Comrade Cyril May on New York Radio (1970)

From issue number 6 (1970) of The Western Socialist

During his recent visit to the United States as fraternal delegate of the Socialist Party of Great Britain to the annual WSP conference in Boston, Comrade May, together with two other SPGB comrades, addressed a successful propaganda meeting conducted by New York Local. While in New York he was interviewed by Arlene Francis (well-known star of motion pictures and TV) on her radio program, on WOR-AM, September 29, 1970.

Inasmuch as the discussion ran about 40 minutes, we had to condense it because of space requirements of The Western Socialist. We take pleasure in presenting Comrade Cyril May’s effective presentation of the socialist case in this interview. Miss Francis asked meaningful and pertinent questions.

Arlene Francis: I would like to introduce Mr. Cyril May, party organizer of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, who is visiting this country to give some lectures. And I'm happy that one of your lectures. Mr. May. is to be addressed to me because what I do not know about your subject is embarrassing to me. Among my few meager bits of knowledge is the fact that the socialist state that you envision does not presently exist nor has It ever existed. Am I right?

Cyril May: That is quite correct. In fact, the statement of a "socialist state” is not one that we would particularly like to go along with because the very word "state” itself has certain political connotations with which you and I would perhaps disagree at this juncture. But it is true that socialism is something that does not exist in any country throughout the world.

Arlene: And has it ever?

Cyril: And it hasn’t ever. No.

Arlene: Then you have come up with a brand new idea today. And . . .  sowhat we are talking about — is what? Ia it another movement toward features such as public control of all utilities? I don't know so I have to ask.

Cyril: OK. Well I’ll try to fill you in with the essentials on it. Socialism to the Socialist Party of Great Britain and to its companion parties in other parts of the world, including the World Socialist Party in the United States, is a system of society, or a way of living if we can put it that way, where the means of wealth production and distribution, the land, the mills, the mines, the minerals, the factories and workshops, the means of transportation will be owned by the whole of society, regardless of sex or race. In short, common ownership is the essential economic fundamental of a socialist society.

Arlene: How do you even begin that?

Cyril: Well, to begin that. It really involves a revolution In the idea process of people. They’ve got to change their ideas and concepts and the scales of social values, that they have today. In short, the establishment of a socialist society, from our point of view, rests upon a majority of people. It can’t be established by some dictatorship or some elitist group. It rests upon a majority of people understanding it and arising from that understanding taking the necessary political action to establish It. So first of all it’s a revolution in ideas.

Arlene: So that it’s a case for the psychotherapist really, before anything else.

Cyril: Well. I changed my ideas and I didn’t have a psychotherapist.

Arlene: What were your ideas?

Cyril: Well, my ideas when I was 14 or 15 were rather typical of most working class boys, I guess. I went to a Methodist Church. I thought at times, I guess, that it was a change of heart that was needed by people. And I looked at the hearts of a lot of people who had apparently changed, belonged to churches, and I found that they had no solution to what I considered to be the major problems then. This was In the middle of the 1930s when the Second World War was looming on the horizon. and after listening to a variety of different political speeches and reading books on it, I came to the conclusion that the ideas of the Socialist Party were the correct ones. But no psychotherapist entered into this. And If we’ve got to wait for psychotherapists to deal with this, then I don’t think It will ever come. It’s long enough to wait for it dealing with it in the normal way. But I think if we let the psychotherapists loose on it we really are in trouble.

Arlene: Yes, but still you’ve said yourself that we have to recondition our own thinking. That takes quite a lot of work to leave in the hands of the individual.

Cyril: No. It doesn't leave work on the part of the individual. But at least they are capable of doing it. The trouble as I see it and the Party sees it, they're not prepared to devote the amount of time to the world in which they live that they devote to football, perhaps. in England and in America to baseball and basketball.

Arlene: Then you don’t recognize natural greed?

Cyril: No, I don’t recognize natural greed, as such. I recognize people are greedy, including myself. But I don’t think that is any natural aspect of man. I rather think that’s more a feature of human behavior that’s determined by social conditions under which he finds himself. (Voice from background: Desperation?)

Arlene: Jeanie just said "desperation.”

Cyril: Well, not so much desperation, perhaps, apart from the way in which this world is organized—rather stupidly in my opinion. There are those who become desperate because on the one hand, the world can turn out sufficient food to feed the millions of the world, while on the other hand millions of people starve. That is a desperate situation, and one which will exist as long as this type of world operates where food isn’t grown primarily for people to eat. I mean, that is of secondary importance. In fact, a lot of food that is produced isn’t fit for humans to eat very often. But the prime reason it is produced, I would say, is for sale on the market with view to profit. No profit, no production, and the people can die of starvation. That’s desperate and I think we’ve got to do something about it.

Arlene: Why does, or does the Socialist Party of Great Britain feel that a gradual reform is impossible?

Cyril: Well, we’ve come up against this political question of reformism in Great Britain since around the turn of the century. Organizations like the Labour Party were formed on the old Social Democratic Federation lines and put out the view that they wanted a different type of society and envisaged that this society could be obtained by a series of political reforms. Well, in England — and obviously I talk out of a great deal of political experience after seventy years of political reforms since the first of the century, some of which have been quite fundamental in character — as for example the introduction of the National Health Service, the fact that certain industries were nationalized, all reforms advocated by the Labour Party, fundamentally these reforms haven’t patched any of the basic problems that confront mankind. And we think that all reforms, some of which may be good, some of which have a left-handed kick, as it were, if added up, do not even touch the ownership of society, which — to us — is the basis of the ills that confront mankind today. So this process of reformism doesn’t in any way bring us that much nearer to the fundamental change which we consider is necessary.

Arlene: Could your ideals be expressed in the ballot?

Cyril: Yes, that is the idea of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the Companion Parties, that the capture of political control, political power, to introduce a new way of life can only be done through peaceful means. We do not envisage a revolution on the streets behind barricades, lynching people, that does not give rise to a sane order of society. So It has got to be done through the ballot box.

Arlene: Were the socialist ideals of George Bernard Shaw any closer to your way of thinking?

Cyril: I like George Bernard Shaw as a dramatist. As a political commentator he was not particularly on the beam. He was a member of the Fabian Society which is an offshoot of the Labour Party. He was interested firstly in what the Labour Party stood for, namely, to try and reform, shall we say, rub the raw edges off the capitalist system but really to keep it in being with its ownership basis.

Arlene: Doesn’t it strike you that your goals are so enormous that they are virtually impossible?

Cyril: Uuhm . . .

Arlene: Of course you wouldn't be working for anything that you thought was impossible . . .

Cyril: Yes. If I thought it was impossible I wouldn't be devoting my time. We do realize it is an enormous task. But we have a number of features which are working for us, in many ways. If the introduction of the new system rested upon the mere handful of socialists, relatively speaking, in this and other parts of the country then you could say, why worry? But the way the system operates and organizes itself throws up such a series of problems which man has got to grapple with one way or another, otherwise he's a dead one, that this in itself, acts very much on happy hearts, and people begin to start thinking of things along lines of dealing with them from a worldwide basis without necessarily being socialists. There are a number of agencies, today, which are certainly not socialist — in fact, very much capitalist — in character but they are beginning to appreciate, and realize that the problems today are no longer confined to one geographical unit, but are world-wide in character.

Arlene: Can you mention what some are?

Cyril: Yes. I should think the Food and Agricultural Organization attached to the United Nations Organization has done an enormous amount of research work and printed a considerable amount of literature which is not socialist, but which in many ways has pin-pointed the problem as being one of a social nature and one of a world-wide character. They stop short there, of course, and here, I think, is their fundamental failing. They are dealing with these evils through the eyeglass of capitalism and as long as they wear that eyeglass they will not go any further than that.

Arlene: What about the abolition of money, which was suggested on this microphone some months back by Alan Watts. It is an interesting idea and it still haunts me — all the ramifications of it. Will you please develop that a little for us?

Cyril: Yes. This is one of the points that the socialist mentions — that they envisage a society without money, that at this juncture most people do think that we are cracked (laughter from the hostess). They've got so used to money that they can't envisage anything except money with which to obtain articles. But if you look back over history money wasn't always in existence, certainly not in primitive times and it only came into existence with the development of private property and became the complex money system that we know today as capitalism has become more and more complex . . . In London, recently, due to the fact that our transport system, much like yours in New York, is run down and doesn't pay its way the suggestion’s been made that it is not worthwhile collecting all of these silly coins and silly pieces of paper; let's ride for free. Well, this isn’t socialism, of course, but it shows the way in which people’s minds are working. To us, money is only a means of exchange in order that if I was in a bar instead of your radio studio and wanted a cup of coffee, I’d have to give fifteen cents for it because somebody owns that cup of coffee and if I want it I've got to pay them for it. But this presupposes ownership all away along the line. But if you have a world based on common ownership, where the coffee, the cocoa and all the thousand and one different things that men need in order to live are owned by the whole of society, then what would we have money for? It's no use paying ourselves money in order to obtain these things. And we envisage this socialist society as being one in which people will give according to their abilities and take according to their need. And we will not need money in order to do that.

Arlene: Isn’t that also Communist theory?

Cyril: Strictly speaking the words “socialism” and "communism” are synonomous terms. Marx, a hundred years ago wrote this in many of the political books and pamphlets he was writing at the time and it’s largely in the 20th century, particularly from the dating of the Russian Revolution of 1917, that the words "communism” and "socialism” seem to have taken on a different meaning. In short, some people look upon "socialism” as being parlor pink and "communism” as the deepest of red. But to us they are, indeed, identical terms.

Low Life in High Places: The Political Scandals (1973)

From the August 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our politicians have recently been looking rather like a man who has found the first flakes of dry rot in his house and who knows that as he crumbles away each piece of dead wood he will reveal more and more damage. The uncovering of scandalous goings on in high places has caused some excited voices to ask whether capitalism is being undermined by its own rottenness. Journalistic fashion, which at other times can be preoccupied with war, or crime, or economic crises, now luxuriates in stories of secret cameras and microphones and boardroom deals.

Watergate, of course, is the hottest piece of scandal, with its insight into the muscle tactics of American politics. Over here we have no Watergate, only Lambton and Jellicoe who show how capitalism’s rulers do not always keep to the standards of conduct they like to lay down for the rest of us. The Poulson case has revealed something of how firms can win contracts and influence people. The News of the World’s tireless muckraking has helped in turning up the BBC payola case, which promises to let us in on the well-known secret that although we may pay our money we do not necessarily take our choice. (America also has a payola scandal, but to the relief of its participants it is crowded off the front pages by Watergate.) Lonrho will go down in the history of British boardrooms as an example of how to succeed in business without really trying.

A big tax evasion scandal is about to break in France, which may involve a couple of hundred companies in accusations of fraudulent operations. In Germany there are rumblings that the hero of the left, Chancellor Brandt, held on to his office last year only by bribing a deputy to change his vote in Brandt’s favour.

We Never Closed

Now the surprising thing about all of this is that it is so surprising. Scandals are exposed only intermittently but the evidence is that they are happening all the time; there is always some group or individual who is trying to steal a march on the rest of the ruling class by bending the rules.

As anyone who has heard of Mayor Daley knows, American politics are almost synonymous with corruption. It was never established whether Kennedy did get his microscopic majority over Nixon in 1960 by virtue of a bit of vote-fixing in Illinois. At any rate, the Kennedys were probably too smart to allow themselves to be connected with any such dealings. Kennedy’s successor Johnson came into power on a cloud of suspicion over his connection with Bobby Baker, whose career included manipulated government contracts, questionable bank deals, diversion of party funds and the employment of the services of call-girls as a gainful investment. Johnson denied any suggestions that he was involved and while his one time protégé floundered in miserable exposures the great wheel-and- dealer president lived to fight and win another day.

How is it with the Empire ?

Rumour has it that things are more gentlemanly in England; or is it that British workers suffer from a different strain of gullibility? Remember, for example, Horatio Bottomley, who swindled his way into and out of several fortunes before he overstepped even the bounds of working class hero-worship. Bottomley’s first swindle was pulled off in the 1890’s but during the 1914/18 war the workers queued in their thousands to join up after hearing one of his famous recruiting speeches. He carried on during the war, while the men he had recruited died in the trenches, and afterwards, rooking rich and poor until it all caught up with him and he went to prison in 1922. Bottomley’s fall was not quite the distressful event it might have been for his admirers, because he had already been through the courts many times. Indeed, it was his success in these cases which made his enemies wary of challenging him; he once tried to bribe someone into taking out a hopeless action against him, to reinforce his reputation for legal invincibility.

Perhaps Bottomley picked up some tips from that other great popular man of the people, Edward VII, who resembled him in many ways — gross, vulgar, audacious and with enough sensual fixations to satisfy the most fervent Freudian analyst. Edward, especially while he was Prince of Wales, gambled, ran up debts, ate massively and indulged a copious and wide ranging sexual appetite, which landed him in scandals in which his only protection was his eminence. On at least one occasion he was the subject of a successful blackmail. None of this prevented him, when he became king in 1902, assuming the leadership of a church which instructs workers that of all sins the deadliest is sexual deviance. It even gave him a mild popularity with some of the workers who suffered deprivation in such bitter contrast to Edward’s vulgar opulence; they thought well of him for his racehorses, for what they called his sportsmanship and — more incredible than all — for his common touch.

Spies and Ribaldry

Under the memory of Edward VII Lambton and Jellicoe are small fry. It was perhaps their misfortune that their exposure, coming just ten years after the Profumo affair, should revive that episode. Profumo, the War Minister who became involved with an expensive prostitute called Christine Keeler, committed his indiscretions at an especially unfavourable time. When Edward VII was stamping the brothels British capitalism was powerful, secure. In 1963 it was a different story and much of Prime Minister Macmillan’s time was taken up with trying to persuade his followers to accept the reality of the decline of British power. It was a popular fantasy, to which the Labour Party was as attached as were the Tories, that British capitalism had secrets which powerful rivals like Russia were itching to steal. That was partly why the Foreign Office spy Vassall got as much as 18 years for allowing himself to be blackmailed into passing information and why soon after there was such a wave of hysteria over Profumo who was said to be, among other things, a security risk.

What memorable summer days they were, with ministers each week awaiting with dread the latest instalment of Christine Keeler’s story, the endless jokes and with the Daily Mirror, feeding the notion that the scandal reached to the peaks of society, suggesting that Prince Philip was involved by the simple ruse of publishing an outraged denial. Somewhere there had to be a halt and in the end the British ruling class took their revenge upon Stephen Ward, the toady who had introduced Profumo to Keeler. Ward was abandoned, then destroyed, by his influential friends — an ending with its own tragic but typical irony.

Privilege

That dirty episode was representative of a social system which cannot come clean. Capitalism has rules which are moulded by the privileged interests of the property-owning minority. It is a society in which there can be no general harmony of interests, in which agreements are signified by the knife in the back, the foot on the neck. Within the privileged minority there are other minorities continually forming, attempting to seize extra privileges and to bend the rules in their own favour. To some extent these are accepted and contained by the rest of the ruling class; it is when they overstep the limits of prudence and become a threat to capitalism’s public face that they have to be dealt with.

Watergate, unsavoury as it is, is no worse than the everyday usage of capitalist politics, which could not continue without a succession of consciously formulated deceptions upon the working class. During the presidential election last year the American workers were aware of a lot of what was involved in the Watergate scandal, yet they gave Nixon an historical vote of confidence — because he promised them, if anything, a more controlled and repressive capitalism and wrapped it all up in the familiar smooth avowals of the used-car salesman.

The Lambton affair has demonstrated little beyond the fact that the privileges of the ruling class extend into all aspects of human life. Lambton himself (Daily Telegraph 21 June 1973) justified it in a predictably audacious way:

. . . men with great ambitions also had a strong sexual urge that was not satisfied easily.

If such men were limited and ordered to be irreproachable, there was a danger of the creation of the power élite. This would undermine the the fundamental purpose of democracy.

And he rubbed in his advantage, when the scandal broke, by holing up in an expensive hideaway. Workers who are caught in similar tangles have no such relief available to them; they have to sort out their personal and emotional difficulties at the same time as they cope with the drudgery of housework, of the office or the relentless production line.

Smoothing it Over

Heath tried to salvage something from the Lonrho affair, which showed up another aspect of privilege, by making his instantly famous remark about the "unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism.” There are no reports of him choking on the words. The shareholders displayed their feelings by packing the company’s special general meeting and enthusiastically supporting the management policies, big handouts, tax avoidance and all, simply because they had produced big dividends. That is the normal face of capitalism, much more logical than Heath’s pathetic attempt to humbug his way out of the matter. The Tory leader, like any other politician, can accept any face of capitalism without a thought for the savagery of its exploitation. Beside that, there are no grounds for objecting to some company directors fiddling a few hundred thousand on the side.

In one way Heath was pointing to a danger in the present situation. The working class are continually allowing themselves to be diverted from attending to the essential matter of abolishing capitalism and replacing it with Socialism. They are diverted by the notion that capitalism would he more acceptable, were it organized by one bunch of tricksters rather than the other. They are diverted by the glamour of a princess marrying a man who is rich partly through a family interest in selling sub-standard food for working-class consumption. They are diverted by the idea that capitalism need not be run as a cut-throat, scandalous business, by this sort of assurance:

It was the Government’s prime concern to see that capitalism worked fairly and effectively because it was on that that our prosperity was established. (Geoffrey Howe, Minister for Trade, replying to questions in the Commons about Lonrho; Daily Telegraph 12 June 1973.)

It is instructive to observe how the ruling class as a whole unite in fostering these deceptions. Brezhnev’s visit last month to America signified another stage in the resolve of the Russian and American ruling classes to divide the spoils of world capitalism as peaceably as they can. Not so long ago, in the depths of the Cold War, the Russians could have been relied upon to make the most of something like Watergate. Yet there was Brezhnev, helping Nixon to divert attention from Watergate and look like the weighty statesman so beloved by all workers — and doing it with a deliberate measure of publicity-catching clowning. Seeing those two robbers at the White House, beaming and waving, who would have believed what they are both capable of, both responsible for?

The world working class should match this with a unity of their own. As the scandals put capitalism’s leaders under pressure, they respond in a familiar way. Nixon adopts the mask of a betrayed innocent, Heath of outraged decency. They are papering over the rot, trying to delay the awful moment when the leprous reality can no longer be hidden.

Ivan

The Myth of Scotland's Oil (1973)

From the August 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

If the victory of the Dundee by-election was regarded as a triumph by the Labour Party, the Scottish National Party must also have been elated by the large number of votes secured by their candidate who ran a close second. This would suggest that the Nats are making a comeback after a period in the doldrums following the party’s zenith in 1968, after Winifred Ewing’s election at Hamilton, when membership was claimed to be in excess of 90,000 with some 500 branches. At present members total some 60,000, with branches around 440.

Why the revival? Undoubtedly the rejuvenating shot in the arm came in the form of North Sea oil. The recent successes of the oil consortiums couldn’t have happened at a better time for the SNP, for two reasons. First—and this is the kernel of the Nationalist argument — the SNP have always asserted that the problems confronting Scotland resulted from the channelling of Scottish revenue directly into the coffers of the “English government’’ thereby preventing the Scottish worker from deriving any benefit from it (despite the obvious fact that his English counterpart doesn’t do too well either!). The advent of the Nats’ new sacred cow, oil, greatly strengthens this argument and has the added bonus of promising such offshoot titbits as rig-building, construction and service industries.

Second, the Nats had previously conceded (surprisingly) that in the early days of home-rule the standard of living would actually be lowered. The wealth they claim oil would bring to an independent Scotland allows them to discard this vote-loser, and the result is that many workers who were previously sceptical of home-rule are now expressing concern over “Scottish Oil” which goes, according to the SNP poster, “To London with Love”.

Who owns North Sea Oil ?

The territorial control of the world’s continental shelf areas was settled by the United Nations Continental Shelf Convention of 1958 when, by an agreement binding after 1969, countries bordering any particular section of continental shelf were given sovereign rights to explore and exploit the natural resources of the shelf. The North Sea continental shelf has since been divided up between Norway, Germany, Denmark, Holland and Britain. The first British round of licences for oil exploration was granted in 1964, several more having been made since, the latest in March 1972. By the end of 1972 at least six commercial-sized oil fields had been discovered in the Scottish sector together with other recent strikes (whose potential is still being assessed). They are:

• Forties Field which was the first and one of the biggest. Discovered by British Petroleum about a hundred miles east of Aberdeen. Eventual peak production will be in excess of 400,000 barrels per day (20 million tons per year).
• Montrose Field discovered about 30 miles south-east of the Forties Field by Amoco and thought to be capable of producing 100,000 barrels per day.
• Auk Field being brought by Shell into production at a rate of 40,000 barrels/day.
• Argyll Field is reckoned by Hamilton’s to be possibly in the 200,000 barrels/day range.
• Brent Field has Shell/Esso anticipating an eventual rate of over 300,000 barrels/day.
• Beryl Field Mobil are looking for a possible 300,000 barrels/day here.

The Face of Prosperity

Under London rule, argue the Nationalists in a new pamphlet The Reality of Scotland’s Oil by Nicholas Dekker, only 9 per cent of the taxes and royalties from this oil will go to Scotland. Under home-rule, however, the Nats claim that by 1980 (assuming that it will take five years to develop an oilfield in the North Sea) new fields discovered during 1973, 1974 and 1975 could bring production up to 150 million tons per year with an estimated gross value of £2,250 million, of which something like £1,400 million or over per annum could tumble into a Scottish exchequer. Coupled with an assumed 50 per cent of “Scottish participation” (investment of capital) in production and of 40 per cent or 60 per cent in ancillary costs (based on above figures), total potential worth to a Scottish economy would be 85 per cent or 90 per cent of gross value—£1,900 million to £2,000 [million] per annum.

This money can, insist the SNP, “be used to secure for all time, prosperity, security, and a satisfying life style for all the people of Scotland”. Among the many promises (play it again, Sam!) would be vastly improved provision for the old, the sick and needy, and the wiping out of the chronic housing problem. Thus armed, the SNP are preparing to contest every Scottish scat at the next General Election.

. . . and its Reverse

Socialists constantly expose the fallacy of home-rule, pointing as examples to other self-governed countries such as Libya, Venezuela, Russia, and even America, where workers derive little if any benefit from oil produced locally. Indeed the opposite can result as is the case in Aberdeen where the oil boom has resulted in a property price-spiral far surpassing anything in Scotland (in fact reaching parity with English property prices) with such bizarre examples as the two-apartment tenement flat which fetched a price of over £4,000!

Equally unsound is the argument that the oil industry must inevitably produce an increase in the number of jobs available. For it could also mean a drop in the demand for other fuels, notably coal, with redundancies in those industries and their offshoots. Not only that, but many of the “new” jobs will, if the SNP have their way, simply have been taken from workers already doing them in England, so it’s a case of robbing Peter to pay Jock, a situation which in no way benefits the workers as a class.

Who Benefits ?

Perhaps the biggest fallacy of all is the Nats’ vision of the anticipated wealth from oil being used exclusively to provide a heaven on earth for Scottish workers. Of course, as the Nats themselves admit, the oil companies will have to have it made worth their while if they are to put up the “vast sums of risk capital to finance search and exploration” and so will the “private and semi-private Scottish capital” they talk about. Also, the cost of government, including the armies of civil servants which any modern capitalist nation must have to administer its affairs, will have to be paid for, and obviously no government can afford to neglect to defend such a valuable property as its oil fields so it will have to provide for defence either independently or through NATO. So, one way and another, there can be little left with which to fulfil the grandiose promises being made. We can confidently assert that the benefit of oil in Scotland will go, as elsewhere in the world, to the owners and the most that Scottish workers can expect from the oil boom is . . . work and wages!

Finally, it’s worth considering that if the North Sea does produce a supply of oil of any significance in relation to world fuel supplies, and bearing in mind the recent panic measures taken by President Nixon, the scramble for oil could become intensified (rapidly expanding Japan, already using 50,000 million gallons a year, estimates treble consumption by the 1980’s). And as trade war sometimes develops into armed war, the tragic result could be that workers living in Scotland could well find themselves, like those in Iceland, being called upon to take up arms to defend “their” oil.

A. McNeill

Labour's Futile Housing Reform (1973)

From the August 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour’s promise to take over all privately rented accommodation in London is a confession of the failure of its previous policies of rent control and improvement grams to solve the housing problem. And it too will fail.

Rent control had eventually led to housing conditions getting worse. Many landlords neglected to maintain their houses properly since the low rents they received didn’t make it worth their while. Faced with this problem the last Labour government came to accept the Tories’ policy of allowing rents to rise to enable landlords to make bigger profits. True, they did introduce a measure of re-control of rents. But this very same Act set up the now notorious “fair rents” machinery which the Tories had merely to extend to council tenants. It wasn’t long before people were complaining that this was benefiting landlords more than tenants — but then it had to if landlords were to make more profit.

Then in 1969 Labour introduced another Housing Act whose effect has nearly been as disastrous as what labour politicians used to call the “wicked Tory Rent Act” of 1957. This Act extended the so-called fair rents formula to some previously controlled tenancies, but it also provided for local councils to make “improvement grants” to landlords. The intention no doubt was that the sitting tenants would benefit in terms of better housing, even if they did have to pay more rent. But it has not worked like this at all. Property companies have bought houses off smaller landlords, obtained a grant to convert them into flats — and then let them off at much higher rents. Far from the sitting tenants’ benefiting they have had to find alternative accommodation. Whole communities of lower-paid workers, as in parts of Islington, have been driven out of their traditional homes by these “improvement” grants, swelling the number of homeless and aggravating the housing shortage.

The whole business illustrates the futility of piecemeal reform as a solution to the housing problem. It proves the soundness of the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s contention that the housing problem can never be solved as long as capitalism lasts. What is required is a complete change in the basis of society which will bring the means of production into common ownership under the democratic control of all the people. Only on this basis can production be planned with a view to satisfying people’s needs. Housing would then be no problem. The resources, human and material, to build enough decent homes for everybody have long been in existence. In Socialism there will be no class privileges or profit motive to prevent them being used to do this, as there is under capitalism.

Letter: “Democracy” in Greece (1973)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Sirs,

In your April issue, commenting on Andreas Papandreou’s Democracy at Gunpoint, you said that the situation in pre-1967 Greece was different from that in other places with “a workable, though limited, political democracy” because ‘‘parliament in Greece did not control the coercive side of the state machine”. This is so, but there are one or two other points which I think should be stressed.

Mr. Papandreou's party was not a Socialist party as we understand it, and although they used the usual slogans of the Left never intended to establish Socialist Democracy in Greece. The Centre Union was very authoritarian in its structure and its policies were by far more conservative than those of the Labour Party here.

The trouble with Greece is that all those who pose now as “liberators”, “democrats” and God knows what (including Mr. Papandreou) failed to realize or did not want to realise that you cannot hope for Socialism unless you have the conscious consent of the majority.

Greek society is a non-democratic one. This is apparent not only in the structure of its political but also of its educational and religious institutions and the family.

That is not to say that I accept the colonels’ argument that they will teach the Greek people democracy(!). Their régime is a ruthless dictatorship and democratic principles can only be learnt by living in a democracy and perhaps making the inevitable mistakes. What I mean is that Greece does not need failed bourgeois opportunists, but Socialists who will work seriously for Socialism.

D. M., Swansea.

Reply: 

In general terms we would agree with the views expressed by our correspondent, providing it is understood that Socialism — a democratic society based on the common ownership of the means of life with production solely for use not sale or profit — could not be established in a single country like Greece but must be world-wide. And of course our review of Papandreou’s book did make it clear that his Centre Union party was the party for modern capitalism in Greece. We would agree that what the workers of Greece need is Socialism, not a government under such “failed bourgeois opportunists” as Papandreou.

Editorial Committee.

A Wet Old Season (1973)

Book Review from the August 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kicking against the Education System

Fifteen years ago the answer to all the deficiencies in working-class education was to have comprehensive schools. This was to be the mid-century’s great reform, comparable with the Welfare State in its hoped-for transforming and equalizing effect. So comprehensive schools were established, and a steep-stepped gradation among them sprang up immediately. Some became the Etons and Gordonstouns of this plastic brave new world; others produced associations of well-heeled parents fighting to keep their children out of them. Inside the schools all the inequalities of the old system were repeated and all the problems recurred. What change?

Without relish, we can say that we told you so. Our 1959 pamphlet Schools Today predicted precisely those outcomes from making State education "comprehensive”. Reformers are painfully slow to learn, however. That is why we are out of sympathy for the agonized cries of Christopher Searle’s book This New Season (Calder & Boyars, £2.60). Alternating presentations of children’s poems with his own bitter attacks on the education system, the writer calls for "rank and file control of the schools” and "democratizing the schools as a fundamental part of society”. Yet we have just been watching a reorganization with those claims and supported by the entire Left fall flat on its face, demonstrating that within capitalism schools are what they have to be.

Contradictory Anger

Christopher Searle’s account of what they are is a wide-eyed one, full of astonished indignation at discoveries that the teacher is a wage-slave, that “the child is . . . raw material to fill up the functions for making profit”, that the education system is “divided and hierarchical”. The reactions are those of the student who has believed in the idealism of training-college discussions, then gone to his first teaching post and been told to forget that nonsense and get on with the job as it really is (which is what most young teachers are told as soon as they start). Of course the statements are true, but the truth is not very profound. In all epochs, education aims to fit the young to live in and maintain their society — not as a rulers’ conspiracy, but as a necessary function. Education in capitalism has no alternative to being education for capitalism.

It has to be said that contradictions and sloppy thinking abound in This New Season. You cannot slate Stepney, where Searle’s school is, as “a decaying, violent neighbourhood”, “claustrophobic”, etc., and then berate teachers for not choosing to live there: on his own evidence, who would? Teachers are “underpaid, confused, frightened”, but also guilty of “cosy, middle-class” existence. The most absurd and prejudicial item in the book is a photograph of the headmaster and the vice-chairman of the Governors, obviously intended to condemn by itself. They look unappetizing, certainly. But would a candid-camera snap of, say, Cliff and Healy be more attractive? And, to turn the thing inside-out, would State education become acceptable if Mrs. Thatcher were a dolly-bird? What nonsense is this !

Blind Alleys

The question is what schools are all about. Searle is correct in saying they exist “to prepare a child for his future employers”, mistaken in thinking this primary function can be stopped as immoral and a worthier one substituted under capitalism. The example given of an alternative is the Scotland Road Free School where it is said “The whole of Liverpool is our classroom”. No doubt the Free School is an enjoyable place, but the truth is that it is as irrelevant as A. S. Neill’s Summerhill. On one hand, its material is children in a social section the State can afford, at least up to a point, not to bother about. On the other, most educational innovations are picked up from experimental and minority schools, and their methods put to use for “the enemy culture”. The poacher finds he was only a trainee gamekeeper, after all.

Beyond reiterating the value of poetry as a liberating activity, and the importance of the English teacher, the book has nothing whatever about the content of education. Searle says:

. . .  we need more schools, more teachers, more books, more facilities for our working-class children, more concentration to develop their frustrated and insulted potential. The more economic and educational demands we make for our class, the more we threaten the prevailing standards peddled in the schools.

It might be remarked that this has happened. Since the 1944 Education Act there have been more schools, books, teachers, etc., and “the prevailing standards” have apparently been reinforced not threatened by them. But what is the desired “more” to consist of? Only hints are given when Searle talks of “the wastage”, lack of “any social opportunity”, “an inequitable and divided society”. One has to infer that he believes there is a superior kind of education given to the well-to-do that should be shared equally by working-class children.

Marketing Goods

There are dreadful fallacies here. To give the most handsome schooling to every child would not alter anything in economic life. An adolescent’s poem in the book asks:

Now will a college be my fate?

Or National Assistance?

The answer is: quite likely, both. Not long ago attention was drawn to the number of science graduates — chemistry in particular — who could not get jobs.

Searle writes of “a choice” offered to the working-class child: “be consumed, move upwards, away from your origins and join the middle class, or fall back and join the labour market”. This is abysmal rubbish. The “middle class” of professional and managerial people are in the labour market with all the rest. And what emerges is that Searle sees himself, for all the talk about “identity” and “class allegiances”, as coming down from the middle class to give a helping hand to the proles:

The teacher, society’s agent in the schools, is like the lonely dustman. Dependent on the children for both his raison d’etre and his raw material, he takes them from the dark world of the school to the darker world of the dead-end job or the dole, and yet his liberalism still likes to make him see them as friends . . . The fact is that we are all workers: teachers, children, parents, and children themselves can soon identify with oppressed and exploited adults.

What needs to be remembered also is that the subject-content of education is itself a collection of marketed products. The “better” the education, the more this applies. A great deal of what is taught in schools, halo-surrounded, is practically worthless either in getting-a-job terms or for personal satisfaction. The biggest educational growth industry of the present time is modern languages — formerly Spanish and German, now Russian, with Chinese on the horizon (in America the upsurge is in Japanese). Not to learn at least one such language is taken as a deprivation, but the fact is that the likelihood of using it for any reason at all is microscopic. The use of mathematics above office-boy or workshop level is so rare as to make its universal teaching absurd. That is not to denigrate any branch of study, but to point out that behind every subject is the sale of books, equipment and buildings. If you don’t believe it, go to an “education exhibition”. Is this the “opportunity” that must be won by struggle?

Attitudes

Searle’s most persistent attack is on the attitudes imparted in schools, summarized by him as “white middle class consciousness”. Its other side is shown by citing a survey made recently by the Medical Research Council’s Social Medicine Unit, where

it was revealed that in the East End of London, the single most important factor in determining whether a child becomes a ‘delinquent’ and appears before the courts, is the school he attends. Their research completely reversed the majority view very widely and conveniently held in the schools that the home environment and lack of parental control is the determining factor in whether a child becomes a ‘delinquent’.

That is all true, as far as it goes. The dividing and streaming of schoolchildren is undoubtedly a catalyst to delinquency: those labelled “reject” get the message and, often, react accordingly. The trouble is that different factors are confused here. Basically, the school and a child’s place in it are likely to reflect his family’s income and circumstances. In the days of the eleven-plus it was commonly said among teachers that the scholarships might as well be given in relation to the parents’ income because that was what school prowess at that age amounted to; and this fact of capitalist life has transferred itself to the comprehensive system.

But delinquents, whatever else is said concerning them, have plainly rejected “white middle class consciousness”. (They have also been rejected by it; and in the quotation above it is hard to see any other kind of consciousness at work.) It remains to be shown that attitudes presented in schools do carry and have a decisive effect. A report in The Times on 19th December 1972 summarized four recent studies on whether education can change people or society. All conclude that it cannot. Thus, the Jencks report from the United States:

To improve schools would not eliminate inequality in cognitive skills or poverty and economic inequalities between adults . . . According to the Jencks arguments, schools are at best only marginal institutions.

Prisons and Freedom

To speak of schools as prisons will not do, despite examples to be found. “Factories” would be nearer the mark. However, in any society there is a minimum of skills and knowledge which must be acquired if the individual and the community are not to be at disadvantages: literacy, proficiency with numbers, the use of tools and means of expression and enquiry. Ideally, what happens beyond that is a matter of individual inclination matched to social needs. Nevertheless, it is mistaken to think that all learning must be fun and wherever it is not is a prison. Much learning, at both child and adult levels, has to be unpalatable grind with satisfaction only at later stages. What is wrong with capitalism’s education is that the satisfactions are rarely one’s own and principally realized in profit-making for others; but to seek to trivialize and gift-wrap learning is to underwrite the Woolworth mentality of capitalism.

Schools cannot be treated as if they were separable from society, capable of being re-directed in isolation. It is always possible for a teacher to have his own attitudes reproduced, particularly in writing and art, by the suggestibility of children and be elated by these signs of a new outlook. Unfortunately, the effect does not last because it cannot be based on understanding. Bernard Shaw said in 1914 that the people who became emotionally excited over peace were the same ones who became emotionally excited over war; and he was speaking of adults. Of course it is desirable that education should aim at “control of our own lives”, and “reciprocity, comradeship and shared experience”. But to obtain that, we must first create a society to which such purposes will be functional — not the other way round.

Socialists working for that society have a special interest in everyone’s education. It is ex ducere to bring forth, “educe” to draw out: not the stuffing-in of school education or the parrot-unison of ideologies, but the joining of knowledge to experience from which the conception of and the resolve for a different world must arise.

Robert Barltrop

50 Years Ago: The Capital Levy (1973)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In the “Forward” (Saturday, May 5th, 1923), Mr. F. W. Pethick Lawrence, a Labour candidate and prominent advocate, sets out what he calls “The Case for the Capital Levy,” with the sub-title, “Lift the Burden of Debt from Industry and Labour.”

★

If the burden rested on the backs of the workers it might be worth while trying to throw it off. But if the workers have no surplus, then they cannot be robbed of what they don’t possess; and, in spite of apparent objections, the workers as a whole do not suffer from high, nor benefit from low taxation. They suffer because they are robbed, and they are robbed whether taxes are high or low, and the degree of the robbery has, over a period, no direct or indirect relation to taxation. As we have seen, the workers receive all the wealth they possess from the capitalist owners, and, further, these owners control at present the machinery by means of which taxes are levied.

Now, the workers either receive a surplus over their minimum needs or they do not. If they don’t, then they cannot be robbed of that non-existent surplus afterwards. If they do, then the capitalists will have given the surplus either because they are philanthropists or because they are compelled by economic forces. If they are philanthropists, then they will not take back the gift they gave; and if they were compelled to give, then the same forces will prevent them from taking it back.

★

The pertinent question Lawrence might answer is this : Would the capitalists, if there were no taxation at all, give the workers a larger share of the wealth produced, and, if so, why?

Mr. Lawrence says : “The main principle of the levy is simplicity itself. It is to pay off debt out of wealth. The wealth of the country as a whole is the wealth of its citizens.” This, as I have already explained, is quite untrue. The wealth of the country as a whole is the private property of the capitalist class. Only the owners of property can suffer the burden of taxation, and only the owners do suffer. Some of them want you, the propertyless workers, to pull their chestnuts out of the fire, and Mr. Lawrence and the Labour Party are making a bid for office on the strength of offering to do the necessary publicity work.

★

While the capitalists will on the one hand be relieved from the burden of paying the debt interest, they will also, on the other hand, be deprived of the present means of paying that interest. Some will gain by reduced taxation what others lose by the paying off by the State of their quota of the debt and their consequent loss of interest on their bonds. The money paid out will, in its turn, be reinvested in industry, and we shall be as we were.

(From an article by E. Hardy in the Socialist Standard for August 1923.)

Mr. Cousins Damp Squib (1959)

From the August 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

What Mr. Cousins is after will leave the workers just as they are, the wage slave victims of capitalist conditions and subject to the threat of terrible wars, with or without the H-Bomb.

The Labour Party is in a turmoil—and the General Election is near. Mr. Cousins of the Transport and General Workers Union has thrown a spanner into the works. He has been making quite a stir in the news by his opposition to the official attitude of the Labour Party on the H-Bomb and nationalisation.

Mr. Bevan has now become quite respectable as an official spokesman. Mr. Cousins has replaced him as the Labour Party rebel—the “leftist.” It is only farce that is played out every now and then with only a change in the personnel. Is there really any fundamental difference between Mr. Cousins and the leaders of the Labour Party?

He objects to the H-Bomb but supports the Labour Party, which is pledged to a defence programme. Millions were killed in the last war without the H-Bomb being used, but he does not support the only policy that will end war. He believes Mr. Gaitskell is sincere but that his policy on the H-Bomb will not be effective.

At the Transport and General Workers Conference in the Isle of Man Mr. Cousins dropped his bombshell. He is also reported as follows: “I have never believed that the most important thing in our lives is to elect a Labour Government. The most important thing is to elect a Labour Government that is determined to carry out Socialist policies.” (Daily Express, 10th July, 1959.)

Now what does he mean by “to carry out Socialist policies”? To him it means nationalisation—state capitalism. He objects to the official line on nationalisation—buying shares instead of the state taking over the industries. But to him. just as to them, state ownership is equivalent to Socialism. In other words, in spite of the long experience of state capitalism, he blindly accepts it as the fundamental aim, despite the disillusion and unrest in state owned or state controlled concerns and the labour struggles in them for better conditions.

Thus what Mr. Cousins is after will leave the workers just as they are, the wage slave victims of capitalist conditions and subject to the threat of terrible wars, with or without the H-Bomb.

In striking back at Mr. Cousins Mr. Gaitskell made some very significant statements. He made it clear that a Labour Government was not bound by the decisions of the rank and file of the Labour Party and that he was first and foremost a patriot. Here are some extracts from his speech at Workington on the 11th July, 1959:

A Labour Government will take into account the views of the Conference, but, as was clearly demonstrated in the correspondence between Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee in 1945, annual conference does not mandate a government.

Both a Labour Government and the Parliamentary Labour Party must be left free to settle in matters of detail how and when the principles and decisions are to be applied in practice. This has always been understood in the past, and it must be clearly understood again today. (Observer, 12th July, 1959.)

Earlier in his speech he was even more emphatically the leader who would disdain the decisions of the Labour movement he claimed to represent:

To give such a pledge [not to resume nuclear tests] might conceivably be to jeopardise the future security of our country, and that I will not do under any circumstances. Those of us who have the responsibilities of political leadership have to remember always that we shall be expected to stand by our pledges.

We will not bother to remind him of the pledges the “political leadership” have broken in the past, but we can remind him that no one is forcing him to take the “political leadership” job. If he doesn’t like what the people who appoint him want him to do he can always resign his job and not fly in the face of their decisions. But that would be the democratic way and leadership is the antithesis of democracy!

Time and again we have pointed out that what the Labour Party was mainly concerned with was not principles but votes. This futile controversy has spotlighted it once again. Labour M.P.’s are wrathful and shaking in their shoes at thought of the effect this blow-up may have on their votes in the next election. That is their main and all-consuming worry. Even Mr. Cousins expostulates that his proposals will not split the Labour Party, and anyhow, he will abide by conference decisions—in spite of the prospect of dire calamity unless the H-Bomb is abandoned.

While the Labour Party storm may have a bad influence on their election prospects it will have no influence upon the subject position of the worker. Only Socialism can remove that subjection—and this has no place in the Labour programme, nor in Mr. Cousins’ outlook.

Gilmac.

Letter: Socialists and Nuclear Disarmament (1959)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Comrades,

Although I am a supporter of the S.P.G.B. for the last ten years, it is not my usual practice to write to you whenever I happened to disagree with the Party on minor issues; but now I am compelled to write this letter, because the point I should like to raise here is a very important and a serious one—it is the Party’s relation towards the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (C.N.D.)—I have read your short A Point of View (May, 1959). I entirely agree on every point you raised and explained in relation to the cause of war and its remedy; but what I don’t agree, is your attitude towards C.N.D. It crystallizes in one single sentence in the first para. “We hold that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is on an unsound basis and inevitably leads in the wrong direction.”

I think this tendency to disassociate with a movement of this character and make judgment that it is uon an unsound basis” is due to your incorrect or false evaluation of the social forces. Most of you may be probably still thinking that it is a movement started by a few non socialists like Canon Collins or Michael Foot or Bertrand Russell or perhaps they (the leaders) might be conscious of the dangers of the present situation, but the people in general who follow them have no clear understanding of our society. This view or any other similar view which is trying to picture that movement as if it is completely dominated and controlled by such a leadership, is superficial, grossly incorrect and an oversimplification of the whole social process which brought C.N.D. into being.

New Consciousness

In the first place I should like to point out that it is not the leaders that came before the movement, but the movement armed with a new social consciousness pregnant with a new force of energy, which appeared first and then a set of leaders are born out of that specific social situation. In the last ten years powerful nations on both sides were boasting that they have more effective and better weapons of destruction than the other side. Many influential politicians and military leaders in Britain, Russia and America repeatedly stated that they are developing bigger and better bombs.

Along with this all round boasting they were actually strengthening all their forces of destruction and arming up to the teeth. Almost every aspect of society was alerted. A new awareness or perhaps consciousness began to develop among all sorts of people of the seriousness of the situation in which they are involved. They began to be conscious of the weakness of their social and political institutions which hitherto they supported, to prevent a new world war. They began to doubt the chance of their survival in the nuclear warfare. They felt it is their duty to “revolt” against this ridiculous situation where two great rival nations threaten each other by clenching their fists. It is this new social situation which gave birth to C.N.D. But this new social consciousness is blind. It has no eye to see the barrier in front of it which is to be removed for their survival. As one of the leading members (sociologist?) of the U.L.R. (Universities and Left Review) pointed out it is a “leaderless” movement. Unfortunately what he implied, later in his speech, was that U.L.R. should try to assume its leadership if not of the whole at least its youth section. Hundreds and thousands of people, especially youths, turned up and joined the C.N.D. fully conscious that they need something new, yet they did not know what they wanted!

It is true various types of political factions in C.N.D. are trying to utilize this blind consciousness as a ladder to climb to political power or at least to strengthen their original position, being utterly unaware of the significance of this new development. But it is the Socialists’ duty to move along with them in order to provide them with an eye so that they can see the barrier which stands in their way. In other words, we should try to create a situation so that the Socialist concept, as an eye, should assume the leadership of this new consciousness.

Isolation

I strongly hold the view that it was our duty, Socialists’ duty, either individually or collectively organized on a party basis, to march along with them with our own banners and slogans and take the opportunity of speaking to such a huge conscious gathering. We lost that opportunity! No Collins or Foots or Taylors can claim even the partial control or ownership of a movement of this character. Nor does it belong to them. It belongs to the whole society. In my view this kind of participation in C.N.D. is only a logical extension of what we had already been doing—selling our literature, discussing with non Socialist marchers etc. Now I begin to feel that it is this type of social isolation or regimentation of S.P.G.B. from the rest of the conscious and militant social forces (as Rosa Luxemburg indignantly pointed out about another aspect—the relation between the masses and the political leadership) which makes our unassailable case ineffective instead of being a powerful political force.

H. J. Panikkar. 

London.

Reply:

We regret that Mr. Panikkar’s letter was too long to publish in full.

During its 55 years of existence, the Socialist Party of Great Britain has seen many organisations which like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, have been pledged to abolish a particular evil of capitalist society. The hunger marchers and the pacifists of the 1930’s were described as movements “armed with a new social consciousness.” Today, members of Road Safety Committees can possibly be described in the same way— at least their death statistics are less in dispute than those of the C.N.D. In truth, as capitalism throws up problems, so it throws up organisations which try to deal with one or more of them in isolation. There is no doubt about the sincerity of some of these movements, or that they concern themselves with very real and terrifying matters. But because they do not demand an understanding of the roots of the problems, their efforts are doomed to futility.

Because of this socialists have no place in these organisations. But this does not prevent them stating, at every possible opportunity, the socialist attitude to such horrors as war. We do not isolate ourselves from our opponents, we are always eager to put our case to them. Mr. Panikkar cannot have missed, on page 78 of the May Socialist Standard, the account of our activities at the last Aldermaston March. This is typical of S.P.G.B. work, whatever non-socialist organisation we are dealing with.

Weapons of war are inseparable from war itself. To abolish them, we must get rid of war. These are caused by the clash of interests between groups of capitalists who want to protect or exploit markets and fields of valuable natural wealth. The need to do this is the result of the fact that, in capitalist society, goods and services are produced with the motive of profitable sale. Obviously, each group will strive to arm itself more powerfully—which means more destructively—than its opponents. Hence the development of modern weapons and the horrors of nuclear warfare. We can solve this problem by abolishing private property. Only a socialist movement can effectively advocate this.

In contrast, the C.N.D. is in favour of the continuation of capitalism. It does not even oppose capitalism's wars, but wants them to be gentlemanly affairs in which people are killed by conventional armaments. Even on the score of nuclear weapons, the C.N.D. is confused. Many of its members support the return of another Labour government—yet the last one started the British H-bomb and missile programmes. This confusion is typical of organisations which may be well meaning, but lack the essential knowledge with which every socialist is equipped. Mr. Panikkar claims that C.N.D. members are ". . . conscious of the weakness of their social and political institutions . . . to prevent a new world war.” Our guess is that the next election will see them voting for the very political parties which administer the capitalist basis of those social and political institutions.

Marches and demonstrations are glamourous and exciting. Alongside, our insistence on knowledge may seem rather dull. But the marchers are going to dissension and futility. The socialist movement alone offers the world any hope.

Editorial Committee.

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Wages by Cheque (1959)

From the August 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Government are to introduce legislation allowing the workers to be paid by cheque. This piffling proposal will probably produce a hurricane of opposition from certain windy quarters in the Trade Unions and Labour Party, and no doubt some Communists. The right of the worker to be paid, in ready cash will become part of the day-to-day struggles, a real cause celebre.

Tory backwoodsmen are saying that this will make the workers more thrifty. They will, they hopefully claim, put their cheques into bank accounts and not spend it all. Savings will increase, and with them, abstemiousness; sobriety, and all things beautiful. The ideal worker from the Capitalist point of view is the virtuous economic cabbage who can live on practically nothing and enjoy it. If he manages somehow to put a bit away so much the better. He won’t be a charge on the Rates or National Assistance later.

Confidence Tricks

This is the unspoken philosophy of Capitalist Governments. From time to time terrific confidence tricks are played by Governments on workers’ savings. Devaluation was introduced by the last Labour Government, and inflation has been the policy of both Conservative and Labour Governments.

Last Autumn the Government removed the credit restrictions on Bank lending. In a great splash of newspaper publicity the Banks announced a scheme for personal loans for such things as cars, houses, T.V. sets, refrigerators, etc. A few days after the announcement the Manchester Guardian reported the experience of about 50 Salford dockers who queued up outside the local branch of the Westminster Bank. It appeared that the dockers were naive enough to believe what they read. They told the Bank manager they wanted to borrow a few quid to tide them over a bad spell. The Bank manager, as Bank managers are wont to do, asked for some security. All the dockers produced their Union cards as a guarantee of their ability to repay the loan, that is, if they didn’t become unemployed or put on short time. The manager delicately informed them that the Bank could not take the risk, Union card or not. The less credulous of us are now asked to believe that if the dockers, and other workers, were paid by cheque they would have money in the Bank. The worker’s possession of a cheque-book is as meaningful as the verse in the Canadian folk song "Good morning Mum, I have a button here, can you sew a shirt on it?”

Robbery

An interesting reaction to this proposal comes from the Bank Trade Unions. They apparently do not relish the the increased work this will entail for the same pay. Heaven knows what might happen if the workers start subbing in mid week.

Apart from claims about saving time on accountancy and wage clerks, there is the question of armed robbery being prevented. Snatching the payroll could, by present ethical standards, be considered more a transfer of property than a theft. The biter bitten would be an apt description. After all, the robbery has already taken place at the point of production. As always, the workers are the victims, not the Capitalists.

Jim D'Arcy

Editorial: The Printing Dispute (1959)

Editorial from the August 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

From the ordinary trade union point of view of a struggle to enforce more pay and shorter hours, the printers' strike seems to have been well conceived and executed and well timed.

The claim was for a 10 per cent. increase of pay and a reduction of 3½ hours, from 43½ to 40. After lengthy negotiations the employers offered 2½ per cent. and 1 hour, but tied up the offer with a long list of demands for the reorganisation of the industry to increase production. The Unions rejected this offer and rejected also the employers manoeuvre of trying to get them to take the claim to arbitration. Having taken a ballot of their members the printing unions came out on strike on June 17th, over 100,000 men and women being involved. The dispute affected the Newspaper Society and the British Federation of Master Printers, but not the Newspaper Proprietors' Association or the Scottish Daily Newspaper Society, so while the Provincial newspapers, the magazines and periodicals and general printers were brought to a standstill the national and Sunday papers and London evening papers carried on, as did a certain number of firms which accepted the Unions' demands. A second dispute affecting printing ink threatened to stop the other papers, but this was avoided.

The timing was favourable for the workers because trade was recovering from the depression, unemployment was falling and the imminence of a general election made the employers, the Government and the big political parties worried lest a long-drawn out strike should hold up the very big volume of literature of various kinds needed for the election.

In the third week of the strike, discussions started under the chairmanship of Lord Birkett. Towards the end of July, at our time of going to press, the employers made an improved offer, of 3½ per cent. increase of pay, and a reduction of 1½ hours. The unions rejected this. They considered that the substantial concessions they were prepared to make to make to increase productivity justified more than 3½ per cent. on pay and at least an undertaking of a further reduction of hours at a later date. Settlement was then Expected at 4½ per cent. proposed by Lord Birkett.

The Sanctimonious “Guardian”

The dispute produced several surprising, diverting and instructive incidents. As was to be expected the Manchester Guardian led the Press in its sanctimonious comment of June 13th, laying down the usual employers' line that everyone believes in the right of the workers to strike so long as they never exercise the right:

The right to strike is a fundamental human freedom, but its exercise ought to be justified by some great cause. There is no great cause in the printing dispute—it is a piece of market bargaining over money.

Can anyone remember the Manchester Guardian ever supporting a strike (except a strike of foreign workers)? The Guardian editor’s further remark was equally hypocritical.

In the nineteenth century, when Britain had few industrial rivals, and when the main domestic industries had well-hedged fields to themselves, a strike or lock-out did not matter much, except in terms of personal suffering.

If some diligent student were to study the Guardian’s attitude to strikes in the nineteenth century, we do not doubt that he would find that the Guardian always managed to find overwhelming reasons for condemning those strikers too.

Lord Sourgrapes

It might have been expected that the newspapers that continued to be published would have solidly defended the employers, though Labour Party supporters doubtless hoped that their two mouthpieces, the official Daily Herald and the unofficial Daily Mirror, would line up with the workers against the employers. It turned out otherwise and some of the liveliest abuse during the strike was to be found in a fierce battle between the Daily Express and the other two. Beaverbrook’s Daily Express roundly accused the big magazine combines of having precipitated an unnecessary strike by their "tough and unaccommodating attitude," and said (4th July) that the provincial newspapers were the “victims of the tycoons of the magazine trade. They are paying a heavy price for their association with these richer more powerful and more belligerent allies." The biggest printing union, NATSOPA, promptly endorsed the charge. The Mirror and. Odhams (the latter owns the People and the Herald) are the “magazine tycoons" referred to, and they angrily denied the accusation. The Mirror of July 6th, in a slashing leader headed “ Lord Sourgrapes—and the drop of poison," explained that Beaverbrook has no magazines except “a couple of inconspicuous comics," called it a “smear campaign,” and passed the buck to the smaller printing firms and smaller newspapers who feared that the Unions' demands would put them out of business. The People (July 5th) blamed the Unions for not having let the claim go to arbitration in the first place. The Herald itself tried to ride both horses. It held that the men have a good case for their original demands, but that the employers “think they have a good case for insisting on increased productivity as a condition of any wage rise" (June 19th). It tried to escape its dilemma by blaming the Government for not immediately setting up a court of inquiry, which, of course, the Unions did not want, anyway.

The “Principle” of Shorter Hours

A weakness of the trade union position (to be found in many other industries as well) is the ambiguous attitude to shorter hours. Mr. Willis, one of the Union leaders and Chairman of the T.U.C., declared at the conference of the Miners' Union that the printers were striking “in support of the principle for which every trade unionist would fight, the shorter week." (News Chronicle, July 8th.) But what are the facts? Though the standard hours are now about four less than in 1938 the actual hours worked in industry are no lower than they were then. The claims for shorter hours have turned into claims for more overtime pay. In 1946 printing hours were reduced by 1½ to 43½, but within a few years the actual average hours of male workers in the paper and printing trade were higher than they were before, and in 1957 were 47 a week.

Confusion about Arbitration and Impartiality

The trade unions are in a muddle about arbitration. The printing unions consistently opposed it on the ground that it would not be “impartial,” but later in the dispute they were asking that Lord Monckton be invited—though he declined the invitation—to preside over the negotiations “to advise, guide and control” the discussions, but not to have power to be final arbiter. Lord Monckton was for four years Tory Minister of Labour (described by the General Secretary of the railwaymen in 1955 as “a very able friend of the N.U.R.! ”) and is now chairman of the Midland Bank, which refuse; to recognise the union of bank employees! Arbitration is established by the Government to settle industrial disputes and it cannot be impartial in the sense of deciding the merits of a case on some abstract principle of humanity. No such principles are laid down for the present court or the one abolished last year. The job of the arbitrators is to find a basis on which the workers can be persuaded to carry on working and the employers can keep in business—with, as an inescapable background, the continuation of Capitalism.

To illustrate the general confusion in the trade union movement it has only to be recalled that last year the T.U.C. and many trade union leaders were deriding the Government for abolishing the arbitration tribunal, which other unions declare they will not have anyway. The Daily Herald then (October 24h, 1958) called it a move to help the employers by abolishing the “referee to see fair play.”

And in the present dispute Mr. Willis, in the matter of strike pickets, was calling on the Government to observe “strict impartiality” (Times, June 26th), as if a government committed to keeping Capitalism going (as all governments must be that take on the administration of Capitalism) could “impartially” stand aside and not defend the property rights of the propertied class.

The International Aspect

The fact is that the trade union movement still broadly accepts Capitalism though prepared to strike against the Capitalists. This was clearly shown by the attitude of the printing unions. They belong to the printing workers Trade Union International, the International Graphical Federation, and some at least of the continental unions acceded to the request that they should advise their members not to do “black” work sent abroad during the strike. But in the middle of the strike NATSOPA released a plan it had drawn up suggesting a deal between the British unions and the British employers. If the latter would concede the demands on hours and wages, in return the unions would cooperate on a joint productivity council: “ The essence of the plan is that the prosperous big groups with stable and profitable home markets will help the small and medium printers, and particularly the printing concerns working on export printing. The plan should make British printers highly competitive in markets abroad.” (News Chronicle, June 23rd, 1959.)

So the unions, while fighting the employers, are quite prepared to collaborate with them to capture foreign markets—where, of course, they will clash with foreign printers who. again with the collaboration of the workers, will be resisting the invasion and trying to counter attack. This, of course, makes nonsense of the object of the printers' trade union international: “To safeguard the economic, occupational and general interests of graphical workers in all countries and to promote their solidarity.” (Our italics.)

In the nineteenth century Socialist critics of the trade union movement used to ridicule the illogicality of workers fighting the employers in the industrial field and electing the same people to Parliament and supporting them nationally. The present outlook of the trade unions shows that they have still a long way to go before they realise that the workers’ interest demands real international working class solidarity against the employers—and for Socialism.

Living it large (1959)

From the August 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard