Leave them kids alone (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Between the ages of five and sixteen children are compelled to attend institutions where they are indoctrinated, humiliated, regimented and brutalised. Schools are places which strip children of their dignity and creativeness and make them learned in the idiocy of capitalist thinking and obedient to the authorities which govern the system of oppression.

The position of the school child is pathetic by comparison to that of older workers. In employment, wage slaves can combine in trade unions to affect the conditions of their exploitation; the child at school has no such chance. School governors and head teachers do not negotiate with children — and where bodies like “school councils" do exist, they are mockeries of democracy which lead to nothing but frustration for the student who wants to alter conditions. Capitalists are not able to assault the wage slave whose labour power they have purchased — indeed, it is a legal offence if a boss hits a worker. Not so in schools: although beating is now officially illegal in some areas of Britain, there are still many schools where adults beat children too weak and powerless to hit back. Even where children are not the victims of physical attack by adults, it is often the case that verbal abuse, sarcasm and intimidation by shouting are used as methods of control. Under British law schools must carry out religious indoctrination and physical training. These too are fates which wage slaves are spared: you can, at least, get through a day in the office or down the mine without some moralising trickster testing you on the contents of St. Luke’s Gospel or some brainless lump of muscle screaming orders at you to jump over a wooden horse. At school these events occur weekly, and unless you are enterprising enough to consistently find excuses for avoiding them you are unlikely to go through at least five years of secondary education without being affected. Fortunately for many young people, compulsory religious indoctrination persuades them to keep away from the tedious and absurd fairy-stories for the rest of their lives.

What else is taught in schools? Without doubt some of it is useful, but the critical child must watch out for the bias of the system. Geography, for example, is taught in a way which often fails to make the distinction between the natural and the social: it is one thing to study a river or a continent, but too often “countries" and “borders" are spoken of as if they are part of the “map of the world" rather than the social arrangements of capitalism. Although not as bad as it once was, geography teaching is still remarkably nationalistic and racist. There are still text books which depict little black children as “happy-go-lucky” inferiors destined to lifestyles of fitting deprivation. (This is ironic because, as a serious study of world geography will show, many areas of mass destitution are among the most abundant in natural resources.)

What goes for geography applies even more to the teaching of history. There are two basic fallacies conveyed by the indoctrinators of history in schools: firstly, the belief that history is no more than the story of the past; and secondly, the narrow outlook which identifies only those events concerning the British — or, at most, European — ruling class as being of historical significance. If studying history is to be of any use it must present the student with the question: What next? Schools fall in with the conservative assumption of capitalist ideology that history stopped at the present and now we can expect the revolutions and fundamental changes of lifestyle which have been the story of society so far to cease. The emphasis on nationalism not only affects British schooling: the children of every capitalist country are encouraged to see the past from the angle of their own particular ruling class. Not only are the blinkers of nationalism fitted on those at school; it is still the case today that a student can enter Oxford University to do a history degree and leave three years later having studied only British history.

The indoctrination process does not escape the study of English. Some of it is creative and stimulating, but many children are put off reading literature after leaving school as a result of the boring experience of learning by heart large chunks of Keats or Shakespeare to pass exams. The snobbery attached to “appreciating" literature is enough to put anyone off. Why should children who appreciate the genuine dramatic qualities of Coronation Street or Fawlty Towers believe that it is “proper" to think more highly about the dramatic excellence of Hamlet or Much Ado About Nothing?

So, schools do not teach children to understand society, but to understand what the ruling class want us to know about society as presently organised. The socialist message to school students is a simple one: just as you probably will not believe everything you read in the Sun and you certainly should not believe everything you read in The Socialist Standard, so you should not accept everything told to you by your educators. Before accepting, think critically and check the truth by reference to your own experience and that of other people; don't believe, understand.

It is not only "knowledge” which schools distort. One of the principal purposes of schooling is to mould the child’s character. What sort of character does the capitalist class require? Workers who are obedient, naive, repressed, malleable, submissive . . . the list is endless, but can be summed up in one word: exploitable. The educated wage slave is a willing victim of the legalised robbery of the wages system. Of course, capitalists need different types of wage slaves: some to wear suits and operate the calculating machines, others to wear overalls and operate the factory machines, some to wear white coats and operate the get-you-back-to-work service. But the one requirement is that they must be willing to be used by a minority to produce rent, interest and profit.

Capitalist schooling teaches children to play roles. Because capitalism can make good use of sexual inequality, schools encourage virility in boys and femininity in girls. After years of this conditioning the educators claim these character differences to be natural. Sexual stereotyping is still one of the most powerful forces for the preservation of capitalist ideology.

In addition to teaching boys to behave like Action Man and girls to be birds, schools teach young workers to fit into the obedience role. For a large part of school life children are learning nothing but to stand up when a bell rings, to start eating when a siren sounds, and to jump through hoops when instructed and to feel guilty when they have disrupted the status quo. The obedient wage slave is a bore of historically unprecedented proportions; many readers will remember the school prefects who spent their later school lives exhibiting the after-effects of a short back and sides to the brain.

What about the people who run the schools — the teachers? They are merely salaried workers who are paid to do the ideological dirty work for their employers. Some of them may be attracted to the “profession" because they like pushing defenceless children around but, on the whole, like other workers who have to run capitalism for the capitalists, teachers are sincere men and women who would rather not have to work within the kind of institutions which schools currently have to be. Like the policeman who thinks he is a social worker, there are teachers who hope to use their position to enlighten their students along liberal lines. But. as has been stated in another context, the educators need to be educated, and many of these trendy teachers have nothing to offer children except indoctrination with a touch of guilt.

Unfortunately for the capitalists, despite the millions of pounds which they spend annually on schooling (more than on military defence because they recognise the value of ideological conformity), the young working class is not acting as required. With what horror do the self-righteous guardians of social conformity regard punks who treat with disdain many of the moral norms of the system. A few years ago Pink Floyd’s record, Another Brick In The Wall shot to number one in the charts, serving as an anthem of youth disillusionment with the schooling process. Although it would be far from true to say that school students who show signs of rebellion in their dress, hairstyles and language are necessarily any more opposed to capitalism than anyone else, there is no doubt that a growing consciousness is emerging among young workers that schools are mucking them about and that society is offering them less than it could. Out of this consciousness will come the growth of socialist thinking. He or she who resents wearing a dull school uniform today could be the socialist who rejects the uniform ideology of capitalism tomorrow. While socialists should not exaggerate the significance of youth dissent, which is a hallmark of our age, we should not ignore the fact that it is part of the process of transition — a transition which will end, sooner or later, in social revolution.

What about children in a socialist society? To begin with, they will be economically dependent on no one, for the wealth of the world will belong to them no less than to their elders. There will be no laws forcing children to study, for in a society of co-operation we will be able to rely on children's innate desire to learn. To begin with, respect for teachers will not be based on fear. Learning will not be the means to passing an examination so as to increase the price of labour power, but to enable one to contribute more usefully to society. The process of learning will not be confined to certain ages, so that by twenty-one formal education is over: in socialist society centres for formal learning, and informal learning through practical experience, will be open to people throughout their lives. Freed from the objective of creating workers, socialist teaching will be able to show people how to stretch their humanity as broadly as possible. Socialism will mark the victory of human consciousness over the domination of capitalist necessity; now, we are forced to confine our thinking within the stultifying barriers of the profit system. In a socialist society, instead of killing off that wonderfully creative ingenuity and imaginativeness of childhood, we will be able to learn from it, to let it express itself fully and to allow our own conception of adulthood to include some of the insights of childhood which the present system has such a need to repress. For too long society has seen children as semi-humans, to be moulded into the pathetic parodies of humanity which men and women under capitalism are today. In a socialist society the great task will be to liberate children from their inexperience and to incorporate the joys of childhood into the lifelong experiences of adults.

Steve Coleman

Poverty and the minimum wage (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is, and always has been, a feature of capitalism that there are big differences in wealth and income between rich property-owners and propertyless workers, but also big differences in wages within the working class. The solution is to get rid of capitalism and establish socialism, in which there will be no incomes from property ownership and no wages system: all the members of society will have free access to the products of industry. At one time leading members of the Labour Party, including Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw, endorsed that idea. The first chairman and leader of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie, declared that the Labour Party existed to achieve it. The Labour Party then abandoned the aim its leaders had once proclaimed (or, as they said, “postponed” it). They did so on the ground that it was essential to be “practical" and to deal at once with the pressing evils of capitalism.

One of the immediate problems that they were going to deal with at once was the existence of large numbers of workers on very low pay. All sorts of remedies have been tried but have been a total failure. Not only is the problem still with us but, according to an independent body — the Low Pay Unit — the lowest paid workers were relatively worse off in 1980 than they had been 95 years earlier when figures were first collected. The Labour Party's programme at the last General Election brought the failure story up to date:

 The next Labour Government will launch an offensive against low pay as part of our strategy for equality. The problem of low pay remains acute both in relative and absolute terms. If low pay at present is defined as less than two-thirds of average male manual workers’ earnings, there were 3 million full-time low-paid workers in 1982, of whom 2 million were women workers. Adding to these figures young workers, part-time workers and home workers, produces a total in the region of about 6 million — a great majority of whom are women.

One supposed remedy was more nationalisation and the expansion of local government services; but many of the “low-paid” are to be found in central and local government and the nationalised industries.

Another alleged cure for poverty was the Beveridge social security scheme after World War II and its accompanying pledge of “full employment” and no more depressions. It has failed in both respects. Along with 3½ million unemployed the depression has increased the number of “low-paid" workers. And this is the SDP-Liberal Alliance's verdict on the social security aspect:

  William Beveridge has been mutilated over the years. Instead of a basic benefit, which was to secure for the old, the sick and the unemployed a tolerable minimum standard of living as of right, we have a complex network of benefits dependent on 44 different means tests. Many people are dependent on benefits which are woefully inadequate.

So the Alliance sees the need for a new Beveridge scheme to remove the accumulated deficiencies of the old one, and to include a new feature, the payment of benefit to low-paid workers in addition to their wages.

Another remedy was to be the election of a Labour government. Their 1918 programme, Labour and the new Social Order, committed a future Labour government to introduce a “national minimum” wage to be applied by law in all fields — employment, unemployment, the sick and the pensioners. In 1935 the leader of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, in his book The Will and the Way to Socialism, said that the next Labour government would create “an equalitarian society" — the rich and the poor would both disappear. "It would", he wrote, "work to reduce the purchasing power of the wealthier classes, while by wage increases and by the provision of social services it will expand the purchasing power of the masses". When he became Prime Minister in 1945 it was his government which introduced the first of the "incomes policies" designed, among other things, to prevent wages from rising.

At one time it was thought that the remedy for low pay was trade union organisation, but it came up against the problem of industries in which unions did not exist or were quite ineffective. In 1909 the Liberal government created “trade boards" (later renamed Wages Councils) for the industries with "sweated" wages. The councils, made up of representatives of employers and workers, along with “independent" members, were empowered to fix minimum rates which were enforced by law. Wages Councils still exist and it is among the workers in these industries that many of the Labour Party’s "low paid” are to be found. An extension of the Wages Council minimum rates for separate industries, is the proposal for a national minimum to apply generally. The 1983 Labour Party election programme included the statement "we will also discuss with the TUC the possibility of introducing a statutory minimum wage", and this has been taken up by Neil Kinnock.

The minimum wage schemes come up against the facts of life of capitalism. The capitalists are in business to make profit; from the capitalist standpoint the only productive worker is one who brings profit to his employer. If the capitalists cannot make profit by employing workers, they do not employ them. While many companies can adjust themselves to paying wages negotiated with the unions and still make a profit, there are others who can stay in business only if they can get workers at very low pay. If compelled to pay more, they fold up..

This situation was dealt with in 1973 in a report by the Prices and Incomes Board, who said that the enforcement of higher rates in certain low pay fields "results in unemployment among low paid workers whom employers no longer consider worth employing at the higher rates". Some advocates of minimum rates show a remarkable blindness to the realities of capitalism. Where it is a question of the criminal law they know, from the millions of crimes every year, that the enactment of laws against bank robberies, burglaries and so on, does not mean that those crimes do not happen. Where it concerns statutory minimum wages they think it is different, but it is not. The Low Pay Unit reported in 1976 about the Wages Council industries: "In 1974, the last year for which figures are available, 13.4 per cent of employers checked as a matter of routine, were paying below the legal minimum compared with 7.9 per cent four years before". In 1983 the Unit reported: "Last year 35.1 per cent of employers inspected were paying below the minimum compared with 31.5 per cent the year before".

What happens, particularly at times of heavy unemployment, is that workers receiving less than the legal minimum prefer to keep their jobs rather than report the underpayment. In the depression years of the Thirties the National Congress of the Agricultural Workers Union said that more than half the farm workers were being paid less than the legal minimum wage and cases were known of agricultural workers who, having received illegally withheld pay after an inspector had intervened, gave the money back to the farmer in order to keep their jobs.

Realising that the levels of minimum wages they wanted to enforce would result in workers losing their jobs, some advocates of statutory minimum wages have proposed to get over the difficulty by the government subsidising the industries concerned. This was in fact done under the Corn Production Act 1917. The Act guaranteed prices to farmers for their produce and introduced minimum rates for farm workers in order to meet the shortage of food caused by the German submarine attacks on shipping. The farmers did very well out of it, but farm workers' wages failed even to keep up with the increased cost of living. When the war-time emergency was over the Act was scrapped. Farming is heavily subsidised now and farm workers have statutory minimum wages, but it has not prevented farm workers being among the Labour Party's 6 million low paid.

All the schemes in three quarters of a century to solve the problem of “low pay” have failed, and further schemes promise no greater success. The Socialist Party of Great Britain was right in the first place in holding that this and the other problems of capitalism will not be solved while capitalism continues.

Edgar Hardcastle

Letters: Marx and crime (1984)

Letters to the Editors from the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx and crime

Dear Sir,

I read with great interest the two parts of the article "Marx’s Conception of Socialism” published in the July and August editions of the Socialist Standard.

Firstly, a point of information: the phrase "the judgement of the criminal upon himself" comes from Chapter VIII of the Holy Family by Marx and Engels. The Foreign Languages Publishing House (Moscow 1956) renders it slightly differently, but the sense is clearly the same.

  . . . under human conditions punishment will really be nothing but the sentence passed by the culprit on himself. There will be no attempt to persuade him that violence from without, exerted on him by others, is violence exerted on himself by himself. On the contrary, he will see in other men his natural saviours from the sentence which he has pronounced on himself, in other words the relation will be reversed, (op cit p.239).

Presumably Marx and Engels meant by this that certain categories of human action, which are now classified as crimes, would be considered reprehensible in a socialist society ("human conditions"). However. while individuals might punish themselves in remorse for such actions, their neighbours, moved by feelings of humanity would try to persuade them not to. Which of these tendencies would win out, the individual's remorse or his neighbour's humanity, one cannot predict. The precise category of actions Marx and Engels had in mind is not clear — they do not mean crimes of violence, for these by definition do not exist, since "coercion is contrary to “(truly)' human nature" (op cit p.238).

Secondly I am worried by the statement that "In a socialist society you will only be able to have free access to the things which society decides it will make available for free access". This sounds dangerously like “‘you will only be available to have free access to the things the majority decide they will make available for free access" and it clearly breaches the principle “'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". The article was on much safer ground when it stated that in the early days of socialism, the attitude of relatively opulent workers to "free access" should be: "Don’t take advantage of it". While it may be true that in a socialist society, a majority would be unlikely to abuse its power, nevertheless, the principle of "To each according to his needs" seems to provide a safeguard for minorities, which although only based on “moral" force is better than no safeguard at all.

Clive Hill,

Graduate Common Room,

London School of Economics.

Reply

We thank Clive Hill for the source of the quotation from Marx, in the Holy Family.

Other interesting statements by Marx and Engels will be found in two Pelican books: Karl Marx — Selected Writings (1976) pp. 167/8 and 234/5, and Engels — Selected Writings (1967). pp. 175/6.

Marx and Engels were both examining crime and punishment in capitalist society from the socialist standpoint. Two quotations will indicate the line of their approach: Marx wrote:

 Punishment is nothing but a means of society to defend itself against the infraction of its vital conditions, whatever may be their character. Now, what a state of society is that which knows of no better instrument for its own defence than the hangman, and which proclaims . . . its own brutality as eternal law?

Engels argued that "society creates a demand for crime which is met by a corresponding supply" and added:

 I leave my readers to decide whether it is just to punish criminals under these circumstances.

On his second point, about "free access", Clive Hill's fears are groundless. The passage in the article was an attempt to deal with a misunderstanding about '“free access" voiced by a questioner at a meeting. Reasoning from what goes on under capitalism, with trade unions and other groups making claims and calling on the employers, or the government, or "society", to meet them, the questioner said he interpreted "free access" to mean that whatever any individual though they would like to have society would provide for them. This misses the point that, with the establishment of socialism, all individuals will be members of the community. co-operating together democratically to meet the needs of all on the basis of “free access" and making the necessary production and other arrangements to make it possible.

Editors

Asbestos deaths

Dear Editors

Although the article ‘“Fireproof Death” (Socialist Standard, October 1983, by Gary Jay) is no doubt written with the best of intentions, nonetheless it contains some inaccuracies which this campaign feels should be set right. Perhaps the most important misinformation is the statement. "There are safer substitutes for nearly all uses of asbestos".

It was actually established beyond doubt (see the Anti-Asbestos Campaign Fact-sheet) that satisfactory substitutes for every Asbestos application will be available in Britain by November 1982. I must stress that this is an independent single issue, non-partisan campaign. I say this because you do not necessarily need to be a socialist to realise that when it comes to Asbestos society can no longer afford free enterprise, if you fully understand the nature of Asbestos and its threat — which Gary Jay obviously does not — viz. "Asbestos and similar hazards”. I assure you that Asbestos is entirely in a class of its own as there are no similar hazards. The others that Gary Jay mentions are hazards of chemical poisons or hazards of human mismanagement — minor hazards. Asbestos however is the single most serious threat to life on this planet that I, or anyone else who understands its chemistry, can recognise. In our fact-sheet we ask whether there will be 40,000 deaths per annum in Britain caused by Asbestos in 2022. Even this is a moderate estimate.

Please in the interests of public health and safety do print a summary of these criticisms.

Harry Moss 

The Anti-Asbestos Campaign

Reply

The fact that there is evidence for all asbestos uses being replaced with safer substitutes strengthens the case against a social system which continues to use this murderous material because of its cheapness, and therefore profitability, to the ruling class. This is one of the numerous social problems which are constantly produced by the profit system. The solution is not to campaign against these symptoms individually.

The uses of various unsafe, dangerous and anti-social materials and products have the same social cause — the system of production for profit. By the time that one well-intentioned reform group thinks it has solved a problem, capitalism has produced many more.

Many thousands of people are dying and being injured in ways which could be avoided. They are victims of wars, starvation, insanitary water consumption, industrial accidents and so on, ad nauseam. These are problems produced by a competitive social system. The majority of people, the wealth-producers, produce wealth as wage slaves. Production, production techniques and distribution are geared to profit and not human need.

It was not, as Harry Moss says, simply “human mismanagement" which precipitated the misery outlined in the Socialist Standard article, including Rowan Point, Ford Pintos, thalidomide and poisonous cooking oils. These problems are endemic to our social system. Asbestos is beyond doubt a highly dangerous substance, as information in the AAC fact-sheet illustrates. But asbestos is one of many urgent problems which have the same solution. In a world capable of producing enough food for everybody, more people starved to death each day in 1982 than died from asbestos in the whole year. On the brink of a nuclear war the world now holds the equivalent of over four tons of TNT for every single human being on the planet.

Only in a society of common ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth can these grotesque problems be made unnecessary. Socialism will mean production for use not profit. The community will control what is produced with all the care, meticulous research and pride which will flow from the awareness that we are producing for our own good, and not as now to provide profits for an owning minority.

Editors

Cross of gold

Dear Editors,

Re: issue of September 1983

On the bottom line, centre column, you attribute the remark “Shall mankind be crucified upon a cross of gold" to Eugene Debs. I believe that you are actually referring to "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold" made by William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was a US representative and presidential candidate upon the Democratic Party ticket.

As usual, enjoyed this issue. Keep up the good work.

Merwin Orner 

New Jersey, USA

To "M.K., Scotland"
The Editors would like to publish your letter, with our reply to the important points you raise. However, it is not our practice to publish letters without knowing the name and address of the sender — not necessarily for publication. Please get in touch with us.

Editors

50 years ago: We Still Live (1984)

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

Another year has gone by and a fresh one is commencing. How are things with us, and what are the prospects?

To begin with, there are two things that are worth a comment. The suspension of the Social Democrat (organ of the Social Democratic Federation) a few weeks ago brings to light the fact that the Socialist Standard is the only one left of the group of journals that claimed to appeal particularly to workers in 1904. The others have either ceased publication, changed their names, or only appear fitfully. A similar process has also been at work with the organisations the journals represented. So true is this, that were we to reprint our first Manifesto, which contains references to these groups and journals, it would be like a voice from another planet to the workers of the present generation.

It is useful to record these two points, because those of our readers who were alive and interested in the working-class movement 30 years ago will remember that the formation of the Socialist Party was greeted with contempt and anger as a splitting movement by a group of youthful upstarts. We were promised a speedy death. But we still live, and we flourish without the aid of trickery, trumpery or trumpets.

The fact that we flourish, however, is not really a matter for great congratulation. We ought and might have expected to be progressing far better than we are doing. The case we put forward is simple and it appeals directly to the interests of all who depend for their existence upon the sale of their mental and physical energies — members of the working class.

[From an editorial "Our New Year Message". Socialist Standard, January 1934.]

Socialism will work (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists stand for the establishment of a system of society fundamentally different from that which exists now. In a socialist society the means of producing and distributing wealth — factories, farms, mines, docks, offices, transport — will belong to the whole community. Common ownership will do away with the need for exchange, so that money will have no use.

Production in socialism will be determined by people on the basis of social need, not profit. At the moment people may need wealth but, unless they can afford to buy it, they must go without. Production is geared to sale with a view to profit. Socialism means production solely for use: bread to eat, houses to live in, clothes to wear.

What will be the incentive to work in a socialist society? There will be no wages, for in a classless society no person will have the right to buy another person's ability to work for a price. Work in socialist society will depend on co-operation and the voluntary decisions of men and women to contribute to society in order to keep it going. Just as an individual could not survive if he or she did not eat, drink or take basic health care, so a socialist society would not survive unless the people in it acted cooperatively in a spirit of mutuality.

Socialism will not be a Utopia where all the problems of existence have vanished. Unpleasant work will still have to be done. Of course, much of the dirty work of the profit system, such as killing and conning and counting bank notes, will be dispensed with immediately in a socialist society. Other unappealing work can probably be taken care of by labour-saving machines. Where dirty work will have to be done in socialist society we can be quite sure of two things: firstly, it will not be done by the same people all the time — members of society will take turns; secondly, such work will be carried out by socially conscious men and women who will appreciate that society belongs to them and therefore its less pleasant tasks must be performed by them. In the knowledge that we own and control the earth, and all that is in and on it, it is unlikely that human beings will refuse to attend to the dirty work within socialism.

What about the lazy people in a socialist society? Critics of the socialist proposition often tell us that socialism would be confronted with millions of men and women who would refuse to do their bit to make society run efficiently. Indeed, socialist society will contain millions of babies and infants who will not be able to work down mines or milk the cows; but, in the sensible knowledge that these dependants will be the providers of tomorrow, we do not think that the inhabitants of socialism will let babies starve to death. Fifteen million children under Five die of starvation every year at the moment — a society based on production for use would not tolerate such obscenity. There will be those in socialist society who are too old or too ill or too incompetent to offer much to society; but they are not lazy and there is no reason why society should not allow them to give according to their varying abilities and take according to their differing needs. And if one who contributes less takes more, why should this be a problem in a society which is based on the satisfaction of needs? Those people living in a socialist society who are too lethargic to work will not be a drain on society's resources for very long, for if they lie in bed for long enough they will die — of boredom, if not of inertia.

But is it not the case that, given a society of unrestricted access to social wealth, human greed will lead people to consume all the wealth of society within one month? Such is the “problem" foreseen by the critics of socialism. To begin with, their prediction is based on the false assumption that socialism would be a society of consumption only, whereas it would obviously be a society where what is consumed would have to be matched by what is produced. So, if people in socialist society decide to eat ten dinners a day — as our critics seem to fear — there will have to be provision made to produce enough food to satisfy such unhealthy gluttony. Of course, in cases where people want what society is unable to produce, or has democratically decided it will not produce, their consumption will have to be limited. This may be bad news for the Utopian but. for the worker who is currently deprived of what he or she needs (not because society cannot satisfy the need or has decided democratically not to but because it is unprofitable to do so) the idea of democratically organised production for use is infinitely preferable to the present social arrangement. For example, the thousands of pensioners who have died of hypothermia are not likely to reject the socialist proposition because it will not allow them to eat ten dinners a day; at least a society based on producing for needs will ensure that no one is unable to have access to warmth.

But what about this greed ? The critic of the socialist idea is truly worried that in a society of free access, people will take more than they need. Now it is quite true that if the stores were opened tomorrow and workers were invited to go in and take as much as they want without having to pay there would be a mad rush and the stores would be empty within a day. But why should this be the case if the stores are always open for free access? It would be odd indeed for the inhabitants of socialism to store dozens of loaves of bread, which would go stale before they could be eaten, when the option would exist to go to the store and collect a new loaf of bread each day or few days. It would be no less odd for us to read today of workers filling their lungs up with water because they fear that when they next turn the tap the free liquid will no longer be there to consume. Perhaps, in innocence, the earliest inhabitants of socialism will indulge in a few feasts of conspicuous over-consumption (who would be surprised at such action after years of poverty and social inferiority?), but such antics will soon end when the physical consequences of such irrationality are felt.

But is it not the case that, even if classes were abolished and all people were equal, a hierarchy would soon arise again and society would be back to square one? The opponent of socialism feels convinced that inequality is a phenomenon from which society can never escape. Perhaps — and only perhaps — socialist society will not eliminate inequalities of talent: one person might be a greater pianist than another will ever be, while another will run faster than another could ever train to run. But this does not mean that socialism will establish a hierarchy of pianists or athletes or poets or brain surgeons. In a co-operative society it will be recognised that poets cannot write their literary masterpieces unless the miner is willing to bring the coal from under the ground. Humanity lives interdependently. And who is to say that miners will not be poets when they are not down the mine and the greatest chess player in socialism will not sweep the streets so that the greatest brain surgeon can walk to the hospital without rats biting at the ankles? The rigid division of labour which is a feature of the present system will not exist in socialist society.

In general, critics of the socialist proposition are not saying that they are opposed to the establishment of a socialist world, as defined by socialists. Most of them are raising objections to socialism which reflect their own conditioning by the present social order. The “problems" which they fear are based on the wrong assumption that socialism is going to be imposed on the conditions of capitalism, including the consciousness which props up the system. Of course, a majority of people whose minds are still filled with the ideas and prejudices of the profit system could never run socialism. That is why the Socialist Party of Great Britain states emphatically that there can be no socialist society until a majority of workers understand and want it. Only then will the baseless fears of socialism’s critics become as absurd as the quaint old fears of the Victorians that electricity in all homes would lead to dangers which society would be unable to handle. Yes, the future always looks strange when people’s minds are imprisoned within the past, but the nearer we get to the next stage in social development the less strange the idea of production for need becomes.

There are thousands of workers walking around with ideas in their minds which are close or identical to those advocated by socialists; as that number grows, and as they gather into the conscious political movement for socialism, the doubts of the critics grow fainter and more absurd and what once seemed unthinkable rises to the top of the agenda of history.

Steve Coleman

Letter: The Basis of Socialism (1974)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Basis of Socialism

Dear Sir,

Perhaps I may be permitted to make one or two observations in your letter columns on the Dec. issue of your excellent paper. I am mainly concerned with the wriggling by ALB in his otherwise very fine article on the question of Marx’s reference to payment by labour vouchers in the early stages of socialism. ALB says that Marx was writing at a time last century when the powers of production had not yet reached the pitch at which abundance of wealth could be created and it may well be true that had be been writing now he would not have talked in these terms. It remains a fact, however, that socialism is a society of abundance or nothing. Shared poverty may be viable for a few idealistic settlers on a kibbutz but this is not the meaning of socialism. Surely, therefore, it is clear that the circumstances of Marx’s day were such that socialism was not possible and that Marx was not correct in suggesting that it was. I suggest that Marx’s contribution to socialist thought was sufficiently great that it could stand the observation that he was not infallible and that socialists do not accept the possibility of establishing the new society except in conditions of abundance. The wriggling is really unnecessary. Perhaps I could add that the concept of labour vouchers or whatever is rather ludicrous anyway. How could even Marx have computed the correct number of time vouchers for a coal miner and a Shakespeare?

A couple of small points in connection with “So they say”. The author, RAHB, makes an excellent point when he shows that the Church, as property owner, need not charge 11 per cent mortgage interest and that the professional financial journalist of the Observer could not be expected to see the obvious. On the other hand I suggest he is wrong in his next paragraph to decry protection to the consumer on the grounds that all interest is extortion and only socialism will get rid of it. But some interest is more equal than others and it must be useful to the borrower to know if he is really paying 15 per cent or 50. As to the usefulness of the proposed cooling-off period, it is not true that a second mortgagee would never get the benefit as his creditors are breathing down his neck. He may well be borrowing to buy something new and if he finds the rate is too high it would clearly be important to him that he should be legally enabled to back out.

S. Gamzu, 

London, N.W.11

Reply

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has never regarded Marx as infallible; on a number of points, e.g. his taking sides in some nineteenth-century wars, we have frankly stated that he was wrong. However, S. Gamzu is virtually claiming that to have advocated Socialism in the nineteenth century was wrong. This we cannot accept.

The basis of Socialism is the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. This was possible in Marx’s day, and indeed would have provided a framework within which the means of production could have been developed much more rapidly than under capitalism to the stage where abundance and full free access was possible. What would not have been possible, perhaps for a generation, would have been the full implementation of the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. This, however, does not mean that there would have had to have been “shared poverty”. Certainly, the former members of the capitalist and landowning classes would have had to suffer a drop in their standard of living, but for the great majority Socialism, even without full free access, would have brought a vast improvement compared with their lot under capitalism.

The labour-time system mentioned by Marx certainly would have had many anomalies, some of which he himself pointed out, but since it never has been advocated by the Socialist Party (see, for instance, the Socialist Standard, October, 1920, republished in “50 Years Ago” in October 1970) we are not called upon to defend it.

Further, as our article pointed out, today, in this age of potential abundance, this is a discussion of academic interest only: full free access could now be very rapidly introduced once Socialism was established. This is the position of the Socialist Party, whatever Marx may have advocated in the last century and irrespective of whether he was then right or wrong.

On the question of protecting borrowers of money, our contributor’s point was that the protection can only be marginal to the real problem. If, as Mr. Gamzu says, a borrower is contemplating a non-urgent purchase he may well have time to change his mind and wait. Few borrowers, we think, are in that luxurious position; to the degree that they need the money quickly, their ability to be choosy about it diminishes.

Editorial Committee.

Letters: Ploughing Back? (1974)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ploughing Back?

I gather from your literature that out of a man’s productive labour his wage is not commensurate with this. In other words his wage is less than the actual value of his labour, the difference going to the capitalist as unearned income. But surely not all of this difference or “profit” goes to the capitalist or shareholder. No doubt some of it does so. Some of it must also go to pay for new capital such as machines, factories etc. and to account for fixed charges such as rent, maintenance costs, electricity bills etc.

To me your argument implies that there is only one factor of production, namely labour. But there are in fact three, namely land, labour and capital. Each of these three must be utilized in the manufacture of the final product. And the cost of the final product must account for each of these three, not just labour. Rent accounts for land, wages account for labour, and profit accounts for capital. No doubt some of this profit goes to the shareholder and thus it can be argued that he is exploiting the worker. True, but not all of it.

Why not create a system whereby the shareholder, or capitalist if you like, is eliminated and all the profit is ploughed back into the industry? The profit margin would be so devised as to form a fixed percentage of the total revenue of the firm and wages would be kept on par with it. So a rise in price of the final product would inevitably mean an equivalent rise in wages. In such a system would the workers still say they were being exploited?

P. C. Green, 

Burnley.

Reply

A capitalist reckons his profit by deducting all his costs of production from the sum which his commodity has realized in the market. The reader suggests that this profit which derives from the unpaid labour of workers, could be divided among those workers minus an agreed amount for re-investment in machinery etc. (and presumbably minus taxation for the maintenance of health services, educational institutions and armed forces etc.).

However, such a system would be no more capable than present-day capitalism of producing goods and services to meet social requirements. Although the capitalist as an individual might be eliminated, the accumulation of capital would continue. In each particular factory or industry production would be dominated by market forces, expanding and contracting in times of greater or lesser economic advantage: in turn bringing periodic unemployment. The ownership and control of the means of production would rest in the hands of innumerable groups of workers, each of which would be a social minority in competition with others, and each making decisions in accordance with its individual economic interests. Propositions regarding the improvement of local working conditions, or of broader social improvements would be considered in the same limited way as they are today — “Is it economic?”

Socialists hold the view that with the natural resources, the labour-power and knowledge available to mankind in the world, human beings are capable of democratically organizing production without anyone being exploited.

Editorial Committee

Labour Vouchers

Surely the answer to S. Gamzu about “Labour Vouchers” (Socialist Standard March 1974) is that they were a measure of TIME and could not have had any meaning as anything else.

Of course they would not distinguish between a miner or Shakespeare and would NOT be “according to need” but TIME worked. In other words a time rationing system.

They would not become money. They would be personal, and probably dated like pension vouchers. Volume I of Capital (Kerr Edn. p.106) points out that Owen’s “labour-money” was no more “money” than a ticket for the theatre.

Horatio.

Work and Socialism

I am amazed by questions put by P. W. Ralphs (letter March 1974) who seems to have completely missed the whole concept of a truly Socialist society as put forward by the Socialist Party.

In a Socialist world there will surely be no “jobs” as such, no employment as exists under capitalism, when one occupation may capture and slowly strangle the individuality and personality of a worker and his family.

In Socialism time now spent “working” will be spent to the benefit of us all, doing things constructive to the maintenance and improvement of society as the Socialist majority sees it.

As a now highly specialized and, in employment terms, narrowly confined medical worker, I recognise the need for many unpleasant tasks in the running of society. I would gladly sweep roads or empty dustbins to maintain a Socialist community, but I would not wish to mine coal or trawl for fish in the Icelandic seas. And if the majority of people thought as I on these last points then society would have to think of alternative power sources (or mining methods) and an alternative food. If the majority disagreed with me, however, then there would logically be enough willing Socialists to maintain these services to the community.

The answer to P. W. Ralphs is simple: in a Socialist world as envisaged by the Socialist Party, the problems he put forward cannot possibly exist. They will be precluded by the social consciousness of the workers of the world, and the problems of capitalism will no longer beset them.

David W. Roberts

Ely.

Editorial: Danger: diplomats at work (1985)

Editorial from the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year, which will see the fortieth anniversary of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, began with what we were told was an auspicious event. In Geneva the Russians and the Americans met to open negotiations about opening negotiations about a future treaty on arms reduction. To be accurate, it was not the "Russians" and the "Americans" who met, in the sense that the negotiations concerned the interests of the majority of the people of those countries. It was representatives of the state powers of those countries, principally in the persons of Gromyko and Shultz, who went to Geneva — and in each case the state power exists to look after the interests of the owning, privileged class of the nation. So it was really the ruling capitalist classes of Russia and America who sent their representatives to talk about how they might reduce their respective capacities to destroy each other and much else of the world at the same time.

At such events it is common for the politicians concerned to make carefully calculated, coded gestures from which the commentators can dredge up a few apparent portents for the future. Such a gesture was Gromyko's hesitant use of the English language to announce the Russian government's attitude towards the negotiations. If this hardened man of the Kremlin was prepared to put himself out to master a few words of English, speculated the media, surely his government must be seriously committed to the fruitful outcome of the talks. Did those halting words signal new hope for this harassed world? There was much relief and praise for the assembled politicians; here, we were encouraged to believe. were high-ranking diplomats earnestly searching for a reduction in world tension, to ensure that there will never again be another Hiroshima. Clearly, this was what is called statesmanship and we should all be thankful for it. even if those same diplomats have in their time managed to stomach the needless death or the slaughter of millions of people.

But if this was statesmanship then it was a case in which its practitioners first organised the building up of a vast arsenal of globally destructive weapons, to the point at which a nuclear war in space is in prospect, before they tentatively began to explore how that arsenal might be reduced — or rather how it might be reduced without putting their interests at risk. This exploration allows the "statesmen" to pose as the saviours of humanity, if we can forget that they agreed to the build-up of the arms in the first place. And if we can forget that, whatever they might announce in their self-congratulatory communiques, they have no realistic hope or intention of exploring the elimination of nuclear weapons, nor of "conventional" arms, nor of the cause of war itself.

Even at that, the politicians have approached the matter with extreme caution. Shultz warned that "a long and arduous process lay ahead" and Gromyko said that the talks were "only a step compared to the immense tasks that are to be addressed in the course of the negotiations on space and nuclear arms . . ." The reason for this caution is obvious; there are vastly important interests at stake in these talks, expressed in the scale of the spending on armaments by the social class whose interests are represented by Shultz and Gromyko. There is good reason, if we accept the priorities of capitalism, for this spending for it goes to protect and expand the powers' standing in the world's economic, commercial and political conflicts. It goes to protect the capitalists' markets and to conquer others for them; it goes to secure their hold on cheap sources of raw material; it goes to establish and maintain their grip on areas of domination such as the Russians have in Eastern Europe and the Americans have over much of the Far East. Expending huge amounts of energy and resources in protecting those interests is considered justifiable even though tens of millions die of famine each year, or of avoidable diseases, or rot in slums, or wither away through neglect and lack of medical care.

Capitalism is lavish with the means of destruction because it is a social system which must operate through competition and conflict; co-operation and harmony are foreign to its nature. The basis of this society—the class ownership of the means of production and distribution — ensures that wealth is produced as commodities, as objects and services intended for sale on the market as opposed to the satisfaction of human needs. Cheap production is important to the capitalist class because it can make their goods more competitive in the markets; thus they must always be concerned to find and exploit the most abundant fields of raw materials, as they have in the North Sea. Access to hungry markets is also vital to their interests for it is there that they can most easily sell their products, with a better chance of getting the highest price. These are aspects of that continuing competitive struggle which is responsible for the world's armed forces and the weapons with which they fight, which are now capable of reducing millions of us to nuclear vapour.

There is no solution to this terrifying situation as long as the basis of capitalism is unchanged. But to change this basis would be to abolish the system and when we have done that there is only one society which can replace it. Socialism will be founded on the world-wide, communal ownership of the means of life. Its wealth will not be produced for sale, for the profit of a minority, but for the consumption and the benefit of the entire people of the world. Competition will be replaced by co-operation. There will be a full participation in all society's activities. especially its productive work, and free access by all to its wealth. On that basis there can be no cause for conflict: common ownership and free access will bring a world of human harmony. And all of this will be organised and operated at the democratically formed will of the people.

That, in brief, is socialism. It is the only way to abolish the problems which at present plague the world and which hamper human progress. It is the only political objective worth the workers' attention. Beside the certainty of the security and abundance of socialism, the false promises of capitalism's leaders are as rancid crumbs. However the diplomats bargain and dissemble they cannot negotiate away the realities of capitalism. The world awaits its appropriation by the working class.

What Causes Famines? (1985)

From the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recent events in Ethiopia have brought the question of famine back into the news. But what are famines? And what causes them? The obvious answer seems to be a situation where people are dying through lack of food in a particular region.

Were we living in a world where everyone had an automatic right to the amount of food they needed to stay alive this simple explanation might be plausible. The only way, in such circumstances, that a famine could arise would be if the total amount of food available to the people of a particular region fell below that needed to feed them all. The trouble with this simplistic explanation is that it is contradicted by the facts. First, there is the fact that during famines some starve while others have no problem obtaining food, whereas if the above explanation were true all people would suffer equally. Secondly, in a number of famines not only has the amount of food available in the region not fallen, or not fallen substantially, but food has even been exported.

These two examples show that a famine is not just a question of the total amount of food available in relation to the total number of people in a particular region; it is more complicated than this. People's access to food (as to other goods) is not free, but depends on a number of economic, social and legal factors defining their position in society.

In a developed capitalist country like Britain access to food depends almost exclusively on having money. People get this money in a number of ways: from owning property (as a non-work income such as rent, interest and profit), from trading or from selling some service, from selling their mental and physical energies (for a wage or salary), and from the state (as pensions and other allowances). So people get money which then gives them a claim on food, of a quantity and quality related to the amount of money they have. This claim is basically a property claim in that the exchange of money for food is a property-transaction involving an exchange of equivalent values.

In undeveloped countries like Ethiopia or Bangladesh the situation is basically the same, except that a category that has virtually disappeared in the developed countries has a much greater weight, namely, those who directly work the land. Such people can have access to food without money as they can consume part of what they grow, but here again this is an individual entitlement arising out of a property situation. They are entitled to the food because they own (or have rented) the land on which it is grown. There are also more people in the undeveloped countries whose entitlement arises out of money obtained from petty trading or selling some service rather than from the sale of their labour power.

This, then, is the framework in which famines occur. It enables us to see why the amount of food available in a region is not the determining factor in a famine. The determining factor is the pattern of people's legal entitlement to acquire food and it is changes in this rather than in food availability that provoke famines.

This point, which is fairly obvious when you reflect a little on the nature of the private property world in which we live, has been well developed in a study undertaken by Amartya Sen for the ILO, published in 1981 under the title Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Sen's basic point is that "starvation . . . is a function of entitlements and not of food availability as such":

 It is the totality of entitlement relations that governs whether a person will have the ability to acquire enough food to avoid starvation, and food supply is only one influence among many affecting his entitlement relations.

To test the validity of this "entitlement" approach, as opposed to the "food availability decline" approach, Sen examines four famines — the Great Bengal famine of 1943, the Ethiopian famines of 1973 and 1974, the Sahel famines of the 1970s and the 1974 Bangladesh famines. The statistics he produces show that these are better explained in terms of a collapse of entitlements to acquire food legally, through exchange or through direct consumption, among certain sectors of the population rather than in terms of a fall in the amount of food available.

Thus he concludes with regard to the Ethiopian famine of 1973:

  The Ethiopian famine took place with no abnormal reduction in food output, and consumption of food per head at the height of the famine in 1973 was fairly normal for Ethiopia as a whole. While the food output in Wollo was substantially reduced in 1973. the inability of Wollo to command food from outside was the result of the low purchasing power in that province. A remarkable feature of the Wollo famine is that food prices in general rose very little, and people were dying of starvation even when food was selling at prices not very different from pre-drought levels. The phenomenon can be understood in terms of extensive entitlement failures of various sections of the Wollo population.

About the Bangladesh famine he says:

  The food availability approach offers very little in the way of explanation The total output, as well as availability figures for Bangladesh as a whole, point precisely in the opposite direction. as do the inter-district figures of production as well as availability. Whatever the Bangladesh famine of 1974 might have been, it wasn't a Food Availability Decline famine.

What Sen calls the "entitlement" approach also provides an explanation for the export of food from famine regions:

  Viewed from the entitlement angle, there is nothing extraordinary in the market mechanism taking food away from famine-stricken areas to elsewhere. Market demands are not reflections of biological needs or psychological desires, but choices based on exchange entitlement relations. If one doesn't have much to exchange, one can't demand very much, and may thus lose out in competition with others whose needs may be a good deal less acute, but whose entitlements are stronger. In fact, in a slump famine such a tendency will be quite common, unless other regions have a more severe depression. Thus, food being exported from famine-stricken areas may be a “natural" characteristic of the market which respects entitlement rather than needs.

In other words, people starve because in private property society they have come to have no legal access to the food they need to stay alive. As Sen puts it in the closing paragraph of his book:

  The focus on entitlement has the effect of emphasizing legal rights. Other relevant factors, for example market forces, can be seen as operating through a system of legal relations (ownership rights, contractual obligations, legal exchanges etc). The law stands between food availability and food entitlement. Starvation deaths can reflect legality with a vengeance.

What is the solution? Sen himself seems to think that famines could be avoided if some sort of social security system was introduced in the undeveloped countries which would ensure people a minimum (even if only a bare minimum) state income when their other "entitlements" fail. Something along these lines may well be tried sometime (where are these poor states going to get the money from?) but manifestly this would only be a palliative. To solve the problem a much more fundamental change is required: the abolition of private property.

All that is on and in the Earth must become the common property of all the people of the Earth. Once the world has been organised on such a communist (in the original sense of the term) basis, access to food, and all other goods, would no longer be dependent on establishing a legal right through owning property, selling one's labour power, and so on. but would be something that every human being would have in application of the principle "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". Given that a more intensive and extensive use of already-applied agricultural techniques could provide enough food adequately to feed every single man, woman and child on the planet, famine and starvation would be impossible. Indeed, people living in socialism will look back at the twentieth century as a Dark Age of continual wars and famines and will wonder why such things were allowed to happen.

Adam Buick

Trouble in store (1985)

From the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

They might have said: "The people who own this supermarket hope you will come in and buy food here. But no matter how much you need it. you must not take anything from the shop unless you pay for it because that's the way we get profits on our investments. If you don't obey these rules you will probably be punished under the law."

What they actually said, in two posters side by side on the door, was: "Welcome to Safeways'. "Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted".

Like many other offences, shoplifting has apparently been on the increase, from 126,844 incidents recorded by the police in 1972 to 242,304 in 1982. The total value of goods lost to the shops in this way is set at about £8 million a year but it is likely that it really amounts to a lot more than that; in particular shop assistants are suspected of a vast amount of undetected theft. Anyone starting a career in crime by testing out their welcome at Safeways may be reassured by the fact that about 50 per cent of contested cases result in an acquittal in court.

There are various methods for the apprentice shoplifter to consider, from the simple one of putting items straight into a shopping bag instead of into the basket so thoughtfully provided by the supermarket and leaving without paying for them; to the more difficult, like grabbing a discarded receipt. finding foods for the same price and getting a refund on them. In between lie methods requiring some manual dexterity, like swapping those sticky price tags or "gleaning"—opening packs of food and eating it while in the store, which can give a supermarket shelf the appearance of a field ravaged by locusts. Some known shoplifters. presumably on their day off, relax by playing games, attracting attention by concealing some item on their person and walking around the shop for a while before replacing it. to the chagrin of the watching store detective.

Who are the shoplifters? An article in Justice of the Peace (28 January 1984) said there has been ". . . an increase in the incidence of organised or group shoplifting (the Australian gang) and the use of violence arid intimidation. . ." but this aggravation of magistrates' paranoia represents too alarmist a picture. A very high "clear-up" rate is claimed by the police for shoplifting — 88 per cent compared to 37 per cent for all offences — which is a measure of the shoplifters' ineptitude. Then there is the fact that nearly half of the incidents recorded in 1982 concerned goods worth £5 or less, which is hardly the type of loot looked for by determined. sophisticated gangs. In fact, juveniles make up the largest group of shoplifters and. according to the Home Office (Designing Out Crime, HMSO). it is the offence most often committed by youngsters truanting from school.

The rising tide of shoplifting has been resisted by the shops in a strengthening of their defences. The Association of Prevention of Theft From Shops, whose Director is a Baroness, acts as an intelligence agency. Many goods are so packaged that it is very difficult to conceal others in with them (it is. of course, also very difficult to unpack the things when you get them home). In clothing shops, tags which can only be removed by a cashier set off a clamorous alarm if anyone tries to take them through the doorway. Shops are surveyed by closed circuit TV and patrolled by store detectives, whose vigilance may be sharpened by the commission they get for every successful arrest.

It is ironic that all this effort is expended to deal with a problem which the shops originally made for themselves. The age of the shoplifter is also the age of the self-service store: “Shoplifting", the Home Office unsurprisingly concluded, "is discouraged by the presence of assistants who are there to serve the customer." But the old style shops, where assistants, who had knowledge and skill as well as patience, served customers across counters, were relatively costly in floor space and wages. (Imagine the acreage of counters, and the swarms of staff, the average Safeways would need if they used that method today.)

All of that was swept away soon after the war in what was called the Great Marketing Revolution, in which a lot of money was invested with the object of cutting staff and making more profitable use of shop floor areas. The revolution left the customers to do the serving themselves, from displays replenished by squads of nocturnal "shelf-fillers" and then to volunteer to pay at check out tills operated at the kind of pressure to ensure the minimum of customer contact and the maximum of alienation. Now nobody stands chatting in a supermarket; the shelves can't talk back and the check out operators haven't got the time.

The big snag with the revolution was that it also allowed the customers to help themselves from the displays and so opened a field of crime to thousands of people who would not otherwise have had such a tempting opportunity. Vagrant alcoholics could help themselves to their booze, penurious mothers could help feed their children, aimless truants could arrange an afternoon s supply of free sweets and fags. About 4,000 of the yearly convictions for shoplifting are of people of 60 and over, many of them never having been in court before and who, but for the existence of the self-service shop, would almost certainly never have fallen foul of the law.

This has given rise to the stereotype of the menopausal shoplifter, a concept whose significance is obscured by the implication that age has to be a disability when in fact the problem lies in the disabling effects of capitalist society. The magistrates' courts see a continuous procession of these wretched, frightened people, often middle-aged women in despair. These women are often described in court, by helpful policemen. as "respectable", which means that they have been nurtured since birth on an insidious diet of capitalist morality. For them, the apex of attractiveness coincides with that of their profitability as an employee — with their youth. The fulfilment of their life began with employment, followed by marriage and a coping with children, housework. the mortgage and the bills while still disseminating a stereotypical sexual allure. At an age when cosmetic artifices can no longer smooth wrinkles, when no profit-conscious employer would give them a seat in the typing pool or at an assembly line, when their children have left home to grapple with the stresses of their own marriage, many women may feel their usefulness died with their fertility and that now they are unwanted, unattended.

An obvious way to draw attention to themselves is to offend against all they have been conditioned to regard as moral and correct. Such people could hardly burgle a house or hold up a bank but shoplifting is an easily available crime, fitting neatly into their daily routine of housework and shopping. Too often, however, their arrest is only another stage in a chronic depression. Hundreds of people every year are driven into a mental breakdown by their arrest and during a recent 18 month period the Portia Trust recorded 32 suicides by people accused of shoplifting. The other side of this bitter story is to be found in the people who own the supermarkets and the companies which supply them, among whom there are some massive fortunes: the Vestey family (£1.5 billion); the Sainsbury family (£900 million); James Goldsmith (£500 million); Garfield Weston (£300 million) (Sunday Times. 7 October 1984). These are some of the class whose interests are protected by the store detectives, the police and the courts, who welcome us to their shops as long as we pay for what we take away, whose interests are in the end responsible for the alienation, misery, depression and suicides.

In its early days shoplifting was perhaps not regarded quite so seriously. In fact one study found that some shops took the level of their loss as an index of their attractiveness. According to the Home Office. "Retailers . . . may be disinclined to change marketing techniques so long as these gain more in sales than they lose in theft". The balancing point, of course, is concerned with profits, which is as it should be in a society whose wealth is produced to be sold rather than to satisfy human needs. The shops warn us that in the end we all pay because they simply raise their prices to cover their losses to the shoplifters. But if it were possible for a company always to recoup losses in that way they would not need to defend themselves so tenaciously against theft, or wage demands, or a slump in their sales.

The shoplifters go to their work untroubled by the spurious, justifying economics of capitalism's defenders. Except that they might ponder on the greater act of legalised theft which establishes the property rights of the owners and whether a more comprehensive appropriation than their furtive acts might do better for the human race.

Ivan

Nationalism is poison (1985)

From the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

  This article was originally published in the Socialist Standard of March 1973. The case it states is as apt today as it was then.

In the struggle to win the minds of the working class Socialists have to contend not, on the whole, with rational critiques of the Socialist position but with deeply held and unquestioned values. A few of these, for example, might be religion, "human nature", "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work" or the association of Socialism with Russia. One of the strongest of these sacred beliefs, and one of the biggest obstacles to the establishment of Socialism, is nationalism ― the loyalty felt by many members of the working class to "their country", the political unit in which they happen to reside.

Socialists hold that the only real divisions which exist in the world are horizontal ones, between different social and economic groups. In advanced capitalist countries this consists in a division between the capitalist class, which owns and controls the means of production, and the working class, which owns none of them and which has to sell its mental and physical labour-power to the capitalist class in order to live. Feelings of loyalty to a nation-State are purely subjective, having no basis in reality; the working class in Britain has more in common with the workers in other countries than it has with the British capitalist class.

There, is however, an alternative view of the world. This is the belief that the important divisions are not horizontal, between different classes, but vertical, between various nations. A "nation" consists, according to this view, of a hierarchy of men and women who, although having differing incomes, social status and power, all have a common interest in working in harmony for the benefit of the whole unit and, if necessary, in fighting against other nations to defend this interest. This completely mistaken outlook is the one held by most members of the working class and nearly all political parties (including the Labour Party). Most historians reject Marx's declaration that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle", preferring instead to see history as a succession of struggles of nations against foreign domination, of subjects against tyrannical kings and of nations and races against each other.

Broadly speaking, nationalist ideologies and movements represent the interests of the capitalist class. Nationalism as such did not exist in pre-capitalist society and its growth and development represents the parallel development of the capitalist class. Nationalism as we know it today first made its appearance during the French Revolution. In the early stages of the revolution cosmopolitan ideas were prevalent ― it was believed that the rest of Europe would be inspired by France's example and would likewise overthrow the old order. When this failed to happen strong feelings of nationalism developed; France was seen as a chosen nation, picked out to be the standard-bearer of revolution throughout Europe.

Politically, nationalism is ambiguous, in that it can take on a "rightwing" or a "leftwing" form. This depends upon the position of the capitalist class in the particular time and place. If political power is held by the aristocracy or nobility, and the middle-class is struggling to assert itself, then nationalism will have "leftwing" connotations. This was the case in Europe until 1848, when nationalism was a romantic, revolutionary force against the traditional ruling class. However, once the bourgeoisie has captured and consolidated its power, then nationalism becomes a conservative and rightwing force.

Although every nationalist movement believes it is unique, there exist basically these two forms of nationalism side by side. In the advanced parts of the world ― the United States, Britain, Western Europe ― nationalism is conservative, whilst in pre-industrial countries engaged in struggles against a foreign ruling class, nationalism is a "leftwing" force.

The World Socialist Movement opposes all nationalist movements recognising that the working class has no country. There are certain other groups ― the Communist Parties of the world, and the so-called revolutionary left ― which, though claiming to have a class outlook, have a wholly opportunist and ambiguous attitude to nationalism, which reflects not so much the interest of the working class as it does Russian or Chinese foreign policy. These groups fully accept the mythology of the existence of "the nation". For example, from an Anti-Internment League pamphlet:

 The people of each nation have the right to determine how they shall be governed. Foreign interference is a fundamental attack on that right. When one nation takes offensive action against another, by introducing troops or in any other way, we cannot sit on the fence . . . And so to Ireland: Ireland is a nation; Ireland is not Britain; and the Irish have a right to decide whether or not they wish to have any association with the rest of these isles.

This attitude is a complete denial of Marxism; it is almost incomprehensible that people who describe themselves as Socialists should write of the "right to re-establish Irish nationhood" (from the same pamphlet). The Irish republican movement is in essence no different from any other nationalist movement; it was brought into being because of the need of a fledgling capitalist class to break away from Britain and erect protective tariff barriers in order to build an industrial economy. Socialists give the IRA and Sinn Fein no support whatsoever.

It will be argued that Marx and Engels supported nationalist movements and that therefore Socialists should do so today. Such an assertion is based on a faulty understanding of the Materialist Conception of History. Marx and Engels were living in an era when the bourgeoisie was engaged in a struggle to assert itself against the old feudal regimes. The victory of this class was a historically progressive step at that time in that it brought about the re-organization of society on a capitalist basis, the essential pre-condition for the establishment of socialism; and it created an urban proletariat, the only class which can bring about socialism. This was why Marx supported the rising capitalist class in their bid to capture political power. However, once capitalism reaches the point where socialism is a practical proposition, there is no need for socialists to advocate the capitalist industrialization of every corner of the globe; they can concentrate fully on the task of establishing socialism. Hence we give no support to any nationalist group, and in place of the opportunism and hypocrisy of the myriad Bolshevik groupings in advocating "national self-determination", socialists echo the rallying cry of Marx and Engels, "Workers of All Countries, Unite!"

Brendan Mee

Running Commentary: Feel the quality (1985)

The Running Commentary column from the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Feel the quality

Were the doctors who decided to refuse further kidney dialysis treatment to Derek Sage serious, when they said this was because his "quality of life was not good enough" to justify it?

Perhaps Derek Sage was a difficult, demanding, aggressive patient at the Churchill Hospital. Perhaps his behaviour did tend to disrupt the routine there; such places are at times rather like a huge factory with an overworked labour force where the routine is important, for without it everything might grind to a halt.

But does this case set a precedent? If so, there will be some trembling hands among the port glasses of the stately homes. If medical treatment is to be allocated on the basis of quality of life and on the demands the patient makes on social resources, how will the privileged class in society fare when they need it?

For example what contribution, other than helping to fill the columns of the gutter press, does Prince Andrew make to the quality of life? Is he not, with his unproductive. parasitic existence, an unjustifiable drain on human resources?

Then what about Mark Thatcher? Apart from losing himself in the desert in an exercise based on the assumption that he could find his way through it, and failing to become an accountant, what contribution has he made to the communal good?

These questions can be asked of the ruling class as a whole. In what way is the quality of life improved by the activities of this assortment of leeches and play-people? How do the majority of people, those who do the useful, productive work, benefit from those long, expensive nights in the casinos of the world, from those orgies of killing on the grouse moors, from those massively indulgent feasts which are called eating and drinking?

How do we benefit from any aspect of the existence of the owning, ruling, coercing. capitalist class? The answer to all these questions is that there is no advantage to humanity in any of this; in fact the opposite is true, for society will be a much happier, healthier, more peaceful place when their standing is removed and class society abolished.

But of course until that happens the capitalist class do not need to worry about their chances of getting medical treatment. What really settled the matter for Derek Sage was that he couldn't afford, at the time, to pay for dialysis. When the money was found for it he was whipped off to another hospital where patients can be as difficult as they like provided the bills are settled easily.

What it comes down to, is that what matters is not the quality of your life but the size of your bank balance — which is roughly how capitalism judges almost everything.

Cause or effect?

The latest issue of Social Trends, the government's statistical picture of what life is like in Britain today, gives no hope for anyone who waits for such surveys to come to any surprising or original conclusion.

For example, Social Trends finds that those who lost their jobs between 1979 and 1983 recorded higher rates of divorce, alcoholism and notified illness. Anyone with any ability to relate facts to each other will not be surprised at this; indeed, it would be astonishing if it were the other way round.

To the people who rely on selling their working abilities to an employer in order to live, holding a job often has an importance beyond mere physical survival. It is also something to do with status, with self-respect as a person who is usefully contributing towards a home and a family. The sack can bring on a depressive sense of unworthiness, at times leading to suicide.

So it is not unreasonable to expect the unemployed to react to the problems of being on the dole by taking to drink, or falling ill, or having difficulty in their personal relationships. The happy, secure, sunshine-bathed family so beloved of the advertising industry is a cruel myth. The reality of working class life, with its unrelenting struggle for survival, is much less attractive.

But of course, if the statisticians saw it as simply as that they might reason themselves out of a job. So Social Trends also contains some discussion about the sequence in which unemployment and illness are related. Which comes first? Is it more a matter of, say, heavy drinkers being more liable to be sacked when redundancies are in the offing, than teetotallers hitting the bottle as a consolation for being on the dole? Such trivial debating points are the stuff of life for the statisticians, the economists, the sociologists, but how important are they?

The majority of people in capitalist society have to find employment. Naturally, employers prefer to take on workers who are fit and well to those who are persistently on the sick-list or liable to lapse into alcoholism or drug abuse. Workers who suffer from these disabilities are among the most distressed members of their class. Their fate under the pressures of capitalism in the 1980s is a bitter illustration of the relentless degradation of working class poverty.

So whether unemployment and sickness are seen as cause or effect, we are brought back to the basic fact of capitalism's class relationships and of working class deprivation. These are not social trends, but inevitable social features which can be eradicated only by the abolition of capitalism.

Not guilty

Band Aid's record about famine-stricken Ethiopia was a shrewd contrast to the usual Christmas mush about presents and children and jolly sleigh rides. It went some way to resurrect, as well as rename, a not-now-so-popular pop group by appealing to the sickened reaction to the sight of wasting, pot-bellied, fly-smothered children.

In turn, this stimulates impatience at the apparent complacency and indolence of officialdom, fuelled by the notion that governments exist to organise away problems like famine with shipments of food, medical supplies and so on. So why don't they get on with their job. instead of leaving it up to a charitably inclined pop group and their customers?

Then there is the measure of induced guilt, as workers in places like Britain are encouraged to be embarrassed at the level of poverty they are accustomed to while millions of people elsewhere are even worse off, expiring through lack of basic necessities like food. British workers are told that, luckily for them, they live in the "affluence'' of the west and that if some of this were transferred to the Third World it would go a long way to eliminating famine, tropical diseases, shanty housing and the like.

There are many faults with these arguments. which get in the way of promoting the idea of a radical social revolution which will really solve these problems. If governments existed to protect human welfare, their priorities would be very different; they would devote a lot less resources to coercion and destruction and a lot more to humane constructiveness.

A society of class ownership is one of privilege, of poverty opposed to riches and of course there must be degrees of both these conditions. There are very rich people in the world and very poor. However poor a worker may be it may be possible, until we reach the very lowest and most degraded, to find someone who is even worse off. But this does not help the argument; the important point is that rich people don't get caught in a famine; hunger is another symptom of poverty and immunity from it another benefit of riches.

So it is actually a class issue. Throughout the world the majority of people are denied by their class standing full and free access to wealth. The guilt of workers who may be somewhat above the most wretched and doomed of people is a false reaction to the problem; it would be better applied as indignation about the social system which divides humanity into classes, with such catastrophic consequences for most of us.