Mr. Foot and the Closed Shop (1976)

From the January 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Times change. Not long ago Michael Foot was the uncrowned king of the parliamentary left with the Tribune group gathered round him. In the Labour Party his reputation was all liberty, equality and Up the Workers; to Conservatives he was a demon king aspiring to fearsome r-r-revolution. Nonsensical as all this was, few people could have imagined a day when The Times would have an editorial asking: “is Mr. Foot a fascist?” and finding the more relevant question to be: “does Mr. Foot know he is a fascist?”

The matter arose from the dismissal of six men from Ferrybridge Power Station. As members of a breakaway union, they were dismissed under a closed shop or one-union agreement. They were then refused unemployment benefit under the “misconduct” rule in the Social Security Act. The General Secretary of the Confederation of Employee Organizations wrote on their behalf to Foot, who is Secretary of State for Employment; and Foot’s reply stated that he found nothing wrong with the procedure:

A person who declines to fall in with new conditions of employment which result from a collective agreement may well be considered to have brought about his dismissal. The consequences of his refusal in terms both of loss of his job and of his possible ineligibility for unemployment benefit must be taken into account by the individual when he decides not to accept his revised conditions of employment.

The cries from The Times and Conservative MPS that this is a suppression of liberty are miserable hypocrisy, of course. Under the last Conservative government it was proposed to try to deal with strikes by refusing Social Security benefits to strikers and their families. The “misconduct” rule has been applied in the past to obtain conformity with government policies: during the last war employees who refused, for instance, to fire-watch at night in their employers’ premises were dismissed and refused unemployment pay. There is a further parallel with the war. The Minister of Labour then was Ernest Bevin, chosen because his standing with trade-unionists would make them more amenable to government discipline, and the “libertarian” Foot occupies the same position now when Labour-run capitalism wants extra sacrifices from the workers.

The Labour Party’s promise in 1972 to repeal the 1971 Industrial Relations Act included an undertaking to bring back the closed shop, which had been made illegal by the Act. This was done in the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act, 1974, with “safeguard” provisions on the lines proposed in Labour’s document In Place of Strife (1969):

Nevertheless the Commission recognized that the closed shop was liable from time to time to cause injustice to individuals and it therefore proposed safeguards . . . to protect the trade union member; it is also necessary to consider those who have conscientious grounds for not joining a union and who are dismissed from their employment in consequence.

The principal safeguard was the right of appeal to an industrial tribunal, which would have the power to award compensation for unfair dismissal. Foot is now bringing before Parliament an amendment to the 1974 Act which, if passed, will repeal the safeguard provisions. Thus, under Michael Foot, a worker who declines to join a specified union may now find himself unemployed and not even on the dole.

While The Times expresses its view about democracy, there is something more important to be said: it shows Foot to be — as we have always known — an anti-Socialist. Socialists recognize and uphold the necessity for all workers to organize to protect their wages and conditions. Far from being an instrument in that continuing struggle, the closed shop works against it. Its basic principle is that of the “wages league”, the desire of craft workers to maintain wages superior to other workers’ and hold at bay any threat of undercutting by less skilled sections.

The classic argument for the closed shop is that, when trade unions in a particular industry have obtained gains in pay and conditions, all those who reap the gains should contribute a union subscription. What can be pointed out at once is that there are advantages also for the employers. The legitimacy of the closed shop, established in 1942, was to a considerable extent produced by capitalists’ own litigation; in Trade Unions and the Law (1968) Gerald Abrahams names several cases which contributed to it. During the period 1971-74 when closed shops were illegal, in the industries where they were long-established they continued through special arrangements between unions and employers. As an extension of this, can it be said that it is in the interests of workers to have their leaders promise “wage restraint” in exchange for legislation which makes official what they are doing anyway? Or that unwilling members are of any use to any organization?

Workers should look carefully at what is happening. The Times blames Foot alone. As the former Labour minister Lord George-Brown pointed out in a letter to The Times on 5th December, “it must be assumed of course that Mr. Foot has the passive acquiescence, if not the active encouragement, of all of his Cabinet colleagues”. It has been shown repeatedly that workers in trade unions will accept and rationalize from Labour governments what they would not wear from the other parties.

They may be ready to create fury against the manipulation of unemployment benefits as a means of getting compliance, and then be placated by the thought that if it is for closed shops and ticked by Michael Foot it is probably all right. Let them consider that the closed shop is divisive and privilege seeking; and that Foot, however he has talked in his time, is a government minister whose concern is to help capitalism out of trouble.

Robert Barltrop

Leninised and Lionised (2005)

Book Review from the August 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx And Other Four-Letter Words. Edited by Georgina Blakeley and Valerie Bryson, Pluto Press, 2005.

Being a collection of essays by academics for their students, this volume examines Marx’s key concepts: capitalism, class, the state, oppression, revolution, equality and democracy, and more. There are numerous books of this type and and most of the chapters do a reasonable job of reconstructing Marx’s thought. However, Paul Blackledge’s chapter on Revolution treats Marx and Lenin as though they were complementary. This is the standard Leninist line put forward by Blackledge:

“While Marx and Engels laid down some general guidelines for building a workers’ party, they did not develop these into a fully worked out theory: this task was taken up by later Marxists, notably Lenin ...”

Paraphrasing Lenin himself, the author claims that Lenin’s State and Revolution (published in 1917) “returned to the works of Marx and Engels” and explained their ideas on revolution. But this untrue. Marx and Engels’ insistence on working class self-emancipation specifically rules out what would become later known as Leninism, the idea that the working class were incapable of self-emancipation and must be freed by a Leninist vanguard party. This is in fact the exact opposite of Marx and Engels’ position.

As the chapter on Working-Class Internationalism quotes Marx: “numbers weigh only in the balance if united by combination and led by knowledge.” And the chapter on Democracy, quoting another commentator on Marx in the twentieth century, declares: “the terrible fate which befell Marx was that he was Leninised.”

Lew Higgins

Editorial: What classless society? (1992)

Editorial from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nobody really believes that we live in a classless society. Not even Major. He knows as well as anyone else that at the top are a small group of big businessmen, financiers, landed aristocrats and rentiers living off their investments. Around them is another group, many of them the first group’s relatives, who occupy the top posts in the civil service, the judiciary, the armed forces and the Church. In Russia they would have been known as the Nomenklatura. Here they are called the Establishment. A more accurate name is the capitalist class.

It is not their posh accents, their old school ties or their titles and honours that makes them privileged. These could disappear without ending class privilege. As could other frills like the monarchy, the House of Lords, Henley and Ascot. Their real privilege is in being rich.

Being rich doesn’t mean having a country estate, a chauffeur-driven Rolls, a yacht and the like. Rich people do have these things, it is true, but any rich person who spent all their income on them wouldn't be rich for long. The trick is to use your money to acquire a regular income that enables you to sustain a life of privilege. And the way to do that is to invest your money, to use it as capital and live off the profits.

How the rich got their money in the first place— whether through inheritance as most do or like most of the others by financial wheeling and dealing—is irrelevant. To stay rich they have to become capitalists. They must use a part of their wealth to purchase a stake in the ownership of the means of production.

Profits are an unearned property income that accrues to those who invest their wealth as capital. Making profits is what capitalism is all about. It is what motivates production. But it involves depriving those who actually produce the wealth of society of a part of the fruits of our labour. This is why capitalism works in the interests of the rich. As a profit-making system it works, and can only work, in the interests of those who live off profits and never in the interests of the rest of us.

Capitalism is a system of exploitation. One class, thanks to its ownership rights over the means of production, is able to live off the work of the other class. Not that the two classes are equal in numbers. In Britain those rich enough to be able to live off their profits can’t amount to more than 2 per cent of the population. Their exploitation of the rest of us is quite legal. In fact property rights are entirely granted and maintained by the state.They amount to a licence to levy a tribute on production.

The way to end exploitative class society follows from this. We, the non-rich, must use our overwhelming numbers to win control of the state and revoke all private property rights over the means of production. At a stroke this will render null and void all stocks and shares, title deeds and other legal entitlements to live by exploiting others. These will become useless pieces of paper. The means of production will become the common heritage of us all and the way will then be open for us to democratically control them in the interests of the whole community. With the capitalist class off our backs, we can begin producing things to satisfy people’s needs and not for profit. This is what a classless society must mean. Nothing short of it merits that description.

End of a Dream (1992)

Editorial from the May 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley were elected leader and deputy leader of the Labour Party in 1983, they were hailed as a "dream ticket"—as a pair who between them were likely to pander to just about every prejudice and delusion and so were expected to bring in the maximum votes for their party. At the time Labour had suffered so crushing a defeat that there was serious speculation about their ability to survive as an electoral force. How should they recover? Make an alliance with the SDP and Liberals? Fight the next election on the kind of programme which Derek Hatton might consider too extreme? Or ditch practically everything they ever called their principles and campaign as an open and unashamed party of capitalism, market forces and all?

In fact there was never any real doubt about which course they would take. Kinnock lost no time in settling to the task of jettisoning what has been called Labour's intellectual baggage— a journalist's title for politically embarrassing policies. He did not flinch, when this entailed disposing of some of his personal baggage for, as a former left-wing firebrand who ostentatiously sat in the Commons chamber with Dennis Skinner while the rest of the Members went to the Lords to listen to the Queen's speech, he had some adjustments to make if he was to change from a friend of the left wing into its scourge. Kinnock's priority was to win power over British capitalism and anything he saw as an obstacle to this—and Militant threatened to be an especially large and deeply rooted obstacle—had to be ruthlessly cleared away.

At the same time, with a little help from some slick, manipulative friends, he refurbished Labour's campaigning style. Out went Michael Foot and his walking stick, speaking passionately but emptily to a genuine audience— genuine in the sense that they could ask questions and put opposing arguments. Out went spontaneous walk-abouts. Out went the red flag, both symbol and song. In came the red rose and an anthem by Brahms. In came the monster rally with an audience hand-picked for their eagerness to give mindless applause to anything their leaders said, rallies where Kinnock strode to the platform picked out by a spotlight in a darkened stadium. Labour's rally at Sheffield was the height—or should it be the depths—of this style of presentation, all aimed at maximum coverage on TV, at putting over the party as fit to govern British capitalism and not allowing any doubt or discussion about it. It is not stretching the point, to say that the Nazis used the same technique in their rallies; it did not sit easily with Kinnock's talk about "government readiness to listen to the people" being "evidence of strength and confidence, not of weakness".

One Labour MP now expresses his doubts about that rally, talking of his "churning embarrassment", but at the time no such criticism was heard because it was represented as a triumph of one way, unavoidable communication in the age of the TV election. Kinnock allowed himself to be managed so that he had no real and direct contact with the voters, gave no chance to anyone to question him and certainly no chance for anyone to harrass him as the Tory leaders were publicly harrassed. But while this was seen as essential to Labour's march to victory it was all accepted and admired. It was only after their defeat, when Labour's election tactics were exposed as futile, that the criticism began to be heard.

When he conceded the election, Kinnock spoke about the security and satisfaction of his own life and contrasted it with that of so many other people, regretting that without power he could do nothing to improve things for them. The implication of this is that the Conservative government is responsible for poverty in Britain, that it is their own creation, almost as if it did not exist before 1979 when Labour was the government. This absurd and feeble deceit is self-exposing; indeed Labour's 1979 manifesto was one long promise to cure the many problems which were still in existence after their five years in power.

The bitterness and bewilderment in the Labour Party now is there because they thought they had mastered the art of persuading the voters to opt for their style of running British capitalism rather than the Tories' way. It was hardly a choice. If the result had gone the other way it would have made very little difference. Poverty, homelessness, unnecessary disease, crime, squalor, war and fear—all these would still have blighted our lives, under a Labour government as they have done in the past. Labour's dream turned into a nightmare but for the working class that is how it is all the time—except that they have yet to realise that an election is their chance to wake up.

Editorial: An unfair fight (1992)

Editorial from the March 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Democracy: rule of the people by the people. The 1992 General Election: a chance to choose whether to be ruled over by Tweedledum or Tweedledee. The right to place a cross on a ballot paper every four or five years does not amount to democracy. To be governed is to be unfree.

The coming election will be a cynical exercise in manipulating workers’ minds to blame A or have hope in B as a way out of the mess of relative degrees of poverty which is the lot of the majority of us. Labourites and Lib-Dems will pretend that all of the problems of capitalism emanate from wicked Tory rule and could be remedied by them carrying out almost identical policies to the Tories. The Conservatives will lie that the workers have done well under them since 1979, despite the objective record of working-class hardship which only the socially blind cannot see around them. There will be smears: Kinnock the crypto-Stalinist; Major the secret puppet of the Thatcherite barbarians. There will be press launches in which political charades will take the form of tame rock concerts. There will be TV broadcasts in which your future will be sold to you by the same twisters who sell time shares and Fairy Liquid. There will be cheap, hollow slogans. There will be crass photo opportunities in which the previously inhuman shapes of Kenneth Clarke and Gerald Kaufman will pose with cuddly kiddies and dying geriatrics. There will be promises so big that all but the strongest will be crushed as they fall upon us.

For all of that, it is better to have the vote than not to have it. The workers in the Chartist movement of the last century were no fools in wanting their chance to determine who will rule. The wealthy who opposed votes for workers on the grounds that the working class is many and the property-owning rich parasites are few and therefore the many might end the social power of the few had a point. Sadly, the past century of working- class franchise has not yet justified those fears of real democracy. The workers have been persuaded to play the game: bought off by reforms and conned by leaders, the potential power of the vote has been wasted in every single election.

The answer is not to abandon the vote and ignore elections, but to work to create a politically-educated electorate of working men and women who understand where their interest lies. The battle, not just when the electoral whistle blows, but at all times, is to win workers’ minds; to make class-conscious workers. Such workers, currently only a small minority, will never waste their votes on electing leaders, nor will they support any policy designed to run the profit system which exploits and dominates them.

Socialists enter into the electoral contest, using it as a means of putting our revolutionary case for socialism to the widest number of fellow workers. In the coming election we shall put up one candidate, Richard Headicar, in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency. He is not a prospective leader, but a delegate to be used by workers who understand and support the socialist mandate. If elected, our delegate will be wholly accountable to the socialist majority which put him into parliament for the sole purpose of stating the socialist position and furthering the socialist cause. When enough socialist delegates are elected, here and throughout the world, the workers' conscious will shall be enacted: class ownership and control of the means of life will cease and the state, which is an instrument of class coercion will be abolished.

The socialist candidate in the coming election will receive negligible media attention and little chance to debate with his rivals who will be too busy engaging in manipulative stunts to dare to take on socialism in democratic debate. Our party will be charged £500 by the state for the right to join the electoral contest and then will meet with an unfair fight in which money, the means of communication and public prejudice will be stacked in favour of the pro-capitalism candidates. On our side we shall have little money and working-class supporters with constraints upon their time, but we shall not flinch from the fight, sure in the knowledge that the undeniable class interest of the vast majority is represented by Socialism which we alone stand for in this election.

Editorial: No to nationalism (1992)

Editorial from the February 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The political virus of Nationalism is spreading. In Yugoslavia and the late Russian Empire, after decades of forced national unity, new national splinters are emerging, echoed by the sound of gunfire. In the north-cast of Ireland both sectarian gangs persist in their absurd nationalist hatreds, while fanatical Welsh nationalists set English property on fire and Scottish nationalist tricksters preach independence from Britain as some kind of panacea for ending poverty. Czechs against Slovaks; Flemings against Walloons; Ukrainians against Russians; western against eastern Germans, and both against Turkish and other immigrants.

Commentators speak of neo-fascism being on the rise. To be sure, gangs of desperate, frustrated, ignorant workers are looking for scapegoats. In Poland they are blaming their problems on the Jews, even though most Polish Jews were killed in the holocaust.The growth of the French National Front, with its facile equation between immigration and national crisis, is a miserable reflection upon millions of people who seem to have learned little from the experience of Nazism.

The world capitalist economy is in a crisis. Millions are feeling the hardship of living under a system which puts profits before needs. Not understanding the system, they seek someone to blame. Deceived by their masters, they seek security in isolation, entombed by artificial borders which stifle the cultures of those who never look beyond them. In Britain, nationalists wrap their ugly flag around them and thank God (who saves The Queen) that they are not continentals.

The contradiction of capitalism is that, being a global system, it cannot allow petty national fragmentation to succeed. The complacent British must become Europeans, and the isolationist Americans must face up to the world slump they must share with Japan, and the Croatians must realise that even if they escape Serbian domination they will soon have to accept German economic rule.

Socialists, whose country is the planet Earth, do not underestimate the importance of cultural diversity. The notion of the whole world conforming to one uniform way of life is far from appealing. It is the profit system, with its inevitable cultural imperialism whereby those with the dollars dictate what we listen to, how we speak, what we read and where we travel, which reduces culture to lifeless conformity to the cheap and nasty offerings of a culture industry.

Socialism is a global solution to a global problem. The problem is that the Earth and all its abundant resources belong to the minority, not to the human community as a whole. The minority abuse the planet Earth for the purpose of making profits. Socialism will end minority ownership and control, place the world in the hands of everyone and produce goods and services solely for need. This will require global organisation and not national fragmentation. Socialism will put an end to every border; nation-states will be abolished immediately.

The working class has no countries. The British do not own Britain any more than the Russians own Russia, the Georgians Georgia, the Armenians Armenia or the Serbs Serbia. We, who produce the world’s wealth, must cast off the chains of nationalist illusion. We have a world to win.

Editorial: Profit before need—again (1992)

Editorial from the January 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Half of bedsit tenants live in unhealthy, unsafe homes, according to a report from the Audit Commission last September. At least 300,000 people in England are homeless, most in squalid bed-and-breakfast accommodation, but thousands live rough in such places as Cardboard City under Waterloo Bridge in London. Nearly 2.9 million homes are in poor condition, according to the last major survey in 1986. including 900,000 statutorily unfit. 460,000 lacking one or more amenities, and 2.4 million in poor repair.

Clearly, for millions of people their basic need for decent housing is not being met. There is an urgent need for existing houses to be improved and for new homes to be built. So why isn't this done? Why are the housing needs of so many neglected in this way?

One possible explanation would be that there is a shortage of skilled building workers to carry out the repairs and build the new houses. That this is not the explanation can be seen from the announcement last August by the Building Employers Federation that 150,000 building workers had lost their jobs since the middle of 1990 and that a further 100,000 would by the middle of 1992. So we are talking of there soon being a quarter-of-a-million unemployed building workers, not counting those who were already without work in 1990.

Perhaps there is a shortage of building materials? But this can't be the explanation either since "producers currently have almost 1.4 billion bricks stacked up in their warehouses—higher than in 1982, the nadir of the last recession, or in the mid-1970s, when the property market collapsed. That is enough to build 170,000 more houses" (Independent, 25 November 1991).

So what is the explanation? Simply that those who suffer from bad housing and those who have no home can't afford to pay for decent accommodation. A report in 1990 from the Audit Office on the homeless was quite explicit on this: “The link with poverty is underlined. The report says the average net income of homeless households in 1988 was under £100 a week, compared with an average income for all households in 1986 of £192 a week" (Daily Telegraph, 22 August 1990). The 1986 survey of housing conditions was equally clear: “78 per cent of homes lacking basic amenities had annual incomes of less than £6000 a year. The same was true for 69 per cent of households in unfit housing and 55 per cent of those in houses in poor repair" (Daily Telegraph, 12 September 1991).

What this means is clear. The resources—the materials and the skilled workers—to solve the problem exist but, under the profit-driven market economy, the incentive to do this is lacking. The capitalist economy only responds to paying demand, not real demand. Some group, such as the badly housed and the homeless, may have a need for something, even something as basic as decent housing, but unless they can afford to pay for this it will be neglected. The profit system only allows production to take place where there is a prospect of a profit being made. If this prospect is absent, then production will not take place. People's needs will go unmet.

This is why we have the obscene situation of hundreds of thousands of unemployed building workers and huge stockpiles of building materials along side millions of people living in bad housing conditions. It is further proof, not that any is really needed, that the profit system does not serve human needs.

The profit-driven market economy is not the end of history and pinnacle of civilization towards which humanity has been travelling since we came down from the trees, as some of its more lyrical defenders used to claim in the 1980s. It is a squalid system that is incapable of meeting even people’s basic needs in an adequate way. That is why it must go, and be replaced by a system of common ownership and democratic control of productive resources. This is the only social arrangement that will allow productive resources to be used for their proper purpose: to satisfy the needs of the members of society.

The Review Column: Bombs in Orbit (1967)

The Review Column from the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bombs in Orbit

A few years ago the nuclear powers (there were then only three of them) signed the Test Ban Treaty, amid mutual congratulations at their humanity in lifting a shadow from the world.

Since then, a lot has been happening.

France and China have got the Bomb and have tested it. The older nuclear powers have carried out numerous underground tests and have devotedly improved the delivery systems of the bombs they already have.

Russia and America, apart from their well publicised space adventures, have fired up many unannounced satellites, which have gathered the data needed to develop a more deadly type of missile guidance.

Now, the Russians have FOBS—the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System—missiles which go into orbit around the earth and are brought back from space onto their targets.

The American Defence Department have stated that, in their view, the FOBS presents no greater threat than an equivalent number of the old, comparatively simple intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Anyone who can find consolation in that is free to do so. Meanwhile, U Thant’s report to the United Nations states the grim opinion that the world (or some states in it) now have enough nuclear weapons to “eliminate all mankind”.

It is pertinent to point out that the latest Russian horror has come into being in the year when they are remembering the 50th anniversary of the revolution which, they say, introduced Socialism.

What a way to celebrate! And what a comment on the true nature of that revolution, that one of its results has been to add an even more fearsome weapon to the arsenal of an already desperately unsafe world.

George Brown

A section of the press has been gunning for George Brown for a long time. That was why, when Brown put on one of his displays of temperament at the dinner given by Lord Thompson, some newspapers revealed a sudden, strange interest in meticulously accurate and detailed reporting.

Brown is by now established in popular estimation as a man who is always ready to show off his personal weaknesses in public. It is, of course, not unknown for politicians to have personal weaknesses of every kind but usually—as is now being increasingly revealed about the private life of the late Lloyd George, for example—the self-appointed guardians of public information have no qualms about suppressing the facts.

Brown’s tormentors excuse themselves by saying they are worried that a British Foreign Secretary should act in so undignified a way, because this must damage British interests abroad.

The first thing to say about this is that whatever influence the British capitalist class may have in international affairs is founded in their economic and military strength and has absolutely nothing to do with the personalities of their diplomats.

The second thing is that a Foreign Secretary must become involved in all sorts of unsavoury matters. He must promote, agree to, arrange, all manner of treachery, duplicity and intrigue. He must deceive and, if he can carry it off, bully. Sometimes he must back his word with armed force—with destruction and killing. He lives in a savage and cynical world.

It is typical of the hypocrisy of capitalism in general, and of this affair in particular, that all sides in it should think it is perfectly alright for a Foreign Secretary to dabble in the slime, provided he does so with all the traditional ceremonies and dignity.

By-elections

There have been Labour governments before, and Labour governments with unpopular policies, and Labour governments which have lost by-elections. But in all these things the Wilson government are breaking the records.

The Attlee government, just after the war, were unpopular—they imposed the wage freeze, they rationed bread and potatoes, they met the severe winter of 1946/7 with drastic power cuts which sent thousands to bed early in cold, dark homes.

Yet at the by-elections they held the line; as one monotonous result after another came in, it seemed the two big parties were immovably entrenched, each in their respective seats.

Wilson’s record is different. The loss of constituencies like Walthamstow and Leicester means that almost nowhere are Labour candidates safe; that the most massive majority is now vulnerable.

This is a surprisingly rapid change in voting sympathy; it is, after all, only some eighteen months ago that the voters, seemingly mesmerised by the magic of Wilson’s political trickery, swept Labour back into power with an increased majority.

Disenchantment was bound to come and what is now in question is whether, under the pressure of these reverses, Wilson will lose his nerve in the same way as Macmillan did after Orpington.

Either way, and even if in a few odd constituencies like Hamilton the electors decide to vote for one of the smaller parties, there will be no change worth getting excited about. As long as the working class express their frustrations and disappointments by turning from one capitalist party to another the problems they complain about, and which persuade them to change their vote, will continue.

So will the deceits of the political leaders’ magic which, however dazzling in the proud, confident morning of victory, always fades in the dim despair of reality.

Cooking the Books: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (2016)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is generally recognised that during the referendum campaign the Brexit side relied on lies – about how much Britain paid to the EU, about how the EU worked, about Turkey being about to join – over and above the usual empty promises of politicians as to how things would be better if they won. The Remain side relied more on misleading statistics.

In April the Treasury released a study purporting to show that a ‘Vote to Leave would make British households £4,300 worse off’ by 2030 (Independent, 18 April). The Remain side immediately translated this into a poster proclaiming ‘£4300 cost to UK families if Britain leaves the EU’. This figure was misleading because it was based on the assumption that Britain left the single market as well as the EU institutions; which does not have to be, and might well turn out not to be the case.

Also, the £4,300 did not represent how much households would lose, but how much they would fail to gain, the assumption being that if Britain stayed in families would be better off by that amount – an empty politicians’ promise as this is not something that the government has the power to deliver or even predict

Nobody knows what things will be like in 2030 or what will happen in between now and then. This allowed the Brexit side to score a point by ridiculing forecasts as to what things would be like as far as 14 years ahead.

Norman Lamont, a former Tory Chancellor, best known for having to manage Britain’s ignominious exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in September 1992, pointed out:

‘Few forecasts are right for 14 months, let alone 14 years’ (Guardian, 18 April).

Ex-Cabinet Minister Iain Duncan-Smith was even more scathing:

‘If anybody can tell me they know what the global economy is going to be like over the next year let alone the next ten years I have to say they’re either soothsayers or they’ve got some link with God’ (BBC, 16 May).

Both true. Capitalism is an anarchic system in which capitalist firms compete to make as much profit as they can, which leads to ever-repeating boom/slump cycles with the occasional big crash. Added to this is jockeying between states, in furtherance of the economic interests of their capitalists, over trade deals and access to markets and investment outlets, sometimes resulting in war either directly or by proxy.

Taken together, all this makes the course of global capitalism unpredictable and uncontrollable. Experienced politicians know this but still claim the credit when by chance things are going relatively well when they happen to be in office. When, however, things go badly they resort to saying that they were ‘blown off course’. This in fact is an apt metaphor as governments are like the captains of a ship, not just at the mercy of the weather but also having to navigate by sight. They can only react to what capitalism places in their path and which they cannot predict let alone control.

Governments do try to forecast what lies beyond what they can immediately see but, despite the sophisticated models and scenarios, these are essentially just guesstimates and not to be taken as gospel, as the Remain side encouraged voters to believe. According to Lamont, himself a one-time Chancellor, they don’t set much store by them:

‘Any Chancellor of the Exchequer who believes economic forecasts needs his head examined’ (City AM, 27 April).

Remember that the next time a Chancellor in his budget speech trots out statistics about what future growth is going to be.

Poetry Work (1999)

Book Review from the March 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Work: An Anthology. Edited by Dinah Livingstone with the Common Words Group, Katabasis, 1999, pb. £12.95 

Call me a philistine if you wish, but I find much contemporary poetry boring. Poets, lacking anything significant to say about change, retreat into reflective abstractions and introspective indulgence. I am not hoping for all literature to be "politically meaningful", but neither should it be precious, remote from the world and proud in its inaccessibility. Poets should seek to be understood. 

Work is an anthology by poets who clearly want to be understood. As importantly, they clearly understand what it is they are writing about. This is not an observer's view of work but the testimony of people who have themselves had to work in order to live. The book breathes experience. It is a superb collection, comprising new works by writers who have a record of publication and reputation and others who were hitherto unpublished. 

The anthology begins with an extract from Morris's How We Live and How We Might Live which serves as a political foreword to the volume, rooting it explicitly in a political recognition of how employment turns the worker into "but an appendage to profit-grinding". Poems within the anthology return to this again and again, few more powerfully than Christopher Hampton's exposure of "the leash" of wage slavery; Sandra Smith's wonderful comparison between workers and birds; and Dilys Wood's moving evocation of a miner's life. There is much more: short, sharp pieces on odd jobs such as the chiropodist by Anna Robinson and Dinah Livingstone's brilliant "assistant birdman of Regent's Park". Mimi Khalvati writes beautifully on the work of being a poet. And these are just some. There are prose pieces, including direct reports from the Hillingdon hospital workers (Asian women who were on strike for four years for refusing to take a pay cut; their employer is a member of Blair's Low Pay Commission) and an account of a young worker killed by casualisation. Ernest Fischer, whose The Necessity of Art remains probably the finest Marxian analysis of the role of art, describes how poetry began in the rhythm of the work song, itself produced by the repeated movements of physical work. So it is appropriate that this fine anthology of poetry should return to the subject of work—to its frustrations, its creativity, its rhythms and its pitiful rewards. The next Katabasis anthology will be on the theme of Home. I'm looking forward to it already.

Steve Coleman

Home (2001)

Book Review from the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

HOME - An anthology. Edited by Kathleen McPhilery with the Common Words Group. Katabasis, 2000.

At its title suggest, this is a compilation of writings on the theme of "home", following on from a similar anthology, "Work" (reviewed in the Socialist Standard, March 1999).

The entries are classed as poems, essays, accounts and reports—the collection relies too heavily on poetry for my personal taste, but otherwise there is plenty to interest the politically aware reader.

The collection opens with a fascinating essay by Dinah Livingstone, entitled "Home on Earth", which poses many question about the nature of "home", not just in the physical sense of four walls (if you're lucky), but also in the broader sense of cultural or national environments. She regularly refers to the Zapatista slogan, "For a world where there is room for many worlds", and also brings in the power of language—"as well as in a particular place, we are also at home in our mother tongue". This thoughtful essay poses more questions than it answers, but certainly set me thinking about my relationship with the world.

Colin Davies, in "The Architecture of the Home", contrasts "modern" vs. "traditional" styles of home building, with the "modernists" getting a clear thumbs-down: Frankfurt flats "spaced and oriented for optimum daylight and sunshine" made "no concessions to existing physical context or to any architectural tradition". "Being perfect, the city is unalterable . . . It is a city without memory and without hope". Davies goes on to reflect that, "Like every other material aspect of modern life, housing has become a commodity."

Later, Dilys Wood offers a feminist perspective with her essay "Woman and Home". I must confess to finding it slightly turgid, meandering along as it does to the conclusion that, "We have just reached the point at which the identification between woman and home has been broken and women can look forward to the same status as men in the world of paid employment."

More about such depressing reformism later. These and other theoretical essays are interspersed with poems and much more personal accounts of "home" life in a variety of settings. Such settings vary from life on the street, to squats, child-care institutions, boarding schools, sheltered housing, nursing homes, even a Hare Krishna temple. These often poignant vignettes offer perhaps more sense of real humanity than the more abstract essays. The accounts of live in a nursing home offers a welcome note of cynicism and defiance whilst a Yugoslav refugee remarks: "I don't think there is any justice left. I think that everything that is important in the world is money, money, money."

Comments like this are scattered throughout the book. Ultimately, though, it is a slightly depressing read for socialists because the only solutions offered seem to be from the usual reformist cul-de-sac. The book's fourth category, "reports", consists of reports from organisations such as Shelter, the Catholic Housing Aid Society, etc, with an under-riding feeling that these are the "experts" to whom we should look for solutions. Maybe that is unfair, but despite much criticism of aspects of capitalism, nowhere is there any suggestion that abolishing the wages system might get to the root causes of society's problems.

Despite its faults, however, Home is a well-researched and at times fascinating book.

Shane Roberts

Small is small (2013)

Book Review from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

No Local: Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won’t Change the World. By Greg Sharzer. Zero books, 2011. 180 pages.

According to Sharzer there are two kinds of ‘localists’–those who openly favour small-scale capitalism (small businesses, ethical consumption, community gardening) and those who see small-scale alternative economic arrangements (cooperatives, LETS schemes, local currencies, credit unions) as a way of undermining capitalism and progressing towards a post-capitalist society. His argument is that ‘while small-scale alternatives can survive and occasionally flourish, they won’t build a new, equitable society. Their prospects are severely limited by the power of capital.’They may be ways for some people to survive under capitalism, but are no threat to it.

Pro-market localists share the assumption of mainstream economics that capitalism is a system geared to meeting paying consumer demand whereas in fact it is geared to making profits and accumulating them as more capital. Capitalist firms are driven by market forces to accumulate as, to stay in the race, they must continually invest in reducing their costs of production. Small firms are not exempt from this pressure. Neither are the cooperatives favoured by anti-market localists. Both kinds of localist are ‘faced with the impalatable conclusion that small alternatives won’t outcompete or destroy capitalism.’ Rather, ‘capital’s inherent drives to profit expose local alternatives to ruthless market discipline.’

Ethical consumption can’t be effective because most people can’t afford it. LETS schemes and local currencies are less convenient than ordinary money and only survive because (and as long as) some activists are prepared to put in the extra work to keep them going. Community gardening in towns has to compete with other, rent-bringing uses of the land. If national governments have been unable to delink their economies from the world market how can local communities be expected to?

Sharzer questions both the feasibility and the desirability of localist schemes to maximise local autarky:

‘Consumer goods, let alone mass public transit systems and high-speed internet, are impossible without a highly-developed capacity to source materials, process them into finished products and distribute them across large distances. For example, making solar panels involves advanced machinery and massive financing that would be impossible to muster locally. (…) Even localism’s direct democracy needs high-tech to reduce people’s workload and allow them time to participate.’

Sharzer, then, makes a powerful case as to ‘why small-scale alternatives won’t change the world.’ This, however, is confined to the opening chapters. After them it’s downhill all the way. A whole chapter is devoted to trying to show that localism is the ideology of the ‘petite (sic) bourgeois’ as if this was a separate class (and as if he wouldn’t fall into it himself). Localism could be described as ‘petty bourgeois’ but only in the economic sense of wanting to create an economy of independent artisans and small (‘petty’) enterprises. Rock bottom is reached when he praises Lenin ‘whose movement inspired millions to take up arms for socialism’, i.e., for state capitalism, his own unviable ‘alternative’.  This means that unfortunately his criticisms are not going to be taken so seriously by anti-market localists.

Adam Buick

How to Avoid the Backfire Effect and Change Minds (2016)

From the August 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Contrary to what we might think, when presented with facts that run counter to what we currently believe we have a tendency of hardening, not softening, our currently held beliefs. This tendency is called the backfire effect and was discovered by researchers investigating how memory and knowledge are updated after correcting information has been received. The backfire effect works in several ways. Firstly there is the familiarity effect, the more someone is familiar with a claim the more likely they are to accept it as true. So, just mentioning a false claim, even if the purpose is to debunk it, will have the effect of increasing its familiarity and so the likelihood of it later being remembered as true. With this in mind, it is best to just focus on the facts if possible. Secondly, there is the overkill effect, information that is easier to process is more likely to be accepted as true. If we provide too many counter-examples, we will overwhelm our audience making our argument less likely to be accepted than if we had focused on one or two key points. The final and most important of these is the worldview backfire effect, this happens when the information relates to one's self-identity or political outlook. In these cases confirmation, and disconfirmation, bias will be working at their strongest as the tendency is to reject things that do not cleanly fit with the narrative of our current belief system. We should therefore be most cautious and self-reflective when considering facts that challenge that which we hold most dearly.

So, with all this in mind are we better off abandoning rational argument altogether? Not at all, but we should use this knowledge to act in a way that will be most effective. Instead of trying to bludgeon people into submission with brute facts we should get them to think about their thinking and to consider how they have formed and structured their beliefs. A cue can be taken from the ancient Greek philosopher and social gadfly Socrates who made himself a perpetual thorn in the side of respectable Athenian society, not by pushing his own views, but by endlessly questioning the assumptions of others. It has been shown that we tend to overestimate the completeness of our own understanding. By getting people to explain how and why they think something in detail, we encourage them to look at all the complexities of the issue and make any gaps in their knowledge apparent. When this method has been tried experimentally it has been found to have the effect of softening the certainty that a view is held. Once a gap has been made in someone's mental model the time is right to introduce an alternative explanation, preferably one that explains all the observed features of the event. People tend to prefer a faulty explanation to no explanation at all.

Effective discussion is as much about social skills and awareness as it is about logic and reasoning. The philosopher Daniel Dennett suggested the following method for achieving a more productive exchange. First, restate your opponent's argument in as clear a form as possible. Then mention any points of agreement, especially non-commonly held ones. State anything new that you have learnt from the argument. Then, only after these first three steps, are you permitted to put forward a rebuttal. By showing that you have taken the time to properly understand your opponent's argument and by indicating what in it you find of value you will already be starting the discussion off on a fertile footing.

Knowing about the common mistakes that we all make enables us to think more clearly about our thinking and so have a greater hope of coming to conclusions that are closer to the truth. If we want to be critical thinkers we should self-identify with the process of critical thinking and not with particular conclusions, that way we can more easily change our opinions in the light of new evidence. We should be seeking to get our politics to fit the facts and not bending the facts to fit our politics. Our default mode of thinking is to retrospectively rationalise reasons to justify our pre-existing beliefs, and by realising this and applying it to our own thinking we are more free to follow the process of reasoning and follow the logic and evidence to wherever it may take us.

DJP

The West Wing (2001)

TV Review from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The West Wing arrived from America as a successful US television show depicting life behind the scenes in the White House, setting out to show the way the White House really works, the “so far unrevealed dedication of these hitherto unpublicised workers and their efforts to keep the president and presidential office functioning”. As a show it is fast, slick, articulate and witty. It is highly watchable TV. Does it tell you anything about the reality behind the scenes other than the exact reproductions (we are assured) of the White House interior and furniture? You would be very unwise to believe much, if anything of the relationships shown or of the presidency. It's highly glamorised fiction designed to bolster the image of the presidency and reassure an American public that this is how democracy works. As such it is merely another example of the age-old myth surrounding the beneficent presence of the great in power. Yes Minister it ain't. But it is very cleverly done.

The staff come across as warm, caring and intensely loyal to the president in whom there is absolutely no trace of a Nixon, a Kennedy, a Reagan or a Clinton or in fact to any president going back to George Washington. This president has no faults other than a few endearing minor characteristics. And he is educated: he reads Latin!

But credibility is sought by having his staff display recognisable human weaknesses from time to time. The president's adviser and close personal friend has been disclosed as a recovered alcoholic and drug addict (nothing more potent than Valium) and has to come clean. The president himself has been revealed as a long-term sufferer from Multiple Sclerosis which he never let on to even his closest friend because he wanted to be president so much. This is about the extent of any flaws revealed so far. Not a sign of sleaze anywhere. As Queen Victoria would have said, “So unlike our own dear parliament.”

More credible is the way that government is shown to work by balancing minority interests one against another. To stay in power it doesn't pay to upset too many people, especially if they represent big business interests. The president is shown as being bitterly opposed to owning guns (by ordinary people that it, not by his armed forces) and he has to use all sorts of pressures and trade all sorts of offers to get his Bill through Congress. It starts to get unbelievable when at the last minute he has to revoke his nearly final appointment of a Supreme Court judge when it's discovered that the judge does not support the right of the individual to keep their private life private and to not allow such devices as bugging to have the force of law. Oh horror! This contravenes the Constitution as laid down by the founding fathers and cannot be allowed. The whole team is shocked, and a last minute substitute (who just happens to be Mexican) is appointed. Similar liberal sentiments abound and one gets the feeling that there is an element of propagandising in all this in an attempt to teach the American public how to think.

It is not only in the USA of course that the role of government is believed to be that of looking after the people who vote for them. It is probable that most people believe that that is what government is for and they record a vote acting under such a belief. It is even possible that there are politicians who believe this and they try to act accordingly. This is a delusion the reality being that government throughout the capitalist world acts to maintain capitalism and usually tries to favour the interests of one group of capitalist interests. Even given the remote possibility that a government may be elected that genuinely tries to represent the majority the realities of administering a market system soon teaches them otherwise. The idea that things go wrong just because politicians are corrupt is too simplistic and leads to the conclusion if only we can get this lot out and another lot in who are honest, things might get better. This is the “if only” attitude and can never work, not because there will never be any honest politicians but because politicians are unable to change the system. A properly-run society – socialism – must be brought about and run by the majority, from below, and can never be imposed from the top, just as capitalism, a system that is constructed to serve the interests of the few, can never serve the interests of the many.

And of course in a land where to run for president, or any public office can cost millions in campaigning and where those millions mostly come from those who have millions, the priority obligation of the president, and his government is to pay back those millionaire supporters. In other words the function of government in the US just as in all governments wherever they are to serve the interests of a class, the capitalist class. The West Wing is romanticised wish fulfilment fantasy, feeding the desire to believe that somehow, somewhere, someone up there is looking after us. A dangerous belief, but it can be interesting viewing to see just how they manipulate us.

Cyril Evans

Proper Gander: Belonging to Our Belongings (2016)

The Proper Gander Column from the August 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The usual concept behind a ‘social experiment’ TV show is to throw people into situations outside their usual routines, such as plonking them somewhere remote and seeing how they cope (Castaway 2000, Eden) or dressing them up in period clothes to live as if they’re in a previous era (The 1900 House (2000) et al). However much light these programmes shed on how we adapt to different circumstances, there's often a whiff of them being the televisual equivalent of putting a load of cats and dogs in a cage and prodding them with sticks. The grand-daddy of this kind of show is Big Brother (2000 onwards), which rapidly degenerated from its almost-anthropological origins into a boring and degrading guessing-game over which of the housemates will shag and/or argue first. Fortunately, Life Stripped Bare (Channel 4) is much less tawdry, despite being an excuse to film people getting their kit off.

Unlike the above shows, Life Stripped Bare doesn’t move its participants into a different place to live. Instead, it leaves them in their own homes, but without any of their furniture, appliances, phones, wallets, nick-nacks and, indeed, clothes. All their possessions are boxed up and locked in a storage container nearby, leaving them with just basic food rations. For the first few hours, there’s little the naked participants can do except sit awkwardly under similarly bare windows. On each of the following days they can choose just one item to get back from storage. During the experiment’s three weeks, they can’t buy or borrow anything apart from food and drink, and they must carry on with their daily lives. Afterwards, they’ll decide which of their belongings they really want back.

Among participant Heidi’s 861 possessions are 31 bikinis and 68 vinyl records. She feels that her ‘stuff’ defines her, so she’s interested to find out who she really is without her belongings. She’s concerned that people won’t like her without her jewellery and make-up, and she feels she’ll get left behind if she doesn’t check social media several times an hour. She says it’s ‘pretty sad’ that she’s defined her life by how many Instagram followers she has, aware that there’s something hollow about her own mindset. Another participant, John, recognises that he’s lost the art of conversation because of the amount of time he spends looking at a screen.

Understandably, the first items they choose to get back from storage are clothes, or used to make them. After reclaiming her first few items, Heidi says that the novelty of getting something else back wears off within minutes, whereas at the start she got a high with each reclaimed item: ‘The more stuff I get back, the less happy I am'. On day five, Andrew and Georgia choose their phones, while housemate Tom instead picks some socks, saying that having his phone isn’t in the spirit of the exercise. A week later he chooses his hitherto under-used piano, wanting to take the opportunity to learn to play it while he has fewer distractions.

After the 21 days, lorries return to the participants’ homes and they get their remaining belongings back. The final part of the experiment is to decide how many of them they want to keep. Together, the three households get rid of nearly a third of their possessions, and feel better for de-cluttering. Heidi says she used to feel that she needs belongings to make her who she is, and comes to believe she wasted her time validating her life through social media. She learns to worry less about needing other people’s approval, put things more into perspective, and make the most of what she’s got.

The point of Life Stripped Bare isn’t to find out how well we can survive with few possessions. It’s more about exploring how we relate to what we own. Which of our belongings are most important to us, why, and what do they say about how we feel about ourselves? The relative scarcity of possessions (and the threat of their scarcity) in capitalism underpins our attitudes to what we possess. Owning things represents some kind of security, and we’re encouraged to equate success with having lots of stuff. Which particular commodities we own, and the extent to which we define ourselves through them, often hinges on how well they have been marketed to us. What we own also affects how we relate to other people, whether we rely on how we’re dressed to win respect or if having phones with social media alienates us as well as brings us together. We've always attached meanings to our belongings, and always will. How we do this depends on the way society mediates between ourselves and what we can own. Capitalism both restricts us and pressurises us into owning stuff, so no wonder there’s often something troubling about how we relate to our possessions, as Heidi and the other participants in Life Stripped Bare found out. With all the questions the programme raises about our attachments to our belongings, it’s ironic that it’s sponsored, and by Samsung Home Appliances.

Mike Foster