned, the analysis of value really ended with Ricardo. Nobody after him added anything of importance to his work. The so-called “Ricardian Socialists” who followed him accepted his view that labour was the source of value, and, on the basis of it, demanded that all products should belong to the labourer.

The first of these writers was William Thompson, an Irish landlord, who, in 1824, wrote a book entitled “An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most conducive to human Happiness.” As the title of his book suggests, the ideas of the “Utilitarian” philosopher, Bentham, had an influence on his outlook. He defined the existing social system as one of force and fraud, and he proposed a new system on Owenite principles. He was very much interested in the Owenite co-operative experiments and visited the Owenite colony at Ralahine, in Ireland.

He took as his basis the view that all wealth is the product of labour. He contended that all men are equal, or nearly so, and therefore capable of producing equal quantities of wealth. Wealth is unequally divided, therefore the few possessors must abstract it from the many producers.

Neither he nor those of the same group who followed him really understood the nature of value. They thought the seller arbitrarily raised the value of articles above the wages paid to the producers, which they took to be the real value. He held that labour was not, at present, an accurate measure of value, on the ground that desires are apt to vary, but he contended that in a future social system such as he proposed, commodities would exchange at the “ value of real use." He assumed that the future system would also be a system of commodity production, but “fair" exchange would be the social principle.

Thompson's confused views of value are illustrated by the fact that he believed machinery added additional value to products beyond the value as mere instruments of production, and also that, in certain instances where labour is saved in the production of an article, value is added to it by this saving of labour.

In 1825, a year after Thompson's book, appeared, Thomas Hodgskin wrote his “Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital," and, in 1827, “Popular Political Economy." Hodgskin, a retired naval officer, was a friend of ] Francis Place and a member of the radical circle that gathered round Jeremy Bentham.

He also argued that the labourer should receive the whole of his product, but he included in the term "labourer" the master and the buyer and seller. He accepted commodity-production as the basis of a future society, but wanted to rule out profit. On the question of value, he was not clear. He confused the value of goods with the quantity, and asserted that the more goods there were the greater was the total value, in spite of a proportional decrease in the quantity of labour required to produce them. He also appeared to think that profit and rent were amounts added on to the value of articles.

Although his outlook on this fundamental question was confused, Hodgskin’s destructive criticism of existing society provided the Chartists with useful weapons in their struggle. He did a considerable amount of lecturing, founded with Robertson the “Mechanics' Magazine," in 1823, and was instrumental in the founding of the Mechanics' Institute, where he lectured. He later joined the staff of the Economist and the Morning Chronicle, dropped out of the active propaganda movement, and lived to a ripe old age.

 

After Hodgskin comes John Gray, a successful business man, who delivered a series of lectures on "The Nature and Use of Money," which were published in book form in 1831 and again later in 1848. In these lectures he claimed to have discovered the real source of social troubles, which he attributed to a flaw in the monetary system. He urged that demand should be based upon production, instead of production being based upon demand, which, he claimed, was the basis of the existing system. He proposed to rectify matters by establishing standard banks which would issue credit in the form of transferable vouchers based upon the stock, etc., or, in other words, based upon the powers of production.

So convinced was Gray of the soundness and the magnitude of his discovery that he had his book widely distributed, particularly to economists and universities, and he offered a hundred guineas to anyone who could refute his views. In recent times the Douglas Credit Theory has had a certain popularity, but there is little in the fallacious theories of the Douglas scheme that was not anticipated by Gray a hundred years ago.

Gray's views on value were quite erroneous. He believed that gold was no true measure of value and that there was none. He contended that the scarcity of gold prevented its value from being determined by labour. He, again, took for granted the continuation of commodity-production, but proposed that, in future, labour should be the measure of value. This was to be accomplished by the producer fixing his own price for his product and the competition of producers determining whether this price was right or not!

Gray was, at one time, considerably influenced by the views of Robert Owen, and, in 1815, he managed an Owenite colony at Orbiston.

The last writer we will refer to is J. F. Bray, a journeyman printer and the author of "Labour’s Wrongs and Labour's Remedy," published in 1839. His book is long and very wordy and full of conceptions of justice and equal rights, inspired by the economic analysis of Ricardo. His fundamental proposition is that as the earth is common to all, and labour is the sole source of wealth, each human being has a right to the fruits of his own labour. He claimed that as wealth was produced by labour, the capitalist, who did not work, lived by the legalised robbery of the producer. He claimed further that the problem was the same in all countries, whatever their form of government, and that, therefore, the solution applied internationally. A strain of anarchism runs through his writings, but he made some very apt criticisms of existing arrangements and had very clear conceptions on particular points.

His fundamental ideas, however, clouded his analysis of the present economic framework. He believed that the capitalist made his profit through unequal exchanges—buying goods at their values and selling them for more than their values. For instance, he saw that the capitalist paid the worker for a day’s labour a wage that was only equivalent in value to the product of half a day’s labour, but he did not see that what the worker was paid was the value of his labour-power. He did not realise the implication of his view. He fell into the same error as many before him and believed that value was equivalent to the wages paid to the producer.

Like the rest of the Utopians, Bray believed that the world had been searching for thousands of years for a just form of society and it was now discovered. To him the correct society was the result of knowledge based upon first principles which were true for all time, and could have been established as easily two thousand years ago as to-day.

It will, therefore, be seen that he had no fresh contribution to make to the labour theory of value. On one point, however, he was quite clear and emphatic—that mere governmental changes would not alter the worker’s position. Hence he advocated a complete change in the social basis—but it was not really so complete as he imagined.

To sum up, it may be said that the analysis of value from the point of view of the labour theory begins in 1662 with Petty, and ends in 1817 with Ricardo. Although the Utopians did not further this analysis, they did excellent service in pushing forward the worker’s case, in the course of which they made valuable and biting criticisms of capitalist society. As Marx has pointed out, the kernel of the matter was contained in their outlook, and their attitude logically led to Socialist ideas.

Gilmac.

Grim Warning (1969)

Book Review from the May 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

My Life by Sir Oswald Mosley Nelson 70s.

For a few years during the '30s the Blackshirts were familiar figures on the streets of London and other big cities. In their all-black uniforms with high necked shirts and broad, heavy-buckled belts, they were a new and disturbing feature of the British political scene—the nearest, in fact, that modern Britain had ever got to a private army.

The membership of the British Union of Fascists was never all that large, but they cast a long shadow. In their early days they had the support of powerful sections of the Right, with a vast amount of newspaper coverage exceeding that of any other group.

In one respect the early '30s resembled today, in the amount of half-baked violence that came from so-called revolutionaries. Meetings were broken up and speakers shouted down, in the name of democracy, but as in the '60s with a footling ineptitude. The hecklers struck menacing attitudes and made bellicose noises, threatening action they had no power to carry out, in the pathetic belief that capitalism was on the point of collapse, and that the working class was behind them.

This gave the Fascists an excellent excuse for forming strong-arm squads. Fascist propagandists always claimed, when taxed with brutality, that they were only defending themselves. As a semi-military organisation, well trained and disciplined, the Blackshirts were able to make short work, both of their violent assailants and of perfectly peaceful and orderly opponents.

The founder and leader of the BUF was Sir Oswald Mosley. Flamboyant, good-looking, athletic, and a war hero. Mosley resembled the 'ideal man.' as portrayed in Edwardian boys' magazines—a tradition that survived well into the '20s and ’30s. This fact, combined with political ability and an outstanding platform manner, appealed to the type of mind that sought by quick dramatic means to cut the Gordian knot of unemployment, poverty, and disillusionment.

In this autobiography—a rather pompous but informative book—Mosley describes the twists and turns, of his political life. Born into the aristocracy at the turn of the century, he did all the expected things: went to Winchester and Sandhurst, served in the Royal Flying Corps during the first world war. was wounded and invalided out in 1916, and entered parliament in 1918 as a Tory MP. His marriage to a daughter of Lord Curzon, a former Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary, was attended by royalty.

It was after entering parliament that Mosley began to emerge as a controversial figure. Bitterly opposing British action in Ireland, he left the Conservative party to become an independent. Later he joined the I.LP. and the Labour Party. Here he once again became controversial, embracing Keynesian theories that were unpopular at the time. He was regarded by many as the Labour Party's great white hope. He became a member of the 1929 Labour government, [only] to resign over its handling of unemployment. This marked the end of Mosley's career as an orthodox politician.

It was during the next decade that Mosley rose to prominence, hitting the headlines more than any other politician out of office. In the confusion that followed the collapse of the Labour government, and the crushing defeat suffered by the Labour party, new leftist organisations sprang up like mushrooms. One of these, the New Party, had Mosley as one of its founders. It was this party that slowly emerged as the British Union of Fascists.

The fascist movement in Britain reached its peak in the late '30s Just what would have happened to fascism in Britain, had it been left alone by events, is difficult to say. But like fascist parties elsewhere it slowly became overshadowed by Nazi Germany, and the drift into war. From about 1937 on, as the line-up became clearer, the B.U.F. found itself more and more unpopular.

The great irony of the second world war was that nationalists like Mosley found themselves in opposition to the war, while the Communist Party became its most ardent supporter. The war led to the suppression of the B.U.F, and the detention without trial of Mosley and other prominent fascists. After the war Mosley was to emerge into politics again as leader of the Union Movement, but never again to be prominent

Fascism was a product of its age. Slumps and unemployment, memories of the hideous losses of the first world war, and an exaggerated fear of Russia produced the climate in which it flourished. Fascism is for all time a grim warning to workers of the perils of short-cuts to salvation.

Les Dale

A Centenary: Isambard Brunel (1959)

Brunel in 1857.

From the October 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an obscure position on Platform One at London's Paddington Station the traveller may notice, with fleeting interest, a plaque which commemorates Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In early Victorian attire, he gazes across at the Gothic-like structure of wrought and cast iron, where his name once meant so much. One hundred years ago, this versatile engineer died, but there is still plenty of evidence of the part which he played in the days when British capitalism established its dominant position in the world.

Mechanical Environment

Brunei came from a well-to-do family. His father—Marc Brunel—was born in the Vexin area of France, where he studied for the priesthood. He left the church for the French Navy and, when the Revolution came, fled to America. Here, as American industry began to develop, he established himself as a successful surveyor and architect. He came to England, where he set up a factory for the mass production of pulleys, of which, during the Napoleonic Wars, the British Navy was using 70,000 a year. He later turned his attention to the cutting and shaping of shipbuilding logs (an early form of pre-fabbing) and the mass production of boots for the army, using 16 different processes to turn out some 400 pairs a day. In 1821, Marc Brunel fell on hard times and was imprisoned for debt.

So it was that Isambard Kingdom Brunei grew up in an environment of mechanical exploration and adventure. Not only in his own family, but all around, could be seen the physical manifestations of industrialism. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the output of coal and iron and the products of the manufactories and the reformed agriculture produced an insistent need for faster and bulkier land transport. In the Cornish tin mine areas and the Durham coalfields the Trevethicks and Stevensons were answering the demand by building the new railways. It is in this field that Brunei is best remembered.

Great Western Railway

After working with his father on the Rotherhithe Tunnel in the 1820's, Brunel designed and constructed several bridges and docks, notably at Plymouth, Brentford and Milford Haven. In 1833 he was appointed engineer to the Great Western Railway and for this company he did some of his greatest work. He was responsible for the first line to Bristol, with all the bridges and tunnels. (Part of his work consisted of negotiating with obstructive landowners). He designed the Wharncliffe Viaduct at Hanwell and the great iron bridge which crosses the river at Saltash in Cornwall. Later he turned to building ocean-going steamships larger than any previously known. In 1838 his Great Western started the first regular steamships service between Great Britain and America, making the voyage in the unheard of time of 15 days. This was followed in 1845 by the Great Britain, the first large vessel to use the screw propellor, which plied between Liverpool and New York.

Brunel also had his failures. His championing of the 7 foot gauge, which started the famous "Battle of the Gauges,” broke down in 1892, when the Great Western Railway adopted the standard gauge. On the South Devon Railway he experimented with a system of atmospheric propulsion, which proved a failure. Perhaps his most spectacular flop was the paddle steamer Great Eastern, a huge folly launched in 1858. The story of the Great Eastern is one of delays and casualties—it was never a financial success and ended as a submarine cable layer. The strain of building her broke Brunei's health. He had a stroke on the day he was watching her engines being tested—5th September, 1859—and ten days later he was dead.

Kings and Servers

Typical of his time, Brunei was impatient of restrictions on invention and careless of public opinion of his work. He reached his fame when the designers and builders of early industrial capitalism were raising their structures to the glory of Utility, Profit and Speed. Those were the days when the glass- vaulted roofs of Paddington and St. Pancras Stations had replaced the cathedrals and churches into which the wealthy landowner and merchant had once poured their surplus. When the railway viaducts and the Stock Markets took the place of the Cloth Halls—and King Coal sat in state on the High Throne, with child labour for his server.

Brunel's railways carried the products of the appalling working conditions of the time, when coal miners seemed scarcely human and children were lucky to work no more than a twelve hour day in the textile mills. For the workers the new capitalism meant hard work, low pay and indifferent food eaten in gaunt, soulless tenements scowling down on the Main Line. It meant squalid back-to-back houses crouching around the pit head and the viciousness of dockland. No gift of science or brilliance of design was directed that way. Here lived the beasts of burden, gin soaked and humble in their misery. In its exciting day of expansion, capitalism spurned the very people who made it possible.

No blame to Brunel for this. He was an inventive master whose abilities were used by a vicious and inhuman social system. Remember that, if you ever take a look at that plaque.

Jack Law

Education For What? (1974)

From the September 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

When it became clear that Industrial Capitalism was to be the road along which Britain was to travel in the future it became equally necessary that it should lay down plans for the education of its citizens. So we had the Education Act of 1870 where for the first time education for the working class was to be provided free and was to be compulsory. And so whilst the ruling class continued to be educated for leadership in industry, government, the Church and the armed forces, a basic education was visualized for those whose future lay as machine operators in the factories. This was the first stage in the evolution of our modern educational system under capitalism.

Karl Mannheim’s view of traditional education is “Education is rightly understood if we consider it as one of the techniques of influencing human behaviour and as a means of social control.” This is true in general of education throughout the history of class societies, but mass education comes about in co-relation with mass production of commodities and the act of 1870 brought in the era of “mass education”. In his work Diagnosis of our Time Mannheim, again, says:

I think it was the great merit of the Marxist approach as compared with the Idealistic one, that it realized once and for all that the life of culture and the sphere of valuations within it depend on the existence of certain social conditions among which . . . the class structure is of primary importance.

Despite advances in teaching techniques, the introduction of new subjects and the growing attention towards aestheticism (freedom of expression in art etc.) one agrees that Mannheim’s statement, i.e. social control, is still the underlying motive. Unwittingly he foreshadowed the advent and intention of the latest innovation—the Comprehensive School—when he advocated the introduction of an educational system which would mean “. . . the improvement of opportunities for the people to train themselves for leadership . . . and the selection of the best in the various fields of social life”. This, we may look upon as the second stage; one that has been forced upon the capitalist class by means of the rapid growth of technological science.

The capitalist world in general and perhaps the USA in particular has hardly yet got over the shock of the USSR being the first in the race to send a man up into space. Such was the blow to America’s educationists that when a book What Ivan Knows that Janie Doesn't was printed and distributed to American schools, a complete revision of American educational techniques was implemented. Russia’s success was of course the result of her implementing the Khrushchev Thesis of 1955 wherein he advocated the emergence of “the new man” who was to be educated to the fundamentals of technology and production. This new-type education (the Polytechnic school) is being hastily copied in Britain and elsewhere outside the Soviet Union. Russia’s educational system then like all others is geared among other things to provide a new meritocracy of scientists, technologists, artists and athletes etc. who will compete and if possible surpass those of the West.

Capitalism cannot allow talent to slip through the net. It is a far cry from 1871 when, at the passing of Forster’s Education Act, a sum of money was allocated which was roughly the amount spent on the annual upkeep of the Royal stables, to the present-day figure which comprises the biggest public expenditure next to that of the armed forces. As Michael Young says, we are witnessing a meritocracy of talent (which is nothing more than saying that clever working-class children are looked upon more than ever as being vital for the furtherance of capitalist technology and the maintenance of its ideology.)

Lord Butler, former politician and an academic, is clear on the role of education. He stated (in relation to students) “. . . the type of capital investment that will accrue with every year . . . and which has enormous value.” The American educationist Gardener states clearly the advantage accruing from education based on “contest mobility” when he says: - “A society like ours has no choice but to seek the development of human potentialities at all levels. It takes more than an educated élite to run a complex technological system”.

Education and élitism in general has hitherto looked to the “genius” as the summit of our culture. Modem capitalism has been forced to abandon this view. Future Socialist society will come about and will be sustained —as present-day capitalism is sustained—by “ordinary” men and women. The only difference will be that their education will be fitting for a free people in a free world.

Education is looked upon as a means of integrating the young into the logic of the prevailing system and the means of bringing about conformity to it. Socialist society will see to it that all will discover how to participate in the transformation of the world for the benefit of all.

John Berger, art critic, stated at a recent lecture sponsored by the Schools Council:

As soon as the young are encouraged to look and to analyse what they see, the inhumanity in our society is clear. The visual evidence of what is wrong is overwhelming . . . and I’m not here thinking of badly designed teapots or vulgar linoleum.

Berger was obviously concerned with the deplorable standards of aestheticism and the shoddy artifacts produced by capitalism, and he is right of course. Socialists are concerned with these, naturally, but are more concerned with the shoddy lives that the vast majority of the world’s people are forced to lead.

Socialists have a great regard for education knowing that it is only an educated working class that can bring about Socialism. Despite the state education afforded to children and adults today, despite the mass of capitalist propaganda, Socialists strive to educate and propagate the knowledge that will finally oust that which in the past and up to the present has helped to subjugate and exploit the world’s workers.

W. Brain

Blogger's Note:

Correction from the November 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The article "Education For What?" (Socialist Standard, September page 160) contains an inaccuracy. It states that expenditure on education "comprises the biggest public expenditure next to that of the armed forces." In fact education expenditure exceeded defence spending in 1969 and has continued to do so since then as the following table shows: -