An Open Letter to the Miners (1984)

From the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fellow workers, you are now involved in a great industrial conflict with your exploiters, the state. Like the teachers, nurses and railway workers, your union is confronted with a government which bows to the god of profit as it tramples on the needs and aspirations of those who produce all of society‘s goods and services. But you don’t have be a miner to appreciate our message since all those who depend on a wage salary or dole cheque in order to survive suffer, in varying degrees, the effects of the same callous social system.

This letter is not addressed to your leaders, although we hope that Arthur Scargill and his fellow elected officials will take the time to read it and respond. The socialist message is directed primarily at you, the workers who are not interviewed on television or driven from one picket line to the next in chauffeur-driven cars. You are the men who dig the coal and run the mines in from top to bottom; who belong to class which produces wealth but does not posses it. We address you for two reasons: firstly, because it is only by spreading ideas to the majority that we will ever achieve real social change – leaders can’t do it for us; and secondly, because socialists know that only when workers raise their political sights will they achieve a society capable of satisfying human needs.

We start from the assumption that your struggle against the state exploiters is part of the class war endemic to capitalism. As socialists, we recognise that the task before all workers is not to win this or that skirmish or gain a few concessions which the capitalist class can well afford; our objective in the class war is to win it. Back in 1905 this was the advice given by the Socialist Party of Great Britain to the railway workers – and it is bit as applicable today as it then:

  What the workers on the railways and in every other branch of industry have to recognise is that the utility of combination, economic and political, lies in the strength it gives to fight. What they have to understand is that they can only fight to the betterment of their own position at the expense and to the disadvantage of the class that employs them. What they have to appreciate if they object to being robbed of any part of the wealth they produce, is that they will not only have to place the capitalist class in the category of irreconcilable enemies, not only will they have to fight them as such always but they will have to beat them out of existence absolutely, before they can enter into the enjoyment of the full fruit of their labour
  . . . The workers on railways and elsewhere will have to understand that it is the possession of the land and tools of production and distribution that gives the capitalist his power. They will have to understand that the only way to break that power is to force him to relinquish his hold upon the means by which all the people live. And then they will … be prepared to work with us for the capture of the political machinery of the country as the necessary preliminary to the capture of all the machinery of wealth production.”. (Socialist Standard, May 1905)

In other words, no answer short of social revolution will do if the problems of the working class are to be abolished from the face of the earth.

Media prostitutes

Unfortunately, what the majority of workers know about the miners’ strike they have received from the media. In this strike, as ever, the whores of Fleet Street have used their limited imaginative talents to defend the position of their bosses: attacks on individuals are the familiar substitute for analysis of the issues involved. On television we are bombarded with images of picket-line violence. But why did the violence start? And why need workers picket in the first place? In answer to these questions there is hardly a whisper. Of course, insofar as the reports of workers persecuting those who disagree with them are not false or exaggerated, socialists condemn unreservedly the anti-working class intimidation of fellow miners. No useful purpose will be achieved by imposing the will of one group on another; persuasion is the key to united strength. One thing is for sure: the media will not be made widely available to you to state your case and call for support from fellow workers. The so-called free press is no more than a propaganda tool of the exploiting class.

The issues at stake

The strike was called because of NCB plans to close down a number of pits and make thousands of miners unemployed. The extent of the proposed cuts has been a matter of contention between the NCB and the NUM but, even in the unlikely event that MacGregor is telling the truth, the result will be longer dole queues and the devastation of a number of old mining communities. It is in response to these facts that miners have gone on strike. The NUM, in accordance with its conference policy, is demanding that no pits be closed. In examining that demand, we need to know why the NCB had made its proposals.

Clearly, the intention to destroy large areas of the coal industry is not a result of what is popularly called Thatcherism. Neither is it a whim of Ian MacGregor’s. The object of production under the present social system – capitalism – is not primarily to create wealth, but to make profits. The government has decided that there is not enough money to be made by exploiting miners in the old way and that they need to trim your jobs and communities to fit in with the demands of the market. Remember: the government does not run capitalism; it is the economic laws of the system which force the government to dance to the market’s tune. In demanding that pits be kept open, even though the government does not regard them as profitable enough, the NUM is effectively demanding that capitalism be run for the benefit of the workers. Of course, society should be run for the wealth producers, but under capitalism that can never happen.

The state capitalist non-alternative

It used to be believed by many workers – including plenty of miners – that the way to make capitalism run in the workers’ interest would be to take the means of wealth production and distribution from the private capitalists and place them in the hands of the state. It was argued that the government would run the mines for the miners and not the ruling class. As long ago as 1912, when nationalisation of the mines was being advocated by certain reformists, the South Wales miners’ Unofficial Reform Committee pointed out that

 Nationalisation of the mines . . . simply makes a National Trust, with all the force of the Government behind it, whose one concern will be to see that the industry is run in such a way as to pay the interest on the bonds with which the coal-owners are paid out, and to extract as much more profit as possible in order to relieve the taxation of other landlords and capitalists.” (The Miners’ Next Step)

On that point the Unofficial Committee was quite right. Nationalisation has amounted to nothing more than state-run exploitation of miners. If workers are to learn one lesson from the strike it must be that nationalisation is no answer. Of course, there are those smooth-tongued Labour opportunists who claim that if only the state was controlled by a Labour government it would all be different. Have they forgotten that Labour did run the state when the firemen, the NUPE workers and the dockers were out on strike? Have they forgotten that it was the Wilson government which initiated The Plan For Coal, which was based entirely on the assumption that the coal industry must make a profit? Fellow worker, as a member of the NUM, you are paying part of your wage into a political fund to send Labour administrators of capitalism to parliament. Is it not time that all union support for this anti-working class party was ended?

The international struggle

As all trade unionists learn through struggle, unity is strength. But unity is not just achieved on a national basis – capitalism is a worldwide social order and workers of all lands have a common interest in joining together against the common foe. One of the reasons the NCB can sit back and smile is that they are importing cheap Polish coal. In fact, coal imports from Poland over the last three months were five times higher than for the same period in 1983. The bosses are trying to break the strike by using workers from another part of the world, and in the bargain are buying cheaper coal because Polish miners receive lower wages.

Scargill has appealed to Jaruzelski, the unelected leader of the Polish police state, to stop coal imports to Britain. Jaruzelski, who needs the money to pay off Poland’s huge bank debts, has ignored Scargill’s plea. But why is Scargill appealing to the head of a state-capitalist dictatorship in the first place? Because the workers there have no independent unions to support the British miners’ struggle. When the Polish miners were organised in their own union, Solidarity, Scargill’s comment (published in the WRP’s newspaper, Newsline) was that they should stay in the government-controlled Unions. So, Solidarity has been smashed, the Polish workers are effectively non-unionised, the price of Polish miners’ labour-power is cheap and British coal importers are rubbing their greedy little hands.

The view that there is communism or socialism in Poland, Russia or any other nation must be rejected. Instead of workers in the so-called socialist countries fitting in with the needs of their state bosses, the struggle of workers must be international. Real unity means that if workers in Britain come out on strike we can bring with us the effective support of workers around the world. There can be no room for nationalist notions, including the policy of import controls, if we are to fight and win against the international ruling class.

The power of democracy

How dare the unelected editors of Fleet Street preach to the miners about democracy. And as for the NCB: who elected MacGregor to receive his fat salary for doing the dirty work of the profit system? A fact which is undeniable is that the vast majority of miners have supported the strike. As was mentioned in the Socialist Standard two months ago, we do not notice the media or the government insisting that, in the interests of democracy, all union members be balloted before a strike ends. Nonetheless, a combination of workers is only as strong as the understanding and commitment of those involved. Leaving the decisions to leaders – even to apparently militant ones – is no substitute for the democratic involvement by all members in all important union decisions. As the Unofficial Committee realised in 1912, leadership results in organisational weakness:

 Sheep cannot be said to have solidarity. In obedience to a shepherd, they will go up or down, backwards or forwards as they are driven by him and his dog. But they have no solidarity, for that means unity and loyalty. Unity and loyalty, not to an individual, or the policy of an individual, but to an interest and a policy which is understood and worked for by all. (The Miners’ Next Step)

Conscious unity — let the bosses try to defeat that!

Fair-deal capitalism

What are the miners asking for? Insofar as the trade union fight is for wage defence, better working conditions, higher redundancy payments and keeping as many jobs as possible, hard negotiation backed up by democratic, militant trade unionism can achieve results. But let’s not kid ourselves –even if the NUM achieves what it seeks, the result will only have held back the capitalist butchery, not defeated the butchers. According to the SWP leaflet, Why You Should Support The Miners, “The first reason why we should support the miners is that they are fighting for jobs”. And what is a job, fellow worker, but wage slavery? Fighting to be exploited – to be dependent on a wage at the end of the week – having to sell your labour-power to the highest parasitical bidder. Is that really the most that workers can ask for?

Karl Marx – who gets an even worse write-up in the Daily Express than Arthur Scargill and therefore must be talking some sense – recognised that trade union action was necessary, but that it would not make capitalism a fit system in which I live. As he put it:

 Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system. (Value, Price and Profit)

As Marxists, we fight not for jobs but for emancipation from a system which turns useful work into wage slavery.

There will never be fair-deal capitalism. Workers can fight strikes from now until Prince William gets a job and there will still be a class-divided society, with the wealth-producing majority living in an economically inferior condition. Kinnock , if elected, would be no better than Thatcher, and Scargill’s rhetoric will, in the end do no more to shake the system than did Gormley’s in 1974. The fact to face up to is that there is a bigger battle to be won.

Capitalism the enemy

Your real enemy is the present system, which produces commodities to sell on the market with a view to profit. Have you ever sat down and thought about what sort of a society it is in which thousands of old workers face the prospect of dying from hypothermia next winter because they cannot afford to buy fuel? Last winter and the winter before that tens of thousand of workers perished in the cold; the market could not see them because it is blind to those without the money to attract its attention. It is sickening, is it not, that economic experts are worrying about how to cut coal production while members our own class are too poor to switch heater?

Capitalism, with its hideous contradiction of mass poverty amid the potential for plenty, is your real enemy. It persecutes you at every level, advertising itself as a world of plenty and then rewarding the wealth producers with deprivation. For too long workers have suffered under this rotten set-up, when the means are at hand to create a society of production for need in which we can all give according to in abilities and take according to our self-determined needs.

What can you do?

Socialism is more than simply a great idea; it is an obtainable alternative to the chaos of the system which puts profit before use. So, what can you do about achieving it? Well, you’ve made a start by reading this letter. If you like what it says, why not pass it on to your friends, workmates and relatives? If you agree with the socialist outlook, so might they. If you want to know more, go along to your local branch and discuss the case for socialism. The Socialist Party is very active throughout the country and we can assure you of a warm reception. If you want more socialist literature, please contact our Head Office.

At the time of writing it is not certain how the miners’ strike will end. Of one thing you and all other workers can be sure: when capital and wage labour are in open conflict, the Socialist Party takes the side of the robbed against the robbers. For it is only through the conscious solidarity of workers, that the system of legalised robbery will be compelled to make way for the reign of united humanity.

Steve Coleman

Letter: Blind faith in the broad church (1984)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Comrades,

I am writing to you with regard to your opinions of the bankruptcy of the Labour Party as an organisation for radical change, and in particular of the articles "Crisis of the Left" (July) and “Labour in Pain” (August).

The choice before Labour is three-fold: Wilsonian pragmatism, with frontal attacks on working people, the welfare state and unions, all to retain power; revisionist radicalism, primarily attempting to reconcile Labour voters with socialism, not impose it on them; and fundamentalism, not diluting or changing our policies one bit. We have to be realistic in listening to voters' hopes, radical in articulating an alternative system to capitalism’s horrors, and resolute in meaning what we say and making people realise that we will not be blown off by capital, as in 1931, 1948. 1967 and 1976. A little bit of socialism time and time again is better than nothing, and is surely worthwhile in helping radical politics.

May I remind you that in the 1983 general election. Labour on a left reformist programme got 8½ million votes, the SPGB 85 votes, a slight difference. If the dirigisme socialism of Labour, blunted and mellowed by internal contradictions and compromises, is too extreme for voters, they aren't going to vote for a revolutionary Marxist party. Are they? Why not pause and think here; what makes you so sure that eventually the workers will turn to full-blooded socialism?

Ken Coates, in his excellent Socialists and the Labour Party (1973) asks many important questions to revolutionaries which have not been answered by you or theorists such as Miliband, Panitch and David Coates. In Coates' pamphlet, he states the obvious truism that any revolutionary mass party must duplicate “the best features of the old Labour Party . . ." This is for the reason that such a party must draw heavily on former Labour activists, who are at the moment consciously influencing Labour in a socialist direction. The revolutionary left misses the fact that Labour is a living, changing organism, not a monolithic block, and is very susceptible to rank and file activism.

Coates also commented:

Since the collapse of the Independent Labour Party, there has been no group of socialists capable of maintaining a full-scale political presence outside the Labour Party . . . (by which) . . . I mean the ability to secure the election of at least a handful of members of Parliament. . .

So far the history of modern British socialism has involved any group existing outside or independently of Labour and, thus the trade union movement, withering away; no matter whether it was a new revolutionary group as with the Socialist League, SPGB, CPGB. IMG or SWP. or a breakaway from the party—the SDF, ILP. National Labour (the MacDonaldites). Democratic Labour (the Tavernites) and the Scottish Labour Party. Labour, despite the disaster of the last election and its recent record of government, is the only credible representative of the progressive working class. The lessons of the 1880s, 1930s and 1960s, periods of radicalism, must be that the only feasible road to socialism in this country is through the Labour Party.

In “Labour in Pain” (August), you hit on a number of important points about the internal contradictions of the party and hypocrisies of the “Broad Church". Nationalisation of the top 25 companies as the IWC and Labour Conference want, or top 200 as Militant wants, is, as you say, irrelevant. Labour’s paranoid pursuit of public ownership has more to do with Gaitskell’s and Wilson’s opposition to it, than its merits. We have to realise that state control of industries does not alter the plight of workers. They remain wage slaves, no matter their income or material affluence, with no power over the factors of production which decide their lives. State control merely replaces the entrepreneur with the bureaucrat, the capitalist system for the servile state. Workers self-management, or to extend it beyond a narrow industrial front into all walks of life— citizens power, can alter the present undemocratic situation. Citizens power must be built on the ideas of guild socialism and the analysis of human nature and the stale provided by group theory. This must involve seeing the state as an obstacle to radical change, no matter how enlightened those in charge, and limiting its functions and roles. However, it has to be noted, sadly, that guild socialism has been neglected and forgotten about, seen as a throwback to the Medieval age with no pertinence to the industrial age.

The SPGB constitution says it stands for "the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth . . Does this glib phrase “common ownership" mean central planning and state control or "Stalinism plus parliamentary democracy or decentralisation and citizens power over capital? We have a right to know.

The SPGB does, on the other hand, say regularly, and in "Why we are hostile” (November), that all working-class people are "enslaved" and must be "emancipated", not by enlightened Fabian elitists, but the workers themselves. This is fundamentally true. R. H. Tawney in The Acquisitive Society (1921) said:

The workers cannot have it both ways. They must choose whether to assume the responsibility for industrial discipline and become free, or to repudiate it and continue to be serfs.

Workers initiatives, take-overs and local plans, rather than centrally decided blueprints, is the only sure way of avoiding the servile state.

You say that only people who are fully in agreement with the SPGB can join. Your inability to lower the SPGB from its high, puritanical and principled pedestal of fundamental, sacrosanct ideas is sad. Socialist parties desperately need a coherent. dynamic ideological anchor to prevent policies appearing as just a "shopping list" with no underlying philosophy, and to resist the claims of capital. Principles are only of use in relation to short-term policies. You seem to miss this.

The SPGB is a valuable part of the British socialist movement. Labour, for all its faults, is socialist, though as you say in November, most Labourites "belong to a party which they imagine will one day exist . . ." However, if we keep trying, we socialists in and out of Labour can discard the stale heritage of labourism and state socialism. While Marx is still invaluable to analyse modern capitalism, particularly in the surplus theory of value and class critique of production, he cannot be dogmatically interpreted.

Dogmatism is not the answer for socialists. The SPGB should engage in an active, open and free debate with other socialists in the Labour, CPGB and other parties about the failure so far, future and road to British socialism, possibly in the Socialist Society. Any debate must be two-way, with no closed minds. We can learn from one another, sharing our experiences of capitalism and socialist action. You can give us some of your critiques and theories of capitalism, if we can give some, dare I suggest it, flexibility. Remember, together the left has enormous potential to win electoral support and change society. Divided, it has nothing. Despite our numerous differences, which are sincere and cannot be glossed over, we are on the same side—the mosaic of the socialist movement, facing a common enemy, not Thatcher or the Conservatives. but capitalism.

Gerry Hassan 

Dundee

Reply:

The Socialist Party is most willing to engage in "active, open and free debate" with those who call themselves socialists. Repeated efforts have been made to encourage the defenders of Left reformism to take the public platform and debate but, contrary to the impression given in the last paragraph of Mr. Hassan's letter, it is the dogmatism of the traditional left which has prevented them from accepting open debate with the Socialist Party. For example, the leader of Lambeth Council, Ted Knight, was asked recently to debate with us in his own borough and replied that there would be no point in such as event as the Labour Party is bigger than the Socialist Party; our Islington branch has written two lengthy letters to The Militant Tendency, challenging them to debate, but they replied in writing that public disagreement “between socialists” would be embarrassing. So, we would advise our correspondent to write to the Leftist parties and groups urging them to make contact with the Socialist Party; they will meet no dogmatic resistance to discuss ideas from us.

We are reminded that the Labour Party won 8½ million votes in the 1983 general election on the basis of a "reformist programme". What is a reformist programme, be it “left” or "right", but a plan to make capitalism run more efficiently from the point of view of the majority of people in society? That 8½ million workers were conned into believing that a Labour government could do this indicates two things: firstly, there are still plenty of deluded workers around: secondly, there are less workers being taken in by the Labour Party now than has been the case in electoral terms for half a century. The validity of Labour’s ideas is not to be judged by the number of votes they received (on that basis, we would be forced to conclude that the Tories and the Alliance are, between them, substantially more “correct" than Labour), but the extent to which they can be realistically applied as a means of solving social problems. Eight and a half million people voted for Labour’s commitment to the NATO military gang, to the continuation of the wages system, to the acceptance that there must still be poor people for whom the state will have to care. They were voting for capitalism. Our correspondent points to the 85 votes received by the socialist candidate and draws the conclusion that if most voters found Labour's programme "too extreme, they aren’t going to vote for a revolutionary Marxist party". The reason workers did not vote Labour is that they have tried it before and it is no more than another way of voting Tory. Workers did not vote for socialism because they have yet to be convinced that it is in their interests: if there had been no Labour confusion-mongers in Islington South during the last election, making promises to workers which could not be kept, there would have been more votes for socialism. The "workers will turn to full-blooded socialism” when they have had enough of capitalism and are ready to opt for a different way of organising society.

The labour illusion is well summed up by Mr. Hassan when he writes that "A little bit of socialism, time and time again is better than nothing . . .”. Socialism — a system based upon common ownership, democratic control and production solely for use — is the direct opposite of the capitalist system. It is no more possible to have "a little bit of socialism" within a world based on minority class monopoly of the means of wealth production and distribution than it would be to be a little bit pregnant. What the Labour Party’s "little bit” amounts to is a programme to reform capitalism and, as our correspondent rightly points out, these efforts have repeatedly been “blown off by capital". We are told that it is necessary to make people realise that capital will not interfere with Labour’s aims in future, but the Marxist critique of reformism is precisely that such hopes are illusory: if Labour is elected to run capitalism, as it sets out to be, it cannot but bow to the needs of profitability.

Calling in expert witness Coates damages rather than helps the case of our correspondent. What are "the best features of the old Labour Party"? Does he mean their support for two world wars or their racist immigration legislation or their strikebreaking record? Or does he mean their record of reformist promises, such as the promise of full employment made in Labour and the New Social Order or Bevan’s promise that there would be no housing problem in Britain after the Attlee government had served its term? If. by "the best features", they mean Keir Hardie’s statement in the Manifesto of the English Socialists that socialism will entail the abolition of the wages system, then we in the Socialist Party are duplicating the best features, whereas Coates and the rest of the Labourites have ignored the socialist tradition.

After the evidence from the star witness. it is a shame that our correspondent once again returns to the old dogmatic chant that history must go on repeating itself. Evidence points the other way: Labour’s traditional support is crumbling (maybe temporarily, hopefully for good) and workers are looking at alternatives. If “the only feasible road to socialism in this country is through the Labour Party", and if, after seven Labour governments, capitalism is still here, where is the evidence that the road is anything but a dead-end?

We are pleased to note that Mr. Hassan accepts the criticisms made by socialists of Labour and Militant's nationalisation (state capitalist) policies. Indeed, we do "have to realise that state control of industries does not alter the plight of workers” — as the miners will testify. It is a pity that our correspondent's clear recognition that state capitalism is not socialism is not applied to the equally non-socialist theory of "guild socialism", as advocated by reformists like G D H Cole in the distant past. The fallacy of “workers’ control” is based on the failure to recognise that where there is a working class — where wage labour exists as a social relationship to capital — the only result can be exploitative. "Guild socialism" presented a naive plan to decentralise and democratise capitalist exploitation. If it has been "neglected and forgotten about”, as our correspondent states, working-class knowledge will be none the poorer.

We are asked whether our Object implies central planning, Stalinism, or decentralised power over capital. It means none of those things. It would be ludicrous to envisage world socialism as a society run by a bureaucracy on a central plan: clearly, common ownership will require a democracy organised by the majority. We do not advocate Stalinism, and socialism means more than parliamentary democracy: our Object commits us to working for democratic control, that is, the making of decisions about society by its citizens on the basis of full information, as for control over capital, we can only reiterate that there will be no wage labour-capital relationship in socialist society and therefore citizens will no more have power over capital than they will over the banks, the police force or the torture chambers: these social features will not exist.

We are not proposing, then, any "centrally decided blueprints", but will leave it to the workers who establish socialism (who we hope will include us) to make the plans. We agree that most plans can be made locally but, under capitalism, "workers’ initiatives, take-overs and local plans" are constantly inhibited by the fetters of the profit system.

Mr. Hassan's comments about principles invite the Socialist Party to fall into the political pit which the Labour Party is stuck in. We are told that only allowing workers to join who agree with us is "puritanical" and "sad”. We say that letting racists, nationalists, religious cranks. Leninists, pro-NATO supporters, careerists and "Wilsonian pragmatists” into the Broad Church is not just sad. but pathetic; not principled, but disgustingly opportunist.

We are told that “principles are only of use in relation to short-term policies". We have a policy (which is neither short nor long-term, but as long as it takes us to achieve) which is to abolish capitalism and establish a world free of class division, exploitation, property relationships, poverty, war and wage slavery. Those aims are urgent and we are not going to be deterred in struggling resolutely for them by those who tell us to unite with the crumb-collectors of the Left.

How nice to be told that "The SPGB is a valuable part of the British socialist movement". We have been waiting eighty years to meet the other part, but have no illusions that we will find it in the Labour Party or any of the other organisations which seek to re-arrange capitalism. Indeed. “Dogmatism is not the answer for socialists" and that is why those who still hold on to the pathetic belief that Neil Kinnock and his fellow reformists will eradicate the nasty bits of capitalism ought to abandon the Labour Party and join a party which defines socialism with clarity, fights for the new system with enthusiasm and remains uncompromisingly hostile to the apologists for capitalist politics.

Editors

Peace and plenty (1984)

From the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wherever you look in the world today you will see suffering. Last year 15 million children died for lack of money to buy food. Poverty and insecurity face the great majority of the human race. Yet about one in twenty people escape this misery. They belong to an exclusive international club which is more accurately defined as the capitalist class. It is not an easy club to join: and its members are able to enjoy their wealth and power and privilege by persuading the rest of us to remain their obedient servants.

These people are the owners of all the companies, land, oil wells, finance houses. They make their profit by employing us as workers to create wealth for them in the processes of production and distribution. They pay us wages or salaries which can never provide more than second-rate, insecure living standards, and leave nothing to save or accumulate while they continually re-invest the wealth we create to accumulate more and more for themselves. This class division between employers and workers is the cause of an unceasing struggle over wages, hours, working conditions, living conditions. This is the class struggle.

But there is also a perpetual struggle among the capitalists themselves. The competition between companies for profits, leading to the conflict between nation states for colonies, markets, raw materials — like oil. copper and uranium and control of trade routes — like Suez or the Gulf of Oman — or territory — like Palestine or Afghanistan — military bases — like Cyprus or Gibraltar — all these keep war going all the time at one or more places in the world. They cause the deaths of millions of us in struggles where we have nothing to gain. As workers we have no stake in the power or property of any nation.

For this reason, nationalisation is of no value to workers. If any state nationalises an industry, this only means that it is now owned by the whole capitalist class of that nation — but not the workers. The state is now the employer and exploiter — with all the forces of law and order at its disposal. Nationalisation on a large scale has often been called socialism. It has nothing to do with socialism — it is state capitalism, such as exists in Russia.

Socialism means producing wealth solely and directly for free use by all. All the resources and machinery for producing wealth will be taken into the hands of the community as a whole, and work will be organised through voluntary co-operation, not the economic force of the wages system. Society's principle will be: "from each according to ability, to each according to need".

In a socialist world there will be no war because its cause will have been removed. The ownership of society’s means of living by a privileged minority will be ended. The governments and states by which they legalise and enforce their ownership and control will be abolished. The armed nations into which they formed themselves and us, with their frontiers, passports, tariffs and fortifications, will cease to have any use: and people will cease to think of themselves as Britons, Germans, Italians, Israelis. Palestinians. Iranians. Russians or Americans. They will live and work and travel where they wish.

Marx said, "the workers have no country". "Workers of the world, unite". And we ask you to unite with us in the socialist movement for the emancipation of humanity from the chains of capitalism. The Socialist Party of Great Britain alone stands opposed to the Labour Party and all other parties which seek to reform the profit system — and so protect and keep it. We work to spread information among workers about the way capitalism operates, and the way in which the majority can remove it by establishing a socialist world of production for need.

50 Years Ago: Socialists and Free Discussion (1984)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

It may perhaps be of some use to point out to those who are following methods that kill free discussion, that they are following in the path of their predecessors in Italy and Germany, and provoking the ogre they fear. The starting-point of the Fascist career in Italy was the seizure of the Italian factories by the workers and the propaganda of violence by the Communists. Germany tells a similar tale. It may be added that the country that gave them the lesson was Russia, and one of the principal defenders of Russian violence Trotsky — is now wandering about seeking an asylum — a victim of the methods he advocated.

It is only by free and open discussion that the workers can grasp the essentials of their present condition of servitude and the way to abolish it. Until they have this knowledge it matters little which of the capitalist parties they support.

While we are on the subject of “freedom of speech" we cannot help being surprised to find what curious, not to say, suspicious friends, this “freedom" has. We see among them the numerous organs of capitalism, which steadfastly decline to allow the publication in their columns of a statement of the Socialist case.

(From an editorial, Reason or Violence, Socialist Standard July 1934.)

The Great White Elephant (1958)

From the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Advertising In Modern Life

When they talk of the marvels of modern times and the loftier race that welfare reforms have brought to being, it is interesting to browse through the ads. in the papers and the television channel. Here, dress-suited prigs sit amid fake period furniture eulogizing cheap tinned soup; pasty youths sip their tonics and slick their hair in hopes of catching the boss's eye; fagged-out, rushed and noise-ridden people by the score swallow pellets and powders by the ton for the noise and rush to continue. Here, in fact, is as great an indictment as could be made of civilization in the mid-twentieth century.

Pure and simple, advertizing is salesmanship: convince the man and he buys your goods. In 1788, toothpaste makers were claiming that their stuff would "faften fuch as are loofe, keep fuch as are already decayed from becoming worfe, prevent the Tooth ach, perfectly cure the Scurvy in the Gums . . .  likewife render the Breath delicately fweet, and remedy all thofe diforders that are the confequence of fcorbutic Gums and bad Teeth." Sixty years ago the most popular soap powder was boosted as "possessing high detergent properties in a concentrated and effective form. Cleanses without injury to skin, fabric or texture."

It has long ceased to be as simple as that Then—years ago, a hundred and seventy years ago—you take it or leave it. Now, to leave it is impossible (except for the blind and the recluse). The advertizing man is no longer a huckster seeking new additions, one by one, to the satisfied buyers of Bloop. His aim is whole social groups, even whole generations, for whom life without Bloop would hurt or be shameful He is sociologist, psychologist, con-man, poet and maker of dreams, with nowhere private and nothing inviolate to him—not the innermost thought nor the smallest room.

There are a hundred means to this assault on social consciousness. Appealing to snobbery and prestige: it is smart to drink this, superior to smoke those. Linking prestige with pride in home or person: clean your home the modern way—and surely you don't still shave with the old soap-and-brush method? Evoking authority with tit-bits of pseudo-science, or vague references to clinical knowledge: the hair is a tube with roots, the intestines are twenty-six feet long, doctors and nurses know all about Blobbo.

The cornerstones of most advertising, however, are Fantasy and Fear. The strip-drawn advertisements for cosmetics, beauty soaps, beverages, and the rest, are explicit, deliberate fantasies of romance or success. In the best-known of them all the strips are peopled by an entire mythology of seemingly real characters: masterful executives, paragon wives and paternal fathers and, of course, the family doctor, benign and wise, sitting back recommending the hot drink that will send Henry bounding up the ladder of success. Or there is the fantasy in prose and a single picture, setting forth a desirable world with which buying some product will somehow put one in touch. Drink Crossbread's, and you commune with Old England, oak beams and dray horses; or Washington's, to be in spirit among the big-thighed footballers and six-hitting batsmen; open an account at the Lowland and enter the semi-detached realm of bowler hats and deference, chequebooks and U-conversations with the Manager.

And there are the sexual fantasies, the dreams of allure, enticement and capture. First shy glances drawn by white soap, first embraces made inoffensive by pink soap; erotic spells cast by shampoos, face creams and cheap perfumes with expensive names (Nuit dans l'Ecurie, one-and-three). Dreamiest, most voluptuous of all are the corset and underwear advertisements, with their Vie Parisienne pictures and their lyrical lore

“The line forms . . . in at your waist,
With a gentle lift of pride up there.
Dance Time, new summer guile . . .
With padded undercups,
And low-hugging Lastex round your back. . . ."

It is wrong to suppose, however, that the sales depend only on those who can share these fantasies. Equally, they set standards for the rest. For every girl who daydreams enslaving Fred by Gluggo, another girl fears the consequences of not using it The advertisements, in fact, make the consequences clear; before the happy ending to the strip a wise friend takes Jean aside and tells her why Fred avoids her.

This is one kind of fear played up by the ads.; fear of social or matrimonial failure. It hardly needs building- up, in a world of perpetual insecurity where most people know only too web that jobs and sweethearts are easily lost. There is fear of disgrace (someone isn’t using Pungo —see the offending noses wrinkle); fear of general inadequacy, of being talked about for remediable failings. This is the secret of the great soap-powder campaigns of recent years. In terms of competition, one may wonder how much is achieved by persuading housewives to change from Diz to Duz, particularly when both are produced by the same firm; but that isn't the real point The effect of seven years' competitive insistence that each soap powder washes whiter, adds brightness, is whitest of all, is whiter and brighter than white itself, has been to make whiteness a social value, something which no woman dare neglect for fear of censure and shame.

The strongest theme of all is fear of harm or deprivation to loved ones. Somebody's mum isn't using Gippo; somebody's baby girl has to ask if the jakes has been made safe for her with Fizz. The wake-up beverages play heavily on this, too; tiredness threatens a man's income just when his daughter has won her scholarship or his widowed mother looks to him for help. It is wrong to sneer at this kind of fear and say people shouldn’t be taken in by it. Nobody wants to be lonely or unpopular, still less to have his children deprived of companionship or opportunity. The advertisers find their material in natural, sensible feelings which are whipped into fears because our world is an insecure and frustrating place.

In a buying-and-selling society, the realm of advertising is unlimited. It goes far beyond the hoardings, the advertisement pages and the television commercials. Thus, in any woman's magazine, where half the space is taken up by advertisements, much of the remainder goes the same way:  fashion pages, beauty articles, stories grounded in the same dream-world as the adverts. The same applies for most magazines and papers. Holiday guides, technical pieces, the Christmas spirit; even the chit-chat about a personality may be, indirectly, advertisement of what he sells.

What are the effects of all this ? There is, of course, the known influence of advertisers on the Press. Large-circulation papers draw about half their revenue from advertisements, the smaller-circulation ones about two-thirds; half a page in the Daily Express costs £3,000. It would be surprising if newspapers did not defer to their advertisers' interests. Mainly the influence is indirect, a standing deterrent to certain kinds of criticism: "A newspaper that receives a large revenue from company prospectuses may have an unconscious bias in favour of our present financial system; and the paper carrying frequent advertisements of patent medicines may, without any conscious deviation from rectitude, give too little weight to the medical profession's views on such goods. A famous editor has, indeed, written unashamedly of 'such needless folly as putting the report of a fatal motor smash alongside of a motor advertisement'.” (“The Newspapers," Oxford Pamphlets on Home Affairs, 1944.)

Occasionally, more direct pressure has been brought to bear. An ex-editor of the Daily Herald stated that his paper’s policy during the Munich crisis was modified on account of the advertisers. In 1938, a British Medical Association advertisement, headed “Is All Milk Safe?” had to be modified to avoid prejudice to the milk industry’s campaign. In his American Freedom and Catholic Power, Paul Blanshard gives several instances of coercion by advertisers in the U.SA Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think (as some people seem to do) that newspapers would be substantially different without this influence; after all, the newspapers support capitalism and the advertisers are the capitalists.

The social effects of advertising go much further. Implicit in all of it is the commercialising of every human relationship: people are valued in terms of their possessions and buying habits, the dentifrice they use, the gleam of their shirts. In this world, as E. S. Turner remarks in his amusing Shocking History of Advertising, “loyalty means always buying the same hair oil. . . . A bride is not a young woman on the edge of a great adventure; she is a conditioned consumer, who, by buying the right cosmetics and the right brassiere has captured her man.'' A generation ago, How to Win Friends and Influence People was the salesman's obsession; now, it is the customer's.

Half-a-dozen minor revolutions in social consciousness—none of them making anyone better off—have been effected or assisted by advertising. The whiteness-phobia, the speed-craze, the conception of beauty and, newest of these, the odour-phobia. In recent times the deodorant business has extended its target from bad breath and strong perspiration to skin smells, cooking smells, “sudden smells" and vegetable smells. It seems on the cards, in fact, that in a few years all natural smells will have been outlawed and abolished, and nothing will be left except the scents of disinfectant and furniture polish. What is worth mentioning about the odour-ads. is that they are easily the lowest, nastiest and most objectionable of all advertisements at the moment (and that, by the way, is really saying something): where, one wonders, are the good taste and culture of which the capitalist class—and, no doubt, the artists and copywriters, too—has always claimed so much ?

The supreme social myth to-day, and the one which runs through all advertising of the last ten years is that of "standards of living.” Most symbolic of it, currently, is the cigarette advertisement which says "I'm raising my living standard" — by changing to a slightly dearer brand; though this writer's favourite is the television commercial where the woman spreads a margarine-and-paste tea for her family, standing in a five-hundred-pound kitchen. Perhaps the most explicit of all is the American advertisement (quoted by Colin McIver in The Anatomy of Advertising), which says

"I know my husband loves me.
"As surely as I know the sky is blue, that dreams come true, that to-day is my birthday . . .  that surely do I know my husband loves me.
"The soft gleam of our very own Gorham Sterling tells me he is thinking of me at wife, mother, hostess—dreaming and planning for our future together."

Modern advertising is the folklore (nursery rhymes and all—hear the children sing the ad.-men's jingles) of the "standards of living” age. It would be funny if it were not so tragic. While the success of a marriage is judged in Gorham-Sterling terms, the collapse of marriage is a major social problem; while people in to-day's hire-purchase paradise see themselves as far, far better off than ever before there are far, far more social difficulties than ever before. For all that has to be said about advertisements, the real criticism is of the society whose values and failures they reflect. Is there any substantial difference between the German general who said "Guns before butter ” and the rest of the world which puts commercial before human needs?

The only sensible way to organise society is for the satisfaction of human needs—that is, on the basis of ownership by everybody of the means of life and access for everybody to everything there is. No advertisements, of course, in such a world; only then, in fact, would the fine, rich wood of humanity flourish free from the dark, parasitic trees of commercialism.

Robert Barltrop

An Appeal For Donations (1958)

Party News from the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

During recent mouths the income of the Party has been below expenditure end in attempt is now being made to rectify the position.

Almost every item of the Party’s expenditure has increased, postage, stationery, rates. Hall hire, advertising, printing, and numerous other items have increased in cost. If we continue to spend at the present level with no appreciable increase in income, a serious position will arise in 1958.

Whilst there will be an increase in revenue from the increased price of the Socialist Standard, we shall not benefit from this for some months.

It is evident that we require monies for all activities, including indoor propaganda, Provincial propaganda tours, new pamphlets, advertising, and Parliamentary activity. As our sole income is from members and subscribers, it is again to you that we address our appeal for funds.

The present political situation and the innumerable problems of Capitalism have thrown a heavier responsibility on the Party. We must therefore always be in a position to maintain and enlarge our Organisation. Lack of funds severely hamper us, so please give what you can.

We are all looking forward to the time when appeals will be unnecessary; at the moment, however, they are very necessary. Donations should be sent to E. Lake, at 52, Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4.

That £75,000 "Pie in the Sky" (1958)

From the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

"And that inverted bowl we call the sky,  

Whereunder, crawling, coopt—we live and die, 

Lift not your hands to it for help, 

For it rolls impontently on, as thou or I.”

Of all the "carrots” that have been dangled before the credulous eyes of the working class (as a loophole for the individual escapologist from wage-slavery) the £75,000 Treble Chance Pools craze certainly takes the proverbial "biscuit.”

Look in any G.P.O. any Friday during the football season and the sight of the queues of budding entrepreneurs for emancipation, feverishly filling in coupons and buying endless postal drafts, is enough to gladden the heart of any government bondholder, let alone the Pools firm’s shareholders.

The giddy idea is to forecast eight draws in one column from about 54 matches—despite the odds against same being in the region of several millions to one.

Capitalism is certainly the gambling system par excellence—from the glittering casinos of Monte Carlo and the Riviera (to say nothing of the fashionable English, Continental and American race meetings) where patrons— drawn from the parasitical "elite” of the international capitalist class—"relieve” their ennui frittering away some of the "filthy lucre” filched from the international working class via the medium of the wages robbery system.

On the other hand, the small-town back-alley dog tracks or the slot-machine craze of Las Vegas, where the lure of the "Almighty Dollar” is too much for working class flesh and blood—writhing under a frustrating poverty-ridden system of society—to withstand.

Certainly a few may hit the "Jack Pot” and deliver themselves from bondage, but, for the vast majority, defeat is inevitable and the slough of despair under capitalism is a "bottomless pit.”

"Let Not Ambition Mock Their Useful Toil”
By and large, trying to emulate a Lipton or a Nuffield or to "Win the Pools” is merely a form of procrastination on the part of those who produce the wealth of the world and in whose hands lies the future welfare of society as a whole.

Instead of being "led up the garden path” by the "success” propagandists of capitalism or by the social bait of a chimerical £75,000 and allowing their life span to "slip through their fingers” struggling in comer shops, offices, mills, mines and factories, trying to get a foot on the proverbial "bottom rung’’—the workers of the world should "support” their own "horse,” which is entered in the "race” for their emancipation—the Socialist Party— which has a "ton” in hand of the “opposition” and with their class conscious support can achieve the Socialist Revolution.

As it is, the years roll on and capitalism is still our unwelcome companion, spreading the diseases of Nationalism, Commerce and Religion, together with the eternal "success” phantasy ad nauseum to ourselves and our children. Confusion enough when it comes to educating them for their real social responsibility—the organsation and achievement of Socialism. Be that as it may, the world organisation for Socialism, with 53 years' "spade” work behind it and equal to the task which lies ahead, will not be found wanting when the mighty organism of the world-wide working class shakes off its political confusion and sallies forth to claim its social heritage— a place in the Socialist “sun.”

Finally, and using Thoreau’s words—"As in the long run man only hits what he aims at, he better aim high" — let us make our “target” nothing short of revolutionary scientific Socialism, from which we can all reap a richer and socially more satisfying “harvest” than any improbable parasitical "successful entrepreneur” existence within the profit system.

G. R. Russell

Party News Briefs (1958)

Party News from the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hemel Hempstead.—Will all those members and sympathisers who live in the Hemel Hempstead area and who are interested in the formation of a group in the area, please communicate with: B. N. West, 44, Adeyfield Gardens, Hemel Hempstead.

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Propaganda.—At the termination of the Speakers' Classes, which have been held by the Propaganda Committee at Conway Hall, six of the twelve members are taking the Speakers' Test and, if successful, will add to the number of official Party speakers to the list and so enable the Propaganda Committee to extend their programme in 1958. The class was most successful and it is to be hoped that arrangements can be made in-the near future to run another series.

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Film at Head Office.—Although no meetings were held during the last three Sundays in December they will recommence this month, the first being held on January 5th. 

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Why the B.B.C. does not understand.—On 10th December the Overseas Department of the B.B.C. telephoned the S.P.G.B. and asked to speak to Mr. Gaitskell. When they were told that we are the Socialist Party, and Mr. Gaitskell has nothing to do with us, the clerk who was making the call was astonished. She did not know there is a Socialist Party that is not the Labour Party. If the B.B.C. had not refused for 20 years or more to let the S.P.G.B. put the Socialist case on the air, perhaps the B.B.C. staff would have known that there is a Socialist Party.

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Lewisham Branch.—We would like to draw attention to the notice of meetings organised by Lewisham Branch, published in another column. The meetings are held fortnightly on Monday evenings. It is hoped that members will attend and bring along sympathisers and make this venture a success.

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Islington Branch have taken over the arrangements for the Tower Hill lunch hour meetings each Thursday. Despite inclement weather, these meetings are being well attended and members who are in the vicinity should try to get along and support the meetings.

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“Socialist Standard.”—Each January a particular reference is made to the Annual Subscription form for the Standard. A form appears in this issue and it is to be hoped that readers will use this and ensure a regular delivery each month.

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Tottenham Branch Secretary writes that Comrade T. H. Fowler died in October last. Comrade Fowler was 80 years of age and joined the Party in 1913, regularly attending propaganda meetings and selling literature. He was always a willing helper in the canteen at Party Conferences and socials. Until earlier this year he was an enthusiastic worker. It is with regret that we learn of his death and extend sympathy to his relatives.

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Extract from letter from Comrade H. Wheatley, Nottingham :—

“My trade-union, the A.U.B.T.W. makes Free-card presentations on 50 years' membership, and myself being included this year, I screwed up pluck to seek permission to face an audience for the first time: a vote of thanks from the recipients really, a very few words; then used the Union-cards of 50 years ago and to-day as emblems of a deeper and broader outlook, hoping that also applied to each individual member; but 50 years was slow progress with results that still left them, fighting old battles repeatedly, pointed out the need to understand the present system, and then realising the identical interests of ALL workers, they must eventually see no reason for division

After much revision and cutting, I got through two closely packed pages of urging to look to the future (yes, I had to write it—managed better that way) and drew quite an embarrassing applause. Our leaflets were spread over a spare table, and on count just over 25 each were picked up.

Seeing I had avoided naming the "Party," I think it speaks volumes for our clear case, that an official should state he soon knew just where I was leading—The S.P.G.B.

The more hopeful side is the 30 or so of working Trade Unionists—and their wives—who probably never heard their position put this way before. An effort to follow up by a S.P.G.B. speaker to address their branch met with the usual coldness—they can’t get them in—just pay their dues and depart. This still in mind for further pressure."

Phyllis Howard

Letter: Are workers worse off? (1931)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. W. Jennings (Harringay) quotes from Marx's "Capital" the following passage (page 661, Glashier edition): -

 Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.

Mr. Jenning's asserts, without evidence, that the workers are getting better off and that "they do take a greater share of the wealth produced." On the strength of this he writes: "Perhaps, after all, Marx was not infallible.”

Marx was not infallible, but Mr. Jennings has yet to show Marx wrong on the point at issue. If Mr. Jennings had looked further into Marx’s writings, he would have seen that Marx made it perfectly clear that he was referring to the worker’s position relative to that of the capitalist. Thus, on page 631 of the Glaisher edition he dealt with the increase in the workers’ purchasing power and added :—

  But just as little as better clothing, food, and treatment, and a larger peculium, do away with the exploitation of the slave, so little do they set aside that of the wage-worker.

Secondly, a moment’s reflection should have shown Mr. Jennings that the workers can, as Marx explained, receive a larger amount of the necessaries of life without receiving “a greater share of the wealth produced.”

Editorial Committee

The Workers' Socialist Party (U.S.A.). (1931)

Party News from the February 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

Readers in the U.S.A. are invited to communicate with the Workers' Socialist Party of the United States, at 315, East 14th Street, New York City.

The Workers' Socialist Party are our agents in the U.S.A., and the "Socialist Standard" is obtainable from them at the above address.

The Mystery of Rising Prices (1957)

From the June 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

An interesting letter from a reader appeared in the Daily Mail on 26th April of this year: interesting because it put a question that baffles most people and because nobody gave the answer.

Here is the question: —

  “In these days of mechanisation it seems strange that most manufactured goods should get dearer. Our wonderful new methods are claimed to give up to ten times the results achieved by older manual methods. Can anyone explain this apparent paradox?”

It is a fair question, and the facts as stated are beyond dispute. Almost every day our newspapers carry reports of some startling increase of productivity, and alongside them announcements of higher prices. What then is the explanation of what the writer of the letter calls “this apparent paradox”? There are several factors, three of which are important. Firstly, the effects of increases of output are almost always wildly exaggerated; secondly, there are large industries in which productivity is falling; and thirdly, prices rise because it has long been government policy to take actions which inevitably raise prices. This last has by far the largest effect, sufficient to offset other changes that might otherwise lower the price level.

Governments and the Price Level

Continually since 1939 it has been the policy of successive governments, National, Labour and Tory, to inflate the currency; that is, to increase the amount of notes in circulation far beyond the amount that would have been sufficient to keep up with the growth of production, trade and population. The note issue in 1938 was under £600 million; it reached £1,400 million in 1945, and is now over £2,000 million. At one time most economists knew well what the effect on the price level is when an inconvertible currency (i.e., not freely convertible into gold) is excessively expanded: now they have forgotten or, like the politicians, prefer to turn a blind eye. Governments do this because, whatever they may say about wanting prices to fall or to keep steady, they really prefer gently rising prices and wages and profits, which give so many people the illusion of being better off. Also they wonder whether a fall in prices might mean a really big rise in unemployment, which would lose them votes.

The measure of the inflation of the currency can be seen in the fact that a gold pound, the sovereign, can be sold for three times its face value of 20/-. Another mark of inflation is the progressive fall of the pound in relation to the dollar. In 1938 the pound would exchange for 4.86 dollars. In 1940 it was reduced to 4 dollars, and in 1949 to 2.8 dollars. In 1932 the American dollar had already been cut to about half its gold content. Some economists expect a further devaluation before very long in Britain. This inflation is then largely the cause of prices being generally at least three times what they were in 1938.

If the government wanted to do so, they could limit or reduce the amount of currency and thus stop the price rise or bring about a fall. Several governments have done this in the past, including the Russian government in 1947.

Misleading Claims about Increased Productivity

We see, then, that even if there were a big increase in productivity through the use of more efficient machinery and methods or other causes, its effect on lowering prices could be offset by the government’s currency policy. But the claims of increased productivity are themselves widely misunderstood and exaggerated.

It is an elementary principle that if by some means the amount of labour required to produce an article could be reduced to half, the price could be halved, but we would expect this to take place only after the new method had become the typical one in at least a large part of the whole industry. If one firm only had possession of the new method they would not cut their price to half, but would use their favoured position to make larger profits, perhaps reducing the price a little in order to capture trade from their less efficient competitors.

But before we get to this point we have to be sure that what looks like a doubling of productivity really is what it seems. And here we are only too often presented with misleading information by newspapers that probably do not have full information (because firms rarely disclose it) and which, in any event, are more interested in sensationalism than in accuracy.

News of new machinery is usually presented in the form that some new machine attended by a small number of workers will do the work of a much larger number working by hand or with another machine. It is in this form that announcements about the power-driven coal cutters is reported; and recent examples have been the automatic factory and office machines loosely described as “automation.” But though we may reasonably assume that some increase in productivity is expected, this kind of information tells us nothing at all about increased productivity. Increased productivity in the last resort means producing an article with less labour, and to know to what extent this has been achieved we need to know about all the labour, including that required to make and maintain the machine. Often this information is not disclosed, as is pointed out in the booklet on Automation, published by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.

An example a few years ago was a report that “the world’s biggest signal box” had been opened by British Railways at York. In almost all the newspaper reports the item seized upon as news was that 27 men could now do the work formerly done by 70 men in a number of separate signal boxes. Doubtless the change over will in time produce some real saving of labour, but most of the Press reports omitted to state that the new box cost £500,000 (Manchester Guardian, 1st June, 1951). It will take a long time before the saving of the labour of 43 signalmen equals the amount of labour taken up in construction.

The coal mines are an interesting example. Astonishing claims have been made about the increased productivity expected from the use of machinery in the mines, but the annual output of coal per worker employed in the coal industry has remained practically unchanged in the years 1951 to 1956, at about 315 tons per year, compared with an output of about 330 tons a year 70 or 80 years ago; which brings us to another important factor often overlooked.

Declining Industries

The coal mines are typical of a number of industries in which the general trend is for output to fall not rise. When coal mining was in its infancy the rich seams near the surface were exploited and output was high. As these are exhausted miners have to go deeper, and poorer seams are extracted—with the result that more and more labour is required for each ton of coal. New machinery helps, but if the labour required to make the increasing amount of machinery produced in the engineering trades for the use of the coal industry is taken into account, the real fall in output is even greater than is shown by the above figures.

In an address to the Rotary Club of Los Angeles (reported in Manchester Guardian, 15th Feb., 1957), the chairman of the Socony Mobil Oil Company, Mr. B. B. Brewster Jennings, surveyed a number of the raw material industries and showed that what is true of coal is true of many other industries:

  “. . . raw materials all over the world are harder and costlier to get. We have seen this very clearly in our own coal industry, in which year by year more non-productive work is needed for every ton of useful coal. For most of our raw materials the picture is much the same.”

He instanced copper, the American oil industry, with more and deeper wells to produce the same output of oil, and iron ore in Canada. His conclusion was that man’s ingenuity will keep up with the rapidly increasing demand for these materials, but only at the cost of more and more capital being invested to do it; which is another way of saying that more labour is required in these industries for each ton of output.

This general trend in the raw material industries shows itself in the fact that raw material prices in the last half century have risen considerably more than the rise of the prices of manufactured goods. And it explains why we so often read that industries which are known to have introduced new machines and methods which reduce the labour required in manufacture (e.g., the motor industry) nevertheless announce higher prices “because of the increased cost of raw materials.”

The Real Increase of Productivity

The real increase of productivity in industry and transport, etc., as a whole is consequently not the very large amount conveyed by sensational newspaper reports, but on a much more modest scale. The Earl of Halsbury, managing director of the National Research Development Corporation, who has written much about “Automation,” was merely restating the accepted view among economists who have studied this problem when, in a recent interview, he said: —

  “Productivity in the United Kingdom rose at one and a half per cent. per annum in the United Kingdom for the first forty years of this century. It’s now rising at three per cent, per annum, double the old rate. . .” (Everybody’s, 16/2/57)

In America, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics, productivity (i.e., the output per worker) in manufacturing industry rose between 1929 and 1953 by 70 per cent. As the period covered is 24 years, this means an average yearly increase of under 3 per cent. (Times, 18th January 1956).

Is this a gloomy view ?

The real facts about productivity may be a shock to those who believe that “automation” will bring a paradise of a workless world and to those who believe that capitalism can offer a spectacular rise of the standard of living. Actually a 3 percent increase of productivity each year could double output in about 30 years, but capitalism presents another gloomy aspect, that its wars and armaments make nonsense of the increase of productivity. Almost all of the increase of productivity of British industry in this century has been swallowed up in the expenses of armaments (now nearly 10 per cent. of the national income) and in succeeding destructive wars, which in a few years can destroy the achievements of a quarter of a century.

Socialism the Only Way to Secure the Benefits of Productivity

Socialists have the only hopeful answer to these gloomy facts of life under capitalism. Only Socialism can end war and armaments and thus stop that waste of production. Equally important, only Socialism can secure that the labour force and the materials now devoted to the financial, trading, and other activities necessary to Capitalism but needless in a Socialist system of society, can be freed for the production of useful articles and services. In this, Socialism offers the certain prospect that the output of useful articles could in short time be doubled. But this involves the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of Socialism in its place.

And, incidentally, to go back to our starting point, the problem of the writer of the letter to the Daily Mail will be solved in a way he has not thought of. Under Socialism prices will not be high or low; there will be no prices!

Edgar Hardcastle

Communist Commotion (1957)

From the June 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

“FREE HARICH, SACK HARRY,” painted with true Communist zeal in large white letters on the roadway greeted the faithful as they entered Hammersmith Town Hall over the Easter week-end to receive their annual dose of dogma from the cardinals of King Street, and to indulge in some public confessions of political sins. This slogan was not a rabble-rousing challenge to strike fear into the hearts of Yankee capitalists or warmongering Tories; it was directed not outwards, but inwards, to the heart of the Workers’ Mass Party itself. Harich is the young intellectual imprisoned by the East German government, and guess who Harry is? Yes, none other than Cardinal Harry Pollitt. Alas! we confidently predict that this slogan will have as little effect in altering the status quo as others which have appeared on walls from time to time to enliven the working-class scene have had (e.g., “Hands off Guatemala,” “End Eden’s War,” “Chuck The Tories Out,” etc.). Harry is still there, and so, presumably, is Harich – but in a different place.

The irreverent slogan was, however, a sign of a definite air of revolt which hung over the proceedings, a revolt which, if not quite amounting to “ruthless self-criticism,” was at least an indication of a fairly advanced state of political masochism. Cardinal J. Gollan, the Party secretary, had to announce that 7,000 of the faithful had left the flock during the preceding year: others were all too ready to voice their doubts, especially about the Russian intervention in Hungary. One delegate remarked that in 22 years he had never known a Congress that had such a ‘type of discussion getting down to it.'” (Observer, 21/4/57). The college of cardinals, including Gollan, Matthews, Mahon and Pollitt, struggled manfully with incantations and holy writ to exorcise the devils of heresy.

Representatives of the Labour press were excluded from the conference. Could this be because Mr. Peter Fryer (who resigned from the Daily Worker over the treatment of his reports from Hungary and who was later expelled from the C.P.) was the would-be representative for Tribune?

Hungary

Although the hierarchy’s policy obtained an “overwhelming majority” of votes in its support from the Congress, there were some rather frank things said about the Russian intervention in Hungary. For instance, Mr. J. McLoughlin, the famous Dagenham campanologist, was most vociferous: “Don’t dig your heads in the sand,” he said “and ignore Hungary. Terrible things have happened.” And, he added, in a final fling at the platform, “I want to come to the next Congress and see at least a partially new front bench – not the Dutt-Pollitt-what’s-his-name axis.” (Observer, 21/4/57.) Tut, tut, John. flattery will get you nowhere.

J. McLachlan (Scotland); “The Daily Worker told us that there was black counter-revolution in Hungary, but, in fact, there were popular demonstrations against a bureaucratic regime,” he said. “I agree that these were used by reactionary forces, and I agree that the final intervention by Soviet forces was necessary. But terrible mistakes had been made by the Soviet and Hungarian leaders and we should condemn those mistakes at this ingress.” (Daily Worker, 22/4/57.)

Another outspoken critic was Mr. Brian Behan. “At meeting of the executive,” said Brian Behan, “he had moved an amendment that they should dissociate themselves from the crimes of the Hungarian Communist Party. but this had not been printed in the Daily Worker. He had been told that this was due to a technical error (!) and accepted this, but he believed that his amendment should have been reported to Congress.” (Daily Worker, 20/4/57.) Readers who may be prematurely rejoicing at the thought of free speech pervading the upper layers of the Communist hierarchy will no doubt be saddened to learn that Mr. Behan did not gain a place on the new executive: the above statement, and others we shall be reporting later in this article, may offer slight clues as e cause of his unfortunate political demise.

Mr. Fryer was not permitted to put his case before Congress, but copies of a speech he would have made were distributed. A portion of this speech (reported in the Manchester Guardian of 22/4/57) is most revealing, and is worth reproducing here: “You can cross out my name from the membership list with a stroke of the pen. But you cannot cross out the truth about Hungary with a stroke of the pen. The truth about Hungary is known perfectly well to many of you who will vote for the rejection of my appeal. In the privacy of his office J. R. Campbell (editor of the Daily Worker) speaks of Kadar as a puppet. I am expelled for blazoning abroad what Campbell knows to be the truth.”

The Bomb, and Conscription

Male Communists are capable of making some monumentally fatuous remarks, but it takes a female Communist (Comrade Frances Silcocks, from Yorkshire) to reach the ultimate low in fatuity. After dilating on the struggle of working-class women against the horrors of the H-bomb, this Diana of the barricades said: “Now we are told that the Soviet Union is testing the bomb, and we are asked what we say about that,” she said. “We are opposed to tests in any country, including the Soviet Union. But what is the Soviet Union to do? Is it to sit on the fence until we throw bombs at them and they have none to throw back?” (Daily Worker, 20/4/57.) Certainly not, Comrade Frances, we hero mothers of the Communist Party would consider it an honour and a privilege to be liquidated by a real, class-conscious, Soviet H-bomb.

“There was a short, sharp debate on conscription. By 321 votes to 135 Congress defeated a proposal that the Party should fight to end conscription.” (Daily Worker, 22/4/57.) The ubiquitous Mr. McLoughlin also had some words to say on this subject: “The Tory Government had announced a new policy on conscription, but the Communist Party was still committed to it. Why?” he asked. “Perhaps because the Russians have got conscription.” “Don’t be provocative,” called out a delegate. (Daily Worker, 20/4/57.)

Democracy

The election of the executive committee was democratic in the extreme; 42 members were “recommended” for election, and, would you believe it, “a party spokesman said . . . that there would be 42 members on the new executive.” (Manchester Guardian, 20/4/57.) How convenient! As we mentioned before, careless talk cost Mr. Behan his seat on the band-wagon.

Lest we appear too harsh on the comrades, we should mention that they stage-managed quite a nice little show of “democracy” during the congress. The minority formulation in the draft revised text of The British Road to Socialism relating to “fraternal relations between Socialist Britain and the countries of the British Empire” received a majority of votes over the majority (executive committee) version. However, we defy anyone to show us any fundamental difference between the two drafts as reported on the front page of the Daily Worker of 22/4/57. The debate was, as the immortal bard said, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

A final indication of the degree of democracy which pervaded the congress is that 57 general resolutions submitted by branches were not discussed, and “before delegates had seen them they were asked to agree to remit them to the National Executive, and in the end they did so.” (Manchester Guardian, 23/4/57.)

“Revisionism”

Cardinal Gollan admirably defined this fine old Bolshevik euphemism for criticism of official party policy in his weighty address to his flock (Daily Worker, 20/4/57). “We use the word ‘revisionist’ advisedly, not as a bit of name-calling, but to describe objective tendencies. These were the contributions attacking the essential basis of the Party, democratic centralism and its leading role.” He later said (Daily Worker, 22/4/57): “Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to fight revisionists all their lives.” Exactly; the modern disciples of Pope Lenin have to carry on the good fight – no wonder they don’t have any time to discuss Socialism.

Another outspoken delegate was Professor Hyman Levy, who denied that the loss of 7,000 members was due to “revisionism,” “but to the attitude of the leaders to events in Russia and Eastern Europe.” (Manchester Guardian, 22/4/57.) Professor Levy “challenged his chairman, Mr. Harry Pollitt, to explain his silence about ‘a gangsterism’ in the Soviet Union. How often has Harry Pollitt been told about this? How often has he told people to keep their mouths shut?” Need we add that Professor Levy’s utterances were nowhere reported in the pages of the Daily Worker! Much prominence was, however, given to a “reply” by Andrew Rothstein, a reply deeply embedded in party dogma. (Daily Worker, 23/4/57).

Kerala

The recent coming to power of a “communist” government in the State of Kerala in India received much plaudits from the assembled comrades. Cardinal George Matthews said (Daily Worker, 22/4/57): “The victory of the Communist Party of India in the State of Kerala is a portent of far-reaching political developments which will take place among the teeming millions of India.” No one outside the Communist Party phantasy world, however, will be surprised to learn that business in Kerala continues much as before, on sound capitalist lines, and the revolutionary Communist ministers’ ” deeds and sayings in one single day are too bourgeois for words,” according to Miss Taya Zinkin in the Manchester Guardian (24/4/57). ‘She continues: “The Chief Minister attended Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s prayer meeting yesterday, bought a copy of his book on the Gita (Hinduism’s Bible), and asked for an autograph of India’s walking saint . . . Meanwhile the Health Minister, Mr. R. A. Menon . . . told the Palghat Poor Home Society that the beggar problem must be solved by private institutions because the Government can do very little,” etc.

“The British Road to Socialism”

Some heretic voices were even raised against this blueprint for revolution (1957 version, with all the latest tactical amendments and deletions to match the day-today, struggle. E. & O.E.). A genuine, old-fashioned kind of Bolshevik is T. Connor who “opposed the draft as a revisionist (ouch; that word again) programme, and he was fighting for a return to revolutionary Socialism. He moved an amendment calling for the formation of workers’ councils and councils of action through which power would be seized.” (Daily Worker, 22/4/57.) Cardinal J. R. Campbell rebutted this idea, evocative as it is of sterner, ruder, Bolshevik days. “The amendment put forward by Huyton, suggesting that workers’ councils and councils of action would elect a Socialist Government, proposed to substitute for the pure milk of Marxism the skimmed milk of Trotskyism,” he said. (Laughter). May we remind the reverend Cardinal and all the sheep who laughed so heartily at his witticism, that once upon a time “councils of action,” “workers’ councils,” “united fronts,” etc., were all the rage on the revolutionary front. For instance, a circular issued by the “Red International of Labour Unions” came into our hands (Socialist Standard, March 1923) before the word “Trotskyism” (one of the foulest swear-words in the Communist vocabulary) was invented. This circular advocated the concentration of “all available strength” by the formation of “councils of action through the medium of conference composed of delegates from trades councils, trade union branches, and district committees, working class local and national political organisations, unemployed organisations, co-operative societies and guilds.” Stick that in your milk and skim it, Campbell. Cardinal Campbell opposed the nationalisation of certain types of land, not because it is not Socialism, but because “it would also lead to endless complications pushing masses of people on to the wrong side of the class struggle.” (Daily Worker, 22/4/57). Yes, but which side? With true revolutionary zeal the good Cardinal also opposed the policy of “no compensation,” because it “would alarm those we are seeking to neutralise, would create the maximum opposition and make most difficult a peaceful transition.”

To prove that the female of the Communist species is more deadly than the male, Mrs. Gwen Shield moved an amendment to reject the draft’s proposal to compensate former owners of nationalised industries. “She wanted them to get only the opportunity to work and when prevented by physical incapacity to get National Insurance benefits.” (Daily Worker, 22/4/57). Good news for all you capitalists!

What of the Future?

Thousands of members have left the Communist Party during the past year, and many more may do so after this year’s conference, which has conclusively proved the party hierarchy’s refusal to budge one inch from its rigid pro-Russian line. But the “hard core” will carry on, for, in Cardinal Pollitt’s own words, “We all owe everything to the party, whatever we do and whatever our job” (Daily Worker, 23/4/57).

Professor Levy summed up the Communist Party’s political influence thus: “The working class of this country have constantly rejected the Communist Party,” he said. “You keep on talking as if you were the leading group.” (Manchester Guardian, 22/4/57). Whatever future party line the diehards adopt in following the tortuous changes in the policy of the Russian ruling class, it will inevitably be anti-working-class and anti-Socialist. The Communist Party’s past history has been a chapter of misrepresentation, trickery, deceit and humbug. Its future is likely to be no different.

Michael La Touche

Karl Marx and Enoch Powell (1976)

From the November 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Suppose that on the occasion of some of these crises, the nation were to rouse itself to the effort of getting rid by emigration of some hundreds of thousands of superfluous arms, what would be the consequence? 

That, at the first returning demand for labour, there would be a deficiency. However reproduction may be, it takes a space of a generation to replace the loss of adult labour. Now the profits of our manufacturers depend mainly on the power of making use of the prosperous moment, when the demand is brisk. Compensating for when it is slack. 

This power is secured to them by the command of machinery and manual labour. They must have hands ready by them, they must be able to increase the activity of their operations when required and to slacken it again according to the state of the market, or they cannot possibly maintain the pre-eminence in the rate of competition on which the wealth of the country is founded.”

This is quoted by Marx in Capital Vol. 1, p. 595: “Lectures on Colonies” by Professor H. Merivale, Oxford, 1841.

But in fact, says Marx: “it is capitalistic accumulation that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant population of labourers i.e. a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital and therefore a surplus population.” Marx called this the Industrial Reserve Army.

Horatio

Lessons for teachers (1988)

Book Review from the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why don't teachers teach like they used to? by Rachel Pinder. (Hilary Shipman. 1987. paperback £6.95)

I hear and I forget
I see and I remember
I do and I understand

This old Chinese proverb forms the opening lines of Rachel Pinder s informative, sometimes amusing and always very readable book. Having spent her working life in teaching and the last ten years before retirement as headteacher in Inner London, she relates the history of teaching by both "progressive'' and ' traditional" methods over many centuries up to the present. In the process she exposes confusion, if not total ignorance, as what constitutes "traditional" methods; what has. and has not. been tried; and the results achieved by the different methods.

In 1510. Dean Colet. founder of St Paul's School, criticised "traditional teaching by rule and formal methods". Richard Mulcaster. High Master of St Paul's in Tudor times, complained about teachers who "think it the best that boys should fruitlessly run through all the rules learned by heart but not understand." Elizabeth Lawrence in The Origins and Growth of Modern Education goes even further back, quoting Plato: "Enforced learning will not stay in the mind. So avoid compulsion and led your child's lessons take the form of play". It appears therefore that "progressive" methods have been advocated and used for 2.000 years. Does that make them "traditional"?

Professor Jean Piaget, an eminent Swiss psychologist, refers thus to John Amos Comenius (1592-1670): "Comenius may undoubtedly be considered as the founder of a system of progressive instruction adjusted to the stage of development the pupil has reached." Comenius said that learning should be in four stages: examine; question; investigate; determine. In 1641 he was invited by Members of Parliament to visit England and set up a school system based on his principles; unfortunately the Civil War intervened.

Although the beginnings of "progressive" education are often credited to Rousseau, it is obviously much older than that. In a review it is neither possible nor desirable to quote every example but the following extract from Richard Edgworth's (1744-1817) Essays on Professional Education perhaps gives a key to Mrs Thatcher's obsession with "returning to basics"

  The first object should not be to teach them reading or grammer. or Latin or arithmetic . . but gradually to give them the desire to learn and the power to attend . . . they must be taught to think (our italics)

Politicians' exhortations since 1976 that schools should "get back to basics" shows an alarming degree of ignorance and apparent unawareness of school inspectors' reports over the past 100 years. The latest of these, in 1981. bears great similarity to one within over a hundred years ago:

 There is no evidence that a narrow curriculum, concentrating only on the basic skills, enables children to do better in these skills: HM Inspectors' surveys suggest that competence in reading, writing and mathematics may be improved where pupils are involved in a wider programme of work and if their skills in language and mathematics are applied in a variety of contexts.

In 1858 the Newcastle Commission was appointed to investigate education and make proposals. One of these was that children should be examined annually by an inspector and schools paid "by results". This was introduced in 1862 and Robert Lowe. Vice President of the Privy Council for Education said in the House of Commons:

  I cannot promise the House that this system will be an economical one and I cannot promise that it will be an efficient one. but I can promise that it shall be one or the other. It it is not cheap, it shall be efficient; if it is not efficient, it shall be cheap.

Examinations were based on a centrally controlled curriculum and although teachers were not forbidden to teach other subjects, there was great pressure to ensure that children would pass the examination rather than that they should learn anything worthwhile. The system worked as far as government expenditure was concerned; this dropped from £813,441 in 1861 to £636,806 in 1865. In Curriculum Change in the 19th and 20*h Century Gordon & Lawton quote from the 1871 school log-book of a Welsh headmaster:

  Believing that one-fourth of the school time that was devoted to subjects not recognised by the government and consequently not paid for by grants, had the effect of keeping a well-informed school but causing the percentage results to be lower than those of schools that are mechanical in their working and unintelligible in their tone. I have been compelled against my inclination to arrange that less time be devoted to them in future and more time to those that pay best.

However this teaching by rote did not produce workers adequately fitted for their role and the system was gradually eroded, being finally eradicated in 1890. How long will it take this century for realisation to dawn that "traditional' teaching, according to official definitions, not only stunts the mind but will produce a generation ill-equipped to provide adequately the labour required by modern capitalism?

Towards the end of the book Rachel Pinder talks of education which is not based only on lessons but also on the involvement of parents, family and friends in widening children's experience and therefore knowledge. This is a concept with which socialists would not disagree.

Eva Goodman