The Mind of a Social Democrat (1966)

Book Review from the 1966 - number 5 issue of The Western Socialist

The Accidental Century by Michael Harrington (New York: Macmillan Co., 1965)

Next to the world-wide Moscovite movement, the largest phony "socialist" tendency is that which is frequently referred to as "social democratic," or, unfortunately, as "socialist." The Scandinavian social democratic parties, the Labour Party of Great Britain and the Socialist Party of America, are all of this tendency. At some time, social democracy could boast some able theorists. Now, however, it has a very low theoretical level. A recent illustration of this theoretical weakness is Michael Harrington's book, The Accidental Century.

The author is known for his book, The Other America, the fame of which is attributable to its stimulation of the discovery of poverty by the liberal press and mass media. The Accidental Century presents the author's general evaluation of the social developments of the last sixty years.

In the preface, the author acknowledges the inspiration of Norman Thomas, Max Shachtman, and Bayard Rustin. It seems incredible that this trinity of social democracy can be openly acknowledged as theoretical mentors. This in itself speaks volumes on the primitive level of social democratic theory.

The book seems addressed to an audience of "liberal liberals," that is, those who are so very, very liberal. In trying to appeal to this type, the author tones down the more radical implications—conclusions are gently suggested rather than boldly pursued.

One somewhat amusing aspect of the book is that the author has taken on the posture of a literary essayist in an apparent imitation of ex-radical writers like Irving Howe, who have landed jobs as professors. As a man of letters and serious literary critic, Harrington is a flop. His pretensions to scholarship are quite  "mid-cult." For example, there is not even a bibliography provided; nor are any citations given for the plethora of quotations. Literary allusions plus a hodgepodge of synopses of men and ideas do not add up to anything profound. Of course, no doubt,, Harrington makes some correct summaries of literary themes, but his whole process is reminiscent of the term paper of the college sophomore mercilessly carried to great length. Clever phrases, comments and thumbnail sketches are not enough justification for writing a book, let alone one that purports to present a serious political perspective.

The theme of the book is the decadence of traditional capitalism along with the institutions and ideas associated with it. Harrington sees some of these ideas as valuable and he laments the dangers to these ideas from the forces unleashed by capitalist development. The cause of this decadence is the undirected and unintended byproducts of technological changes. This "revolution," as he calls it (his terminology is imprecise), has "unsettled every faith and creed in the West."

This, one would think, would be generally welcomed by Harrington. Yet there is a definite note of ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism in his designation of useful ideas as "Western." He is really expressing sorrow for the decay of social democracy. Had social democracy presented a real alternative to capitalism, its decay would not have been so complete.

Harrington tells us " . . . the one set and undeviating principle of socialism is its commitment to making the . . . free choice of the citizen the principle of social life." A hundred and fifty years ago this expression of the ideals of bourgeois democracy would have been progressive. But today it ignores the recognition that democratic theories must be related to a social context. The social democrat never understood that the science of political economy is the heart of the matter. Democracy cannot exist on thin air; it refers to a social context. Specifically, where the social relations of wage labour and capital exist, democracy cannot exist. It is not that more planning is needed but that outmoded social relations must be abandoned. Socialism is not just that people get what they want; it refers to what can be done when people want and get a different society with different social relations.

William Jerome 

Material World: Shit news (2015)

The Material World Column from the August 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 193-member General Assembly, the UN’s highest policy-making body, declared water and sanitation a basic human right in July 2010. The United States, Britain, Australia, Austria, Canada, Greece, Sweden, Japan, Israel, South Korea, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Ireland all abstained. It has remained a pious resolution, a human ‘right’ that is yet to be implemented. Most developing nations have fallen short of meeting their goals on sanitation and the world’s poorest countries have been lagging far behind, according to a UN report.

The world has missed the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target by nearly 700 million people. The UN has now vowed that the practice of open defecation must be totally eliminated by 2025 (yet another example of wishful thinking).  One in three people, or 2.4 billion worldwide, are still without sanitation facilities – including 946 million people who defecate in the open. The report says progress on sanitation has been hampered by inadequate investments in behaviour-change campaigns, lack of affordable products for the poor, and social norms which accept or even encourage open defecation. Today, only 68 percent of the world’s population uses an improved sanitation facility – below the MDG target of 77 per cent. At present rates of progress it would take 300 years for everyone in Sub-Saharan Africa to get access to a sanitary toilet, said the report. More optimistically in Cambodia latrine coverage has been increasing by 1.3 percent per year– a growth rate at which it could take more than 60 years for the country to be ‘Open Defecation Free.’

There are 41 million people who do not have access to a toilet in Pakistan and as a result they are defecating in the open. In India alone, there are nearly 600 million people (out of a total population of over 1.2 billion) without access to sanitation, according to the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council. The Indian 2011 census found that nearly 70 percent of rural households, as well as over 18 percent of homes in towns and cities, don’t have toilets.

The study says diarrheal disease, largely caused by poor sanitation and hygiene, is a leading cause of malnutrition, stunting and child mortality, claiming nearly 600,000 under-five lives every year. Where there is open defecation, pathogens spread quickly, causing diarrhoea, cholera, bilharzia (caused by freshwater worms) and other diseases. More than 1,400 children die each day of diarrhoea-related diseases linked to a lack of safe water, basic sanitation and good hygiene.

Inadequate facilities also affect education and economic productivity and impact the dignity and personal safety of women and girls. Women across rural India are stalked by sexual predators and raped or molested when they venture out into the fields at night. In one such incident two teenage girls from the village of Katra Shadatganj (228 km southwest of New Delhi), were raped and hung from trees. Since then, at least four other similar cases have been reported in the same region. It subsequently emerged that each of these women came from homes that did not have toilets, and were accosted while attempting to relieve themselves at night. The truth is that the ruling elite (that's the government and multinational corporations who own the country) do not care for those living in abject destitution. India is the world's biggest arms importer. It budgets tens of millions on a Mars space programme. It is spending its money on crap. As far back as 1925 Gandhi said ‘Sanitation is more important than independence’.

The spectacle of ‘socialists’ seeking to improve capitalism on behalf of the ruling class has a long history. During the early 20^th century in America grew a movement called ‘sewer socialism.’ In the Britain the term was ‘municipal socialism’. It sought to reform capitalism on the local level by cleaning up neighbourhoods with new sanitation systems and municipally-owned water supplies. But ‘sewer socialism’ has gone down the stinking drain as a step in the direction of socialism. The socialist transformation of the political and economic system is absolutely necessary to stop the waste of valuable resources on senseless wars and to raise the living standards and quality of life of the vast majority of the population. A socialist party deserves the name only to the extent that it acts towards that necessary social revolution, nothing less. Capitalism is shit: let’s flush it down the toilet.

ALJO

Labour MPs in confusion (1989)

From the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party has always attracted a wide range of politically bewildered do-gooders and reformists. These believe that in spite of their many differences, they can all band together and run capitalism more acceptably than the Tories. In the past some, like David Owen, have decided that their ambitions would be better served by getting out and abandoning the principles they once claimed to hold. Others like Tony Benn have remained despite their out-of-step ideas, to become eccentric and embarrassing curiosities in the eyes of their more ambitious colleagues.

In his leadership acceptance speech of October 1983, Neil Kinnock attempted to forge a new unity by referring to "socialism" in the vague and misleading way that the Labour Party has often had recourse to when convenient:

Our function, our mission as socialists, is to see we gain the power to achieve that, and there is no other way but by Socialism—deliberate organisation of all the resources of humankind and talents. That is the definition of Socialism.

Such loose catch-all phrases may win standing ovations at Labour Party Conferences, but would also receive lip-service from all kinds of other capitalist politicians too.

In contrast to this, the Socialist Party has always held to a clear and precise definition of our aim, and being a democratic movement without leaders, any Socialist Party member could be relied on to explain this clear definition of socialism: a worldwide system of society in which goods and services are produced solely to satisfy human needs, not profit; which will only be possible when all the productive resources are democratically controlled, rather than at present where they are owned and controlled by private individuals or by the state on the "people's behalf". It cannot therefore be a system of buying and selling or bartering. Money will then be obsolete, as will be the need for human beings to starve while food is destroyed or allowed to rot because they cannot pay for it. This definition, of common ownership, production for use, and free access to all wealth, is expanded on throughout the journals and pamphlets of the Socialist Party.

Mixed Economy
In an effort to find out what was lift of Kinnock's so-called socialist unity after five years of his leadership, one of our members wrote to a number of Labour MPs late last year and asked for their definitions of socialism. The results were quite spectacular, confirming our suspicion of utter confusion, disagreement and bewilderment.

Both Kinnock and his right-hand man Hattersley simply sent copies of Democratic Socialist Aims and Values which at the time was the latest creation of the Labour Party's waffle factory in Walworth Road. The nearest that the pamphlet came to defining socialism was as a system of state capitalism, heavily decorated with a generous dose of liberal rhetoric. "The state', we were assured, "is an instrument for sustaining and enhancing the liberties of the whole community". "Free trade unions" would be vital to democracy; but Kinnock has been rather shy about any pledge to repeal the anti-trade union legislation of the past ten years. They trot out the old clichés about "redistribution of wealth" (and this is one promise which the 1974-79 Labour government did keep—the richest ten per cent became richer!) but there is no talk of changing the basis on which wealth is produced, only a recommitment to the "mixed economy", as "there are many areas of the economy where market allocation and competition between companies . . . is essential" and "democratic socialists believe in market allocation". Next they'll be telling us that defenders of capitalism "believe in common ownership".

Tony Benn was one of several respondents who referred us to literature on the subject, in this instance a list of the many books and pamphlets he has written since 1957. He also sent the Aims and Objectives of the Campaign Group, which advocates "a steady expansion of common ownership . . . covering the commanding heights of the economy". It is clear, however, that this refers to state capitalism again, as the leaflet elsewhere speaks not of ending the state, government and law which are all parts of the profit system and of class division, but of subjecting these institutions to "fundamental reform" only. Likewise, when interviewed in the Socialist Standard in 1980, Benn upheld the Clause Four blueprint for nationalisation.

Gwyneth Dunwoody also referred us to the old chestnut of Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution, while Dale Campbell-Savours plumped for "a collectivist approach" with a bit of "democratic accountability" on the side. His comment that "I could have spent several hours pondering in the most subtle detail exactly what I do mean by Socialism, and it might be good for me personally to do so" could well be taken to heart by many of the other respondents. Peter Shore, on the other hand, went for "a society of equals . . . to end the exploitation of man by man". He seems to have forgotten that saying that under Labour governments the exploitation of "man by man" is replaced by its opposite.

Stuart Bell sent several typed sheets, the gist of which can be summed up by his assertion that "the Labour Party believes in a mixed economy where profits are accepted but where profits are accepted but where a better use of them would be re-investment". He also showed an unfortunate lack of prescience by stating (in November 1988) that "Mikhail Gorbachov and the leader of the Chinese people . . . are seeking to democratise their socialism, to make it accountable and therefore flexible and responsive to the needs of people rather than bureaucracies". So, according to his defence of state capitalism referred to as "socialism", is the wholesale slaughter of Chinese workers part of this new "flexible" response?

Self-Publicity
Michael Foot declined to provide a definition, instead recommending various books by Aneurin Bevan, John Strachey, himself and others. Several others also found themselves more inclined towards arrogant self-publicity than to define for us what they stand for. Ken Livingstone assured us  that we would find his definition of socialism in an interview he had had with Tariq Ali. Eric Heffer complained to that to define socialism "would take a lot of time and effort" and recommended instead that we get his latest book. Likewise, Bryan Gould recommend his own book and, as a teasing taster gave us this morsel, that socialism is "a political system designed to break down the concentrations in society and to defuse power as widely as possible". There was certainly a breakdown of concentration as far as these definitions were concerned.

Bearing in mind that many of these people have been elected to power on the basis of standing for something called "socialism", their general reluctance to give a clear and practical definition of what they stand for shows a quite outstanding contempt for the people who elect them to such positions of power. Perhaps the best example of this arrogance came from Robin Cook, whose assistant wrote that "Robin Cook has asked me to thank you for writing to him, unfortunately he does not feel that he is in a position to respond to your request." You could probably get a more helpful response from the queen.

Jeremy Corbyn wrote of an absence of exploitation, respect for the natural environment, and production for need and not profit. In this last phrase, he came dangerously close to a genuine definition of socialism. But the capitalist class need not fear; production for need cannot be introduced on the basis of minority control of the means of production, whether through private enterprise or through the state control which Corbyn stands for. Tam Dalyell limply offered "a system based on the advantage of the community rather than the individual". Finally, Denis Healey (don't forget the MBE) suggested "collective control of society" with the rider that "I hope my views will be clear to you in the enclosed pamphlet". In what might be regarded as a symbolic gesture, however, there was no pamphlet enclosed.

Politically Bankrupt
Then, for some light relief, some Tory MPs were also asked the same question. Teresa Gorman and John Carlisle both felt too bound by parliamentary protocol to be able to answer correspondence from a constituent of another MP. Dame Jill Knight quoted tediously from the Universal English Dictionary about collective ownership of capital. Henry Bellingham wrote passionately about "restrictions of an individuals freedom". Leon Brittan would not offer a definition as he would prefer to leave that to those who claim to be socialists. (He seems unaware that he would have as much claim to call himself a socialist as some of the other respondents!) Finally, our member was warmly reassured by Graham Bright that "as a Conservative MP my aim is to preserve the liberties of my country and ensure its peace and prosperity".

The conclusion to this enquiry, then, must be that the Labour Party remains quite bankrupt politically. Even when invited to define socialism, the rhetoric of confusion continues to churn out. Even in their most visionary moments, these people continue to fluctuate narrowly between the limited horizons of private and state forms of capitalism. They are unable to define socialism clearly or in practical terms because they are caught up entirely in the idea of trying to run capitalism. For a clear explanation of the socialist alternative then, workers must turn to the uncompromising, principled aim of the Socialist Party and our companion parties in the World Socialist Movement.

NW/CS

Why not socialism now? (1998)

From the May 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why does the World Socialist Movement not get involved in social activism, in trying to do something now under capitalism?

There is an endless stream of issues under capitalism and a myriad of organizations are involved in them. These issues are clearly attractive to people and generate a huge amount of donations. For example, Greenpeace International has 2.9 million members, six ships and a $153-million budget (as of September 1996). So why don't Socialists get involved too?

Every organization has to decide what it is working for, and whether that aim is important. When the first of the parties in the World Socialist Movement was founded in 1904, it decided it was going to work for socialism.

The socialist analysis of society shows that capitalism itself is the underlying cause of most of the problems which the social activists want to solve. The social activists attack the symptoms but ignore the cause. Social activists work to reform capitalism, socialists work to eliminate capitalism: the cause of the problems.

If people eliminate the cause of the problems, the problems won't keep cropping up. Instead of trying to fix the symptoms, year in and year out, forever, people can eliminate the cause, once. Then we can all get on with living our lives in a world where solutions actually solve problems, instead of just covering up symptoms.

Emotionally difficult

This approach can be emotionally difficult. It may even mean that someone dies today, who might have been saved by social activism. A simple analogy to explain the socialist perspective.

If a pipe bursts and the water is rising on the floor, one can start bailing the water out while it continues to flow in, or one can turn the water off, and then start bailing. It may take a while to find the tap, and some valuables might be destroyed while searching, but unless the water is turned off, the water will continue to rise and bailing is rather pointless.

Socialists are not immune to the human tragedies which occur daily, by the millions, and which generate thousands of social activist groups trying to stem the tide. Socialists suffer those tragedies as severely as anyone else, but work to encourage people to find the tap and turn it off.

If the reform actions of the social activists saved everyone who might have died today, it would be harder to question their approach. But the fact is they don't even come close. After the Holocaust in the 1940s, people said "Never Again". In the 1990s, genocide was on people's minds again, for a few hours, when the atrocities in Srebrenica, Bosnia hit the front pages. Genocide didn't stop for 50 years. It continued all along in places such as East Timor, but wasn't, apparently, important enough to make the front pages. The environment promoting genocide didn't go away, and so neither did genocide.

If the social activists had solved the myriad of problems, or were even to be able to say that things were steadily improving, that would argue in favour of their approach to social activism.

But that is not the case. The reality is that the reforms which the social activists promote do not work. The social activists are not gaining much, if any, ground, and the same problems continue to appear. It is often one step forward, several steps back.

That is the reality of capitalism. Social activism cannot change that.

Or rather what most people call "social activism" can't change it. Socialists are social activists, and suggest that working to eliminate the cause of the problems is the most valuable type of social activism.

Socialists make a choice. We choose to use our time and limited funds to work to eliminate the cause of the problems. One can pick any problem and often one can find that real improvements have taken place, usually after a very long period of agitation. Rarely, if ever, has the problem disappeared, and usually other related problems have cropped up to fill the vacuum of destruction or suffering left by the "solution".

After hundreds of years of social activism, both the problems of war and poverty, which most people consider to be rather important, are still major problems and are nowhere near solution. War didn't stop in 1918 or 1945, it continues every day, somewhere in the world. The anti-war movement seems to be fading out without ending war.

The anti-poverty movement is now marginal. Eliminating war and poverty are no longer even in the realm of discussion for reformists. The reformists have failed.

Reformism has failed

Some environmentalists tell us that if the environment is destroyed all the rest won't matter. That is true enough, but there is little indication that the huge, well-funded environmental movement is making much real headway. For example, since the Rio Earth Summit, the forests of Brazil, sometimes called "the lungs of the planet", are being destroyed faster than before.

Worldwatch Institute tells us that millions of hectares of tropical and deciduous forest still disappear each year, and carbon dioxide emissions are at record highs.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently reported that major air pollutants have decreased by nearly 30 percent over the last 25 years, while the economy grew. That's good. But does anyone think that the fight for breathable air is over? It isn't, and if industry moves out of a country to get less strict (cheaper) regulations, the fight will get a lot harder.

Maurice Strong, who was Secretary General of the Rio Earth Summit, and now heads the Earth Council, says "far too few countries, companies, institutions, communities and citizens have made the choices and changes needed to advance the goals of sustainable development." Strong also tells us that 100 countries are worse off today than 15 years ago, with 1.3 billion people earning less than $1 a day.

Socialists have been saying for over 90 years that reforming capitalism won't solve the problems and we have been proven correct so far. People who say that it is too early to accept that verdict seem willing to wait another 90 years to see what has, by then, transpired.

If socialists are correct, that would mean another 90 years of war, of poverty, of economic crises, of environmental destruction. It means that and more, as the destructive capability of society increases daily. There is no even moderately compelling evidence that socialists are wrong. There is compelling evidence that socialists are right.

Socialism is what socialists want, so socialism is what they work for, not the reforms of the "social activists".

The Companion Parties of Socialism, in the World Socialist Movement, are socialist parties. They promote socialism because that is all a socialist party can promote.

If you find a "socialist" party promoting "social activism", you'll have found a non-socialist party ignoring socialism and working for reforms, not solutions.

A tiny group of socialists can't solve the world's problems; only a huge, socialist majority can do that. It is up to every individual to create that majority, and to use it to turn off the tap of capitalism, so that the problems can be solved.

Steve Szalai

Material World: Criminals in Business Suits (2012)

The Material World Column from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Few of us have any real understanding of the secretive world of intelligence and undercover operations. Spy thrillers are hardly a reliable guide. But perhaps we can learn a bit from the revelations of whistleblowers – disillusioned insiders who decide to tell all and damn the consequences.

I have before me memoirs by two American whistleblowers –Susan Lindauer, Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq (2010) and Sibel Edmonds, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story (2012). Both books are self-published. Which could mean either that no publisher would risk taking them or that no publisher thought them credible.

Lindauer was a CIA “asset”who represented the US in unacknowledged and therefore deniable “back-channel”communications with various governments. She negotiated an agreement with the government of Saddam Hussein that took all declared American interests into account but still failed to avert the US attack on Iraq. She says that when she blew the whistle, she was arrested on obscure charges under the Patriot Act and that while she was in prison an attempt was made to declare her insane and forcibly drug her.

Edmonds translated tapped telephone conversations from Turkish and Persian sources for the FBI. She discovered that a colleague was working for the very businessmen it was their task to monitor and says when she tried to persuade her bosses to do something about it she was fired. She was also branded a traitor by the government of her native Turkey, to which she could no longer safely return.

Pillars of society

The official mission of the FBI is to fight dangerous forms of organized crime like terrorism, money laundering and the illegal trade in narcotics, arms, nuclear components, and military and industrial secrets. The trouble for FBI agents who sincerely want to pursue this mission is that many of the criminals engaged in these activities are extremely well-connected and influential –real ‘pillars of society’. As Edmonds remarks, most of us associate global crime with gun-toting gangsters and Mafiosi. However,

“Turkish criminal networks consist mainly of respectable-looking businessmen (including top international CEOs), high-ranking military officers, diplomats, politicians and scholars.”  (p. 97)

These respectable people employ the best lobbying firms and cultivate (to put it more crudely, buy) equally respectable American public officials and Pentagon, State Department and White House bureaucrats, securing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in US government contracts for Turkish companies.

Naturally, those officials and bureaucrats do not want to receive FBI reports about the criminal activity of their partners. They made it clearly understood that even raising such delicate matters, let alone acting on them, would “irreparably damage our relations with a key ally.”

Nor did Bush Administration officials want to endanger even more lucrative relations with another “key ally”by having the connections of prominent Saudis with Islamist terrorism brought to their attention. It was much more convenient to blame Saddam.

This does not mean that nuclear non-proliferation, prevention of terrorist attacks and other declaratory goals are completely phoney. In principle, some policy makers might like to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons. And they do not relish the prospect of being blown to pieces in their plush air-conditioned offices. It is just that they do not give these issues high priority. Other things take precedence. Especially making money.

Terrorism, of course, is only a bad thing when it is directed against ‘us’. The CIA has always been happy to fund and promote terrorism against Russia and other rival powers. Sometimes terrorists escape the control of their patrons and ‘bite the hand that fed them’. This is known in the trade as blowback. 

Divided agencies

Neither of the whistleblowers gives credence to the theory that the Bush Administration actually arranged the attacks of September 11, 2001. Lindauer, however, speculates without any proof that a rogue group of US intelligence agents could have given the terrorists a helping hand by laying explosives under the Twin Towers.

In the weeks and days leading up to September 11 it wasn’t easy to discern what exactly top US officials wanted. They received warnings of imminent terror attacks from their own agents and from other governments (the French, for instance), but appeared not to heed them. How was their unresponsiveness to be interpreted? Most likely they were ‘in denial’ – their heads stuck firmly in the sand.

Some agents continued right up to the last moment to repeat the warnings and urge the adoption of countermeasures –for example, the deployment of anti-air defences on the roofs of threatened buildings. Others took a different view.

What makes such things possible is the division of intelligence agencies into numerous small groups that are isolated from one another and responsible only to the very top of the government hierarchy. When –as evidently often happens –they find themselves without clear guidance from above, they may begin to act autonomously and at cross purposes. Thus, in the run-up to the war with Iraq, some groups of agents (like the one Lindauer belonged to) were trying to avert war while others were trying to bring it about.

Stefan

Capitalist crises (2015)

Book Review from the August 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Capitalism’s Crises: A Debate'. Contributions by Andrew Kliman, David Harvey, and Doug Lain. Marxist-Humanist Initiative. 54 pages.

Andrew Kliman wins this debate hands down.  David Harvey has tried to argue that Marx didn’t really hold or didn’t stick to the theory of ‘the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’.  He did suggest that, as labour is the only source of profit and as capital accumulation tended to be labour-saving, there was a tendency for the amount of profit to grow more slowly than the amount of capital invested. So Harvey’s view is easy enough to rebut. The real debate, which Harvey does not enter into, is how this tendency might be related to financial crises and economic downturns.

Some argue that there is a direct link between the falling rate of profit theory and crises, in that, as a result of the introduction of more and more labour-saving machinery over a period, the rate of profit eventually falls so low that there is no longer an incentive to invest so much and so there’s a slump in production.

Kliman’s argument is that the link is only indirect:

‘Marx did not regard the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as an immediate cause of commercial or financial crises. He argued that a decline in the rate of profit leads to a crisis indirectly and after some delay. It promotes overproduction (by, e.g., depressing productive investment demand). It also promotes financial speculation and swindling (…) it is only when debt finally cannot be repaid that a crisis – that is, a financial crisis – erupts, and the crisis then leads to stagnation’  [Kliman’s emphasis].

He also writes of ‘the existence of many intermediate links between the fall in the rate of profit and the outbreak of crisis.’  But with all these intermediate links is this really a falling rate of profit theory of crises? Doesn’t it amount in the end to saying in effect that capitalism causes crises?

No such questions arise over the complementary view that during a slump the rate of profit rises through the devaluation of capital (capital is not a thing but a sum of values), so creating the condition for a resumption of capital accumulation. Kliman explains this well, underlining a very useful distinction between a financial crash (the actual ‘crisis’ point) and the drop in production that follows, useful because those in the Marxist tradition (including ourselves on occasion) sometimes use the word ‘crisis’ to cover both.

Adam Buick

Work - as in holic (1994)

From the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

I am unemployed at the moment, on a small retainer from a government which begrudges it heartily and doesn't miss an opportunity to remind me of the fact. Officially I am an IT trainer and (for the benefit of those at the benefit office employed to stop my benefit) I am actively seeking work. Information Technology, if you don't already know, is for those who think there is something seriously groovy about electronic filing systems and adding machines. I certainly do. In this heady world of techno fashion toys people like me describe new clever filing systems as "sexy", which shows you how disturbed we are.

It is interesting to note in passing that the CBI recently complained that Britain was going down the toilet because its workers are not trained in Information Technology. Anyone who knows anything about computers knows this is all bollocks, and that Britain will go down the toilet whether or not its workers know how to save a text file memo in dBase. I suspect the government takes the same view. I got made redundant, after all.

Being unemployed is of course a pain in the arse, but it has its moments. I'm pretty rich in freedom for one thing, although oddly I fritter that away in just the same way an employed person does money, wondering where it all went at the end of the month and thinking that it never seems to buy anything these days.

But I've had a dose of life in the Office, as a computer programmer, and by god that was like being on a different planet. Forty hours a week for forty years under forty-watt light-bulbs — that was a nightmare I had to get out of bed to experience. The cheery accounts department banter only made it worse. But what threatened to push me over the edge was that I was surrounded by workaholics. I developed a large rash of "attitude problems" and "under-motivation complexes" by being planted among individuals who all wanted to chalk up fourteen hours graft a day and no passes.

Chas was the accountant. Very nice chap, charming, friendly, lots of brains and charisma. One of the new breed of managers, who don't give orders but merely ask "personal favours", giving you the impression that they're your friends and not your employers. Chas works from seven a.m. till ditto p.m. virtually every night (and takes work as well). Then there's "owd Fred", who'd been there since they took all the railings away from the park for Spitfires, and he was putting in a solid ten hours a day. There's Arthur who would look at his watch and say "Christ, I'll get shot . . . " but still wouldn't go home.

Who you know
The Managing Director, a relation in the old family, would come in for an occasional gloat round the office but was usually out fishing in the afternoon, from what I could see.

So did I have the wrong attitude, I wondered? Is office work so exciting that people the world over just can't tear themselves away from it even to go to lunch? In extremis, I turned to friends for a little psychiatric help.

"Look here," I chattered through clenched teeth, manfully containing my hysteria, "is it me or is it them? Who's the nutter?"

"Oh, that's nothing," came the careless reply. "I worked at a place once . . ."

One morning I staggered into work after a particularly heavy night on the piss to discover that the mainframe computer had crashed because, get this, one of the staff had come back to finish some invoices at midnight. Unpaid, mind you.

And when you suggest that socialism could roll along quite happily because at bottom human beings quite like work and would do it paid or not, people look at you as if you're completely deranged.

"Oh no," they state flatly, "you can't have a society where everything is free and nobody is paid to work. No one would do anything. People are too selfish."

Working to rule
People think I'm cynical. Well now, let's not get the wrong idea. I'm not flatly knocking dedication to the job. I wouldn't want to be shovelled bleeding into Casualty one night after being bagged by some drunken bastard in a Volvo only to find that the staff were on their shift break and couldn't possibly be disturbed until halfpast two. I realize that working strictly to rule isn't always practical or desirable. But there are one or two basic economic considerations here that are worth pointing out. Unions exist, as everyone knows, to try to improve the pay and conditions of work. Many however have exactly the same attitude to them that we do to a commercial plumber. In other words, we treat unions like a paid-for service, to resort to only when our pay-packet springs a sudden leak, and not as organizations that require our constant attention. Union reps with hundreds on their books usually can't get double figures into the meetings. The fact that this is partly the movement's own fault for being undemocratic in the past isn't really the point. What is the point is that workers themselves, by opting out of a union which "charges eight quid a month and does sod all" and by agreeing to work extra hours for nothing, are not doing themselves any big favours.

Being an unemployed IT trainer myself, I could take the view that every IT trainer out there who is doing work for free is a traitor to the cause of my personal unemployment. The state won't come up with the funds to pay me, and thanks to them it doesn't have to. According to one researcher, "the cost of replacing the work of the voluntary sector would be well in excess of £20 billion — or some 12p or 13p on the basic rate of income tax." Since we're being so generous with our time, why don't we volunteer to run the NHS as a charitable endeavour and then we can put the nurses out of work too? (Half the hospitals in the country seem to be paid for out of collection as it is).

Meanwhile the Managing Director is presumably still pissing himself laughing down by the river. Whoops, another bite on the line  . . .

Joining the dog race
If you bred whippets for sale, you wouldn't feed them on smoke salmon and then sell them for half their value, would you? No, you'd buy the cheapest dog food you could get away with and charge the highest price you could get. Thus are fortunes made. It's not a matter of greed as some people seem to  think but simply of common sense. Gather ye profits while ye may, because of course the bottom might drop out of whippets at any moment. Not a pleasant thought.

In capitalism people's skills, like whippets, are a commodity. In fact, unless you're rich, it is the only commodity you've got to sell, so why sell yourself short? The selling process is nothing but the frantic pursuit of means to pay for the privilege of living. It's like being born with an overdraft that you can never clear off.

The labour market that we sell ourselves in works like any other market, in other words, on the basis of supply and demand. If you have trained for thirteen years as a doctor, you're a bit of of a rarity and in some demand, so normally you'll fetch a decent price. (Naturally they'll always try and pay you less, if they can get away with it — you have to learn to haggle, which is why unions were created in the first place). If you have trained for thirteen years as a Conquistador you will certainly be a rarity but no one is going to pay you large sums of money to invade Mexico. The labour market is quite ruthless. Some workers fetch good prices and other don't. What's more, like any other market, nothing is stable and demand is unpredictable. The buyers of labour wring their hands and sniff that the recession is ruining them, but they make a staggering profit out of this arrangement.

Just look for a minute at where the profit comes from. If employers were to pay you exactly what you're worth to them, they wouldn't make a penny out of it for themselves. So they pay you less than your labour is earning them and keep the difference, to save up and buy themselves nice clothes, politicians and continents. Ah but, you might ask, how do they know exactly what your labour is worth to them? After all, most workers are not employed to produce anything at seventy pounds a week that you can paint green and charge a hundred quid for. In the real world it's much more complicated than that. So they employ accountants like Chas to figure it out for them (and they don't pay him the millions he saves them either).

Why should a worker give ten hours to an employer when the contract says eight and they're only paying for seven anyway? Add to this the anti-union feeling which also exists, and one begins to see that really, until people start taking their own interest seriously, the owning class has got it made.

Paddy Shannon

Cooking the Books: Hypocrisy and the Unemployed (2015)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

The government blames the unemployed for being ‘a burden on the taxpayer’, denouncing those of working age without a job as scroungers and devising all sorts of schemes to try to drive them  off state benefits and on to the labour market. They do this well knowing that there will always be a pool of unemployed and so that not everyone can get a job, however hard they try and however harsh the sanctions. Their calculation is that bashing the unemployed is a vote-catcher.

Not only do they know that there will always be a pool of unemployed but they also want there to be. They don’t want ‘full employment’ as this would exert an upward pressure on wages, cutting into profits. But the truth sometimes slips out, as in an article in the Times (10 June) by its Economics Editor, Philip Aldrick. He referred to an ‘equilibrium unemployment rate’, defined as ‘the level at which wage inflation pressures build up.’

This used to be called ‘the natural rate of unemployment’ but conceding that unemployment was natural to capitalism was considered too much of a concession to its critics and it is now called in economics textbooks the ‘non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment’ (NAIRU). It’s a bit of a dubious concept (it’s trying to calculate when a boom begins to get out of hand, but even if this could be done it wouldn’t make any difference as nobody could do anything about it). But that’s not the point. The point is that government policy-makers believe it.

Economists differ as to what this rate is. Some put it at 6 percent. The Bank of England puts it, for the UK, says Aldrick, at ‘5.1 percent – the average between 2001 and 2007’. He quotes a City economist (these days the media interview them rather than academics despite their obvious lack of independence) called Michael Saunders of the Citi investment bank, as suggesting that the rate here could now be as low as 4 percent, and comments:

‘In other words, at the economy’s optimum cruising speed, 400,000 fewer people need be unemployed than before the crisis.’

‘Need be unemployed’! That’s a telling phrase, saying that some people need to be unemployed. In the three months to April this year the unemployment rate was 5.5 percent, or 1,810,000. If it had been 4 percent this would still have left 1,316,000 as ‘needing’ to be unemployed.

The government may well, from one point of view, want to cut the benefits bill by reducing the number on the dole, but, from another point of view (that of big business whose interests they serve), to reduce the number too far would set off an upward pressure on wages to the detriment of profits. It’s a balancing act. Capitalist firms will have to pay one way or another. Either their profits are taxed to pay unemployment ‘benefit’ to at least 1,316,000 (or on the Bank of England’s figure 1,678,000). Or their profits will be eaten into by rising wages.

So, however many application forms they fill in, however many courses they go on, however many times they report to the DWP,  between one and two million people will not get a job because, if a substantial number of them did, it would upset ‘the economy’s optimum cruising speed’ and the government doesn’t want that. In saying that they are practising ‘tough love’ by harassing people as a means of helping them to get a job, Cameron, Osborne and the rest (the leaders of the Labour Party too as they are also into bashing the unemployed) are shameless hypocrites.

Sour milk (1986)

Book Review from the May 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Loyalists and Loners, Michael Foot (Collins, £15.00)

Those who were on the left wing of the Labour Party during the Attlee governments of 1945/51 will remember Michael Foot as an heroic but tragically neglected saviour from the rigours of Crippsian austerity. Bevin's Cold War belligerence, Morrison's careerism. If only Foot could be Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer—preferably all at once—it would herald the dawn of socialism in Britain. The British ruling class would be in open alliance with Stalin, pensioners would be elevated into a new privileged class, Harley Street would be jammed with the proletarian sick. But it could never, wailed the left, happen. Foot was too honest, too radical, too fiery to be allowed into government.

By this time those delusions, usually misnamed idealism, had crusted over Foot had made it into a Labour cabinet, with instruction to buy off the 1973/4 coal strike and end the Three Day Week. In time, with what seemed a spasm of desperation, Labour elected him as their leader, which meant that the doorway of Number Ten was in his sights. What happened during those days of power and influence was that Foot proved to be as tamely conventional as the rest—with the difference that he could rely on his reputation for fiery honesty and radicalism to put over such policies as supporting Thatcher's Falklands war. Faced with an embarrassing, probably a vote-losing conference decision for unilateral nuclear disarmament, he fudged the issue. The orderly administration of British capitalism and the profitable exploitation of its working class were as much a priority for him as for any right-winger, any Tory. In the 1983 general election it was clear that Foot's reputation as an intellectually fastidious, but otherwise dishevelled eccentric was a liability. He cynically submitted himself to the party's image-builders, trying desperately to appear like a man you would gladly buy a second-hand election promise from.

In spite of all this, left wing prejudice ensures that Foot's reputation remains unsullied. He has progressed from radical firebrand to elder, ambitionless statesman; clearly in the tradition of political has-beens, it was time for him to get out a book. Perhaps this was not wise: Loyalists and Loners exposes Foot as an intensely patriotic man, a person who is so confused — and confusing — about capitalism's class society that he writes in these crudely ignorant terms: " . . . for the bulk of the British adult population, the moment which must stand out most proudly in their collective memory was 1940" (written in 1965): " . . . the British people were not going to give in to Hitler and Hitlerism . . . (1983).

This collection of essays, book reviews and other miscellania — which Foot audaciously offers as serious analysis — includes many pieces which deny the author's reputation for tireless affability. Tony Benn's abrupt changes in style and attitudes are described as a deliberate ploy to hijack the Labour leadership (if so it as particularly stupid and short-sighted); for David Owen, "The sweets of office seemed to soften even the harsh Owenite accents"; of poor old George Brown, "Some of his judgements were so topsy-turvy, so much in defiance of the common sense view, that the astonishing fact is how long his other qualities enabled him to survive at all". Another "astonishing fact" might be how Foot excuses his own involvement in a party peopled by such monstrosities. Or why he should attack these tricksters ("I called him [Tony Benn] a liar and he got up and left") while he admires others, such as Bevan and Enoch Powell, who are equally guilty. In fact, Powell is treated with all the nauseating chumminess on which capitalist politicians are so copiously nurtured. Powell had a "passion for truth . . . " he was " . . . stating the case against the nuclear deterrent with a crystal logic no one else could equal . . . " the fact that Powell never became Prime Minister " . . . was a tragedy for Enoch, and a tragedy for the rest of us too".

Politics is not a subject for dilettantes. It is all about the power of the working class to revolutionise a decadent, repressive, murdering social system into history. This vital issue finds no mention in Foot's pretentious exercises in irrelevance. Is this the best this reputedly cultured man can do? For sure, Foot knows about the Socialist Party and he lays claim to understand socialism, as witnessed in his contemptible sneer in Debts of Honour:

I naturally went to Hyde Park to hear the orators, the best of the many free entertainments on offer in the capital. I heard the purest milk of the word flowing, then as now, from the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Little wonder, with such lack of insight, that Foot is capable of producing so flimsy, unilluminating and boring a book as this.

Ivan 

The Red Revolutionists (1914)

From the January 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

They have got a "Socialist" Government in power at the local Parliament down Thornton Heath way. The Prime Minister is a Mr. E. S. Evans of the I.L.P. This gentleman at the last General Election spoke for the Liberal candidate, as no Labour man was running. This, as will be readily guessed, supplies the key to the position. It might be expected that the King's Speech, as presented by such a government as would be scraped together by a Socialist (!) of this type, would be in no vital principle different from one that King George himself, with Queen Mary at his elbow to keep him from losing himself in the abstract speculation as to what the contents of the ink-bottle would taste like, might draft if the business had not been taken out of his hands.

The "revolutionary" Cabinet state in their "King's Speech" that: "Widespread dissatisfaction with the working of the Insurance Act serves to show that philanthropic intentions are of less value than the careful application of scientific knowledge." Great Scot! Liberal legislation based on "philanthropic intentions"! This is what blindness to the class struggle brings one to. When the Liberals apply with quite uncanny care, more scientific knowledge than there is room for in the fat heads of these I.L.P. wights, to the task of giving the workers 4d. for 9d., the latter think they meant to give 9d. for 4d., and say that they have failed because their "hearts" were better than their "heads."

Is it out of the plenitude of their I.L.P. experience, though, that they assert that the "funds at the disposal of political organisations are a prolific source of corruption"?

Nothing more revolutionary than "nationalised production of armaments" is even hinted at in the speech and it might have been quite epoch marking in its way. The Secretary for Home Affairs, Scotland and Ireland is a Mr. T. Irving, who left the I.L.P. because it wasn't revolutionary enough. This gentleman ran for the local Council last November, and a leaflet he issued then bore the proposal that, inserted in the Speech, would have made the walls of capitalism quake. It is "Grow your own vegetables."

A. E. Jacomb

A Message for Aldermaston Marchers (1963)

Editorial from the April 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

This might be your last Aldermaston. The March has lost its impact and become an "Easter habit." These marches were originally organised in the belief that with mass support you would be able to force the British Government to renounce nuclear weapons. You have had the support. You have engaged in all types of activity on a vast scale. You have captured the energy and enthusiasm of tens of thousands; you have distributed leaflets and pamphlets by the million. And yet you have failed.

The past six years has seen the development and stockpiling of all types of nuclear weapons in this and other countries. Polaris submarines (and no doubt their Russian counterparts) keep their patrols day in and day out. Bombers with their loads are on round-the-clock alert. The neutron bomb—"the ultimate weapon"—is on the point of production. In fact, nuclear-wise the world is "hotter" today than ever before. Russia, alike with the other capitalist powers in her concern for expansion and supremacy, proudly tells of her multi-megaton explosions. The British Government defence estimates of £1,838 million will be passed by Parliament without any real opposition. The United States armaments bill this year will be about £19,000 million.

Your protests, both constitutional and direct action, have had no effect on the Government. The Labour Party, like the Conservatives, are committed to nuclear weapons. Your own leaders have spoken evasively and you have found yourselves wavering.

In the knowledge that you have not "banned the bomb," many of you have widened your interest, and nuclear disarmers are brought more and more into other forms of protest. You have protested about housing, about poverty and hunger, in the hope that you may be more successful in these fields than with the Bomb. But you will not succeed, and your continued disappointments are leading to apathy and disillusionment. Before this happens to you, why not face certain facts about which there can be no dispute.

We live in a world if private property relationships—where the minority have and the millions have not. A world ruled by buying and selling with profit as the driving force. Competition and tension dominate our lives. Men compete for jobs and capitalists compete for trade. Exports are a "must" for every country, and the big fish eat the small ones. Today America and Russia face each other, armed to the teeth, both proclaiming their desire for peace and the need to preserve their "way of life." But "peace" and "preservation" lead to the brink of war as in the recent Cuban crisis.

War solves nothing. You say that you are not in favour of war, yet you support the very system that gives rise to it. Your main concern is that war should be "humanised." For you it is war with nuclear weapons that is immoral and suicidal.  We can understand your desire to abolish these weapons, but the position you take is inconsistent and unrealistic. Socialists are opposed to war in all its forms. But first and foremost we are opposed to the capitalist system which gives rise to war among other social problems. You are concerned with removing evils in isolation. This cannot be done. Policies of social reform over decades have not fundamentally altered the class basis of society; poverty, unemployment and insecurity are still with us..

Many of you, supporters of the Labour Party, will be in a difficult position at the next General Election. Your loyalty will be tested to the point that you will vote Labour in order to keep the Tories out. You hope that a Labour Government will be more likely to renounce nuclear weapons, a hope that has no justification, for the Labour Party is committed to protecting British capitalism. And to do this, they will ask you to fight with all the monstrous weapons of modern technology.

Have you ever thought that Socialism might be the answer? Not nationalisation, or some vague talk of public ownership but a world based upon common ownership of the means of wealth production. A world where men will co-operate to serve the interests of all. Not production for buying and selling and killing, but to serve people's needs—for use, not for profit. Socialism will be world-wide and means the abolition of classes. The Socialist Party of Great Britain and its companion Parties in other countries work to this end. It is the only solution to war and the other major social problems.

A pipe dream you may say. But only so long as you and millions like you are prepared to waste your time dealing with the effects of capitalism instead of removing the causes. The Socialist Party offers you no easy way out. Socialism will not come about by marches, sit-downs, or days of prayer. Socialism requires the understanding of men and women. It is not a blind faith, but a conviction based on knowledge.

The choice is in your hands. Either the present type of world continues with its threats of war, unemployment and poverty, or you get down to the job of building the only desirable alternative that will be in harmony with social development. The real choice before mankind is Socialism or Capitalism. Where do you stand?

An Important Event (1930)

From the December 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

Formation of the Workers' Socialist Party, (U.S.A.)

Ten months ago we announced that our comrades in the Socialist Educational Society of America had launched a monthly paper, "The Socialist." After a short but useful life, publication of the new journal had to be suspended owing to the aggravated unemployment which hit the U.S.A. The promoters of the paper found their own pockets less able to meet the expense of publication because many of them were out of work, and the audiences at street corner meetings were in a similar plight, and could not buy the paper, or give so generously to collections. For the time being the American organisation has to manage without a journal, but this has not prevented the carrying on of meetings and educational activities, and we are pleased to chronicle the founding of the "Workers' Socialist Party of the United States," on September 8th.

Like ourselves, the members of the American Party are asked why they are adding to the number of Socialist parties. Is America not already blessed with a multiplicity of so-called Labour, Farmer, Socialist, and Communist parties? Why start another? Why increase the confusion? The answer is the one given by the S.P.G.B. in this country; there is no way of challenging and destroying the confused theories and spurious programmes of the parties which promise to reform capitalism except by building up from the ground an organisation of Socialists working only for Socialism.

It will, perhaps, sound odd to justify the new party in America by referring to something outside America, but it will, nevertheless, be found true on examination that the condition of the working class in Great Britain is proof enough of the need for the Workers' Socialist Party in the U.S.A. In Great Britain we have the counterpart of all of the reform parties of the U.S.A., but with a difference. Here they have been more successful, and one of them, the Labour Party, has twice formed the Government, and before that was represented in Coalition Cabinets. In this country, a very large part of the reform legislation demanded by bodies such as the "Socialist Party of America," which is the American equivalent of the I.L.P., has been put on the Statute Book. But to what effect? Every year that passes, despite its certain crop of new reforms, shows the working class rather worse off than before in relation to the wealth and power of the capitalist class. Every year shows more clearly the need for a Socialist Party striving for Socialism, and the uselessness of all of the parties of reform. Reform of capitalism through Communist violence is no better than reform through the Fabian "inevitability of gradualness." Only the Socialist Party has consistently pointed to the one sure road. After our years of effort it is, then, encouraging to see comrades taking up the task for themselves in other countries. Like the Socialist Party of Australia, the Workers' Socialist Party of the United States is based upon our Declaration of Principles, with only the minor alterations required because of the different terminology of the institutions of that country.

We offer our congratulations and good wishes to our companion parties.

Darkness at Noon (1969)

Book Review from the February 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Great Terror by Robert Conquest, Macmillan, 84s.

Robert Conquest is no friend of Russia and that fact alone will probably be enough for most supporters of the Russian regime to discredit his account of Stalin's purges. 

The one unfortunate fact, for the  tireless Russophiles, is that Conquest's stuff is carefully documented, with even its trivia with testimony. And what is perhaps the most terrifying part of the book ― "casualty figures" of the purges ― computed in part from Russian government population statistics.

It is arguable, whether most of the book was needed. There is little to be  gained from yet another account of the Kirov murder, the trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev, the pitiless system of arrest, interrogation, execution or slow, living death in the labour camps. Most of it has been done, somewhere or other, before.

The casualty figures are another matter. There are of course no official details to go on; it must all be done by combining the evidence of participants ― some of them NKVD officers ― with official statistics and matching it all up with the Census of 1959. Conquest's conclusion, which is staggering but difficult to argue against, is that, as an under-estimation, twenty million were killed ― by execution, in the “collectivisation drive", in  the  camps ― under the Stalin state capitalist regime. 

The Nazis could hardly have improved on this. And for some of the time this wholesale murder was going on, we were told that the Russians were our gallant allies, contented under the solicitous care of Uncle Joe. Henry Wallace, who was then the American Vice-President, visited one of the worst camps in 1944. The place was specially tarted up and Wallace duly found it "idyllic".

This sort of story should make even the most obstinate Tory pause for thought. What happens to a man who fights for power over capitalism? The answer cannot be avoided and the last forty years have given evidence galore. He does the job as the system demands and on those terms everything ― murder, torture, everything ― is justified.

Ivan

Between the Lines: Timewasters 1 & 2 (1992)

The Between the Lines Column from the January 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Timewasters: I

This year will see another gang of Labour fakers doing the rounds of kissing babies and promising the moon. Those who recall the records of past Labour governments will be insulted by such appeals; those who do not will be massively disillusioned if they place faith in Kinnock and Co. to build the New Jerusalem (or even a few more council flats) for them.

Those who fall for Major's smooth-talking deception about the creation of a classless society will be no less betrayed. Michael Cockerell's four part Class Rule (BBC2, Tuesdays, 9.50 pm) was a series which made great use of the archives to show how since 1945, British governments have repeatedly appealed to workers on the basis that they would abolish class, and have consistently confined such hopes to the empty realm of rhetoric.

After the Second World War Attlee defeated Churchill on what seemed to be a genuine tide of working-class desire for a more equitable society. When Labour won Hartley Shawcross is supposed to have said that "We are masters now", and Ministry of Information propagandists were paid to make films about how Britain belonged to everyone. Of course, the harsh reality of who owned Britain intervened and the Attlee government ended up using troops to smash strikes and telling the wage slaves to accept austerity for the sake of economic success -  for their bosses. Attlee was voted out and there then followed the thirteen wasted Tory years during which the aristocratic slob Churchill was removed and Macmillan, born into inherited class parasitism, posed as being an ordinary chap. The Macmillan Tories appealed to the One Nation fraud that Britain belongs to us all.

Cockerell's programme (number two in the series) showed how the Tories used sociologists to tell them that they needed to win over the skilled, aspirant workers if they were to hold on to power. In the "never had it so good" fifties the Tories built council estates for "respectable" wage slaves who would be bribed into submissive contentment. Tory MP's adopted proley tones for broadcasts which sought to depict them as just one of the lads - like vicars talking at youth clubs or Maxwell addressing his ex-employees at the pension fund meeting. It was all a disgraceful fraud. Unlike Maxwell, who had the fortune to drown before he was caught out as a transparent crook, the Tory Ministers were caught while still in office, and after Profumo the "we're all in it together" rhetoric of One-Nation Tories had an altogether hollow ring to it. In a desperate bid for sympathy the Tories appointed an unelected Prime Minister called Alec Douglas Home who did not know that feudalism had ended.

Home's undisguised condescension towards the lower orders was exploited fully by the super-opportunist Harold Wilson, a Labourite con-man who got to power by telling lies about the hardship of his miserable northern youth. (In fact, the liar had been an economics don at Oxford before taking up major criminal fraud in Westminster).

It is easy to forget that Wilson won the 1964 election on an appeal to working-class sentiments of wanting to do away with the rule of chauffeur-driven Lords and rich men. Today Wilson is a rich Lord and so is the fraud who followed him, Jim Callaghan. These lying tricksters perpetrated every known Tory stunt in their bid to run British capitalism on behalf of the minority owning class - yet it is a fact (not reported by Cockerell) that when Wilson beat George Brown for the Labour leadership in 1963 he was sent a telegram by the Central Committee of the Communist Party stating that at last a genuine socialist had become Labour leader!

Another fact missed by Cockerell, in an otherwise well-made series, was that Major was not saying anything different from Thatcher when he made his hollow promise about creating a "classless Britain". Often forgotten by political observers is a radio interview given by Thatcher in 1985 in which she said:

"I want people to have the right to property, the right to occupational pensions, the right to shares; the right to be the same as everyone as everyone else because they have that independence. That is my dream . . . Like Karl Marx, I want to get totally rid of class distinctions."

(Quoted in The Times, 6 May 1985).

Under Thatcher the number of people living in official poverty more than doubled. Major's efforts will be no different from that of Thatcher or of Macmillan; and who but the most naive expects the future Lord Kinnock to be any different from Messrs Wilson and Callaghan? The lesson of the Cockerell series is that this century has been one of broken political promises and shattered working-class dreams of equality. It is time for a change.

Timewasters: II

But still the pseudo-socialists emit their poisonous ideological gas. On Question Time (BBC1, 5 December) a faceless, nameless (at least, I have forgotten) Labour MEP spewed out the same old Labour cliches about how they would re-organise capitalism. On the panel with her was Tony Benn, who thinks that it is still 1945 and that what Attlee said he was doing was true. The MEP looked at Benn like something you scrape off your shoe; he sneered at her undisguised Toryism. While Labour's soul was being fought for all whispers of a socialist revolution were strictly off the menu.

Not so the following night when Timewaster III, Anne Murphy, appeared as one of the guests on the appalling midnight Channel Four phone-in show, Ring My Bell. Murphy is a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain -  that's right, the one that folded its tents and agreed to die of shame. Murphy's crowd want to hang on to the ghost of the old Stalinist monster, and in so doing she did more harm to the case for socialism in her replies to callers than MI5 could wish to do unaided. Murphy told callers that "under" socialism workers would be paid more and that, while we might be "critical" of Ceausescu, he was the leader of a good socialist country. Murphy plans to stand against Ken Livingstone in the next General Election as a Revolutionary Communist. Perhaps the workers of Brent East can hold a competition to decide which of them comes from a more dishonorable, detestable and failed tradition.

Steve Coleman 

Cooking the Books: The Other Adam Smith (2015)

The Cooking the Books Column from the August 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Socialist flat-earthers must wake up to reality,’ ran the headline in an article in the Times (11 June) by ex-Tory MP Matthew Parris, ‘Capitalism has conclusively won the day but Conservatives need to get over their reluctance to defend private profit.’ According to him, ‘free-market economics’ has been proved right compared with ‘socialist economics’ just as Darwin’s theory of evolution has when compared with creationism; so ‘socialist economics’ should be treated in the same way as creationism.

‘This century’s intellectual consensus should show Marxism the door. Whether strictly defined as public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or more loosely as state direction of the “commanding heights” of the economy, socialism must be counted as definitively discredited.’

He’s talking about state-run capitalism of course, not genuine socialism. As a way of running capitalism it could be said to have failed (certainly failed to improve workers’ lives), though not to the extent that Parris suggests. The state is involved so much today in the running of capitalism, via taxes, subsidies, regulations, laws and economic policies, that to call the modern capitalist economy a ‘free-market’ is a misnomer. It’s a state-regulated production for profit market economy.

Basic to any form of capitalism is the pursuit of profit. This is what drives the economy, whether it is the private profit of private capitalist firms or the surplus of state-owned industries. Where, as in most countries currently, most industry is owned and operated by private enterprises, governments have to recognise that these enterprises have to be allowed to pursue profits. All governments have to be ‘business-friendly’ to avoid provoking an economic slowdown.  As Parris put it,

‘You cannot have free-market economics without the profit motive. You cannot have the profit motive without letting the pursuit of private profit weave itself intimately into the fabric of ordinary citizens' lives.’

He wants Adam Smith to be taught in schools in the same way Darwin is ‘as a scientist whose analysis is now the consensus amongst most thinking people.’ Smith certainly tried to analyse in a scientific way the market economy that operated in his day and he did correctly conclude that, under it, ‘it is only for the sake of profit that any man employs a capital in the support of industry’ and that:

‘The consideration of his own private profit is the sole motive which determines the owner of any capital to employ it either in agriculture, in manufactures, or in some particular branch of the wholesale or retail trade.’

There is no harm in teaching this scientifically-established fact in schools, irrespective of whether or not this is considered the best way to organise the production and distribution of wealth (which it isn’t but it’s what we’ve got). There are other things in Smith. He outlined a labour theory of value (Marx got the idea from him) and suggested that it was labour that added value to materials in the course of production and that this was the source of profits as well as wages. As he put it:

‘The value which the workmen add to the materials … resolves itself … into two parts, of which the one pays their wages, the other the profits of their employer …. He could have no interest to employ them unless he expected from the sale of their work something more than what was sufficient to replace his stock to him.’

Labour as the source of profits! This may explain the reluctance that Parris noted of supporters of capitalism to defend private profit as this would have to involve defending the exploitation of labour.