About Socialism (1988)

From the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

1. What is the Socialist Party of Great Britain?

It is a political party, separate from all others, Left, Right or Centre. It stands for the sole aim of establishing a world social system based upon human need instead of private or state profit. The Object and Declaration of Principles printed in this introductory leaflet were adopted by the Socialist Party in 1904 and have been maintained without compromise since then. In other countries there are companion parties sharing the same object and principles, and they too remain independent from all other political parties.

2. What is capitalism?

Capitalism is the social system which now exists in all countries of the world. Under this system, the means of production and distribution (land, factories, offices, transport, media, etc.) are monopolised by a minority, the capitalist class. All wealth is produced by us, the majority working class, who sell our mental and physical energies to the capitalists in return for a price called a wage or salary. The object of wealth production is to create goods and services which can be sold on the market at a profit. Not only do the capitalists live off the profits they obtain from exploiting the working class, but, as a class, they go on accumulating wealth extracted from each generation of workers.

3. Can capitalism be reformed in our interests?

No: as long as capitalism exists, profits will come before needs. Some reforms are welcomed by some workers, but no reform can abolish the fundamental contradiction between profit and need which is built into the present system. No matter whether promises to make capitalism run in the interests of the workers are made sincerely or by opportunist politicians they are bound to fail, for such a promise is like offering to run the slaughter house in the interests of the cattle.

4. Is nationalisation an alternative to capitalism?

No: nationalised industries simply mean that workers are exploited by the state, acting on behalf of the capitalists of one country, rather than by an individual capitalist or company. The workers in nationalised British Leyland are no less the servants of profit than workers in privately-owned Ford. The mines no more belong to "the public" or the miners now than they did before 1947 when they were nationalised. Nationalisation is state capitalism.

5. Are there any “socialist countries”?

No: the so-called socialist countries are systems of state capitalism. In Russia and its empire, in China, Cuba, Albania, Yugoslavia and the other countries which call themselves socialist, social power is monopolised by privileged Party bureaucrats. The features of capitalism, as outlined above, are all present. An examination of international commerce shows that the bogus socialist states are part of the world capitalist market and cannot detach themselves from the requirements of profit.

6. What Is the meaning of socialism?

Socialism does not yet exist. When it is established it must be on a worldwide basis, as an alternative to the outdated system of world capitalism. In a socialist society there will be common ownership and democratic control of the earth by its inhabitants. No minority class will be in a position to dictate to the majority that production must be geared to profit. There will be no owners: everything will belong to everyone. Production will be solely for use, not for sale. The only questions society will need to ask about wealth production will be: what do people require, and can the needs be met? These questions will be answered on the basis of the resources available to meet such needs. Then, unlike now, modern technology and communications will be able to be used to their fullest extent. The basic socialist principle will be that people give according to their abilities and take according to their self- defined needs. Work will be on the basis of voluntary co-operation: the coercion of wage and salary work will be abolished. There will be no buying or selling and money will not be necessary, in a society of common ownership and free access. For the first time ever the people of the world will have common possession of the planet earth.

7. How will socialism solve the problems of society?

Capitalism, with its constant drive to serve profit before need, throws up an endless stream of problems. Most workers in Britain feel insecure about their future; almost one in four families with children living below the official government poverty line; many old people live in dangerously cold conditions each winter and thousands die; millions of our fellow men and women are dying of starvation — tens of thousands of them each day. A society based on production for use will end those problems because the priority of socialist society will be the fullest possible satisfaction of needs. At the moment food is destroyed and farmers are subsidised not to produce more: yet many millions are malnourished. At the moment hospital queues are growing longer and people are dying of curable illnesses; yet it is not "economically viable" to provide decent health treatment for all. In a socialist society nothing short of the best will be good enough for any human being.

8. What about human nature?

Human behaviour is not fixed, but determined by the kind of society people are conditioned to live in. The capitalist jungle produces vicious, competitive ways of thinking and acting. But we humans are able to adapt our behaviour and there is no reason why our rational desire for comfort and human welfare should not allow us to co-operate. Even under capitalism people often obtain pleasure from doing a good turn for others; few people enjoy participating in the "civilised" warfare of the daily rat-race. Think how much better it would be if society was based on co-operation.

9. Are socialists democrats?

Yes: the Socialist Party has no leaders. It is a democratic organisation controlled by its members. It understands that Socialism can only be established by a conscious majority of workers — that workers must liberate themselves and will not be liberated by leaders or parties. Socialism will not be brought about by a dedicated minority "smashing the state", as some left-wingers would have it. Nor do the activities of paid, professional politicians have anything to do with Socialism — the experience of seven Labour governments has shown this. Once a majority of the working class understand and want Socialism, they will take the necessary step to organise consciously for the democratic conquest of political power. There will be no Socialism without a socialist majority.

10. What is the next step?

Many workers know that there is something wrong and want to change society. Some join reform groups in the hope that capitalism can be patched up, but such efforts are futile because you cannot run a system of class exploitation in the interests of the exploited majority. People who fear a nuclear war may join CND. but as long as nation states exist, economic rivalry means that the world will never be safe from the threat of war. There are countless dedicated campaigns and good causes which many sincere people are caught up in, but there is only one solution to the problems of capitalism and that is to get rid of it, and establish Socialism. Before we can do that we need socialists; winning workers to that cause requires knowledge, principles and an enthusiasm for change. These qualities can be developed by anyone — and are essential for anyone who is serious about changing society. Capitalism in the 1980s is still a system of waste, deprivation and frightening insecurity. You owe it to yourself to find out about the one movement which stands for the alternative.


If you have read this set of principles and agree with some or all of them, contact the Socialist Party with your questions and ideas about what you can do to help speed the progress towards Socialism.

Editorial: In Place of Wishes (1988)

Editorial from the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Each year at this time an arbitrary line is drawn across our lives. It has as much mysticism about it as any religion. On one side of the line lies the Old Year with its mistakes, its problems, its inadequacies. On the other the New Year beckons us, with its pristine sanity, enlightenment, happiness. It is a time to make resolutions that the next twelve months will be innocent of the disfigurements of the past twelve. Some people mark the occasion by getting drunk, to lubricate the process of acting towards others with warmth and respect. Others may rely on the collective hysteria of the occasion to intoxicate them. Happy New Year, they wish each other. It’s probably not all insincere, either.

But powerful as alcoholic poisoning and popular delusions can be there is an amnesiac scale about the event which is positively staggering. For does life really get better from year to year for the millions of people who wish to each other that it should? The millions who snatch the short holiday to pretend that they are something other than the social class which, although productive and useful, is exploited, repressed and deceived?

That question was what actually dominated the election last June. Thatcher and her crew energetically told us that things were not only getting better but would carry on like that, as if the Tories will never rest until they have drenched us all in prosperity. Enough workers were impressed by this campaign, shrewdly aimed as it was, to send the Iron Lady back to Number Ten.

It is likely that the Tories won a lot of votes through their schemes to enable workers to buy shares in the privatised industries. This whole idea, with its elaborately buoyant publicity, rested on the assumption that the Stock Market is a casino where share prices always go up, so that workers who borrowed a little money to buy a few shares could then sell them quickly and so make a small profit. This illusion — that the class structure of capitalism had been radically changed by Norman Tebbit was badly damaged by the stock market crash, which catapulted distraught yuppies into a position of media-dominance. In fact, a falling stock market also offers the possibility of making money — but in a way not usually open to penurious workers.

It is worth mentioning this if only because a popular response to any criticism of Thatcherite Britain is that the critics are motivated by a septic envy. There is, apparently, an opulent gravy train on the move for those who are economically nimble enough to climb aboard. The economically disabled have only themselves to blame. But is this society, which we labour under, really so carefree an arrangement? Are its critics really so devoid of material to support their arguments?

Well what, apart from the events on the Stock Exchange, happened last year? What effect did all those salutations, last January, have for us?

It was, in fact, a year of disasters in a very material sense. The crazy massacre of Hungerford cannot be explained away as an isolated mental breakdown. Michael Ryan was a man who could not answer, to his own satisfaction, the sexual, social and familial expectations of capitalism. So instead he loved his guns, his cars and his terrible fantasies. The capsize of the Herald of Free Enterprise was not an accident for the ship was being sailed just as the company's balance sheet thought appropriate. At the time of writing the immediate cause of the King's Cross fire has not been made public, but emerging facts have shown up the reductions in vital staff and the tardiness in replacing dangerously outdated equipment, in the cause of reducing costs and so maximising profit.

Although as a disaster it is rather less dramatic, the problem of the homeless grew worse, with the numbers of families with nowhere to live increasing as their chances of finding anywhere within a reasonable time decreased. Young workers have been coerced into accepting government approved work or courses under pain of being cut off from state benefit. The government's discovery that state benefits can be cut by changing their name and the conditions under which they can be claimed brings memories of the special indignities heaped on the unemployed during the 1930s. Finally, in face of the official statistics which tell us that it is not happening, the waiting lists of workers who need treatment in hospital grew longer so that some die while they are waiting and babies are prevented from having desperately needed operations through a lack of specialised nurses who have been driven out of the work through their paltry wages. Even the consultants, contemplating the beds kept empty by the priority of conforming to a budget, have been moved to make their unequivocal protests.

There was no happier prospect abroad. At the end of the year Bob Geldof was flying back to Ethiopia to ask why, after all that effort and expenditure, millions have to suffer an agonising, degrading death by starvation. Those sickening pictures of dying babies, too sick even to take their mother's milk, are condemnation enough of capitalism in themselves. The Gulf War continued to consume its fearsome human diet, there is slaughter in Africa, Haiti, Afghanistan and the brutality of South Africa's racist regime does not lessen. The cold cynicism of capitalist politics has been exposed by the Irangate affair, which cannot be hushed over by even Reagan's consummate acting skills. He may yet be saved by the diversion of a treaty to abolish medium-range nuclear missiles which, even if it should ever be fully implemented, would still leave us living in a world with more than enough destructive power to kill us all several times over.

No, it was not a Happy New Year. Neither was 1986, 1985, 1984 . . . We shall need to do more than wish that things will get better. We have the power to change the world and the ability to run it in the interests of the human race. And the reasons for that are all too obvious.

Running Commentary: Common assault (1988)

The Running Commentary Column from the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1669, a petition was presented to Parliament by a "lively boy" on behalf of schoolchildren, to protest at "the severities of the school discipline of this nation", calling schools "not merely houses of correction but of prostitution". In 1889, one of the four demands of the London schoolboys' strike was an end to caning. This has now finally been instituted in Parliament by a vote of 231 to 230, nearly a hundred years later (so much for the speed of the reform process). But beating children in schools is still legal and widespread in countries like the USA, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. And in Britain, parents and those having "lawful control or charge" of children are still allowed to administer "moderate and reasonable" physical punishment with impunity. How a physical assault on someone who is smaller and weaker can be moderate and reasonable is one of the mysteries which only the great Law Lords in their wisdom can fathom.

Corporal punishment in schools was banned in Poland as early as 1783, in France in 1881 and in every other European country by 1982. One of the main reasons it was not banned sooner in Britain was the teachers' trade unions' passionate defence of the right to beat schoolchildren. The NUT became committed to opposing corporal punishment, through Conference Resolution, only in 1982 and the NAS/UWT has remained in favour up to its inevitable acceptance of the new Act. Figures taken from school "Punishment Books" in the early 1980s by the Society of Teachers Opposed to Physical Punishment showed approximately 250,000 school beatings a year in England — one every 19 seconds. In 1979, Buckinghamshire celebrated the International Year Of The Child by reintroducing corporal punishment for infants. And a 1974 survey in Edinburgh found over 10,000 instances of use of the tawse (leather strap) on just 70,000 children in two terms.

In the USA, corporal punishment is legal in 42 states, especially in the Southern Bible Belt where the inane and barbaric dictum "if you spare the rod. you spoil the child" is popular. The traditional weapon for this purpose in the States is the wooden "paddle". It has been officially estimated that there are about three million such beatings there each year, mostly at the primary level and disproportionately carried out on black children (Times Educational Supplement, 31 July 1987). In Georgia, state law gives immunity from civil or criminal action if the punishment is given "in good faith" and is not "unduly severe". Last year one Georgia 13-year-old who had been "paddled" returned and stabbed the principal to death and an Alabama mother is being charged with assault after hitting a teacher over the head with the paddle he used to hit her seven-year-old son. The comment of John Sikes, the Georgian School Superintendent, once again acknowledges the inevitable problem of setting up up compulsory conditioning centres, like prisons, and calling them places of learning:

We've been using paddling here since schools began, and to be honest with you, I don't know what we'd do without it. The only alternative is to send unruly kids home, and they won't learn anything there.

Recent reports from both Malaysia and Swaziland have also exposed widespread sadistic treatment of schoolchildren (TES, 14 August 1987). The Malaysian NUTP union has documented 200 cases including savage beatings, locking children in cupboards for long periods, making children lick urine from the floor and one teacher who habitually punishes boys by squeezing their testicles; one of his pupils recently had to have one testicle surgically removed; the head reassured the union that this teacher was being "transferred to another school ". All of the other documented cases have also led only to the teachers concerned being reprimanded or transferred.

With all of the recent press coverage of assaults on children, it should not be forgotten that this vast number of legal assaults is taking place across the world. Such 'sanctions' are a common part of the compulsory conditioning of capitalism's schools.

Clifford Slapper

Running Commentary: Abortion debate (1988)

The Running Commentary Column from the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abortion debate

David Alton's Bill seeks an 18-week time limit on abortions — to make it illegal for any woman to have an abortion after the 18th week of her pregnancy. Alton is fully aware that many of the tests for handicap and hereditary disease cannot be performed until after the 18th week but he thinks it is wrong to seek an abortion on those grounds. There will be an exclusion clause in the Bill allowing mothers the “right" to an abortion after 18 weeks. If the mother's own life is at risk her pregnancy may be terminated.

Alton's Bill has the support of some women who object to abortion on religious grounds. Many of the other supporters are churchmen or priests who argue their moral case from the authoritative position of perhaps never having had a sexual relationship. much less risked the anguish of an unwanted pregnancy. All of these people are convinced that a pregnant woman who waits more than 18 weeks before deciding whether to have an abortion should, in future, be forced to bear the child, regardless of the economic or emotional consequences.

Speaking in opposition to the proposals on a TV programme were two women who had chosen to have their pregnancies terminated. Neither enjoyed the experience, did it for "selfish" reasons or came out of it psychologically unscathed. Also opposing the Bill was a representative of a major charity-run abortion clinic who witnesses the human misery of unwanted pregnancies every day of the week. Ultimately, though, the Bill will stand or fall on the say-so of the majority of men in Parliament.

But the issues are not the time limit or the moral correctness of abortion. It is the present economic and social system that turns the birth of a human being into a nightmare of poverty, lost freedom and missed opportunity. So before becoming involved in what Alton claims is a "human rights" issue, consider instead a society where women and men are free to make their own decisions and shape their own lives on equal terms.


Read all about it

"Workshy costing firms £5bn a year", shrieked the headline. I couldn't believe it. Here was a reactionary newspaper finally telling the truth about the ruling class. A full and frank expose of the idle rich and the nature of capitalism. I read on. "Industry chiefs are planning a crackdown on absenteeism after a survey showed days off work are costing British business £5 billion a year . . . The survey puts the UK in a bad light compared with major trading competitors". The truth was revealed. It was not fearless revelations about how capitalism exploits the working class but just another attempt to make workers feel guilty because they weren't producing enough surplus value for their benevolent bosses. The final paragraph said it all. "It is not a comforting record, particularly when there are so many on the dole who would work conscientiously at any job they were fortunate enough to have".

Muttering "Victorian values" I turned the page. "Royal pair back to work after brief reunion" met my gaze. Concern for my blood pressure prompted me to quickly pass on. As I did so 1 thought of all those on the dole who would consider themselves fortunate to have a "job" like Charlie and Di and how much better it would be if their watchword was "Abolition of the wages system!"

Adjacent to the Royal story was one headlined. "Part-time workers getting raw deal". A report by the Low Pay Unit showed that nearly four million British part-timers earn less than the "decency threshold" of £3.25 an hour and many more miss out on redundancy payments and maternity benefits. The low paid include 98 per cent of shop checkout workers. 96 per cent of bar staff and 89 per cent of receptionists. It's not reading these things in newspapers that's bad for your health, it's capitalism that's bad for your life. Let s get rid of capitalism.

Dave Coggan

Less can mean more (1988)

From the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

While all the razzmatazz, media hype and self-congratulation has been going on in Washington over the INF agreement, a group of NATO nuclear experts have quietly been engaged in discussion over what are euphemistically called ‘'compensatory measures", or in other words, how to fill the gaps left in the western alliance's war machine by the scrapping of missiles under the terms of the INF treaty. The end result could be more, not less, nuclear weapons in Europe.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the INF agreement marked the dawning of a new age heralded by those two saintly peace-makers Reagan and Gorbachev. In fact the INF treaty is a paltry little agreement that at best will get rid of just 3-4 per cent of nuclear weapons on both sides — there will still be plenty more left to blow up the world several times over. Under the terms of the agreement (if it is ratified by a two-thirds majority in the US Senate — Gorbachev can be confident that the Supreme Soviet will obediently endorse their leader s decision) all Cruise and Pershing II missiles already deployed in Western Europe will be destroyed over a three year period. In return Russia will scrap its SS20s, and shorter range SSI2 and SS23 missiles.

But meanwhile, in NATO, strategists are proposing ways of plugging the gaps left behind — like through the deployment of new air- and sea-launched nuclear weapons or moving more US F-l 11 nuclear bombers to bases in Europe so that they are within easy reach of Russian targets. No doubt Russia's military supremos have been engaged in similar planning of "compensatory measures”.

The determinedly optimistic will probably argue that the INF treaty is only the beginning and that it is likely to be followed by the cutting of strategic weapons by 50 per cent within a year or so as a result of START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks). Fifty per cent certainly sounds like a big cut until you realise that what they are arguing about is an agreement which aims to achieve a common ceiling of six thousand warheads on both sides. It's hard to feel optimistic about that.

Once all the euphoria has evaporated and the media circus has left Washington for the next location on the non-stop leadership-promotion tour, perhaps people will reflect in the cold light of reason, on what has really been achieved by this treaty.

Firstly, it is an agreement whose main purpose must be seen as economic and political rather than the removal of the threat of nuclear annihilation. Gorbachev needed an arms reduction treaty — and the worldwide publicity which accompanied it — in order to bolster his political position and enable him to pursue his programme of domestic economic and political reform from a position of greater strength within the Russian political elite. Reagan badly wanted to be remembered for something other than the shabby deals connected with the Irangate scandal, the enormous budget deficit, his penchant for jelly beans and his inability to string together a coherent sentence unless he had a script in front of him.

Secondly, the treaty does not address the problem of how to dispose of nuclear weapons. Even when the plutonium has been removed from the warheads, the remaining rockets — packed full of highly flammable fuel — will be extremely dangerous to destroy. Nuclear missiles are designed to explode causing the maximum possible damage, not to be dismantled with minimum damage.

Finally, and most seriously, the INF agreement does not even begin to tackle the real problem of nuclear weapons. Not only does it propose to scrap only a tiny proportion of the total nuclear stockpile but also it raises no questions at all about why we have nuclear weapons, or indeed any other kinds of weapons. In fact to the extent that arms treaties of this kind reinforce the position of political leaders (and hence the capitalist class which they represent) and present them as basically reasonable, benevolent people, then they could be said to also reinforce the capitalist system and all its attendant problems — including war.

Janie Percy-Smith

Socialist activity in Ireland (1988)

Party News from the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The World Socialist Movement continues to make its presence felt in Ireland. Recently, the World Socialist Party (WSP) has run very successful public meetings on the case for world socialism in Belfast. Dublin and the place which has acquired the name of "Stroke City" as a result of being referred to as Derry-Stroke-Londonderry for fear of offending either side in the sectarian dispute over its name. New members continue to be attracted to the WSP including those who, in becoming socialists, have overcome the bigotry and prejudice of either side in that sectarian dispute. It is clearer than ever, that the only real basis on which Protestant and Catholic workers there will unite is that of class consciousness and the principled movement for a socialist alternative. The local journal, the Socialist View, produced in alternate months at 20p, has recently doubled its print run to 1000 and is selling well on the streets of Belfast in particular. Out of the violent conflicts of capitalism, workers are increasingly looking for a sane and practical answer, and they are finding it in the form of the World Socialist Party.

CS

50 Years Ago: Elections in Russia (1988)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Sunday, December 12th, some 94,000,000 Russian "electors" went to the poll to cast their votes for the 1,100 unopposed candidates chosen for them by the Government to sit in the new two-chamber Parliament, the Council of the Union (569 members), and the Council of Nationalities (574 members). Except in one or two constituencies there was no alternative candidate. so there was no element of choice — opposition parties not being allowed. It was also made plain to the electors that they should not deface the ballot papers or stay away from the polling booth, so the result was almost as much foreseen and prearranged as if the figures had been wholly faked by the authorities.

Russia has changed much since 1918. in which year Lenin, with a Cromwellian gesture, used armed force to disperse the democratically-elected constituent assembly when he found that that body, long demanded by the Bolsheviks and elected under their authority, had a non-Bolshevik majority. In a few more years, in spite of all the scheming of Russia’s rulers, their fraudulent democracy will perhaps be changed into the real thing under the pressure of the electorate.

[From an article “The Russian Election. What is Stalin's Purpose?" Socialist Standard January 1938.]

Shelter for the homeless? (1988)

From the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nineteen eighty seven was International Year of Shelter for the Homeless. What was the government's response to attempts to draw attention to the plight of those without anywhere decent to live? It published a Housing Bill which it claims will "revitalise housing in England and Wales" by reversing the decline of rented housing and improving its quality; giving council tenants greater choice through the "right" to choose another landlord; and by directing money more accurately at the most acute problems.

But rhetoric aside, what will the government's Bill do for the homeless? Nothing — they are not even mentioned in the proposed legislation. What will it do for tenants? Nothing — except make them liable to higher rents and harassment by landlords. What will the Housing Bill do for landlords? Plenty — they will be able to raise rents and evict tenants more easily as a result of "deregulation". What will the proposals do for the Tory party? They hope that it will aid their political fortunes by increasing the number of "owner-occupiers" — considered to be more likely to vote Conservative than council tenants. They also see the new measures as a means of reducing the powers of local authorities who are regarded as a potential source of opposition to central government power.

What is in the Housing Bill?

There are 22 million tenants in Britain, the majority of whom rent their homes from local authorities. Council housing is far from ideal. At its worst it is typified by vast rundown estates and bleak high-rise or deck-access flats. Much local authority housing is "unfit" and in need of major repairs, renovation and. in some cases, demolition and rebuilding. Furthermore local authority housing managers have been guilty of racism in housing allocation practices and inhumanity in their treatment of the homeless.

Nevertheless it is also true that at its best, and for those who can get it. council housing has also been a means for workers to obtain low cost housing — a pitifully small step in the direction of recognising people's need for warm, dry, decent homes. But even that tiny glimmer of recognition of the importance of collective provision is now under attack. The government's main purpose in this legislation is the continued encouragement of home "ownership" and the removal from local authorities of the responsibility for housing. They aim to achieve these objectives in a number of ways:

• Offering council tenants further inducements to buy their homes while at the same time discouraging local authorities from building any new homes for rent through new arrangements for housing finance (see below).
• Setting up Housing Action Trusts (HATs) in certain inner city areas which will compulsorily take over all local authority tenancies in a designated area. Housing Action Trusts will be run by boards appointed (not elected) by the Secretary of State and unaccountable to either tenants or the local electorate.
• The "Pick-a-Landlord" scheme — yet another Tory con-trick which uses the hijacked language of rights, freedom and choice. Under the proposals council tenants will be given the "right" to transfer their tenancy to a landlord of their choice — a tenants' co-op, housing association or private landlord. Once the tenancy has been transferred — and it won't be a case of individual houses or flats being transferred to new landlords but whole estates — it will not be able to be returned to the local authority.

Implications of the Housing Bill

The housing pressure group, Shelter, has said that the Bill will mean "a future where anyone who cannot afford to buy will find it almost impossible to find a decent home". There will be fewer council houses to rent — some will be sold off to tenants, others will pass to new landlords under the "Pick-a-Landlord" scheme. The remaining council houses will either be those that are in such poor condition that no-one wants to buy them even at hugely discounted prices or so expensive as a result of higher local authority rents (see below on Housing Finance) that workers on low incomes will not be able to afford to live in them. Some of the worst council houses will become "dump" estates for the homeless and "problem" families for whom local authorities will still have responsibility under the Homeless Persons Act.

Housing Associations have, until now, had a policy of providing good quality housing for people on low incomes or with special needs. Under the government's proposals. Housing Associations are intended to have an increased role in the provision of housing. However, they will also be forced to change their priorities and policies in order to fit in with the demands of that new role (see inset on Housing Associations). Firstly, they will be forced to raise their rents; secondly, they will be obliged to restrict the number of low income tenants in any development. In other words they will end up behaving in much the same way as any other large institutional landlord — providing housing for those who can pay rather than for those on low incomes or with special needs.

The removal of Rent Act protection and the establishment of new kinds of tenancies in the private rented sector (see below) is also likely to mean higher rents, harassment by landlords, illegal evictions and the selling of rented property by speculators at huge profits.

Meeting Housing Needs

The Housing Bill will be a disaster for all those workers who cannot afford to "buy'' their homes and especially for the homeless. For years people have been talking about a "housing crisis" in terms of the scale of homelessness and unfit, decaying housing stock. We should not be surprised that a government which barely disguises the fact that it panders to the interests of those with wealth and power at the expense of those with neither, should propose this Bill as an answer to that "housing crisis". It is, however, particularly sickening that it also hypocritically uses the language of "freedom of choice" in order to sell its proposals to workers who, in reality, have very little freedom or choice. For the majority are forced to "choose" to buy houses they cannot afford knowing that if they default on the mortgage "their" home will be repossessed by the bank or building society from whom they borrowed the money. Tenants are now to be given the "right" to choose a new landlord. In fact it will be the landlord who chooses them — or rather their homes — where he or she thinks they will prove to be a profitable investment. In most cases council estates will be attractive to new landlords for their land or for the sales potential of suitably gentrified houses. Council tenants’ "freedom'' to transfer to a new landlord may turn out to be freedom to be winkled out by landlords who want to sell their homes without the negative asset of a sitting tenant.

Clean, dry, warm, decent housing is a fundamental human need. Capitalism has never placed that need very high up its list of priorities. This Housing Bill makes that sad fact abundantly clear.

Janie Percy-Smith

Housing Finance
The government is proposing to change the way that Local Authorities manage their housing budgets by establishing an accounting measure called "ring-fencing". What this will mean is that councils will no longer be allowed to subsidise local authority rents using money from the general rates fund. If this happens there will have so be huge increases in council rents in order to compensate for the shortfall caused by the withdrawal of subsidies,


The continuation of the right so buy council homes at substantial discounts will exacerbate the tendency towards higher rents, since local authorities will no longer be able to limit she discount available to take account of building or renovation costs incurred on the property since 1974, as at present. The abolition of the ‘cost floor rule", as it's known, will mean that the council could build a house for £40,000 one day and the tenant could buy it the next for just £16,000 (a discount of 60 per cent). Obviously this will be a major disincentive to councils building new houses But it will also mean that the remaining local authority tenants who cannot afford or do not want to buy their homes will have to pay higher rents to subsidise the cost of houses sold under the new system as a result of the way that council house costs and rents are pooled.


Housing Associations
Housing Associations currently finance their projects by taking out loans from either the local authority or the government-funded Housing Corporation. Rents are fixed at "fair rent" level by the Rent Officer but are subsidised by grants which cover 85 per cent or more of the shortfall between cost and what can be raised by means of a "fair rent".

Cuts in the Housing Corporation's budget and in local authority expenditure have already reduced the money available for grants to Housing Associations. Under the government's latest proposals, grants to Housing Associations will be reduced — probably to a maximum of 50 per cent of the cost of house building or renovation schemes. The balance will have to be raised on the private money markets.

But for Housing Associations to be an attractive proposition for private investors they will have to expand — more properties mean more assets and more security for investors’ money — and they will also have to increase their rents to ensure that investors get a return on their capital.


The Private Rented Sector
Under ihe new legislation Rent Act protection will be abolished on all new lettings. Instead landlords will be able to let property using two kinds of tenancies:

Assured Tenancies — first introduced in 1980 for newly built properties owned by landlords registered by the government. The Housing Bill will extend the range of properties for which assured tenancies will be permitted which will mean more rights for landlords to set rent levels and determine the terms and conditions of tenancies. Tenants' rights will be correspondingly reduced.

Shorthold Tenancies — will last from between six months and five years. At the end of the agreed period the landlord will automatically regain possession of the property. Although tenants will still be able to get their rent registered by a rent officer the level will be determined in accordance with "the market" rather than a “fair rent'’ and so is likely to be higher.

Although housing benefits will still be available to help those on low incomes there is likely to be an upper limit set for rents in each area above which housing benefit will not be payable, in order to deter people on low incomes from moving into high-rent property, even where that is all that is available.

New realism — new unionism (1988)

From the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The trade union movement is being afflicted, we are told, by a "new realism". What does this term mean and how does it differ from the "old realism" which previously affected them? To have a clear understanding of this change we must first of all examine realism in the context of present day society. To be a realistic member of capitalist society, whether you are a trade unionist or any other member of the working class, it is essential that you have a blinkered and distorted vision of the possibilities for the future. In other words, to be a realist you must see capitalist society as an inevitable feature of human life. Any person who puts forward the view that the earth's resources should be owned and consciously and democratically controlled by and in the interests of humanity, anyone who believes that the purpose of production should be to produce useful items to meet peoples' needs rather than for profit is of course being unrealistic. The argument that, freed from the present constraints of minority class ownership of wealth and production for the purpose of exchange, society has the potential to produce directly for use, is of course quite unrealistic. The evidence all around us is that present day society's ability to produce is outstripping a system confined to production for sale. Hence we have such contradictions as "over-production" of food for the market alongside millions of people, worldwide, dying of hunger quite unnecessarily and the vast majority living sub-standard lives. In addition, modem technology, which could be used to further increase productive capacity and free people from dangerous and/or soul destroying work, in many cases cannot be fully applied. Such evidence you must of course ignore for to draw the conclusion from such everyday experience that we could create a sane society will result in at best being labelled a utopian dreamer and at worst a dangerous subversive. Such are the constraints of being a realist in capitalist society.

If you want to remain a realist, while it is acceptable to wish to reform society, you must remember there are limits to how far you can go. Therefore, as a trade unionist, while under certain circumstances it is feasible to ask for higher wages or improved conditions. you must always take into account the needs and right of your employer to make a profit out of your labour. Remember, as a realist you have accepted capitalism — with production for profit as its golden rule — as inevitable so you must surely realise that if there is a conflict between your need for a decent standard of living and your employer's need for profit then, as a realist, you must accept that profit must take priority. Then we have those totally unrealistic people who believe that we can end the current class relations of production where the producing non-owners of the means of production are economically forced to sell their ability to work to the owners in return for a wage or a salary in order to live. Along with common ownership of the means of production and the replacement of profit by need and usefulness, as being the priority behind production, these unrealistic members of society argue that people could voluntarily give their skills and abilities to society and have free access to all goods and services on the basis of self determined need. To such people we realists must point out the unrealistic nature of such demands. They are after all based simply on the actual experience of the world around us as it is the useful majority, the working class, which produces all the goods and provides all the services that keep society going. So once again, as a realist, such everyday experience must be ignored for surely it is obvious to us all that a society which is organised around the domination of a small useless minority over the useful majority is natural, inevitable and unchangeable?

As trade unions are essentially an integral part of capitalist society it follows that as institutions they must accept that society, with all its inherent features, as inevitable. The point is, before elaborating on the new realism of trade unions, to look at how their previous mode of realism affected their behaviour.

It is quite clear that a main complaint of the trade union leadership with the present government is the latter's refusal to give the unions a role in the management of British capitalism. In the past the trade union movement had established a reputation for working with, and being accepted by, governments of various shades. In the late 1930s the TUC were gradually drawn into the consultation machinery which accompanied state intervention in industry. Thus the textile union became involved in the task of reorganising the cotton industry and the TUC were consulted on the appointment of representatives to advise the government on the fishing industry by the legislation of 1935 and 1938. In 1938-9 the TUC general council were asked by the National government to help to prepare its plans for war mobilisation and air-raid precaution. That the trade unions fully supported the Second World War and saw it as a war to defend democracy can be seen by this statement issued by the Trades Union Congress in September 1939.

  The defeat of ruthless aggression is essential if liberty and order are to be re-established in the world. Congress, with a united and resolute nation, enters the struggle with a clear conscience and steadfast purpose.

After the Second World War the trade unions supported the newly elected Labour government, many of its leaders and members mistakenly believing that its policy of widespread state ownership would radically alter the structure of capitalism. Of course little or nothing changed and Attlee's government pursued policies of wage restraint in both 1948 and 1949 which the official leadership of the union movement failed to oppose. During the period 1948-50 that same government used troops to break strikes in the London electricity power stations. in London and Bristol docks, against gaswork maintenance workers and in strikes at Smithfield market. However involvement in the government of capitalism did not end with the Conservative Party's election victory in 1951 as this statement made by the General Council of the TUC in that same year makes clear.

  Since the Conservative administration of prewar days the range of consultation between Ministers and both sides of industry has considerably increased and the machinery of joint consultation has enormously improved. We expect of this government that they will maintain to the full this practice of consultation. On our part we shall continue to examine every question solely in the light of its industrial and economic implications.

It was with the election of the 1974-9 Labour government that the trade unions were last deeply involved in helping to administer capitalism. In the period 1974-7 they agreed to a policy of wage restraint known as the Social Contract. This agreement was based on the mistaken belief that prices could be held down by limiting wage increases. In reality the agreement had little effect on prices.

In fact price levels rose between the return of the Labour government in February 1974. and February 1977 by 71 per cent. However policy did have a drastic effect on wage levels. According to figures provided by the Treasury, the purchasing power of the take home pay of workers on the average wage fell by 12 per cent between December 1974 and February 1977. (The Times 16 May 1977).

So a realism confined to capitalism is nothing new to the trade union movement. Now they are faced with the twin pressures of a prolonged economic recession which has resulted in declining membership and influence and a Conservative administration which has fostered a hostility to the kind of collective organisation and action that trade unionism entails. It is in this context that the "New Realism" has to be seen.

As trade unions accept capitalism as an inevitable way of life, they lack any analysis of the root causes of the problems faced by working class people. What is also lacking is any understanding of why workers develop the kind of ideas that they do. In this situation unions are forced along the road of reacting to surface appearances. It is on the basis of this mistaken analysis that trade unions are seeking to appeal to what they believe is a new breed of workers — a new "affluent" group of workers who aspire to a different set of values and attitudes compared with what is seen as the "traditional" working class. This group of workers, it is believed, have fundamentally different interests as they might "own" their homes, have a new car and even have a few shares in one of the newly privatised, formerly state owned enterprises. At the same time lower paid and unorganised workers still have to be catered for. To some union leaders new realism means appealing to this group of affluent workers who are supposed to be less "militant", presenting an image of unions which stresses the need to co-operate with the employer. Hence we have the business unionism of the EETPU, sponsored by the likes of Eric Hammond, with the non-confrontational policy of no-strike deals.

The Daily Mirror (June 24 1987) discussed some of the problems of declining membership faced by the unions and the kind of methods, termed as "New Unionism", by which they are attempting to respond to the situation. The TGWU, once (under Jack Jones' leadership) over two million strong, is now down to under 1.5 million; the AUEW which in the days of Hugh Scanlon had one and a quarter million members has slumped to 857,000. while USDAW has lost 100,000 members in eight years and the NUM has declined from 250,000 to 104,000 in a decade. So-called modern methods, the Mirror notes, are being used to increase membership. Union ties, badges, scarves, beermats and track suits are being sold to brighten up the image of the movement. Along with no-strike deals the EETPU offers benefits such as private medicine in an attempt to attract members. Thousands of pounds are being spent on advertising and recruitment drives. The GMBU spent £35.000 on a campaign run for them by a firm of design consultants which is best known for promoting Lamborghini cars. NUPE. the TGWU and USDAW are all spending considerable amounts of money on public relations, design consultants, typography and advertising. In recruitment campaigns, videos, double decker buses, promotional packs, educational films for use in schools and pop concerts are being used. The TGWU enlisted pop star Billy Bragg for concerts promoting union membership among the jobless and low paid and unorganised part- timers.

Many of the problems this so-called new realism is attempting to deal with have been faced before by the trade union movement. Much of the loss of membership is through economic recession and the restructuring of the British economy. Thus jobs have disappeared in many traditional industries where union membership was high and new ones have appeared in places where unions have yet to gain a stronghold and where government and employer strategy and the economic conditions will make things difficult. Much of the loss of membership in the three unions mentioned in the Mirror article — the TGWU. AUEW and the NUM — can be put down to the recession and restructuring of the economy. However the area that gives rise for most concern is how the movement is responding to the divisions within the working class and the concept of no-strike deals. It does not take a genius to realise that under capitalism the working class is divided. It is divided in many ways, unemployed and employed, high and low paid and so on. However the trade union response to this situation should be to promote the common interests, not to pursue policies that are likely to increase those divisions. Unemployed, employed, high or low paid, the root cause of working people's problems is that they have to sell their ability to work in order to live and that their standard of life is dictated to them by the price they can get for the sale of their labour power. Most workers, whether low or high paid, have to spend the greater part of their lives in employment which is boring, sometimes dangerous and nearly always uncreative and degrading. The lives of most workers are dominated by their employment and at the level of consumption their needs are to some extent fashioned for them as the same forces which control the means of production are also dominant in the sphere of mass communication. Thus, while it is true that capitalism has created some differences in life style for different sections of the working class, all workers share many common, everyday experiences, and although they take place in different settings, they will last as long as capitalism does.

Thus the new realism of the unions is based on false premises. It is based on the idea that capitalism is inevitable, that workers and employers can have common interests. What is more, it fails to get to the root cause of workers' problems and can therefore never solve them. What is needed is an alternative realism, based on a knowledge of how this society operates, for only then will workers be aware of how to carry out the defensive struggle within capitalism with some success. Most of all this realism needs to make it clear that this society can never be made to operate in our interests. Mostly we need a realism which does not see the present as unchangeable but one that sees the possibilities of today as the reality of tomorrow.

Ray Carr

Between the Lines: Keep the tears flowing (1988)

The Between the Lines column from the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Keep the tears flowing

Television thrives on tears. Tears of distress make good news disaster stories; tears of sentimentality bring in a few quid for Terry Wogan's annual evening of pseudo-benevolent piety. Children In Need (BBC1. Friday 27 November, all evening); tears of anger, such as those of victims of so-called terrorists' attack, are easier images than those of explanation. It is a cruel and harsh observation to make, but the facts indicate that cheers go out in the TV centres every time news of a new cause for tears and mass suffering comes in through the teleprinter. One sees the look of excited expectation upon the faces of these tasteless, trivialising newsreaders; "And news is just coming in of an air disaster in Manchester — it looks like as many as twenty could be dead — but keep watching, we'll do our best to push the figures up — and then we'll be the first on the scene when the injured are persuaded to show their ugly wounds before the cameras — as a matter of fact, a little birdy tells me that we might just have first degree burn on a little kid to flash before you. so keep your eyes on the screen and then well show you the ritual tour of the overcrowded casualty wards by The Royal Couple".

No, of course it is not true that TV producers actually take a sadistic pleasure in seeing workers suffer, but there can be no doubt that tears make good TV for them and that is what they are out to make. One recalls that awful day when cameras showed the burning alive of those numerous workers who stood on the unsafe terraces at Bradford Football Club and perished. Of course, the commentators were genuinely moved. But something else was going on. TV uses disaster for a particular social function. Firstly, it is intended to say to viewers. "Look at these poor sods: you might be poor, insecure and depressed, but at least you're not the ones being burned alive. There's always someone worse off than you. you know". How long have workers been deterred from taking real action to solve our own misery now on the grounds that to do so would be wrong, for first we must attend to the miseries of those who are worse off than us?

Secondly, there is something inherently irrational about tears. To be sure, it is psychologically very useful to have a good cry when misery becomes too much to bear — and it is incredible the number of men who are afraid to do so, not least because of the TV imagery which shows that "men don't cry". But tears are an expression, not an explanation; a cry and not a speech. And TV likes to catch the workers at our most inarticulate and animalistic. It confirms the basic Christian doctrine that try as we might to pose as reasoned beings, when the Lord decides that it is disaster time (vicious swine that this legendary god must be) all we are empowered to do is weep like babies.

Thirdly, disaster allows the capitalist system to be seen as caring. That is why Margaret Thatcher is always on the scene — with cameras firmly focussed on her — when the tears are flowing. The newsreader lets us know that The Queen sends her condolences. When do these uncaring, rich parasites send their condolences to the families of the thousands of old people who die of hypothermia each winter because they are too poor to switch on a heater? But give us a nice, single, packaged disaster and we see just how caring these defenders of the system really are.

What TV does not show — or, if it ever makes moves towards doing so, it happens at late and undramatic moments — is why these tears must flow. Why did hundreds drown in the cold sea off Zeebrugge? Was it anything to do with the shipowners making huge profits out of over-packing cross-channel ferries? Why did they burn to death at Bradford? Were the owners of the football club, who allowed spectators to stand on dangerous wooden stands, not placing profit before human needs? Why did they burn to death on the escalators at King's Cross station? We do not yet know, but might it not have at least something to do with London Regional Transport's decision to divert the money it had allocated for scrapping the unsafe wooden escalators to building heavy steel barriers to stop fare dodgers?

Why are children in need, Terry Wogan? Your children will not be in need (and we are very glad to know it) because you receive millions of pounds for presenting trivia to the BBC. But is it really worth spending one evening a year indulging in a TV charity marathon which can only collect less than £10 million from the entire population of Britain when every hour the British government spends £1.5 million on arms alone? Children In Need shows a tragedy beyond the tragedy. The tragedy it tries to depict is that of large numbers of kids who need our pennies and the few quid which the worker can spare in order to alleviate their suffering. Credit where it is due: the presenters of the programme all do a very good job in showing us just how needy these kids are. just how tearful we should be. But the tragedy which transcends those tears is that we are now living in a society which is more than able to satisfy the needs of those deprived and diseased children — more than capable of allocating resources to end or alleviate as much as possible their suffering, but does not do so because of the warped logic of capitalism which must place profits before needs.

The real tragedy is that we must look at the needless waste of children's health and happiness which has been allowed to go on in a system which makes a TV show out of caring and an economic science out of saying "go away and die". When workers wake up to the sense of what capitalism is doing to us all — to the children of Ethiopia who now are pushed before the cameras so that more tear-flowing may be indulged in. led by the ever-miserable Bob Geldof — and to men, women and children across the world — when workers wake up there will be more important things to do than to weep. We can leave that to the tears of relief which will doubtlessly follow upon our self-emancipation.


Murder by law

If tears are what you fancy, then few programmes in 1987 could have had more effect than Fourteen Days In May, shown by the BBC last November. This was a documentary which would soon disabuse innocents who were under the misapprehension that racists stopped sending their victims into gas chambers after the Nazis fell from power. Not so. This extremely moving documentary told the story of a black worker from the Southern USA who was convicted to death for the alleged crime of shooting a white cop and — worst of all — raping a white woman. In the racist South nothing short of legalised murder would suffice to teach the man a lesson (there's nothing like death to teach us lessons, I always think) and in this particular state death is by gassing.

The BBC cameras showed the gas chamber being prepared by the wage slaves in uniform, and even the gassing of a rabbit on a trial run. All very sick. We watched the victim live out his final fourteen days on Death Row where he had been for eight years. We watched him hope for leniency and we watched him walk into the gas chamber. It was like watching a social system throwing up. After Johnson had been gassed to death we had a message from the producer flashed across the screen. On the night that he had allegedly committed the two crimes of which he had always pleaded innocent he had been with a black woman. This alibi went into a police station some time after his arrest and offered herself as a witness but was warned by the white cop that she had no right to interfere in their business.

Earlier the same month we were shown on Channel Four the excellent two-part documentary, Shoah, which told of the mass gassing of people by the Nazis half a century ago. Capitalism still goes on; the gas chambers are still being used; who the hell are the inhabitants of this system to call themselves civilised?

Steve Coleman

Rear View: Same shit, different day (2016)

The Rear View Column from the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Same shit, different day
General elections worldwide, whether ‘fair’ or foul, past and present, have one result in common: they won, we lost. You will not hear socialists today talking about the USA being on the brink of revolution or that ‘the capitalist class is on its last legs’ as the Marxist Daniel DeLeon did in 1896 and 1902 respectively. Elections can serve as a barometer of socialist consciousness and ultimately as a way of making capitalism history. In the US Sanders’ reformism was no threat to the status quo, and President s Trump means business as usual just as much as President Clinton would have. Depressing enough without considering the recent coronation of King and Queen Ortega in Sandinista Nicaragua.


An old opiate
‘Schools across Egypt are forcing Christian children and those of other religions to wear the Muslim headscarf and quote the Koran by heart, or they will be punished and kicked out of school. Muslims are also getting punished if they do not wear their hijabs. One 12 year-old Muslim girl named Rahman Salem was forced to leave her school lesson after taking off her hijab, and was banned from participating in any activities at her school, located in the Northern part of Egypt’ (cbn.com, 5 November). Religion 101: Islam means submission, so such news should not be surprising. Socialism 101: banish gods from our minds and capitalists from the Earth! Socialists unlike professional atheists recognise that capitalism is the main source of irrationality and exploitation in the modern world. Religion then will not end until we the 99 percent understand and act to end the vale of woe that is capitalism.


From the horse’s mouth
‘Indonesian President Joko Widodo said there will be “no compromise” to his country’s sovereignty in the contested South China Sea, ahead of a visit to staunch US ally Australia. The comments come after Australia’s foreign minister, Julie Bishop, on Tuesday said the two countries were considering joint naval patrols in the contested waters. China claims almost the entire South China Sea, through which about $5 trillion worth of trade passes each year. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam and Indonesia also claim part of the sea…Indonesian warplanes staged a large-scale exercise last month in the waters around the Natuna Islands archipelago, following a spate of face-offs between the country’s navy and Chinese fishing boats in the gas-rich southern end of the South China Sea’ (reuters.com, 4 November). Here we have it black and white: wars are fought over trade routes, areas of domination and resources.


Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov
Valery Raskin, a so-called Communist MP, wants to see the dead dictator feature on coins and notes as a way of marking the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917: ‘Lenin’s return to Russian rubles will confirm the fact that our society has finished its formation and entered the phase of maturity. This will also be good because the majority of Russian citizens have warm feelings towards Vladimir Iliych [Lenin] and the Soviet era in general, as it allowed us to become one of the world’s leading countries. We should pay tribute to Lenin, who laid the foundation of a social state in Russia’ (rt.com, 2 November). This is a fitting tribute as Lenin and the Bolsheviks hastened the development of capitalism in Russia. He also distorted Marxism and thereby severely damaged the development of a socialist movement. That members of the 99 percent in Russia are wage slaves like us and have need to reflect positively on life under past dictators says much about the struggle to live under  Putin.


Imagine no countries
We hear daily reports of the horrors of war in places such as Syria. Imagine then, if possible, all the accumulated indignities and suffering which led to one resident of a refugee camp in Greece to state recently: ‘Give me the money to pay a smuggler and I’ll go back to Syria right now. There the death is quick. Here we are dying slowly'(pri.org, 2 November).

50 Years Ago: America Votes (2016)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The mid-term elections in America provided the customary festival for the devotees of the Great Man Theory.

Disgruntled Democrats were ready to blame President Johnson for their losses. The Daily Telegraph‘s Washington correspondent passed on a report that Democratic leaders in Michigan were thinking about opposing Johnson as their Presidential candidate in 1968.

On the other side, jubilant Republicans surveyed their leaders — Reagan, Romney, Percy, Nixon — and began planning the build-up to present one of them as the nation’s saviour at the polls the year after next.

Whichever party is defeated at the election, the Great Man Theory remains unbeaten. The Democrats who now blame Johnson for their setbacks are conveniently forgetting that they once adored him as the man who would build the Great Society. The only remedy they have to offer is to peddle the same sort of nonsense about another man.

In the same way, the Republicans who are now come to praise men like Reagan and Percy may yet stay to bury them in unforgiving recrimination.

This is a familiar spectacle. Capitalism’s leaders are always being credited with more power over the system than they actually have. No man, and no government, has ever been able to control capitalism; in the end the system wins.

When we have an election in which the votes reflect a developing knowledge of that fact, we shall be somewhere near getting rid of the problems the great men are always promising, and always failing, to solve.

(Socialist Standard, December 1966)

Politics is Not in Control (2016)

From the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last time there was a prolonged period of slump and stagnation, in the 1930s, a few correctly identified the cause of the problems facing the majority class of wage and salary workers as the world-wide capitalist system of minority class ownership and production for profit. Unfortunately, however, most of those who wanted change misidentified it as there being something wrong with capitalism’s political superstructure.

Extremists on both the left and the right blamed political democracy, or ‘bourgeois democracy’ as they both called it, and both saw the way out as a dictatorship within the boundaries of the nation-state. Mainstream political opinion, too, envisaged a national, not to say nationalist, solution, in protectionism, or the erection of tariff barriers to keep out foreign imports as a way of trying to revive home industries. This didn’t work and in the end the rivalries to protect national capitalist interests led to war.

Is history about to repeat itself? Not that there is any reason it should, but it doesn’t seem so, even though there are signs of a return to national protectionism as advocated by Bernie Sanders and Trump in America and in the sentiment behind the Brexit vote in Britain. This time the political reaction of both the left and right has been different. There has been no tendency to blame political democracy as such; to blame the current elected politicians, yes, but no call to replace political democracy with political dictatorship.

Quite the contrary. This time the trend has been to blame there not being enough democracy. On the left , this has expressed itself in substantial support for parties like the Five Star Movement in Italy, Podemos in Spain, and the Pirate Party in Iceland which blame remote and corrupt politicians and favour a more direct democracy in which voters themselves get to decide more. On the right too the call has been for more referendums and to ‘take back control’, even if to try to push through a populist and nationalist agenda.

Although more respectable, ‘more democracy’ is as little a way out as ‘less democracy’ was in the 1930s. This is because the problems the working majority face today, as then, result not from some fl aw in the capitalist system’s political superstructure but from the very basis of the system – minority ownership and production for profit. What is required is not political reform but a complete revolution in the basis of society.

Even if the political superstructure was made more democratic – with electors being able to initiate referendums, recall MPs, instruct them how to vote by internet polling, etc – this would not make any difference to the way the capitalist economic system operates.

Today’s politicians fail, not because they are insincere, corrupt or incompetent (as many but not necessarily all are) nor because they are not subject to enough control by those who elected them. It’s because those who elected them have set them an impossible task, that of making the capitalist economic system work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers. This can’t be done because the workings of the capitalist economic system forbid it.

Capitalism is a profit-making system that can only work in the interests of the privileged few who live off profits, never in the interest of the majority. As the system runs on profits, making profits has to come before meeting people’s needs. If they don’t, or are not allowed to, then the economic system stalls. That’s the nature of the system.

This is why greater transparency, no corruption and more voter control will not make any difference to the way capitalism works. The new breed of elected representatives that this would bring, and has already brought in some countries, would not be able to fare any be% er than the old gang. The economic laws of capitalism would oblige them too, on pain of provoking an economic downturn, to put profit and the conditions for profit-making above solving the majority’s problems and meeting their needs properly. Given the profit system, profits must come first.

This said, the call for ‘more democracy’ is valid. But, within capitalism, it is not going to make any essential difference. For it to be effective requires a radical change in the basis of society, from minority ownership to common ownership by all. Only on that basis can production be geared to directly meeting people’s needs instead of being subjected to the economic laws of the profit system. Only on that basis will there no longer be the vested interests and inequalities that distort formal democratic practice today. Only on that basis can what people decide they want be implemented and those they choose to carry this out be subject to effective democratic control. In short, socialism is the only framework in which ‘more democracy’ can be meaningful.

Adam Buick

Material World: Pirate Nations – The Jolly Roger (2016)

The Material World Column from the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘We’ve had enough!’ The Pirate Party have captured the imagination of many in Iceland, especially the young. Iceland’s political landscape has been transformed by its general election result and the success of the Pirate Party which won 10 seats in the 63-seat parliament – up from the three it won in the 2013 general election, in a voter turn-out of 79.2 percent.  For the Icelandic establishment, they may still retain control of the helm but their ship of state is beginning to flounder.

The Pirate Party does not have a leader, although former Wikileaks activist and founding MP Birgitta Jonsdóttir tends to speak for it in public (perhaps, as a poet, she has a better way with words). She said her party subscribes to its agenda of ‘fundamental system change’.

They are challenging the assumption that political leaders are necessary and politics could not operate without them.

Ásta Guthrún Helgadóttir, another of their parliamentary members explained, ‘We are not here to gain power. We are here to distribute power.’

The Pirates’ core issues appeal to the popular sentiment in Iceland; direct democracy; freedom of expression; civil rights; and government transparency as set out in a crowd-sourced constitution which creates new rules for civic governance.

Political parties under the Pirate flag are now active in many countries. But we should remember that their libertarian attitudes were based on the history of real and sometimes not so real pirate ‘nations’. In the modern era, we have had Somalia which was notorious for its piracy, while one of the earliest foreign interventions of the newly-independent United States was the suppression of the Barbary pirates operating from North Africa. Our conception of piracy stems from the adventurers of those state-sponsored buccaneers and privateers from the time of Raleigh and Drake when the Caribbean was a melting pot of poor immigrants, political exiles and escaped plantation slaves.

Christopher Hill in Radical Pirates? described life at sea as based upon mutual aid, a much necessary survival tactic in which piracy was no exception in fostering a natural solidarity. Many pirates had crewed on merchant ships and grown to dislike the hierarchal authoritarianism.

Booty was divided up by a fairly egalitarian share system and those maimed received extra compensation. The Dutch Governor of Mauritius met a pirate crew and commented: ‘Every man had as much say as the captain’. The captain enjoyed no special privileges. Pirate captains were elected and could be deposed at any time for abuse of their authority; for cowardice or cruelty towards the crew and revealingly, for refusing ‘to take and plunder English Vessels’ for the pirates had turned their backs on the state and its laws and no lingering feelings of patriotism were to be allowed. The captain only had right of command in battle, otherwise, all decisions were made by the whole ship’s company.

Libertalia (or Libertatia) was a more-than-likely fictionalised colony founded in the late 17th century in Madagascar by pirates. Marcus Rediker, in Villains of All Nations, writes of Libertalia, ‘ [The] pirates were anti-capitalist, opposed to the dispossession that necessarily accompanied the historic ascent of wage labor and capitalism. They insisted that ‘every Man was born free, and had as much Right to what would support him, as to the Air he respired.’ They resented the ‘encroachments’ by which ‘Villains’ and ‘unmerciful Creditors’ grew ‘immensely rich’ as others became ‘wretchedly miserable.” They spoke of the ‘Natural right’ to ‘a Share of the Earth as is necessary for our Support.’ They saw piracy as a war of self-preservation. [They redefined the] fundamental relations of property and power. They had no need for money ‘where every Thing was in common, and no Hedge bounded any particular Man’s Property,’ and they decreed that ‘the Treasure and Cattle they were Masters of should be equally divided.’

Of course, the Pirate Party of Iceland will be unable to manage things much better than the conventional parties since it is capitalism, not the politicians, which runs its government and which is to blame for all our problems. They will have the doomed future of the original anarchistic pirates they wish to emulate, which they will soon discover if they ever do form a government.

ALJO

Gigs and Umbrellas (2016)

From the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look at some changes that have led to new forms of work, and ask whether these are truly new and better than traditional kinds of employment.

Being your own boss, as a self-employed sole trader, may sound like a good idea. You can to some extent decide on your own hours, and are not subject to a boss or manager who lays down the law about how you do your work. But, like so much under capitalism, the reality does not match the image.

Officially, a self-employed person runs their own business and sells goods or services for a profit. You can hire other workers, you provide your own equipment, and (according to gov.uk) you ‘can decide how, where and when you do your work’. You have to register as self-employed, keep proper records and complete a self-assessment tax return each year. You will have to cope with insurance and business rates and provide for your pension. You have to worry about business plans and cash flow. Moreover, you will not get sick pay or holiday pay, and income can vary and be unpredictable. Self-employment is clearly not all plain sailing, with lots of administrative matters to take care of as well as being sure you actually make enough money from your work.

There are nearly five million self-employed in the UK, an increase of 45 percent since 2002; part-time self-employment has grown much faster than full-time. The self-employed work in many areas, from plumbers and electricians to accountants. As another example, many hairdressers rent the use of a chair in a salon, rather than being employed by the salon. But, while the number of self-employed is going up, their earnings have been going down. One claim is that average wages for such workers are less than they were twenty years ago, at £240 a week. BBC Online (20 October) looked at some examples. One man who has his own cleaning business was earning far less than previously but said he had a much better work–life balance. A session singer said payments had changed very little over the last couple of decades but, with changes in music-buying habits, his income from sales was now virtually non-existent. The rise in numbers is partly the result of workers who have lost their jobs trying to set up in business on their own. But it is also due to people being classified as self-employed when that description is not really applicable to them.

At the end of October, minicab drivers for the firm Uber won a case at an employment tribunal, which ruled that they should be classed as workers employed by the company, rather than as self-employed, and so should receive holiday pay and the ‘national living wage’. Uber put passengers in touch with drivers via a Smartphone app, and claimed to work for the drivers, enabling them to increase their ‘business’. But in fact Uber recruited and controlled the drivers, set their fares and ran a disciplinary procedure. The tribunal judges described the company as using ‘twisted language’ to describe their relationship with its workers. Uber took 20 percent commission from its forty thousand British drivers, and is a massive international company operating in over sixty countries, with income last year of $1.5bn. This was clearly not self-employment at all but a bogus set-up which made the company big profits, intensified the exploitation of the drivers and worsened their working conditions.

It has been estimated that well over 400,000 of the five million mentioned earlier are wrongly classed as self-employed. It is impossible to know the correct figure, but it is clear that Uber are not the only company that gets away with calling employees self-employed. The courier company Hermes has been alleged to be another example, as has Deliveroo. Even the Financial Secretary to the Treasury has stated that ‘Employment status in the UK is determined by the reality of the working relationship and not simply by the terms of any contract’ (theregister.co.uk, 27 October). In fact this is part of a wider phenomenon, sometimes known as the gig economy (based on the idea of musicians performing and getting paid for individual performances, rather than working regular hours). A gig economy is ‘an environment in which temporary positions are common and organizations contract with independent workers for short-term engagements’ (WhatIs.com). Freelance work has been common for years, especially in areas such as journalism and translating, and the majority of freelance workers are women. The Internet has increasingly made it possible for people to work from almost anywhere, so that the worker’s location and that of the company employing them can be miles or even continents apart. Many more people now work from home or from coffee houses, which can be very atomising in terms of having no face-to-face contact with fellow workers.

Another new development in this area is so-called umbrella companies, which operate as intermediaries between temporary workers (often called contractors) and the agencies that provide work. About a third of supply teachers, for instance, have had to join such a company. Supposedly this makes it easier for teachers who work in different schools, and even for different agencies, in the course of a week, as they have only one organisation to deal with from an administrative and payroll point of view. But many workers in such a situation have found themselves worse off financially, since the umbrella company takes a cut from their earnings, and it can take some time to get paid. This is not technically self-employment, and is in reality little different (if at all) from working directly for an agency or school.

The Communist Manifesto noted how fairly prestigious occupations such as doctor, lawyer and scientist had under capitalism been converted into wage labourers. Maybe the nature of employment is currently changing further. Rather than the masses of workers employed for years or decades in mine, mill, factory, shop and office, there is now much more short-term and temporary work with a sequence of employers, where someone can work for one company for a week or a month but then for a quite different company, undertaking different projects for which continued employment with one employer would simply not be appropriate. Many computer programmers and other IT specialists work this way, for instance. It all shows how zero-hours contracts are by no means the only way in which capitalism is making workers even more insecure.

One defence of self-employed status is that it involves workers owning the means of production. But owning a laptop or a van and a few tools does not make anyone independent of the market system or the overarching control of the capitalist class. The gig economy, umbrella companies, ostensible self-employment: none of these alters the subordinate status of the workers they apply to or represent anything other than a merely formal break with wage labour.

Paul Bennett