Notes By The Way: Acton by-election (1944)

The Notes By The Way column from the January 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

Acton by-election

The recent by-election at Acton, London, provided some piquant details to liven up our somewhat depressing war days.

Eight candidates started. The Government candidate was a golf champion (amateur—of course).

One "Independent” told reporters that he was “fighting for more potatoes and nurses for old-age pensioners." He walked about Acton wearing a tin-hat on which he balanced a box bearing his slogans ("Star," 24/11/43). Another Independent Liberal withdrew "so as not to split the I.L.P. vote," showing that he has no illusions about the Liberal, non-Socialist, I.L.P. The cream of the joke, as usual, was supplied by the Communist Party. According to the Press, the C.P. advised Acton electors NOT to vote at all—for any of the four candidates—on the grounds that the Government nominee supported the release of Sir Oswald Mosley. It is a bit awkward—after all—when you’ve been shouting your head off in Trafalgar Square the week before for the imprisonment of Mosley to urge workers to vote for a candidate who favours his release. But if you oppose, or abstain from voting for the Government candidate, you are NOT supporting the war —or the Government.

A classic example of the inevitable results of unprincipled compromise. The C.P., "using Churchill"-(? !), having in twenty-three years advised the workers to vote for each other party in turn. Labour, I.L.P., Liberal, then Conservative, and finally, Coalition, has "united” itself into nothing. It now advises workers not to vote for anybody, and has no intention of running its own candidate.

Its history might well be entitled "Unity Through Everybody—to Nowhere." Small wonder that the "Evening News,” quite unintentionally, probably sub-consciously, when giving the list of guests at a Labour M.P.'s wedding recently, placed, after Tommy Trinder, Bud Flanagan and Miss Evelyn Laye—Mr. William Gallacher, M.P.

The Socialist Party also advises electors NOT to vote for any of the candidates. They are ALL (including the I.L.P,) anti-socialist. But only until such time as the Socialist Party has sufficient support to run socialist candidates.

Beveridge Be-bunked

"1794 AND ALL THAT."

In October, 1943, the Glasgow Fabian Society held a Conference on Full Employment.

At: this meeting Sir P. J. Dollan stated that —

  "Full employment is not a new issue. Tom Paine suggested that there should be full employment in 1794. There is nothing in the Beveridge Report, except the amounts. which was not foreshadowed by Tom Paine in "The Rights of Man.” ("Forward," October 30, 1943.) 

Which is just what the Socialist Party proves in its new pamphlet, "Beveridge Reorganises Poverty."

The difference between the Fabian Society, Labour Party, I.L.P., Communists, Sir Patrick Dollan, etc., and the S.P.G.B., is that the Socialist Party concludes that— .

  "The Beveridge proposals will not solve the problem of the working class. They will level the workers' position as a whole, reducing the more favourably placed to a lower level and putting the worst paid on a less evil level. This is not a 'new world' of hope, but a re-distribution of misery.” (Page 20.) 

  The outstanding social problem of the age is "the poverty of the working class, and not just the additional burdens borne in times of unemployment, old age and sickness, burdens which incidentally Beveridge does little to lift. The poverty of the working class is due to the private ownership by the capitalists of the means of production and distribution. Socialism alone can end that poverty.” (Page 20.)

The social reformers urge the workers to continue chasing the will o' the wisps which have been suggested since 1794, with various amounts, without appreciable result.

This little pamphlet will go far towards de-bunking the Beveridge and other "Plans" as solutions of the poverty problem of the workers.

("Beveridge Reorganises Poverty" is obtainable from S.P.G.B., Rugby Chambers, 2, Rugby Street, W.C.1. Price 3d. Post free 4d.)

Kindersley Lawsuit

Dublin High Court has recently considered an action by Lord Kindersley to direct Lady Aronmore to deliver his grand son Gay to him, so that said offspring may attend Eton.

We wonder if the noble Lord, whose appeals to the rather more modest mass of the people of Britain to go without things they need and invest the money in War Savings ("Give till it hurts"), would be very deeply hurt if it were suggested that he might have saved all those heavy lawyers' and school fees—and put them in his own War Savings!

Or can't a Kindersley attend a Council School?

See Naples—and Die!

The "Evening Standard” for Wednesday, November 3. reports that the Allied Military Authorities evacuated the whole population of Naples, four hundred thousand of them, before they turned the electric current on, as they feared mines connected to the circuit.

"These were Naples’ poorest folk, the little shopkeepers, labourers, factory hands, fishermen and their families," and —here’s the point—"among them were old folk to whom, after years in dingy lanes, Naples’ superb harbour was almost n discovery.” (Our italics.)

In other words, thousunds of people in Naples are so poor—that is, are so pre-occupied with scraping an existence in Naples' slums—that they did not even KNOW' they lived in one of the world’s most beautiful harbours.

The beauty is reserved for those who can AFFORD it. Poverty is the mortal enemy of leisure—which is. the prerequisite for the appreciation of beauty.

A magnificent social vista extends before the eyes of those workers who raise themselves out of the mental slums and trudge the heights of socialist knowledge. By their own efforts they can apprehend, "see" Socialism—and LIVE.

The "Independent” Trader

Mr. Lynch, the President of the National Union of Small Shopkeepers, has sent Mr. Bevin a telegram “pointing out that 100,000 traders have had their businesses closed down during the war.” The telegram states “that traders over forty . . . have been told to sell their concerns and go down the pit.”—(“News Chronicle,” November 4.)

Mr. Lynch might have saved himself the telegraph charges. One of the effects of modern war is the acceleration of the process of the Concentration of Capital. Commerce as well as Industry is being trustified. It has become well-nigh impossible for any appreciable number of working men to achieve “independence” from employers by opening a small shop.

What this “independence” is worth, when obtained, the Hardships Tribunals (representatives of the capitalist class), who instructed small traders to “sell up and go down the pit” have shown.

Nothing can prevent the small traders from being always on the verge of "going down the pit” into the ranks of the wage-working class. Socialism—not small shops—is the way.


Crime After the War

The London evening press has published official reports of important conferences being held now by London police to make plans to deal with the wave of violent crime which is confidently anticipated after the war.

And surely, alongside the other post-war plans to consolidate Capitalism, with the Beveridge Report and the new Plan of London—Scotland Yard's Post-War Reconstruction deserves an important place.

What the police chiefs are mainly concerned with, quite naturally, is the advent of thousands of unemployed desperate men, some even perhaps in possession of arms, highly trained in all the most effective means of violent assault and killing, and inured to bloody violence.

A leading article in the Atlantion, the Atlanta Penitentiary convicts' paper, quotes Lord Wavell:

  "Field-Marshal Wavell is said to have described the modern soldier in these terms—a good soldier must be part burglar, part footpad, part athlete, part gunman, and all guts.”
  "If this is on the level, General Eisenhower is overlooking a lot of good material—and we don't mean at Harvard either.” (The Star, quoted in Forward, 16th October, 1943.)

His commanding officer claimed that Ruby Sparkes was the best soldier in his company.

The London police chiefs are probably right. Alongside of Unemployment, Disease, Invalids, Poverty and Prostitution there will probably appear their bed-fellow—Violent Crimes. Whatever they plan may catch criminals—but will not abolish the cause which makes them—Capitalism.


1,250 Cigars for Cairo Talks

  "Five hundred native servants were engaged to assist five officers and 17 other ranks of the British Army in catering for the delegates attending the Cairo conferences.

  “Three hundred lb. of tea, 37,500 eggs, 400 lb. of coffee, 7,500 lb. of bread, 500,000 cigarettes, 1,250 cigars and 2,000 tins of milk were ordered for the conference by the supervising officer, Major N. P. Jeffery, of the Army Catering Corps, who was in charge of catering services for the Eighth Army in the Western Desert. 

  “A.T.S. sergeants and corporals were brought from all parts of the Middle East to act as housekeepers for the delegations. One A.T.S. sergeant had a full-time job as personal attendant to Mine. Chiang Kai-shek.”—(“Evening Standard,” December 8, 1943.)

The banquet at Cairo was, however, exceeded by the colossal spread at Teheran, where Stalin, as usual, drank over twenty toasts in rare wines.

Well! It seems to be a pretty good instalment of “freedom from want,” if you happen to be one of the “chiefs.”


Austerity at Home

The ”News Chronicle” (December 11, 1943) reported a sale at Christie's on December 13 of fine wines, spirits and liqueurs from the Kentish home of the Countess of Limerick who died some months ago. “Among the top prices were £46 for a dozen bottles of champagne, £60 for a dozen bottles of brandy, and £48 for twelve bottles of German wine.”

“A box of 92 Corona cigars went for £39, or over 8s. each.”

Probably over-paid miners, of course, who don't know what to do with the high wages they're not used to!


Destruction Unlimited

Recently the Press has made much of the accounts by an R.A.F. pilot of the destruction of the Ruhr dams. He describes how a scientist instructed him for months—scientific experiments were made on a dam due for destruction in the Midlands. A picked team trained incessantly to fly at exactly the right height—to ensure complete demolition.

When the dams were burst the damage by flooding was colossal. Millions went down the drain.

Again, as the Allied forces pressed on into Italy the Germans decided to open the flood-gates and flood the Pontine marshes, the reclamation of which (by draining) was claimed as a major triumph of Fascism. In this case the military reason was the opposite one—defence, not attack.

Again the destruction of wealth was incalculable. In a further case, the mighty Dnieper dam, in the Ukraine, was blown up by the Russians themselves to prevent its use by the Germans. The Dnieper dam was the crowning achievement of the Soviet Government; its loss, immense.

In all these cases we see one thing clearly apparent— the destruction of what man has toiled to create by war is staggering. Why is this? The Socialist Party, learning, from Marx, pointed out years ago that Capitalism is in the daft and senile stage now.

Productivity of labour has now become so great that man can harness the rivers to his purpose.

But so long as these great works are privately owned (as they are under Capitalism, even if State controlled) their very ability to increase the supply of wealth becomes the cause of wars, for the shrinking market.

The war solves the crisis, for the time being only, by destruction.

After having converted swamps into fertile lands, or diverted rivers to assist navigation, man blows them all up, so as to start all over again.

In the same way as he digs gold out of the earth, under Capitalism, to put it down there again.

So long as humanity is divided into warring cliques (inevitable under Capitalism) we shall never get much further than making wonderful things, and blowing 'em up.

Socialism, by making the great achievements of modern engineering science the common property of all, will abolish war and the senseless destruction of what should be great boons to humanity, because crises will go with capitalist production.

Horatio.

Shaw on Beveridge (1944)

From the January 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

  "Capitalism will be very lucky if it gets off as cheaply as Mr. Beveridge proposes." 

George Bernard Shaw, "World Review," November 1943.)

The Beveridge Plan (1944)

From the January 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an interview with Maurice Webb of The Daily Herald (July 22nd, 1943), Sir William Beveridge says: " I would not make any important change in my Social Insurance plan, and I am hoping the Government will go ahead with it.”

This was in answer to Webb's query whether, in the light of seven months' public debate on his report, he still stood by its essential principles.

He went on to say that if the plan has any defect it is that it costs the Treasury too little in the early stages, and not too much, as some people allege.

“I do not think any Chancellor of the Exchequer will ever again have the chance to do the same thing so cheaply as now,” said Beveridge.

What an indictment out of the Capitalists' own mouths. Simply thinking in terms of HOW CHEAPLY THEY can try to patch up their old outworn system of society which is as full of holes as a sieve. No thought of human happiness at all.

Sir William said he regarded the operation of his plan as a quite simple and easy matter which ought not to embarrass us or present any insuperable difficulties. “I would like this problem of Social Insurance GOT OUT OF THE WAY,” he said, "so that we can get on to the much more difficult problems of reconstruction which call for attention." 

When asked what he thought the chances were of the Government proceeding to operate his plan, he said he was confident it would do so. And so are we. At any rate it is certain that the Government would not have commissioned Sir William to investigate these matters had they thought he would do it unfavourably to the system to which they so tenaciously cling.

Sir William is now about to begin (as a private venture?) his investigation of Unemployment. He does not expect the Government to be unfriendly to his own personal efforts. Nor do we. For if his findings equal those of his security plan, the Government have nothing to be afraid of at all.

He emphasised that the provision he would make for social security is contingent on avoiding MASS unemployment after the war. "But maintenance of employment doesn’t mean the elimination of all unemployment.” he said.

"In a free society industrial changes and development are bound to cause a small amount of unemployment for which adequate insurance provisions should be made.” But he is quite convinced that given proper direction of resources it will be possible to avoid the grave mass unemployment we had between the wars.

According to Beveridge, then, no real solution has ever been bothered about before to reduce unemployment to the minimum. And even he, the new Saviour of Mankind, openly admits that under Capitalism unemployment must remain, while so many millions are without the means of making life comfortable for those who produce everything and own nothing.

When he talks about adequate insurance provisions, we can be sure that they will be well below what a worker will earn when at work, and for the majority of workers, even in these piping times, that only amounts to subsistence.

Then again, his glib phrase, "proper direction of resources.” And who is going to give proper direction to the resources of the other countries which are bound up with our daily life? And does he think that his family allowances will induce young working-class couples to raise families of cannon fodder “BETWEEN THE WARS" just in time to be old enough to fight those wars?

To Mr. Webb he said it will take about six months to complete his enquiry; at the end of which he will issue a report to the public (on his own private responsibility) setting forth such proposals as seem adequate after a completely objective examination of the whole problem.

Socialists can save him that six months’ enquiry. We can tell him the cause of unemployment. We can also tell him that, short of SOCIALISM, involving as it does the abolition of Capitalism and the Wages System, he will never find the solution.

Samuel Phillips

Voice From The Back: Don’t tell it like it is (1999)

The Voice From The Back Column from the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Don’t tell it like it is

Freedom of the press is regularly made a mockery of in Turkey, with the connivance of the authorities, states the journalists’ defence organisation, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), in a report made public Thursday October 22. “Between January and August 1998 two journalists have been killed as a result of police operations, five have been tortured, fifty-eight attacked, menaced or harassed, and forty-five others have been interrogated” states the report, which adds: “At least six journalists were in prison for press offences at the end of September 1998.” Le Monde, 24 October.

Onward Christian brokers

Christian workers have always felt out of step reconciling their beliefs with the “hard sell” and “bonus envy” culture of the City. But now, according to the Centre for Marketplace Theology, an independent Christian initiative to bring the principles of God to the Square Mile, more Christian and non-Christian traders, bankers accountants and lawyers are looking for an alternative to the City’s prevailing ethos of greed . . . Malcolm Matson, an entrepreneur . . . says, “It only takes a couple of institutions to fail for people to start to take stock . . .” But Matson is well aware of the City’s resistance to a Christian message. In 1993 he was elected as a City alderman on a platform of Christian reform but was “blackballed” by the Corporation of London. “I ended up in the courts where I won a judgement to show they were acting illegally.” Independent on Sunday, 1 November.

Give that man a prize

“If food were distributed equally, the aggregate food availability would indeed determine how much food each person could get. But obviously this does not happen in any actual society. To decide whether a person will in fact be able to acquire enough food, we have to see what he owns, what he can produce with what he owns, what he can get in exchange, and so on. Starvation will result if a person is not able to establish ownership through these means. Starvation is a social outcome reflecting an entitlement failure. Availability of food is only one influence among many affecting that outcome.” So stated Amartya Sen in a BBC Radio 3 broadcast on 21 March 1989, expressing a view that famines are not caused by a collapse in food production but by a collapse in (some) people’s legal access to food, whether through money to buy it or through direct access to land to grow it, which he had already expressed in his 1982 book Poverty and Deprivation: An Essay in Economic Entitlement and Deprivation. Sen has just been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics. So, for once, the prize has gone to someone who has had something relevant—and—true—to say.

EU-phemism

It’s official! We no longer have any unemployed people in the EU. This, at least, appeared to be the conclusion of a commission report on employment rates published last week. According to the document, the Union’s 18 million jobless are not out of work, unemployed or even on the dole. They are merely “Unused labour stock”. So now you know. European Voice, 22-28 October 1998. Marx had a more expressive phrase: “industrial reserve army”.

Body snatchers

Kidnap is the big concern for large companies, says Paul Slaughter, managing director of London-based Task International, which provides bodyguards for big businesses. “Ransom demands worth millions of pounds go through Lloyd’s insurance market every year,” he says, “but it is not common knowledge because companies and insurers do not want to admit there is kidnap and extortion.” During the last two years there have been more than 12,500 known kidnaps. The average ransom demand is about $1 million (£600,000). Financial Mail on Sunday, 1 November 1998.

What a gas!

"The controversial police use of CS gas spray has come under fresh attack after a detective had a heart attack in training . . . The detective constable, who is in his early forties and has not been named was last night in a critical but stable condition in hospital after the incident on Thursday. He had voluntarily walked through a cloud of CS gas to experience its effects as part of a one-day training programme which all police are require to take". Mail on Sunday, 25 October 1998.

Fin de capitalisme?

Pre-millennial tension is not, as is commonly thought, a fear of the unknown. Instead, it’s a fear of the known—the dreadful, sinking suspicion that the alien invasion won’t come. This idea—that nothing will change—is as potent and horrendous as any fin de siècle fantasy of cultural implosion. It means we’ll be marooned in the nineties. Imagine that! An eternity of pointless, non-committal cultural air-kissing . . . We long for something to happen so badly that we don’t care what it is. Guardian, 19 November 1998.

The Transcendental Power of Drama (1999)

Theatre Review from the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our Country’s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker. Touring.

The first time I saw Our Country’s Good, when it was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 1988, I found it difficult to speak for some time afterwards. Fortunately most of the audience, including my partner and our friends, were similarly placed. The occasion has been so redemptive and affirmative, so full of the possibilities of transforming change, that we could only wait in our seats until our emotions quietened. Later we saw the play again, this time with our two children and their partners, and the impact was the same. No surprise then that at the end of the year Timberlake Wertenbaker won the Play of the Year Award for her thrilling, transcendent drama.

Now ten years later, Out of Joint are touring with the play. We caught it at Bury St Edmunds, from where it was going on to Blackpool and Eastbourne. I would advise anyone who is sympathetic to the ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy, to make a special effort to see this marvellous production, played with total conviction by a wonderful cast. With most of the media seemingly intent on dumbing-down—the better to enslave, coerce and imprison compliant minds—here is a tale of blazing vitality which affirms that people can free themselves from both their physical and ideological prisons, and emerge with confidence and a sense of purpose determined to manage their own lives.

Our Country’s Good is based on Thomas Keneally’s novel, The Playmaker. This tells the story of a group of criminals who were amongst the first to be transported to Australia. It describes how the 736 convicts aged between 9 and 82 travelled 16,000 miles and “endured eight months of unbearable hardship. Amazingly 690 survived the voyage. Chained up in the hold of the ship, they were deprived of light, and during bad weather, of air. The hold was cramped: 4 people shared a space 6 foot by 7 foot which was only 5 foot 5 inches high. After three months at sea their clothes had worn bare and they were given sacks instead”. This is the condition in which we see the convicts at the beginning of the play.

The First Governor of Australia, Captain Phillips, is surprisingly sympathetic to Enlightenment ideas, but he is surrounded by officers whose opinions evidence a full complement of alternative views of the world; people very like those we are familiar with today. Collins, the pragmatic Advocate General intent on doing what the law bids, especially if this carries the support of the Governor; the cynical Captain Tench who believes criminality is innate; Major Ross, bigot and sadist; the Reverend Johnson worrying lest he might offend the scriptures; and so on.

But Phillips is a realist who recognises that when the convicts are released at the end of their sentences, they will help to determine the new society being built in the colony. Advised by Tench that once a criminal always a criminal, he quotes Rousseau, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”; and wonders whether if the prisoners are criminals “we might have made them that way?”. Eventually, with the aid of Collins, he persuades his colleagues, to allow one of the junior officers to direct the prisoners in a play. “We belong to a country which has spawned great playwrights: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and in our time, Sheridan. The convicts will be speaking a refined, literate language and expressing sentiments of a delicacy they are not used to. It may remind them that there is more to life than crime and punishment. And we, this colony of a few hundred will be watching this together, for a few hours we will no longer be despised prisoners and hated gaolers. We will laugh, we may be moved, we may even think a little.”

And, slowly, painstakingly, notwithstanding the difficulties—and the sadistic bullying of some of the guards—some of the convicts begin to respond. Playing other parts, and finding the resources in themselves to do so, they begin to see the possibilities of growth and change both for themselves and others. Finally, against all the odds they succeed triumphantly.

Wertenbaker’s play is an eloquent and passionate statement about the transcendent power of theatre. But more than this it is also about the thrilling possibilities of change for us all. At the end of the play the audience continued to clap for almost a minute after the cast had left the stage. As well as applauding the actors and the wonderful script, it was easy to image that they might also have been reacting to the chance of exercising choice for themselves. The air seemed heady with intoxicating possibilities.

Michael Gill

Climate change – Capitalism can’t cope (1999)

From the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Representatives of all the world’s capitalist states meeting in Buenos Aires in November failed to agree on any effective action to cut back the emission of greenhouse gases—because the required measures would have undermined the competitiveness of some to the advantage of others. Capitalism simply does not provide a framework for the rational solution of the probl,em of threatened climate change.

On a long-term geological scale, climatic fluctuations have always occurred with cycles of cold (glacial) and warm (interglacial) periods. In the shorter term, fluctuations often occur on a regional basis and last only decades. For example, the south side of the Sahara has been experiencing drought since the 1960s causing Lake Chad to shrink from 23,500 to only 2,000 square kilometres.

The human cost of such climatic fluctuations is considerable. In the USA in the 1930s continuous high temperatures and low rainfall led to depleted vegetation cover, dust storms and a greatly reduced harvest which left many people hungry and destitute. Like most disasters, however, the human cost need not have been so great, the profit system playing its part. An increase in wheat prices in the 1920s and a rise in agricultural technology had led to short-sighted, profit-led agriculture which left topsoil exposed and made such a disaster all the more likely. Also, like all food “shortages”, it was not a lack of food (US stocks being easily enough to feed all in need) that people suffered from but a lack of money to pay for it.

The 20th century has seen a general warming, attributed by most to the greenhouse effect, which if it continues, would make such disasters, or at least extreme weather events, more commonplace. The century has seen across-the-globe average surface temperatures rise by between 0.3 percent and 0.6 percent, with the 1980s and 1990s being considerably the warmest on record. However, any changes in the vastly more important natural factors—solar activity, volcanic activity, natural carbon dioxide levels—would contribute to climate change more dramatically than would greenhouse gases.

There is still some uncertainty about what is causing global warming:

  “The spasmodic character of the observed warming . . . , is difficult to explain and it will be many years before any clear signal of greenhouse global warming emerges . . . Opponents of the theory of the enhanced greenhouse effect point to the fact that at least half of the warming that has taken place over the last hundred years occurred before two-thirds of the enhancement of the major greenhouse gases took place” (Andrew Goudie, Future of Climate, p.23).

Nonetheless, the profit motive, mainly through cause the unrestricted burning of fossil fuels and deforestation since the industrial revolution and particularly in the late 20th century, has led to an increase in greenhouse gases and so to the real possibility of an increase in global temperature.

A massive global increase in carbon dioxide emissions has occurred from 1,620 million tons in 1950 to 6,056 million tons in 1995, with the US the main contributor but with China fast catching up with a rise of 13 percent between 1990 and 1994. As well as carbon dioxide greenhouse gases include nitrous oxide and methane (now 2.5 times its natural level) which are produced by certain types of agriculture (paddy cultivation and cattle ranching for example), waste disposal and fossil fuel burning. Human-made CFCs, a greenhouse gas, have also been released into the atmosphere with the added result of ozone layer destruction.

Such increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, it seems increasingly likely, will result in increased atmospheric heat retention which will in turn result in an increased average global surface temperature.

On the other hand, another impact of industrial output comes from sulphate aerosols from burnt fossil fuels which could reduce temperature by reflecting solar radiation and modifying clouds. As a worse-case scenario, nuclear war, apart from killing instant millions, could result in a massive global temperature drop below freezing, effectively making the planet uninhabitable.

Global warming, however, appears to be here now, and a very pressing issue it is too with figures for 1998 showing record global temperatures for every month, with increases above previous levels being between 0.1°C and 0.2°C. The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) projects a global increase in surface temperature of between 1°C and 3.5°C by the year 2100.

The impact of such a warming would be particularly important for coastal systems, with more erosion, increased salinity of water supplies, changes in tidal ranges and deposition, and increased coastal flooding. Sea levels could rise as much as 0.5 metres over the next 100 years with potentially disastrous consequences in low lying, heavily populated regions such as Bangladesh. Extreme weather could become more severe and tropical diseases such as malaria could move North and South. According to the IPCC 1996 report, “coastal ecosystems are particularly at risk, including salt water marshes, mangrove ecosystems, coastal wetlands, coral reefs, coral atolls, and river deltas”.

Ineffectual responses

Possible responses would most obviously be to cut down the vast production of greenhouse gases and to establish an effective response to the most likely effects of climate change.

The two major attempts made by world governments to respond to this issue have been ineffectual in the extreme. As one would expect, this was due to the impact that any effective response would have on profits and “international competitiveness”. These two attempts were the proposed European Union carbon tax and the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), both of which aimed at reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

The EU discussed the adoption of a carbon tax but did not adopt it because of the fear that if other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries did not adopt similar policies, the international competitiveness of EU members, or at least of particular industries within it, would be affected.

The FCCC, consisting of 166 governments signing mostly non-binding agreements, was established in 1992 at the Rio summit with the aim of reducing greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. Despite the agreement of all governments in the FCCC, few have done anything meaningful to meet the targets that were set. With production costs set to rise if the FCCC were applied, business lobbies were established to prevent any changes from being adopted. In the USA, for example, the Global Climate Convention was set up in 1989 with the task of representing the interests of the fossil fuel-based industries.

In such a situation, as the failure of the FCCC Conference in Buenos Aires in November confirming it is as near to impossible to achieve any action to reduce future emissions, let alone to produce any framework for combating any rise in temperatures.

Attempts to halt the massive output of greenhouse gases in the hope of preventing a possible global warming have resulted in negligible success, mainly due to capitalism’s higher priority—profit. Judging by capitalism’s lack of response to human need in the face of other vast human tragedies that could easily have been solved without the restraints of the profit system, it seems highly unlikely that flooding or the other consequences of warming would be dealt with in anything other way than as a panic effort at providing vastly inadequate aid after the event.

The issue of climate change is just one of a vast range of problems which capitalism is hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with. Human and environmental needs come a poor second whenever the needs of capital dictate. The history of sincere but failed attempts to correct a system which cannot meet needs leads to the conclusion that a new social system should be tried. A system without money and the profit motive in which the interests and needs of all are paramount. In such a system the challenge of the human impact on the environment can be seriously addressed for the first time. People, and not money, will control their lives and the direction of social progress.

Colin Skelly

Capitalism fails again (1999)

Book Review from January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tigers in Trouble. Ed. Jomo K.S. Zed Books. £14.95.

The current crisis in Asia is usually said to have begun with the forced devaluation of Thailand’s currency, the baht, in July 1997. It then spread to the other countries of the region, in particular Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea which also had to devalue their currencies as outside banks and financial institutions stampeded to withdraw their money.

It would, however, be a mistake to see this as just a financial crisis. As most of the contributors to this book make clear, the financial crisis was a reflection of the situation that had arisen in the real economy where, spurred on by rising export sales which they expected to continue, private capitalist firms had expanded productive capacity beyond what could profitably be sold on world markets. As various different contributors put it:

  “In Japan the post-Plaza recovery [i.e. after 1985] was based on a very strong investment boom, but only to result in excess capacity subsequently. Again, the current difficulties in East Asia are traced back to excessive investment in the region since the beginning of the decade” (p. 42). 

  “Alternatively, it may be termed an over-investment crisis which, in a way similar to Japan, has caused massive over-investment and over-capacity which will produce downward pressure on the prices of traded goods and thus deteriorate the terms of trade of these countries” (p. 57). 

  “Insofar as it is possible to isolate the original sin in this particular Asian drama it must lie in the deceleration of export growth experienced by the entire region from about the middle of 1995” (p. 66). 

  “[In Korea] Lack of investment co-ordination led to overcapacity, which resulted in falling export prices, falling profitability due to low capacity utilisation, and the accumulation of non-performing loans in a number of leading industries, including semi-conductors, automobiles, petrochemicals and shipbuilding” (p. 228).

This became a financial and currency crisis because much of the investment in productive capacity that proved to be excessive in relation to markets had been financed by loans from local banks which in turn had borrowed the money from financial institutions in the industrialised world (US, Europe, Japan) where interest rates were.

Contrary to what some claim, banks do not make profits by “creating credit” by the stroke of a pen but are, as this crisis has again confirmed, intermediaries who make profits—or not—out of the difference between the rate at which they lend out money and the rate they pay those they themselves borrow the money from.

When exports began to slow down some of these loans became “non-performing”, i.e. the interest on them was not being paid. Which meant that the local banks were not going to be able to pay interest to those they had borrowed from. When these international lenders got wind off this they decided to get out. This put pressure on the dollar exchange rate of the local currencies which eventually collapsed, so making the situation of local banks worse as they had in effect borrowed in dollars which now became more expensive. This “credit crunch” meant that they were unable to lend so much to local businesses, even those which were still profitable, so obliging them too to cut back on production and lay off workers.

The slump in production which always follows over-investment and overproduction set in, with countries which had enjoyed in the decade 1985-1995 sustained annual growth rates of over 7 percent returning negative figures and seeing unemployment more than double.

In time—after the excess capacity in relation to the market has been destroyed (capitalism’s solution to the problem of poverty amidst potential plenty)—growth will resume but two contributors (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh) doubt that this will be at the same rate as previously. These countries’ growth has been based on “export-oriented industrialisation”, but “the fundamental problem of insufficient world markets for very rapidly increasing exports still remains” (p. 82). Another, Kregel, is even more pessimistic. He thinks this situation could lead to a rise in protectionism which “is precisely the scenario which was the prelude to the global crisis of the 1930s” (p. 66). We shall see.

Adam Buick

Bring Back The Test Card (1999)

TV Review from the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

They say it is a sign of getting older when policeman look like precocious sixth-formers, when you start bemoaning the lack of professionalism in modern sport and when you go around saying that music is “not what it was like in my day”. But however things may change and standards may decline, good old British TV is the one thing that will stay the same—the best in the world, and nobody can dispute it. Well here’s someone who’s about to. Frankly, anybody who believes British TV is unsurpassed in its professionalism and quality can’t have their eyes properly attached to their brain.

British television over the years has become the most noticeable expression (and exponent) of the dumbing-down of society. True, television everywhere since its invention and widespread application has been an instrument of ruling class propaganda and subtle conditioning. Something watched by people on average for about 30 hours a week is likely to have some influence on those who indulge, and TV’s influence has been huge. But what has changed over the years, as it has expanded as a medium and helped magnify the inanities of a decadent society, has been the quality of its output.

It did indeed used to be stated with tiresome regularity that British television was the best in the world. Look at America, its detractors would say, and be grateful for what you’ve got. Even if this view was complacent, there was almost certainly a grain of truth in it. It would be interesting, however, to ask the self-same TV executives who were putting this argument forward some years ago why, if British TV was so good and American TV so awful, the former has become just like the latter rather than the other way around. Could it possibly be something to do with the globalisation of culture around the modern metaphoric icon of the McDonald’s hamburger? And that America’s cut-throat values of competition, individualism and more competition flavoured with added piety have now triumphed?

Smash the Mac

Of course, the good thing about modern TV in Britain is that, just as in America, there is more choice. Or at least there appears to be more choice. The problem is that even though there are far more cans of televisual baked beans on offer down at the analogue and digital supermarkets, there is nothing to choose between them— they are all essentially the same. The appearance of more choice is just that—an appearance, or even an apparition, that is soon dispelled when reality starts to kick-in. British TV is no longer a serious, quality, entertainment medium. It was never reliable, unless reliably Establishment in orientation, but it had its good points. These have now been drowned under a welter of monotonous crime programmes, tired and repetitive soap operas, moronic game shows and third-rate sitcoms which would have never seen the Commissioning Editor’s desk in the 1970s, let alone had the chance to progress from there into the waste-paper basket.

As in the States, there is more viewer participation than there used to be, and this is one ray of light. In the old days, viewer participation on the BBC constituted having an extraordinarily tall man with an improbably short Auntie appear on the Generation Game so they could be patronised by Bruce Forsyth. Naturally enough, this sort of thing still goes on (after all, why change a winning formula?) But there are now plenty of programmes whereby Jo(e) Public can appear to have his or her say. The problem this time is that these programmes are rarely if ever concerned with serious issues, and when they are (typically on alcoholism, family break-up, etc) the entire debate is framed in tabloid newspaper terms and thereby rendered all but meaningless.

Christmas TV has offered little if any respite from this dumbing-down process. Never exactly a hot-bed of intellectual pursuit, it now appears to be in league with the breweries in a last-ditch attempt to drive people out of the house on wintry nights.

But if you are sitting down reading this after another dose of meaningless and patronising Christmas crud, don’t just wallow in your armchair and complain. Get up and go and do something less boring instead. This journal, for one, is full of relevant suggestions.

Dave Perrin

Get it Straight in 1958 (1958)

From the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everybody knows that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line: a simple, unanswerable, self-evident proposition. Who, then, could fail to think and act on it? Well, in the matter of getting Socialism almost everybody acted otherwise. It remained for small bodies of Socialists, like those who formed the S.P.G.B., to insist that the straight line from capitalism to Socialism is the shortest way and the only way. This takes us back to old arguments that have largely been forgotten but which ought to be remembered and studied by all who want Socialism.

What was needed ?
In the earlier days of the Socialist movement there were men and women who had the Socialist idea and knew what was needed, but who rejected the S.P.G.B. They did so for reasons that seemed to them convincing. They agreed that, for the fundamental social change, there must be a Socialist majority, politically organised, gaining democratic control by taking the machinery of government out of the hands of the capitalists. But when they looked at the workers who had to be won over to Socialism they were dismayed. They saw millions of men and women, ignorant of Socialist principles, harassed with problems of getting a living, supporting the Liberal and Tory parties, dazzled by monarchy, loving a Lord, and awed by the power, wealth and knowledge of the rich. It would, they said, take half a century to turn this depressing human material into a political army for Socialism. What was needed was a quicker way. Something must be done immediately to ease the hardships of the poor and improve capitalism, and in the course of doing this the grateful workers would turn readily to Socialism. So they said to the S.P.G.B.: “You mean well and your case is logical, but logic is not enough. The slow, hard progress on the direct, uphill road to Socialism is theoretically right, but impossible in practice. Human beings being what they are we must leave the straight road and come back later on.”

The Bye-ways of Social Reform
So they laid their plans and revised their programmes. They undertook to keep the great Socialist objective before their eyes, though rather a long way off, but would, for the moment, concentrate on the day-to-day practical things, like minimum wages, old age pensions, abolishing war, getting rid of the Monarchy and the House of Lords. Naturally this would take a lot of energy away from propagating Socialism, and meant turning aside from the main road to go into bye-ways; but only for a time, they said. Then, with an invigorated working class behind them, happier and freed from the worry of war, they would come back to the high road and prove to the S.P.G.B. that the roundabout way was the quickest in the end.

Time to take stock
Now the temporary turning aside into the bye-ways has gone on for half a century and we can examine it again in the light of experience. What do we find? The promised reforms we have in plenty, contributed by Liberal, Tory and Labour Governments in profusion, though without weakening capitalism. But something has gone wrong with the plan. Instead of being freed to come back to the main job of getting Socialism, the Labour Party is now wholly absorbed in trying to win still more reforms, many of them the same ones that they promised to introduce quickly at the beginning. Now they are arguing about which kind of reformed House of Lords we are to have; about ways of modernising the monarchy; about further plans for getting the trade unions under Labour Government to accept “wage restraint”; about whether to fight wars with or without the H bomb.

If they had been the Tory Party, aiming to keep capitalism going as long as possible and willing to make concessions in the shape of social reforms to dissuade the workers from demanding Socialism, it could be said that the original plan had worked very well indeed. But some of the early supporters of the Labour Party genuinely did not look at it in that way. They really did aim at Socialism. But the attractive side roads or social reform led only into the morass of capitalist politics and now they are hopelessly bogged down in it. They have not come back to the high road that leads to Socialism. They have forgotten all about the road and the objective at the end of it.

A striking case in point is the fate of what was perhaps their best proposal, to get good, cheap houses for the workers. The intention was admirable and it seemed especially attractive because many Liberals and Tories were prepared in the interest of efficiency to support it, too; at least they appeared to be willing. Indeed it was a Liberal-Tory government that first introduced rent control and the Labour Party was glad to support it. Then the Labour Party found that the purpose of that Coalition government measure in 1915 had a snag: it was not intended to be low rents with high wages, but low rents to make it possible to keep wages down. Such an idea had not entered the heads of the early Labour Party advocates of rent control, but when the Labour Government came to administer capitalism in 1945 they convinced themselves that the “economic situation” (that is, the economic situation of British capitalism) left them no alternative but to link rent control with the late Sir Sir Stafford Cripps’ “wage restraint." That was one bitter pill that they swallowed. Now events have forced them to swallow another, for they have discovered that rent control, by keeping rents below an “ economic level" makes it not worth while for landlords to keep homes in repair, so that slums have been produced in the past 12 years at a rate faster than when the Labour Party began. They have, therefore, like the Tories, abandoned rent control. As the Manchester Guardian rightly says:—

  “Rent control—the freezing of the rents paid to private landlords for house property—has no serious defenders as a policy for present application. Notwithstanding its rash promise to 'repeal' the Rent Act, the Labour Party has long recognised that the need to conserve our decaying stock of houses makes a change of policy imperative, and that whether the new policy be Conservative or Socialist, rents must go up." —(Manchester Guardian, 5/12/57).

Now the Labour Party is back where it started, looking for another cure for the housing problem within capitalism. But it is not just the housing reform that has misfiled, it is the whole theory of social reform as a means of getting Socialism. Capitalism nullifies them all and thwarts the reformers' intentions. The reformist policy has not brought Socialism nearer and it has destroyed what socialist interest there was originally in the minds of those who joined the Labour Party to get Socialism. The Party that was to show the S.P.G.B. how to reach Socialism quickly has become merely Her Majesty's Official Opposition, an alternative government for capitalism. Even for the purpose of getting concessions from the propertied class they were wrong. As the S.P.G.B. maintained at the time, if the energy devoted to reforms had been used instead to build up a militant Socialist movement the propertied class would have hurried forward with reforms in the hope, though a vain one, of buying it off.

The shortest distance between two points is still a straight line.

Edgar Hardcastle

Notes By The Way: Robbing the Thrifty (1958)

The Notes By The Way column from the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Robbing the Thrifty

Elsewhere in this issue (Fifty Years Ago) two contrasting quotations are given, the first relating to the vast army of people who, forty years ago, were dependent on the Poor Law and the second a quotation from Colin Clark about the 1,700,000 now receiving National Assistance. As he says, the so-called Welfare State has done little more than change the name from Poor Relief to National Assistance.

His main point is, however, the way in which Labour and Tory Governments, by steadily raising the cost of living—60 per cent. since 1947—have whittled away the purchasing power of savings and fixed pensions.

  “While the social services are handing out benefits to some, the Government, through its financial policy, has been robbing the meagre savings of the humble and the weak and driving them back on to the bread line. Not a record to be proud of."

While this was happening to the humble and weak the rich and powerful had great opportunities for adding to their wealth through the rise of prices of company shares and properties of all kinds. Many great new fortunes have been made under the “Welfare State,” while the governments, the Trades Union Congress and the National Savings Committee were preaching thrift to those who could least afford it, and deploring the growth of gambling and football pools.

The Savings Racket in Russia

If the Labour and Tory governments in Britain have whittled away the value of savings by their policy of raising the cost of living, the government in Russia has achieved the same end by much more drastic methods.

In 1947, when they revalued the currency, issuing new currency in place of the old (but much less of it) they cancelled one-third or one-half of all deposits in Savings Banks above 3,000 roubles (about £143), and cancelled two-thirds of the face value of most State bonds. Thus, the worker who had invested £100 found himself owning only £33.

Earlier this year a still more drastic action was taken, particulars of which were given in Soviet News (10th April, 1957). published by the Russian Embassy in London. (See also Economist, 20th April, 1957.) The announcement was made by Mr. Krushchev. He stated that the total amount of loans outstanding was 260,000 million roubles (about £24,000 million), so that the cost of the tax free lottery prizes paid out on the bonds in place of interest must have been nearly £900 million a year, an amount much bigger than the cost of interest on the British National Debt.

Mr. Krushchev blandly explained that the Russian government has decided to raise no more loans, and as this could not be done “unless the payment of winnings and redemptions on the previous loans was suspended at the same time,” the government also proposed to postpone the payment of winnings for a period of 20 to 25 years.” Instead, they would repay the 260,000 million roubles at the rate of about 13,000 million roubles a year (about £1,200 million), but without interest or lottery prizes until the end of 25 years.

Mr. Krushchev did not say that the Russian government was going to do this: they were merely proposing it. and would only carry it out if the Russian workers approved! The same issue of Soviet News reported that the Russian workers had approved.

The suggestion of the Economist as to the reason for this move is that the size and cost of the debt had become so large (nearly half the annual budget) that it had become “a real burden” on State finances. The British Chancellor of the Exchequer must be envious of his Russian opposite number's freedom of action.

The Elusive "Middle Class” Again

In the Observer (1/12/57) Mr. Alan Day had an article on “Inflation and the Middle Classes,” discussing whether it is true, as some Tories say, that “the middle classes” have suffered more harshly from inflation than have other people.

He agreed that “one section” have undoubtedly been badly squeezed—"the pensioners and other retired people living on fixed-money incomes." He also agreed that the same is true of “the elderly working classes," but with the difference that the former have been on a higher standard of living and therefore have farther to fall before they can qualify for national assistance.

Apart from this, Mr. Day believes that the "middle classes" as a whole have not been badly hit, though some of them (he mentions "classics masters” as an example) have suffered because they are less in demand than they used to be. The others have had their salaries raised with the cost of living, though, as Mr. Day points out, it is done with less publicity than the raising of wages of railwaymen. dockers, etc.

But what is of more interest is what Mr. Day means by "middle classes." He deals in the main with people who sell their mental and physical energies, just like dockers, but who call their pay salaries instead of wages. In short, they are members of the working class, and the name "middle class" is inapplicable.

Mr. Day admits this. He confesses that he cannot define the term and writes:—

  “The only possible definition is that people are in the middle class when they think they are.”

But surely the remedy is too simple. If people can belong to a non-existent class merely by thinking that they belong to it, all they have to do about their problem of low pay is to think that their pay isn’t low. Or, since they think the working class are better off, why not think themselves into the working class? Or, better still, why not "think" instead of day-dreaming? Think about capitalism and their working class status in it; then think about Socialism, in which they would be able to live and work as intelligent members of a free society, no longer hag-ridden by notions about class.

One in Ten Americans is a Slum Dweller

Under the above heading the Daily Mail reports a survey made in America by the magazine "Fortune."

  “To-day, some 17,000,000 Americans live in dwellings that are beyond rehabilitation—decayed, dirty, rat-infested, without decent heat or light or plumbing.”

The Daily Mail says that, according to the survey, in America’s biggest and richest cities like San Francisco, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Houston, the number of people crowding into slums is growing proportionately faster than the population of the city as a whole.

The major reason for the slums is said to be "prosperity itself,” because, as jobs are to be had, people come in from small towns and farms, the South, and Puerto Rico.

Horizontal Alcoholics

Many writers have used the theme of a visitor from another planet as a means of taking a fresh look at the imbecilities of our world. Naturally, he cannot see any more or any deeper than his creator and most of the creators, being accepters of the present structure of society, have seen the odd little evils and missed the accustomed big ones. All the same, a visitor from another planet which had a developed capitalist system, and who was blind to the major evils of capitalism, might well blink at some of the crazier activities of official and unofficial legislators and moralisers. A latest example comes from Washington, U.S.A., and was reported in the Daily Telegraph (30/11/57).

Because the local legislature believes "that people are liable to drink more standing up," they made a law requiring that people who want to drink in public must do so sitting down.

The local Restaurant proprietors do not like this and want the few repealed. They point out that, to escape the law, drinkers pop over into Maryland, "where they can drink standing up. This means they can escape tipping."

Until some years ago there was another law which ruled that drinks had to be mixed out of sight of the customers, "so that non-drinkers would not be tempted. It was changed when some bartenders were found making Martinis with olives which customers had left in their glasses."

It recalls the Defence Regulation that at one time made it illegal to treat other people to drinks. (Or is it one of those many laws that exist still but are ignored?).

Does the Washington law allow the customers to take their drinks lying down?

New York Stock Exchange and the British Labour Party

The Daily Herald in a leading article (25/11/57) smugly reports that the President of the New York Stock Exchange—“no Socialist he”—has borrowed from the British Labour Party the idea of government investment in company shares, for that is what he is advising the American government to do "for small firms that need money to grow bigger.”

According to the Herald this proves that "the temple of private enterprise in Wall-street ” has been forced to go in for "public enterprise,” "because it is necessary for the efficiency of industry.”

We are not much concerned with the Herald’s belief that boards of directors will be more efficient and careful when handling government money than when handling shareholders' money, except to say that it is difficult to think of any single reason why it should be so.

What interests us more is that the Herald should so easily manage to get the thing upside down. When the temple of capitalism borrows an idea from the Labour Party all it shows is what queer ideas the Labour Party has, and how much the Herald has changed since its early days when it would have scoffed at the proposal.

A Straw in the Wind

The General Secretary of the Communist Party, Mr. John Gollan, in his report to his executive committee after his visit to Moscow, referred to the question of "Unity of the Socialist Parties and the Communist Parties.” (Daily Worker, 2/12/57.)

Mr. Gollan and the British Communist Party will now and for as long as the instruction holds, describe the British Labour Party as a Socialist Party, likewise the Labour parties in other countries. It was not always so. In 1929 the Communist Party’s election programme "Class Against Class” had this of the Labour Party

  “This Party is the third capitalist party. It lays claim to the title of Socialist Party, but has nothing to do with Socialism.”

At other times they have called the Labour Party social fascists and similar abusive names. Is it that the Labour Party keeps changing? Not at all. It merely means that the Russian government wants a new tactic to be employed towards the Labour Party so overnight it becomes a "Socialist party.” Who knows what it will be called by the end of 1958.

Edgar Hardcastle

50 Years Ago: Vast Army on Poor Relief (1958)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “There is a vast army of men and women wretchedly poor, living under abject and squalid conditions, and existing on a pittance eked out by the poor rate and private charity.” (Statement by Home Secretary, quoted in Socialist Standard, January, 1908.)

Vast Army on National Assistance (1958)

  “We make a lot of silly statements about our so- called Welfare State, in which poverty has been abolished and provision made for everyone. But the number of people on Poor Relief (we now call it National Assistance, but this is only a change of name) now number 1,700,000, nearly as high as the figure for the worst depression years, and very much higher than it was in the years before 1914. when practically none of our present social services were in existence.”

[The economist, Colin Clark, in The Cost of Living, p. 7.]

The Managerial Society Part Three — Fabian Version (1958)

From the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part Two

Management is a nice neutral word to describe capitalist property relations. It has no harsh ring of class antagonism, no hint of social conflict. The word is greatly in favour with Tories and Labourites. Once Labourites talked about capitalism and even hard-faced capitalists, but that was long ago. Now, according to the new Fabians, capitalism has gone, and capitalists— including the hard-faced ones—have been displaced from power by—Management. Some of the new thinkers now refer to capitalism in the past tense, just as historians refer to Rome or feudalism.

Capitalists without Capitalism
Although capitalism has gone, vide Crosland and others, capitalists still linger on, presumably through sheer inertia. It appears, however, that they are but vestigial survivals in the socio-economic body, like the appendix. Time and the managed enterprise plus State planning will wither them away. Actually it was not the new Fabians who pioneered the notion of a departed capitalism, but an old-time Labourite, Mr. Morrison, who in a more remote past used to talk in an old-fashioned way about the capitalist system. Nevertheless with the return of the 1945 Labour Government—which he regarded as a “victory for Socialism,” he declared: “The Labour Party does not propose to abolish the profit motive” (Observer, 28/10/46). In the same speech we were told the “new order” would be based on the recognition that “Management must in future recognise Labour as a service and not as a commodity.” He added that “this new status of the worker would, however, involve new duties as well as new rights.” It may be recorded that, “The victory for Socialism” was unblemished by any attempt of counter-revolution on the part of the capitalists.

To show that by 1948 class antagonism had been abolished, Mr. Morrison in another speech (Observer, 14/3/48) assured us that

  “The modern worker is or should be a responsible partner in industry . . . knocking at the manager’s door with ideas and suggestions.”

After that it was easy for Mr. Morrison to define Socialism as

  “The assertion of social responsibility for matters which are properly of social concern.”

This, of course, is crass confusion. The terms social and Socialism do not mean the same thing apart from the fact that both are derived from society. Anything from the issuing of licences to the supervision of brothels can be of social concern, but they have nothing to do with Socialism, which means the establishment of a social organisation based on free and social access to the agencies of production and distribution.

Enter the New Fabians
After this the new Fabians began to feverishly explore the “new social order” via the New Fabian Essays. Mr. Anthony Crosland, one of the contributors, is certain that capitalism has been abolished. What he isn’t certain about is the form of society which has replaced it, so he plumps for calling it “Statism,” and it becomes his version of the Managerial Society. All it amounts to is the fact that vast units of capital and the enlargement of the State’s economic functions have replaced the laissez-faire capitalism of the 19th century. But even laissez-faire was not a universal feature of capitalism. The U.S.A., Germany, Italy, Japan, etc., all began as capitalist countries, with marked State intervention, so there must be some feature more fundamental to capitalism than laissez-faire. If, of course, State intervention into the economic life of a country is “Statism,” or ” Socialism,” as the new Fabians hold, then the countries just mentioned have never had capitalism. Such are the startling conclusions drawn from the logic of Mr. Crosland.

It is a Marxist commonplace and acutely analysed long ago by Engels, that the growth of monopoly capital is a logical development from laissez-faire. Thus we can say —capitalism is dead, long live capitalism. If the elastic and highly competitive character of 19th century capitalism led by its very nature to monopolistic forms, this does not mean that competition has been eliminated, but, on the contrary, re-enacted on a vaster scale.

Old Fallacies of New Fabians
Because Crossman, Crosland, Roy Jenkins, Albu, and other Fabians believe, as did old-time Fabians, that State economic activity is Socialism, and because they limit capitalism to mean merely the uninhibited free play of market forces, for them State enterprise and the existence of huge formations of monopolistic and semi-monopolistic capitals is the negation of capitalism. Having restricted the content of capitalism to mean laissez-faire, they see State intervention and government policy entwined with capital interests as the decline and fall of the system. They fail to see that the transformation of 19th century State policy from non-intervention in economic organisation to active participation, was not due to so-called Socialist tendencies, but to the challenge by other powers to England’s economic supremacy.

Just as both old and new Fabians have not taken into account the fact that for English 19th century free trade competition there was substituted international competition, in which tariffs and protection were legitimate aids, and for the cut-throat competition of the free market there is substituted the cut-throat competition of the international units of capital. Add to this the colonial policies of the Big Powers, the export of capital and the search for spheres of influence and it is not hard to see how capitalist economics and politics go hand in hand.

Again, it was not socialistic tendencies, but world competition which compelled governments to undertake to subsidise or nationalise those industries whose services and commodities are vital to the needs of the capitalist economy as a whole, i.e., coal, gas,, electric power, transport, etc. And the need for State intervention becomes especially urgent where conflicting interests prevent these industries, when privately owned, from carrying out the necessary reorganisation. Again, the necessity of supplying cheap services and facilities for industry as a whole may mean a rate of profit or a slow rate of return unattractive to outside sources of investment or that private funds have ample and more lucrative avenues elsewhere. In that case it becomes necessary for the government to reorganise certain basic industries essential for the entire economy.

Because Labourites have represented large-scale formations of capital as a development towards Socialism and nationalisation as its stepping-stone, they are forced to maintain that the coalescing of large industry with State enterprise is the virtual elimination of capitalism and its replacement by a managerial system which constitutes the transitional period of Socialism. In such a way has Burnham’s theory been Fabianised or paralysed.

The State and the Classes
Although the Fabians have “abolished capitalism” they have not abolished the State. But they say it is no longer the executive committee of one class but “the social instrument of all classes.” Thus the army, air force, police, judiciary, etc., are all at the disposal of the working class if and when they care to use them unless, of course, another class wants to use them at the same time. Then one supposes it is a question of priorities. No doubt, when workers are on strike, especially in a big way, they may take note of such useful information.

The Fabians have, however, abolished classes, or almost. Thus Mr. Crossman in a broadcast (August, 1948) :—

  “In the Marxist sense there is no longer a bourgeoisie only a vestigial group to remind us of its former dominance. There is no more a proletariat in the Marxist sense, only a remnant to remind us of past miseries.”

Having eliminated the main division of capitalism, the odds and ends left seem hardly worth classifying, although Mr. Crossman still speaks of classes.

Now many Fabians who criticise Marx at least know someone who has read Marx, or someone who knows somebody who has. But such important sources of information do not seem to be available to Mr. Crossman. Otherwise even he might have known that Marx classified bourgeoisie and proletariat as property owners and those who possessed only their capacities to work. The class structure of capitalism—and this is the essence of capitalism, said Marx—is the division between owners of capital and wage-workers, whose means of livelihood consisted of selling their services to the former. Whether the capitalist is a man of great wealth or only moderately so, or whether the propertyless wage worker—proletarian—receives high or low wages does not determine the social relation which capital owners and employees enter into. It is ownership of means of production which is the basis of capitalist society.

That this division between owners and non-owners, in spite of two Labour Governments and fair shares for all, still holds good, can be statistically verified. The Oxford Institute of Statistics tells us 80 per cent. of capital is owned by 10 per cent. of the population, and that 1 per cent. own half of the entire capital.

Mr. Crossman might even get a few facts about the class division of wealth from some of his Labour cohorts. Writing in the Sunday Pictorial (27/11/55), Mr. Wilfred Fienburg, Labour M.P., stated :—

  “Let us face it, there ARE two classes in Britain to-day . . . one-tenth owns nine-tenths of the wealth and there are the others, 45,000,000 others, who own practically no wealth at all.”

And Professor W. Arthur Lewis writing on the Distribution of Property, Socialist Commentary, December, 1955, said:—

  “Two-thirds of the private property in this country is owned by less than 4% of the population. This uneven distribution lies at the root of most of the evils with which Socialists have been concerned in the economic sphere— especially the uneven distribution of income and economic power.”

Yet Mr. Crosland calmly asserts :—

  “It is no longer true that property relationships determine the distribution of economic power.” (New Fabian Essays, page 38)

Concentration of Wealth
In spite of the fact that, according to the new Fabians, capitalism is going or is gone, the concentration of wealth into fewer hands is still a marked phenomenon of this “non-capitalist society.” In fact, Mr. Bevan, a fellow-member of the same party as Mr. Crosland says :—

  “Even among the wealthy classes the concentration of wealth in the upper layers is disturbing—200 companies out of 176,000 in Britain take more than a quarter of all profits A little over 1 % take 60% of the profits.”—(Reynolds News, 15/5/55.)

While Margaret Hall on “Monopoly Policy” in The British Economy (p. 422), says :—

  “By the mid-twentieth century the concentration of economic power was accepted as the normal evolution of the advanced capitalist systems.”

So, in spite of the fact that, according to some of the new Fabians there has been a dispersal of wealth and economic power, there has been no dispersal in ownership. Neither has Mr. Crosland’s non-capitalist society altered the trends of the concentration of capital.

The Mixed Economy
The mixed economy, as it is called by “the new thinkers” to describe extant capitalism is supposed to be the British way of effecting a happy compromise between capitalism and Socialism. It is neither happy nor a compromise. Actually, over nine-tenths of manufacture, building, trade, and finance is privately owned and the remainder of State enterprise—power and railways—are themselves, as we have said, economic appendages to private enterprise. Even people like Mr. Morrison have never envisaged the mixed economy as more than a two-tenths State industry and eight-tenths private industry. Thus the mixed economy has a whisky and soda flavour. Mostly the spirit of private enterprise and a dash of nationalisation to take off the raw edge—but hardly a mixture.

Propaganda Value of the Managerial Society
The concept of a Managerial Society seeks to soft-peddle working class resentment and feeling in the struggles over the division of wealth. Now, the bloated, top-hatted, cigar-smoking capitalist of old-style Labour cartoons has been faded out. Instead we have managers who, though they seek profits, are really interested in the skills and techniques of management and who, unlike the capitalists, are workers, a special kind of worker, but still workers, and between one section of workers and other sections of workers there should be a general unanimity of interests, not conflict. Under the old capitalist society it was division and struggle. Under the managerial set-up it is, or should be, co-operation and collaboration, and if vide Mr. Crosland we might not be “all Socialist now,” we are at least all workers now.

In this way have the new Fabians presented the Managerial Society or, as they alternatively call it—British Socialism.

Ted Wilmott

Beggar’s belief (1999)

From the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Capitalism creates a mass of people who are permanently unemployed and then has to devise means to control them.

In 1728 John Gay wrote The Beggar’s Opera for the London stage. It was an attack on the corruption of Robert Walpole’s government of private men and on the self-interested motivations that were now to drive society. It featured a central character called Mr. Peachum, a turn-key (gaoler), who aided, organised and fenced for the criminal fraternity of London (representing the cut-throat selfishness of Walpole’s ministers) and then turned them in to the authorities when they were no longer profitable to him.

It is not surprising that such a play should appear with the arrival of capitalism within society, with its emphasis on mercenary personal gain replacing any notion of loyalty or community. It is also not surprising that a prison was the chosen setting, nor that the law was seen as a corrupt tool in the hands of a selfish few. What is surprising, is how durable this image from the dawn of Modernity has turned out to be.

The prison was a common feature of 18th century writing, because it was emerging as a new and devastating weapon in the class war. Under feudalism the population could be controlled by fear, by selected spectacular public executions, to keep the whole thing running. Emergent industrial capitalism, however, needed a disciplined workforce, ready to clock on and work like machines, and obey. For industrial capitalism, gory punishments and executions were wasteful, and did not create sufficient internal discipline. Other methods were required.

Thus, with the advance of capitalism, we see less and less reliance on execution as a means of social control, and more and more on the rise of the prison. It is telling that the prominent liberal philosopher Jeremy Bentham advanced, for his idea of a Utilitarian Utopia, the Panopticon, a prison/workhouse/school, wherein from a central tower an observer could see into all the individual cells, without being seen themself. The idea was that the uncertainty of not being detected would prevent the inhabitants from stepping out of line, and thus there would be no offences. This was a fantasy of the factory, perfectly compliant workers, in their place, and knowing their own duty and work. It is also an image from which capitalism has never been able to escape, because it is precisely that discipline that it needs to function. This applies not just in the workplace, but in the whole of society.

Surplus population

The big problem for capitalism is that it contains the seeds for its own discord, so whenever social discipline breaks down prison is deployed to try and patch things up. The prison remains as a solid reminder of the anti-social nature of capitalism.

Capitalism creates such social breakdown because its creates a “surplus population”. Capitalism can, to keep up the compulsion on the workers to work, only fully maintain those workers who succeed in selling their labour power. Some of the rest are maintained at a lower level as an “industrial reserve army” to be used in the event of production expanding. Beyond them is a stagnant pool of the permanently unemployed who are regarded as “unemployable”. In recent years, as economic growth has slowed and the introduction of labour-saving methods continued, the size of this pool has grown. As far as the capitalist is concerned these workers, since they are on no use to them, can go hang (quite literally in the past).

Thus Noam Chomsky has spoken of “a kind of superfluous population there’s no point in educating because there’s nothing to do with them. You put them in prison because we’re a civilized people and you don’t send death squads out to murder them” (interview with David Barsamian, 1971).

The facts for America bear this out. In California education budgets have been slashed, and prison officers earn 30 percent more than lecturers, with a massive increase in the use of prisons. In that state alone over 130,000 people were held in prison in 1995, and it was still rising then. California has allocated $3.2 billion extra to its prison budget since 1992. Nor is California alone, and nor is it the worst. In 1993 California had 607 prisoners per 100,000 population, Texas had 700, and Georgia had 730. The combined totals of the three most populated European states (France, UK, Germany) only reached 84 per 100,000 head of population in the same year. In 1997 in the USA the figure was 645.

In 1995 5.4 million Americans were within the prison system (that includes remand, on parole, in prison, etc.), which works out as about 5 percent of the adult male population. The prison system has been deployed, to great effect, both to ameliorate the unemployment statistics (all those prisoners don’t show up) and to control the “socially excluded”. Within the vast network of controls, the US poor are being restrained and disciplined. This is on top of the increasing number of restraints being imposed by the American “welfare” system.

In recent years in Britain, both under the Tories and Labour, the prison population has began to shoot up as our masters, realising the bankrupt nature of their policies, and the stagnant nature of modern capitalism, decided to copy the US model. According to Home Office Statistics for 1997, there were 61,114 people in prison in the UK, 5,833 more than the previous year, and increase of 11 percent. The prison population has increased by 37 percent since 1993 (when it was 44,570), and it is clear that it is the greater use of custodial sentences that has caused that increase. The number of prisoners per 100,000 head of population has also increased to 111 (120 in England and Wales, 119, in Scotland and 95 in Northern Ireland), second only to Portugal in Europe.

What’s more is the increasing use of private prisons, selling them to a whole bunch of Peachums, to make a profit from locking up the poor (Gay is still with us). The massive amount of spending on prisons is going to create a demand to keep the prisons full (which will be complemented by police arrest quotas), to justify the payments and swell the security firms’ profits. As the system gets more and more expanded, more firms are being allowed a slice of the prison cake. In August this year, two months after the 1000th convict was tagged for home detention (a cheap and easy modern equivalent of the Panopticon, to enable the government to extend prison control even further), the government announced the winning firms that had tendered to administer these schemes.

The Curfew Orders which necessitate tagging are a way of subtly increasing the effect of prison, and controlling the numerous “petty offenders” for whom prison is too expensive and wasteful and option

More discipline

In April, the government announced that it was going to extend its “Welfare to Work” scheme to some lucky young prisoners, to help them find work (and thus buck the 76 percent recidivism rate for young offenders). This linking (apart from being a naked attempt to try and use their “captive audience” to increase the success figure for the New Deal) demonstrates the intrinsic values of the New Con, that it is a device by which the government is trying to control the surplus population, and allocate them to work, whenever they can find it for them. Already they are embarking on making it mandatory for single mothers to attend their initial New Deal interviews. Increasingly more and more strings are attached to “welfare”. Inspectors can call round at recipients homes and look round for signs of co-habitation, with a de-facto search warrant, under threat of extra-judicial punishment (removal of benefits).

Prison is also a device by which to promote and re-enforce racial division in society (as if creating a “criminal class” isn’t divisive enough). In Britain 1.5 percent of the British male population are Caribbean, however a staggering 10.4 percent of the British male prison population are likewise Caribbean. Of the female prison population, 12.9 percent were Caribbean, while only 1.8 percent of the general female population are.

The racism aspect is worsened when one considers that some 2,720 immigrants are held in “Detention Centres” as what the Home Office euphemistically calls “non-Criminal Prisoners”, part of the government’s attempts to prevent immigrants entering the country.

Also prison was used extensively for fine defaulters, of whom some 6,300 found their way to gaol, helping victimise the poor of society even more.

It is worth remembering, that throughout the Thatcher Years, police pay awards were significantly above other public sector pay awards (such as nurses and teachers), as the government fought to secure the loyalty of the police force. The result of this can be seen in the difference between the police involvement in the Miners’ Strike (with an illegal national police force being established, and the miners’ freedom of movement restricted) and recent events in Australia, where the police refused to intervene in the dockers’ dispute telling the government straight that they should fight their own battles. Also, increasingly, local councils are reliant on Close Circuit Television Cameras (with ever increasing sophistication) to keep an eye on us and ensure we are behaving (that damned panoptic eye again). We are not judged to be responsible enough to go about our own lives.

Other attacks on basic liberties abound, police stop and search powers are increased, the right to silence is removed, the right to trial by jury is decreased, freedom of movement is restricted. The change of government has made no difference. Increasingly the state is trying to shape and control our lives through bureaucracy or through the police.

The only solution open to capitalism now, faced with social decay and chaos, is to criminalise the “surplus population”, to lock them up, to take control of them and increase discipline throughout society. Capitalism’s only solutions are brutal and barbaric, and in 1997 70 inmates of prisons killed themselves.

Socialism offers to end the social conditions that cause that breakdown and necessitate enforced discipline, offering instead self-worth, and freedom of association in production, a strong inclusive social identity. The prison is not a symbol of capitalism. Capitalism is a prison, and it is imperative for us to try and break out of it.

Pik Smeet