Editorial: What a show of pretence and hypocrisy (1963)

Editorial from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Yet another political scandal has hit the headlines. Mr. Profumo’s indiscretions are only the latest in a long line of such extra-curricular activities on the part of our elected representatives but, unlike most of the others, he failed to keep his indiscretions discreet.

His confession and resignation have left the Conservative Party in confusion and the Labour Party cock-a-hoop. The latter, of course, can hardly go wrong as long as they don’t overplay their hand and show their glee too openly. It is enough for them, whilst fervently protesting that they are not in the least concerned with Mr. Profumo’s sexual behaviour, to keep the pot quietly simmering with expressions of deep and distressed concern for the country’s security.

As for the Conservative Party, they are quite demoralised, in spite of all Mr. Macmillan’s efforts to pull them together. Following upon all the other distasteful events of recent months, the new bombshell has shattered forever the sacred relic they have so carefully carried in their political baggage for so long — the idea that they alone are the Party who should rule because they are gentlemen, the personifications of all the noble traditions of high principle, strict morality, implicit honesty, and overwhelming trustworthiness.

The sensation-mongering Press, after taking a bad beating over the Vassall case, are back in full cry. Miss Keeler got what is reported to be £15,000 from the News of the World for her confessions, and was also well paid by the Sunday Mirror for her letter from Mr. Profumo. No doubt more large sums are in the offing for her and others in the case. At the same time, it is disclosed that the actual facts were known to many sections of the Press even when Mr. Profumo was making his denials last March, but that they all chose to keep quiet about them. Not, be it added, because of scruples about Mr. Profumo, but because they were afraid of losing some money in libel damages. So much for the boasts they periodically give us about telling the truth at any price.

Large sections of the public, of course, put on their usual show of shocked protest whilst fervently perusing every hard-bought detail the newspapers provided for them. One of the choicer blooms of the British cultural scene, the weekly ration of spice, scandal, and snigger, flowered brighter than ever.

What a show of pretence and hypocrisy it all is. The capitalist political parties all play the game of setting up their leaders as men apart—as people of greater intelligence, higher principles, stricter morals, than the common herd. The working class accept all this, and even grow to believe it, in return for lots of nice, fat promises to have things done for them and the relief of not having to think for themselves.

All sorts of people are drawing all sorts of implications from the Profumo a case. But for Socialists, its chief importance lies in the way it reflects, yet again. the cynicism and hypocrisy of the capitalist parties and their system, and the political laziness and ignorance of the working class who support it all and refuse to take action to get rid of it.

News in Review: The Profumo affair (1963)

The News in Review column from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Profumo affair

It was in the May Socialist Standard, at a time when Mr. Profumo’s strenuous protestations of the innocence of his relationships with Christine Keeler still held public water, that we pointed out how unimportant are the personal morals of the administrators of capitalism.

Now that Profumo has come clean, and now that we have been treated to the squalid detail of the Argyll divorce case, what we said in May still stands. With something to be added.

The rather nasty stories have lifted a corner of the curtain on a life which is completely foreign to most workers.

The life of rich houses, glamorous holidays, expensive women and powerful men. Of easy luxury and sophistication. The life, in fact, of people who can dedicate their lives to what they conceive as living.

Which is something very foreign to most members of the working class, who are only the people who make possible the lives of luxury and glamour.

Profumo was a member of a capitalist government and capitalism teaches us, when we are children in school and when we are grown up enough to read its journalism, that the basis of morality is monogamy.

Many workers absorb this teaching and, no matter what it costs them in terms of personal strain, conform to it. Others conform because they cannot afford to do anything else. Promiscuity can be a costly business.

It can also be a tragic business, for workers. Only recently The Observer ran a series on illegitimate children in this country, which showed up the sadness of many unmarried mothers who are forced by their circumstances to give up their babies when they desperately want to keep them.

This sort of tragedy need never happen to rich people who are also promiscuous. They have no trouble in taking care of any number of children, 'legitimate" or no.

In more ways than one, capitalism is a sordid, inhuman social system in which only the ruling class are free.

War in the air

The early railways fought each other tooth and nail for freight and passengers, often taking enormous physical and economic risks in the process. In the same way, the great airlines are currently coming to grips over the pickings to be had on the world’s busy airlanes.

For some time, the American transatlantic carriers have been fighting the rest —and particularly Britain—over fares and cargo rates. This provoked the recent crisis in which British airports were on the point of being closed to Pan American and Trans World aircraft; something which was averted only when the American Civil Aviation Board made a temporary climb down. The situation remains threatening.

And now the war is hotting up in the freight carriers.

BOAC has been happily operating piston engined freighters across the Atlantic and had no immediate intention of spending any more millions on jets to speed up this service.

This intention has been upset by Pan American’s opening of the first all jet freight service, over both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Fast and capacious, the Boeing freighters have started an air cargo sales war which may, as in the case of passenger traffic, develop into a rate war.

If this happens, we shall probably see every airline which aspires to a place in the sun on the transatlantic run being forced to buy aircraft which they cannot afford, do not want, and which they often have to send off only half full of cargo. We may see countless aircraft which have plenty of useful life in them being scrapped or sold off for a song. And perhaps we shall see the airlines taking the same sort of physical risks which the primitive, battling railways took.

Competition, we are often being told, is one of capitalism’s health-giving substances. In fact, just like the other features of the all-wasteful society, it is a ludicrous way of running human affairs.

Advertising for votes

Do you vote for capitalism? You do?

Well, how does it feel like to be in somebody’s sights? You should know —both the big parties are now drawing a bead on you.

You have probably seen the big spread ads. which the Tories have been taking in the papers. You have probably heard that the Labour Party is indignant about where the money comes from, and you may have reflected that this argument has lost a lot of its point since Labour started putting out its own big ads.

These are part of a very expensive 
campaign. And it is all aimed at you.

The Tory ads. are punchy, with facts and figures about the roads they will lay down, the hospitals they will put up, and so on. If only, that is, you will give them the chance. Has it struck you as strange that after twelve years of Conservative paradise there are still no new hospitals in this country and the roads are still in a mess?

The Labour ads. are perhaps rather more airy, with some distant ideals of justice and equality—and Mr. Wilson just caught in the act of almost giving the new Labour thumbs-up sign. Labour has to go easy on the facts and figures. Their own record is pretty awful and to say too emphatically that there is anything wrong with Britain today leaves them open to the countercharge of running down the old country, dammit. That wouldn’t go down with a patriotic voter like you, would it? So Labour puts in the plea that everything could be all right. If only you give them the chance.

And will you? The big parties are lashing out the thousands in an effort to persuade you to put them in charge of British capitalism. But whoever gets that job will make no difference; the black spots which capitalism makes will remain unerased.

The tragedy is that the ballyhoo, the big splash, is what so often counts.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain cannot afford expensive publicity campaigns and indeed has to bleed itself merely to run one or two candidates in an election. Yet only Socialism can give us the sane world which most people, somehow, are looking for.

Remember that, when you read the next big ad. Remember it when you vote. They’ve got you in their sights but, in a way, you are the one who pulls the trigger.

The Pope is dead

Pope John died when, just before the Profumo scandal burst, news was in short supply. Especially the juicy "human interest” sort of news on which the popular press thrives. On thin rations, the papers made the most of the drawn out death agonies. Some of the headlines were almost ghoulish.

This gave us a peep at one of the nastiest sides of capitalism—the side which works for a profit out of human suffering, even when it is the suffering of one of the great upholders of property society.

Not only reporters rushed to say nice things about John XXIII. Bertrand Russell, a professed non-believer, echoed the popular estimation of the dead Pontiff as a man of peace:

The Pope used his office and his energy to bring peace and to oppose policies which lead to war and mass murder. His encyclical is a magnificent statement of the deepest wishes and hopes of all men of decency. . . I mourn his death.

There is, indeed, some rather tenuous evidence that the dead Pope was prepared to act as some sort of a go-between in a new world carve-up by the United States and Russia. This is the sort of diplomatic dabbling which often qualifies all sorts of people for the description of "peace loving.”

But this holds good only in peacetime. We know that, just like his predecessors, the Pope would have done nothing to oppose a future war and that in such a war there could well be Catholics on both sides, killing each other.

Thus does capitalism make warriors of them all.

In any case, modern war has nothing to do with a supposed lack of men of peace among the world’s leaders. Capitalism itself causes war and the leaders always go along on the tide of destruction.

And let all peace lovers remember that capitalism has always done well out of the servile ignorance of the religious, and especially of the Church of which John XXIII was so briefly the Vicar Supreme.

Postscript on housing

Of all the people to write a postscript to the special issue of the Socialist Standard on housing last May, it had to be the Minister of Housing himself, Sir Keith Joseph.

The last few days of that month gave birth to yet another White Paper which is supposed to be going to solve the housing problem. (“. . . promises,” commented The Observer, “borne on fairly insubstantial wings.”)

The new plan is to give housing subsidies only where the government thinks they are needed. Thus is quietly killed off the old policy (which was also going to solve the problem) of giving subsidies virtually indiscriminately. How long before the latest plan is pronounced to have failed?

There will be a bit more entertainment from the government’s financial jugglers; £100 million is intended to be available to encourage the building of houses for rent. From the merry shouts of welcome which greeted this announcement, nobody would have thought that these were the very policies which, in one form or another, have failed so blatantly in the past.

And, of course, the government will be speeding up slum clearance and will build more houses. The happy day when everyone will be living in what Housing Ministers think is a decent home has had to be postponed for a bit more, what with all this planning. Actually, it has been put off for another ten years. Said Sir Keith:

This programme will within 10 years transform the country's housing position, and will bring within reach of nearly every citizen in the land either a modern or a modernised house.

Presumably the Tories are hoping to win a few votes on this programme. Perhaps they will. It would not be the first time the working class have been hopelessly deceived about one of the ways in which capitalism blights their lives.

The importance of Mr. Profumo (1963)

From the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

it was the Daily Express which pointed out, quickly, cruelly, that profumo is the Italian word meaning perfume. But the famous scandal sticks in a way undreamt of in the philosophies of big newspapers.

Now Profumo’s “sin,” for the Tories, was not just that he was running a mistress. That was bad enough, but there have been some famous precedents who have got away with the same thing. It was not even that the girl was being shared with a Russian intelligence agent and at least a couple of others, although that was enough to wilt the flowers on the starchiest of hats at a Conservative women’s fete. What really put Profumo beyond the pale was that he admitted to telling a lie. Not a lie to just anyone, but to the House of Commons, which is supposed to be an assembly of gentlemen and where it is the tradition not to question nor debate personal statements like Profumo’s original assertion of his innocence, this was what Robert McKenzie called a kick in the stomach for the Tories, who have always liked to think of themselves as the party of better people, of Christian gentlemen.

It was the lie which gave Lord Hailsham the excuse for his fireworks in his TV interview with McKenzie, when he blasted Profumo as a man who has “ lied and lied and lied ” and insisted that the whole affair was a moral issue. Hailsham is well known as a Tory moralist, a strict Christian who professes unshakeable principles. So is another central figure in the drama surrounding the government crisis—Enoch Powell. The hullabaloo over Profumo has served to make these men— and others like them—heroes of integrity. The inference we are invited to draw is that generally capitalism administered by the sort of men who would never tell a lie and that Profumo was just the inevitable bad apple.

Alright. Let us have a look at this business of lies. And if we do, the first thing to hit us is that political history is crammed with examples of men who, as a matter of course, have told enormous lies yet have never been accused of being liars. Some of them, in fact, have died as respected pillars of capitalist society. Stafford Cripps, for example, was the very caricature of an ascetic moralist. Strict vegetarian. Fervent Christian. Like Enoch Powell, he was supposed to be a man who stood for principle before everything. Did Cripps, then, never tell a lie? We need nudge our memories only a little to recall that in 1949 he protested for weeks that he had no intention of devaluing sterling, while all the time his plans for devaluation were cut and dried. There are plenty of other examples of Cripps’ flexible reverence for the truth.

The Tories are not, of course, untarred by this brush. Hailsham and Powell are only two of those who were unprotesting members of the Eden government which embarked on the Suez fiasco. They apparently held their consciences in check when their government broke its word to the United Nations and justified the invasion by what were quickly revealed as blatant lies. More recently the same, government has been what we can politely call less than frank over, the deportation of Doctor Soblen and of Chief Eriahoro. In fact, in a more subtle way, Christine Keeler is not the only matter on which Profumo has been dishonest, although on these issues his ex-colleagues in the government would never dream of calling him rude names. As Minister of War, Profumo bore the ultimate responsibility for the big publicity campaign to persuade people to join the Army. The advertisements used in this campaign showed such a one-sided view of Army life that even some newspapers felt moved to protest. Profumo’s ads. showed clean-living young men playing rugby, climbing mountains, patrolling romantic deserts. They did not hint that military discipline, in its dreary stupidities, is designed to degrade and brutalise men. They did not mention the unpleasant places a soldier may be sent to, nor the dirty jobs he may have to do there. They ignored the fact that soldiers often die especially horrible deaths, looking not at all like clean living Soldiers of the Queen as they do so. The advertisements told lies, but nobody in the government got upset with Profumo because of that.

Neither have they been upset by the lies about, say, the effects of testing nuclear weapons. The government assure us that the danger from these exercises is negligible and that another little test will not do us any harm. Yet they know perfectly well that every test adds to the atmosphere’s load of radioactivity and that this means that a lot of people, especially children, will die who would otherwise have lived. Overseas, as well, lies are told on this matter. President Kennedy has recently announced that his government will suspend all tests, unless some other country starts them up again. This may well be followed, as it was in 1958, by a similar announcement from Moscow. Both sides will pose as the guardians of peace and human safety. Yet both sides know that a suspension of tests does not mean that the development of nuclear weapons has been suspended. They know that they are all working on -their bombs and that when they think it is to their advantage to do so they will think up some reason to start testing them again. Are Kennedy and Khruschev, then, champions of truth?

It would, indeed, be surprising if men in their position were, for they administer a social system which is full of lies, and not only those told by politicians. Were the makers of thalidomide telling the truth when they asserted that the drug could safely be taken by pregnant women? What sort of principle were they upholding, when they protested that the delay in the American Food and Drug Administration approving thalidomide was costing them their chance of exploiting a Christmas market? Do the mass-production tailors believe their own advertisements, which show aristocratic young men being admired by glamorous girls for the cheap off-the-peg outfit they are wearing? Are the estate agents who advertise a cramped, poky apology for a house as “ neat and compact ” and a garden with knee-high weeds as “mature” keen churchgoers who regularly say their prayers?

We know what grounds these lies are excused on. We know that capitalism claims that strategic and commercial reasons justify telling lies. As R. A. Butler said about the Cripps lie, “. . . I know that if you talked about devaluing the currency well ahead of time, you would do indefinite damage to your own currency. . . .” But they cannot have it both ways. Capitalism professes to work on a basis of morality; workers are taught from the very beginning that the road to Heaven is paved with honesty and high principles. Yet capitalism admits that its own interests force it to deny these principles. And since when have the sort of morals propounded so often by capitalism's leaders been relative, adaptable, matters of expediency? A lie, after all, is a lie under any circumstances. No, they cannot have it both ways, although over Profumo that is how they have tried to have it.

Imagine a politician who told the truth! A Minister of Housing who admitted that he could not solve the housing problem! A Foreign Secretary who blew the gaff on every double-crossing international carve up as soon as he had made it! A Chancellor of the Exchequer who introduced his Budget with the admission that it was just a rehash of a lot of ideas which had flopped in the past! If that happened nobody would get involved in a scandal. There would be a dignified resignation, surrounded by sorrowful stories of tiredness, strain and mental breakdown.

Profumo told a rather foolish and, for him, a risky lie. But at least it was a lie about his personal life, a lie which involved only a very few people. In contrast, day after day capitalism goes on turning out lies which affect the welfare and in many cases the very lives of millions of people. What is more, those lies play their part in bolstering the social system which degrades and depresses the majority—the only socially useful people—the working class.

No minister gets worked up about that. There are no top level inquiries, no resignations, nothing on television. In cases like the Profumo scandal the working class are supposed to be content with a mixed diet of salacity and hypocritical moralising. The same newspapers which got indignant over Profumo's lie saw nothing wrong in paying thousands of pounds for Christine Keeler's story, nor in publishing photographs of her which we will describe—and not for want of a better word—as arresting.

It will be tragic if in among this smoke screen of hypocrisy and scandal the essential fact is lost sight of. Let us state it here, quickly and simply.

Lies are essential to capitalism and super moralists like Lord Hailsham know it. And capitalism itself is the biggest lie of all.

Ivan

A long, cool look at a hot potato (1963)

From the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politically speaking, the issue of full employment has become a very hot potato. Ever since post-war capitalism pulled out the first of its many surprises by not going into the deep slumps which were such a feature before 1939, governments have trod carefully, thinking perhaps that a couple of million unemployed would mean the end of their term of power. (Although if they do think like this they may be over-pessimistic. Despite the heavy unemployment between the wars, the working class never got around to challenging capitalism ; indeed, in 1939 they were preparing for yet another slump under yet another Conservative government.) Inevitably, Chancellors of the Exchequer have churned out many soothing speeches on the theme that the jobs of the working class are safe in their hands. Then can even produce that old and faithful ally Statistics to prove their point. Yes, a hot potato.

And why? It is obvious that employment is important to the working class under capitalism for the simple reason (and we shall have more to say on this) that they depend on their jobs for their living. But the matter does not end there. For so many workers their employment is more than that. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that they almost deify the company they work for. Listen to them talk about it: “ My Job “ My Company.” You can almost hear the capitals. If employment is important to the working class, if it is a delicate political issue, it can be because a depressingly high proportion of workers ask for nothing much more from life than the chance to live in servitude.

In these circumstances it is only to be expected that there would be a lot of wrong thinking about employment. In the first place, about “ full ” employment. Recently, the newspapers, the novelists, film directors, TV men, and so on, have made the startling discovery that in many industries and in many parts of the country full employment is a sour joke. In the shipbuilding industry, for example, and in the towns where the shipyards are based. Day by day, gloomy reports come in from the yards. Employment is low. Orders are scarce. Some yards are completing what they fear may be their last work for a long time. A few small yards have had to shut down.

In the second place, a lot of nonsense is often talked when unemployment is in prospect, and it is not only the politicians who are to blame here. Consider again the shipbuilding industry and the recent decision of the Court Line to order a big tanker from a Japanese shipyard. Court Line is a British company, although the tanker is for a subsidiary of theirs in the Bahamas. Nobody needed to be a clairvoyant to forecast that the placing of this order abroad would provoke strong protests and sure enough that rumbustious fellow, Mr. Ted Hill, secretary of the Boilermakers' union, satisfied our expectations. This was, he said, a ”. . .  wrong to the British workers.” And more specifically: “Any British shipowner who places an order in Japan is un-British.”

Mr. Hill did not tell us, at the same time, what he thought of foreign shipowners who have their ships built in British yards. The Sunderland yard of Joseph L. Thompson & Son, Ltd., for example, recently completed the 24,500 ton bulk carrier Kolfinn for an Oslo firm. This was the fiftieth vessel built by the yard for Norwegian owners; their next launch will be an 80,000 ton tanker for Red Olsen & Co., Ltd., also of Oslo. Mr. Hill did not comment that it was un-Norwegian of Olsens to place their orders on the Wear instead of using them to develop their own shipbuilding industry. Neither did he say that it was un-Russian of the Soviet government, when they recently invited tenders from British yards among others—for six fishmeal factory ships.

Mr. Hill’s brand of nationalism is very much a have-your-cake-and-eat-it affair, with the added complication that he is not the only one to be after the cake. When the Russians put out the fishmeal ships for tender, there were signs that the British government were considering swapping an order for Russian oil for the contract to build the ships. This may have pleased the boilermakers, but it upset the miners, who regard every drop of oil as a threat to their jobs. Mr. Sidney Ford, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, described the oil-for-ships deal as “ridiculous.” “This cannot/' he said, “ be a good thing for the coal industry."

And while all this rumpus is going on, capitalism continues on its way, as serenely as it may. For capitalism, once we accept its basic, chaotic illogicality (and that is what trade union leaders have done) has its own orderly logic for its actions. Court Line did not give its order to Japan to cock a snook at British shipbuilding. They protested that they had made every effort to get their ship built in a United Kingdom yard. But:

It was found, with sincere regret, that British prices and credit terms for this type of vessel resulted in an uncompetitive unit when compared with the offers received from abroad. Had the order not been placed in Japan, no ship would have been contracted at all.

Court Line, in fact, are taking advantage of the low shipbuilding prices which are resulting from the current battle between Swedish and Japanese yards and are gambling that the recent rise in tanker freight rates will still be effective when they take delivery of their new tanker. From their point of view it was reasonable to place the order abroad; the economic requirements of capitalism saw to that. In the same way it was reasonable for the Soviet government to put Mir. Ford's mind at rest by ordering their fishmeal ships from Sweden. They got a good price, a promise of quick delivery and generous credit terms. What more does any Capitalist concern ask for?

Capitalism, because of its insistence on the profitability of an enterprise, is often bound to make life difficult for anyone who preaches economic nationalism, whether they do so in the board room or a trade union conference hall. For the working class, it goes even deeper. Last May, an American trade union leader on a visit to this country uncovered an example of the use which the employers can make of working class nationalism. He was Mr. Ben Segal, the director of international affairs in the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers. This is how The Guardian of May 17th reported him:

. . . General Electric, the American company, had pointed out to their own unions the dangers of lower standards in Japan, but . . . it was found that their own international company was the largest stockholder in Toshiba, one of the principal manufacturers of electronic products in Japan.

Nobody need get indignant about this. A nationalistic working class are wide open to the smooth operator.

The big point in this is that capitalism has split its population into two and of these two it is the working class who need to get a job to live. But merely finding employment does not mean that a worker has solved his problems; indeed, so often it is the people with the better jobs who suffer the most strain. And even when he is earning a steady wage, the worker always finds that he lives under restrictions and that the cloth available to him allows only the skimpiest of coats to be cut.

Let us pile it on a bit more. A worker only gets a job when his employer can make a profit from his labours. If, for any one of a number of reasons, the profit is not there then very often neither is the job. This is why workers are so often interested in their employers finding markets for their goods. It is why shipyard workers agree with Ted Hill raving about “ un-British ” shipbuilders on one side, and on the other miners agree with Sidney Ford snapping about “ridiculous” international trading deals. In another way, it is why workers in the North want industry diverted to them from other areas. It never seems to strike them that this is the most futile tinkering with the problem and that the very best that they can hope for is to keep themselves in a job while another worker somewhere else gets the sack. Employment, of course, is the great dream of the working class; to many of them a regular job is the sun and the moon. What a measly outlook! For the only difference between employment and unemployment is often that between one degree of poverty and another.

Until the working class have grasped this fact, capitalism will continue, and so will its anomalies and stupidities. Industries will continue to boom and to slump and if they are industries like shipbuilding the slumps will cause some concentrated suffering in the areas which live off the industry. For capitalism makes its wealth in order to sell it, and this applies to ships just as it does to anything else. When conditions look good for selling cargo space, the tendency is for a lot of ships to be built. This in itself can mean that the market becomes restricted, helped perhaps by something like a decline in general international trade. This is what defeats gambles like that which Court Line are making over their new tanker. Too many ships compete for a limited market. Ships are laid up (there are over 500 like that at the moment). Shipyards slump and whatever help they may get from their governments (a £30 million fund was recently announced by the British government to aid shipbuilding) can have little effect on the problem.

This is something like the situation today. The chairman of the Houlder Brothers shipping line described it like this in his last report to the shareholders:

. . . instead of reaping the benefit of the expansion in world trade, the shipowners of the world have robbed themselves of that benefit by excessive building of new ships.

This excessive building has been stimulated by. . . over optimism generated by the prosperity of previous years. . . unhealthy encouragement imparted by tax considerations in some foreign countries and . . . the building up of national fleets based on policy unrelated to commercial considerations.

There speaks an authentic voice of capitalism, unconsciously displaying the system's crass anarchy. For no economist, no managing director, no minister, has yet been able accurately to predict the course of capitalism's markets. But all of them must go out on some sort of a limb and take their chance on beating their rivals into a market. British shipbuilding may be groggy on the ropes but it is still in there punching, even if rather weaker than before. Camell Laird's chairman said in his last report: “. . . we have intensified our efforts to attract business from overseas. We shall pursue relentlessly and vigorously all potential business at home and overseas . . ."

Cheers, almost certainly, from the Cammell Laird workers. Cheers, for sure, from their shareholders. Employment may be a tricky issue for capitalism and there may be a lot of nonsense talked about it. But the worst thing of all is that the nonsense usually persuades the workers that their interests are hand in glove with those of their employers and this delays the day when the world can take a long, cool look at itself. And come up with the right answers.

Ivan

Finance and Industry: Enter the trading stamp (1963)

The Finance and Industry Column from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Enter the trading stamp

In this present world of ours, goods are produced for sale. To enable things to be sold, a whole complicated network of distribution has grown up, involving wholesalers (first, second, and the rest), retailers, hire purchase companies, credit firms, discount houses, as well as sundry other middlemen and hangers-on. Each of these takes his cut, which naturally he tries to make as large as possible, from the process whereby the articles of life find their weary way from the factory to the consumer.

Now yet another group of middlemen arc trying to muscle in the trading stamp companies. They are not, of course, entirety new to this country, but so far they have not played much of a role. In the United States, on the other hand, they have become big business and some of the American firms are now invading Britain.

Arguments are already heated about whether the consumer really gains anything from trading stamps. Some observers say that he does and that it is the retailer who does not give stamps who suffers by losing his trade to his competitor who does give them. Others say that American experience shows that the consumer may benefit slightly at the beginning but that later he will be no better off because more and more retailers will go over to the stamps and add their cost to their selling prices. They allege that this has already happened in the U.S., where the net result of the trading stamp boom has been to put up retail prices to the point where what the consumer gets back in stumps he pays for in higher prices.

But all this is really beside the point. Whether the consumer gets a small advantage at the expense of the retailer, or the latter makes it up by higher prices, it only serves to conceal that all that has happened is that yet another set of middlemen has managed to get into the act, getting a nice fat rake-off for doing something which is utterly useless from the point of view of actual production.

It really amazes us sometimes the way people will dismiss Socialism as utopian, but accept all the idiocies of capitalism as normal and reasonable. Not one ounce of extra wealth is produced from the activities of the trading stamp companies; the only result is to sharpen the struggle over the profit derived from what has actually been produced.

Competition goes supersonic

Things look like moving faster than ever in the air world. And we don’t mean only aeroplanes. The prospect of lots of extra supersonic bangs before long is going to disturb more than the sleep of those unfortunate to live too close to airports. Lots of airline operators, as well as politicians, are already reaching for the tranquillisers. Everything seems ready for yet a further round of waste, muddle, and stupidity in the international air industry.

Pan-American's decision to order six Anglo-French Concords took only 24 hours to squeeze an announcement from President Kennedy that the United States were going to build an even faster plane. The staggering sum of $750 million has been mentioned as a likely cost.

The Concord venture is being supported by the British and French Governments to the tune of £75 million from each. The final cost may well be more. All the purpose of all this vast expenditure of wealth? To enable a microscopic few of the world’s inhabitants to cross the Atlantic in three hours or get to Australia in half a day.

All this against a background of waste and absurdity in which the great majority of the airline companies are already losing money and where the pace of competition is so hot that large numbers of perfectly good aircraft are discarded with years of useful life in them. So fierce is the drive for speed that many of the world's airports are no longer really capable of coping with the planes. Now all the sorry story over jets seems likely to be repeated with supersonic aircraft.

Not all the experts are happy about the new development. Lord Brabazon is one. Instead of “promoting air transport for the peoples of the world,” he has said, “the airlines have simply helped the rich to travel vast distances at very higher speed and cost.” And, he added, “A big machine carrying 200 people in comparative comfort at up to 250 m.p.h., but landing at no more than 60 knots should be safe, welcome, and pay.”

But Lord Brabazon, more than most, should know that his appeal will go unheeded. Air transport and aircraft construction are no longer the concern of private capitalists, but have become wards of the state. In general, they now make no more sense, even from the capitalist economic viewpoint, than the vast industries that have grown up to throw rockets into space. They have become part and parcel of the struggle between national groups, in which the various governments are prepared to go into all sorts of projects, spend vast amounts of money, engage in ridiculous competition with each other. They are a supreme example of the tendency of the units of capitalism to get bigger; in the air it is no longer the private capitalists that fight each other, it is their national states. Behind every aircraft company there are state subsidies, government orders, and national military needs.

No, the Concord was not well-named. Discord would have been more appropriate.

Facts about fish

A recent report from F.A.O. reveals that 1961 saw the world's highest production of fish—just over 41 million tons. This shows an increase of 10 million tons, or 30 per cent., over the total catch in 1957, but the picture is really not as optimistic as it looks.

Most of the increase is the result of a phenomenal rise in Peruvian production —of small anchovies processed into animal feed. Apart from this and "a modest rise in the Chinese catch, world production has remained virtually static. Indeed, the alarms are already sounding of a likely decrease in production as the well-known fishing grounds become depleted. The boats get bigger, their engines more powerful, and their range ever-wider, but the catch tends to get smaller. Competition has led to overfishing.

But, as usual, the paradox of production under capitalism discloses that there are still many more fish in the sea than ever come out of it; of the sea’s possible production, 90 per cent. is still left untouched. And even under present conditions. F.A.O. reckons that the total world catch could be doubled without too much danger to stocks. Today, 80 per cent. of total production is caught north of the Equator; the southern seas are almost unfished.

Capitalism will itself see to it that the oceans of the world give up more of their riches. But progress will as usual be slow and wasteful. The trawlers of dozens of countries will continue to compete fiercely with each other; will set out to fish over the same grounds; will spend useless weeks at sea, some of them, before reaching fishing areas which the trawlers of other countries can reach in a quarter of the time. There will still be disputes over international rights; over 3 mile, 6 mile, 12 mile limits; prices will still be subject to catastrophic fluctuations. Over all will remain the constant threat of overfishing.

Even in this situation, F.A.O. tries to introduce a little order and co-operation, but competing self-interests foredoom its efforts to failure. What is required is the harmonious, organised and co-operative development of research and productive techniques to provide a steady, reliable, and efficient production of food from the sea.

But we shall not get that under capitalism.

Stan Hampson

People You Know: Ex-Flying Officer Bob (1963)

From the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

He likes to be known by the popular, friendly, the “good company” name of “ Bob.” The youngest and favourite son of respectable, godly parents, Bob, during his schooldays, was drawn into the boy scout movement. As a scout he learned how to tie a variety of knots, to fix up tents, to do wonders with a jack-knife, and to light fires without matches or lighters. He also learned the virtue of perpetual preparedness—of preparedness, in particular, for working hard and for defending one’s country in peril. For was not loyal and willing service, in peace or war, a right and bounden duty?

It cannot be said that there was much glory in the various occupations by which Bob sought a living in the years preceding the second World War. Each was marked by its particular brand of stultification— smelly, unhealthy surroundings; tedious mechanical operations; arduous back-aching toil. All were paid at the lowest possible rates. And, ironically enough, in all these loathsome occupations were ex-servicemen of World War One who, I no doubt, had grown tired of trying to reconcile their miserable conditions with the great “ fruits of victory ” that once they were promised.

Not that Bob saw anomalies in the scene—he had never dreamt of looking for them. Uppermost in his consciousness was a smugness that saw no need for questioning, for seeking to know things which in any case could not improve the serenity of outlook that already was his. Pleasing enough for him that he had once been a perfect “true blue” scout: that now, on the verge of manhood, he was helping in his own way to maintain the greatness of England.

The outbreak of war found Bob more than eager to give his services. Disdaining to wait for his calling-up papers, he hastened to enlist. He preferred, somehow, that his entry into the heroic arena should be through the Air Force—the Army and Navy, it was whispered, attracted the more common elements. And so Bob joined the R.A.F., to spend the following months learning to fly, to make parachute landings, and to drop bombs accurately on given targets. At last, fully trained, and raised to the rank of Flying Officer, he engaged in a number of ‘“ops” over Germany—most of them highly successful in the way of “enemy destruction.”

The war ended and he was demobilised. He had “done his bit.” Proud and self-assured, he came back to the daily hawking of his energies in order to live. But not for him now the grimy, sweating, low-paid toil of his pre-war years. The “la-de-dah” and practiced glibness of his fellow flying officers, the swanking discourse of the Officers’ Mess, the studied preservation of “superior” manners—these and other things had made of Bob an easy persuasive talker capable, in not too discerning company, of impressing and convincing. He became a commercial traveller with a salary of £1,000 a year.

He remains so today. But Bob is now a married man with three young children. His job demands that he should always be well-dressed and smart, that, he should have a handsome car and a reasonably “posh” residence. All this, and the hire-purchase payments by which he is still paying for his furniture, he finds just a little beyond the purchasing power of his present £1,500 per annum salary.

Bob has not completely severed his connection with the R.A.F. Besides regularly attending the annual Air Force reunion dinners, he is the commander in the local Air Training Corps. Through the latter he helps to make fliers, parachutists and air-bombers of the future.

This is the Bob of today. By nature he is, in his way, a man of integrity and goodwill. His trouble is that he has never looked into himself or into the world around him. He does not know, therefore, that despite his innate worthiness, his outlook and his conduct have made of him an anti-social being. He has never questioned, let alone discovered, the mockery of the “national glory” that had been part of his childhood teaching. Had he done so, he might have rejected the patriotic concepts that were later to lead him to a proud acceptance of atrocious working conditions.

He might also have suspected the capitalistic commercial nature of the war into which he eagerly rushed in the belief that, just as his masters said, here was a war of British right against German wrong; a war for “ our ” country’s survival; a war for the preservation of democracy. He may even have felt revulsion at the thought of teaching callow adolescents how best to engage in war from the air, how best to kill on a wholesale scale— and all on behalf of a privileged few whose competitive interests are war’s real cause.

One of the most deplorable features of Bob’s case is that he failed to learn from his own personal experience the fallacy of his national pride. There was nothing of which he could be proud in subservience, ill-pay, loathsome conditions, and a shackling to the treadmill by economic necessity. And even on his present £1,500 a year, Bob, were he logical, could feel no pride in the enforced daily pushing of travellers’ lines, the flowery representations, the “switched-on” charm and the many other humanly degrading devices of the commercial traveller. And this quite apart from the indignity and anxiety of a continued indebtedness to hire-purchase firms.

The tragedy of Bob is that he has allowed himself to be moulded exactly to the pattern desired by his capitalist masters, or, at least, by the various elements that represent capitalist interests. How thankful must be these people that the working class has so many like him!

Frank Hawkins

Blogger's Note:

Does this qualify as a short story? I'm not too sure, to be honest. Whatever the case, it's similar in tone and style to the 'People You Meet . . .' series of articles that 'Ronald' penned for the Socialist Standard in 1949/50.

The Passing Show: Social revolution in Japan (1963)

The Passing Show Column from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Social revolution in Japan

Under the above heading The Times told us recently of changes in Japan brought about by the war. But if the reader expects to learn that the wealth producers, the Japanese workers, have taken over, he will be disappointed though he should not be surprised. What in fact the article deals with primarily is the rise of new propertied group and families in place of the old.

The richest man in Japan has an income of 440m. yen (£440,000) a year. He is Mr. Konosuke Matsusha, chairman of the Matsusha Electric Industrial Company. His declared income is nearly twice as large as that of anyone else in the country. According to figures based on tax returns for 1962. the 20 richest men in Japan have incomes ranging from £121,000 to £440,000. All but one are industrialists. Some of the names in the list are almost unknown to the general public and the famous pre-war names—Iwasaki (founders of the Mitsubishi combine), Okura, Mitsui and Sumito Mo—do not appear anywhere.

Of course, there has been no social revolution for the other Japanese, those whose names are always unknown. The latest figures published by the International Labour Office show average earnings in Japanese manufacturing industries, ’’including family allowances and end-of-year bonuses,” as 22,834 Yen, or about £22 16s. 8d. a month.

Bigger and Fewer Breweries

Official figures published in the April issue of Economic Trends showed how far take-overs have gone in industry as a whole. In eight years, 1954-1961, £1,600 million was spent on take-over bids, but of this total nearly half came from the 98 companies each with assets of £25 million or more, though they represent only a tiny proportion of the 2,600 companies whose shares are quoted on the Stock Exchanges of this century. Altogether 3,400 companies were taken over (most of them not quoted on the stock exchange).

One industry in which amalgamation has gone far, but with more to come, is the brewing industry.

In place of a multiplicity of breweries many of them small and local, a writer in the Financial Times (May 25) writes of the industry now being dominated by six major groups.

What the boards aimed to achieve by take-overs was to consolidate brewing and distribution in large regions and thus achieve big economies and larger profits. Local breweries are being closed down and a considerable number of the local ”milds, bitters and light ales” are disappearing, ”no longer worth producing in small quantities.” Standardisation of a smaller number of nationally advertised brews is the order of the day for capitalism in brewing. It is ironic to recall the old argument against Socialism that it would deprive us of the variety of choice that capitalism gave us. Maybe the local varieties were no better (or worse) than the TV advertised popular brands, but that is not what drinkers were told before the change took place.

Common Market under a Cloud

When the drive for British entry into the Common Market was in full and hopeful flood the line taken by its advocates was to say that all was well inside the Six and British industry must be in to share in the benefits.

It was equally to be expected that immediately entry was blackballed by De Gaulle, they should nearly all have a change of heart and say that it really did not matter after all.

Now a few months have passed and some of the earlier arguments have begun to look rather thin. In place of the supposed absence of labour disputes we have seen massive strikes in France and Germany. French farming interests which were partly responsible for the objection to British entry have now brought the French and German governments into conflict, and both of them into conflict with American farmers over the entry of their exports into Europe.

The bloom has gone off the German industrial and stock exchange boom, because of falling profit margins and stronger pressure for wage increases.

At the same time, helped by some industrial recovery and rising profits, many British capitalists and politicians are thinking that they can do better out of Europe, and British exports into the Common Market have increased, as also exports to Russia.

The fact is that both before and after, the arguments were based on wrong or too limited assumptions. The European Common Market carries no more guarantee of permanent rapid expansion than any other large or small region of capitalism, and no more able to escape wage disputes and fluctuating profit margins.

And what happens to one industry inside or outside the Market is not necessarily the experience of other industries. . While motor car exports to Europe have been rising, and the Ready Mix Concrete Company claims record sales on the Continent, one firm, Wilmot Breedon, producers of motors, aircraft engines and domestic appliances, reports that the profits made in Britain were overshadowed by the heavy losses of its French subsidiary.

So for the moment the Common Market is rather out of favour.

What Mr. Profumo did to the Stock Exchange.

One of the emptiest dreams of the capitalists is to imagine to themselves how happy they could all be if only they could go on making, profits without the constant interruption of “politics." One of a cloudless sky politics keeps blowing up. On Monday, June 10th according to the Evening Standard, the London Stock Exchange had its biggest slump since Cuba—not this time the work of one of the K’s, but of Mr. Profumo. “Dealers, nervous about the eventual outcome of the Profumo affair, marked share prices down all round."

The same issue of the Evening Standard had an article asking whether Mr. Profumo, out of politics, can hope to find an outlet for his talents in business. The argument raises diverting side issues:

A man in public office has to have a high moral character and appear totally incorruptible. . . In business, however, standards are not always that high . . . But the business world doesn’t think much of a liar, especially if he gets found out

The writer of the article, the City Editor of the Standard, asks: “If he came knocking at your door would you give him a job ? ” But there is no urgency about it:

The ex-Minister of War comes from a rich family. The Profumos have for many years controlled the £34,000,000 Provident Life Association of London.

Most of the shares are held by trusts in which Mr. Profumo has an important role. In 1961 the trusts sold some £1,000,000 worth of shares for cash in a public issue. But they still own around two-thirds of the company’s Ordinary share capital, Worth some £3,700,000 at current market prices.

Mr. Profumo, of course, is only one of the beneficiaries. But he must draw quite a useful income from the investment.

Last year Provident Life paid out £120,000 in Ordinary dividends, of which the trusts must have received a considerable share.

Edgar Hardcastle

Classic Reprint: What is patriotism? (1963)

A Classic Reprint from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

We reprint this article from the Socialist Standard of December, 1915, written in the middle of the first World War, its message still rings true, and we know it will be of great interest to our readers.

The answer depends largely upon the point of view. From one standpoint patriotism appears as the actual religion of the modern State. From another it is the decadence and perversion of a noble and deep-rooted impulse of loyalty to the social unit, acquired by mankind during the earliest stages of social life. From yet another viewpoint, that of capitalist interests, patriotism is nothing more or less than a convenient and potent instrument of domination.

The word itself, both etymologically and historically, has its root in paternity. In tribal days the feeling of social solidarity, which has now become debased into patriotism, was completely bound up with the religion of ancestor worship. In tribal religion, as in the tribe itself, all were united by ties of blood. The gods and their rights and ceremonies were exclusive to the tribesmen. All strangers were rigidly debarred from worship. The gods themselves were usually dead warriors. Every war was a holy war. Among the ancient Israelites, for instance, the holy Ark of Jehovah of Hosts accompanied the tribes to battle. It was this abode or movable tomb of the ancestral deity that went with the Jews in their march through the desert, and even to Jericho, playing an important part in the fall of that remarkable city. All the traditions of the Jewish religion, in fact, were identified with great national triumphs.

Thus tribal religion was completely interwoven with tribal aspirations and integrity. Tribal “patriotism” and religion were identical. Indeed, without the strongest possible social bond, without a kind of “patriotism” that implied the unhesitating self-sacrifice of the individual for the communal existence, it would have been utterly impossible for tribal man to have won through to civilisation. Natural selection insured that only those social groups which developed this supreme instinct of mutual aid could survive; the rest were crushed out in the struggle for existence. Is it a matter for wonder if it be found that such a magnificent social impulse, so vital to the struggling groups of tribal man, received periodical consecration in the willing human sacrifices so common in primitive religious ceremonial ? Bound up with the deliberate manufacture of gods for the protection of the tribe and its works, there is indicated a social recognition of the need for, and value of, the sacrifice of the individual for the common weal.

This noble impulse of social solidarity is the common inheritance of all mankind. But being a powerful social force it has lent itself to exploitation. Therefore, with the development of class rule this great impulse is made subordinate to the class interests of the rulers. It becomes debased and perverted to definite anti-social ends. As soon as the people become a slave class “the land of their fathers” is theirs no more. Patriotism to them becomes a fraudulent thing. The “country” is that of their masters alone. Nevertheless, the instinct of loyalty to the community is too deep-seated to be eradicated so easily, and it becomes a deadly weapon in the hands of the rulers against the people themselves.

With the decay of society based on kinship, religion changed also, and from being tribal and exclusive it became universal and propagandist. “Patriotism” at the same time began to distinguish itself from religion. The instinctive tribal loyalty became transformed, by the aid of religion and the fiction of kinship, into political loyalty. In a number of instances in political society, as in Tudor England, the struggle for priority between religion and patriotism became so acute as to help in the introduction of a more subservient form of religion. Thus patriotism became emancipated from religion, and the latter became a mere accessory to patriotism as handmaiden of class rule.

Though universal religion did not split up at the same time as the great empire that gave it birth, patriotism did so. The latter has, in fact, always adapted, enlarged, or contracted itself to fit the existing political unit, whether feudal estate, village, township, county, kingdom, republic or empire. No political form has been too absurd for it to fill with its loyalty. No discordance of race, colour or language has been universally effective against it.

What, then, is patriotism in essence to-day? It is usually defined as being devotion to the land of our fathers. But which is the land of our fathers? Our fathers came from many different parts of the world. The political division of the world in which we live is an artificial entity. The land has been wrested from other races. The nation they call “ours” is the result of a conquest over original inhabitants, and over ourselves, by successive ruling classes. Unlike the free tribesmen we are hirelings; we possess no country.

Nationality, of which patriotism is the superstition, covers no real entity other than that of a common oppression, a unified government. It does not comprise any unity of race, for in no nation is there one pure race, or anything like it. It does not cover a unity of language, for scarcely a nation exists in which several distinct languages are not indigenous. Nor is it any fixity of territory, for this changes from decade to decade, while the inhabitants of the transferred territory have to transfer their allegiance, their patriotism, to the new nation.

The only universal bond of nationality or patriotism that exists for us to-day is, then, that of subjection to a single government. Patriotism in the worker is pride in the common yoke imposed by a politically unified ruling class. Yet it is this artificial entity that we are called upon to honour before life itself. This badge of political servitude is called an object worthy of supreme sacrifice. The workers are expected to abandon all vital interests and sacrifice all they hold dear for the preservation of an artificial nationality that is little more than a manufactured unit of discord: a mere focus of economic and political strife.

Thus one of the noblest fruits of man’s social evolution—the impulse of sacrifice for the social existence—is being prostituted by the capitalist class to maintain a system of exploitation, to obtain a commercial supremacy, and preserve or extend the boundaries of a superfluous political entity. The workers are duped by the ruling class into sacrificing themselves for the preservation of a politico-economic yoke of a particular form and colour. Many so-called Socialists have fallen headlong into this trap.

Had social solidarity developed in equal measure with the broadening of men’s real interests, it would now be universal in character instead of national. The wholesale mixture of races, and the economic interdependence of the whole world, show that nationalism is now a barrier, and patriotism, as we know it, a curse. Only the whole world can now be rightly called the land of our fathers. Only in the service of the people of the whole world, and not against those of any part of it, can the instinct of social service find its highest and complete expression. The great Socialist has pointed the way. He did not call upon the workers of Germany alone to unite. He appealed to the toilers of the whole world to join hands; to a whole world of labour whose only loss could be its parti-coloured chains. And in this alone lies the consummation of that tribal instinct of social solidarity of which patriotism is the perverted descendant.

Capitalism, therefore, stands as the barrier the destruction of which will not only set free the productive forces of society for the good of all, but will also liberate human solidarity and brotherhood from the narrow confines of nationality and patriotism. Only victorious labour can make true the simple but pregnant statement: “Mankind are my brethren, the world is my country.” Patriotism and nationalism as we know them will then be remembered only as artificial restrictions of men’s sympathy and mutual help; as obstacles to the expansion of the human mind; as impediments to the needful and helpful development of human unity and co-operation; as bonds that bound men to slavery; as incentives that set brothers at each other’s throats.

Despite its shameless perversion by a robber class the great impulse to human solidarity is by no means dead. Economic factors give it an ever firmer basis, and in the Socialist movement it develops apace. Even the hellish system of individualism, with its doctrine of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, has been unable to kill it. And in the great class struggle of the workers against the drones, of the socially useful against the socially pernicious, in this last great struggle for the liberation of humanity from; wage-slavery, the great principle of human solidarity, based upon the necessities of to-day and impelled by the deep-seated instincts of the race, will come to full fruition and win its supreme historical battle.

That is our hope and aspiration. For the present, however, we are surrounded by the horrors of war added to the horrors of exploitation, and subjected to the operation of open repression as well as to the arts of hypocrisy and fraud. With the weakening power of religion to keep the workers obedient, the false cult of nationality and patriotism is being exploited to the full. Like religion, patriotism has its vestments, its ceremonies, its sacred emblems, its sacred hymns and inspired music; all of which are called in aid of the class interests of our masters, and utilised desperately to lure millions to the shambles for their benefit. Thus is an heroic and glorious social impulse perverted and debased to the support of a régime of wage-slavery, and to the furtherance of the damnable policy of the slave-holding class: to divide and rule.

F. C. Watts

Church, Faith and Property (1963)

From the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nearly one hundred years ago Marx wrote: “The English Established Church will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on one thirty- ninth of its income.”

Remembering the zeal with which the Church fought to protect its tithes over the centuries and its traditional defence of private property, Marx’s assessment was justified, and the current dispute about the 39 Articles reinforces it. The Church dignitary who raised the issue declared that he does not agree with all of the Articles but he nevertheless assented to them because otherwise he could not have got the appointment: which led other, more conscientious, churchmen to protest about him and his ideas of ethical conduct.

But if the Church’s attachment to what are supposed to have been its basic articles of faith for four hundred years is lukewarm, its interest in looking after its property is in no doubt. Its total income is now over £40 million a year, more than double the amount of a few years ago.

A large part of the increase has been due to a change of policy over investments of the Church. Commissioners who, instead of relying on prayer made use of investment experts. Their total income, which in 1952-3 was under £8 million, was in 1961-2, more than £16 million; of which £8,993,275 came from Stock Exchange Securities, £4,576,161 from Agricultural and Urban Estates, and £1,471,949 from mortgages.

Doubtless those responsible would say that they have to keep up with the times, which also accounts for their minds turning to amalgamation of the rival Christian faiths. But while they are learning from the business world about more profitable ways of investing they might also take note that amalgamation often means “take-over.” The Sunday Telegraph (9/6/63) warns its fellow Anglicans that parleying with the Roman Catholics may result in “the eventual submission of the Church of England to the Roman obedience.”

While on the subject of winds of change in the Christian world the Communists must not be forgotten. Pope John not only interested the Church of England in his discussions for unity, but also the representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, and when he died the Daily Worker in its issue of June 4, claimed that he was mourned by “hundreds of millions of people throughout the world,” among those millions being supporters of the Communist Party. Under the heading, “World Mourns Peace Pope,” the Daily Worker claimed that the Pope “opened the way to new possibilities of co-operation between Catholics and Communists for peace and social progress.”

Edgar Hardcastle

50 Years Ago: The Need for Socialism (1963)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Today the human race is living out of conformity with its environment. The operation of social forces has separated society into two classes, with different modes of living and a different outlook on the world. The dominant class has thrown off all pretence of function and has become solely parasitic, a cancerous growth in the body of the social organism. Its presence is detrimental to the race. The only useful class is robbed of the results of its labour ; the wealth goes to feed the cancer, the useless class. Increasing powers of production, instead of giving the workers leisure and opportunities for self-development, only increase their sufferings and intensify their labour. The result of longer hours, of technical education and training, is only so much more food for society’s malignant growth, so much more wealth for the capitalist class, from which to hire the forces that overawe the workers and keep them in subjection.

The very existence of such forces, when capital has become international, reveals their purpose to the workers, whose every effort on the industrial field is thwarted by them. Antagonism that only shows itself on the industrial field sectionally and spasmodically, stands out as class antagonism when the armed forces are used against all sections of the workers in turn. The political machine then becomes a challenge to the workers ; it stands out as the symbol of capitalism, the nucleus of the capitalist State. Its control means power.

The working class have nearly exhausted the long chapter of blunders that characterised their history during the nineteenth century—machine smashing, Chartism, Liberal-Labour representation, etc. They must either begin over again or make a serious study of their real position and find that control of the political machine is within their reach and is the first step that must be taken towards freedom.

[From 'Socialism To-day' by F. Foan, July 1913, Socialist Standard.]

Parliamentary Fund (1963)

Party News from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is the Party/s intention to contest three constituencies at the next General Election. The expense will be considerable and our coffers are empty. Full information will be published later, but meanwhile readers are urgently requested to send donations to the Party. Cheques, P.O.'s, etc. should be crossed, payable to the SPGB, Parliamentary Fund, and sent to the treasurer, E. Lake, SPGB, 52 Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4.

P. Howard (Party Funds organiser)

SPGB Meetings (1963)

Party News from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Aphorisms of Socialism [II.] (1912)

From the July 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

Being an explanation of the Declaration of Principles of the S.P.G.B.

Aphorism II.

In society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.

We saw, in considering our first aphorism, that society is divided into two classes – a class of sellers of labour-power and a class of buyers of labour-power. This division was seen to arise from the class-ownership of the means of life – those who do not possess being compelled to sell their labour-power to those who do.

This sale and purchase of labour-power resolves those who possess into non-producers and those who do not possess into producers.

Hence we have, in the terms of our second aphorism, a class “who possess but do not produce,” and a class “who produce but do not possess.”

The proposition is that between these two classes in society there is an antagonism of interests manifesting itself as a class struggle.

The very nature of selling and buying presupposes opposing interests. While sales, in the long run, are exchanges of equal values, individually they are not necessarily so. A given class or grade of goods may at one time be selling above, and at another time below, its value. In these cases the sales are not exchanges of equal values. But eventually the high and the low prices cancel each other, and so the result is arrived at that sales, in the long run, are exchanges of equal values.

The reason, if course, of this fluctuation of prices, is that their adjustment is left to the forces of competition.

It is clear that, since commodities, as such, are insensate, and have no will power to fight their own battles, it is in reality their owners who must stand in opposition to one another. It is they who resist the forces of competition when those forces are against them, and use them to their utmost capacity when they are in their favour.

It is only by this continual struggle of buyers and sellers against one another – the former to buy as cheaply as they can, the latter to sell for the highest possible figure – that prices rise and fall. Without this struggle we cannot imagine prices falling when goods are plentiful by comparison with demand, and rising when the reverse condition obtains.

This struggle, presupposed by the competitive exchange of goods which we call buying and selling, can only arise out of opposing and conflicting interests. Therefore the sale presupposes the struggle ; the struggle presupposes antagonism of interests.

Without the last, then we cannot have the first, and where the first (buying and selling) is found, there antagonism of interests must inevitably exist.

So when we show that society is divided into two classes, one of which has no means of livelihood other than selling its labour-power to the other, we have no option but to conclude that there is antagonism of interests between those classes.

Let us look at it another way. The struggle is over the possession of the product of the workers’ toil. Whatever this product may amount to, and whatever form it may take, this fact concerning it remains constant : the more of it that is taken by the producer the less there remains for the non-producer, and the larger the portion taken by the non-producer the smaller must be the amount remaining for the producer.

In such case neither side can prosecute its own interest without detriment to the interest of the other, and hence again we find that “in society there is an antagonism of interests between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.”

In the case of buyers and sellers of ordinary commodities, that is, of the products of labour, this antagonism of interests cannot manifest itself as a class struggle, because there is no class distinction between buyers and sellers as buyers and sellers. That which draws the class line between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess is not the fact that the one does not produce and the other does, or that the one buys labour-power and the other sells it. It is the fact that the one possesses the means of life and the other does not.

As a matter of fact, buyers and sellers in the ordinary commodities market cannot be separated into classes as such, for every buyer becomes a seller in his turn. So the antagonistic interests, here, can only manifest themselves in a series of struggles between individuals or groups of individuals.

On the other hand, in the labour market the buyers and sellers are only such because of the class distinction. There, buyers and sellers are by this very fact separate classes. The seller only becomes a buyer by becoming a possessor and so passing into the other class, and the buyer only becomes a seller by becoming dispossessed and so being precipitated into the propertyless class. And this changing about is comparatively rare in the latter case and extremely rare in the former.

In these circumstances, then, whatever may be the differences between individual workers as competitors for the sale of labour-power, and between non-producers as competitors in the purchase of labour-power, the two classes, as long as they exist as such, must always be opposed to each other as buyers and sellers.

The breach between the individuals of the same class may to some extent be closed, for it is largely a superficial breach. It has been said that the more one class takes of the product of labour the less falls to the lot of the other class. This means that class interests must be antagonistic. Between individuals of the same class, no such thing is true. One worker does not necessarily get less because another gets more, nor does the increased share of one capitalist necessarily leave less for another. The capitalist does not ordinarily increase his wealth by taking away from his fellow capitalist, but by subtracting from the worker.

The sectional interests, therefore, differ from class interests in this, that though they are often antagonistic, they are not fundamentally so. The class interests, on the contrary, are fundamental and must inevitably clash.

As further urging the point, it is recognised among both classes that the conflicting interests of sections may be reconciled to some extent by substituting combination for competition. Hence we have rings, trusts, combines, mergers and associations on the capitalists’ side, and trade unions on the workers’ side.

The conflict of sectional interests, then, since these interests are sectional, can only manifest itself as sectional struggles; but the antagonism of class interests must, from its class nature, exhibit itself in the form of a struggle between the classes.

This class struggle is not fought out with the same degree of consciousness at all times, for which reason it does not at all times wear the same aspect. In the earlier days of the capitalist system its nature was masked. There did not exist the same clear line of distinction between the two classes. Men were unconscious of the secrets of capitalist production, and therefore could not realise the irreconcilable antagonism of interests between the classes in society.

The reasons for this are many, but they all have one foot upon the same stone : the stage of development of the means and instruments for producing wealth.

Thus these means and instruments had not then reached the giant proportions and stupendous costliness which forbid the worker ever hoping to become possessors of them and so lifting themselves into the class above. Such uprising on the part of individual workers was in the early days of capitalism so common an occurrence as to largely obscure the class struggle, and it is quite conceivable that men could not easily discern a class barrier which was so easily surmounted, or regard as a class apart that circle which was every day being invaded by members of their own class.

Again, there were not such extremes of riches and poverty to impress the incongruity of the wealth distribution on the minds of the victims of a vicious system. The productivity of labour was comparatively low, and for that reason the share taken by the producer and the non-producer respectively was not as glaringly disproportionate as to compel thought.

And still again, the development of the system had not yet reached that level at which it sets the owner of the productive wealth free from any participation in their operation. The rise and development of joint stock companies have had the effect of largely banishing the owners of the means of production from the arena of production. Their personal command over their productive wealth has given place to personal command over their stocks and shares. They are so far removed from production that they cannot possibly be supposed to have a hand in it. But the earlier capitalists, from their closer connection with industrial operations, never appeared to stand in the position of superfluities. Their co-operation seemed to be a necessary part of the productive operation, and therefore the share they took of the product did not appear as surplus-value plundered from the workers, but as wealth which the masters had assisted in producing.

These things prevented the working class from realising that they were the producers of all wealth, that the capitalist class were parasitic, existing upon the robbery of the workers, and that there was an irreconcilable antagonism of interest between the two classes and therefore a class struggle. So the struggle was fought out without any great conscious direction.

But the development of the means and instruments of production, and the consequent and attendant development of the methods of production, have stripped the capitalist system of most of its secrets. Men cannot let go unchallenged for ever a system in which an astounding increase in the productivity of human energy accompanies the appalling poverty of those who carry on production. Men cannot observe without thinking the growing detachment from industry, the heaping wealth and luxury, the increasing idleness and uselessness, of those who own the means whereby they live. Men cannot witness without rising knowledge of the class division, the strengthening of the barrier which shuts them ever more completely out from the circle of luxury, leisure and comfort which increasingly mock their poverty and insecurity and the hopeless futility of all their weary labour. Men cannot see the forces of competition harrying all into combinations and organisations, but always, always, organisations and combinations of masters and men apart, of masters and men opposed — men cannot see without a dawning of light, a conception of the class struggle, a strengthening of class feeling, and the birth and uprising of a new understanding and principle to guide and direct the class struggle. In other words, the development of the capitalist system itself gathers up all the scattered, inarticulate forces fighting a ragged battle which they only half understand, and welds them into a solid army prosecuting an ordered struggle for a clear and definite purpose – the industrial development, in short, makes the Socialist and the Socialist movement.

So the class struggle, as time goes on, assumes a different aspect, in strict correspondence with the changing visage of capitalism. When the capitalist class stood as revolutionaries before the capitalist system, their victory was essential to further progress, and therefore was good for the race in the long run. But immediately they had overthrown the reactionary system of the period and established a new system, that system in its turn, and the class who ruled under it, became reactionary.

And as this reactionary character has become more pronounced, as the system and the class have become a greater clog to progress and more fruitful of social injury, so the character of the class struggle has become more revolutionary. While the fight for the possession of the wealth produced under the system is not less bitterly maintained, the class struggle finds its highest expression in the movement for the overthrow of the capitalist system of society, with its antagonism of interests, and the emancipation of the working class from thraldom.

This, then, is the true meaning of our statement that there exists a class struggle in society. It is a struggle on the one side to maintain and on the other side to abolish a social system.

A. E. Jacomb