Brave community (2007)

Book Review from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Brave Community. The Digger Movement in the English Revolution. By John Gurney. Manchester University Press £55.

Gerrard Winstanley has a prominent place in the socialist tradition. In advocating, in 1648-1652 in the course of the English bourgeois revolution, a new social order where there would “be no buying and selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole Earth shall be a common treasury for every man, for the Earth is the Lords’”, he was clearly just as much a forerunner of modern socialism as was Thomas More and his Utopia of 1516. In fact, he went one better than More and tried to put his theories into practice when on 1 April 1649 he and others started tilling and planting crops on (St) George’s Hill, near Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, on a communistic basis as a first step towards spreading such moneyless communities throughout England.

Gurney’s book is a detailed examination of the social, economic and political situation in the area that led to this as well as of the other individuals apart from Winstanley who were involved. The driving force of the English Revolution has been analysed as the “middling sort”, i.e. those who were neither big landowners nor landless labourers. In the countryside these were mainly tenant farmers; they had their conflicts with the lords of the manor which radicalised some of them in and around Cobham in Surrey. But it wasn’t them who became the Diggers, even if Winstanley himself was a “middling sort”.

The year 1649, as the year in which the King had been executed, was a year when to many people anything seemed possible. The previous year had seen a bad harvest and many poor people were in desperate straits. It was to them that Winstanley – whose clothing business in London had failed – preached (and this is the right word, as his motivation was both religious and practical) that God had given the Earth to everyone to be used as a common storehouse from which to feed and clothe themselves and that they should use it to produce what they needed without working for wages and without any buying and selling.

According to Gurney, Winstanley wavered between seeing this as the result of the Second Coming (in people’s hearts) that would restore the original situation of no ownership and seeing it as a practical solution of the landless poor in post-civil-war England.

The occupation of George’s Hill did not last long, only a few months till August, when local opposition from tenant farmers who wanted the land for grazing forced the Diggers to move to another site at Cobham. This lasted a little longer, but it too was over by April 1650 as a result of both legal and direct action initiated by two local landlords.

This prompted Winstanley to publish his Law of Freedom in a Platform which is a classic of socialist literature. According to Gurney, Winstanley stayed on in Cobham for the next twenty or so years as a respectable member of the local community, but by 1675 had moved back to London, apparently relatively well off and a Quaker sympathiser. He died in 1676.

Adam Buick

Ubiquitous Marr (2007)

Book Review from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

A History of Modern Britain. Bt Andrew Marr. Macmillan, 2007, £25.

Some readers will find much to like about this book, written by the ubiquitous teleMarr, radioMarr and Daily Marr and based on his recent TV series on BBC2. It is entertaining, witty, good-humoured – and never boring. Others will be less keen, seeing its 630 pages as obese and garrulous, stuffed with descriptive detail but light on discussion of ideas (do we really want to pay good money to learn about Churchill “sitting in his hospital bed wearing pale blue pyjamas with a silk shirt and cardigan?”)

The book has five parts, each covering about a decade from the end of the World War II to the present time. Marr sums up the 1945-51 period: “Labour had made Britain a little more civilized and certainly fairer. But it had accomplished nothing like a revolution.” He write of “a certain vision of British socialism” and the word socialist (as noun or adjective) is used dozens of times in the book. But always it refers to Old Labour people or policies like nationalisation.

Part Two, titled “The Land of Lost Content” (meaning happiness) is about the 13 years of Tory government, (1951-64). Marr drops a few top political names (Macmillan, Home), rakes some sexual muck (Profumo, Vassall) and celebrates miscellaneous celebrities of the time (Ernest Marples, the Beatles, Sir Bernard Docker). Domestically, manufacturing industry and shipbuilding were in decline and “the growth of car mania” was under way. Internationally, Suez was a disaster, and British Empire was reducing to Commonwealth of nations.

 

Part Three takes us on to the years 1964-79. Andy calls this part “Harold, Ted and Jim”, meaning Heath’s Conservative government was sandwiched between the Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan. Economics is one theme: the balance of payments crises, the pre-Thatcher rise of the free market, the overflowing rubbish winter of discontent (1979). Internationally, Rhodesia broke away from British rule, and the “troubles” in Ireland got worse. But Marr seems most enthused by cultural issues: legalising homosexuality, reducing censorship, the growth of the pop music and celebrity industries.

The author calls Part Four “The British Revolution” (1979-90). He means Thatcherism. It “heralded an age of unparalleled consumption, credit, show-off wealth, quick bucks and sexual libertinism.” Marr believes that Thatcher was “extremely lucky. Had Labour not been disembowelling itself and had a corrupt, desperate dictatorship in South America not taken a materialistic gamble with some island sheep-farmers, her government would probably have been destroyed after a single term.” Maybe – probably not. It’s idle speculation. More solid is Marr’s account of why Labour lost power after and took 18 years to regain it: briefly, failure to deliver on promises.

Marr lingers for six crocodile-tear splashed pages over Thatcher’s political death. The poll tax was a disaster for her. “One by one the inner core of true Thatcherism fell back.” She eventually resigned, but not before fixing John Major as her successor.

Part Five, oddly called “Nippy Metro People”, brings us up to date. First there are seven Major years and then a Blair decade. The blurb for the book talks of “the victory of shopping over politics… a culture of consumerism, celebrity and self-gratification.” Marr reviews recent economic and political events: the pound not going in with the euro, the modernisers of Labour who moved it away from the “unelectable” left. But again he gives prominence to cultural matters: the Diana cult, New Age spiritualism, celebrity glossy magazines, the costly Dome.

On the last page Marr shows his inegalitarian hand on leadership. “[We] need those optimistic politicians, the next leaders, the ones whom we’ll laugh at and abuse. And we need them more than ever now.” Speak for yourself, Andy – only sheep need shepherds!

Stan Parker

Northern Ireland: Back to power-sharing (2007)

From the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

What thirty years of death and destruction in Northern Ireland brought?

It was a great day at Stormont. The great and the good from many countries were there including the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. Centre stage, of course, were Ian Paisley, yesterday’s ‘Never-Never’ man, now grinning like death in the apocalypse, and Martin McGuinness, yesterday’s IRA commander, expensively tailored and replete with effusive grin.

The event was generally acknowledged to be the formal end of Northern Ireland’s infamous thirty years of internecine warfare in which nearly 4,000 people were killed and some 60/70,000 injured.

Doubtless the fare was rich and the guests ate heartily. Paisley, Adams and their followers especially may have baulked somewhat at the political menu and the public exhibition of having to eat their words – admittedly, generously marinated in personal emoluments well beyond their past dreams of fulfilment. They could all be well satisfied with the price they got for their bloodthirsty ‘principles’.

Among the less great, the voting fodder who were afforded the democratic privilege of watching the circus on television, there was cynicism and utter disbelief but undoubtedly the overwhelming majority of the people of the province looked on the spectacle with differing measures of relief. If this collection of provocateurs and proxy killers was to be endured for peace – or what passes for peace in capitalist society – they would put up with it. The more thoughtful would have scratched comfort from the realisation that its not very different elsewhere.

Who better to end conflict than those who had created it? It was the First Minister in this new legislature, Ian Paisley, then a clergyman in a church of his own invention and busily engaged translating biblical inanities into mantras of political hatred, who was the principal architect of conflict for the last forty-five years.

If he had reason to hate the traditional IRA it might have been because they had publicly renounced armed struggle in 1962, thus threatening the political fabric of an Orange hegemony which was based on the threat of the IRA. Paisley’s religion and its associated politics were nourished by hatred of catholic nationalism and official Unionism’s updated response to the new political climate harboured the promise of a peace that would leave Paisleyism – the brand of bigotry that bore his name – redundant.

Ironically, Paisley’s anger at the threat of peace was shared by those republicans who abandoned the new pragmatic IRA; effectively, those on the catholic republican side who mirrored the hate politics of Paisley and his cohorts.

First killings

When the first shots and explosions in the Northern Ireland conflict occurred the Provisional IRA did not exist. On the 27 May 1966 a three-man gang of protestant paramilitaries went into the catholic Falls Road area with the intention of assassinating a well-known republican. They missed their target but they availed of the opportunity to shoot and kill a drunken catholic called John Scullion.

The circumstances of the second killing demonstrates that, despite Paisley’s bigoted ranting, inter-denomination movement in the Belfast ghetto districts had not yet reached crisis point. At 2 a.m. on Sunday 26 June 1966 four young catholics felt safe enough to go for an after-hours drink in a hard-line protestant area when they were attacked by loyalist killers; three were shot, one fatally. Later the police arrested and charged three members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).

Thereafter politico-religious zealots, some directly associated with Paisley, carried out explosions at four reservoirs serving Belfast and a member of Paisley’s religious sect was killed by his own bomb while attempting to blow up an electricity generating station in Ballyshannon, in the Republic of Ireland. Paisley’s close associate and fellow director of the Puritan Printing Company – who, incidentally, stood as a Protestant Action candidate against the World Socialist Party in the late 50s – was convicted on explosives charges.

By now the touch-paper of violence had been well and truly lit. The Unionist Prime Minister at the time, the condescending Captain Terence O’Neill, and several subsequent Unionist Prime Ministers tried to take the heat out of the situation with puny reforms limited by the spectre of a bellowing Paisley demanding their political heads for ‘selling out the protestant people’ but the mass torching of homes had become a grim nightly diversion of the lumpen proletariat on both ‘sides’ . The sectarian police force was overwhelmed and the British Labour government, that had allowed the pot to boil over the years, sent in the army.

Another terror element

This was the period of the so-called Cold War and in the higher echelons of the British army there were those who adhered to the ‘Eastern School’ of military strategists. Their thesis was based on the notion that the balance of terror represented by nuclear warfare made conflict between the two major power blocs improbable. Instead, ‘the enemy’ would make war by proxy, exploiting areas of local conflict and potential conflict.

The main protagonist of this doctrine was Brigadier Frank Kitson, then a senior officer serving with the British forces in Northern Ireland and responsible for key elements of army strategy. Kitson had served in Aden where the practice of army sponsored gang-and-counter-gang operations had been operated unsuccessfully against the two opposing nationalist forces fighting the British there. The evidence of collusion in sectarian killings levelled against the army over the years in Northern Ireland are consistent with the working of such a policy.

The entry of the British army brought another element of terror into the Northern Ireland conflict. Not only was the army bereft of any ultimate political objective, it was heavily influenced by some officers who perceived a local conflict in absurdly wider terms, and, despite the evidence of then current happenings, its intelligence base was that of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), a notoriously anti-nationalist paramilitary police force.

The IRA (later called the Official IRA), wanted no part in a sectarian war and to its credit initially refused to release weapons to its Belfast and Derry members to use against protestant workers who were loyalists. In the wings a small group of republicans were endeavouring to create a movement that would offer armed resistance to loyalists. Their efforts were sustained by the bigoted posturing and naked aggression of Paisley, the partiality of the RUC, and the crass stupidity of the military strategists.

In July 1970 the army put a ring of steel around part of a nationalist area in west Belfast, declared a curfew, brutally confined people to their homes and killed four civilians. The curfew lasted over the week-end during which houses were systematically searched . On the Monday the media showed the destruction the troops had wrought. That destruction could be said to be the birth pangs of the Provisional IRA; the republican sectarians now had an army and a surfeit of recruits.

It would be naive to believe that the reckless move on the part of the army – a move which could only give emotional muscle to those promoting a return to militant republicanism – was an act of military stupidity, but in the background there were events which explain why the London government, which, as always, were the puppet masters of the generals, permitted the move.

The previous month had seen the return of the Tories – the Conservative and Unionist Party – to power in Britain. This gave the Ulster Unionists – the Tories’ political cousins – a more sympathetic ear at Westminster and in Northern Ireland the Ulster Unionist Prime Minister, James Chichester Clarke, was in serious trouble and inevitably Ian Paisley was prominent among those creating that trouble.

Go, so I can take your place

Paisley had led a strident crusade against Clarke’s predecessor, Terence O’Neill, because O’Neill had shown a willingness to remove some of the notoriously undemocratic practices used to consolidate Unionist political hegemony; practices which affected the working class in general but which catholic nationalist leaders nourished as purely anti-catholic grievances.

Paisley had raised the slogan ‘O’Neill Must Go!’ and it found sufficient response among the backwoodsmen of the Unionist Party to force O’Neill’s resignation. Now his slogan was ‘Clarke Must Go!’ The legend for Clarke’s proposed exit was because the writ of the sectarian Unionist Party did not run in some nationalist areas of Belfast and Derry. Again, Paisley’s activities were causing tremors within the Unionist Party whose Standing Committee was summoned to debate Clarke’s fate. Five days before that debate was scheduled to take place the army carried out its ruthless attack temporarily removing the sting from the Paisley threat.

Others who took on the Prime Ministerial role and later the role of First Minister had to ‘Go! before the present incumbent – Paisley – got the job.

By now, of course, the Provisional IRA’s murder campaign was in full swing endorsed by the notion that they were fighting a war to drive out the Brits but inexorably they were drawn into tit-for-tat sectarian killing. Additionally, they murdered catholics and protestants in any way tenuously associated with the British administration – numerous in an economy where public money underwrote some 60 percent of all jobs. Especially ruthless and cowardly, the Provisionals forced non-combatants to fight their dirty war by forcing them by threat to themselves or their families to deliver bombs to determined targets.

The IRA and the protestant paramilitary gangs as well as the duplicitous ‘security’ forces were killing people with military ordinance. Paisley brought death and disorder by threats and phantom battalions of red-bereted ‘defenders’ and midnight squadrons of men waving their government-issued firearms certificates.

Now Paisley’s DUP and the IRA’s Sinn Fein are together in government. Sane people can only hope that the electorate put them there because it was the despicable price that had to be paid for peace – for the game was always about power – even in Mother Erin’s British-subsidised Fourth Green Field.

Ironically, Paisley’s antics over the last 40 years have done more to emaciate Unionism’s power base than the IRA; conversely, Sinn Fein is now an integral part of the political structures its murder campaign was supposed to destroy.

It is reasonable to ask what the working class got in return for its suffering, for the victims – the killed and the killers, the mentally and physically maimed, the prisoners – were, as always, overwhelmingly of the working class. The media clarions our reward; we are going to get peace, we are told. The agencies that were making war have gone into partnership – showing once again that peace and war emanate from the same source.

Meanwhile real power will not reside in Stormont, or London, or Dublin. It will reside in the cheque books of the billionaires and the multinational consortiums whose profit considerations will decide the priorities. Ultimately it is their writ that determines how we live in latter-day capitalism – even, indeed, if we live.

Richard Montague

Cooking the Books: Oliver in Blunderland (2007)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a recent speech Tory MP and would-be intellectual Oliver Letwin – his last brilliant idea was the poll tax – ventured to discuss Marx and Marxism. After mocking Gordon Brown for mouthing sounds such as “post neo-classical endogamous growth theory” he himself offered an alternative set of sounds in “shift the locus of debate from an economo-centric paradigm to a socio-centric paradigm”, and continued:

“It all goes back to Marx. Before Marx, politics was multi-dimensional – constitutional, social, environmental as well as economic. But Marx changed all that. The real triumph of Marxism consisted in the way that it defined the preoccupations not only of its supporters but also of its opponents. After Marx, socialists defended socialism and free marketeers defended capitalism. For both sides, the centrepiece of the debate was the system of economic management” (Daily Telegraph, 10 May).

Marx did argue that the key issue in politics ought to be the ownership and control of the means of wealth-production, but unfortunately the actual debate in the 20th century was not between socialism (common ownership) and capitalism (sectional ownership). It was merely over the best way to manage capitalism: through state ownership and control or by leaving things to the free play of competing, profit-seeking private enterprises.

This debate, says Letwin, is now over:

“Since Thatcher, and despite recent recurrences of something like full-blooded socialism in some parts of Latin America, the capitalist/socialist debate has in general ceased to dominate modern politics. From Beijing to Brussels, the free market has won the battle of economic ideas”.

In other words, except for Chavez we’re all pro-capitalists now. We have, claims Letwin, “entered a post-Marxist era”.

He is assuming that socialism and government ownership are the same thing and that Marx favoured government ownership, and concluded that anyone favouring government ownership was a Marxist. Both premises and the conclusion are wrong.

That government ownership is socialism is a popular misconception and, to be honest, is how the word “socialism” has come to be used. But it has never been accepted by Marxian socialists, who have always drawn a distinction between state capitalism (nationalisation by a capitalist government) and socialism.

Nationalisation has been carried out by all sorts of governments, both in Britain and in other countries. The Post Office became a government monopoly in Britain in 1680. A Tory government nationalised the telegraph system while successive Liberal and Tory government nationalised the telephone network. An Act of 1844, piloted through by Gladstone, provided for the nationalisation of the railways if need be. In France cigarette production was a government monopoly and in Prussia the railways were government-owned. So, on Letwin’s logic, Napoleon, Gladstone and Bismarck must have been Marxists.

Marx was always clear that socialism as such had nothing to do with government ownership of capitalist industry. It was a new social system where the means of production would belong to the whole community – not the state, which as an instrument of minority class rule, would disappear – and where there would be production to satisfy people’s needs not for sale and profit, and so where there’d be no money, no banks, nor working for wages.

Socialism in this sense or capitalism should have been the burning issue of the 20th century but, as stated, unfortunately it wasn’t. Far from entering “a post-Marxist era” we are still in a “pre-Marxist era” where politics has yet to be what Marx wanted: a political struggle by the class of wage and salary workers to win control of political power with a view to establishing the common ownership of the means of production by the whole people.

50 Years Ago: Socialists and the Press (2007)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live in what is claimed to be a “free country,” where there is “free expression of opinion,” but this must not be taken literally. It does not mean that anyone can say or write just what he likes. The Official Secrets Act and the libel laws cut off considerable areas of expression, into which you trespass at your peril. Much greater restriction arises because we live in a money world, in which capacity to make views known depends largely on what you can afford to pay. If your resources run into hundreds of thousands or millions pounds, you can publish the Daily Worker, Daily Express, etc.: if not you may have to be content with a monthly journal. But what about the possibility of the “free” expression of varied points of view in the columns of those and other journals with the big circulations? This again is a very narrowly circumscribed possibility when it is a question of securing publicity for a minority and not popular point of view, such as that of the S.P.G.B. When daily newspapers misreport matters of concern to us, or when they refuse to publish our letters or advertisements, there is no remedy—and this notwithstanding the existence of the Press Council, which is supposed to keep an eye on the conduct of the Press.

(From front page article by ‘H’, Socialist Standard, July 1957)

Labour Party woes (2023)

Uxbridge by-election

From the SPGB Discussion Forum

"I can’t see how Labour can be content with the results of the 3 by-elections.

They won in that rural seat in Yorkshire but can expect to lose it at the general election when Tory abstainers return to the fold. They should have won Uxbridge in west London but didn’t. They are pleading that there was a local issue there that sunk them (extension to the area of a charge for using old cars and vans) but, besides being a bread and butter issue, this concerns all the outer London boroughs.

It is clear too that, in seeking to please the international speculators who lend governments money, they are alienating the more radical-minded of their voters sone of whom are deserting to the Greens. In fact, they lost by much less votes in Uxbridge than the Greens got. Starmer may be regretting his outburst about hating tree-huggers.

They weren’t trying in the West Country but what happened to their vote there is also relevant. An “independent socialist” picked up 635 votes compared to their candidate’s 1009. They lost winning the London by-election by less than 635. In other words, Left-of-Labour candidates in other constituencies in a general election could prevent them winning some marginal seats and might even result in a hung Parliament with the LibDems and the Scots Nats holding the balance of power.

Serve them right, some might be inclined to think. That’ll teach them to behave like a government in waiting whereas they might just be a minority government in waiting. On the other hand, that would provide them with the same alibi they used to try to get out of the failure of the 1924 and 1929 Labour governments that “we were in office, not in power”.

Actually, of course, all governments are just in office as no government has the power to overcome the economics laws of capitalism and make the system serve the interest of the majority."

The Review Column: Co-op in Trouble (1967)

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

Co-op in Trouble

The latest published results of the Co-operative Wholesale Society confirmed something which everyone knew. The Co-op is well down the slippery slope.

Net trading profits are down from over £3 million in 1965 to £792,000 last year; retail societies’ share of the national retail trade has fallen from 11.9 per cent (1957) to 8.8 per cent (1967). The Sunday Citizen has died, the final collapse coming when the CWS management cut its advertising and public relations spending, which the Citizen relied on, by £800,000.

The Co-op has been left behind in the great post war retail boom. While firms like Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer’s were making rich with their skilfully designed stores, their thoughtful employment policy and their keen prices, the Co-op has seemed to exist with a death wish. Some of its cakes and biscuits, for example, taste as if they came out of a cement mixer and some of its fashions look as if they were designed by a man from the government surplus store.

The CWS is now facing the fact that it can either die, or at best exist feebly—or it can compete. It has chosen the latter. Philip Thomas has been brought in from profit conscious Associated British Foods as chief executive. He has appointed several new top managers, among them another man from ABF and one from Boots. And the axes are starting to swing.

At this year’s CWS Annual Meeting. Thomas promised “hurtful and unpopular decisions . . . substantial economies”. Already some staff privileges have been withdrawn and mergers and closures of factories, with consequent sackings, are in the offing.

In all this, only a passing reference has been made to the fact that the Co-op was once supposed to be different— an example of Socialism, no less, within capitalism. The ghost of this ludicrous idea still walks, and Thomas is out to exorcise it. “Commercial realism . . . the inevitability of economic pressure”: these are the words he is incanting as he tries to save Ihe Co-op’s commnercial soul.

Middle East

To anyone who does not understand the word, it is Socialism which has been at war in the Middle East. President Nasser claims to be a Socialist, and so do many of his allies. There is even something, which they do not define, which they call Arab Socialism. Israel once said that Socialism was being built there, that the kibbutzim were a new way of life free from the commercialism of capitalist society, and that within its borders men would find new freedom and dignity.

But in the recent flare-up both countries showed—if this was necessary—their true nature. Egypt intensified her arguments about the legality of Israel’s frontiers, over the conquest of the port of Eilat and over the extent of Egyptian control over the Straits of Tiran.

Disputes over territorial boundaries and strategic positions, carried on within the complexities of international law—and often in the end by armed force are a familial part of capitalism. They have nothing to do with Socialism, which will be a society without national boundaries and international economic rivalry.

Israel is now the most powerful military nation in the Middle East. Conscription there is comprehensive, with even women battle-trained, and the whole thing is backed up by the sort of hysterical nationalism which demanded the appointment of strong man Moshe Dayan as Minister of Defence.

This intensive militarism had its effect against the ill-trained Egyptian army. These are just some of the descriptions used in just one edition of the Times last month, reporting on the Israeli advance: “masterpiece of mechanized war . . . quick thrusts . . . ruthless air attack”.

Militarism and patriotic hysteria are among the most unpleasant of capitalism’s by-products. They are two of the many antisocial attitudes, so common today, which will not exist under Socialism. That they are so powerful in Israel reveals, if nothing else does, the nature of society there.

Time to be Free (1967)

From the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

An observer from outer space could be forgiven for thinking that human beings enjoyed work more than any other activity, since the vast majority of them spend the best part of their waking lives at it. However, if he hovered in his space ship long enough to hear the bells and whistles and sirens wail round the world as knocking-off time swept round with the evening shadows, he would be able to infer from our behaviour that we regarded work as unpleasant, if not positively hateful. He would see people streaming out of factory gates and office doors with the terrible urgency of creatures suddenly set free.

From that height, however, he would find it utterly impossible to understand why they should return next morning and allow the gates to be shut behind them again. Even if he could land and talk to some of them he would be likely to find that they did not understand either. If there were a Socialist in the group he would find great difficulty in explaining to the visitor that the civilised world was owned—not by these hundreds of millions who laboured all day to produce and distribute everything that came out of the factories and fields and mines and seas—but by a small elite who hardly ever came near them. It would take some time to explain what ‘owned’ meant. It would take far longer to explain why people allowed it to go on for even a minute longer. In fact, when the visitor had been told that people actually supported the system that kept them enslaved, that destroyed much of the wealth they laboured to produce, and that sent them out to kill one another in millions from time to time, he would probably let in the clutch and streak off home to Alpha Centaurus or wherever he came from.

The trouble is that people hardly ever get this space traveller’s view of things. On the whole, they tend not to question the state of society into which they were born. And they tend to accept their place in it. They have either forgotten or have never been told that it is only in the last four or five thousand of their million years on the planet that they have been steadily dispossessed of the world they live in by a few of their own kind. They have come to accept the idea that work is not something that they do because it is a satisfying activity, or even because they see the need to do it, but simply because of the wage without which they could not live. And so they shrug their shoulders or grit their teeth and sell the best part of their days for the best part of their lives to their employers. During all this time they apply themselves to tasks which are exhausting, boring, frustrating, humiliating, exasperating, degrading, dirty or dangerous, and sometimes a mixture of them all. Very often the jobs that they do are as near pointless as makes no difference. Sometimes they are actively harmful or destructive. And always the satisfaction that there might have been in a job is soured because it is done under the threat of the sack, because neither the tools with which they work nor the product when they have made it belongs to them, and because the demands of profit insist that the job must always be done at a speed or for a price that makes quality and satisfaction impossible.

If you ask people why they do it, what keeps them at it, year in and year out, they will tell you—after they have made the accepted declarations of love and duty towards their family—that it is all for the sake of the few hours a day that are free from work. This is their ‘leisure’, meaning the time that they are allowed, or that is lawfully theirs. The word has no meaning except in a society based on compulsory labour. Leisure is the time in which people are allowed to live for themselves. They often say that they only really begin to live when they leave work. This is why they watch the clock. This is why everybody calls the late afternoon ‘the rush hour’. They rush for the bus stop or the car park or the station in order to start a jostled journey home that is almost as wearying as the day’s work itself.

It is now about nine hours since they left the house with sleep in their eyes and an undigested mixture of tea and cornflakes in their insides. They get home again feeling grubby and hungry and irritable. Leisure starts now! They are free to embark upon the riotous pursuit of pleasure. It is the moment they have been waiting for all day. And it is the moment when the dreary daily truth reasserts itself. They flop into a chair. Really, they need a wash and a change of clothes and light nourishing meal, but for the time being all they can manage is to sip yet another cup of refreshing tea and gaze vacantly at the tail-end of the children’s programme on the television.

It is at this point, usually, that the commercials intervene. A lean and bronzed young man races laughing down a sunbaked beach, empty except for the slim vivacious girl who flees before him, also laughing. ‘Cut’ to the foam-flecked water’s edge as he gains upon her. She reaches the sanctuary of the boat only to have him climb triumphantly in above her and take lovingly in his thumb and forefinger a piece of her creamy chocolate bar. Quite apart from its obvious (and perverted) intention, this advertisement, like many others, demonstrates the fact that energy and zest are essential for the active enjoyment of leisure. But these are just what the worker has sold in order to get his daily bread. There is little or nothing left over for leisure. The first call upon his free time is the re-creation of this energy for tomorrow’s work.

The second is the business of running a home and bringing up children who will form the next generation of workers. If he has a quick wash and a meal there will just be time to play with the kids for half an hour before they have to be got to bed. And then there will be jobs waiting: in the winter a couple of hours decorating; in the summer the garden or the car. Always there will be things that need mending or fitting, forms that need filling and bills that need sorting. By now it will be nearly ten o’clock, and many of the jobs will have been put off until the weekend, but by pushing these to the back of his mind and neglecting to tidy his tools away there is just time to put on his coat and slip down to the local for a couple of pints of wild libidinous pleasure before closing time.

What is generally not realised is that workers are almost perpetually tired. Many of them, particularly the younger ones, cut down on their sleeping time so that they can spend a couple more hours at a dance or a night club, and this has a cumulative effect upon both physical and mental health. What makes it possible is that the pattern of tiredness is undergoing a radical change. Year by year, with the introduction of more machinery, fewer and fewer jobs require a large output of physical energy, but more and more produce mental and emotional exhaustion because of the tension and pressure and pace involved. The result is that most workers arrive home feeling tired but edgy, played out but unsatisfied by their work. They have the vague impulse to go somewhere or do something, but fewer and fewer of them are able to do anything positive about it. This is why many of the young ones must have a motor bike or scooter just to ride round upon—to ‘go’—nowhere in particular. This is why all sorts of useless activities have been invented so that workers can actually do something in their spare time which does not remotely resemble work. What they need most of all is mental recreation if they are to achieve a state of mind which will enable them to face the prospect of going to work again the next day.

With leisure time severely restricted, and the frustrations of capitalism always on the increase, excess has become the order of the day with a large section of people. The intensity of work tends to be matched by the intensity of ‘pleasure’, and often frenzied effort to impart some quality and value to life to make up for the dehumanisation of the daily round. The last thing that most workers want to do is think—about what is going on in the modern world—and the leisure industry is geared up specifically to prevent thinking. Leisure is organised on such a scale and in such detail that workers have no need to plan their holiday activities or their evenings out. It is all done for them. All they have to do is accept it. They are prevented from being alone or quiet for a moment. It is all ‘go’, desperate activity, preferably useless and expensive, often destructive or cruel.

Over and over again, the relaxation of moral strictures and the provision of greater and greater leisure facilities are welcomed as increased freedom. And yet they do not give the contentment that freedom gives. Indeed, the feelings of boredom and frustration get worse. Because freedom has not been increased. It has been curtailed. Many of the activities, such as sports, in which workers used to engage for recreation have been taken over by professionals. One by one, their pastimes, such as skittles or cards, are dwarfed and superseded by glossy commercial versions. Television has entered their homes and stifled their conversation, showing them characters and personalities more charming and interesting than their families or friends. Regardless of programme quality, they need to have the set switched on ‘for company’. The more that capital invades their leisure time, the less they have left to live for themselves, and the more control is extended over what was once their private life. The fact that most workers welcome the change does not invalidate what is happening, it simply makes the process more degrading. Through television, the standard leisure diet for most people most of the time, they can indulge in vicarious action and luxury and travel and violence and love and success, without really having any of these things. They can escape from the real world of work and worries and chores—without really escaping. And all the time the programmes relentlessly advertise capitalism’s most important modern product—the idea that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

If the space traveller watched us for long enough he would see that it is not in our work that we give most convincing proof of our status as wage-slaves, but in our ‘free’ time. We run out from work like animals released from a treadmill, only to perform unquestioningly upon the toys in the cage. We are slaves because we have the slave mentality. The bondage is in our minds.

S. Stafford

Blogger's Note:

'S. Stafford' was the sometime pen-name of the late Ron Cook.

Pomp and its Circumstance (1967)

From the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

If political journalists, who are hard men but who like the rest of us have to earn a living, ever get down on their knees to offer up a prayer of thanks, it must be for George Brown. Perhaps Brown is what the insurance companies call accident prone; at all events, he seems incapable of staying out of trouble, and of the headlines. If he is not waggling on television under some sort of Outer Influence, George is threatening to resign. If he is not cuddling Princess Margaret he is turning up in a dinner jacket at a reception for some visiting dignitary, when the invitation was quite clear that everyone should wear white tie, tails and decorations.

Some people, most of them likely never to wear tails, get very annoyed about this flouting of conventions. Others give three cheers for George, for his lovable sincerity and constant pride in his humble origins. Amid the uproar from both sides, the essential facts go unnoticed.

Take, for a start, Brown’s dinner jacket at the reception for King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. If he had really wanted to strike a blow against the flummery of State occasions, if he really wanted to remind those present that the affairs they had been discussing would affect the lives of millions of people, he could have done better than a dinner jacket which, although it is one step down from tails, is more than one step up from a lounge suit. He might have come along in a sports jacket and flannels, like Harold Wilson on his first Sunday as Prime Minister. Or, to really make the point, what was wrong with a boiler suit and cloth cap, drinking out of the saucer and wiping his mouth on his sleeve?

What Brown overlooked was that this particular battle was fought and lost a long time ago. The Labour government which came into office in 1924 had many problems waiting for it, but apparently none was so pressing or so onerous as the question of what to wear when they were at Court, or of how to behave when they mixed with their social betters, or of how to make sure of an invitation to the next Royal Garden Party.

When that government took office there were something like one and a quarter million people registered as unemployed, people who could barely afford a dinner, let alone a fancy suit to eat it in. The world abroad was in its customary troublous state, with disputes in Ireland and the Middle East. But there were high hopes of what Ramsay MacDonald and his men would do, of how they would transform society. Jerusalem may not actually have been built yet, but the Labour M.P.s were going to Westminster to lay the foundation stones.

The first thing MacDonald had to do was to go along to meet the King, for the first time in his life, and to show him the man the workers had given him as Prime Minister. Perhaps some of Labour’s more naive supporters thought MacDonald would take advantage of this historic opportunity to tell the King that the days of the ruling class were numbered. In fact what happened was that the King did the telling; he let MacDonald know how concerned he was that nothing should be done to upset the routines and the ceremonies of the Court and MacDonald, who had come to all this from a precarious childhood with an unmarried mother in a poverty-stricken Scottish fishing village, who had needed police protection from the crowds who disagreed with his opposition to the 1914/18 war, who was supposed to be the man to build the new society, assured the King that nothing would so be done.

Labour’s first Premier was as good as his word. The next day he appeared in the full glory of Court dress with knee breeches, gold braid and a sword. Even the old ladies of Kensington, once so fearful of what would happen to them when Labour nationalised women, had to concede that he was a magnificent figure, especially compared to the gnome-like Stanley Baldwin.

Of course MacDonald’s men had to follow suit and not a few of them did so with enthusiasm. In his book Decline And Fall Of the Labour Party John Scanlon recalls having lunch with a Labour Under Minister whose only topic of conversation was the cost of full Court dress, and whether he could hope to be in office long enough to get his moneys-worth. Labour Ministers discovered that the class struggle could be carried on only as long as they were dressed in a tail coat; they presented their daughters at Court, they went to Royal Garden Parties and, so that their wives would not embarrass them on such occasions, they sent them to the Webb’s Half Circle Club, where they learned to disguise the fact that they came from mining villages and industrial slums.

All this was a long time ago. No Minister is now required to fool around with a sword when he goes to Buckingham Palace to let the Queen know how capitalism is running, and it is a long time since anyone was sent to the House of Lords with anything more enduring than a Life Peerage. The ritual of capitalist government has changed, and continues to change, but in one form or another it lives on, under Tory or Labour. Indeed, there is evidence that the Labour Party are as enthusiastic about it as the Conservatives.

A few months back, for example, the Wolverhampton Labour Party caused a minor storm by drinking a toast to Harold Wilson and the Labour government when they should have been toasting the Queen. Tory M.P.s like Quintin Hogg and Gerald Nabarro, who can never be accused of having any doubts about which side of the barricades they serve on, denounced this as “disloyal, repulsive, scurrilous.”

Now this might have been a chance for the Labour Party to show a little revolutionary glow, if not exactly the fire with which they once said they were consumed. They might even have argued with Hogg and Nabarro. Instead, in effect they agreed with them:

“Harold Wilson is a good Prime Minister. He is loyal to the Queen; so are we.” (Cllr. Frank Clapham, vice chairman Wolverhampton Labour Party.)

“… had anyone suggested I should have toasted the Queen at that point I would gladly have done so. I am not in any way disloyal. In fact, I sympathise with some of the tasks which Royalty has to undertake.” (Terence Duffy, the man who proposed the toast.)

“The loyalty to this country and its Sovereign of members of the Labour Party is not in question.” (Letter from Ten Downing Street, authorised by Harold Wilson.)

It is clear that Labour has not travelled far, in any direction, since MacDonald in his knee breeches thrilled them all. It is worth asking what is meant, when they declare their loyalty to this country and its Sovereign.

This country is one of many capitalist states in the world, which means that it is one where socially there are two types of people. One type consists of those who never have anyone getting up to swear loyalty to them, who always look rather comical when any of them dares to put on a tail coat and who can be easily recognised because they have to work for a living. They are the working class, who serve and suffer under capitalism but who continually vote for the system to carry on.

What sort of a living these people get can be gauged, if not from our own experience as workers, from the mass of statistics about us. Last April, for example, the Inland Revenue published a survey of personal incomes by regions for 1964/5. Something like 59 per cent of the cases had an income below £999 a year. On the other hand, there were 369 people—and anyone with the inclination can work out what percentage of the cases they were—with an income between £50,000 and £75,000, and 121 with an income between £75,000 and £100,000.

It is clear that an income of £100,000 a year does not come entirely, if at all, from working for it. Here, then, we have the other type of person in capitalist society, who can dress up, who often receives the loyalty and servitude of the workers and who also supports caoutakist parties, for the simple reason that they enable him to cream off the benefits and the privileges of the system

It is the job of governments to protect the privileges and interests of this class. In this country, these interests are often expressed in a mass of ritual and flummery. Parlisment, which makes the laws by which property society is organised, eannot start its business until a lot of over mature men have staged a procession dressed in funny clothes. The Courts where the laws of capitalism are interpreted and applied are run by people in impractical gowns and ludicrous, uncomfortable wigs. Every so often, the royal and aristocratic figureheads of the capitalist class put on heavy and expensive robes and show themselves, dripping with jewels, to the loyal and underprivileged workers lining the streets to gawk at a Coronation or a State visit or a Royal premiere.

This dressing up, this ritual, may annoy some people even some politicians—but behind it all capitalism works with its own deadly firmness of purpose. Frail bodied judges in mediaeval wigs hand out long sentences to tough criminals lor offences against property. State visitors come in their finery to play their part in capitalism’s perilous tangle of international rivalries. To abolish the rituals, to make the Head of State do his job in an off-the-peg suit, would be worse than an empty gesture. For in a society of privilege, we might as well have an occasional admission that it exists, even if workers are so docile that, with the gorgeous evidence of it paraded before their very eyes, they can only stand and cheer.

This is the very heart of the matter. Not a few firebrands have confused the privileges of capitalism with their ceremonial expression. Not a few have thought that to abolish royalty would be an attack on the system of inequalities. They ignore the fact that the Royal Family is only the apex of a pyramid and that the whole thing has its foundations in political ignorance and apathy.

And who are among the greatest contributors to this ignorance and apathy, if not the Labour Party, who stand for privilege when they say they stand for equality? Who have the most to answer for, if not the Labour leaders whose lifetime of political activity might have taught them the futility of mere gestures while capitalism’s business of exploitation and oppression goes on unchecked? George Brown has had many accidents in his time but one he has always managed to avoid, and that is blowing the gaff on his own party.

Ivan

Work and Employment (1967)

From the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fortunate indeed is the man who gains his livelihood by performing a task that he enjoys. Millions, born of working class parents, are condemned to earn their living by doing jobs that, at best, they can tolerate or, at worst, they hate.

Workers from birth, by teaching and training, are blinkered from sight of an alternative to a life of work for wages. High wages and security of employment become their life’s target. Boyhood dreams of a life devoted to some sensational, romantic or interesting occupation turn out to be—just boyhood dreams.

There is a tendency to confuse work with employment. The terms are used haphazardly, ‘Work’ being used when ‘Employment’ is meant, and vice versa. Work is the effort used to overcome a resistance, it is the expenditure of physical and mental energey. Employment is work performed in someone else’s service. All employment is work but all work is not employment. Work, in itself, can be enjoyable, employment seldom is. That is why millions go reluctantly to their employment and hasten away from it to seek pleasure in some form of work.

After five days in an office or factory, on a lorry or down a mine, workers will devote their week-end leisure to gardening, driving a car, some do-it-yourself occupation or a strenuous sport.

Why, then, does work, when it is employment, become distasteful? How does employment contaminate work and make it unpalatable?

The elements which make work enjoyable are, variety, the exercise of the worker’s initiative and intelligence, the satisfaction of creating something, and pride in the product. Remove one of these elements and the pleasure diminishes. Remove them all and it vanishes, the work becomes tedious.

A few centuries of capitalism have succeeded in eliminating those elements from the work men do for their livelihood by making employees of practically all workers.

Capitalism is a system where wealth is produced essentially for a market with a view to profit. The market is competitive and the competition exerts a continuous downward pressure on the cost of production, resulting in the introduction of ever more and more labour saving devices and more intense methods of production. Employees are coerced to produce more commodities in quicker time for the minimum possible total wage cost. Labour saving machinery ousts the craftsman. The division and sub-division of labour increases productivity but creates an army of semi and un-skilled workers doing repetitive jobs. The worker becomes proficient, not by the exercise of his initiative and intelligence, but by the continual repetition of a task.

Professor Charles Babbage, a nineteenth century mathematician, who devised a mechanical computing machine and who was a forthright apologist of capitalism, stated,

“. .. the most important principle on which the economy of a manufacture depends, is the division of labour amongst the persons who perform the work. 

… If, however, instead of learning all the different processes his (the worker’s) attention be confined to one operation, a very small portion of his time will be consumed unprofitably at the commencement, and the whole of the rest of it will be beneficial to his master.”

Sixty years later Henry Ford in his, My Life and Work, was able to show the application of the idea.

“With one workman doing a job he could turn out from thirty-five to forty pieces in a nine hour day, or about twenty minutes to an assembly. What he did alone was then spread into twenty-nine operations. That cut down assembly time to thirteen minutes, ten seconds. Then we raised the height of the line eight inches—this was in 1914—and cut the time to seven minutes. 

… we began to departmentalise so that each department would do only one thing … I did not know that such minute divisions would be possible; but as our production grew and departments multiplied we actually changed from making automobiles to making parts.”

The development of this process has varied in different trades and industries. For generations clerical workers considered themselves immune from its effects, but the typewriter, the adding machine, the electric Hollerith calculator, and the electronic computer have brought home to them with a vengeance the realisation that capitalism works on them in the same way that it works on their manual labouring colleagues.

Variety of task is almost extinct. Demands on most workers’ initiative and intelligence are low. The final product of his labour is so remote that interest in it has waned almost to vanishing point. During his hours of employment his attention is divided between his task and the clock and his interest is focussed on finishing time and pay day.

This is not a condemnation of machinery. Machines enable men to avoid many laborious tasks. Without machines society would not be able to enjoy many of the comforts and luxuries of modern living. The evil lies not in the machine itself, but in its ownership by an exploiting class who introduce it only when it serves their profit-making ends.

Employers introduce labour saving machinery, not to lighten the labour of their workers, but to cheapen it. The workers have had to fight every step of the way to achieve the shorter working hours which machines have made possible. Every gain by the workers of shorter hours is an incentive to their employers to instal more labour saving devices.

Modern automative machinery does not sub-divide labour processes into smaller units. It takes over batches of consecutive labour units and performs them mechanically with a minimum of human aid.

At the end of last February the British Computer Society held a symposium in London. The talks dealt with computer operations applied to grocery, brewery, tobacco, fashion goods, departmental stores and bakery trades. Automation introduced by the American bakery firm of Sara Lee was discussed and reported in the April issue of the Transport and General Workers’ Union journal, The Record.

This bakery produces fifteen different products which are frozen immediately after baking. On the bakery side the computer monitors raw materials, liquid and dry, including eggs, and weighs and mixes the ingredients.

“The cakes are baked in foil, packed in cartons and conveyed automatically to the warehouse.

Each carton surface has a “bar code” which decides the route that it shall follow. The cartons are tripped off the conveyor and pallet loading is automatically controlled by the computer, each tier is picked up by a suction head crane and stacked on the pallet. The warehouse contains eight of these suction head cranes. A loaded pallet consists of 80 cartons, which is then picked up by one of five stacker cranes and randomly stored in one of the ten racks in the warehouse. Each rack contains 5,310 individual cubicles. The computer memorises information concerning the whereabouts of each pallet load and when goods are being despatched it sends the stacker crane to pick up the appropriate quantities of each product. The computer sorts out the load and sends it to the despatching area where for the first time it makes contact with human beings who check the order and load on to the delivery vehicles. The computer records all products in and out and gives a rundown of stocks every quarter of an hour on tape.”

A reduced number of workers programme the computer and serve as a human check on mechanical accidents; they are adjuncts of the machinery. Their interest in the product is so remote as to be almost non-existent. They see and handle only the cases in which it is packed and the sheets of paper showing production data and marketing statistics.

Everything that gave the craftsman pleasure, satisfaction and pride in production is gone. Employment has made work a routine and often boring task. Physical effort is reduced, mental stress is increased.

The ideas of millions of workers are confined within limits set by the present social system. They conceive of no alternative to a wages system and, as discontent is a nagging sensation, they subdue it and become resigned to a life of employment. They look forward with pleasant anticipation to their daily leisure time relaxation, their week-end rejuvenation and their annual holiday recreation.

A word that has climbed the charts of the English languague is “Escapism”. Originally coined by psycho-analysts to define the attitude of mind of people who seek to avoid unpleasant realities by withdrawing into a world of fantasy, the term has assumed a wider application to include those who seek temporary escape from boring or harrassing life by concentrating on more pleasant activities or subjects for thought.

The workers’ week-ends and holidays are not so much times for rest as periods of “Escapism”, that offer the variety and interest denied them during their hours of employment.

Socialism, by ending the private ownership of the means of wealth production, will end work for wages and the division of society into an employing class and an employed class. Millions now employed in defending private property, calculating profits, seeking markets or in other socially unnecessary tasks, will be released for productive work. Machinery will be used to lighten or eliminate the more obnoxious or laborious tasks. When profit is no longer the motive for production all people will have the opportunity for a more varied experience and will be able to regain an interest in the productive process.

When men are no longer exploited by employers and can go to work with a light step and a smile in pleasant anticipation of an interesting day, leisure time and holidays will assume less importance in their lives.

W. E. Waters

Britain and the Common Market (1967)

From the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

After a lapse of four years Britain has again applied to join the Common Market. Last time it was a Conservative government. This time it is Labour, showing that capitalism imposes similar programmes on its political parties in power. The line-up for and against Britain’s entry draws support from both parties as it did in 1962. In fact Labour rebels have taken a stronger stand on this issue than on any of the other controversial measures of the present government.

On May 2 Harold Wilson declared in a House of Commons statement:

“This is an historic decision which could determine the future of Britain, Europe and the World for decades to come.”

Leading Labour opponent of Britain’s entry, Emmanuel Shinwell, said in the same debate:

“In view of the unqualified approval by three members of the opposition benches, can I assure the Prime Minister that with all the force of which I am capable even by myself, I will give him the most relentless and ruthless opposition.”

In view of the claims of both sides it is worth examining the question in relation to working class interests.

At the end of the nineteenth century world trade and industry was dominated by the states of Western Europe with large empires under their control. The world wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45, which were the outcome of the struggles between these powers for supremacy, resulted in their decline and in the emergence of America and Russia as the leading industrial and military powers. A struggle developed between them with Eastern Europe dominated by Russia and Western Europe by America. They stationed their armed forces in these areas and geared the economies of these territories to their own.

In Western Europe America consolidated its military power through NATO. The economy was revitalised by American government funds through the Marshall Plan with the condition that the countries of Europe must band together and agree on a joint recovery programme. Thus America, in meeting the challenge of Russian state capitalism, was forced to finance the revival of industrial competitors.

Expansion in world trade soon allowed production to exceed pre-war levels and one country after another had its “economic miracle”. European capitalists had a large pool of unemployed displaced workers at their command along with the latest plant and equipment. Britain, on the other hand, survived with much of its industry intact and its order books were filled for years ahead to supply the backlog of demand from its traditional markets. Its workers were in a relatively strong position as a result and were able to enforce demands for pay increases and to maintain working practices which became more and more of a hindrance to efficient production as manufacturing techniques developed.

In spite of early enthusiastic pronouncements by Churchill and Attlee on European unity no practical initiative to this end was taken by Britain. The first move to set up what is now known as the Common Market was the establishment in 1951 of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) by Belgium, France, Holland, West Germany, Italy and Luxembourg. Its aim was to regulate the production and marketing of coal, iron and steel in this area. The ECSC was soon faced with problems in Belgium, with its uncompetitive coal industry. Mines were closed and thousands of miners laid off. Mineowners received compensation from the ECSC; miners got compensation from the dole and industrial retraining for other work. The employer-employee relationship remained as before.

The difficulties facing the ECSC have continued. With increasing iron and steel production and with mergers and streamlining to meet world competition, profit margins have dropped. The coal industry has its troubles with mine closures recently in the Ruhr. In Britain the coal and steel industries face similar problems and membership of the ECSC would only give them access to a market which is already oversupplied—and this would affect the present ECSC members. Whichever of the partners gains from entry the position of the workers, the insecurity of living on a wage or salary, will remain.

In 1957 the Rome Treaty setting up the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) was signed by the same six states. The EEC, or Common Market, aimed at

“… the creation of a customs union with a common external tariff and by the abolition of internal tariff duties and quotas, the establishment of a common agricultural policy, the free movement of persons, services and capital; and a harmonised transport system” (Westminster Bank, The Common Market and the United Kingdom).

British capitalism, with the bulk of its trade located in the Commonwealth and Sterling Area, took little interest in the Common Market. The European Free Trade Association (EFTA) was set up by Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria and Portugal in 1960. Its main aim was the progressive reduction of customs duties on industrial goods. There was no provision for common external tariffs nor a commitment to political unification, which made the idea more acceptable to the British government. By 1961 trading conditions were changing in the Commonwealth and Sterling Area, making it harder for British goods to be sold there. Countries such as America and Japan were taking a growing part of their trade. The Common Market, with the prospect of a home market of 250 million people including Britain and some of its EFTA partners, became an attractive proposition. The first application came at a time when EEC itself was making heavy weather of formulating a common agricultural policy. Britain’s conditions, on agriculture, Commonwealth trade and concern for EFTA, proved too much and negotiations broke down in January 1963.

Since then there has been a change of government and Labour soon found themselves as impotent as the Conservatives to deal with the economic ills of British capitalism. Meanwhile the trends in world trade which had made application desirable earlier continued. Britain’s share of Commonwealth trade continued to decline. Trade with Europe, on the other hand, increased. With EFTA, where customs tariffs were lowered, it increased 70 per cent since 1960. In the EEC where external tariffs were going up it increased by 100 per cent for the same period (Financial Times, 2 March 1967). Hence the new application.

The Common Market has come about as a result of the pressures of world capitalism. It is an effort to give Western Europe the political and economic structure to compete commercially and militarily with America and Russia. Britain’s desire to join is not motivated by some newly discovered principles of internationalism by Wilson and his government. Rather it appears to offer the best hopes of a solution to some of the problems of British capitalism. The Confederation of British Industry has made it quite clear that it favours entry: As reported by The Times they said:

“This is the move that industry has been waiting for and the CBI have been urging the government to make. The CBI’s recent report, based on a year’s analysis, concluded that on balance entry would be to the benefit of British industry” (3 May 1967).

The interests of the working class are not served by debating the merits of being in or out of the Common Market. The Common Market amounts to the re-arrangement of tariff barriers amongst member states. The alternatives posed by opponents of Britain’s entry vary from keeping present arrangements to forming a North Atlantic Free Trade Area and to greater trade with East Europe. All of these proposals leave capitalism intact. Production for sale and profit would continue; the working class would still exist; and the social problems of the system would still be there.

Joe Carter

Tokyo 1985 (1967)

From the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

To those of you who remember a few years ago the “double your standard of living in twenty-five years” promise from R. A. Butler, The Times, of 27.2.67 should have made interesting reading. It carried an article on page 5 about some of the promises being made currently to the workers of Tokyo. They certainly have a familiar ring.

No housing problems, no smog, a car for everyone of Tokyo’s 4,300,000 families—yet no traffic jams. And so on . . . But this is for twenty years time if they all work hard and if the economy continues to expand, conditions which no planners can control, but this does not stop them planning, of course. Incidentally, do you notice how these “plans” have a longer period set aside for their fulfilment now? No longer do we hear of “five year plans” which were so popular (particularly with left wingers) in the thirties and forties Such are the massive problems of modern capitalism that no “expert” can even pretend to solve them in such a short time.

So now we get a twenty (or 25 or 30) year plan superseded after a year or two by another twenty year plan. Which, in its turn is superseded, and so on. Which keeps workers on their toes in pleasurable expectation, the planers in business, and capitalism generally ticking over.

50 Years Ago: Socialists and War (1967)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

No matter which group of the Masters win the struggle, the Workers remain enslaved. The division of interests is not between the peoples of the world, but between the classes – the Master Class and the Working Class. Not, therefore, in their fellow Workers abroad, but in the Master Class at home and abroad, are the working-class enemies found.

What interest have the Workers, then, in either starting or carrying on war for their masters? Absolutely none.

Every Socialist must, therefore, wish to see peace established at once to save further maiming and slaughter of our fellow Workers. All those who on any pretext, or for any supposed reason, wish the war to continue, at once stamp themselves as anti-Socialist, anti-working class, and pro-capitalist.

Moreover, where the Working Class have the necessary means – the franchise – for their emancipation within their grasp it is clearly an anti-Socialist and treacherous act to urge them to use those means for the purpose of placing political power in the hands of the masters.

We stand for PEACE without reference to terms, since the fruits of Capitalist war are the Masters’, and only the pains and penalties thereof the Workers’.

From the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain Manifesto published in the Socialist Standard, July 1917

Errors in last month’s Socialist Standard (1967)

From the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

We must apologise to our readers to a number of errors in the June Socialist Standard.

On page 85 in the article “Young Conservatives” the paragraph commencing “One unpleasant feature …” third line down the word ‘large’ should in fact have been ‘small’.

On page 90 in the article “Free Distribution” the paragraph which introduces the quotation in the first column was wholly omitted. It should have been:

“Sir Alan Herbert, the humorist, always makes a witty speech at the Annual Meeting of the shareholders of the Savoy Hotel. This year he spoke of an Air (nationalisation) Bill:”

On page 92 in the article on “The Newspaper Industry” the heading to Table 3 should have read “Profits Before Tax” not “Tax Profits Before”.

Party News (1967)

Party News from the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Please Note

Mid Herts Branch will not meet during August. First meeting in September will be on Monday September 4 at 8 p.m. at the Bed well Community Centre.

Camden (Bloomsbury) Branch will not meet during August, Meetings re-commence at Conway Hall on Thursday September 7 at 6 p.m.

Southend Branch will deliver the Socialist Standard to your home. Write to H. G. Cottis, 19 Kingswood Chase, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.

Camden (Hampstead Group)

We have pleasure in announcing the formation of the Camden (Hampstead Group) of the SPGB. The Group will hold its first meeting on Monday 4th September, 8.30 p.m. at The Enterprise, Chalk Farm Road, N.W.I, (opposite Chalk Farm Underground Stn.). It is intended to meet alternate Mondays after this date. A series of lectures, discussions etc. is being arranged and details will appear in the August S.S. In the meantime, if you are interested in the activities of the Group and wish to go on our mailing list, contact Secretary: Tel. 01-4853182. The Group will also be pleased to consider speakers from other organisations to address them.

Our Thanks 

We wish to thank the Victoria Labour College of Melbourne, Australia, for their donation to our library of two short pamphlets by Rosa Luxemburg—Socialism and the Churches and What is Economics? In addition their journal, The Labor College Review, frequently reprints article from this journal.