Editorial: Who Needs Money? (2018)

Editorial from the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Today our lives are dominated by money. Everyone has to obtain some to be able to buy what they need to live. For a privileged few this is not a problem as they own enough income-yielding assets to provide them with a free – and generous – monetary income. Most people, however, have to struggle to get money, with no choice other than begging, stealing or scamming but to sell their working abilities for a wage or a salary. To live, under capitalism, you have to get money by hook or by crook.

Politics boils down to politicians promising to put more money in people’s pockets – even though they are unable to deliver on this, at least not permanently. Even many of those who realise that a more radical change is required see this in terms of some reform of the monetary system. Alongside long-standing monetary reform proposals such as Social Credit and a return to the Gold Standard, in recent years there have been more modest proposals such as LETS schemes, local currencies and, now, Bitcoin which we look at in this issue.

Given that money so dominates people’s life it is understandable in a sense that a solution to the problems people face is sought in monetary reform. But this is not a solution as these problems have another cause – the capitalist system of class ownership of the means of life and production for sale on a market with a view to profit. For this reason no monetary reform will improve things. In fact, since many such reforms are based on a lack of understanding how the monetary system works let alone how the capitalism system works, the chances are that, if tried, they would make things worse.

It is capitalism’s minority class ownership and control of the means of production that forces the excluded majority to seek money to live by selling their working abilities to an employer. The price they get for this determines how much they get to live and in fact rations it. It can never rise above a certain level as otherwise it would encroach on profits, capitalism’s lifeblood and what makes the system go round. This wages system is basic to capitalism.

The way out lies in substituting common ownership of the means of production for class ownership, and production solely to meet people’s needs for production for sale and profit. On this basis, the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ can be implemented. In other words, instead of people having to acquire money to have access to what they need to live, everyone will have open and free access to this. Money – and the rationing it involves for all but a privileged few – will be redundant.

The way out is not some new kind of money but the abolition of the whole wages-profits-money system that is capitalism.

50 Years Ago: The Materialist Conception of History (1955)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

All history, indeed all intellectual life, can be explained only from the accompanying and preceding material conditions, since any other theory than this postulates an uncaused thing, which is contrary to all experience, and is therefore unscientific and untenable. Intellectual life is but the reflex of material conditions. That intellectual life has a secondary reflex action upon material conditions in no way changes the fact that material conditions form the base, origin, and material of all intellectual life.

Now, in the Materialist Conception of History we are given the dominant factor in the determination of all history; that is, the method in which wealth is produced and exchanged. Obviously, in order that there may be human history two things are essential; firstly, men, and secondly, food and shelter for them. How much, where and how food and shelter can be obtained, determines, firstly, man’s existence, secondly, where he shall live, and thirdly, how he shall live. Therefore the Materialist Conception of History is without doubt the determining and basic factor in all history; indeed, broadly interpreted, all material conditions are comprised in it.

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The question often occurs; how is it that in identical environment some are Socialists and some are Conservatives, if economic conditions determine, in the last resort, the views of men? The matter of this “identical environment ” can be illustrated by a simple analogy. Suppose a hundred soft clay balls were put in a bag and sat on, these balls would all be in an identical environment, like men in any class in society subjected to economic pressure, so what would happen? Some balls would be squared, ' some, slightly flattened, and some utterly squashed, as determined by their position in this so-called identical environment. In society different classes have different environment. In a given class some would be slightly modified Conservatives, and some revolutionary: as pressure increases so all would become entirely altered. All, then, would be affected, but slightly unequally, since no two balls, or two persons, could possibly be in exactly the same environment. So in society men picture the future from what they see and feel in the present. Some by hereditary fitness and actual environment would more easily and clearly comprehend the needs of the present and the tendency of things; others in conditions less violently affected would find it more difficult to see clearly, or would from the materials in their hands or inherited weakness, form false pictures which would lure them in wrong directions.

From the November 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Mental Illness in a Changing World (1955)

From the December 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few years before the last war a young doctor took over a practice in a London suburb. He was a smooth man, plump as a schoolboy and urbane as any house-agent’s clerk; painstaking and efficient His reputation spread and his practice flourished. Yet he has recently lost many of his patients to a partner who joined him a few years back. The significant fact about this partner is that he came fresh from experience in a mental hospital and when examining his patients’ physical ailments he never forgot to probe their mental upsets.

A few dry-as-dust statistics will show that this attitude of the partner towards his patients is not unreasonable. The Mental Health Research Fund recently stated that 10 to 20 per cent. of all who consult their general practitioner suffer from some neurotic condition rather than a physical illness. More than a quarter of industry’s absenteeism is due to some form of mental illness—which exceeds the common cold. The Medical Officer of Health for Salford has said that one baby in every 19 will spend some time in a mental hospital and that one in 12 will one day suffer a mental breakdown.

Psychosomatic Diseases

Apart from the purely mental complaints, the psychosomatic illnesses—more easily known as physical disorders which are caused by mental upset—have become disturbingly common since 1939. A million men in Great Britain suffer from peptic ulcers, which are said to be mainly the result of emotional and constitutional disturbances; large employers such as the G.P.O. and London Transport find these ulcers to be the commonest form of prolonged ill-health among their staff. Coronary thrombosis is another psychosomatic disease; deaths from this have increased frighteningly. Coronary diseases were responsible for 37,000 deaths in 1947—by 1951 this figure had swelled to 58,000.

It is thus not wonderful that the mental hospitals are so busy. The Hospitals Year Book for 1954/5 states that of about 482,000 hospital beds in England and Wales nearly 142,000 are occupied by cases of mental illness—later reports suggest that this figure is, if anything, rather an underestimation. The Ministry of Health Board of Control reports that in 1954 mental hospitals were overcrowded to the extent of 18,932. According to the Manchester Guardian (31/10/55) a recent article in the Lancet on mental hospitals made them sound more like concentration camps, with underfed inmates and nurses struggling to keep charge of as many as 100 patients apiece. The Board of Control comments in an earlier report that “The steady increase in the number of admissions to mental hospitals does not appear to be the result of any gross increase in the incidence of nervous and mental illness in the general population . . ." but is due to the fact that ". . .  old prejudices are dying and there is an acceptance of treatment in hospital where it is available . . . " Whether or not that is true, it is sobering to reflect that we are yearly setting up records in mental hospital admissions, despite over a century’s development of knowledge and experience in treating diseases of the mind.

Ignorance and Cruelty

The care and treatment of the mentally ill was cruelly neglected until well into the 19th Century. The insane were thought to be possessed of a demon and fully responsible for their actions. Consequently their treatment was harsh in the extreme; they were heavily chained, beaten and tortured. The madhouse attendants were ignorant and corrupt brutes who cared nothing for their charges' well-being and often left them confined for days in their own filth. Chillingly suggestive was the remark of one visitor to a madhouse, who, when asked whether the patients he had seen were men or women, could only reply, “ Women, I think, but I am hardly certain.”

One of the most famous of the early madhouses was Bethlem, or Bedlam, which stood in London on the site now occupied by the Liverpool Street Station. Here were scenes of sickening uproar and confusion, which gave the word “bedlam" to the English language. For a penny or twopence any sufficiently sordid London citizen could watch the antics of Bethlem’s inmates, one of whom for example—although apparently quite sane and rational—was confined in an iron apparatus for nine years, and released only to quickly die of advanced tuberculosis. In the White House at Bethnal Green thousands of bugs paraded the walls at night and 30 or 40 rats at once squirmed over the gangrenous legs of the patients: yet a House of Commons Select Committee reported that this establishment was “. . .  considered as good as the generality of Licensed Houses where Paupers are received . . . " And it was not only pauper lunatics who were ill-used. A contemporary account tells us that George III in his madness was " . . . encased in a machine which left no liberty of motion . . . sometimes chained to a staple ... frequentlv beaten and starved and at best he was kept in subjection by menacing and violent language."

Such attempts as were made at systematic treatment yielded nothing better than shocking the unfortunate patient by abruptly plunging him into cold water, or weakening him with drastic purgatives, vomits and copious bleedings.

Tuke’s Retreat

In 1791 a woman called Hannah Mills died in disquieting circumstances at the York Asylum. Her death roused the interest of a thoughtful Quaker called William Tuke, a tea and coffee merchant, to whose family the history of the great Rowntree fortunes can be traced. Tuke persuaded the Society of Friends to open at York “. . .  a retired Habitation with necessary advice, attention, etc., . . . ” for the insane where ". . .  a milder and more appropriate system than that usually practised might be adopted." This habitation was opened in 1796 under the name of the Retreat—it explains the origin of the old saw which dubs York “the city of lollipops and lunatics.”

The methods applied at the Retreat were a tremendous advance for their time. Chains and terrorization were discarded and replaced by a serene family atmosphere. No one was punished for failing to control his actions; self-control was encouraged by putting him in charge of small animals, such as rabbits or poultry. No effort was spared to make him feel a normal, usefully active person. These methods became famous and Tuke’s Retreat prospered. It stands to this day and is still a centre of advanced treatment of the mentally sick.

Many efforts were made during the early 19th Century to reform the laws governing mental institutions, but most came to nothing. In 1816, 1817 and 1819, successive Bills designed to ensure the inspection of private madhouses passed through the Commons but were rejected by the House of Lords. “There could not be,” said Lord Chancellor Eldon in 1819, “A more false humanity than an over-humanity with regard to persons afflicted with insanity.” Fortunately their Lordships' views were customarily behind the times and in 1828 came the first comprehensive laws on the certification of the insane. Soon afterwards the County Asylums arrived to carry on the work of the pioneer establishments. The most notable of these asylums was at Hanwell. where a thousand patients were accommodated and Tuke’s system of the minimum of restraint was extended to the complete absence of mechanical restrictions. Hanwell Asylum is now St. Bernard’s Hospital, a puddle-coloured building on the Uxbridge Road, where the red ’buses whizz to and fro, watched by the patients standing on benches behind the high wall.

Uncomfortable Fact

Throughout the early 19th Century the movement for lunacy reform gathered strength, culminating in the Lunatics Act of 1845, with which Lord Ashley (later the Earl of Shaftesbury) was closely concerned. This Act brought all types of institution under the supervision of a national inspectorate. The Lunacy Act of 1890 consolidated the 1845 Act; most of its provisions still apply to certified mental patients. The 1914/8 war provided an abundant crop of cases of physical disturbances attributed to mental stress and an opportunity to test the theories of the new schools of psychiatry. The Mental Treatment Act of 1930 allowed the new categories of “voluntary" patients, who could enter and leave a mental hospital at choice and the “temporary” patient who was expected to recover within a few months. The National Health Service Act of 1946 place the treatment of the mentally disabled on a par with that of the bodily sick.

Yet we are still faced with the uncomfortable fact that mental illness is more common than ever and tends to increase. Improved methods of diagnosis and a generally more enlightened approach could account for part of the increase but still leave a large lump of it unexplained. What are the reasons for the mental and associated illnesses flourishing so unhealthily? Why is it that, as the Lancet has remarked rather sadly, having spent so long encouraging the mentally sick to enter hospital there are now nevertheless so many of them that measures must be taken to keep them out or curtail their stay? It is true that mental illness is most frequent in those countries which we are pleased to call the most civilised; for this reason many are content to lay the blame upon modern society. Lord Boyd-Orr has said (Manchester Guardian, 23/7/55): “Such simple things as a motor car in a street or a radio, with its exciting news, could give a shock to the nervous system that was unknown 50 years ago. The stress and strain of modern life . . . were causing an increase in disease, particularly of the heart and nervous system.”

True as that may be, it is only part of the story, for it takes no account of the real nature of the strenuous problems which goad so many into a nervous breakdown. It is not the radio of itself which worries the nervy, but the fact that it brings the word of war and unhappiness into the home. Among the causes of nervous people we can point to the need to work overtime (often foregoing part of a Summer holiday) to work off a Hire Purchase debt or a mortgage on a house; the press of inadequate housing; the battle of travelling to and from work on overcrowded transport; the high accident rate on congested roads; the after-effects of the war and the threat of its hydrogen-bred successor. None of these are a necessary part of society; they are products of the essentially competitive nature of the modern Capitalist world, with the hurry and worry and scurry of its struggle for survival at its fiercest in the great sprawling cities.

Way Out
What of a way out of our problem? We have come a long way since the days of witchcraft trials and the cruelty and tumult of Bedlam. The force which changed the face of Tuke’s England, which built the cities, the railways and the factories—which has suppressed some diseases but has nourished the nervous complaints—has had its part in altering mens' ideas on many things, including mental illness. We are now up against the fact that the tensions of modern Capitalism are washing out the efforts of the mental health reformers. The only effective way of dealing with mental illness is to go for its roots— that means the social system which measures human activity not in terms of its usefulness but on whether its results can be sold in a shop or on a market. Until we get rid of that rock-bottom insanity there will always be people who are mentally sick, as testimony to the impossible strain of trying to live like a human being in an inhuman world.

Ivan

50 Years Ago: Carnegie and—Cant? (1955)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Andrew Carnegie, Croesus and library vendor, has recently delivered himself of several lectures upon the horrors of war—Carnegie, the head of the great American Capitalist Corporation which raised an army in opposition to the steel-workers of Pittsburg struggling to prevent a further hardening of their already hard enough conditions; Carnegie, the head of the mighty firm that conducted a bitter and bloody war to vindicate the right of Capital to wring out of the labour of the workers larger and ever larger profit; Carnegie, the multi-millionaire, every penny of whose stupendous wealth is stained with the blood of his workmen, slaughtered by armed Pinkertons to make Carnegie’s holiday and to help build him a reputation of a great philanthropist—this Carnegie comes to say:— 

   “There still remains the foulest blot that ever disgraced the earth, the killing of civilised men by men like wild beasts as a permissible mode of settling international disputes, although in Rousseau’s words, ‘ War is the foulest fiend ever vomited forth from the mouth of hell'. "

So, "the foulest blot,” when used to settle international disputes . . . and yet when it occurs at Homestead, the hell that sweats for Mr. Carnegie the millions that Mr. Carnegie’s labour never produced, Mr. Carnegie expresses his horror in—loud silence. It is wonderful the great difference a little change in the geographical situation of the seat of war will make.

From the Socialist Standard, December 1905.

Material World: No Promised Land (2018)

The Material World column from the January 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

If there were a nation that one would expect to be sympathetic to asylum seekers it should be Israel – a land that became home to refugees. However, rather than being welcomed tens of thousands of Africans are being detained and deported. It appears to be acceptable to persecute people, just as long it doesn't happen to be you.

However, Knesset member Yael German thinks differently saying 'Our history requires us to give them a place here.'

Israel has reached an international agreement that allows the deportation of around 40,000 (5,000 of them children) African refugees with plans to shut down the Holot detention centre giving asylum seekers a choice of leaving the country or going to prison for an indefinite time.

The United Nations refugee agency said it was seriously concerned about the proposals with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees telling Israel it had 'legal obligations to protect refugees and other persons in need of international protection.' The Refugee Convention came about after the Holocaust to ensure that nothing like it ever happened again.

The Israeli government dehumanises the African migrants as 'infiltrators' and economic migrants. Yet, there are probably more Russian, Ukrainian and Georgian citizens living illegally in Israel, but they are less obvious because they are white and dwell among the Russian-speaking communities.

Israel has just opened an embassy in Rwanda which has agreed to take the migrants from Israel and receive $5,000 for each one. Rwanda's Foreign Affairs Minister Louise Mushikiwabo has said Rwanda is willing to accept some 10,000 African asylum seekers.

'We are concerned that if you move forward with these plans the lives of thousands of individuals will be put in jeopardy, and the name of the Jewish State and the Jewish People will be irreparably stained,' said the letter by 25 groups including HIAS, the leading Jewish immigration advocacy group, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Conservative Movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, the New Israel Fund and T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights. 'As a people who were once refugees, and were once strangers in a strange land, we believe we have a special obligation toward refugees, whatever their religion or race...  Please do not deport these individuals who have sought refuge among the Jewish People, but rather let us work together in addressing the burdens and challenges of our moral obligations' said the letter.

'Israel’s failure to follow the Jewish imperative to protect and care for the gerim – the landless sojourners who seek refuge among us – is a far greater threat to the Jewish character of the state than is the community of African migrants and asylum seekers who have escaped forced military service, torture and crimes against humanity in Eritrea and Sudan and sought safe haven in Israel,' Rabbi Michael Lezak, co-chairman of T’ruah, told Newsweek.

The Knesset’s Internal Affairs Committee approved a bill for its second and third readings to extend limitations on migrants until the government can deport them including taking into custody migrants who violate the geographic limitations imposed on migrants such as banning them from Tel Aviv, where health and welfare services are available. It also voted down requests that exceptions be considered for women, children and disabled people. The Committee had voted 'against allowing sick children to see doctors,' Amnesty International Israel said.

Chen Bril Egri, its head of Campaigns for Refugees and Asylum Seekers called on the country to allow all the migrants to stay and said the panel’s decision 'expresses shameful cold-heartedness by the descendants of refugees who have forgotten their past, and who show contempt for basic human rights.'

But such humanitarian appeals will be ignored by some Israelis such as Tel Aviv City councillor Shlomo Maslawi who accuses Africans of '. . . turning synagogues into bars and selling drugs . . . ' and who peddles the Netanyahu propaganda that South Tel Aviv’s poverty, prostitution and drugs can be blamed on African asylum seekers, but many residents recognise he is cynically scapegoating a defenceless population for the government’s own negligence and culpability.

Israel could absorb the African migrants, but by permitting them to live in Israel it would potentially mean opening a door for non-Jews more generally to move to Israel. Given the longer term historical background, challenging the 'Law of Return' remains too much of a taboo for the Israeli political parties from Labor to Likud. But as socialists we sympathise with the suffering of our fellow-workers of whichever ethnicity and we ask them all to set aside their nationalism, their religious bigotry, their ethnic hatred and racism and to join together to put an end to the real problem – capitalism and the oppression it causes everywhere.

ALJO

Pathfinders: Tempus Non Fugit (2018)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists who are not among today’s socially-connected youth and who do not read The Sun newspaper will probably never have heard of Jack Maynard, the Brighton YouTube vlogger (like blogger, but with video, geddit?) and will certainly not care that he got himself thrown off I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here late last year after just three days on the show. But the reason for his summary expulsion from this must-be-seen-on if not must-see show is revealing.

The YouTube ‘star’, it seemed, had sent a number of racist and homophobic slurs via his Facebook account which The Sun, that bastion of egalitarian and anti-discriminatory social values, felt morally obliged to bring to the nation’s attention. Despite effusive apologies and energetic denials that these off-the-cuff remarks reflected his real views, Mr Maynard found himself an overnight toxic brand, leaving presenters Ant and Dec with no choice but to announce his immediate departure from the celeb-infested jungle. Oh the fickle finger of fate.

But wait. The slurs in question had been posted six years before, when the fifteen-minute celeb was aged just 17. It didn’t matter. The tabloids had by now got the bit between their teeth and gleefully reported that Japing Jack had also sent text messages importuning a 14-year old girl for nude photos. Sexual exploitation being utterly foreign to the tabloids, this caused a sensation. It didn’t matter that the girl herself, while agreeing that Jack had been a ‘dickhead’, also pointed out that “He was 16, I was 14. He didn’t know how old I was, and I didn’t know how old he was at the time. I cannot stress enough that the messages were harmless” (The Sun, 5 December).

You may also recall the suspension last year of Labour’s MP for Sheffield Hallam, Jared O’Mara, following revelations of homophobic, sexist and racist remarks made online more than a decade previously. Leading the moral charge on that occasion was, surprise surprise, The Sun, which called it a disgrace that Labour bosses had known about these comments for a whole month prior to sacking Mr O’Mara. A whole month. Fancy. Meanwhile another source had this to say about Labour’s supposed ethical inertia: “Labour has become cultish, and now values loyalty to the hard left more than suitability and capability" (BBC Online, 26 October).

What is becoming ‘cultish’ is the idea that whatever you have said at any point in your life remains and will forever remain your viewpoint, as if it is indelibly tattooed on your brain. Once, such comments would have been forgotten or at least hard to dig up. Now that one’s entire history is available in real time on social media, it stops being history at all but becomes part of an extended and eternal present. You can say you’ve changed your view. You can say you don’t believe those things anymore. But there is the evidence for all to see. You said them. You are guilty.

All present and incorrect

One of the lesser known cognitive biases and a veritable plague in the world of bad historical fiction is a thing called ‘presentism’, in which people unfairly judge past ideas and events by the currently prevailing ethical assumptions. Presentism, also known as cultural hypocrisy, is at work in much of the media’s deprecation of past sexual mores among certain celebs in the unreconstructed 1970s. It’s not that past behaviours should necessarily be condoned or glossed over, but such revelations need to be leavened with some recognition that those times were different and that the world has moved on. This acknowledgment of time passing is precisely what is missing from the new illusion of the eternal present.

Much of physics, and indeed science in general, is based upon the principle of symmetry, of numbers balancing on both sides of the equation. But there is one crucial asymmetry upon which the physical universe is founded, and that is time. The second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of entropy, states that the degree of disorder in any closed system must always increase, and never decrease, over time. In other words, time flows in just one direction. Broken cups cannot magically jump back from the floor onto the table edge and reassemble themselves (despite what Stephen Hawking tried to argue in A Brief History of Time). Cold coffee cannot miraculously reheat itself. People cannot ‘un-die’.

This law is the organising principle of matter. It is the thing which oversees the growth of complex systems and their ultimate death and dissipation into chaos. If this law were to be broken, if time were to stand still, not just life but all physical reality would disintegrate. What happens when our modern, virtual world breaks the same law? Does the virtual world also disintegrate? What would this disintegration look like?

It would look like what we’ve got: a world that remembers everything as contemporaneous, the way you watch an old movie whose actors are young while in the real world these same actors are old or dead. It would look like an eternal present where the actor exists side by side with his younger and older selves, extending sideways like an endless series of reflections between two mirrors. It would be a world with an infinity of stories served up in a Cinema of Babel, told for entertainment, without sequence and without consequence. It would be a world where nothing changes and where changes mean nothing. All contradictions exist side by side, without contradicting each other. All ideas are equally valid, all theoretic dials set to zero, all roads circular and all philosophy reinvented as postmodernism. It would be a world of trivia, of the existential absurd, of Bake-Off programmes and the unbearable lightness of being.

It is a world of pseudo-immortals who have forgotten how to forget. One thing we’ve already forgotten is that this eternal present is only about 20 years old. When Princess Diana died in 1997 the world-wide web was still being born. People still wrote letters and sent postcards from holiday and wrote cheques in supermarkets and got lost or stuck in traffic with no way to phone home. Nothing was instant except coffee and mashed potato. Social media meant reading the newspaper in the pub.

For revolutionaries, the eternal present is a place where change can’t occur because people can’t be allowed to change their minds. But we know this isn’t true, and that socialists have come from all walks of life and all political backgrounds, including the Tory Party and even the far right. This is what revolution is. People change. If we remember everything else, let’s not forget that.

Paddy Shannon

50 Years Ago: Capitalism and Psychology (1978)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the capitalist class was young and still engaged in the struggle to overthrow their feudal oppressors the physical sciences met their requirements. The development of the processes of production in order to meet the growing demands of the world market, coupled with the improvement in weapons of warfare, were their chief immediate needs.

Now, having definitely established themselves as the rulers in society, they must turn their attention to the task of preserving their system and increasing the benefits they derive from it. In this pursuit they find a constant menace in the unrest of their slaves. They can employ force when dealing with particular sections, but in order to control the working class as a whole they must use cunning. They must employ knowledge of the minds of those whom they would control. Hence psychology comes to the rescue of priest and politician, journalist and factory manager.

Oh! Psychology! What wonders are committed with thine aid! Vegetarians and beefeaters, atheists and Christians, discovered an instinctive harmony with one another when the interests of capital are threatened.

From an article “The Psychology of Capital” by Eric Boden, Socialist Standard, January 1928.

50 Years Ago: Industrial Peace (1978)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again we are being regaled in the Press and from the platform with unctuous rubbish concerning the desirability of “peace” in industry. The overwhelming fascination which the topic appears to possess for capitalist representatives and labour leaders alike only speaks for their mental bankruptcy and the fatal readiness of the workers to be deceived by promises.

The subject of the industrial conflict is the exact amount of blood, nerve and sinew that shall be sucked dry of energy in order that a small class of idlers may feast and frolic. The cause of the conflict is the fact that the idlers own the means by which alone the blood, nerve and sinews of the workers can be re-energised. Every increase in the blood, nerve and sinew, every corresponding increase in its output, only heaps higher the wealth that the idlers waste.

Never has any capitalist, never has any labour leader, produced a shred of evidence to conflict with this simple, obvious fact. Similarly, not one of them dare deal with the only remedy. If the workers are to enjoy the fruits of their labours, they must own and control the means by which they produce them. The land, factories, railways etc. must be made the common property of all to meet the needs of all. That is what we mean by socialism.

[From an article by Eric Boden, Socialist Standard Feb 1928.]

The Questions They Ask . . . (1978)

From the February 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Speaker: Your party has an Executive Committee—right? And yet you say you are opposed to following leaders! Aren’t the EC the leaders of your party then?

Answer: No! The EC of the Socialist Party are not leaders. They could not lead the members if they wanted to (which they don’t) because Socialists do not need somebody to tell them what they should do.

Implicit in membership of the SPGB is an understanding of Socialist principles. In fact, membership is conditional upon this. Therefore the members have the knowledge which enables them to make their own minds up for themselves. It is a fact that the rules of the party are so framed as to guarantee that the members control the EC. First, the EC is elected annually by individual ballot. Each candidate is nominated by a Branch of the party.

Then, the EC is bound by rule to carry out the decisions of Annual Conference. In addition, any six Branches can demand a party poll on any question they deem to be of sufficient importance. Or, if they prefer, they can demand the calling of a general members’ meeting. And perhaps most important of all, every meeting of every committee of the party is open to all members—and indeed to all members of the public. Our door is always open for those who wish to know what’s going on. This, is the guarantee that no group or caucus can seize control of the party.

Contrast this with the intrigues, backstairs frame-ups and underhand double-dealing which are the stock-in-trade of all the other parties. The sort of carve-ups revealed in the Crossman Diaries, the manoeuvring for jobs in the Labour and Communist Parties, for example. All this can only flourish with an ignorant membership. The membership of the SPGB is small—because so far there are not many socialists.

50 Years Ago: The policies of the Liberal Party (1978)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Report of the Liberal Party Industrial Enquiry has at last appeared, but is should be called “The Capitalists’ Whitewashing Programme”. From beginning to end it tails attention to bad conditions but never once does it enquire into the cause. The remedy proposed is more of the conditions that caused the evils. More capitalism. Empire Development — of Capitalism. More shareholders — in Capitalism. More Free Trade in goods — and labour power. Less taxes for the industrial lord. Cheaper coal. More roads, and similar pills for the economic earthquake.

All these quack doctors can suggest is that the workers should buy shares where they work and get a share in the profits in large concerns, and when jobless they can work on the roads or in the forests — developing capitalism for the capitalists. They tell us that ownership is far too concentrated, and while they report thus, the Liberal capitalists, like their Tory friends, are busy amalgamating, centralising, combining and trustifying modern capital in more powerful concerns, whether like Sir Ernest Benn in the publishing world or like the Brunners in the chemical industry.

The Labour Party are angry because the Liberals have pinched their policy and put it in the Liberal Report. The MacDonalds and Hendersons say the Report embraces much of Socialism, but any Socialist who looks into the Report to find the Socialism will wear his eyes out in vain.

From an editorial “The Liberal Industrial Fraud” published in the Socialist Standard in March, 1928.

Letter: Technology and Socialism (1978)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The writer of the article "Technology and the working class” (November Socialist Standard) says, "Progress is not a matter of finding new things which could transform existence. It is the development of society’s capacity to let them happen.” This of course is far from telling us what progress means. Modern society has developed the capacity to allow many technological inventions to happen and operate, but that does not necessarily mean progress, does it? If the hand mill gives us society with the feudal lord, and the steam mill society with the industrial capitalist, in what sense does the writer call this progress? A change from hand mills to steam mills does not necessarily constitute progress, no more than does a change from gunpowder to atomic bombs. No-one can of course dispute that there has been scientific progress, because this is verifiable. But has scientific progress made man any happier and kinder to his fellow man? One can hardly talk of any progress here at all. Man’s life on earth seems to be what it has always been, that is, quite short and very rarely sweet. Progress means a lot of different things to different people, and after 6,000 years of human history we do not have very much progress to boast about, do we? And in regards progress to Socialism, we can safely say there has been no progress there at all. Socialism has been a non-starter since the publication of the Communist Manifesto of 1848. It is true of course that Marx saw technology as a precondition of the change from capitalism to Socialism, but the progress in technology has had a rather sinister effect on the working class. In that it has turned the workers into robots. And how do you possibly expect robots to establish Socialism?

Ian Campbell

Dundee

Reply.

Surely there are ways in which scientific progress has made men happier. Take the development of medical knowledge, for instance—many diseases which were once rife are now things of the past. You refer to the human lifespan as “quite short”, but it is now about twice as long on average as it was in Marx’s day. Standards of medical care and hygiene are far higher today than in any earlier period of history.

Technological innovation throughout human history has created a situation where the productive forces of society can produce an abundance of goods. It is the existence of a profit-motivated society, capitalism, that prevents most of the benefits of technological progress form reaching the working class. The article made the point that products based on technological inventions are either too expensive for most workers, or else their quality is reduced to make them marketable. Other inventions are put to utterly anti-social ends under capitalism—atomic and nuclear bombs, for instance. In Socialism there will be no criterion on which to base the use made of technology other than that of benefit to society as a whole.

The workers have certainly not been turned into robots by technological progress: it has rather led to them acquiring sufficient skill, knowledge and critical awareness to take over the running of society when they have become convinced of the possibility and need for them to do so.

Society is too complex to be operated by robots; instead it is living, feeling and thinking workers who run society (at present, unfortunately, not in their own interests).

And it’s just not true to say that there has been no progress to Socialism since 1848 The Socialist movement is a small but persistent voice for Socialism. Of course development of Socialist ideas has been less rapid than we would wish, but we are confident that the working class will come to an appreciation of the potentialities inherent in themselves and in society, and of the ways in which capitalism prevents these potentialities from being fulfilled. They will then take the necessary steps to establish Socialism—and that’ll be real progress!

Editors.

50 Years Ago: The Failure of the Labour Colleges (1978)

The 50 Years Ago column from April 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

In July 1925 we wrote on the significant action of the National Council of Labour Colleges in joining its old enemy, the Workers’ Educational Association, in an education scheme sponsored by the TUC. We pointed out that the acceptance of money from the trade unions to cooperate with such bodies as the WEA and Ruskin College meant the passing of the independence of the “Movement for Independent Working-Class Education”.

Time has justified our warning. The “Plebs League” has ceased to exist as an independent body and three years later others, including men in the NCLC itself, are recognising the truth of what we then anticipated.

In particular the NCLC, as we long ago pointed out, cannot hope to receive trade union money if at the same time it exposes the part played by Labour and trade union leaders in supporting the capitalist system and its ways. The NCLC had to choose and it chose the money in preference to the independence.

From an article “The Failure of the Labour Colleges”, Socialist Standard, April 1928.

Diary of a Capitalist (1978)

From the April 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

   We print below some excerpts from a journal, giving the private thoughts of a member of the ruling class (not always the same as their opinions for public consumption, which is what you can read every day throughout the British press). We hope to print further extracts from time to time. 

Sunday. My new Rolls-Royce drophead is going splendidly. It’s very good value for £45,000. As the Rolls- Royce adverts used to say a few years back, if you have a Rolls everyone can see you’ve got good taste. So I’ve proved I’ve got that, all right—£45,000 worth of it.

I keep the Rolls mainly for business journeys, for example going up to town to my head office. As chairman of the company, I have to travel in a certain style. The car is kept smart by a firm I’ve found in the City, run by an ex-chauffeur (Sunday Telegraph, 15.1.78). They take your Rolls in for a day and give it a good service and clean, right down to hand-polishing the radiator and putting saddle soap on the leather upholstery, for £100; then, after that, they come and pick the car up one day a week and keep it up to standard, for only £45. They think one good going-over per week is enough to maintain a Rolls as a credit to its owner, and it’s dirt cheap at only nine fivers a week.

My butler and I parted company today—I found him reading a rag which said we should abolish the wages system! As I said, how am I going to get people to produce the goods which make my profits without a wages system? I’ve put an ad in the paper for another one, offering £7,000 a year and car allowance, which is what a decent butler gets nowadays (domestic situations, The Times, 20.1.78).


Monday. Dropped in at an interesting press conference this morning, held by the Independent Schools Information Service. Its director claimed that many manual workers—he instanced miners, a machine operator, a fairground worker, a policeman, and a postman—send their children to independent schools. “We reject the epithet ‘bastions of privilege’,” he said (The Times, 17.1.78). There are, of course, independent schools and independent schools. They range from the very expensive, with highly paid staff and lavish equipment, and a pupil-teacher ratio as low as six to one, to the ramshackle institutions which offer worse premises and lower-paid teachers than most state schools, and which only survive because of snobbery among some parents. The really posh public schools charge about £2,000 a year, so my two sons set me back some £4,000 annually. I don’t think we need worry, at those prices, that our boys at Eton are going to be swamped by proletarian brats; and if there was a risk they’d put the price up.


Tuesday. Another bit of news in the paper: it appears that the workers regularly go hunting, besides sending their children to public schools. The Master of the Cotswold Hunt denied the other day that fox-hunting is an upper-class sport. “That’s an outdated belief. We have many working people who come to the hunt on Saturday afternoons” (TV Times, 26.1.78).

The MFH’s forthright words made me sit down and work out how much it costs me to go fox-hunting. I bought my hunter—not a bad piece of horseflesh—for £2,000. Then there’s the saddle, £100, and bridle, £50. The clothes cost me about £400—a couple of hunting jackets (£100 each), breeches £50, whip £10, handmade boots £100, top hat £20. On top of that the horse costs £30 a week at livery stables, plus about £100 a year for shoeing, and then there are vets’ fees, rugs and blankets, and so on. Besides all that the stable charges for transport, though one could always buy a trailer for £500. Then the fox-hunter mustn’t forget his, or her, “evening dress wear for the important social side of the hunt” (as the TV Times puts it); and this isn’t the ordinary evening dress outfit I put on for dinner every night, but a special rig-out I keep specially for hunt functions. The Old Surrey and Burstow Hunt, for example, has distinctive evening dress with scarlet facings, and the East Kent prescribes “evening dress—scarlet, buff silk collar, white silk facings”.

I suppose most people suspect that hunting in the proper style, like sending your children to good boarding schools, is only for the rich; but this propaganda to the contrary helps to keep the poorer people happy, which is good for capitalism.


Wednesday. Had a bit of trouble today at one of the factories owned by the family holding company. The workers are asking 15 per cent more pay. They say prices have gone up 10 per cent in the last year, and an increase of 15 per cent, after tax and other deductions, means (for all except the very poor) only 10 per cent more take-home pay. So they needed 15 per cent merely to regain the same position they were in a year ago (ignoring all the losses they have suffered as prices have gone up each month, though their wages remained stationary). They had the nerve to point out that our profits went up 35 per cent on last year’s (just like the Barclay’s Bank profits, Daily Telegraph, 24.2.78), so we could easily afford 15 per cent more pay.

I went down there, and called the union representatives in to a meeting. I said I had every sympathy with their claim, and in normal times (of course, “normal times” never come, but they were too polite to mention it) I would naturally agree to restore their nominal pay so that in real terms they wouldn’t have to take a cut in the wages they agreed this time last year. But, I said, it just couldn’t be done. The national interest, I said, demanded sacrifices from us all (especially them, though I didn’t say so aloud!), and I was naturally obliged to support the Government, which had laid down only 10 per cent wage increases. I gave them all the usual stuff —law and order must be upheld, respect for our democratic institutions, light at the end of the tunnel, putting this old country of ours back on its feet, the regular load of clap-trap—and in the end they had to accept the 10 per cent. I’d worked hard for it, though. I had a meeting with one of the head-office boys in their union yesterday—plush London hotel, slap-up meal, brandies ad lib, cigars on the house—and finally he agreed we would all have to tighten our belts. At least his members would. So he came down to the factory today and backed me to the hilt. You put the Labour Government in, he kept telling the shop stewards: you aren’t going to turn traitors now, are you?—the usual trade-union leaders’ line. So we got our agreement signed and sealed, and the factory hands got back to their proper job of building up my profits, for lower real wages than they agreed last year.

Thursday. More trouble today. One of the small companies owned by the family trust has a chain of provincial hairdressing shops. At one of these shops the staff were turning nasty. An assistant had found out that employers are supposed by law to pay the wage-rates set by the wages council for the industry, and began complaining that their pay was below even the wages council’s low figure, which starts at £26.50 for a forty-hour week. He’d read somewhere about the Low Pay Unit’s report that twenty-four in a hundred hairdressing employers pay below the minimum legal figure (The Times, 3.2.78). So I went down to sort it out. The trouble-maker began spouting at me about upholding law and order, and our democratic institutions and so on, so I shut him up a bit sharpish. I told them I’d close the place down completely if there was any more trouble (they don’t belong to a union, so we can be a bit more direct in our methods). There’s nothing like a million and a half people in the dole queue to make the others see reason! So back to work they went.

I’ll have to watch that agitator, though. He had some cheek, quoting law and order at me. He’ll have to realize that law and order is intended to help people like me keep him in his place: not the other way round. 

Friday. Marvellous meal this evening at the Inn on the Park’s Four Seasons restaurant. Normally a meal for two there costs about £26 (The Times, 7.2.78), but this week four chefs from Maxim’s in Paris have come over to superintend the cuisine, so dinner for my girl friend and me this evening cost £60. The girl friend said if the hairdressing assistants who were so awkward yesterday saved their entire week’s wages, they could almost afford one meal at these prices! We had a good laugh about it over the Filets de Sole Albert.

Saturday. Bought the wife a new coat—ocelot fur, with lynx border, £3,000 (Sunday Times, 4.12.77). And booked a three-week cruise in May for the two of us to the West Indies, £1,392 (Daily Telegraph, 24.2.78). It’ll make a nice break.

I turned down a four-week art treasures tour to Bali, Java, and so on, which would have been £2,496 for the two of us (Sunday Times, 4.12.77). One doesn’t want to be ostentatious in these hard times.

Alwyn Edgar

50 Years Ago: Unemployment in Australia (1978)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

While Australia is being boomed abroad — by emigration touts — as a paradise for the workers, and thousands are flocking to her shores in search of work, in the capital cities the unemployed are marching the streets, registering at the Government Labour Bureaus, and sending deputations to the State Governments asking for sustenance or work.

All the old fallacies that have done service this century are being trotted out by the pen-valets, politicians and other hangers-on of the capitalist class. Free trade and protection hold pride of place although in circumstances in which either of these fiscal policies is in operation unemployment still remains a problem. According to Stead’s Review, June 1927, the figures submitted by the League of Nations demonstrate that the percentage of unemployed in Australia was greater than in any other nation associated with the League.

When the Labour Government came into power in Victoria it set out valiantly to deal with unemployment, but after six months unemployment is worse than ever. The Premier’s (Mr. Hogan’s) explanation is that the sole cause of the unemployment problem is the adverse trade balance.

From “A Letter from the Socialist Party of Australia”, published in the Socialist Standard, May, 1928.

Obituary: R. B. Gill (1978)

Obituary from the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have learnt of the death in a car accident of our Comrade Ray Gill, who last December emigrated to Australia. Doctor Gill joined the Party in 1974 and subsequently wrote a number of informative articles on the National Health Service for the Socialist Standard. Our Australian comrades will share our regret at his untimely loss.