Greasy Pole: The Chingford Factor (2001)

The Greasy Pole Column from the October 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Norman Tebbit announced, before the 1992 general election, that he would not be standing for the Commons again the Chingford Tories might have decided that they had had enough of being represented by a fanatical, hard-line, militant Thatcherite. But they didn't think like that – they voted to replace Tebbit with Iain Duncan Smith, a candidate Tebbit approved of so much that he later described him as “a remarkably normal family man with children”. In the 1992 election, breaking the new man into the constituency, Tebbit took Duncan Smith canvassing. A woman asked them what they thought about fox hunting. Perhaps Tebbit thought this was too deep and complex a philosophical question to be left to the new candidate. Before Duncan Smith could draw breath Tebbit informed the woman: “Madam, these are the teeth of a killer. This man must have meat or die.” Well you might say he has had his meat now, as the carcasses of Ancram, Portillo and Clarke testify.

Duncan Smith's victory provoked some anxiety among the more vulnerable Tories about his stance on issues like Europe, gay rights, capital and corporal punishment. Would this ex-Guards officer, they worried, blast away their fragile majorities with some brisk, parade ground statements which would provide some juicy copy for the media but cost them their seats? Whatever their reservations they might have consoled themselves that their new leader is honest, brave and consistent. Well if that had been true Duncan Smith would be unique among politicians. In December 1999, answering a question on BBC News Online about the chances of Portillo thrashing Hague in a leadership election, he said:

“I don't think any leadership contest is imminent or likely to take place...William Hague's leadership of the Conservative Party is beginning to show real results and that we are seeing damage to the Labour Party. The simple answer is there is no leadership competition. I am very happy with William Hague's leadership.”

Brains 

He was not always so ardent an admirer of the man he replaced as Tory Leader. In the 1997 contest Duncan Smith not only opposed Hague but ran the opposing campaign of the prominent Eurosceptic John Redwood. He clambered onto the Hague bandwagon only when Redwood was knocked out of the running. Then there was the matter of his sudden change over Clause 28. Some of his supporters were worried that his unbending stance on this issue clashed with their efforts to recast the Tory party as a caring, listening devotee of diversity. Duncan Smith seems to have been impressed enough by this apparent threat to his votes to forget his “principles” and change course, promising to “review” Clause 28.

One possible explanation is that he is not the smoothest of operators. “Nice chap. Army officer with all that implies” was how one contemptuous Tory MP described him in the late 1970s. “His pronouncements are half-baked, immature ideas . . . not the sharpest knife in the drawer” was a more recent, less tolerant, assessment by someone who was, but who is probably not now, a shadow minister. Remembering his history as a Maastricht rebel, it is now assumed that, for lack of any better ideas, Duncan Smith will want to preside over a kind of festival of right-wing mania in the Tory party. Well this may happen but it need not be so. Harold Macmillan, for example, emerged as Tory leader in 1957 carrying the hopes of many in his party that he would prevent any more moves to dismember what was left of the British Empire. Then he disappointed, not to say outraged, them with policies epitomised in his “winds of change” speech. John Major was elected largely because he was Thatcher's favourite, the man chosen to carry on where she had left off. Then she – and a lot of other Tories - quickly learned that they had made a mistake. There is no reason to assume that the experience of Duncan Smith's leadership need be any different.

Chingford 

And if he does change course, how will that be received by the Chingford Tories, who chose him as a worthy successor to Tebbit, memorably mocked by Denis Healey as “the Chingford skinhead” and scourged by Michael Foot as “a semi house-trained polecat”? What, in other words, goes on in that northern segment of the great metropolis? Well there are two Chingfords. The north bit is greener and more affluent and the south drabber and more depressed. As a constituency it sits uneasily on the electoral map, an isolated blob of blue surrounded by a red sea of Labour in Walthamstow, Ilford North and Edmonton. The local government reforms introduced by the Heath government moved Chingford from Essex, with its undertones of rustic tranquillity, into the London postal district of E4, which gives a few estate agents a few headaches as they sweat to persuade customers that they are not buying into the East End, the Krays, Albert Square and all that. The Knowhere Guide informs us that “If you're out for a fight it's a great place if not it sucks!” And there is the mystery of the large, attractive swimming pool which is no more because it was changed into a waterpark and then sank without trace.

Chingford's residents are mainly white, in manual jobs and “home owners” – which means they are painfully buying a house which in all practical terms belongs to a bank or a building society until, if they can avoid any disasters like repossession, it eventually becomes theirs. In the better part of the town they live in broad, leafy streets, some of them bordering on Epping Forest. This is the estate agents' idea of traditional Tory suburbia. Its devotion to the Conservative Party may be quieter and more refined than in places like Basildon but it did not stop them choosing a political rottweiler like Tebbit as their MP and electing him again for the next 18 years. Such was Tebbit's power in the party that he might have become its leader, if Thatcher had not held on until his time had passed. And now the Chingford Tories have Duncan Smith who has scaled that height; no doubt they are delighted with their choice.

As a constituency Chingford is in bits and pieces; for example part of it is in the London Borough of Waltham Forest, which is not famous for being green or affluent. Of the 20 wards in the borough 16 are in the top 20 percent for housing deprivation and 12 are in the top 12 percent for income deprivation. In August 2000 the unemployment rate in Waltham Forest was 5.7 percent compared to a rate in Chingford of 2.6 percent. It would not be unusual if a sense of living in an oasis of placid security surrounded by a desert of deprivation bred a defensive neurosis in the Tories there, inducing them to put their trust in people like Tebbit and Duncan Smith to represent their fear and grievances at Westminster and beyond.

Enemies 

But the Chingford Tories should temper any delight in their MP with caution. Inevitably, Duncan Smith has made some enemies on his way up and they will be looking for a chance to settle old scores. And then there is his rag-bag of a front bench, including the surprisingly resurrected Michael Howard, all of them watching and waiting for him to fail. The task he has taken on – the defeat of Blair's government – is so massive that success at the next election would be unprecedented. The best he can aspire to, for years yet, is to dent Labour's majority. If he can't make that dent large enough to allow his party a real hope of returning to power in the near future he will probably be going the same way as Hague. One thing he must have learned by now is that he leads a party of ruthless in-fighters and back-stabbers who have sent better men than him marching off into the sunset.

Ivan

Who Benefits from Aid? (1971)

Book Review from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rich Against Poor, by C. R. Hensman. (Allen Lane. The Penguin Press. £2.95.)

The Postwar world has seen a shift in policies to the Third World. As imperialism left the scene, "aid" came into fashion.

This book emphasises how the aid process conceals a process of exploitation as great as the earlier imperialism. While Western governments pride themselves on their charity to the starving millions, the truth is that their role is no more one of benevolent altruism than was that of the old-style pawnbroker.

Like the pawnbroker, they take a fair whack in interest charges: Ghana is still paying off Nkruman's debts at a crippling rate (medium-term loans alone take 20 per cent of her entire budget). Aid-giving governments would prefer to see their customers come again than to set them properly on their feet financially.

So the developing countries will never become "developed" while seven-eights of the aid they receive is directed at supporting the military and political rulers of these countries. Only one-eight of aid given by America is actually of a purely economic nature, and even then, it is not directed at alleviating poverty, but has what Hensman calls an "anti-development" role.

As a former Brazilian Minister of Economic Planning wrote:

This development of which we are so proud has brought about no change at all in the living conditions of three-fourths of the country's population. Its main feature has been a growing concentration of income, both socially and geographically . . . The majority of the Brazilian population has reaped no benefit  . . . Because of the anachronistic structure of Brazilian agriculture, it has led in many regions to a relative increase in the rent from land, thus rewarding parasite groups. Similarly . . . a variety of subsidies—in the name of development—have very often put a premium on investments which . . . favoured a still greater concentration of income in the hands of privileged groups.

Aid, then, plays its part in helping the rich get richer and forcing the poor into ever deeper poverty. 

This is on the whole a useful book, covering a lot of the ground. Hensman is especially thorough in discussing the Indian sub-continent, Latin America and America's history and contemporary scene. But there are many notable gaps: Africa and the Middle East are barely mentioned, and the Green Revolution not at all.

While unsympathetic to Russia, he is typical of the unscientific leftist in viewing China through ludicrously rose-coloured glasses. Lyrically, but without supporting evidence, he tells us that in China the poor are free.

Again typical of a woolly sheep of the left is his style. He uses many undefined terms loosely—terms such as rich and poor, development and anti-development, proletarian democracy and the war on poverty—and when he starts to argue the case for the "abolition of anti-development", it is far from clear what he is proposing.

His conclusions, after assembling a mass of interesting information on sordid international capitalism, are astonishingly naive and jejune. He exhorts his readers to boycott products made by "exploited" or "sweated" labour; to make contact with their fellow-poor (possibly by infiltrating aid agencies?) and finally to overthrow the bosses and establish "proletarian democracy". Only then can the developed nations "stand beside the poor in sympathy and solidarity".

In no way does Hensman examine what is meant by exploited labour or the nature of an exploiting class. He does not explain how a closer acquaintance with the bourgeois classes of Karachi and Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay—a cannibal breed who exploit their own kith and kin as viciously as any colonial power—could improve international working class solidarity. As for his revolution—presumably along Maoist lines—Socialists see no merit in a society still dependent on the labours of a wage slave class, with mankind still divided by barriers of nationality and a continuance of today's divisions between the haves and have-nots.

The book has other faults: Hensman has provided a grotesquely inadequate Index (e.g. no mention of Russia/Soviet Union, and although he refers to Swift's "modest proposal"—about Irish depopulation—one finds no reference in the Index, either to Swift or to Ireland). A book of this sort should also have a bibliography—especially at this price. 

Charmian Skelton

On Moscow's hit-list (1985)

From The Place Where I Live Series in the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The village of Tatsfield is set high on the North Downs on the Kent/Surrey border; elevation 800 feet. The area is on of gentle landscapes and is always a delight as these change with the seasons.

The community has a long history and during its earliest times had to deal with a problem of water supply. With the high elevation, rain sweeps away and disappears rapidly through the chalk on which the village sits. With the water table hundreds of feet down, wells were impossible. Yet for the early neolithic community, whose implements can still be found, the area had its advantages. The higher ground was more clear that the densely forested lower surrounds and this gave space and freedom of movement. The ability to move and communicate made for the area's long history.

The Romans were based here and the site of their road passes through local farms. At nearby Titsey lies the ruin of a Roman villa. The Normans also based themselves here and it was they who first built the local church, six years after the conquest. Again, communications were important in feudal times as evidenced by the Pilgrims' Way which still passes through the village. This was the link between Canterbury, London and places west.

A local anachronism is that Tatsfield still has a squire with rights including that of appointing the local vicar. Now, this remnant of feudalism exists side by side with the ubiquitous commuter who has taken over the village in recent times. Tatsfield is now a dormitory village and every morning commuters stream out to Croydon and the City. In the recent past most of the villagers were local farmworkers. Now, hardly anyone works locally and very few do a socially useful job of work. Seeing the morning exodus one might think that a good proportion of the millions in commerce, insurance, finance and banking sleep in Tatsfield.

The congenial landscapes belie the fact that the military have often had a presence here. Walking through local woods one becomes aware of platforms of concrete, each now under a layer of leaf mould. These are not archaeological mysteries but emplacements which were sited on the high ground during World War II as part of the South East defences of London. These also ringed the Battle of Britain airfield at Biggin Hill, three miles away.

The advantages of elevation now provide for a more sinister and lethal form of communications. With the development of wireless in the 1930s the BBC constructed a radio communications centre in Tatsfield. This became a world-wide listening station and it was from Tatsfield that the first Sputnik was detected in space in 1957. This installation now forms part of an American run electronic guidance system for targeting missiles on Russia and Eastern Europe.

A recent Socialist Standard made the point that the preoccupation of CND with the siting of cruise missiles is irrelevant. A more important reason why Britain would be a target us the siting of these guidance systems. This American base in Tatsfield means that the villagers go to their beds at night in the knowledge that they are very high on the Moscow hit-list. Somewhere in Eastern Europe is a missile aimed at Tatsfield.

Provided we win over a majority workers to socialism and avert the pressing of those lethal buttons, east or west, what would be the part played by the village in socialism? The old facility for communications would come into its own directly for needs. The existing base, now used for the military, could be adapted with satellite links as part of a world communication system, bringing the world's people together, especially as part of co-operation in dealing with problems.

The only important productive resource in Tatsfield is land and with the enactment of common ownership the squire's estate and local farms would become the common possession of the whole community. As the Tatsfield community would then become part of urgent worldwide action to increase food production, how could this best be achieved?

Ironically, when walking over the fields and noting the existing use of land one realises what can be learned from what happened during World War II. The land in Tatsfield is second grade agricultural land and what it grows best is grass and cereals. At the present time it is mainly down to pasture for beef and dairy products. Nevertheless, with effort, much higher calorie values can be extracted from the soil with cereal and vegetable production. In the second world war, as elsewhere, the policy was applied in Tatsfield of converting a lot of grassland into arable food production with such crops as wheat, barley, potatoes and a wide range of other vegetables.

This required more workers and one local farm was worked by over fifty people; it is now run by only two, the farmer and his son, with some seasonal work put out to sub-contract. As a result of the war policy of converting grassland to arable with more workers, food production in Britain was increased by 70 per cent. The fifty people working one farm in Tatsfield contributed to that increase.

Initially, in socialism, the community in Tatsfield might fight a very different kind of war — on world hunger. The means for increasing food production could be similar. Where would the people come from? There are plenty in the village already. There would be no insurance, banking and finance so some of the people now doing this could provide for real needs by looking after crops. In this way, the present commuters could enjoy the fresh experience of seeing what their own village is like during daylight hours on a weekday. Transport and energy could be used, not to send people out of the village making futile daily journeys to the city, but to send food to people who need it.

Any visitor to Tatsfield could see the possibilities for increased food production, especially with horticulture. With the people running glass production sending glass, the Tatsfield community could provide a range of fruit, vegetable and salad crops almost all the year round. There is also a fish farm in the village so the expertise required for expanding this form of food production is already here.

How could this increase in food production be co-ordinated with that of other communities? Again we learn from the war years. In 1939, the Ministry of Agriculture set up co-ordinating committees in each of the 61 counties of England and Wales. These in turn divided the work between district council committees. The same arrangement could provide for decentralised democratic control of productive resources in socialism. Tatsfield is part of Tandridge District Council which is one of eleven district councils in Surrey. We could therefore have local representatives on co-ordinating committees at these various levels so as to ensure that the overall pattern of food production was kept in reasonable balance, making appropriate use of various soils and growing conditions.

In socialism the term "our village" would for the first time take on some meaning. We would create a genuine community, not in any insular or parochial way but simply as the immediate means of working with each other as part of our wider responsibilities within the world community. We would even repair and maintain the church. It has a lot of history but capitalism can't even look after that properly.

Pieter Lawrence

Editorial: The Stricken Labour Party (1960)

Editorial from the November 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

The same gale that paralyzed the Trade Union Congress in the Isle of Man in September struck the Labour Party at Scarborough a month later.

The delegates went through the usual form of pledging their unity and fraternity at the end of the proceedings but it never had a more hollow ring. And the end is not yet. In the months to come the factions will wrangle bitterly about the leadership, the victors at Scarborough will try to press home their advantage and the defeated will fight back and try to reverse this conference's decisions.

Seen in perspective the British Labour Party, and like-minded parties in many parts of the world, had three main claims to working class support; the home policy of social reforms and full employment to lessen the evils of capitalism, the policy of wholesale nationalisation of industry, and the policy of seeking international harmony, avoiding war and promoting disarmament. In the course of years and during three periods of Labour Government first one and then the other of these aims has run into disaster. In 1931 it was the "economic blizzard" and record unemployment that ended MacDonald's Labour Government and split the party. In two world conflagrations they found themselves helping Tories and Liberals to impose conscription and wage war, and in 1951 it was the Labour Government that launched the great cold-war rearmament programme. Even in 1924 the Labour Government ran into trouble, at the time over its armament building directed against France. On the home front nationlisation has turned into an election loser and the Tories have shown themselves adept at taking over social reforms from the Opposition—the latest example being the new pension scheme, invented and popularised by the Labour Party before being enacted by the present government. And the Tory government, luckier than Labour was in 1929-1931, has had years of low years of low unemployment and thus robbed its opponents of a useful weapon.

What distinguishes the Labour Party's present troubles from earlier ones is that ever since 1951 they have been under attack and internally divided over home and foreign policy together.

But what was it that hit them ? What has happened to bring so many good intentions to such an impasse? The answer given by Socialists when the Labour Party was founded is still true and should by now be glaringly evident. World wide capitalism is a social system of class division, owning class and working class, and the exploitation of the latter by the former. Internationally it is a ceaseless struggle of the national ruling group for dominance of resources, trade routes, strategic ports and markets. Everywhere the driving force is profit and everywhere strife and violence are the marks of the system. Labour Party policies of trying to secure smooth running and harmony at home, through reforms and nationalisation, are as irrelevant to the real task of creating a new classless social system as are its hopes of international peace through United Nations.

It is the violent impact of capitalism impact of capitalism, not abstract theorising about policies, that is shattering the Labour Party.

The Labour Party's near disintegration is nit the failure of the movement for Socialism. Their extremity should be our opportunity. The tide of disillusionment that threatens to overwhelm millions of Labour supporters gives Socialists a greater chance of gaining support for our affirmation that only by the overthrow of world capitalism and its replacement by Socialism can there be a happy future for human society.

We cannot refrain from pointing out to Labour supporters who are now discovering that their Party has been on the wrong lines all these years that the S.P.G.B. said at the beginning that it could not happen otherwise. It was foredoomed from the start. 

The Hillsborough disaster (1989)

From the June 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

In treating such events as the Hillsborough disaster, a degree of circumspection is called for. Even the Labour Party has been reticent about scoring political points despite the fact that Dennis Howell can quite correctly claim to have warned of the danger of perimeter fencing ever since its introduction. It is equally valid to point out that forgetting or ignoring what happened on that Saturday is not an option for concerned, thinking humans.

Collecting the Cash

The tragedy (for in its inevitability it was a tragedy in the dramatic as well as the popular sense) has united far more than the people of one city as it involved Liverpool, the most successful British club of recent times. So among the dead and injured were workers from many parts of the country. Those still alive know where they stand in the list of priorities, as every line. of enquiry into the causes of the catastrophe shows that the comfort and safety of the ordinary spectator came plumb last. Among the fans there may be many who understand why comfort is low on the list of priorities; a rudimentary grasp of profit maximisation would tell them that providing high quality facilities for those who pay what they can afford, regardless of the facilities available, makes bad business sense. What many didn't realise was that the same principle applies to safety. It may seem facile to point it out, but the fact that it is a commonplace should not detract from the relevance of the commercial priority of collecting the cash. The huge gates which were fatally opened at the thirteenth hour contrast starkly with the turnstiles which represent the most cost-effective way of making sure everyone coughs up.

Other priorities were less obvious: the allocation of tickets in open disregard of requirements was done not for the benefit of Nottingham Forest supporters but for that of the police, who did not want the bother of directing groups of people around the stadium. The perimeter fencing had emergency access not for desperate people to get out but primarily for the police and stewards to get in. The medical facilities were more suited to a studio theatre than a massive open-air stadium.

In this disaster, as at Bradford, the authorities are in the uncomfortable position of having no hooligans to blame. Although The Sun in its egregious fashion was pretty quick to make unsubstantiated and irrelevant accusations, the general observation was that crowd violence was not a factor. In fact the hooligan problem and the attempts to deal with it have always been red herrings as far as stadium facilities are concerned. Leaving aside the fact that most "football" violence occurs outside the ground, the idea that it is contained by creating conditions inimical to all but those who are handy in a ruck has always been more absurd than paradoxical. Similarly nobody has explained why they think people who are prepared to indulge in flagrant anti-social behaviour in full view of the police will baulk at using a forged, stolen or borrowed identity card if that scheme comes into operation.

Naked Incompetence

As usual on these occasions the experts and leaders stand naked in their incompetence, highlighted in the aftermath by the contrast with the improvisation of ordinary people. As those in the stand were pulling desperate fellow spectators from the chaos of the terrace the police were driving others back into it. As the authorities were wondering why there weren't enough stretchers the fans were commandeering the advertising hoardings. As the mourning of those who had every right to be very angry went ahead in a touchingly dignified manner, the press were publishing pictures of people in their death agony with scant concern for any offence which might be caused.

Never fear, though, the prima donnas were not slow to get in on the act and show their "concern". Thatcher turned up in Sheffield on Sunday, which was probably a wise move because had she turned up in Liverpool one doubts even the formidable Merseyside Police could have guaranteed her safety. Charles and Di popped into the hospital for want of something better to do. Liverpool FC donated £100,000 immediately to the relief fund, that sum being approximately one twentieth of what it paid for the exclusive right to make a profit from the footballing skills of Ian Rush. And, of course, Religion PLC. was there: socialists do not doubt the sincerity of the priests' sympathy, but it is plain that some explanation has to be given as to why the all-loving god let this happen to people who fill the collection plates.

Sane Society

Many socialists would argue that there is no place for competitive sport in a sane society. The present writer does not subscribe to that view, but it is clear that no sane society would in any imaginable circumstances put 50,000 people one by one through what amount to rat traps in order to verify their right to access to an area from which there is no escape in time of crisis, and all for the benefit of a tiny minority with whom they have next to nothing in common.

The late Bill Shankly is reputed to have said "Some people say I regard football as a matter of life and death. That's nonsense—it's far more important than that". Shankly's obsession with sport is legendary but we must now wonder if, had he witnessed the Hillsborough disaster, he would have rephrased that particular witticism.

JFU

Cooking the Books: Who Pays the Working Poor? (2015)

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

‘Better Than Raising the Minimum Wage. Help Americans who need it with a major, carefully crafted expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit’, was the title and subtitle of an article in the Wall Street Journal (21 May) by Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest capitalists.

His argument was that the modern economy requires more and more skilled jobs and fewer and fewer simple, unskilled ones and that, as a result, there are now fewer jobs for those capable only of doing unskilled work. As he put it, this

‘is simply a consequence of an economic engine that constantly requires more high-order talents while reducing the need for commodity-like tasks. The remedy usually proposed for this mismatch is education … But even with the finest educational system in the world, a significant portion of the population will continue, in a nation of great abundance, to earn no more than a bare subsistence.’

According to him, raising the minimum wage other than marginally won’t solve this problem but would in fact make it worse because it would drive out of business small employers who could not afford to pay it. He’s got a point. No employer will take on someone whose labour can’t produce them an adequate profit, in some cases which doesn’t even reproduce the value of the labour power they purchase.

He proposes instead to use the tax system to pay a tax credit to workers incapable of commanding a wage above the poverty line. This exists in the US under the self-explanatory name of ‘Earned Income Tax Credit’. It is in effect a subsidy to employers as it allows them to pay below-poverty-line wages knowing that the state will top up their employee’s income to this level.

A similar scheme exists in Britain, introduced by Gordon Brown in 2003 when he was Chancellor. But while Buffett wants to increase payments in the US George Osborne announced in the July budget that they are going to be cut. The arguments used were revealing, openly admitting that tax credits are a subsidy to employers.  Rachel Sylvester, in her column in the Times (23 June) quoted an ally of Ian Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, as saying:

‘You’ve got some big businesses that are making huge profits but paying their workers poverty wages. They get away with it because workers are supplemented by the tax credit system but why should ordinary taxpayers subsidise these companies?’

Unlike Buffett, the government here wants to increase the minimum wage (renamed in Orwellian a ‘Living Wage’), so shifting the burden of paying for the working poor from the state to employers.

Clearly, then, there is a dispute within pro-capitalist circles as to how to deal with the problem of workers unable to sell their low quality, ‘commodity-like’ ability to work for a so-called ‘living wage’. Does the state try to make employers pay them a living wage? Or does it top up the low wages which are only what employers are prepared to pay? Or again, does it simply pay them ‘welfare’ for not working?

In the end, as with many political issues, it comes down to which section of the capitalist class should bear ‘the burden’. The last two options involve taxing the capitalist class as a whole, one of them to subsidise some employers. In practice, the first does too in the end as a higher minimum wage increases the number who are ‘unemployable’ and so dependent on a handout from the state.

Greasy Pole: Crack down on the fraudsters! (2001)

The Greasy Pole Column from the February 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The queen's speech is when she dresses up in large, heavy and expensive clothes and rides in her carriage to the Houses of Parliament—but only to the House of Lords because, as a result of something which happened a few hundred years ago, she is not allowed into the Commons, who have to be brought to the Lords to listen to the queen by Black Rod, who is called that because he carries one. The MPs go to the Lords with each minister walking beside their opposition shadow, often sharing a private joke but presumably not about the queen because they have all sworn loyalty to her.

When they get to the Lords they hear the queen telling them about the work which is planned for them in the next session, which is a bit boring for the ministers because they know it already. The speech is punctuated with the phrase "My government will . . ." as if the queen is telling the government what to do when really it is the other way around. Some people sneer at all this as a mess of outdated flummery. Others regard it as essential to our way of life and think that without it civilisation as we know it would crumble into the dust.

In December, for example, the queen told us that her government is going to crack down on Benefit fraudsters—people who claim state benefit when they are not legally entitled to. The government certainly thinks this is important because they say it costs between £2 billion and £4 billion a year and some ministers have been known to hint that bloated claimants roll up in posh cars to sign on at the dole office, or skim up a ladder to clean windows when they are claiming disability benefit for a bad back.

Campaign

Some months before the queen had told us about the crack-down it had been publicised in the DSS Xpress, a magazine which announces itself as "For all staff throughout the DSS" so does not have any Page Three girls or racing tips or agony aunts. But what it does have is no more relevant. The front page of Issue No. 2 (June 2000) is dominated by a piece "Tackling the fraudsters". Based on an interview with Charlotte Abrahams, one of a team running a campaign to expose and prosecute people who make illegal claims for state benefit, the article crackles with teeth-grating quotes like "What fraudsters are doing is unfair" and "We need DSS staff to 'buy in' to the idea and give us their support”—which make Page Three and tipsters and agony aunts seem rather less objectionable. Charlotte tells us that benefit fraudsters ". . . are taking public money—our money—that is meant for the vulnerable". She highlighted a recent TV campaign which depicted the Social Security "cheats" as greedy cynics who are willing to stoop to scrounging drinks off their mates. Anyone who felt their gorge rise when they watched these ads could have gone out to get away from them, except that if they did that they might have come across the same message, plastered across the backs of buses.

But the DSS Xpress is not content stop at hunting down illegal benefit claimants. On the back page there is a piece about another anti-fraud campaign—this one against Social Security staff. The hunter-in-chief is one Tony Edge, who has worked for the DSS for over 30 years and is now a man with "a special interest in fraud and compliance issues". He is not one to mince his words: "This is an important matter with potentially serious consequences in terms of the loss of public funds and the public's confidence in us". (After 30 years, it seems to have escaped him that there are very few organisations "the public" have as little confidence in as the DSS). The burden of Tony's campaign is to encourage staff members to spy on each other and to report anyone they suspect of defrauding their employer in any way. This can't be healthy for what is called staff relations but in case anyone fails to understand what is expected of them there are three touching stories about how this has worked in individual cases, one of fiddling expense claims, another of claiming benefit while working, and another of using unauthorised software in the DSS computers. So far, no stories of anyone smuggling the odd paper clip home but presumably Tony is working on it.

Manifestos

We might have expected that the Labour government, ever alert to any opportunity to exploit popular neuroses, would come up with a policy to bash the Social Security fraudsters. The policy announced in the queen's speech had already been flagged up at Labour's conference in September, when we were told about plans to take new powers to trawl through bank accounts and insurance policies, to check telephones and electricity and water meters of people suspected of making false claims. Tony Edge must have been quite excited at the prospect. The government can claim to have a mandate of sorts for this, for their election manifesto used militant words like "crack down . . . clampdown . . . maintain action against benefit fraud of all kinds". Which was not new or different because the Tories were making the same threats: "Social Security fraud," they screamed in their manifesto, "must be stamped out". They had already started on this: it was Peter Lilley who began hunting down the fraudsters when he was in charge of Social Security; in 1994 he set up a Benefit Review, partly to measure the scale of false claims. It should not surprise anyone that New Labour are enthusiastically carrying on where the man they once hated, as the most implacable representative of Thatcherite policies, left off.

In places where the real world of poverty and survival operates, the estimate that fraudulent claims run into billions of pounds every year does not go unchallenged. The Royal National Institute for the Blind has examined how the Benefit Review decided that the claims for Disability Living Allowance were potentially losing £499 million a year through projected fraud. They concluded that the Review arrived at this figure by adding the amounts involved in "suspected fraud" (which were not in any way proven) to those in "confirmed fraud". When we take into account the fact that of 1,200 interviews carried out by the Review the number of cases of "confirmed fraud" was only 18 we see the matter in a rather different light. In fact, if each of those 18 people had been receiving benefit at the highest level the loss would have amounted to £77,000. Set against this, the Review projected underpayment of benefit, due to under-reporting or to mistakes by Benefits Agency staff, of a little over £230 million. To put a human face on their findings, the RNIB listed cases in which blind, sometimes elderly, people had had their claims, which were quite within the rules, refused and who won their case only after a long and stressful appeal. Of course it would once have been quite proper for these people to be scourged by Peter Lilley—and now by his successors in the Labour government—as scroungers and fraudsters.

Poverty

The assault on so-called fraudsters is popular with politicians because it has a number of elements crying out to be exploited by anyone with ambitions to climb the greasy pole. The victims of the assault are often among the more deprived and vulnerable people. It is easy to depict them as calculating, cynical scroungers when they are often simply desperate about how to survive, and not doing this as efficiently as they might. In many cases when they have made false claims they have overlooked the fact that they could have applied legitimately for some other benefit, except that nobody at the DSS went out of their way to tell them and the forms were too long and complicated. They are typical of the human casualties of this social system in which workers are judged by the degree of their availability for profitable exploitation. In terms of their access to the wealth which their class produces they are in the lower reaches, where poverty means sickness and premature death. In June 2000 researchers at Glasgow University found that women from poorer backgrounds are three times more likely to contract cervical cancer. In September the Joseph Rowntree Trust stated that two million children in Britain are in conditions where they lack at least two "basic" amenities, things like a damp-free home, an annual holiday or usable furniture. Yet these people are among the class who produce all the wealth of capitalism. The fact that they allow themselves to be deprived of proper access to what results from their labour is a fraud on a scale which historically dwarfs the most lurid of what happens down at the Social.

Then we must ask what are we to think about the assurances from political leaders, that the problems of society can be ameliorated, or even eliminated, by a few simple measures. Blair's Labour Party is particularly eager to try this deception. That is why they make so many speeches denouncing some uncomfortable aspect of working class life, as a prelude to churning out yet another new law to reassure us that nothing more is needed to settle the problem. In this way we get a law against the so-called yob culture, which is defined, not as the boorishness of MPs in what they call their debates but as disruptive behaviour in city centres by alienated youngsters. Or a law which slaps a curfew on teenagers, on the grounds that if a young person is on the streets after a time approved by Jack Straw they are bound to be planning to burgle an old person's home. And a law clamping down on Social Security fraud. Get rid of problems like these, we are informed, and we shall benefit enormously from the existence of a working class which does not rebel against the repression of its social position. All of that argument is fraudulent.

And finally, Blair's Labour Party won millions of votes by persuading people that they are a proper alternative to the Tories and that under their government capitalism in Britain would be run in a different, more humane and progressive way. There is a mounting pile of evidence to expose how untrue this is, including the government's assault on people who practice a kind fraud which is unacceptable to capitalism. Which makes the Labour Party among the worst of fraudsters, whose exposure should be a priority.

Ivan

Postcapitalism? (2015)

Book Review from the September 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Postcapitalism. A Guide to Our Future', by Paul Mason. Allen Lane.

In his new book Channel 4 journalist and one-time Trotskyist Paul Mason begins by explaining the periodic growth and contraction of the capitalist economy by Kondratieff wave theory.

Kondratieff waves are named after the Soviet-era Russian economist (shot under Stalin) who imagined a 50-year periodicity in capitalist economic activity, and who then concluded that each economic cycle reflected the advent, adoption, flourishing and demise of its age’s defining technology.

Kondratieff’s waves operate on a timescale midway between the epochal transformations of social systems, based on a change of class ownership and control of the social means of production, and the Marxian economics of nature-imposed social reproduction under the capitalist social system, based upon its characteristic mode of class ownership and control of the social means of production.

Scientifically, one would seek to explain Kondratieff’s apparent wave phenomena in Marxian terms, i.e. in terms of the social system’s essence – capital-- but such attempts have so far failed to convince and this intriguing problem for Marxian theory remains unresolved.

However, for the purposes of Paul Mason’s argument, capitalist society has now started to ride the information technology Kondratieff wave. For him, information technology is the surfboard that took us out to the wave and, once we master it, it will be the surfboard that rescues us from the capitalist depths and carries us to the post-capitalist shore. Our ride will take one Kondratieff period of 50 years.

So what characterises the Kondratieff IT wave which Mason says we are now on?

The IT wave has already established its essential characteristics through the emergence of free Open Source software, free creative commons internet resources, free Wikipedia collaboration, etc. The IT wave’s free goods are premised on the assumption that IT development and IT maintenance require a vanishing amount of human labour, and that consequently IT software products and IT firmware-based technology possess a vanishing marginal cost (i.e. can be replicated for everybody for free). And IT technology will invade everything we produce.

His argument is that this characteristic invariant of the IT wave -- free technology and its technology-based products -- is totally subversive of capitalism, since the indispensable compulsion for a capitalist ruling class to withhold ownership and control of the means of production from the working class, thereby forcing the working class to work on its terms, will no longer serve its capitalist purpose once everything is free. The means of production might just as well be owned by everyone or by no-one.

That, in a nutshell, is his argument. IT will issue us into an Age of Abundance -- the necessary precondition for postcapitalism to succeed. Postcapitalism will be characterised by renewable energy, neutral carbon, zero socially necessary labour time, and zero marginal cost.

So far, so good, up to a point. Some interesting socialist (in our sense) arguments, entertainingly and intelligently told, including a good description of the labour theory of value, a good discussion of the economic calculation pseudo-problem, etc.

But Mason’s argument is tainted by his apology for gradualism and his reformist transitional plan.

If this seems an unnecessarily harsh judgment, judge for yourself from the legislation, and the prevailing capitalist social relations under which it is to be promulgated, that he wants ‘a government that embraced postcapitalism’ to pass while on its IT Kondratieff wave.

Here is his list of some of his transitional reforms outlined in his final chapter as ‘Project Zero’: Suppress market forces for energy. Suppress or ‘socialise’ all monopolies. Pay everyone a basic income. Regulate the rate of profit. Enforce profits to be ploughed back into ‘social justice.’ Make WiFi free to break up the telecom monopolies. Cheapen the cost of basic necessities. Produce more stuff for free. Sell water, energy, housing, transport, healthcare, telecommunications and education at cost price. Shrink (national and personal) debt. Reduce the time for holding patent and intellectual property rights, e.g. 25 years. Increase the use of creative commons copyright. Incentivise investment in renewables. Support local power grids. Elect bank bosses democratically, and scrutinise their financial behaviour. Track down and suppress all off-shore trading. Make it unethical for a chartered accountant to propose a tax avoidance scheme. Issue fiat money to kill neoliberalism. Increase the velocity of circulation of money to ‘tame’ speculation. Set a high inflation rate to stimulate sustainable growth, etc. etc.

His laudable aim is to promote the transition to a non-market economy of abundance where goods and services are free, but his long transition period turns out to be a fantasy hybrid world, an illusory economy in which markets, profits and banks exist alongside a growing non-market, non-profit, non-money-based sector.

The Marxian answer to his gradualist project and its reform agenda is that, while capitalist social relationships exist, his reforms have no chance of succeeding. And once a socialist majority consciously abolishes capitalist social relations of ownership and control of the social means production, his reform agenda becomes redundant, unnecessary and meaningless.

TWC.

The Enemy on the Left! - New Statesman (1973)

From the March 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

A regular column dealing with the antics of those who call themselves socialist but in practice do nothing but harm to the cause.

Last month this column dealt with Tribune but that other fraudulent socialist paper, the New Statesman is of course just as guilty of these attempts (often all too successful) to con the working class out of their votes. I well remember in the '64 election, reading out at an SPGB meeting a leading article from that paper which actually went through the various issues and could not avoid showing that there was not a pin to choose even between the promises of Tory and Labour. But you should turn out the Tories because Wilson is such a good chap! You may find it difficult to credit that an "intellectual" paper could be so pathetic. And ironically, the same paper now tells its readers that Wilson pollutes the political atmosphere! It takes an "intellectual" rather a long time to spot a blinding glimpse of the obvious. But I wanted to deal with its attitude to democracy (which is an essential facet of Socialism). They recently ran an article on Kaunda's one-party state in Zambia. Now it is clear to the meanest intelligence that a one-party state us just a euphemism for a dictatorial tyranny. For it means that anyone who wishes to oppose the government (or is even suspected of such ideas) finds himself not in Parliament, not even on the hustings, but in a gaol, or a concentration camp, or cemetery. This is true whether the one-party is white Nazis or black Kaunda-ists.

Just to underline this the Guardian reported some time ago that the "socialist" Kaunda had taken to ending his meetings with a ringing slogan: "One State! One Zambia!" Consciously or otherwise taking a leaf out of Hitler's book, he might as well amend that to "Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Kaunda!" But the point here is that you might think that the NS article was a denunciation of dictatorship. What a hope! The writer was their "Africa expert", the same John Hatch who used to defend in the same NS the régime of that even worse black Hitler, Nkrumah. The article was an apologia from beginning to end. And to hell with those who rot in tyrants' gaols. These inverted racialists scream for "One Man, one vote" in South Africa or Rhodesia. Quite right, too. Why shouldn't blacks have votes> But when Kaunda or Nyerere, these pseudo-socialist darlings of the lefties, effectively decree "All blacks, no votes!" (for what is a vote without a choice?), the lefties organise no demos, break no embassy windows (not that emotional outbursts of that nature are any use, of course). They really are inverted racialists who say that black subjects of leaders like Kaunda whom lefties have spent their lives arse-licking are not fit for votes.

L. E. Weidberg

The Enemy on the Left! - Tribune (1973)

The Enemy on the Left Column from the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

A regular column dealing with the antics of those who call themselves socialist but in practice do nothing but harm to the cause.

The antics (no other word will do) of the pseudo-socialists of the world — needless to say they are by no means confined to this country — fill just about half the acreage of every day's papers, so it is difficult to pick one or two items out of the available abundance for discussion in this column. If one sees something particularly gruesome from, say, Foot or Wilson or Nyerere (they are all socialists now, of course, even the grotesque Amin) one knows that tomorrow's press will produce something even more heinous. However, it should be instructive if this month we look at an item from one of the best-known left-wing papers in this country.

Tribune has of course been associated since its foundation with all the best Labour lefties from Nye Bevan (late, but I fear, unlamented) through his successor at Ebbw Vale, Foot, along with Atkinson, Allaun, Heffer and the rest of the menagerie. A few weeks ago they ran a piece getting all hot under the collar about a remark made by Reg Prentice who is on Wilson's front bench and is in fact his Minister for Unemployment designate. It seems that this pseudo had the impudence to say that a figure of 400,000 unemployed was "acceptable" and the Tribune pseudos were quite ready to tear him to pieces over it. First let us just have a think about the statement itself (which was not repudiated by Wilson or any other front-bencher to my knowledge). If one includes dependents, it means that about a million members of the British working class must find it acceptable to be members of the non-working class (I know they would find it acceptable if they were made members of the real non-working class, the capitalists, but I don't think that's what Prentice meant.) It appears, therefore, that the Labour leadership find the fate of a million people living on doles and social security in our so-called affluent society to be acceptable. How jolly of them. Whether it is acceptable to the million poor devils themselves, or whether anyone but a lunatic should support a party which finds this sort of thing acceptable, well, you don't really expect Labour politicians to lose sleep over that as long as they're all right Jack.

But the Tribune types are different? You could have fooled me. The Foots and the rest were all there at Westminster keeping their Labour government in power a few years ago when the unemployed figure was not 400,000 but 600,000. Acceptable or otherwise, Tribune MPs had to accept it, didn't they? And of course there was only one reason why the figure did not rise to a million (i.e. at least two million people suffering from the pernicious disease of capitalism) while Labour was in power. And that was that in 1970 the electorate threw them out, so that the honour of achieving the million was won by the Tories. It has long been clear to all but the wilfully blind that capitalism will produce its ups and downs in unemployment along with the other evils which afflict society, irrespective of whether the capitalist managers call themselves Tories or Labour (or, god help us, socialist). And it is just another of the crimes of the lefties that they hypocritically deride the Tory government for doing exactly the same sort of things which their own party did before them.

L. E. Weidberg

Editorial: Should Aliens Be Allowed In? (1938)

Editorial from the September 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

The persecution of minorities in many countries has made more acute the problem of the refugee, seeking a land where he will be permitted to live in comparative peace. But with hardly a single exception there are no countries which will freely admit the penniless wanderer, no matter how good his credentials or how great his need. A London magistrate, in passing a heavy sentence on some refugees who were smuggled in without the consent of the Government, angrily denounced them and upheld the policy of punishing before expelling those who try to break in. He was only echoing what many people and many newspapers say. One of the common arguments against giving refuge is that some refugees are "undesirables," but those who say this do not go on to advocate admitting the "desirable" refugees freely nor indeed do they examine what does and what does not constitute an "undesirable." If it meant professional burglars it would at least be clear, but more often than not it means anyone who may be described as an "agitator"—that is one who wants to make the world a better place by exposing existing evils. A sensibly run community, anxious to improve itself, would welcome assistance from any quarter, but capitalism is not a sensibly run system of society, and the capitalists want to maintain capitalism more than they want anything else. So in their eyes a Socialist is an "undesirable," whether born in Germany of Jewish parents or born in London of the native blend of invading races of long ago. Not so a member of a foreign ruling class. If a Baron Franckenstein wants refuge in England then the formalities which the penniless refugee must observe can be waived, and he can have a knighthood bestowed on him, all without a murmur of protest from the magistracy or the capitalist Press. Not that the Austrian Baron is a criminal, but, after all, he does belong to a thoroughly undesirable class, the class which lives on property incomes—that is, by the sweat of the brows of the working-class. To the clear-sighted worker the capitalist class are all undesirables, no matter where they originate.

The problem is, of course, obscured by arguments about unemployment. We are asked if we want foreign workers to take jobs away from British workers, and on the surface it looks like a reasonable point of view. Actually it is baseless. It is true that if an Italian waiter comes to London he may get a job in preference to a British waiter, just as hundreds of thousands of British workers have in the past managed to get jobs in America and many other foreign countries. But unemployment in the mass is not caused by the size of the population and does not increase because the population is increased, whether by births or by immigration. Capitalism everywhere normally has its unemployed, no matter what the population figures may be. If unemployment disappeared, then the workers would be able to demand more wages, and this would reduce profits to the vanishing point. Unemployment is, therefore, a capitalist necessity. The capitalist himself deliberately creates it by installing labour-displacing machinery in the effort to keep costs down and profits up.

The truth is that capitalism to-day is an anti-social arrangement and produces anti-social ideas, even contradictory ones. Human beings intelligently carrying on the production of wealth for all to consume would welcome additional willing hands, quite apart from the natural desire to give refuge to the persecuted. Instead, the competitive struggle arising out of capitalism makes the worker shun his foreign fellow-workers in distress, and makes him welcome the wealthy idlers born at home or abroad who consume the wealth produced by the working-class without giving any help in the process of production.

As for contradictory ideas born of capitalist economic contradictions we see the very newspapers and public men who are now crying out about the falling birth rate and consequent decline of population opposing the entry of able-bodied, industrious refugee whose numbers would help to arrest the decline.

A few years ago these same people—before the scientists got busy on population trends—were preaching smaller families as a way to get rid of unemployment. Now they first forget the unemployment and demand larger families, then remember the unemployment again as a reason for keeping out the poor refugees (but not the Baron Franckensteins). 

A Ghost of the Past (1938)

From the September 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

As a propagandist, the present writer has recently met with some violent abuse from Communists when referring to the changing policies of the Communist Party. The abuse has often reached the point of accusing the S.P.G.B. and its speakers of deliberate lying and even of fabricating evidence of the Communist Party's past hostility to the Labour Party. A case in point which provokes Communists to accuse us of lying is reference to a statement made in 1930 by Mr. H. Pollitt, which encouraged Communists to break up Labour meetings. Mr. Pollitt's statement is so often denied at our meetings that there can be no harm in reproducing it. It appeared in The Daily Worker on January 29th, 1930, and reads: —

"A Labour meeting should not be allowed to be held anywhere. This will bring us into conflict with the Authorities, but must be done. The Daily Worker will lead the revolutionary workers boldly and openly against this Government of scoundrels and agents of capitalism."

Perhaps, quite naturally, in view of the Communist Party's present genteel drawing-room methods of wooing the Labour Party, any evidence of its apostasy is likely to arouse hatred.

Sammy Cash

Material World: No Peace in the Pacific (2015)

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

After Costa Rica’s civil war in 1948, Jose Figueres, the then president of Costa Rica, abolished the army, took a sledgehammer and began the demolition of the nation's military headquarters. That fundamental decision was enshrined in the 1949 Constitution. To this day, Costa Rica has no army, navy or air force, no heavy weapons of any kind but instead they have the Fuerza Pública (Public Force) responsible for law enforcement and border patrol.  

On September 2, 1945, a formal surrender ceremony was performed in Tokyo Bay, Japan, aboard the battleship USS Missouri. After its defeat in World War Two, Japan, as an act of remorse at its previous expansionist aggression, declared in the country’s post-war constitution’s Article 9, that the Japanese people ‘forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes’ and thus restricted the Japanese military, known as the Self-Defence Forces, to engage only in self-defence. It meant that a large and technologically advanced state could not engage in any collective alliances or coalitions aiding friendly countries under attack, principally the United States or its proxy forces such as the Philippines. In the mounting tensions of the Chinese territorial claims to much of the South China Sea and its numerous islands, the full military potential of Japan requires to be deployed to protect or acquire whatever rich resources the region possesses.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants Japan's armed forces to join in military activities abroad and actively assist allies. Abe’s right-wing nationalism has created suspicion among many that it would lead a country that has long embraced pacifism into war again. The Abe government has yet to offer a full and unconditional apology for past aggression and atrocities committed by previous Japanese militarism during its period of colonisation. Abe seeks to ‘normalise’ the Japanese armed forces’ role in foreign policy and he defends the bills creating a more muscular military by saying they ‘are not for engaging in wars’ but are a deterrent to ‘prevent war.’ He has argued that the bills will allow Japan to better defend its allies under the United Nation’s collective self-defence doctrine, which allows for ‘individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs.’  He describes this by the oxymoronic term, ‘proactive pacifism’ and hopes it will draw the Japanese people away from their anti-war sentiments.

Normally, amending the Constitution would require two-thirds approval in both houses of Parliament, followed by a national referendum. Abe has circumvented that process by having his government declare a reinterpretation of the Constitution and then following up a package of eleven security-related bills which, unlike a formal constitutional change, requires only a majority vote and there is no referendum. A recent survey by Asahi Shimbun newspaper showed only 26 percent support the legislation that will enable Japan's Self-Defense Forces to engage in wars overseas. 56 percent of those polled expressed opposition.

Many countries try to bamboozle us with Orwellian language. America’s ‘Department of War’, a more truthful name, thought it wiser to re-name itself ‘Department of Defense’. Israel describes its military as a ‘Defence Force’, and by doing so, hopes it explains away the occupation of and the offensive actions against Palestinians. Wars are now called ‘peace-keeping’ missions or ‘humanitarian’ interventions.

The Socialist Party has always held that the menace of war cannot be done away with and will always loom over us while its cause, the capitalist system, remains. Modern war is really an extension of business when the economic rivalries between the vying national sections of the capitalist class can no longer be peacefully resolved or controlled. The Japanese people are to be applauded for the stand they have taken against wars of aggression. However, the realities of diplomacy and nationalism mean that the capitalist class will protect their interests in whatever way they can … and perhaps the reason their armies are called ‘defence’ forces is that they exist to defend the ruling class. It would be encouraging if all nations could follow in the steps of Costa Rica but sadly it won’t happen.  While we have capitalism we cannot have stability. Always new crises will occur and new sources of conflict will appear over markets, the sources of raw material and geo-political strategic points. Seeing the world as it really is, we know that we shall have wars because the capitalist basis for them remains.

ALJO

Remember! (1915)

From the December 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

Surely we will remember. When the time
Of reparation comes, as come it must,
We will remember many an age and clime,
Many a life down-trodden in the dust;
The Negroes bent and broken by the whip,
The Chinese children bought and sold in shame,
The white girl held in prostitution's grip,
The white man free in nothing but in name.
We will remember those who died in vain
To quench a nation's blood-thirst; all the scorn,
Indignities and insults that we bore.
And you, our masters, you, our curse and bane,
Shall bear a tithe of what we slaves have borne
Ere gladly you forget for evermore.

F. J. Webb 

Editorial: The attitude of the London Dockers (1949)

Editorial from the August 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

The action of London dockers in coming out on strike over two ships that were concerned in a dispute originating on the other side of the Atlantic is a gesture that must be applauded by all those interested in the solidarity of labour. Whatever the merits of the dispute these London men were prepared to make sacrifices in a cause that had no direct influence on their own wages and conditions of labour. It is this aspect of the dispute that is heartening to socialists as it is one of the harbingers of that wider and more pregnant solidarity that will herald the triumph of Socialism. This particular strike has occurred at a time when prominent trade unionists and all the Labour Governments, including the Russian, are stressing the importance of nationalism.

It is true that trade union internationalism is a long way from the internationalism in which socialists are interested but it still expresses, even if at times unconsciously, a recognition of the identity of the workers' interests all over the world as opposed to the interests of the international capitalist class.

The attitude of the dockers is in striking contrast to the views of the Government. Whereas the dockers were, in their action, giving expression to an international outlook the Government's is almost entirely national as witness the following statement by the Attorney-General, Sir Hartley Shawcross:

"These unofficial strikes are an act of economic treason to our trade unions, to the Socialist movement and indeed to our country." (News Chronicle, 14/7/49.)

As "our country" does not belong to us but to those who own the means of production and distribution, the Labour Government definition of "economic treason" is one that should not worry the dockers or any other workers. The fact that it has not done so in the present dispute is one that must give satisfaction to the socialist.