What Comes After The Labour Government? (1947)

From the July 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Shinwell, Minister of Fuel, has resurrected an old legend. Speaking at Margate on May 7th he said: “There was a lot of talk of what kind of a Government would come in after this one, but there was only one possible kind which could come in and that was a Government even more to the left.” (News-Chronicle, May 8th, 1947.) Ever since the first Labour Government in any country took over the hopeless task of making the bitter fruits of capitalism palatable to the exploited class there have been a series of defences put out by Labour leaders. This is one of the series. The first, which does not long survive their taking office, is that Labour Government is very successful. The next is that it isn't successful but just remember the difficulties it faces. The third is that all would have been well if the workers had not embarrassed it by demanding higher wages. The fourth is that its policy was successful at home but that it ran into trouble with foreign countries (or alternatively that its foreign policy was sound but it was weak in home affairs). Fifthly and lastly, that it isn't much good, being too "right-wing," but that it will be followed by something better, something more "Left.” Space precludes going into the woolly nonsense that lies behind those terms “Left” and “Right,” beloved of the hazy and lazy-minded, but one thing we can do to enlighten Mr. Shinwell. Probably he sees himself cast for a leading role in the “Left" successor to the present Government. What he overlooks is that the reputation of being a “Leftwinger” is lost as easily as it is gained, and once lost is gone forever. All the ”Right-wingers” whom Mr. Shinwell loved to trounce in his earlier, irresponsible days as oppositionist started as he did, on the "Left." They lost their status when they joined Labour Governments and accepted responsibility for defending capitalism. Mr. Shinwell is now among them; the erstwhile critic of increased production campaigns, of conscription, and of the use of troops in strikes has now got to defend them all, and a harsh world insists on judging politicians by what they do, not by what they used to say twenty years ago.

On another score Mr. Shinwell's myth lacks foundation. History is all against it. There have been numerous Labour Governments and their experience makes nonsense of the theory that electors, having tasted of the diluted Labour brew and found it unsatisfying demand a more potent draught of the same brew next time. In Britain the 1924 Labour Government was followed by a Tory Government, the 1929 Labour Government by a Tory-Liberal-National-Labour coalition. The Australian Labour Government which was swept out of office at the 1931 election was heavily defeated by the anti-Labour United Australia Party. The present Federal Labour Government in Australia and the Labour Government in New Zealand have been losing support and seats but not to what Mr. Shinwell would call "Left-wingers.” In Western Australia a Labour Government in office for 14 years lost six seats at the recent election and is likely to be succeeded by a Liberal Government. In Germany as a whole, and in Prussia, Labour Governments after the first World War were succeeded by anti-Labour Governments and coalitions and eventually by Hitler.

It not only happens thus but it is all very natural. Those electors who supported Labour Parties ‘‘as an experiment,” or “to give them a chance,” are much more likely, when experience disappoints them, to turn back to the Tory or Liberal parties. In Germany the sequence of events was particularly disastrous. The failure of the Labour Governments to make a success of capitalism brought the Parliamentary system itself into disrepute and paved the way for the Nazis.

Only when the workers have finally shed the belief that capitalism can be made to work in their interests will they decide not to support any party of capitalism. When they do reach this level of understanding we shall not have a “ Left ” Government but Socialism.

Mr. Shinwell may perhaps have in mind the experience of Russia where the Kerensky “Labour” Government was overthrown by Communists who promptly abolished the elected Assembly because it had not a Communist majority, installed their dictatorship, and suppressed all the opposition parties, including parties like Mr. Shinwell’s.

If Mr. Shinwell shares the opinion of most of his Labour colleagues he does not regard the Communist dictatorship as an improvement on the British Labour Government and therefore cannot be hoping that the latter’s “Left” successor will be a Communist Government : If by chance he does think that a Communist Government is better than his own Labour Government he would be under the obligation of explaining his position in the Labour Government and Labour Party and of explaining why he remains in a Government that has so signally failed to harmonise its foreign policy with that of Russia.

The fact that Mr. Shinwell should feel it necessary to look on the prospect of a Government to some extent different from the one in which he serves is an indirect admission of the correctness of our case that Labour administration of capitalism is bound to fail; for if Labourism can succeed, as Mr. Shinwell and the Labour Party say it can, why should the workers want anything different from what they have got under Mr. Attlee and Mr. Shinwell? Yet, as the Manchester Guardian points out (April 29th, 1947), in all the resolutions placed by Labour supporters on the agenda of the Labour Party Annual Conference, there was hardly one that did not criticise the Government and demand a different policy. Almost the only resolution expressing approval was one from Dulwich: “That this Conference fully approves the present policy of the Government, which is ethically sound, and, therefore, must be politically right.” Even this reads more like an attempt to convince themselves that the policy must be right than a confident belief that it is. 

Edgar Hardcastle

"It Makes Your 'Eart Bleed" (1949)

From the June 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article packed with vital and fascinating information, Mr. Charles Graves in the Sunday Express of May 8th gave his readers the facts about the miserable plight of this year’s debutantes, and in doing so performed a valuable public service which should not pass without comment. Further, since it is possible that in some remote corner of this island there are those whose week-end reading is confined to the Bible and News of the World and remain therefore unaware of this grave social problem, it is felt that the greatest possible publicity should be given to Mr. Graves' article, of which the following is a brief summary.

First let the writer make it clear just what debutantes are. “Official debutantes,” says Mr. Graves, “are girls between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, who will be attending the Presentation Parties at Buckingham Palace on May 18 and 19.” It is not clear from Mr. Graves as to how the 584 young debutantes who are being launched this year are chosen, and this detracts slightly from the value of his article. It can be assumed, however, that in this democratic day and age and in the fourth year of Labour Party Rule that they are elected by popular ballot, and their attendance at Buckingham Palace is in no way connected with their membership of the ruling class.

What is their social function? They are the great providers of employment for as Mr. Graves points out, “What may seem to some people, at first sight, to be a great extravagance is actually of direct benefit to hundreds of workpeople in London—dressmakers, salesgirls, manicurists and other beauty parlour specialists, taxi-cab drivers, car hire firms, florists, dance academies, contract bridge teachers, waiters, wine merchants and the like.” Let the reader imagine the social unrest that would follow mass unemployment among contract bridge teachers. As the great providers they are related to the various workers mentioned above in the same way as horses are to road sweepers, rats to rat-catchers, disease to doctors, burglars to policemen, and so on. Another of their functions is in the words of Mr. Graves to provide “the traditional reason for having a season at all.” 

As is so often the case with public benefactors it is only at great personal cost and sacrifice that they become of such value to the community. The following details will give the reader some idea of the cost that they, or at least their parents, incur in “doing good.” According to Mr. Graves the lowest price for dinner frocks and ball gowns is about sixty guineas. Many of the parents in these days of Crippsian austerity are buying at less exclusive shops, but even so “cannot escape the fact that evening shoes cost six guineas or so.” The cost of a dance or ball during the season is nearly double the pre-war figure and this year a mere forty have been planned at Claridges and Londonderry House and elsewhere. Bands, flowers, food and drinks are twice the pre-war cost and £900 is not an extravagant estimate says Mr. Graves for a dance of 400 people. “One way and another it will be impossible to launch a debutante this year for less than £500. And that is a real utility price.” Such is their sad plight!

Does the writer hear a low ominous rumble of protest at what appears to be extravagance? In one poignant sentence Mr. Graves quiets this. He says, “As for the girls themselves, they are surely entitled to taste what little glamour they can before they start the drudgery of earning a living and thinking about P.A.Y.E.”

Yes, that is the gruesome unvarnished truth. Not only do these slaves to the community provide work but actually work themselves. Mr. Graves is quoted again. “The Monkey Club in Pont Street has a number of debutantes among its students who are taking such subjects as domestic science, cookery, foreign language, arts award (the history of music and art from the sixteenth century until today), music, secretarial courses, and from now onward, interior decoration. Debutantes, however, are released from any studies until the afternoon, with an occasional lecture at midday. The Principal realises that a girl who is doing the season will not have the energy to study at 10 a.m. if she has been dancing until one or two in the morning.”

Sally Ann Vivian, daughter of Lord and Lady Vivian, for instance, has had automatically to learn about red and white wines, but has still to learn bridge, which is part of the education of any modern young lady. What is more, among the many post-war deb’s who have taken jobs Mr. Graves informs us that one is actually third cook at the Bank of England.

Should the reader imagine that the strain of public duty on these young women is too great and that they are in danger of treading the path of dissipation, the writer hastens to assure him that “The average debutante does not really like even champagne. It tastes much the same to her as cider and she would just as soon drink water,” There is, of course, no connection whatsoever in the reference to champagne and the fact that the deb's are said to be launched into the season.

Enough has been said to demonstrate the unenviable lot of these young women and the plight of their parents who foot the bill, “so spare them your jealousy,” says Mr. Graves, “if you feel any. Especially when you remember that after their brief butterfly existence for three months they will go back to the cocoon of austerity like the rest of us.”

J. Lockwood

A Paddington Placard. (1913)

Party News from the May 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

We desire to announce to the workers of Kilburn and North Kensington that Paddington Branch is holding meetings at Victoria Rd., High Rd., Kilburn, on Wednesdays at 8.30 p.m., and at Lancaster Rd., Portobello Rd., North Kensington on Fridays at 8.30 p.m.

This announcement will also constitute an effective salute to “our nearest friends,” the sympathetic scribes of the local sheets, who want Socialism in rag-time, please.

They are somewhat perturbed at the approach of summer, and with it the Socialist Party’s street-corner propagandists. This should allay their fears.

And then there is that Paddington pest, who revels in mouthing that miserable lie about the Socialists of Great Britain who hibernate during the winter to blossom forth with the flowers in May. There will be no plausible excuse after this— he will know where to find us in future, when he can present a case against us without resorting to dirty innuendoes and lying misrepresentation.

We are enjoying large audiences at Kilburn, and the prospects of forming a branch are promising. The wiseacres of Anti Socialists are in attendance twice a week when sober, and they regale their dupes with the ancient wheezes about us, which occasionally make them grin, but never prompt an intelligent question.

To get the workers to think and act is our business, not theirs, and in making this raid upon the preserves of these agents of reaction and confusion we shall ruthlessly expose and condemn them.

The local B.S.P. members boom the “Daily Herald,” advocate Syndicalism, and consciously do everything to frustrate the workers in realising what Socialism is and what it implies. For the workers to support such frauds as those is tantamount to committing suicide. We counsel them to ignore with contempt such a treacherous party. Have nothing to do with them! Attend our meetings, give an attentive hearing to our speakers and question them if need be.

We don't ask you to take for granted what we say just because we say it. We implore you to stop and think — stop and consider what your position in modern society represents. Reflect upon the value life has for you under the present hellish conditions! Listen to the Socialist Party’s propaganda and ponder over it. Procure our literature, the finest obtainable, and read it up, because men and women must be educated in order that they may be free.

Then, having achieved education, organise on class lines for the conquest of political power, making for the overthrow of slavery and bringing about the birth of the Society of the future.

Ben Carthurs.

Cooking the Books: The Magic Money Tree (2017)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the leaders' debate on BBC1 on 31 May, the Tory substitute, Amber Rudd, kept on accusing the Labour Party of relying on a 'Magic Money Tree' to conjure up the money to finance their election promises. She was repeating a Tory mantra designed to get people to believe that Labour's attractive reforms were impossible as there was no money there to pay for them.

In fact, there is plenty of money there, in the form of accumulated profits which, in theory, a government could tax or borrow. It's just that the Tories are against this as they want to protect profits (or want to spend it on vital things for capitalism like weapons of war). But, more importantly, to overdo this would disrupt the workings of the capitalist economic system.

Capitalism is a system of production for sale on a market with a view to profit. Profits are what makes it go round as an economic system. It is driven by investment for profit. If the prospects for this are good, then there's expansion and a boom. If they are not, then there's an economic downturn; which happens quite normally from time to time as part of the way capitalism works, when a boom leads to overproduction in a key industry whose fall in investment then has a knock-on effect on other sectors.

This can also happen through government intervention. If the policy a government pursues threatens profits or makes conditions for profit-making worse, this will have an economic effect – investment and so production and employment will stall. Capital will go on strike.

Left-wing governments that have set out to increase popular consumption have experienced this many times and have attributed it to a 'bankers' ramp', a 'wall of money', or 'gnomes of Zurich'. But there is nothing they were able to do about it and in the end they had to capitulate to the economic forces of capitalism and give priority to profits and profit-making. Two examples within living memory would be the Wilson government of 1964 and Mitterrand in France in 1981. Both demonstrated the limits of reformism.

A Corbyn government would have come up against these forces too and failed, not because the money wouldn't have been there, but because it can't be used to improve people's life at the expense of profitable investment. Profits are the forbidden fruit on the Money Tree – one reason why it makes more sense to end the whole capitalist system rather than try to make it work in a way it just cannot.

In one sense it's capitalism that is a Magic Money Tree – for the capitalists. They invest money in production – buy premises, machinery, materials, hire workers – and sell what it produces, and end up with more money than they started with. Magic. But, like all magic, it's an illusion. What happens away from appearances is that the workers they employ produce goods of a greater value than what they are paid as wages. It is this surplus value that is the source of profits and, further down the line, of the interest of bankers, the ground rents of landlords, and what governments spend. To stop this workers need to take an axe to the root rather than merely trying to get back some of the fruit.

The Economics of Housing (1963)

From the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The worker who cannot get a house, or has to put up with overcrowding, or who struggles for years with payments on a mortgage, will ask why something is not done about it. He may be surprised, though not helped, to be told that a great many people for a long time have been vainly busy with the problem.

Since 1851, when the first Housing Act was passed by Parliament, there have been nearly forty governments, Liberal, Tory and Labour, and every one of them has been pledged in some way or other to deal with the housing problem. Many fact-finding inquiries have been made by government departments, Royal Commissions or private organizations; hundreds of books and reports have been issued; and Lord Shaftesbury, who sponsored the 1851 Act, has been followed by a long line of well intentioned social reformers who, on humanitarian or other grounds, sought the abolition of slums and overcrowding or tried to keep rents down. One Royal Commission on Housing, 1885, had as a member the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.

Yet after all this time the housing problem has not been solved and it shows no sign of being solved now. What is more, it never has been solved at any time in the past century: there was never a time when people could look round and say that the things had at last been done.

The problem has been there all the time, though to succeeding generations it has seemed to take on different forms. At present it is the overall shortage of decent accommodation which makes the sufferers think how much better it would be if there were so many houses that you could see in every street “ House for Sale ” or “ To let” signs. But that is just what people did see earlier in the century.

In 1911, in England and Wales, there were over 400,000 uninhabited houses, with landlords looking in vain for tenants or buyers, yet at the same time there were another 400,000 houses officially described as “overcrowded.” Rents were much lower then than now, but so were wages, and the tenants of the overcrowded houses could not afford to move into the “empties." Anyone who imagines that housing problems started with World War I, or anyone who blames overcrowding on immigrants, should note that date, 1911. It was before World War I and was at a time when hundreds of thousands of people were leaving this country every year to settle in America and what were then British Colonies. The flow of immigration was out, not in.

The reason the housing problem has never been solved is that it is not really a housing problem at all but part of another and larger problem. The nature of this problem is indicated by the names of some of the housing Acts, names such as “Housing of the Working Classes Act,” “Artisans Dwellings Act "—but whoever heard of an Act for the housing of landed aristocrats or one for millionaires and company directors?

In the capitalist world we live in, the making of profit is the driving force behind production, and the employing class to whom the profits flow therefore have a continuing interest in keeping wages down. But they also have an interest in the health and efficiency of the workers they employ. In the nineteenth century, governments and employers were alarmed at the effects on health, physique and working efficiency of slums and overcrowding, but they were and are also concerned about its cost. So all the measures to improve housing or to reduce rents by subsidies or rent restriction have had the wages situation in mind.

When a Tory minister in a coalition government started rent control in 1915 it was because the rise of rents when building stopped during the war was causing violent discontent, and workers were pushing for higher wages. Rents were restricted (at the expense of the landlords) in order to help keep wages down. The same thing happened in other countries, and it. was shown by an International Labour Office inquiry into the effect of rent control in some continental countries in 1925 that the low rents had primarily benefited the employers.

In 1956 when the Tory government announced its intention to lift rent control on many houses the spokesmen for the Labour Opposition attacked it on the ground that the raising of rents would provoke determined and successful pressure by the workers for higher wages. This is indeed what happened. The year 1957 was a peak year for strikes. Wages went up by more than the average rise of the cost of living, and the addition to the total wage bill of the employers in fact exceeded the increase in rent gained by the landlords.

The employers had never minded the landlords being squeezed by rent control in the first place, but it became evident in the course of years that restricted rents and low profits for landlords had as one of their consequences the deterioration of housing and the creation of more near-slums. All three of the big political parties recognised this, though the remedies they offered were different. While the Tories imagined (wrongly) that decontrol would bring into the market spare accommodation where tenants were clinging to controlled houses larger than they needed and that this would prevent big increases of rents and house prices, and the Liberals slated them for not having done it sooner, the Labour Party proposed allowing some increase of rents conditional on improved maintenance. They linked this with the retention or reintroduction of control allied with the policy of wage restraint, as under the last Labour Government.

None of the three parties claimed in 1956 that the existing housing policies had been successful and should be left as they were. For one thing, with an acute shortage, control was to a large extent unenforceable: a writer in The Times (17.6.61) estimated that more than half a million houses that were supposed to be controlled were let at illegally high rents. And, in face of the facts, nobody claims that the housing problem has been solved after a hundred years of solutions. Nor will it be as long as capitalism lasts. Only when ALL production is carried on solely for use, by and in the interest of the whole community, will the production of houses be brought into line with human need.

Edgar Hardcastle

Editorial: The Housing Problem (1963)

Editorial from the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

This month we publish another special issue of the Socialist Standard. As many of our readers will know, we do this from time to time when we wish to deal more fully with a topic of current importance. Sometimes our subject is what we might call a “perennial” feature of capitalism, something that is linked with and indissoluble from it—like war. At other times we have concentrated our attention on particular, perhaps passing, features or events—such as Africa or the Common Market.

In this issue we give our special consideration to a topic that many people are inclined to dismiss, rather surprisingly, as something new, something temporary, something that will soon be coped with and disposed of. We speak of the housing problem.

Yet the harsh fact is that the problem of housing, far from being a temporary inconvenience or a passing hardship, is a problem as old as capitalism itself and one that will remain unresolved as long as capitalism lasts.

Over ninety years ago, Frederick Engels was writing about housing. In a pamphlet called The Housing Question he exposed the pretensions of the reformers of his day to be able to solve the problem, and the hopes of their successors to do anything better, so long as capitalism lasted. What is the situation now, almost a century later?

Many of the houses that in Engels’ day had already been standing for thirty, forty, even fifty years, are still standing now. I.T.V.’s Coronation Street was named, not after George VI’s coronation in 1937, nor George V’s in 1910, nor yet after Edward VII’s in 1901, but after Queen Victoria’s in 1837. And in Salford, which Engels knew well, they have only just got round to pulling down Waterloo Place, built in 1815 and named to commemorate the victory over Napoleon.

Today, there are more than one million houses in this country, probably worse than those in Coronation Street, reckoned to be unfit for habitation. Be that as it may, people still inhabit them and many will do so for a long time yet. And so low are the standards that “qualify” a house for this category that even one million is certainly an underestimate. In Liverpool alone there are 88,000 houses beyond any prospect of repair; in Birmingham 50,000 families are on the waiting list for houses for which the average waiting time is eight years; in Oldham it has been estimated that the staggering proportion of one house in four is unfit to live in. And in London, where the situation is perhaps the most acute of all, the families of the homeless are forced to walk the streets.

The political parties of capitalism all profess to be concerned with the problem, of course, just as they have been doing since Engels’ time. They engage in mutual recrimination about it, just as they have always done. The Labour Party reproach the Tories for building only 300,000 houses a year; the Tories retort that while the Labour Party was in office the annual housebuilding rate only once exceeded 200,000.

We are treated, it goes without saying, to all the usual promises of what each party intends to do if elected next time. In 1945, before they became the Government, the Labour Party boasted “We shall build four or five million houses and knock down any amount of slums”. Said the former Conservative housing minister only last year, “The Government intend to see that, every family has its home, and a decent home, that is the pledge”. Switch the promises, or the parties saying them, or the times when they were said, it does not matter very much. The game goes on much the same.

Frederick Engels, we have no doubt, would find it all rather familiar. Certainly familiar enough to be able to say, as he did over 90 years ago and with just as much relevance and justification, "The so-called housing shortage, which plays such a great role in the press nowadays, does not consist in the fact, that the working class generally lives in bad, overcrowded and unhealthy dwellings. This shortage is not something peculiar to the present; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modem proletariat in contradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly from it. In order to make an end of this housing shortage there is only one means; to abolish altogether the exploitation and oppression of the working class by the ruling class”.

Would he find anything about the present housing problem to cause him to change even one word of this statement?

He would not. Capitalism is the real problem we must deal with. It was then. It is now.

Greasy Pole: Theresa - Strong And Stable (2017)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

We were told that Theresa May decided, flushed with optimism, to hold a general election on June 8 when she was hiking with her husband through Dolgellau, a small market town lying at the base of the Cader Idris range in Snowdonia. Dolgellau was once a woollen town but it was taken over by the automatic looms. Now it relies on tourists, who walk and climb or stay at the hotels there. When May was a small toddler a group of Socialist Party members climbed to the summit of Cader Idris, where one of them who was pregnant stood deeply awestruck by the view. That evening in the hotel there was a lot to be discussed – such as capitalism’s abuse of the world’s beauties, like the political conceits of the system’s rulers to the misery of its people. For May it is rather different now from her relaxed stroll through Dolgellau.

Speaking Out

One who would have been particularly interested in that discussion was Ed Balls, whose book – Speaking Out – has recently been published. This is an account of his political experiences including a previous election when, according to Balls in an advisory mood: ‘What we badly need in Britain is a return to the sort of leadership exemplified by Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister and Gordon Brown as a Chancellor…’ without speculating on how this proposed combustible partnership might have operated. Speaking Out is about Balls’ time as an Oxford undergraduate, then as an economist at Harvard followed by the Financial Times and a place at the Treasury until with the election of the Labour Government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown a succession of ministerial posts preceded the defeat of that government and had him emerging as shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.

PMQs

That was when he achieved a kind of notoriety appearing on the TV screens exchanging insults and indecipherable hand gestures with David Cameron during Prime Ministers Questions – which entailed the exposure of Cameron to lasting scorn among the fans by mistaking West Ham for Aston Villa. Those broadcast clashes earned Balls a reputation as a left-winger inspired by a passion to help establish a more equal society. Except that he denied this with his very own words: ‘But being Labour doesn’t mean that I can’t also believe in a market economy which creates wealth and good jobs . . .  you couldn’t build a stronger economy on a fairer society through opposing business; it had to be a partnership between the dynamism of business and the helping hand of government. And my arrival from the Financial Times, the pink-papered global business newspaper, to work for Labour in 1994 was one symbol of that change they were pursuing’.

Osborne

This was a preamble to Balls’ next, heavily publicised, ambitiously gratifying, personal appearance on TV when as the news came in late on polling day he picked over the tastier morsels with George Osborne. It was not comforting for Theresa May – but then how was Osborne to react when one of her first responses to becoming party leader was ruthlessly to eject him from being Chancellor of the Exchequer – even if he could then take his revenge as editor of the Evening Standard? And in any case May herself had never hesitated to make enemies. Apart from her infamously informing the Tories that they were better known as The Nasty Party there was the matter of her costly tastes in clothes, like a ‘Deliciously Soft Escada Cashmere Coat’ priced at £1950 and her revealing underwear such as headlined by the Express as ‘The Day Theresa May’s Boob-Busting Bra Sparked Twitter Meltdown’.

Paisley

Walking that day with her husband through Dolgellau Theresa May could feel easy about fixing the date of the election. She had cleared a number of rivals out of the Party, leaving her supreme to assure the voters that she alone would ensure Strong Stable Government. She would see off Jean-Claude Juncker along with those other tiresome European mediocrities. The Tories were a long way ahead with every opinion poll, leaving Jeremy Corbyn behind in what seemed a swamp of defeat. But as the campaign got under way another, profoundly unsettling, picture emerged. And when it came to that fateful day Jeremy Corbyn was returned in his constituency with 73 per cent of the vote and the Labour Party gained 30 seats. After all those confident boasts May’s party did not have enough MPs to set up a government. There was plenty of advice and predictions. In the end she turned up with yet another surprise by announcing that, along with her guilt and despair about the outcome of her campaign she would ensure that at least she could be at the head of a government, even if it entailed being in alliance with the Democratic Unionists – Ian Paisley’s original sprouting in Northern Ireland.

Crackpots

The DUP was formed in 1971 and has survived during various disciplines of militarism known as The Troubles. It is now the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly and its ten seats at Westminster make it the fifth largest in the Commons. But as it was typically known as ‘a coalition of crackpots’ it seemed unlikely that May would aggravate the chaos in her party by trying to survive as a government with their support. But that is what emerged from the chaos, with May as the titular leader of a minority government intended to operate on only ‘matters of mutual concern’, which left her enemies to speculate hopefully on exactly how it could fail. There is no lack of evidence that this will happen, if only in the recorded attitudes of the DUP leaders. One is in the Caleb Foundation opinion that the origins of the Earth – by god over six days – should be taught in schools. The party is hostile to LGBT groups and opposed to same sex marriage: ‘Peter will not marry Paul’. Northern Ireland is the only place in the UK where it is illegal to have an abortion, with a prison term of life for cases of drug-induced abortion. In December 2015 Arlene Foster became the party leader but in January 2017 she had to step down from the post of First Minister after presiding over a disastrous Renewable Heat Incentive Scheme costing the Budget some £400 million and ensuring that Theresa May’s effort to survive through an alliance with the DUP would look very unlikely. Which should divert us no more than on that long gone day on the Welsh mountain.

Ivan

The Communists, the Labour Party, and Parliament (1943)

Editorial from the April 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

We hold that as the Labour Party is committed to the policy of trying to reform capitalism, instead of the policy of abolishing capitalism, no purpose useful to the Socialist movement would be served by the S.P.G.B. seeking affiliation with the Labour Party. Consequently the S.P.G.B. never has tried to affiliate with the Labour Party or any other party in this country. We could not pledge ourselves to give loyal adherence to the non-Socialist programme of the Labour Party.

On the other hand, the S.P.G.B. is not opposed to the Parliamentary system. We hold that the only important thing that is wrong about Parliament, from our point of view, is that it is controlled by the wrong people and for the wrong purpose. Its M.P.s at present have been sent there by electors who want capitalism to be retained. When a majority of the electors have become Socialists they will send their delegates to Parliament with the mandate to establish Socialism. In the words of our Declaration of Principles, the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, will be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation. We have always held the above views, and have never been beguiled by the various opposing views that have had their long or short periods of popularity. The S.P.G.B. never went in for theories of armed revolt or general strikes, or "taking and holding" the factories by industrial organisations. Nor did we ever give support to the idea of soviets or dictatorship.

All of this is by way of providing a background to the dispute between the Communist Party, which wants to affiliate with the Labour Party, and the Labour Party Executive, which doesn't want the Communists to win enough support to be able to force a way in. The Communist Party's position, judged by any ordinary standards, is peculiar—but then, if any such standards are applied, the Communist Party itself is revealed as a peculiarly irresponsible and dishonest organisation. It has proclaimed for years that the Labour Party is this "third capitalist Party," yet it wants to be inside. It has proclaimed that the road to emancipation lies through soviets not parliament, and through civil war and dictatorship not votes and democracy, yet it unhesitatingly affirms its belief in Parliamentary democracy when trying to wheedle its way to affiliation.

The Daily Worker (March 6th, 1943) published an article by J. Walker, M.P., putting the Labour Party's view against Communist affiliation, and alongside it a reply by W. Gallacher, M.P., writing as a Communist M.P.

Here is a question put by Walker, followed by Gallacher's reply:—

Walker: "Does the Communist Party believe in the British, system of democracy and democratic elections, or does it still believe in a policy of dictatorship?"
Gallacher: “ Of course, we believe in parliamentary democracy. That is why I am in Parliament. That is why I am such a regular attender and why the Party is so anxious that I should give a good account of myself.
   The dictatorship of the Proletariat applies to quite different conditions from those we are discussing now. It arises out of the attempt of the dispossessed exploiters to overthrow by violence the victorious forces of the working class."

Anyone who knows what was and is the official policy of the Communist International, of which the British Communist Party is a subordinate part, will recognise at once that Gallacher's reply is not by any means full-blooded Communist doctrine. Why Gallacher does not state his own Party's case only he knows. Perhaps he has forgotten what it is. Let us therefore recall a few earlier statements made by the Communists.

The fundamental document is the "Statutes and Conditions of Affiliation of the Communist International," as adopted at the Second Congress, Moscow, August, 1920 (published by the Communist Party of Great Britain at the time, price 2d.).

The opening statement contains the following:—

   The aim of the Communist International is to organise an armed struggle for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the establishment of an international Soviet Republic as a transition to the complete abolition of the capitalist state. The Communist International considers the dictatorship of the proletariat an essential means for the liberation of humanity from the horrors of capitalism; and regards the Soviet form of government as the historically necessary form of this dictatorship. (Page 4.)

Another interesting little item is contained in the first of the 21 Conditions which are binding on bodies like the British Communist Party which are affiliated to the Communist International. Condition No. 1 lays it down that adherents of the Third International must use any means of propaganda that are at their disposal, "in the columns of newspapers, at public meetings, within the Trade Unions and Co-operatives," to " denounce not only the capitalists, but also their allies, the reformists of every colour and shade."

Another document worth recalling is the answer the Communist International gave to the I.L.P. when the latter contemplated seeking affiliation. It was drafted by Lenin, and published by the British Communist Party under the title "The Communist International answers the I.L.P." (1920, reprinted 1932, price 2d.).

This is what Lenin wrote on Parliament:—

    "Whoever tells the British working class that it can overthrow the capitalist dictatorship in the British Empire through any other means than the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is by taking the full power into their own hands by depriving of political power all those who defend capitalist exploitation, and by organising a Red labour army—deceives himself and others."

Lenin went on to say that even supposing the unlikely event of a working class gaining power by parliamentary elections, "even in that case the Communists are not for a minute freed of their duty of saying to the workers the following: (1) that it is most unlikely that the English bourgeoisie . . . will give up its power without a struggle and become subject to the paper will of the parliament; (2) that, therefore, the workers should prepare not for an easy parliamentary victory, but for victory by a heavy civil war; (3) that should the workers have succeeded in gaining power without this civil war, that would only signify that the necessity of civil war would confront the working class as soon as it set out to realise its will to defend itself from capitalist exploitation and speculation; so soon as it began to liberate the masses in the colonies, now oppressed by British Imperialism." (Page 21.)

It will now be seen that Gallacher's "Of course, we believe in parliamentary democracy" is quite a long way from the whole of what good Communists are supposed to believe.

Above all, Gallacher did not recall what Lenin wrote in reply to Gallacher about the question of supporting the Labour Party. This was in Lenin's "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder" (1920, published by Martin Lawrence, 1/-) Gallacher at that time was opposed to Parliamentary action and to voting for Labour Party candidates. Lenin replied to Gallacher by showing why Communists should take such action.

   At the present time the British Communists very often find it hard to approach the masses and even to get them to listen to them. If I as a Communist come out and call upon the workers to vote for the Hendersons against Lloyd George, they will certainly listen to me. And I will be able to explain in a popular manner not only why Soviets are better than Parliament, and why the dictatorship of the proletariat is better than the dictatorship of Churchill (which is concealed behind the signboard of bourgeois " democracy”), but I will also be able to explain that I want to support Henderson with my vote in the same way as a rope supports one who is hanged—that the establishment of a Henderson Government will prove that I am right, will bring the masses over to my side, and will accelerate the political death of the Hendersons and the Snowdens, as was the case with their friends in Russia and Germany. ("Left-Wing” Communism, p. 68.)

Last of all there was Gallacher's original opposition to Parliamentary action altogether. He used then to describe himself as “anti-Parliamentarian,” and wrote about his views in a letter to the Workers' Dreadnought (February 21st, 1920).

"Any support given to Parliamentarism,” he wrote, "is simply assisting to put power into the hands of our British Scheidemanns and Noskes. Henderson, Clynes & Co. are hopelessly reactionary.”

Again:—

    The rank and file of the I.L.P. in Scotland is becoming more and more disgusted with the thought of Parliament, and the Soviets or Workers' Councils are being supported by almost every branch. This is very serious, of course, for the gentlemen who look to politics for a profession, and they are using any and every means to persuade their members to come back into the Parliamentary fold.

Gallacher in his letter had a final word of disgust for those "who are so eagerly clamouring for Parliamentary 'honours' (?) and who are so anxious to prove that they can rule as effectively as the 'boss' class politicians themselves.”

Now all is changed. Gallacher now has Parliamentary honours himself and wants to take what he regards as his rightful place alongside Henderson's successors in the Labour Party. 

Socialism In The Village. (1921)

Pamphlet Review from the March 1921 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism In The Village by C. A. Pease (I.L.P. Pamphlets 1d.)

This is the title of an I.L.P. pamphlet written by Mr. C. A. Pease for the rural workers, professing to tell them how to remake “Merrie England.” The last and most successful attempt to organise agricultural labourers has opened a new and promising field for political propaganda, and the I.L.P. no doubt hopes to compensate itself here for the loss of numerous members who could not resist the charms of the British Bolsheviki. For this purpose the pamphlet may be useful enough, but its educational value to the workers is just nothing. It is almost to be regretted that it is simply written and costs only one penny.

To start with, there is nothing in it about Socialism.

Mr. Pease begins by saying that the war has left the villages unchanged. This is hardly correct, but curiously enough, the one thing of vital importance to the workers, their exploitation, which must necessarily remain while capitalism lasts, is utterly misunderstood by him.

There certainly have been movements worth noting. First, there has been a striking development both in the technical side of agriculture and in working conditions. The acute shortage of food and labour, arising out of the war, has led to an enormous increase in the use of labour-saving machinery, and at the same time the machinery itself has undergone rapid improvement. The growing use and simplification of the milking machine during the last few years are but one instance of this. The effect of the minimum wage clause of the Corn Production Act, and of we spread of trade unionism, has been a very considerable reduction of hours, accompanied, as was to be expected, by a proportionate intensification of labour. If a farmer has to pay fixed minimum wages for a certain number of hours, he will see to it that no time is lost, and whereas farm life in the past may have been somewhat leisurely, it is no exaggeration to say that now every minute counts. It is the boast of the new type of farmer or farm manager that his men have to work under factory conditions, in spite of the repeated cry that industrial methods couldn’t be applied to agriculture. In addition there has been, of course, an equal change in the kind of skill required of a competent farm hand; the man who drives a tractor is expected as well to be able to do his own repairs, or at least to know sufficient to be able to locate faults in his engine.

Secondly, rising prices of farm produce and land have been the cause of great activity in buying and selling agricultural property. Increased profits have enabled tenant farmers to clear themselves of debts and mortgages, the relic of pre-war stagnation, and purchase their holdings while the former landowners have been only too pleased to sell out at double and treble 1914 prices, as they have been able to do. The countryside can almost be said to have changed hands. Although he does not understand how it happens, Mr. Pease realises that both farmers and landowners live on the agricultural workers; he sees there must of necessity be a struggle between employer and employed over the division of the produce of the latter's labour, and that organisation helps the workers to  get a larger share than they otherwise would. He then, however, makes the following sweeping statement:

"But no sooner have wages risen in agriculture, as in other industries, then farmers and manufacturers, shipowners, coal owners, and the employers of every sort, have raised prices to such an extent that their profits, far from falling, have been greatly increased, while the wage earners find themselves little, if any, the better for their rise in wages."

One naturally wonders why, if this is true, the I.L.P. does not advocate the break-up of the unions, except for the fact that it derives much of its support from them.

If the capitalists can raise their selling prices at will, why do they fight against demands for wage increases? and why should they delay price juggling until after higher wages have actually been given? Why should prices in Germany have increased so much more and prices in America so much less than in this country? Why in 1914 did prices jump sometimes as much as 50 per pent, while wages had an opposite tendency ? The fact of the matter is, of course, that a manufacturer or farmer always sells his goods for as much as he can get, and if a farmer asked 70s, for a quarter of wheat, and imported wheat was being sold at 40s., well, he might go on asking and asking and asking; Wage increases cannot be passed on in this way. Rising' prices compel the workers to demand more in order to live; the existence of unemployed will always prevent them from getting much more than the bare necessaries of life and they frequently get much less.

Mr. Pease has the usual I.L.P. attitude towards the State.. He says “when the Government makes any genuine attempt to control prices it is met by the difficulty that farmers and manufacturers will cease to produce goods unless they are sure of a profit which will satisfy them.” What is a “genuine attempt to control prices”? The Government represents the interests of the capitalist class; it must on occasion, such for instance, as when famine threatened during the war, artificially stimulate production and limit a too extravagant soaring of prices, but can it seriously be expected to control prices in the interests of the workers and to the detriment of any considerable section of the employing class?

Mr. Pease continues: “By combining and forming trusts, capitalists have now become so powerful that they can defy trade unionism and even Parliamentary control.” Mr. Pease has yet to show when the capitalists were not in a position to “defy trade unionism," but it is the concluding few words which are the real puzzler. When Mr. Pease has explained how the capitalists have become so powerful as to defy themselves, perhaps he will answer the following question put to a religious orator: "Can God make anything so heavy that he cannot lift it?"

Still, even if he does not understand the working of the capitalist system our author tells us how to end it, "Make capital as well as land public property"; “as long as capital is owned by individuals the capitalist will control trade and industry”; “By capital is meant not only money, but such means of producing wealth as buildings, machinery, rolling stock, mines, etc.” What is meant by "public ownership of money” must he left to the economists of the I.L.P. to explain, but the rest is clear enough. Capital is to be owned collectively by the State instead of by individuals. The Post Office is instanced to show how it would work. The workers are to have “a really sufficient livelihood,” and the surplus will be used for “public services—and the expenses of government.” That “expenses of government” means interest paid to our old friend the capitalist, and if the standard of living is that of the postal workers, or say the clerks employed by the I.L.P., the surplus left for the interest will be big indeed. It is, of course, unfortunate that the postal workers should choose this moment to decide that it may be necessary for them to strike to better their conditions. Mr. Pease does not attempt to explain how the paying into the Treasury of profits made in the Post Office benefits the workers either in or out of the postal service.

Our reformer has difficulty in making up his mind whether the landowners ought to be compensated when the State takes over, but decides finally that they may, because “it can be done without costing a penny. The landowners shall he given Government bonds in return for the land, the interest on which will be more than covered by the rents paid to the State. ” It is all so simple that one wonders why its discovery should have been left to Mr Pease, who doesn’t appreciate the real beauty of it. This will be the position. The “people” will own everything, including the land; they will let the land to themselves, pay themselves rent, hand some of it over to the ex-landowners for giving them their own property, “all of which will cost the nation nothing.”

To make it doubly secure the nation “can recover any part it pleases of the bond-holders incomes by means of the Income Tax.”

He probably thought it might not be quite convincing, so he naively adds, “however, we are more concerned with the results of Land Nationalization than with the method by which it will be carried out.”

This means that Mr. Pease, and presumably the I.L P., does not aim at the abolition of wage slavery, but only at the improvement of the position of the slaves. It will no longer be possible to argue that “farming won’t pay unless the labourer is a low-paid wage slave.” He has not grasped the fact that capitalists normally make profit by paving for labour-power at its value in the cost of keeping the labourers and enabling them to reproduce themselves.

All that Mr. Pease has to offer the agricultural labourer is already guaranteed him by the Corn Production Act, but apparently the I.LP. has room for farmers too. They are to get “security of tenure” and “compensation for improvements” which, however, are already promised in the Government's Agricultural Bill; in return they must undertake to cultivate their farms according to the laws of good husbandry—here again Mr. Lloyd George has forestalled Mr. Pease.

In case the workers prove sceptical our author produces the goods—in Australia, in the shape of the State agricultural enterprises of the Queensland Government. The I.L.P. used to be very keen on the Australian Labour Governments, but just recently Mr. Ramsay Macdonald has found another “typically I.L.P. State ” in Georgia. Perhaps some disillusioned victims of this earthly paradise have been declaring that it is all moonshine.

The “Daily Herald” recently indignantly repudiated the suggestion that under nationalisation the workers would be forbidden to strike. What they, and Ramsay Macdonald, have to explain is why strikes should be necessary.

Mr. Pease has the same difficulty. His theory requires the Trade Unions to make a graceful exit; it really is unkind of them not to do so. “As a fighting force, protecting Labour against Capital, it should no longer be required.” But the Trade Unions will still be necessary "to guard the interests of their members.” Against whom? Mr. Pease does not say.

However, he makes the best of a bad business and turns the Union into a Guild, which solves a whole host of difficulties. The Guild, however, has its problems too. The Guild will control the farming industry and will therefore require capital; it then “might easily become a wealthy corporation, making profit at the expense of the community.”

Having protected the agricultural workers against the “nation,” we now have to protect the “nation " against the agricultural workers. How? Oh just suppose it is done, “A workable plan may be found ! ”

There are heaps of other delightful things that might (and might not) happen which as Mr. Pease says, “would be pleasant and interesting to picture,” but it is to be feared that if the agricultural labourers read such rubbish as this it will be a long time before we see “the country gentry retiring from the countryside” and handing over their mansions to the workers. As I would not like to think that Mr. Pease had laboured in vain might I suggest that the I.L P. supply this pamphlet to the “courtly, kind- hearted country gentry” to help lighten the tedium of rural life for them ?

Edgar Hardcastle

Editorial: Burning Injustice (2017)

Editorial from the July 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

So many things about the Grenfell Tower fire continue to stink, even weeks after the disaster. The flames were not even out, nor the bodies counted, before the recriminations and finger-pointing began.

Not surprisingly the building owners, Kensington and Chelsea Council, quickly came under savage criticism for spending £8.6m on a recent refurbishment aimed at creating new rentable space and prettifying the exterior with new cladding, but not bothering to install sprinklers or ensure that the cladding material was fire-proof.

Why, people wanted to know, was there only one fire exit in a building of 120 flats, an exit frequently blocked by rubbish including old mattresses which the council did not remove? And why, when the fire broke out, was there such chaos on the ground with nobody from the council on the scene to establish any kind of central meeting and information point for survivors and anxious relatives?

Perhaps it was to deflect some of this blame that the council leader shamelessly implied to the press that sprinklers had not been installed because residents did not want the inconvenience. Though disaster frequently brings out the best in ‘ordinary’ people who fall over themselves in a rush to help, as we also saw after the Manchester and London attacks, the same cannot be said for elected officials. While Jeremy Corbyn lost no time in racing to the scene, and even the Queen turned up, the hopelessly aloof Theresa May bungled yet another press opportunity by ignoring the victims and speaking only to firefighters, sparking a huge march in Whitehall demanding her resignation.

It would be a truism to point out that capitalism doesn’t care about the poor. It comes as no surprise to learn that tower blocks for rich people have multiple exit points, sprinkler systems and efficient fire-proofing. A similar fire that swept through Dubai’s plush Torch Tower in 2015 yielded no casualties at all. The fact that residents’ frequent warnings about the building’s safety were ignored by a council presiding over one of the richest boroughs in one of the world’s richest cities is also par for the course.

What we ought to learn from this, if we don’t already know it, is that capitalism’s elected officials and bureaucrats are not smarter, better or faster than the rest of us but are, on the whole, greedy careerists and bone-idle time-servers with their eyes on the perks and not on their responsibilities. When it really counts, it is the so-called ‘ordinary’ people who, time and time again, show initiative, common-sense, cooperation and indeed heroism, while the elected officials stand around with their thumbs up their backsides waiting for someone to tell them what to do. If socialism relied on people like that, we would give up the revolutionary project right now. Instead, it is the ‘ordinary’ people – the vast majority of the world’s population – who show in times of crisis that they have got what it takes. They are, in short, ‘ordinary’ enough to change the world.

Russia 1917: As We Saw It (2017)

From the June 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 'usurper of the Socialist name' who was made Minister of War was Alexander Kerensky.

The position as we conceive it is as follows. The capitalists of Russia, long squirming under the irksome restrictions placed upon their expansion by the feudal nobles, found in the conditions arising out of the war, a situation full of promise and they proceeded to exploit it. The Russian Army, they calculated, essentially an army in arms under duress, could have no love for the powers that drove them to the shambles, while the people at large, groaning under the misery of the universal chaos, would accept the overthrow of the nobility with acclamation. So far they appear to have calculated correctly. They accomplished their coup d'état.

Having got safely so far, of course, the Russian capitalists were greeted with the applause of their fellow capitalists the world over. But, as the history of many revolutions shows, the job is only half complete largely upon a disaffected army and people ― an army and people writhing under the torture of this cruellest of wars, naturally find it no easy matter to keep the war machine a fit and efficient instrument for further prosecuting the war.

The simple Russian soldier, once the hand of the militarist bully relaxed its grip upon his throat, gave expression to his real feelings with regard to the war by fraternising with the "enemy" by battalions, and by deserting in myriads. The simple Russian peasants, to whom "Russian aspirations in the Straits" was a meaningless phrase, and the pan-Slav question empty vapouring; to whom the enemy was the now deposed authority who had directed usurious taxation against them, holding their ungrown crops in mortgage to force them, broken and destitute, from their lands, offered no force moral or physical, to restrain the "unpatriotic" to the path of duty. Hence we find the Provisional Government engaged in the task of hunting around for some force wherewith to compel obedience to their commands, while the capitalist world looks on, its heart torn with anxious fears, wondering if they will find it. (. . . )

As in England and France and Germany the capitalist class have turned to the pseudo-Socialist and other labour fakers to aid them to their bloody victory, so in Russia the enemies of the working class find their agents in the ranks of the working-class leaders. Who fitter than a "Socialist" to harangue an undisciplined army? Who fitter than a "rebel" to lure other rebels from their rebellious ways? Who fitter than a "leader" of "democracy" to represent the shadow of democracy as the substance, and to inflame the "democratic" passions to the defence of liberties which do not exist? So they made a usurper of the Socialist name Minister for War, and sent him, hot-foot, to do work which no Socialist, in any country, could or would do.

So, having secured this agent to divide the workers, the Russian capitalists feel that they are strong enough for a bolder move, and have announced their intention of establishing a sort of travelling Courts with soldiers to execute their orders, though for the moment fear of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates Committees constrain them to hold their hands. Meanwhile they are straining every nerve to create a force, both of public opinion and military, powerful enough to strike at those who dare to challenge their right to rule, and when they have secured this, then the butchery will commence ― the real bloodshed of this revolution starts.

(Socialist Standard, June 1917. Full article can be read here.)

The Future Is Yours To Mould (1945)

From the January 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Allied Powers have again asserted their supremacy and are ruthlessly stamping out the opposing forces. It has now become certain that victory is for the Allies on the Continent. As the conflict nears an end, the press, the pulpit and the radio prepare the minds of the people for things to come.

Let us cast our minds back to the “dark days,” when Britain stood alone with her “back to the wall." The capitalist class suddenly discovered there seemed to be some sort of inequality existing among the people of this fair isle (a startling discovery), and began to voice opinions such us, "Why should rich men's sons go to public schools and poor men's not? Why shouldn’t working men and women have a decent standard of living? As a matter of fact, why should there be any unemployed? By gad, sir, something must be done about it! But for this war being in the way, we might get on with the job immediately. Drat those Nazis! Let us all throw our weight on the oars and pull together until such time as we have rid ourselves of this menace."

So the workers fell in and pulled on the oars of the good ship “Kidology," sailing towards the ever-receding mirage of security and plenty.

The time for the pay-off is coining near, but there seems to be a change in the attitude of our saviours; their voices are weak, we can't hear them any more. The opinions of our masters and their henchmen have changed. Now it is, “We will have to work hard for the peace or else we can have no new order." No, your eyes have not deceived you; you did read in a newspaper that unless we find a foreign market for goods there will not be any employment for the working class. Yes, you also read that British shipping would be in a very bad position after the war. “What is this all about? Why, didn't someone say something about this before?"

Someone did tell you about it. The Socialist Party of Great Britain told you, as we told your fathers during and after the last war, that war solved no problems for the working class; that conditions after the war would be the same as before—nay, even worse. War is a product of this system of society, as unemployment is, and all the other miseries the working class are subjected to. No one is going to “save" the workers. No one is going to lead them into paradise. Your fathers fell for that tale after the last war. They left things to leaders, then sat back and waited. Whilst they waited in poverty, the rotten conditions got some of them and they drank themselves to death: others just died the natural death of a worker, in the workhouse.

You are young, fellow-worker—the future is yours to mould. Are you going to go on in the same old way as your fathers did, or are you going to make an effort to understand the world in which you live? Until you do, you are doomed. You are going to feel the cold, clammy hand of poverty in its worst form. You are going to know what means test investigation is: what it means to stand in a dole queue and wish to Christ you had never been born; see your children grow up and then be snatched from you, to go out and kill or be killed in a war where the bombs will be “better and more beautiful.” War is as sure to come under capitalism as day follows night.

It is quite simple to understand the fundamentals of Socialism. One doesn’t require an awful lot of study to realise there are two classes in society. You, fellow-worker, belong to the working class, the useful section of society— makes all the wealth. You build the palaces, the mansions whose labour, when applied to nature-given material, and the liners. You also build the rotten bug-walks you live in.

The other section—only a small fraction of the population—own and control all the means of living. Only when this section can find a market for their goods is the machinery of production set in motion. Only when this section can find a market for their goods do the working class find employment. When goods are piled high and no market is to be found, the workers are unemployed and go hungry. Goods are produced for profit, not for use.

War results from different sections of the international master class searching for places to dump goods, sources of raw material or trade routes. Whether the country of their birth has a large empire or none at all makes no difference to the working class. They have nothing to sell but their labour-power, which they sell to the highest bidder, the amount received in return is only enough to replace the workers’ energies and reproduce the species, that there may be someone to slave when they are thrown on the scrap-heap, incapable of acting their part as work beasts.

There is only one way by which the workers can escape the hell which they are subjected to, and that is to realise the only solution is Socialism—the common ownership of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people. Socialism will only be possible when the majority of the people understand and consciously organise to capture the powers of government, including the armed forces.

Fellow-worker, you have a duty to perform to your children. Your job is to seek knowledge and organise for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of Socialism. In years to come, when your children ask you, "What did you do after the last war. Daddy?” don’t let it be said you hung your head in shame and said, "Nothing, Son.” Rather let it be said. "I fought along with my comrades to establish Socialism.” The world is yours to mould.

Bert Vallar

War as Terrorism (2012)

Book Review from the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just War. by Howard Zinn. Charta, €10.00.

Howard Zinn, who died in 2010, was a radical American activist and writer, author of A People’s History of the United States. This volume contains the text of a talk he gave in Rome in 2005, together with some striking photos by Moises Saman. Its strength lies in a combination of personal remarks and more general reflections.

Appalled by what he knew of fascism, Zinn volunteered for the US Army Air Force in 1943, and flew in bombing missions over continental Europe. But once the war was over he gradually came to question what he had been doing. Accounts of Hiroshima showed what the effects of the atomic bomb had been, and Zinn realised that when he helped to drop napalm on the French town of Royan, he was participating in the killing of children. The Second World War might seem to be the extreme case of a humanitarian war, but however just a war against fascism appeared to be, he and others ‘had become unthinking killers of innocent people’.

The defeat of Hitler and Mussolini did not lead to the end of militarism, as there were now two superpowers with thousands of nuclear weapons. And war, Zinn argues, is but ‘the extreme form of terrorism’. The US attacks in recent years on Iraq and Afghanistan are motivated by a desire to control resources such as oil. So soldiers do not ‘give their lives for their country’: their lives are taken from them, not given, and this is in the service of the government and the rest of the ruling class. Governments use a combination of coercion and propaganda to get workers to fight for them.

Zinn quotes Albert Einstein: ‘Wars will stop when men refuse to fight’. More accurately, wars will stop when people no longer support the social system that gives rise to them and replace it with one where wars are a thing of the past. In this book at least, Zinn has little to say about how this might happen, though he does refer to a world ‘in which national borders are erased and we are truly one human family’.

So, a slim volume but an instructive one.

Paul Bennett

Class Dismissed - How TV Frames the Working Class (2012)

Film Review from the March 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s almost taken for granted that television doesn’t accurately reflect how we live, but it’s not always easy to articulate how it distorts the real world. Class Dismissed: How TV Frames The Working Class is a useful examination of the ways the goggle-box deceives us. The film was made in 2005 by Pepi Leistyna of the University of Massachusetts - Boston, and is easy enough to find on the internet. It only discusses American television, but the trends are recognisable elsewhere.

To follow the film, you have to tune in to the definitions of ‘class’ used. When its talking heads refer to the ‘working class’ they use the narrower meaning of people with low incomes, little power and less “cultural capital” (or what could be called sophistication). This is contrasted with ‘middle-class’ people who are a notch above on each of these scales. The ‘middle class’ is living the American Dream of gleaming affluence and clean-cut leisure.

According to Leistyna, ‘middle class’ characters on television are depicted as empowered, independent and sassy because the social and economic forces which often prevent these traits are downplayed. These characters only need to struggle against aspects of their personality which might stop them living the American Dream. Programme makers are less interested in showing issues relating to wider social forces or being dealt with collectively.

So, TV tells us how we should define success and that this is to be achieved individually, rather than through political action. An exception to these trends was Roseanne, an early nineties sitcom which retained some left-wing ideas thanks to the persistence of its show runner Roseanne Barr. However, even in this show, the family ‘made it’, and became wealthy. A British equivalent would be the Trotters becoming millionaires in Only Fools and Horses.

Leistyna gives another example of how ‘middle-class’ culture is shown on television in ways which hide wider problems: if a television show depicts a well-off black family, then this disguises the real inequalities that exist between communities. Programme makers would see it differently, of course. They would say that minorities can be shown in a positive way to challenge stereotypes and to improve how they are represented. However, Leistyna would reply that television only depicts successful characters from minority groups in ways compatible with ‘middle class’ values. He’s saying that television tolerates minorities as long as they are living that American Dream.

This depiction of those who have ‘made it’ differs from how ‘working-class’ people are presented on television. When a ‘middle-class’ character makes a mistake, it’s seen as an aberration from the confident, successful person they should be. When a ‘working-class’ character makes a mistake, it’s because that’s just what they’re like. Leistyna reels off a list of characteristics associated with ‘working-class’ people on television: bad taste, lack of intelligence, reactionary politics, poor work ethic and dysfunctional family values. Imagine a racist Homer Simpson who pushes Marge around, and you get an amalgamation of these traits. Leistyna describes how the ‘working class’ is portrayed as an underclass of hillbillies, rednecks and trailer trash whose lives are there to be ripped open on The Jerry Springer Show. Or its closest British counterpart The Jeremy Kyle Show.

Leistyna’s argument could be boiled down to saying that television reinforces ‘middle-class’ ideology as an attack on the working class. This is television as propaganda to sell the American Dream and distract us from thinking about how capitalism really works. While his argument has merit, it would be more accurate to say that the mindset Leistyna associates with a ‘middle class’ is just mainstream capitalist ideology. ‘Middle-class’ people are also alienated and exploited within capitalism, even if they don’t always have the same pressures as those lower down the social scale. The film ends by recognising that changing the ideology presented on television requires changing the society which creates that ideology. And that’s something else worth switching off your television for.

Mike Foster

Cooking the Books: Women, Work and Wages (2017)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an interview with the magazine section of the Mail of Sunday (26 March), the author and playwright Fay Weldon provocatively claimed that, through women going out to work,  'the feminist revolution' had led to 'halving the male wage, so it no longer supported a family.'

It is of course absurd to attribute women going out to work to feminism. That resulted from capitalism's need to overcome a labour shortage. In fact, if anything, it will have been women going out to work that led to the rise of feminism. In any event, there is nothing wrong with women going out to work, apart, that is, from under capitalism this being as wage slaves (Weldon's objection is the old-fashioned one that this means that children are brought up by nursery staff rather than their mothers).

This said, is there any substance in her claim that women going out to work has reduced the male wage? This is not as implausible as it might at first seem. In Marx's day and for many years after, when few married women went out to work, men's wages had to cover the cost of maintaining a wife and children. So, Marxian socialists defined the value of labour power as what it cost for a male worker to reproduce his working skills and also to maintain a family.

In time those administering capitalism came to realise that this meant that unmarried men were being paid too much, and a campaign was launched for 'family allowances' as a payment from the state to workers with children. The trade union movement was wary about this as they realised that this would exert a downward pressure on wages, by relieving employers of the need to include an element in wages to cover the cost of maintaining a family and raising a new generation of workers.

We in the Socialist Party had something to say on the subject in a pamphlet we brought out in 1943 Family Allowances: A Socialist Analysis. This endorsed the trade unions' reasoning, pointing out 'that once it is established that the children (or some of the children) of the workers have been 'provided for' by other means, the tendency will be for wage levels to sink to new standards which will not include the cost of maintaining such children.'

Once married women went out to work, drawn into it by capitalism's need to make a fuller use of those capable of working, the next logical economy for employers in the payment of wages would be to no longer pay married male workers enough to maintain a non-working wife. In this sense,  married women going out to work would exert a downward pressure on male wages.

Nowadays, the wage paid by employers has come to be enough to maintain only a single worker, whether man or woman, married or not. The norm now, for raising a family, is for both partners to go out to work and pay for this out of both their incomes. To this extent Weldon has a point but it is an exaggeration to say that male wages have been halved, if only because equal wages for men and women has yet to be achieved. It will, however, have had the long-run effect that wages will not have gone up as much as they would otherwise have done.

This is not an argument either against women going out to work or against equal pay, but rather one against the whole wages system under which workers, male and female, have to sell their working abilities for a wage or salary reflecting costs determined by market forces.