Editorial: The Post Office Workers and the Trade Disputes Act (1943)

Editorial from the September 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

By the time these words are in print the question of the affiliation of the Post Office Workers’ Union to the Trades Union Congress will probably have been settled temporarily—by being shelved; but the consequences of the campaign will not end there. The Post Office workers have done good work by bringing the issue to the fore, and have made it certain that the whole question of the 1927 Trade Disputes Act will be a live issue after the war, even if, in the meantime, the Government makes or promises to make some concession over the single issue of the affiliation of lower grade Civil Service unions to the T.U.C.

The 1927 Act was ostensibly introduced because in 1920 some millions of workers came out on strike to help the miners. Actually its causes went much further back than that. The employing class were badly frightened by what happened in 1926, but some at least of them realised that that spontaneous demonstration was a symptom of a slow change that was taking place in the outlook of the workers. The workers were gradually becoming more conscious of the fact that as a class, irrespective of occupation, they have a common interest, to be expressed politically as well as industrially, against the employing class. Mr. Churchill, at that time Chancellor of the Exchequer, put it as follows :

“The development of trade unionism, particularly in the present century and particularly in the last decade, has produced a very great change in the situation. We have seen the trade unions become great political factors, actively engaged in party politics, in endeavouring to secure the return to Parliament or to office of one particular set of politicians, and to oppose the interests of the others.” (Quoted in Parliamentary Report May 30, 1927, col. 55.)

The 1927 Act sought to hinder or undo this development by making any strike (or lock-out) illegal “if it has any object other than or in addition to the furtherance of a trade dispute within the trade or industry in which the strikers are engaged, and is a strike designed or calculated to coerce the Government either directly or by inflicting hardship upon the community.”

The Act curtailed the legal right of picketing, made it necessary for trade unionists to give individual consent, in writing, before contributions to the political fund could be collected from them, forbad Local Authorities to make compulsory Union membership a condition of employment, and forbad Civil Service Unions to have outside trade union or political affiliations or to have political objects.

While the employing class and their instrument, the Tory Party, may be induced to make some concession to Civil Service Unions, they will do so with understandable reluctance. They know quite well that to concede something now on one clause of the Act will only be followed by demands for concessions on other clauses, and if they have to give way on the whole Act, that will be a definite set-back for them. Actually Civil Service unions in this country are more restricted than in the U.S.A. or the British Dominions. Generally speaking, the unions there can and do affiliate with outside trade unions, support political parties and affiliate with the International Postal Workers’ trade union movement, so that the Tories cannot argue that concession to the Civil Service unions is impracticable in itself.

The Sanctity of the Law

The campaign has had its interesting features. For 16 years the Civil Service Unions and the T.U.C. have protested against the 1927 Act, but nobody took any notice. All they got from the late Mr. Neville Chamberlain early in the war was a sort of promise that if they behaved themselves the matter might be considered after victory. Then the Post Office workers decided to carry on in defiance of the law. With startling suddenness the Press and the politicians woke up and broke into an almost unanimous chorus of protest. “Perhaps there is a case for changing the law,” they said— though they had usually been silent about it hitherto—”but no Government can ignore, or act under, a threat of law-breaking. This is Fascism, not democracy.”

(It may be remarked here that the Post Office workers did not take the only possible line. They could have tried quietly encroaching on the Act on the assumption that the Government, being fully occupied with the war, might ignore it.)

The Government, which includes three Labour Members, Messrs. Bevin, Attlee and Morrison, then issued a pompous warning to Post Office workers that if they persisted they would cease to be eligible for employment as established (i.e., permanent and pensionable) Civil Servants.

This talk about democracy and law-breaking sounds rather unconvincing in the light of certain facts. First, it is worth remembering that it was in 1927, when the Act was passed, that Mr. Churchill was praising Italian Fascism, and leading Fascist newspapers were returning the compliment by claiming that the Act was on Fascist lines. It should also be recalled that some of the leading members of the 1927 Tory Government had themselves in the past been active preachers and organisers of defiance against the Government. Lord Birkenhead and Sir William Joynson-Hicks were among those responsible for the 1927 Act, who had distinguished themselves by backing the Ulster preparations for rebellion (with German arms) against the Liberal Government of 1912-14 on the issue of Irish Home Rule. It was Lord Birkenhead who had said (January 22, 1912, at Liverpool) : “There is no length to which Ulster will not be entitled to go—however desperate or unconstitutional—in carrying the quarrel,” and again (at Ballyclare on September 20, 1913), “we shall stand side by side with you, refusing to recognise any law, and prepared with you to risk the collapse of the whole body politic to prevent this monstrous crime.”

The above quotations are taken from a leaflet issued by the Labour Party and T.U.C. in 1927. At that time Mr. Ernest Bevin was even talking of defying the law himself. In a speech at a Trade Union Conference called to oppose the 1927 Bill he touched on the possibility of members of his Union being ordered by the Courts to work with blacklegs, and said, “I am afraid that all the illegality and all the decisions would not influence us very much.”

Just as the poachers of 1912 turned into gamekeepers in 1927, so it seems that Messrs. Bevin, Attlee and Morrison have had their heads turned in 1943. The curious feature about this is that Mr. Attlee long ago knew and wrote about what happens in such a situation as the present one. His present plea is that he and the other Labour members are in the Government to fight foreign Fascism and must stand by the Government and see the law is enforced. In 1937, in “The Labour Party in Perspective,” he discussed what the Labour Party ought to do about coalitions to fight Fascism, and strongly urged that the Labour Party ought not to support Capitalist Governments. This is what he wrote :

“There are those who, realising the danger of menace of the Fascist Powers, tend to take up an attitude of supporting a Capitalist Government at home as the least of two evils. They tend to under-estimate the reality of the struggle between Capitalism and Socialism, and to magnify the differences between democratic Capitalist States and Fascist States. The danger of this attitude is that in fighting foreign Fascism they may encourage the subtle introduction of Fascism at home. (Labour Party in Perspective, p. 220.)

When the Labour members entered the Government in 1940, Mr. Attlee gave as one of the reasons, “To maintain the unity of the nation.” It should by now be apparent to Mr. Attlee that by taking on joint responsibility with Tories and Liberals for running Capitalism at war he has put himself in the position of directly opposing a. demand made by the Trade Unions and hitherto supported by himself. In other words, he is dividing himself from the trade union movement in the name of “national unity.” Thus does the reality of the class struggle break through. All of which points unmistakeably to the acute struggles which will up on the home front after the war ends, when the capitalist politicians—now stridently calling for liberty in foreign parts—will return to the old job of keeping the workers in subjection at home. Even members of the Labour Party who favoured the entry of their leaders into the National Government in 1940 may wonder why they did not have the foresight to insist beforehand on explicit concessions from the Tories, including legislation to amend the 1927 Act.

One lesson the incident drives home once more is the certainty that those who control the political machinery, the Government, can withstand and suppress efforts by trade unions or others to force their hand. The road to emancipation for the workers lies through gaining control of the political machinery.

The Origin and Growth of Nazism pt.2 (1943)

From the September 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

In January, 1919, the first elections under the new Weimer constitution were held. German Social Democracy polled more than 11½  million votes. Eighteen months later these votes dropped to less than half. As the new republic was synonymous with the German Labour Party – indeed it was there own handiwork – this meant only one thing: sooner or later the democratic republic of Germany would fall and bury the founders beneath the its ruins. The question was: Which political force would achieve the assassination  of German democracy?

The enemies of the republic were numerous. There were the avowed capitalist parties, representing the German industrialists and big business. These parties called themselves “Nationalist.” They feared the working class backing the Social Democrats; above all, they were afraid that the more extreme section of the workers, organised in the “Spartakus” group (later the Communist Party of Germany) and in the “U.S.D.P” (Independent Socialists), would gain the upper hand over the moderates. There were the numberless right-wing splinter organisations which only a system of proportional representation could call into a precarious existence. The real threat, however, came from the army, or more properly speaking, its “illegal shadow”, the “Free Corps.”

However, all of them lacked the one essential which in the last analysis can alone carry a political party to victory – they lacked mass-support. Political murders, putsches and intrigue were the order of the day in Germany in the early post-war years. Governments came and went at yearly intervals or even less. The inflation in 1922-1923 sent the mark into the pit of depreciation – so bottomless that even the best mathematical minds could not peer into it without toppling. Nevertheless,  the ramshackle structure of the newly-born republic held, because none of its enemies had succeeded as yet in building a mass-party. The mass-parties at that time were still on the side of the republic. Apart from the Social Democrats, who believed in the republic to the very last (and, let it be stated, kept a solid core of support among the industrial working class numbering about six million), three main parties, all of them openly capitalist, proclaimed their support for the Weimer constitution and participated in the coalitions which governed Germany for ten years until 1930. There were the Democratic Party (Liberals, never strong, soon to disappear), the Catholic Centre Party (party of the agrarian Catholic South), and the German Peoples’ Party (Conservative, leader Gustav Streseman). The last two parties ratted on the Republic at the critical moment.

During the first two years of its existence, the Nazi movement had to content itself with the province of Bavaria as its main sphere of influence. In this locality it quickly gained a notoriety quite out of proportion to its numbers. Bavarians are by temperament the least stolid and by political standards the most backward of the “German” people. The showy effects and fury of language and methods used by Hitler and his colleagues drew their attention even if it did not at first gain their support. It is by no means paradoxical that Bavaria, the first stronghold of the Nazis, had also been the first and only German province to proclaim itself a “Soviet Republic” – as short-lived as its first President, Kurt Eisner, who was assassinated shortly after assuming office. Conditions and people alike provided fertile ground for an “extremism” that was utterly irrational as it was based merely on violent discontent without an inkling as to the real cause of the post-war distress. And the foundations of centuries had been swept away: the Bavarian Monarchy, the semi-feudal hierarchy – in short, dependence on the older order was no longer available and the population as a whole was not ready as yet to work along the lines of the new, democratic constitution which demanded at least a modicum of political self-reliance. Into this political vacuum the Nazis poured their crude mixture of “radical” and patriotic propaganda. Their theme song was simple and catching: “The people of Germany were suffering for their defeat of 1918. But this defeat was not achieved honestly on the field of battle! No, the German army was not beaten by its foes abroad; it was stabbed in the back by the enemies of the people in Germany itself, the ‘Marxists’.” (All supporters of the Weimar constitution were dubbed “Marxists.”)

Granted the premise, the rest was not difficult to swallow. And no political party in Germany denied it. Only a Socialist movement  could explain that victory and defeat do not materially affect the economic position of the workers, but a socialist movement did not exist in Germany. The Communist Party, forced through its dependence on Moscow to sacrifice working class interests to the varying needs of Russian foreign policy, bewildered and disgusted by their political somersaults the more militant workers who were looking for an alternative to Social democracy. Able and tested men such as Paul Levi and Daumig left the Communist Party rather than serve as stooges to the Comintern.

The lessons of the Russian and Italian dictatorships were not lost on Hitler and his associates. The method of intimidating opponents by physical violence suited the social riff-raff of military adventurers and professional thugs that constituted the active core of the early Nazi party. Already, in 1920, Hitler had been sentenced to a month’s imprisonment for breaking up an opponent’s meeting. During these early years the Nazis were only one of many small nationalist and anti-semitic organisations. Three factors, however, soon gained it more prominence than any of its rivals. (1) Its useful connections with groups in the army; (2) The oratorical powers of Adolf Hitler; (3) That it made serious attempts to influence the workers, shopkeepers, professional men, etc., by means of a theoretical platform containing all the “radical” ingredients that look so attractive to the strugglers for existence. The Nazi party, like its bitter opponents in later years, the Communists, was never thought of as “Reformist,” although its economic programme simply stunk of the old hash served up by every reformist party throughout the capitalist world. “Provision for the aged,” “Protection for the small trader,” “Education for the talented children of the poor,” and so on, ad nauseum.

Its “revolutionary” content was signified by its title, “National Socialism.” State capitalism, misnamed “State Socialism,” had been a feature of German capitalism since Bismarck. Long before that, Marx had dealt contemptuously with the trickery of certain capitalist elements to palm off their cry for help from the State as “Socialism” (see Communist Manifesto, 1848, chapter on “True” or “German” Socialism). The defeat of 1918 had weakened the German capitalist class considerably and many of them were looking to State control as a solution. The Nazis were thus bidding for capitalist support whilst at the same time deluding the workers who had been taught to regard Nationalisation as “Socialism.”

Further, the Nazis posed as “Unconstitutionalists.” In 1923 they were in fact determined to overthrow the existing government of Bavaria in a coup d’état. With the dismal rout of the Nazi street-fighters on November 9, 1923, the Nazis abandoned the idea of a coup and set themselves the task of winning the masses. Hitler, who together with the late General Ludendorff had led the “insurrection,” received a sentence of nine months’ imprisonment. Altogether Hitler had cut a sorry figure during this affair. He – the man who claims to have won an Iron Cross, first class , during the last war – fled at the sound of the first shot. After his release from prison, Hitler reconstituted the party into a legal, parliamentary organisation. Nevertheless, the opposition to “the system” (as the Nazis cleverly called the Weimer republic) plus their vicious abuse of the opponents, as well as their incessant baiting of Jews, maintained for them a reputation of being “revolutionaries.” And let there be no misunderstanding: they were “revolutionaries” in the sense that they aimed at a political revolution: the elimination of the democratic constitution which permitted minorities, including the Nazis, to exist. And the army of thugs, the “S.A” and “S.S.” (“stormtroops”), ostensibly maintained to keep “order” at Nazi meetings, provided the sinister substance to Hitler’s demagogic threat: “When our Party comes to power, heads will roll.”

But in those days few took the Nazis seriously. The stabilisation of the German currency and the world-wide economic recovery after the post-war slump, kept the party small. In the elections of May, 1928, they polled 800,000 votes. Comparing the figure with the vote given to the Social Democrats (9 million) who could have foreseen that in less than five years the Nazis would be the political masters of Germany?

Sid Rubin

(Final part published next month, October 1943)

A Bishop on Birth Control (1943)

From the September 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Bishop of St. Albans asked the Government in the House of Lords yesterday to take drastic steps to end what he described as ‘a scandal.’

“At a time when every man and woman was needed for vital work for winning the war, he said, thousands were employed in the manufacture and distribution of contraceptives, with the consequent use of raw materials, especially rubber.

“I understand that this work in this particular firm is said to be a sideline. Even so, apart from the mail-order department, the number of these articles is simply amazing. Seventy-five gross or more a day of boxes each containing twelve of these articles at five days a week means an output of over 35,500,000 a year.”—Manchester Guardian, 8/4/43.

The Bishop of St. Albans is most perturbed. It appears that fifty years hence there will only be twenty-six million people in the British Isles, because the birth rate is falling so rapidly. Apparently, despite the paramount importance of the war, much greater damage is being done by “French” letters than German bombs. It is not the savagery of the Nazis or the bestiality of the Fascists—but the “refusal to face responsibility and self-sacrifice in having children” that is causing the trouble.

It is really a nuisance, after all the speeches and plans —and the promise of family allowances after the war—to find millions of workers, like Lenin’s peasants in 1917 (who voted against the war “with their feet”) “voting” against capitalism with contraceptives.

Recently the Bishop returned to the charge : —

“The Bishop of St. Albans, Dr. Michael Furse, declared yesterday that the Church must “face boldly” the decline in the birthrate, which he described as “appalling.”

The Church, said the Bishop, who was speaking at St. Albans Diocesan Conference, should bring pressure on Parliament to ban the sale of contraceptives to any but married people.

Then they should be sold only on production of a doctor’s certificate as in the case of dangerous drugs. 

Refusal to face responsibility and self-sacrifice in having children, he added, was “not only unpatriotic but against the law of God.”—(Daily Mail, May 21.)

Naturally, it is the duty of Bishops, tending their “flocks” of sheep, to breed them, as required. We emphasise, “as required,” because one other infamous priest, a certain Dr. Malthus, in his day, when the sheep were a bit too prolific, thought just the opposite to Dr. Furse, and told the capitalists to stop ’em breeding too much. He, if he could, would have dished out “those articles” like the present Government has issued gas-masks.

Karl Marx, on page 676 of Vol. 1 of “Capital,” enjoys himself considerably at the expense of the Protestant Parsons by showing that they have always “monopolised the delicate question … of the economic fall of man.” “They generally contribute to the increase of population to a really unbecoming extent, whilst they preach at the same time to the labourers the ‘principle of population.'”

In fact, we might reasonably claim that Malthus’ suggestion, Limitation of Population, is being practically applied in this country to-day—without result, so far as a solution of social problems is concerned.

In Germany, and the democratic Bishop is most concerned about winning the war, Dr. Furse’s proposal has been operated for years.

Douglas Reed in his book, “Insanity Fair,” relates an amusing incident of a desperate little chemist who deposited his entire stock of the banned articles outside the British Embassy.

Doubtless, Dr. Furse would have dealt summarily with this scoundrel. The idea seems to be that we abolish “those articles” here, to help us beat Germany, that is—imitate Germany slavishly—so that we can restore their right to contraceptives; then perhaps they’ll help us to restore ours later. Actually, whatever people do makes little difference. One of Marx’s greatest services was to show how capitalism compensates labour shortage by machinery.

“The labouring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to an always increasing extent. This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits alone. An abstract law of population exists for plants and animals only, and only in so far as man has not interfered with them.”—(Capital, Kerr Edition, Vol. 1, p. 692.)

The Bishop is quite right—it is appalling. Appalling, that millions of intelligent young working men and women, faced with the prospect of the hopeless struggle to raise children in the conditions of the war-torn, unemployed world of to-day—are compelled to stifle the strongest natural instincts and voluntarily starve themselves of the great prerogative of parenthood. Only Socialism, where the material bases of existence are free to all, will allow men and women to enjoy the happiness of producing children whose lives will be even more universal than their own.

Horatio.

Review—”Our Towns—A Close-up” (1943)

Book Review from the September 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

Within two weeks of the evacuation scheme being put into operation at the beginning of the war, the habits and general behaviour of the evacuees had been reported in both national and local press and had been discussed in Parliament. Charges were made against the evacuees that many were irresponsible, dirty and generally slovenly in their habits; that they “over-indulged in alcohol,” smoked too much, and spent their money “wrongly” in many other ways. One of the results of the publicity was an investigation by the Hygiene Committee of the Women’s Group on Public Welfare into these charges, and an examination by them of the conditions of life of thousands of town dwellers. They published their findings in a study, “Our Towns—A Close-up” (Oxford University Press, 5s.), and in the introductory comment : “This book is a thinly disguised report” ; exactly, a report of bitter poverty,

To obtain a knowledge of the social conditions prevailing prior to the war, they studied reports of local authorities, works by Titmuss, Sir John Boyd-Orr and others, and also interviewed witnesses such as Health Visitors, Teachers, and Local Government Servants. The information presented here in a most compact and useful form gives a deplorable picture of the conditions then prevalent. The authors made an examination of the complaints against the background of poverty and bad living conditions that many evacuees endured. They also submit recommendations as measures likely to help in the solution of the problems.

We shall not spend much time dealing with the charge of “wrong spending” on drink, tobacco and different forms of money clubs. Should the workers spend nothing on these things they would still be poor; in fact, the expression “wrong spending” applied to the workers comes within the category of a bad joke. It is shown that in 1937, “one-third of her (Britain’s) families had breadwinners earning less than £2 10s. a week” (page 111).

One of the main charges was that of bad feeding habits and a failure to choose the most nutritious foods. Here the authors give sufficient evidence to show the close connection between malnutrition, illness and poverty. An extract from the Report of the Medical Officer, City of Birmingham, 1938, is given. He stated that:

“During the year 1938, 43,507 children were examined at routine inspections at the schools and their nutritional state was classified as follows :

A (excellent nutrition)……………..   2.3%

B (normal nutrition)………………   86.9%

C (slightly sub-normal nutrition)….    9.4%

D (bad nutrition)……………………..1.4%

—(Page 117).”

While poverty is regarded as the major cause of bad nutrition, it is later suggested in this Report that there are other factors equally important underlying malnutrition as a whole. The facts from the Annual Report, 1933, of Dr. Spence, Medical Officer for Newcastle-on-Tyne, indicate however that the basis of malnutrition and illness is poverty. The facts require no emphasis—they appear on page 35 : —

“In a comparison between a group of children from one to five years of age from the city’s poorest streets and a group of similar age from families of the professional class:

124 children of the professional class had had : Pneumonia 2; Pleurisy 1; Chronic and recurrent cough 2; Measles 6.

125 children from the pooreset streets had had : Pneumouia 17 ; Chronic or recurrent bronchitis 32 ; Measles 46 ; Recurrent Diarrhoea 0; Abscesses, septic skin infectious frequent.”

That poverty is the basis of these evils is also clearly indicated in the following statement : —

“The importance of poverty as a root cause is illustrated by a striking table in which Titmuss (‘Poverty and Population,’ pages 304/5) shows that Durham and Northumberland have as compared with all other regions of England, a very low income level, particularly in Durham, where it appears to be the lowest of any county. The highest overcrowding rate. The highest death rate and infantile mortality rate. The highest death rate for children up to 4 years of age, with a heavy excess of death from respiratory diseases.” (Page 103.)

The charges relating to skin diseases and prevalence of lice were also investigated. It is shown that in ten of the large towns 40 per cent. of the poorer child population were infested with head lice. Although the authors are highly critical of many families, even suggesting that it is a matter of indifference to some, they do show that skin diseases and the presence of vermin are “fostered by overcrowding,” and that thousands of working-class families are free from it, “but in the conditions of poverty this is achieved at the cost of unremitting vigilance and toil.”

There is ample evidence to show the insanitary conditions under which people lived, and how these conditions affect the habits of those who have to endure them indefinitely. Extracts are given from an enquiry, “Growing Up in Shoreditch,” published by the Shoreditch Housing Association in 1938. This enquiry into the home circumstances of some 400 Shoreditch L.C.C. schoolchildren showed : “that in 381 cases only the 93 who lived in flats and 11 others had an indoor closet, and in 206 cases out of 390 the closet was shared by a number of families ranging from two to seven. In 22 per cent. of cases the closet was shared by three or more households, and in 5 per cent. by four or more.” (Page 88.) Also facts are given on the bad water supply and poor heating arrangements in many homes. Only 56 per cent. of 365 cases investigated had a private water supply. In 57 cases the supply was shared by three families or more.

These are only a few examples of the environment and conditions of life of thousands of working class families. Many more are given in this work. We have no space to examine in detail the recommendations; they are confined to reforms within capitalism. Margaret Bondfield, in her preface, suggests that there is a need for “a co-ordinated structure of services which leaves no gap,” and states that a weakness of reformist efforts is that: “it is patchwork reform, and so often the pieces do not fit.” We will add—reform is patchwork and can be nothing more. The need for to-day is not a multiplicity of reforms but a social revolution from Capitalism to Socialism. That alone will guarantee ending the horror portrayed in this book.

The work has the merit of giving in a condensed form information that generally speaking is hidden away in local authorities’ reports. Definitely a useful weapon for the Socialist propagandist

Lew Jones

Poverty (1943)

From the September 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

To those of us interested in social progress, the greatest of evils that has confronted and still confronts humanity, is Poverty. Poverty is a cancerous growth that has shattered the lives of workers. Housed in poisonous slums, an exhibition of ugliness and dirt, who can but wonder that workers have their senses dulled, and their creative aspirations crushed out of them. Debased through overwork and periodic unemployment, living in conditions of squalor-breeding disease, and having little time to review the world around them, it is understandable why the working class have not yet found a solution to their poverty.

And what of the respectable poverty of those workers who dwell in sweet suburbia? Those workers who surreptitiously scrimp and save in order to keep up appearances in a life which offers them a monotonous round of “pictures”—Saturday, “Local” or Church on Sunday, and of being “something in the city” during the rest of the week. A demoralising existence, but one of Respectability which must be maintained at all cost, even if it means apeing in manners, speech and dress the parasitic ruling class. Behind this grinning mask of false jovialness is the growing fear of insecurity. Capitalism is casting a dark shadow of doubt in the minds of workers wherever they live.

And you, the workers in khaki, scattered over the face of the globe on your mission of death and destruction—possibly the only time you travel abroad—you will find a colossal contrast between the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the workers, no matter in which country you find yourselves.

Poverty and riches are relative. In China and India the teeming millions of toilers literally have a hand to mouth existence, while the industrialists, mandarins and princes live in luxury, comfort and ease. In the highly developed Capitalist countries, because of the development of machinery and speed of production, the workers produce far more wealth than the Indian peasants and workers, but receive only sufficient on an average to maintain them in efficient working condition. In contrast to this, the capitalists have, in abundance, those things that are denied to the workers. Yet the working class produce everything that is placed on the world market.

Workers, it is no use relying on the capitalist class to solve your problems. If they could abolish poverty, they would lose their privileged position, power and prestige. The Beveridge Plan, the Atlantic Charter, Churchill’s Four-Year Plan, and any other nostrum can all be thrown on the scrap heap. They do not delve into the roots. It is the Socialist, and only the Socialist who has the solution, and it is the working class who have the power to build a world in which life can be a beautiful adventure. A world where slums, starvation, dole—in a word, POVERTY, no longer exists.

How can this social evil which hangs like a spectre over the working class be eradicated ? It is necessary to repeat a truism that few people now deny, but many unfortunately forget. THERE ARE TWO CLASSES IN SOCIETY. The capitalist class who constitute the minority in society,own the factories, mines, workshops, slums, ships, railways, airways, and all the machinery for producing wealth, but who are parasitic because they do not take part in its production. . . . The working class who are forced to sell their energies to the private property owners, because they, the workers, do not own the means and instruments of wealth production, and are propertyless. The working class constitute the vast majority.

THERE IS A CLASH OF INTERESTS within capitalism. On the one hand workers organise on the industrial field in Trade Unions to struggle for better working conditions, and higher wages : while capitalists struggle to force wages down. Conditions are favourable for workers in their struggle when there is little unemployment, as at the present time when conscripts have replaced the queues of job-hunters outside the Labour Exchanges, and unfavourable when there is widespread unemployment.

There is no way out for workers within the framework of capitalism. Struggle as they may to improve their lot, and they do sometimes get a few crumbs, THERE ARE TWO CLASSES IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY. Here lies the root of the trouble. When the majority of workers become class-conscious nothing will prevent them from overthrowing and replacing Capitalism by the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of wealth production, which presupposes a moneyless, classless society, in which people will have free access to all the good things that society can produce. This is SOCIALISM.

Is this too much to ask of those who produce but do not possess? Only you can judge. Would that we could circulate our literature over a wider field. Would that our pens could in a few words crystallise to each one of you weary slaves, the message of Socialism. WORKERS AWAKE FROM YOUR SLUMBERS—YOU HAVE A WORLD TO GAIN.

S. W. C.

Duff and David (1943)

Book Review from the September 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The Christian Ethic” is the slogan now blared from ugly little godboxes to venerable fanes of this Precious Island; hot gospellers join hands with Soviet-loving Deans; ecclesiastics clinging tenaciously to a Good Job in inverse ratio to their hold on the “tenets” of their faith join lustily in the racket; the Church dubbed by their fellow Christians as the “Scarlet Woman” pitches the loud speaker to its own peculiar note, assured that it alone is sole arbiter of what constitutes “Christian Ethic.” This by way of introduction to Duff Cooper’s book, “David,” which is just, a clumsy revelation of the mentality of Duff Cooper and his set.

Look up this rather mythical biblical character’s record; it is no better, and not much worse, than Carlyle’s favourite “heroes,” or of the “heroes” of our own time. There will yet be a haloed Stalin in the Christian Calendar. Holy Writ roundly declares David to have been a “man after God’s own heart”; he was accorded the privilege of ancestoring the Messiah himself. Duff Cooper is hard put to it to justify the ways of God to Man through his enthusiastic write-up of a lecherous, treacherous guerilla chief; he even has to blacken the character of Uriah, with no warrant whatever from the Book of Kings, to make some excuse for the dirtiest action of his hero. David, while “on the run,” had the chance to slay his enemy Saul while asleep. Duff Cooper’s treatment of this episode is revealing.

“His statesmanship told him that that was not the way to win a throne. . . . David, believing himself to be the anointed of the Lord, would not raise his hand against the only other man who had been so anointed. … It was a great act of statesmanship, and a great act of faith.”

Our author gapes in wonder and admiration at David’s exhibition of “patience and prudence”; a genuine Blood-Tears-and-Sweater of the olden time.

“The future could not have been darker for David, yet even so, he was prepared to leave it to the Lord in whom he trusted.” In the name of Faith, St. Augustine, substantially the codifier of “Christian Ethic,” sanctified brutal Intolerance, quoting Christ for his authority; in the name of Faith Christians tortured and burned each other; in the name of Faith chattel slavery was strenuously defended, elementary rights to women denied. None of the horrors resulting from Capitalism in its worst Moloch period but found its apologists among bishops and hired Christian “economists.”

It seems incredible that anyone can be found to throw away half-a-guinea on this outrageous castration of vigorous Authorised Version English, eked out with fluffy “corroborative detail” in the familiar B.B.C. juvenile religious broadcasts, and comments in the flabby style and unctuous spirit so mercilessly flayed by the unfortunately little known “The Four Gospels ” of Tolstoy.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is fairly and squarely opposed to “Religion,” whatever guise it may assume. It respects the sincere Christian reformer, but deplores his fundamental errors based on superstition. It is under no delusion that a Secularist political regime would ensure Socialism. Germany, and more especially Russia, are sufficient warning that skilful training with emotional appeal on non-religious lines can produce a youth fanatically attached to the equivalent of “Altar and Throne.” But the Secularists of Britain seem hardly alive to the serious recrudescence of the worst sides of Spiritism, the subtle danger of “agreed syllabuses,” and the rest of the present religious racket.

Augustus Snellgrove

Voice From The Back: The US Is Staying Indefinitely (2005)

The Voice From The Back Column from the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The US Is Staying Indefinitely

“The Air Force’s top general said Monday that American warplanes would have to support Iraq’s fledgling security forces well after American ground troops eventually withdraw from the country…. In an interview earlier this month, General Jumper was even more explicit when asked about the Air Force’s future in Iraq. “We will continue with a rotational presence of some type in that area more or less indefinitely”, he said. “We have interests in that part of the world and an interest in staying in touch with the militaries over there” (New York Times, 30 August). The “interest” they have, is of course, Iraq’s oil.

Blessed Are The Warmakers

When the priests and ministers in the USA prattle on about “blessed are the peacemakers” they obviously don’t know much about how capitalism operates. “The United States is the largest supplier of weapons to developing nations, a US congressional study says. It delivered more than $US 9.6 billion in arms to countries including those in the Near East and Asia in 2004, and boosted worldwide sales to the highest amount since 2000. The total worldwide value of all agreements to sell arms last year was close to $US 37 billion, and nearly 59 per cent of the agreements were with developing nations, according to the Congressional Research Service report” (Sydney Morning Herald ,31 August).

Blessed are the Poor?

Another piece of nonsense much favoured by the bible bashers is “blessed are the poor”. Good news then for the pious in the USA according to the latest figures. “The number of Americans living below the poverty line rose for the fourth successive year during 2004, extending the gap between rich and poor in the world’s wealthiest nation. …. At the other end of the scale, a survey of the biggest US companies by compensation consultancy Pearl Meyers found the average payout for chief executives rose 13% in 2004 to $10.5 million.” (Guardian, 31 August). You are living in New York on minimum wage? Oh, blessed one! Consult the US Bureau of Statistics.

The Doom Machine

We often hear scares about the likely effects of global warning, but this report seems to come from a reliable source and should scare us all. “Only extraordinary changes in the output of warming gases now and until 2050 would make any difference, Martin Parry told the British Association science festival. … The estimates came from a government-funded study by Professor Parry’s team at the Hadley Centre, the Met Office’s climates forecasting centre” (Times, 6 September). The report was carried under the headline “Ozone rise will doom millions to starvation” and calculated that about 500 million are at risk but by 2050 this would rise to 550 million. Truly, modern capitalism has become a doom machine!

Priorities

“The world’s poorest people are being denied access to drugs because pharmaceutical companies are focusing their resources on diseases suffered by wealthy, middle-aged Americans, such as obesity and heart disease, a leading expert will say tomorrow. Dr David Rhodes, the Health Protection Agency’s (HPA) head of business development will claim that spiralling costs are driving firms to invest primarily in drugs that tackle diseases of older Americans” (Observer, 11 September). This is good business practice according to the ethics of capitalism, a bit tough on those suffering from tuberculosis, malaria and water-borne diseases in the less developed countries, though.

A World In Crisis

The columnist Lee Randall certainly summed up the nightmare of capitalism well when she wrote: “Twirl the globe and stab your finger anywhere. I could spend whole days writing cheques for innocent victims of war, natural disasters, terrorism, disease or poverty, and it wouldn’t be enough. Every tomorrow brings new woes. … I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling overwhelmed, uncertain about what can and should be done. But I’m open to ideas” (Scotsman, 10 September). How about world socialism, Lee?

Editorial: Time to Move On (2005)

Editorial from the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the Berlin Wall fell and the Kremlin’s Empire collapsed in Eastern Europe, Western leaders spoke about a “peace dividend” and how money previously spent on arms would be re-channelled into social programmes; redirected towards the fight against poverty, inequality and ignorance. Some spoke about “the end of history”, how capitalism was at last triumphant. Capitalism, at the dawn of a new millennium, had supposedly seen off its rivals and now, left to develop, would bring prosperity to all.

In reality:

• World military spending for 2005: $1 trillion (or just over $31,709 per second)
• Number of billionaires in the world: 691
• Number of people malnourished: approx 815 million
• 1 billion people lack access to clean water
• 2.4 billion people lack access to decent sanitation
• 17,280 children die every day from hunger

According to the most recent UN Human Development Report:

• 54 countries are now poorer than they were in 1990, which is when world leaders made their “peace dividend” claim.
• The world’s 225 richest individuals, of whom 60 are Americans with total assets of $311 billion, have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion – equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the entire world’s population.
• The estimated additional cost of maintaining universal access to basic education, basic health care, reproductive health care, adequate food and clean water and safe sewers for all is roughly $40 billion a year, or less than 4 percent of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world.
• The richest fifth of the world’s people consumes 86 percent of all goods and services while the poorest fifth consumes just 1.3 percent.
• The United Nations Children’s Fund reported in 2005 that one billion children, or half of the world’s population of children, suffer from poverty, violent conflict and the scourge of AIDS.

Capitalism may well have advanced the scientific and technological capabilities of humanity to a stage where we can now feasibly establish a world of abundance, a world without waste or want or war. But the facts speak for themselves. There are now more starving, thirsty, homeless and unemployed people on the planet than at any time in human history. Rather than providing for the needs of the world’s people, Capitalism stands as a fetter to the full and improved use of the world’s productive resources in the service of humanity.

Capitalism need not be the end of history. It is just one station along the railway line of human social development at which we are presently standing. We can move on, progress. By progress, what we mean is socialism, a society based on common ownership, democratic control and production solely for use. Real change is possible, but only if enough of us really do want to move further along the track to where real human history begins.

Letter: Self-Determination (2005)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Self-Determination

Dear Editors

The last two decades have witnessed an increasing number of anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation movements seeking a voice through protest and opposition to the damaging practices of trans-national corporations and the World Bank, IMF and WTO. The probability is that the vast majority of these individuals have never studied economics or politics and don’t understand much of the workings of current economic policies, but they certainly do see and feel the results and negative effects of these policies and they have a feel for what is unjust. They share a common desire for a better world, a fairer world. They may not have identified clearly or explicitly what it is they want in this other, better world, but they have undoubtedly recognised much of what they don’t want. Their protests and their slogans are demands to be heard; these are ways of expressing anger, frustration and disagreement with the status quo.

Around the world such groups are voicing many different grievances from many different angles. Bolivians grabbing their water rights back from Bechtel, who are now suing the Bolivian government for compensation for what they would have earned in the future. Hundreds of thousands of Indians being forced off their fertile productive farmland in favour of huge dams which promise fat profits for fat cats. Millions of AIDs sufferers denied access to life-giving treatments for lack of cash.  Empathisers in the minority world protesting against the methods and results of worldwide capitalist business.

So many different reasons from so many different perspectives; different stages of anger, deprivation, disenfranchisement. It would be unrealistic to make broad generalisations about the myriad individual goals but it’s certainly possible to gather the separate bits and pieces together and view them as discrete perspectives with converging aims. All these fingers may not be poised over exactly the right button but at least they are scrabbling in the right area. Surely, better something rather than sitting in a darkened room absorbing more mind-numbing images from another evening’s bombardment courtesy of the capitalist media?

It’s about choices. People’s first choice should be socialism. It seems such a small step from the examples given here, but a huge paradigm shift. For people focused on life’s necessities – enough food for the family everyday, somewhere safe to sleep, healthcare and childcare for increasing numbers of chronically ill, a job this month, next year that will pay the bills – it’s hard to focus on the light at the end when the tunnel is long and dark. So, as socialists, how do we address this last little push, this yawning gap? Let’s not criticise those who haven’t figured it out yet. Let’s harness their strengths and energies. We need first to get people to see the light, recognize it for what it is and then to keep focused on heading for it through the long dark tunnel of capitalism, in growing numbers, with growing strength in the knowledge that there is a better world, a fairer world, a socialist world.

Janet Surman, 

Turkey.

Katrina – not just an ill wind (2005)

From the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Driving along the freeways abutting on the Gulf of Mexico it comes as a shock to see so many signs announcing that you are travelling a designated evacuation route. For this is a part of America which is well accustomed to the extremes of stormy weather. But Hurricane Katrina was something utterly out of the ordinary. We are still digesting the accounts of the horrors endured by people who were caught in the path of the hurricane and of their suffering since then. What lives they had have been wrecked; what possessions they relied on have disappeared into the floods with the corpses, the rubbish and the sewage; what they saw as their future has been literally blown away. So far there has been no reliable estimate of the loss of life: does it run into hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands? For those who worry themselves about such issues there has been no informed guess of how much the disaster will cost the insurance companies; Merrill Lynch, who know a thing or two about pushing money around, have come up with the figure of $22 billion. And George Bush, who could once luxuriate behind apparently unassailable ramparts of support, has had to contemplate the erosion of his popularity.

In its destructive power and the misery it unleashed against the people of the Gulf States, Katrina was extraordinary. But in some important respects it was completely normal and predictable. To begin with there was the stampede of politicians – in particular George Bush – to avoid any responsibility for the catastrophe and for the official failure to rush help to the victims. Apart from the damage to roads, buildings and the like, the hurricane’s breach of the levees protecting New Orleans was crucial. Bush told a TV reporter that “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees” but that was simply untrue. Business Week newspaper, for example, thought differently: “Engineers have known for years that New Orleans’s levees couldn’t withstand anything above a category 3 hurricane” (Katrina was category 5). In fact as recently as 1998 the category 2 hurricane George forced the water levels up to a foot below the top of the levees. In 2002 a local New Orleans newspaper concluded from its investigation that a major hurricane would devastate the region.

Money

Anticipation of the breach should have led to the levees being heightened and strengthened, saving a lot of lives and preventing untold misery for the people. But before Katrina arrived on the scene the funding which could have improved the levees was cut by $71 million; a previous Secretary of Environmental Quality in Louisiana was angry enough about this to forecast that “a disastrous flood was inevitable”. One local emergency management chief thought that the cuts were imposed because “It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq and I suppose that’s the price we pay”. He might have put it differently – for capitalism killing people is more affordable than protecting them from harm.

So what of the people who lived in the path of the storm, of the wind and the flood and whose lives were to be so dramatically affected by decisions on where money was to be spent? In the vast majority they were black and in the lower reaches of poverty. In New Orleans two thirds of the population was African/American, with a quarter of them officially graded as living in poverty. In the Lower Ninth Ward of that city, which suffered particularly badly in the flood, 90 percent were African/American with almost a third of them classified as living in poverty. In a flash of candour which must have caused acute anguish to her minders Barbara Bush, the mother of George Bush and the wife of the former president, shared her thoughts about this: “So many of the people in the area here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. So this [fleeing from the hurricane, from the floods, the fear, the death, then living in the squalor of emergency accommodation] is working well for them”

Poverty

Typically, the people living at or below the poverty line endure bad housing without proper plumbing, hot and cold water, a shower or a bath. It also means that, crucially in America , they could not afford a car or any other ready means of carrying out the official advice to evacuate the area before Katrina arrived – and that if they did manage to flee they would have no access to ready places of refuge. It seems obvious that such people should help themselves from damaged shops and stores, putting survival before capitalism’s property laws. They would not have been deterred to be told that this was looting, a very serious crime; nor would they have been impressed by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s apparent condoning of the same type of activity, when it suited him, in the case of Iraq: “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things”. Perhaps Katrina had informed the looters that to be poor can be to suffer a desperately inadequate life style with miserable prospects and that the poorer you are the worse this is.

Katrina was a disaster of epic scale for the poor of the Gulf States, fleeing the winds and the waters, or cowering in some noxious shelter. There was some bad news also for the other side of the class divide. The firm Deloitte, who are called “consultants” (which does not mean they are readily available to give advice to anyone trying to get by on Social Security of any kind) calculated that the hurricane could have damaged parts of the American economy on a scale comparable to the events of 9/11. One of the firm’s spokespersons warned about the effect on the insurance industry, on tourism, leisure, hospitality and the stock market. In fact the stock markets in London and America hardly fluttered. In any case any tremors were overridden by the good news for the kind of people who may consult Deloitte. Arguing that the damage to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico would cause a shortage, the oil firms were quick to raise their prices. On the assumption that because almost a third of America’s coffee crop would have been stored in New Orleans the price of coffee on the market soared by 11 percent.

Profits

The construction industry – notably part of the Haliburton Group, which was once bossed by Vice President Dick Cheney and which prospers so well out of repairing the damage the American forces have done in Iraq – was eagerly preparing bids to reconstruct the damaged cities of the Gulf. Shares in Haliburton did not fall but went up by two percent. In England shares in Aggrreko, who supply portable power generators, soared by 7.5 percent and shares in Wolesley, which supplies plumbing and heating, were up by three percent. One financial adviser, after the obligatory acknowledgement that a lot of people had suffered terribly in the hurricane, had something of a song in his heart :

“The impact of events such as Katrina, while devastating for the

people involved, tend to be quite short-term and you should

be investing in America, or any other region for that matter, for the

long-term – at least five years and probably 10 or more. Over that

period, can you afford to be out of the world’s largest economy

and stock market, which has some of the best companies in the World?”

And how is the reconstruction likely to turn out? If the experience of the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami is any guide, the face of places like New Orleans will be changed for ever as luxury tourism is foisted on the place, leaving one or two small areas where a kind of sanitised memory is allowed to survive. The chairman of the New Orleans Business Council ominously spoke of how “to use this catastrophe as a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic” of the city. Well, the people of New Orleans and of the rest of the world have been warned.

Socialism

Katrina was a disaster of epic proportions which no style of human organisation, even one based on communal ownership and control of the means of life, could have averted or controlled. But such a society would have prevented a calamity on the scale of New Orleans. A classless society, organised on the basis of human interests, would not have misjudged the power of Katrina, nor compromised the safety of its people in its path by undermining the strength of defences because it was financially advisable to do so. It would not have bungled any necessary rescue and support services. And as an open and democratic society it would not have been plagued by politicians disguising their true failures and impotence behind a screen of lies.

R. C.

Hurricane Katrina: Aspects of the disaster, published by Indymedia, United States (2005)

From the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

• The city has a 40% illiteracy rate. 
• New Orleans Police Department officers, who have been accused of drug running, corruption and theft, were ‘caught’ on videotape looting a Wal-Mart.  
• The Arizona Republic reported that its local sheriffs “watched New Orleans police officers loading their patrol cars with items taken from various businesses, a couple of pharmacies, a hardware store, an auto-parts store and a grocery store.”
•  The Bush administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund New Orleans flood control, and ignored scientists warnings of increased hurricanes as a result of global warming.
•  There are many first-hand reports of relief organizations being refused entry into the city. The Red Cross’ official website explains “The state Homeland Security Department had requested–and continues to request– that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.”
•  New Orleans is the only deepwater port in the US served by six class-one railroads. None of these were used to take people out of the city.  Tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees was halted because of President Bush’s visit to the city. “We had arrangements to airlift food by helicopter to these folks, and now the food is sitting in trucks because they won’t let helicopters fly,” said Casey O’Shea, U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon’s chief of staff. It was not reported whether the supplies ever actually made it to those who most needed it.
•  Private military companies have been employed to guard the property of the city’s millionaires from looters.  “As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.”

http//neworleans.indymedia.org

Katrina: the poor suffer more (2005)

From the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recently sickening ravages of property and life wrought by Hurricane Katrina have been extensively covered by the media, but with some rather glaring omissions.

The first was that a society based on the rights of property over life had a great deal to do with exacerbating an already traumatic situation. What we witnessed the most on television were pathetic yet stark scenes of poor people huddled in a sports stadium, homes lost forever, awaiting supplies and aid that took endless days to arrive. During this time more people died, the ill were uncared for, and conditions of existence plummeted to unsanitary levels often associated with the shanty towns of South America or Turkish prisons, but not with the United States of America. While these already traumatised people had to endure an additional trauma of abandonment and lack of the basic wherewithal to survive, millions of homes and offices unused and awaiting buyers sat empty around the country. But they were not available to the million homeless of New Orleans, whose life savings had been lost in homes rendered rubble, or who simply never had the savings to invest in their own house.

Nobody on television asked the most salient question of all: “should people struck by terrible tragedy be victims of charity at all, or should they instead be automatically entitled to society’s wealth simply by demonstrating clear-cut needs for homes, hygiene, food, clothes, and comfort?” Society as presently constituted is not geared toward the satisfaction of our needs, but rather to the sale of commodities to yield profits, and such a society proved itself demonstrably incapable of meeting needs of the dire and desperate kinds that followed on the heels of Katrina. But hey, there are already millions of homeless and poor people in the United States who are not entitled to those vast numbers of empty homes awaiting purchase, so why should these victims of extreme weather be any more fortunate?

Had you or I decided to by-pass the sleeping government and simply pick up a couple of homeless individuals and drop them off in another town, we would have had to do so only by taking time off work. Most of us, as workers, have commitments to our employers that may not be so casually by-passed. And in capitalism, even relief efforts are subject to the welfare agencies’ budgetary constraints. Ever heard of the tens of millions of starving and ill children who die each and ever year around the world for whom there is simply not enough money to go around? While relief for those left in New Orleans was certainly offered by the Red Cross and eventually by the state, few asked whether it is sane or even effective to meet critical human needs depending upon how much money or how many volunteers may be assembled. What if those of you donating a few dollars at supermarkets for Katrina victims simply don’t raise enough? Does that mean that the plight of those struck by disaster is entirely the result of your personal failures, or of a society in which wealth is produced only to be sold, and not to meet our needs? We socialists think the latter.

Nobody on television asked whether by rights the wealth of society should not be automatically due to all individuals. Thus, the million New Orleanians with homes tragically destroyed suddenly enter into that category of “homeless,” those without the monetary means to buy or rent. Nobody on the idiot box asked the most obvious question: “why shouldn’t homes be available to anybody who needs them?”

A further question never raised in recent television coverage was about the severity of the storm itself. Many scientists around the world are now convinced that the ecological devastation wrought by modern society has played its part in altering global weather patterns, even while conservative politicians and owners of polluting industry deny such hypotheses and try hard to keep them from being discussed in the media. Tropical forests are vanishing at the rate of city sizes per day, ice is melting at the polar caps, storms are increasing and worsening, temperatures are rising, ozone levels are diminishing. Quite a few scientists have made calculations that if present levels of ecological destruction continue unabated for the next ten, twenty or thirty years, then catastrophic alterations in weather will no longer be avoidable, even if pollution were stopped after such a date. While it is difficult to be certain if the damage to the planet caused by capitalist production has been responsible for recent changes for the worse in weather, one thing is clear – such dire warnings from the scientific community are not going to be taken seriously. This leaves us rightly concerned whether we are heading into an era in which such similarly devastating phenomena as Hurricane Katrina will not be exceptions, but the rule. What are you all going to do about it? When will citizens take control, and stop leaving critical decision making to leaders of all parties led by the supremacy of corporate interests. What are you personally going to do to render this planet a joy to share, to create a society for you and your children that meets our needs?

The World Socialist Party of the United States is a companion party of the World Socialist Movement. It aims to bring about a non-violent revolution in the ownership of the means of production from private or state to common. In such a society, money will no longer be necessary, as the things and services we require to live fully (food, clothes, medical services, homes, transportation, and other modern human needs) will be freely available to all. This is because the means of production will be owned in common by the entire community, and will be democratically controlled by that community as well, a society in which leaders are replaced by truly democratic decision making of all citizens.

In a society of common ownership, all war in such a nationless world will be immediately abolished, while the end of starvation and dire poverty will quickly follow suit. Without the barriers of economic cost holding back human progress, more ecologically sustainable ways to provide energy and production for ourselves will be immediately planned and created on a global basis. We will become for the first time in history a truly human family looking after itself.

Dr. Who 

(World Socialist Party of US)

Cooking the Books: The market fails again (2005)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Within a month of the Live8 concerts that were supposed to influence the leaders of world capitalism to do something about poverty in Africa, the charities had to get their begging bowls out again. This time for a famine in Niger, an ex-French colony to the north of Nigeria with a population of over 11.6 million.

In October last year various international agencies including the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation signalled that, due to a bad harvest and an invasion of locusts, cereal production in Niger in 2004-5 was likely to be 7.5 percent below normal. In accordance with the law of supply and demand the price of millet, the main cereal grown and consumed in Niger, began to rise, with the result that the farmers whose crop had failed were unable to afford to buy enough food for their families. Malnutrition, especially amongst children, grew.

The government reacted by bringing in a scheme to sell millet at a reduced price, but although this was below the market price it was still two times higher than the price the farmers had received for their 2003-4 crop.

Dr Isabelle Defourny, of Médicins Sans Frontières, takes up the story:

“In early June, Niger’s prime minister acknowledged that the government’s response was ineffective when he noted that hundreds of thousands of the 3.5 million people threatened by the food shortage were too poor to be able to purchase cereal, even at a low price. Those most severely affected by the food crisis have the least resources, including farmers whose harvests were poor and cattle producers and craftsmen. Many had already exhausted their resources, selling goods and animals to feed themselves.” (Messages, MSF newsletter, July-August, www.msf.fr/documents/base/2005-07-01-Messages137VA.pdf )

MSF urged that “free food distribution is the only way to keep the situation from worsening and to prevent large numbers of deaths”, a perfectly reasonable proposal if we were living in a society geared to serving human needs and welfare. But we’re not. The authorities took a different view, for reasons explained by social researcher, Jean-Hervé Jezequel, in an interview in the same issue of Messages:

“ . . . in early June, at a meeting of the Joint Commission for Consultation, the decision-making body of the ‘action plan’ which includes representatives of the state and of institutional donors, the government of Niger declared that despite the seriousness of the food crisis, it would not set up free distribution operations. The only political reaction from the institutional donors came from the ambassador of France, who was glad there was a ‘policy that will not destabilize the markets’. The ambience was almost surreal: ignoring the emergency food situation, economic considerations were, without hesitation, given priority over the fate of endangered people.”

The French newspaper Libération reported that some cereal merchants had held back stocks to drive up prices further and that others had “disposed of their stocks in neighbouring Nigeria where the population has a higher purchasing power” (9 August).

So, yet again, as in every “food crisis” since the Great Starvation in Ireland in the 1840s, the workings of capitalism have produced the obscene spectacle of the export of food from an area where people are starving because, not having money, they don’t constitute a market and so don’t count.

Party News: Livingston By-Election (2005)

Party News from the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party stood a candidate in the Livingston by-election, in central Scotland, on 29 September, caused by the death of former "ethical" Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. As it took place while this issue was at the printers we are unable to report the result, but details of the campaign as it progressed and its outcome can be found on the by-election blog at http://realsocialism.blogspot.com

Editorial: Heartbreak House: The Swindle of Nationalisation. (1945)

Editorial from the October 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leaders of the Labour Party, with the active support of the Communists, are putting over a monstrous deception on the workers in the mining and other industries.

If Conservatives were now in power they would be telling the workers that it is necessary for them to work harder in order to replace what has been destroyed by war and to produce articles needed owing to the present scarcity of coal, clothing, food, etc.

After the last war the same tale was told—and in due course the workers reaped the harvest of increased production in the shape of glutted markets, unemployment and wage cuts. Remembering what happened then many workers would now be sceptical about such propaganda if it came from Conservatives and the employers generally. They would suspect that they were again being tricked into sacrificing themselves for the benefit of capitalism and the profits of the capitalist class.

Now the propaganda campaign is in full swing again, but this time it comes from the Labour Party and Communists and it is baited with the pretence that under Nationalisation greater production will benefit the whole community and not the propertied class.

Mr. Michael Foot, Labour M.P., writing in the Labour organ, the Daily Herald (August 7th, 1945), puts the Labour Party case:—

“Partly owing to the war, there is a severe physical shortage of all the goods required to provide an abundant, life, and if that abundant life is to be assured in the future certain immediate privations will have to be endured in order to restock the capital industries. No Tory Government could make this appeal, for the worker would suspect that the summons to hard work, discipline and abstinence would result only in fortunes for the few and the later wastage of unemployment. The new Government is in a different situation. It also must appeal for hard work, discipline and, for a short period, continued abstinence. All these are needed to increase the total wealth for distribution, but a Labour Government at the same time can give concrete proof of its resolve to use this wealth for the benefit of the whole community. By its social insurance and health and housing plans it can show its determination to secure a greater equality in the distribution of wealth. By its nationalisation proposals it can show its resolve that the re-equipment of industry shall not merely bring greater profits to the few. By its financial measures it can prove that, when this period of shortage is over, no return will be allowed to wasteful unemployment.—(Daily Herald, August 7th, 1945). 

Mr. Foot in his article was answering criticisms made in the Economist, August 4th, the central point of the criticism being that if the owners of a nationalised industry receive as compensation the same income that they were drawing already there is no surplus from which the workers could receive higher wages unless (through more machinery, greater efficiency and harder work), the productivity of the industry is increased. Mr. Foot’s answer is that the Labour Government will get this greater productivity and it will benefit the workers and "not merely bring greater profits to the few.’’ (our italics).

The Labour Government having in the words of the Daily Herald, convinced the electorate "of its detachment from class interests '' (i.e., working class interests), and "of its devotion to the welfare of the whole community". (Daily Herald, August 1st, 1945), no longer adheres to its old propaganda in favour of drastically redistributing the national income in order to help the workers.

Instead it has taken over the familiar capitalist argument that the only way to improve the lot of the workers is to increase the total national income. Mr. Herbert Morrison clinched this in his speech to the National Conference of Labour Women on September 5th:—

“If we were to be able to provide better benefits under the social insurance measures, reduce taxation, and provide more of the goods of life for everybody, the only way was by increasing the total national income ... it could only be done by work, thought, drive and initiative."(Daily Telegraph, September 6th, 1945).

In the same speech Mr. Morrison justified himself by the plea that "there was a limit to what could be achieved merely by transferring money from one person's pocket to another’s,” and went on to explain why, in the interests of efficiency, the Labour Government holds it necessary to reduce taxation on the profits of the capitalists.

A few days later the Communist, Mr. Arthur Horner, National Production Officer of the National Union of Miners and President of the South Wales Miner’s Federation added his piece to the campaign. He told a Press Conference in London that he was asking the miners to increase output by 10 per cent. On the ground that The Mines are to be nationalised he

“asked the workers in the pits to adopt a new attitude . . . Hitherto the policy of the Union had been to get what they could out of the owners. Now they had taken on the responsibility of assisting in running the industry they must accept new methods. They must take a more active part in assisting greater technical efficiency and increasing output.”—(Daily Telegraph, September 7th, 1945).

This new emphasis on the capitalist doctrine that the workers can only get more by producing more, contrasts glaringly with what the Labour Party and the Communists were saying just before the war. Compare Mr. Morrison's statement now with the Labour Party pamphlet “The Nation's Wealth at the Nations Service.”—(Douglas Jay. Labour Party, 1938).

Mr. Jay wrote :—

“Labour's ultimate objective in economic policy is the removal of unjustifiable inequalities of wealth and opportunity by the transfer of private unearned income and capital into public hands. There exists something like £1,200,000,000 of annual unearned income in Britain to-day; and probably two-thirds of this is inherited income which the recipients have done nothing to earn or deserve.

Fortunes totalling nearly £600 million are left every year by private persons mainly to their own friend, and relatives, many of whom are already wealthy. Here is the available reserve and capital on which Labour must draw to supply the minimum human needs of the poorest . . . .”

He went on to say that “a far greater transfer of wealth can be achieved than any yet attempted, without any dislocation of the community's economic life.”

Another indication of the Labour Party's change of front is their present complete silence about, the “capital levy.” After the last war this device, which was offered as a means of transferring wealth from capitalists to workers, occupied first place in the Labour Party programme.

So much for the Labour Party since it has progressed from the pre-war political wilderness to the milk and honey of office.

Let us now consider what Socialists have to say about the whole problem of producing and distributing the articles needed by the community. Let it be emphasised once again that the Socialist case is poles apart from that of the Labour and Communist parties.

At present the means of production (land, factories, railways, etc.), are the private property of a small minority of the population, the capitalists. By virtue of their ownership they draw a large unearned income in the form of rent, interest and profit from the wealth produced by the working-class. The Labour Party's remedy for the poverty problem is (while leaving the greater part of capitalist, industry unchanged), to introduce a purely nominal change of ownership in certain industries that are to be “nationalised." Instead of receiving incomes in the form of dividend on shares in mining or railway companies the present owners will relinquish direct ownership and receive instead approximately the same capital and income in the form of Government stocks and the interest thereon, and the existing gross inequality of property and income will not be affected.

But there is a snag in this from the point of view of trying to run with the hare while hunting with the hounds. The Labour government have promised “fair compensation" to the owners in nationalised industries and are committed to enabling the capitalists in private industries to obtain a “reasonable return on the capital employed" (Sir Stafford Cripps, Daily Herald, August 13th); but they are in the dilemma of also having promised higher incomes to the workers which, under the conditions laid down, can only come from an increase in the workers' output.

The only real remedy is one the Labour Government cannot employ because they did not seek at the election a mandate to abolish capitalism. If capitalism were abolished and socialism introduced there would immediately be two big developments through which the poverty, problem of the working class could be solved by increasing the number of men and women actually engaged in production. One is that the members of the capitalist class, no longer able to live in leisure and luxury at the expense of the workers, would become useful members of the community helping to produce the articles needed by the community. The second is that all kinds of activities necessary to capitalism but unnecessary under Socialism would cease, and this would free millions of workers for production who are now engaged in banks, insurance companies, and advertising, or in the taxation and rating departments of the Central and Local Government; as well as those now required by the capitalists to serve in the armed forces for the competitive struggle with foreign capitalist groups. As is explained in our pamphlet "Socialism" the output of wealth could be at least doubled by these means.

This is the only way in which the poverty problem can be solved and the Labour Government, trying to run the capitalist system, cannot solve it. What they are doing is to act as Caretakers for the capitalist class, calling on the workers to increase output (just as a Conservative Government would have done), but using seductive arguments about “service to the community" which would only be justified if in fact the means of production had been transformed or were going to be transformed into the property of the whole community. While maintaining (with merely superficial changes), the system under which the capitalists exploit the working class, the Labour Government are pretending that exploitation has ended.

It is clever propaganda, but the realities of the class struggle between those who own, but do net produce and those who produce but do not own, will not for long be smoothed over by even the most plausible Labour-Communist orator. The working class faced with the same old ruthlessness of capitalist employers, of Government Departments and of the Boards of the Mining and Transport undertakings when “nationalisation" takes place, will find that they have no defence except the limited defence provided by their own trade unions. In strikes and lockouts the web of half-truths spun by the Labour leaders will be rent asunder, and the workers will have made an advance towards the necessary understanding of the fact that Socialism has nothing in common with Labourism.