Proper Gander: Class struggle (2026)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Silent classrooms with students reading line-by-line in unison, wary that any wrong action will lead to a swift reprimand probably isn’t what we imagine secondary schools to be like. However, this approach has been taken in recent years, as Richard Bilton reports in Britain’s Strictest Schools for BBC1’s Panorama. The Athena Learning Trust runs six secondary schools in Devon and Cornwall with 6,500 pupils in total. On its website are syrupy phrases like ‘High support and high ownership are at the heart of our ethos. At Athena, we are resolute in our pursuit of support, kindness, and integrity’. Such words sound particularly hollow to the students, parents and ex-teachers who are concerned about its tough stance on discipline.

As the documentary tells us, Athena Learning Trust has a ‘two strikes’ policy for when its students break the rules: a warning for the first breach and then being sent to detention for the second, called ‘reflection’. Breaking the rules while in reflection leads to ‘suspension’: being barred from the school short-term. Such approaches are familiar, but in Athena schools, looking out of the window can be an infraction. One of the students tearfully explains the ‘321 focus’ catchphrase, heard dozens of times daily, which is a (clumsy) acronym for ‘face and observe the teacher in clearly upright silent attention’. There are strict expectations not just about students’ attention, but also for punctuality and their uniforms being ‘perfect’. We’re told that children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) are more likely to behave in ways which challenge the rules, although Government Adviser on behaviour in schools in England Tom Bennett says people with conditions such as ADHD need a ‘calm, safe, dignified environment’ and that tight discipline supports this.

Having a lot of regulations to breach has meant that a lot of punishments have been issued. The programme states that Athena’s Ilfracombe school has around 1,000 suspensions a year, almost five times higher than the average across England. One of the parents interviewed for the documentary describes how his daughter got into a cycle of going from reflection to suspension repeatedly, therefore missing out on what was being taught in the classroom. He and others attended a drop-in session to voice concerns, arranged by Panorama’s producers, which Bilton says attracted more people than anticipated. Those interviewed for the programme aren’t short of adjectives to describe Athena’s regime: ‘authoritarian’, ‘cruel’, ‘dystopian’, ‘robotic’, ‘abusive’, ‘almost militarian’ and ‘a bit like a dictatorship’. Athena’s management didn’t agree to be interviewed and instead issued a statement.

Athena is an ancient Greek goddess associated with wisdom and handicrafts, both appropriate to schooling. She’s also associated with warfare, perhaps reflecting her namesake’s regimented methods. Schools with reputations for lax standards of behaviour and low exam results were taken over by Athena because it was acknowledged that changes were needed. The stringent policies covering discipline were introduced because the demographic of ‘white underprivileged people near the coast’ is hardest to teach, Independent Councillor James Ball says he was told by Athena staff.

Bilton asks whether Athena’s approach has been beneficial. Its schools mostly have good outcomes from Ofsted assessments and exam results have improved. But according to former Athena teacher Robin Johnson, the children have a ‘joyless education’, and students say they find the ethos ‘depressing’. As another ex-teacher says, when children have come to hate school, this ‘can’t be good, no matter what their GCSE results are’. Some parents have decided to educate their children at home instead.

This summer, hundreds of people attended public meetings protesting against the schools’ practices, and ‘parent power won’, says Bilton. Athena Learning Trust is being disbanded, as we’re told towards the end of the programme, its footage having been recorded before this was announced. CEO Ben Parnell has resigned and the Department For Education will monitor Athena to implement changes until its schools are transferred to other trusts.

Athena has operated in the academy system, as a not-for-profit charitable trust. While organisations which run academy schools are still funded and regulated by the government, they aren’t overseen by the local council, and so they can be run in different ways to state schools. More than 80% percent of secondary schools in England are academies, with other frameworks in the rest of Britain. One criticism of trusts which manage multiple academies (like Athena) is that decisions are made in some centralised head office distant from the schools, and therefore don’t fully consider local concerns. They are likely to take into account the interests of any financial backers, which could include businesses, other educational establishments, faith groups or voluntary groups. While the academy system isn’t a ‘privatisation’ of education, it has made schooling more corporate in how it is structured.

This system is an attempt to make education run within the constraints of capitalist society. While Athena’s methods may have been extreme, they were a response to the difficulties of the circumstances the schools found themselves in. One consideration not explored by the documentary is the number of students in each class. Large class sizes are a result of schools not being able to afford the staff or the room to have more classes which have fewer people. Smaller class sizes would mean that more time could be spent with each student, personalising their learning and reducing the likelihood of distracting behaviour. But as resources are rationed by money, large classes are the norm and discipline becomes a more pragmatic option. This doesn’t excuse Athena for the harm its approach caused to some of its students, although in a way it teaches them what to expect once they leave school for wider society which also stifles learning with unaccountable rules and the threat of punishment.

Mike Foster

The Middle East powder keg explodes (2026)

From the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

President Trump probably didn’t realise it but when the United States joined Israel in an attack on Iran at the end of February he lit a fuse that caused the Middle East powder keg to explode and with it his ridiculous dream of getting the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, every single country in the region — Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Israel and even, on one occasion, Egypt — has been bombed. At stake has been control of the oil and natural gas resources of the region and the trade routes taking these and their by-products out to other parts of the world.

The Carter Doctrine

In his State of the Union message to Congress in January 1980 President Jimmy Carter read out what has since come to be known as the Carter Doctrine. It was a reaction to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

He set out the reasoning behind the doctrine:

‘The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits [sic] of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world’s oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position, therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.’

And concluded:

‘Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force’.

The United States had already built up, and paid for, the military power of Israel to be its proxy in the region. Following the overthrow of the self-styled Shah of Iran in 1979 in an ‘Islamic revolution’ which installed a hostile regime under Ayatollah Khomeini, Israel was the only powerfully armed state in the region that they could rely on. The US also had established a permanent military base in all the Gulf states except for Oman.

Taking out Iraq

In the end it wasn’t military action by Russia that led to the Carter Doctrine being activated. By the beginning of the 1990s the state-capitalist regime there was collapsing, on the way to the final dissolution of the USSR in December 1991. It was the action of Iraq, whose leaders decided in August 1990 to invade and annex Kuwait in order to get free access to the Persian Gulf for its oil exports. This led to the First Gulf War in which Iraq was driven out of Kuwait by a United Nations authorised coalition led by the US. The coalition stopped after driving Iraq out of Kuwait, leaving the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein still in power.

The US continued to regard the Iraq regime as a threat to its interests in the region and in 2003 decided to finish the job on the pretext that Iraq was developing ‘weapons of mass destruction’, including nuclear ones. This time they didn’t get UN support, only that of Tony Blair’s Labour government. The Second Gulf War was a walkover and Saddam Hussein was quickly overthrown. No WMDs were discovered but a regime opposed to US control of the region had been eliminated.

This turned out to have an unintended consequence. The Saddam regime, which was Sunni Muslim, had repressed the Shia majority in the South as well as the Kurds in the North. With that regime gone, the exclusion of the Shia majority in Iraq ended, opening the way for the Shia Islamic regime in Iran to gain influence there. In short, it strengthened another regime that threatened US control of the Gulf.

The current line-up

Just as the US had established a string of bases in the Middle East so in effect did Iran, made up of Shia militias in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. There are Shias in other Arab states. Bahrain has a Shia majority while Saudi Arabia’s oil fields are situated in a Shia majority area. Both dynastic regimes ruled by Sunni despots severely suppress any sign of Shia political activity.

The regime in Iran had always seen Israel as a key element in maintaining US domination of the Gulf, denouncing it as a ‘Zionist entity’ to be wiped off the map. This was couched in religious terms, but behind it were strategic considerations to do with control of the Gulf. Israel returned the compliment and regarded the Iran regime as an existential threat to be destroyed.

The scene, then, was set for any military confrontation. On the one side the US with military bases in friendly Sunni Arab states and Israel as its (unruly) attack dog and, on the other, Iran with proxy Shia militias in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. Israel took the initiative in June last year when it bombed Iran, resulting in a twelve-day war between the two states, in which the US joined to bomb nuclear sites in Iran.

The pretext was that Iran was developing a nuclear bomb. That might or might not be true but, in terms of the principle of ‘might is right’ that governs relations between capitalist states, it wouldn’t be surprising if it was true. Iran would have an interest in having the Bomb just as the US would have an interest in it not having one.  A nuclear Iran would shift the balance of power in the Middle East in its favour. Trump’s claim that if Iran had the Bomb it would use it on Israel is most likely nonsense, especially as Israel is a nuclear power too. States acquire nuclear weapons not necessarily to use them but more as a deterrent and to increase their might, and so their bargaining power, in relations with other states.

Better than the Bomb

At the end of February, Israel and the US again attacked Iran for the same reason. Again, this has had an unintended consequence. Iran discovered that it has a better bargaining chip than the Bomb and one which it could actually use — the capacity to disrupt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the trade route which, as Carter noted, vital exports for the world economy of oil and natural gas from the Gulf have to take. Which it has used to its advantage. Trump has egg on his face while Israel is frustrated and may be tempted to have another go.

Socialists have always contended that wars break out when one side considers vital capitalist interests are at stake, over control of natural resources, trade routes, markets and investment outlets and strategic points and areas to acquire or protect these. The killings and destruction in the Middle East are a textbook confirmation of this.

Adam Buick

Anti-fascism (2026)

Book Review from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bye Bye Blackshirt. By Mark Krantz. Bookmarks. 2026. 114pp

This book is a well-researched account of the opposition to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) as that grouping rose to prominence in the 1930s on the back of similar movements in Italy and Germany. It offers a powerful evocation of the context and the atmosphere of the time it investigates, focusing in particular on the various ways in which, up and down the country and mainly in the years 1934-36, BUF activities were violently countered by left-wing groups and their supporters.

Taking their cue from Hitler’s Nazi party, Mosley and his BUF were virulently anti-semitic, portraying Jews as a malignant force in society – the enemy-in-chief. In a period of severe economic depression, they found a significant number of recruits among frustrated workers looking for ‘others’ to blame for their plight and sense of hopelessness. In London and up and down the country (for example Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Gateshead, Leeds, Swansea, Plymouth, Gillingham), the BUF organised large-scale meetings, both indoors and outdoors, often with Mosley at the helm and sometimes bringing along several thousand supporters dressed in black shirts who paraded slogans like ‘Perish the Jews’ and were primed to deal violently with protestors. At one of their rallies in 1934, Mosley announced that ‘Jews more than any single factor are undermining the prosperity of the British people today’.

The anti-BUF protests that took place were organised mainly by the Communist Party and the Independent Labour Party who themselves encouraged violent means to prevent meetings taking place or speakers being heard. Their tactic was what the author calls ‘direct confrontation and disruption’. So at a meeting in Gillingham in 1934, when Mosley appeared outside the meeting hall, we are told that ‘he was spat upon and missiles were thrown, including bottles’, and likewise, in Liverpool, he was ‘knocked unconscious by stones thrown at his head’.

Police were present at these events in numbers with a brief to facilitate the marches and meetings on ‘free speech’ grounds and thereby effectively siding with the Fascists in trying to prevent or ward off protests. The result was that protestors themselves were often dealt with violently by the police and arrested and charged with public disorder, in some cases leading to prison sentences.

At the most well-known of these events, ‘The Battle of Cable Street’ in October 1936, Mosley and his followers set out on a provocative march through what was known as the Jewish quarter of the East End of London. But the thousands of police seeking to ensure the BUF’s passage found themselves outnumbered by larger numbers of political opponents and locals who had put up barricades, mainly consisting of furniture, to block the procession. They charged to clear the way but were met, the author tells us, ‘with milk bottles, stones and marbles’ and ‘a brick went clean through the window’ of Mosley’s car’. The police gave it up as a bad job and Mosley and his followers had to turn back. The book describes the Battle of Cable Street, perhaps a little over-excitedly, as ‘the apex of the mass anti-fascist protests that stopped the advance of fascism in Britain’. And it is certainly true that, following this, support for the BUF began to wane and, by the time war broke out three years later, it had gone down dramatically, especially as it was seen by the British state as a potential ally to the Nazi enemy.

The book’s key argument is that the reason why the threat of a fascist takeover in Britain was never realised was the vigorous physical opposition it faced from left-wing forces and those who joined them. And this must indeed have had an effect. But it must be open to question whether, even it had not happened, any attempt at a violent takeover of the state by Mosley and his deluded followers could have had the same kind of success as Mussolini’s forces had had in Italy in the previous decade. Though the BUF presented itself as a threatening force, those workers willing to follow Mosley constituted a very small percentage of the population and would probably not have been capable of overturning the well-established system of capitalist democracy that existed in Britain, nor of setting up a repressive right-wing dictatorship as in Italy and Germany.

The writer also draws comparisons between Mosley’s movement in the ’30s and the current right-wing populism in Britain stirred up by such loathsome individuals as Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson. Will these be any more successful than Mosley in fomenting division and hatred among workers? It remains to be seen. But it has to be observed that the alarmism about this that Bye Bye Blackshirt evinces is typical of the longstanding Trotskyist belief in impending catastrophe and the hope that fear of this will cause workers to rally to the leadership of a vanguard party of the left to rescue them from the crisis and assert its own control. Such is the Trotskyist concept of ‘revolution from below’, which is entirely at odds with the need for a conscious spread of socialist understanding leading to democratic political action to establish a true socialist society of common ownership and free access – the real ‘revolution from below’.

Howard Moss

The architecture of autistic order (2026)

From the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

When I first got involved in left politics in the early nineties, an older comrade asked me how I thought we’d get to socialism.

I drew a straight line with an arrow.

Socialism was at the end. That was the goal. The arrow might have to move around obstacles but it always pointed in the same direction. Simple. Logical. Honest.

He looked at me and said it wasn’t as easy as that.

I never said it was easy. I just answered the question as clearly as I could. But I knew in that moment I was speaking a different language. So I started adapting. Fitting in. Saying things the way people expected them to be said.

It always felt contrived. It always felt illogical.

The arrow is still pointing in the same direction.

For decades the clinical establishment has looked at the autistic mind and seen deficit. Restricted interests. Social dysfunction. A fragmented internal life.

That is not my experience.

My experience is order. Sometimes relentless order. A mind that looks for the underlying machinery of things, the patterns, the systems, the internal logic that holds everything together or exposes where it’s broken.

What gets called disorder is usually just a different kind of order. One that doesn’t fit the world capitalism built.

In a capitalist world, order is social and hierarchical. It runs on unwritten rules, reading the room, knowing your place. The rules shift depending on who’s speaking, one standard for the CEO, another for the worker on the floor.

For an autistic mind, that’s not order. That’s chaos with a dress code.

My internal logic doesn’t work like that. A rule is a rule. If a standard is valid it applies universally, not selectively, not based on status, not depending on who’s watching.

When I point out a double standard I’m not being difficult. I’m identifying a structural fault. Hypocrisy is a mechanical failure of the truth.

This is why dialectical materialism made immediate sense to me when I encountered it.

Not because it confirmed what I already believed. Because it gave me a framework that actually followed its own logic. It explained injustice through material conditions and power rather than vague appeals to human nature. It replaced the baffling question of why people behave the way they do with a structured analysis of how the system is weighted.

For a mind that struggles with the unspoken and the inconsistent, socialist theory functions as a decoder ring.

It doesn’t ask you to read between the lines. It puts the lines on the table.

The friction is real though.

Capitalism produces chaos, economic, social, psychological. And an autistic mind trying to find logical consistency in a system built on contradiction will burn out. The disability doesn’t come from inside. It comes from the collision between a systematic mind and a society that runs on inconsistency and calls it normal.

That collision is exhausting. I know that from forty years of trying to adapt to it.

What I’m arguing for isn’t a world that accommodates autistic people as a minority group with special needs.

I’m arguing for a world built on consistent principles. Where the rules mean what they say. Where resources are distributed according to logic rather than power. Where the architecture of society actually follows its own blueprints.

That’s not a neurodivergent fantasy. That’s socialism.

The arrow is still pointing in the same direction it always was.

I still think the diagram was right.

Pablo.

Cooking the Books: What is a commodity ship? (2026)

The Cooking the Books column from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 29 July Reuters reported that ‘thirty-nine commodity ships passed through the Bab el-Mandeb strait’. A ‘commodity ship’, what is that? Presumably a ship that carries commodities, but what is a commodity? According to Reuters, the ships were all carrying either crude oil or chemical products made from oil.

If you look through a paper like the Financial Times you will come across a page which, alongside a list of share and bond prices, shows the prices of ‘commodities’; besides oil and natural gas, such products as coffee, sugar, cocoa and wheat.

According to Wikipedia, a commodity is

‘an economic good, usually a resource that specifically has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them. The price of a commodity good is typically determined as a function of its market as a whole. (…) Most commodities are raw materials, basic resources, agricultural, or mining products, such as iron ore, sugar, or grains like rice and wheat. Commodities can also be mass-produced unspecialized products such as chemicals and computer memory. Popular commodities include crude oil, corn, and gold.’

In this sense, commodities are goods that have a single world price. The price of some of them is included in financial publications because financial capitalists speculate on how these prices move as well as on share and bond prices. The fact that their price is fixed by the world market puts countries which depend heavily on producing and selling them at the mercy of world economic forces, with dire consequences when the price falls.

This is a narrower use of the term than in the 19th century when a commodity meant anything useful that has been produced for sale on a market. This definition was shared by Marx. In fact the opening lines of Marx’s Capital are: ‘The wealth of societies in which a capitalistic mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.’

As a commodity is something useful that has been produced for sale on a market, it has an exchange-value in addition to its use-value. Not all useful things are commodities, for example things produced directly to satisfy some need or want, such as food produced by farmers to satisfy their own needs or taken from them to satisfy the needs of some exploiting class. Under feudalism and previous class societies most wealth — useful things — was not produced as commodities.

The two definitions of a commodity are not necessarily incompatible as one can be seen as a subset of the other and closer to the ideal form. However, for Marxian economics all commercial cargo vessels are commodity ships.

In socialism, wealth will not take the form of commodities as it will not be produced for sale but directly for use, both by other workplaces to produce their product and by individuals to use and consume. Ships will still transport natural resources and agricultural products from the part of the world where they were extracted or grown to another part where they will be used but they won’t be commodity ships, just tankers and bulk carriers.

The Crisis: The Planners’ Swansong (1947)

From the September 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism we know and have long endured. Socialism we could have and will have when a majority understands the need for it. But is there a half-way house, something that has ceased to be Capitalism but is not Socialism? Socialists know that there can be no such thing, but many people both in the Labour Party and outside thought that it was possible and desirable. Not that the Labour supporters of planned capitalism called it that. Indeed they said precisely the opposite—”there is no half-way house between a society based on private ownership in the means of production, with the profit of the few as the measure of success, and a society where public ownership of those means deliberately planned for attaining the maximum of general well-being.” (For Socialism and Peace, Labour Party). Yet that is just what the Labour Party has been trying to do and in the experiment it received the support of many who knew quite well that what they were seeking was to keep capitalism but rid it of its chaotic features and subject it to planning and controls. Among the latter was the capitalist group who control the Economist. In its issue for August 2nd, 1947, the Economist admits that doubts have now arisen. In an article “The Planner’s Last Chance,” we read: “The Economist has long ago committed itself to the view that it is both desirable and possible to have not indeed a detailed control over all economic processes, but a certain measure of purposive direction of the general economic climate. It must be confessed, however, that the experience of the last two years has considerably dimmed that faith. Here was a situation that should have been easy to diagnose and a set of controls already in existence more far-reaching than any socialist planner had ever dreamed of. Yet . . . there can hardly be any room for doubt that it has been bad.”

The article concludes: “But something more than the Labour Party is at stake: the fate of an experiment to which many people who are not Socialists had attached their hopes, the effort to assert man’s control of his economic environment. For unless the planners make haste to plan for realism, the blind forces of economic nature will take over – either because something snaps and the people revolt against controls, or through the massive growth of black markets. It is the planners’ last chance.”

Of course, when the Economist refers to the blind forces of economic nature taking over, what it really should say is that the capitalist system will go its usual chaotic way in defiance of the edicts of those who think to mould it and control it from the backrooms of Whitehall.

What keeps capitalism going is the capitalists’ prospect of selling at a profit the commodities produced by the working class. British capitalism is largely dependent on selling industrial products overseas and on importing cheap foodstuffs and raw materials. The destruction and wastage resulting from the war and the loss of overseas investments severely damaged the position of British capitalism, and at the same time the destruction of agricultural and other raw material production all over Europe and the East caused a big rise of prices of the materials British capitalists have to import.

Thus British capitalism finds itself badly squeezed from both sides. A third factor arises because of the present low level of unemployment. Unemployment is the safety-valve of capitalism because without it wages rise to the point of endangering profits.

The experts in the Labour Party, busily planning for “full employment,” have never appreciated this. If forced to face up to the fact that the threat of the sack is the goad which drives the worker to toil hard making profits for the capitalists, and that it becomes ineffective if there is no unemployment, their answer has been that they would find some other incentive. Socialism will have its own incentive, the knowledge that all are working for the good of all and not for the benefit of the propertied class, but the Labour Party by some mental twist imagine that an incentive that will arise naturally under Socialism could be imposed on planned Capitalism. Mr. Bevin put this point of view in a broadcast to America on April 25th, 1941. Basing his view on a misreading of wartime experience of the Essential Work Order he declared, “a factor that is becoming apparent is you get better discipline and loyalty with fear of dismissal removed than you do by the threat of it.” (Daily Herald, 26/4/1941).

Another misjudgement of the planners arose out of their failure to understand the way capitalism fetters production. Seeing that in times of crisis of “overproduction” there are masses of unsaleable goods, that is to say goods that cannot be sold at a price sufficient to yield a profit, they jumped to the conclusion that capitalism actually produces more than enough to provide adequately for the needs of the underfed and under-clothed working class. This was never true. The Labourites sneered at Marx and failed to appreciate the charge he and other Socialists made against capitalism that because it produces only for sale at a profit and not for human need it prevents the production of sufficient food, clothing and shelter for the needs of humanity. If all the able-bodied population were working, and if all the wasteful forms of activity that are indispensable to capitalism were cut out (e.g. financial operations, armed forces, munitions, bureaucratic activities, etc.), then the production of useful articles could be increased two-fold or more. What the Labour Party did not realise is that these forms of waste really are indispensable to capitalism and cannot be eliminated under capitalism. Planning has actually made some of them bigger not smaller.

Through their error the Labour Party encouraged the workers to believe that under Labour Government it would be possible to “soak the rich” to feed the poor. They published a pamphlet, The Nation’s Wealth at the Nation’s Service (Douglas Jay, Labour Party, 1938) in which this view was put in all its crudity. Quoting figures of the vast income and fortunes owned by the capitalists Mr. Jay said: —

“Here is the available income and capital on which Labour must draw to supply the minimum human needs of the poorest, and to see that no man woman, or child lacks food, clothes, housing, education, or the necessary instruments of civilian, or military defence.”

The rich still have their property, and their gross incomes (before taxation) have increased more than wages. True they are more heavily taxed but this has largely been used to pay for the increased civil service and armed forces – what Mr. Jay calls “instruments of civilian or military defence.” How this feeds the poor it is hard to imagine, unless it is intended to fatten up the civil servants and soldiers in order to eat them later on.

The remedy for the workers’ poverty is not soaking the rich but Socialism.

It has now become a question of only academic interest because the Labour Government soon found out by experience what any socialist could have told them, that you can’t keep capitalism functioning, dependent as it is on profit-making, if your policy results in profit being eliminated. So now we have the Labour ministers telling the workers to work harder, and assuring them that nothing more is to be gained by soaking the rich.

On the Labour Party’s planning in general and on their excuses for the failure of their plans little need be said. We have had scores of plans, constantly changed in each of the several crises, and all the worker has to do is to read in the latest crisis speeches about the new austerities we are to undergo and then consult the Labour Party’s election literature. He will search in vain to find any of these austerities and pains and penalties set out there. The foretellers of our future told us everything except what has actually occurred. The stock excuse is that things have happened that were unforeseen, from the hard winter to the rise of American prices; but that is the crux of the whole matter. If planned capitalism is possible at all then the whole essence of it is that the planners must be able to foresee what is going to happen. If you can’t foresee, then you can’t plan and planning is worse than useless. Equally puerile is the excuse that the planners did not expect things here or abroad to be as bad as they are and therefore only planned for economic fair weather, not foul. In 1879 the Tay Bridge collapsed in a gale and a train plunged into the flood with a loss of 80 lives. Imagine the engineers and designers excusing themselves afterwards with the plea that they only designed the bridge to stand fair weather stresses, not winter gales!

Equally to the point is the fact that the world economic gale of which the Labour Government now complains is partly the result of its own plans. It planned to increase exports and to limit imports and forgot that the more it succeeded in doing this the more the other countries, in self defence, and under their own planning schemes, were trying to do the same, keeping out British exports and encouraging their own exports.

The Economist need not linger in doubt any longer. Capitalism cannot be planned into harmony either by the Labour Government or by themselves.

Edgar Hardcastle

Dr. Sweezy on Marx’s theories (1947)

Book Review from the September 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the late Lord Keynes wrote his General Theory of Employment Interest and Money it was hailed in certain quarters as a step towards Marx in its method of analysis in respect of the problems of present day society. His conclusions revealed, however, that so far as any realistic evaluation of the nature of contemporary Capitalism was concerned, he had taken two steps away from Marxism. Undoubtedly a renewed interest in Marx’s economic teachings has been stimulated by the recent development of Capitalism and certain economists going further than Keynes have attempted to reconcile their own academic teachings with the objective analysis of Capitalist Society carried out by Marx in the middle of the last century. The results we need hardly say have been barren and, at times, ludicrous. To students of Marx, therefore, any book which sets out to present his doctrines in the light of modern capitalist evolution is of interest. Dr. Sweezy, a Harvard economist, attempts this and in some respects succeeds in his book The Theory of Capitalist Development, although in others he overwhelmingly fails.

His opening chapter on the methodology of Marx is interesting; methodology being another name for scientific method or the mode of investigation by which systematised knowledge is acquired. This involves the great importance of the process of “abstraction” which is essential to scientific method. A process which, as Sweezy says, “constitutes the method of successive approximation, or moving from the more abstract to the more concrete in a step by step fashion.” To put it another way, it is a question of going from the simple to the complex. When analysing a complex situation one must at the outset eliminate anything that is extraneous and likely to complicate the issue. To use a scientific axiom: to understand is to omit. Thus to understand the essential it is necessary to exclude what is non-essential for the purpose of the immediate investigation. A single example will illustrate our meaning. By the process of abstraction we can recognise the identical elements denoted by the objects, man, horse, bird, fish, etc., and combine them into a general concept—”vertebrate.” Thus we have the perception of a common property or identity of structure, which exists independently of their differences. To use scientific terminology, in order to arrive at this underlying relationship which exists between these different forms of life, they must be treated as an isolated process. In passing to a more detailed account, however, of the actual physical structures peculiar to their kind, factors which were arbitrarily eliminated as non-essential for the purpose of the crucial investigation, must now enter into consideration. The broad classification, vertebrate, now comes to acquire a more qualified and limited connotation the more it is brought into conformity with the totality of the various species, concretely considered. The validity of the use of abstraction is then: does it assist in helping to discover the essential relationship connecting the phenomena under investigation? That is its ultimate justification.

The same scientific principle holds good in Marxism. Marx began his analysis of capitalism by treating it as an isolated process of simple commodity relationships between capitalist and worker in which complicating factors like differences in the organic composition of capital, foreign trade, export of capital, non-capitalist regions, were deliberately excluded. Volume I of Capital can then be said to be the first stage of abstraction. Of course in capitalist society, considered from its concrete totality, commodities do not sell at their value. That socially necessary labour —the basis of value—is not a constant but ever-changing quantity. That monopolistic practices and imperfect competition distort the pattern of exchange relations, and so on. All this might seem to imply that Marx was going away from the actual conditions prevailing in capitalism but as every scientific thinker knows, scientific analysis rigorously demands such a procedure if the set of events under analysis is to be provided with an efficient cause for their happening. When ignoramuses like Schumpeter and Alexander Gray, whose books on Marxism have been recently reviewed in these columns, scream with the rest of their academic brethren about the so-called contradictions between the various volumes of Marx, they fail to see that such apparent contradictions are an integral part of the scientific method. They imply no more than various stages of abstraction for the purpose of analysing more clearly the problems of the present social system and so arriving at a thorough and comprehensive knowledge of the social forces underlying it. This is our interpretation of the guts of Sweezy’s opening chapter. There is nothing original in this explanation of Marx’s economic methodology but the author elucidates it clearly and lucidly.

Chapter 2 on Value is also instructive, the author dealing with the more abstract side of Marx’s value principle the qualitative aspect. Undoubtedly the opening chapter of Marx’s Capital volume I, has been the least understood by his critics. It was here that Marx sought to demonstrate that any theory of value to be scientifically valid must discover a homogeneous quantity which although itself no? value was nevertheless able to provide the terms by which the exchange value of commodities could be expressed. It was here that Marx’s abstract undifferentiated labour or the expenditure under socially determined conditions of production provided the clue. Thus although labour is not value itself, it constitutes nevertheless the substance of value and so enables the different kinds of concrete labour—use values—to be reduced to this element common to them all. By being made qualitatively equal they can thus be rendered quantitatively comparable as exchange values. It was Marx’s separation of labour-power and labour—his major contribution to political economy—that enabled him to elucidate his theory of value much more cogently and comprehensively than his classical predecessors, Smith and Ricardo. Marx showed that labour-power was a commodity whose value was determined like all other commodities by the amount of social labour necessary for its production and reproduction. Labour, on the other hand, was a definite expenditure of human productive activity and thus capable of objective quantitative measurement and so as a value principle is independent of mere price fluctuations. The fact that abstract materialised labour takes a commodity form is the outcome of historically conditioned social relationship of commodity owners (including, of course, buyers and sellers of labour-power). Value itself is then a social quality, quantitatively expressed in exchange value. It can be seen then, the decisive and revolutionary break Marx made from the classical economists, Adam Smith and Ricardo, who merely treated value from its quantitative side—Exchange Value.

Sweezy also discusses Marx’s Law of the tendency of the falling rate of profit. The rate of profit must not be confused with the rate of surplus value. Thus if the organic composition of capital is £9,000 constant and £1,000 variable and the rate of exploitation of the workers employed by the variable capital is 100 per cent, then the surplus value produced by the workers will be £1,000. The capitalist, however, computes his profit on the total outlay of his capital, thus the rate of profit is “surplus” divided by “constant” plus “variable” which is 10 per cent. With every increase in the ratio of constant to variable capital the rate of profit falls even if the rate of exploitation remains the same. The author does not, it seems, accept the tendency of the rate of profit to fall due to the rising organic composition of capital but seeks to show that accumulation of capital with its increasing demand for labour-power tends to raise wages, and by so reducing the amount of surplus value bring about a fall in the rate of profit. Only when the capitalists strive through the introduction of labour-saving machinery to maintain the rate of profit or to raise its former level does the rising organic composition of capital come into the picture (page 105). It is true that as accumulation expands the supply of available labour power in the market will approach exhaustion point and the price of labour power will tend to rise, at least in certain industries and among certain workers. Fresh capital, meeting less and less reserves of cheap labour power will also tend to go increasingly into constant capital (labour saving machinery, etc.), and the organic composition of capital will be raised. Nevertheless this change is dictated by the relative scarcity of labour power and it does not follow that alteration in the organic composition of capital is necessarily offset by a proportional increase in the rate of exploitation. In this case a rising organic composition of capital is associated with a fall in the rate of profit. Moreover, as Marx points out,

“Two labourers, each working 12 hours daily, cannot produce the same mass of surplus-value as 24 labourers working only 2 hours even if they could live on air and did not have to work for themselves at all. In this respect the compensation of the reduction in the number of labourers by means of an intensification of exploitation has certain impassable limits. It may, for this reason, check the fall of the rate of profit but cannot prevent it entirely.” (Capital, Vol. 3, page 290, Kerr edition)

It is true that cheapening of the elements of constant capital, increase of relative surplus value and relative overpopulation are counteracting tendencies against the decline in the rate of profit. It has been often said that Marx’s analysis gives no clear indication of which set of tendencies would prevail (although Marx himself appeared inclined to the view that a fall in the rate of profit would be associated with continued capitalist expansion and increased technical changes.) Marx, however, was the last person to deduce a falling rate of profit in a vacuum. That would have been foreign to his own scientific and historical approach. For him the dynamics of capitalist society and the interaction of the totality of class relations and interests was the dominant feature in shaping economic trends. And there the matter must rest.

The author renders a good account of the general nature of capitalist crises although his own treatment on certain aspects of the matter must be read with circumspection. Sweezy enumerates two types of crises, one associated with the falling rate of profit and the other that he terms realisation crises, i.e., the inability of the capitalist to sell commodities at profitable prices. This last type of crisis emphasises what Sweezy calls the underconsumptionist tendencies inherent in capitalism. This “underconsumptionist ” approach seems, however, an unsatisfactory formulation of the treatment of crises. It is true that under the stimulus of capitalist accumulation the productive forces will expand and this will tend to higher wages. Nevertheless wage levels are always in the final analysis regulated by the desire of the capitalist class to maintain the customary rate of profit on their capital outlay. Moreover, as the result of the increased productivity of the worker arising out of the expansion of the productive forces, the ratio between the value of his labour power and the value of the wealth he produces is further increased, higher wages notwithstanding. His own share of the total product suffers then a relative decline. With a greater amount of surplus value in the hands of the capitalists there is a tendency for increasing investments in the means of production. Thus the expanding forces of production come into conflict with the limited consuming power based on the antagonistic character of class income distribution inherent in capitalism. To call this underconsumption is, however, to strain the meaning of the term in popular economic usage. Again this underconsumptionist aspect is merely an inevitable corollary of a more fundamental feature that is the basic conflict between the powers of production and the productive relations of capitalist society. As Marx points out,

“It is not a fact that too much wealth is produced. But it is true that there is periodical over-production of wealth in its capitalist and self-contradictory form. . . The capitalist mode of production, for this reason, meets with barriers at a certain scale of production which would be inadequate under different conditions. It comes to a standstill at a point determined by the production and realisation of profit not by the satisfaction of social needs.” (Capital, Vol. 3, page 303, Kerr edition).

Or, again, “the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.” (Page 293, same work).

Again Sweezy’s view that crises arise due to a shortage of labour-power which forces wages up and consequently causes the rate of profit to decline is hardly Marx’s view of the matter. In Vol. I of Capital on The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation Marx repeatedly stresses the fact that demand for labour-power does not keep step with the expansion of capital. In other words owing to the rising organic composition of capital the variable portion does not, as a means of the employment of wage-labour, keep pace with increases in the working population. Marx, of course, does not deny that the possibility of crises can arise from “labour shortage,” especially in early capitalism (page 700, Capital, Vol. I, Modern Library edition). Just as the present shortage of workers today carries distinct crisis implications. Nevertheless the appearance and growth of a surplus industrial army he held was the chief feature in the general law of capitalist accumulation. To sum up, Marx’s writings do not indicate two separate features of crises but rather that the possibilities of crises and crises themselves are indissolubly linked with the basic contradictions inherent in present day class society It is these contradictions which give to crisis under capitalism its familiar periodic character.

The chapter which criticises breakdown theories is excellent. The author shows that no such theory of final capitalist catastrophe can be logically deduced from Marx’s writings. Rosa Luxemburg, Otto Bauer and Grossman are all acutely criticised for their formulation of breakdown theories. Our own pamphlet, Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse (written during the last crisis) was a valuable contribution in showing why crises as such do not bring an end to capitalism, in answer to the spokesmen of various political parties, Communist Party included, who were noisily proclaiming the 1931 slump as the beginning of the end of the present economy.

For reasons of space we cannot adequately deal with Sweezy’s mathematical treatment of the transformation of value into prices of production for the purpose of maintaining equilibrium conditions between industries that produce means of production and those that produce means of consumption.

But surely the essence of the matter lies in the historical treatment of the development from simple commodity production to a developed capitalist economy. In simple commodity production constant capital plays little part and is, therefore, relatively unimportant. Here the law of value is directly controlling the exchange relationships. In modern capitalism different organic compositions of capitals bulk large. Seeing, however, that only the variable portion (the part employing wage labour) produces surplus value then different units of capital according to their organic composition will produce different quantities of surplus value and consequently different rates of profit. The capitalist, however, is indifferent to the ratio of means of production to variable capital and seeks the customary rate of profit on his total capital outlay. How this is brought about is due to the competition for spheres of investment in different industries, capital leaving those industries whose rate of profit is low and invading and expanding those industries where the rate of profit is high and where, as the result of this expansion, prices fall and with them the rate of profit. By this incessant competition for various spheres of profitable investment an equalisation of profit or an average rate of profit is brought about. Thus the price at which capitalists sell their goods oscillates not round their value but the price of production, i.e., the cost of production plus the average rate of profit. Nevertheless the sum of the prices of production at which commodities are produced equals their total values. Again this process does not alter the sum total of surplus value produced b the workers, the only point is its distribution according to the requirements of a profit motive economy which necessitates an equal share on a given expenditure of capital. Under developed capitalism the law of value is indirectly controlling exchange relationships, nevertheless, it must constitute the starting point of investigation for elucidating the phenomena of production prices peculiar to capitalism. This modification of value into production prices is then the result of a long drawn-out historical process and a mathematical treatment of it from the unhistorical point of view of equilibrium conditions has little significance, as Sweezy admits (page 128), “the law of value can he discovered and analysed in principle by the use of either value calculation or price calculation.”

His last chapter, “The Decline of World Capitalism” is unadulterated rubbish. He mistakenly holds the view that the world is split into two separate social systems, i.e., Socialism in Russia and Capitalism elsewhere whose fount is the U.S.A. He further holds that the social system of Russia coupled with its growth elsewhere will exercise a disintegrating effect on capitalism. Great Britain and Western Europe — presumably on the Soviet model—might go socialist at the end of the war (this book being first published in America in 1942). Bit by bit Socialism would undermine the stability and structure of Capitalism in perhaps a peaceful fashion. Thus the Fabian principle of peaceful permeation is elevated to international status. Apart from the theoretical falsification of the real issue Sweezy’s idea of “a peaceful era” following the war has been hopelessly falsified by the inter-imperialist rivalries of the great capitalist powers, U.S.A., Britain, France and Russia.

Nevertheless sections of the book provide a useful source for the better understanding of the theoretical foundations of Marxism and its application to the social problems of our time.

Ted Wilmott

Notes by the Way: Shades of 1931 (1947)

The Notes by the Way Column from the September 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

Shades of 1931

 

It is interesting to note the similarities and differences of the present crisis and that of 1931, which split the Labour Government, and led to its Prime Minister, J. R. MacDonald, going over to a National Government while the present Labour Party leaders went into opposition. Both crises have been described as being largely due to the aftermath of war, for MacDonald’s manifesto to the nation for the October, 1931, elections referred to “some of the most fruitful causes of the economic misfortunes—like War Debts and Reparations—from which the whole world now suffers so grievously.” Both crises took the form of an “adverse balance of trade,” too many imports and too few exports, and then as now the Government was looking to the expansion of exports and restriction of imports as the way out.

There is a curious resemblance between the present Government’s appeal to Parliament for emergency powers, not for specific and known measures, but for measures of all kinds that may appear necessary from time to time, and MacDonald’s 1931 appeal .to the electors for a “doctor’s mandate”—”as it is impossible to foresee in the changing conditions of today what may arise, no one can set out a programme of detail . . . The Government must therefore be free to consider every proposal likely to help, such as tariffs, expansion of exports and contraction of imports, commercial treaties and mutual economic arrangements with the Dominions.”

Among the differences are the following. This time British capitalism’s troubles are attributed to the rise of food prices in U.S.A. and in the world generally. In 1931 it was the opposite, we were told that the trouble was due to the catastrophic fall of prices. Mr. G. D. H. Cole wrote in 1932: “The result of increased productive power has been … a great mass of unemployment in the manufacturing countries, and a fall in the prices of foodstuffs and raw materials which has more and more “impoverished the producers of these classes of goods. These impoverished producers cannot afford to buy as many manufactures as before, with the consequence that many businesses have gone bankrupt and many millions of industrial workers have been thrown out of work.” ( Economic Tracts for the Times,” 1932, page 12).

This time, says Mr. Douglas Jay, “the only final solution is a fall in the world price of food and raw materials.” (Daily Herald, 4/8/47). Of course, when the fall takes place we shall be back at 1931 !

Last time the trouble was said to be “over production,” this time it is “underproduction.” Last time the Government took the lead by reducing unemployment pay and the pay of civil servants, teachers, etc. This time it is an appeal to the workers to work longer hours and not press for higher wages.

Spivs and Hard-faced Men

It is an old story that what the parties of capitalism say when they are in opposition undergoes a remarkable change when they get into power. A straw which shows the way the wind is blowing is the way the Labour Party has set up an entirely new Aunt Sally in place of the old one. After World War I the Labour attack was directed against a cartoon-creature popularised by Will Dyson—the Hard-Faced business man, or war profiteer. We hear little of him now, his place having been taken by the “Spiv,” a term used for the individual who prefers to live by gambling, quick dealing or by “fiddling” in the black market, rather than by toiling in a mine or a factory.

The Labourites are not lacking in explanations for this, in the pretence that the idle rich are not with us any more. This is a droll story particularly favoured by Mr. Dalton.

Intoxicated with their own belief that capitalism would be all right if only it were “controlled” the idea is only very slowly creeping into the minds of the Labourites that black markets are the inevitable product of price controls and rationing. Where there is great wealth and poverty side by side the rich will always be able to get what they want, legally if they can, illegally if they must.

Political Secrecy

The Committee of Privileges of the House of Commons has condemned the practice of M.P.’s selling to the Press information about the proceedings at private Party meetings in the House of Commons. While not holding that Party meetings have the same privileges as sittings of the House of Commons the Committee, or a majority of them, hold that certain privileges attach to such meetings because the holding of private Party meetings is now a normal part of Parliamentary procedure.

Some M.P.’s differ from the majority of the Committee on this point but it does not appear to have occurred to anybody that the simplest, best, and only completely water-tight, remedy for the selling of information about private Party meetings is to cease to make them private.

And if anybody thinks that secrecy of Party meetings is necessary it is sufficient to point out that S.P.G.B. meetings, conferences, E.C. meetings, etc., are open to all members and to the public. But then, of course, the S.P.G.B. is a very different sort of political party, one that is really democratic.

The Communists and Censorship

The Catholic Universe criticised the Russian government on the ground that it had done everything to prevent Russians from taking an interest in Western civilisation. The Daily Worker (28/7/47) retorted by pointing out that Shakespeare and other English classics are widely read in Russian translations. Mentioning Marlowe. Smollett and Fielding the Daily Worker asked, “would, perchance, any of these works he found in the Vatican’s ‘Index’ of forbidden books?”

Quite a legitimate retort, except for the fact that in Bolshevik Russia, just as in Catholic Spain, there is suppression of organisations, news and views unpalatable to those in power. Besides, in view of the way the Communists and Catholics managed to work hand in hand to interfere with freedom, of the Press in Italy the former should keep quiet about the latter. According to the Rome Correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (14/5/47) they voted together on anti-democratic clauses of the new Constitution. When the Catholics moved “that in cases of emergency publications may be sequestrated by police officials, provided they give an account of their action within 24 hours” the Communists voted with them; as also when the Catholics moved for “the insertion in the new Constitution of the Lateran Pacts and Concordat which were signed by Mussolini and Pope Pius XI.” It was only a revolt of the Communist rank and file which prevented their M.P.’s from voting for the prohibition of divorce.

There is another aspect of the supply of information to the Russian workers. The Daily Worker thinks that its case is made good because Russian workers are permitted to read the works of long dead English novelists and playwrights. The Daily Worker mentions that “new translation of works by Dickens are to be published in the Soviet Union.” Now for an example of the use made of Dickens. Cabling from Moscow during what passes in Russia for an election, Alexander Werth told the following incident:

“Six young Communist girls wanted to know how candidates were chosen and campaigns conducted in ‘bourgeois’ countries. They wrote to the Young Communist paper . . . which promptly replied by referring them to the Eatanswill election in the ‘Pickwick Papers’.” (Manchester Guardian, 25/1/47).

Mr. Werth goes on to say that the Young Communist paper told its inquirers, “Eatanswill is an imaginary place, but what Dickens wrote correctly describes English reality.”

Of course the motive for this deception is obvious. If the Russian workers discovered that real electoral contests take place outside of that country they might the more quickly resent the continuance of their totalitarian regime which permits the existence of only one political party.

On the subject of the Russian censorship the Daily Worker (31/7/47) reported the complaint made by the Amalgamated Engineering Union delegation which visited Russia last year. The Daily Worker’s statement reads:

“In conclusion, however, the report says the delegation sometimes had a feeling ‘that we did not have real freedom of movement and action.’ ‘For example,’ it adds, ‘photography was discouraged and our letters home were censored.’ ”

Mr. Aneurin Bevan on the Export Drive

The Sunday Express (6/7/47) quotes from a speech made by Mr. Bevan in 1945:

“We are told by some people who ought to know better that we shall need to increase our exports after the war by 50 per cent. . . . Expanding exports are the will-o’-the-wisp private enterprise is compelled to pursue.”

All the countries are now (a) trying to increase their exports and (b) cutting down their imports. Now that Mr. Bevan is a member of a government engaged in trying to increase exports by 75 per cent. over the prewar level and at the same time preaching austerity and less imports perhaps he will explain what happens when all the countries export to the limit and import nothing.

Edgar Hardcastle

Editorial: Labour “fiddles” with the Cost of Living (1947)

Editorial from the September 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

When we insist that the abolition of capitalism and introduction of Socialism is the only way out for the working-class, members of the Labour Party usually give the answer that Socialism is something for the future and what is needed is a practical policy for the present, a policy to deal with everyday things like prices and wages and rents and fares. Let us then take a look round and see just what the Labour Government has done about these things.

Between the wars the Labour Party denounced the official Cost of Living Index on the ground that it had long ceased to be reliable. Since 1939 the Index has moved further and further away from reality. Government policy, both in the war-time Coalition and since Labour came to power, was to juggle with the Index in order to prevent it from rising beyond the point it reached in 1942. Thus the pretence was kept up that the cost of living had increased since 1939 by only 31 per cent., or about 4d. in the 1s. This juggling was done by using subsidies to keep down the prices of certain articles that were included in the Index and ignoring the much bigger increases of prices not included. Of course almost everybody (except the Government) admits that the increase is much more than 31 per cent. As long ago as April, 1946, the Manchester Guardian concluded, on the basis of other official figures, that “the cost of living has increased by 55 per cent.” (Manchester Guardian, 15/4/46), and recently Mr. Bernard Harris, City Editor of the Sunday Express, summed the matter up with the remark, “That Index has apparently become incapable of movement, and no one pays any attention to it any more.” (Sunday Express, 1/6/47).

Now the Labour Government has thought up a new deception, A more accurate index is to replace the old one, but, and here is the snag, it is to relate only to future movements of the cost of living and will not indicate how large an increase has taken place already; and although the cost of living has been rising sharply during the past year the workers are now told by Mr. Attlee not to ask for wage increases. ”I appeal to all of you not to press at this time for increased wages.” (Daily Herald, 7/8/47).

So prices have risen and wages are not to rise, which is just the opposite of Labour promises. They promised to support higher wages, and what they said about prices was, “everybody knows that money and savings lose their value if prices rise so rents and the prices of the necessities of life will be controlled.” (Labour Party Programme at the General Election, 1945, “Let us Face the Future.”).

True the Labour Party kept that promise to continue rent control and indeed extended it by setting up Rent Tribunals for furnished rooms ; but here again there are several niggers in the woodpile. While net rents are controlled, actual rents are rising because of the increase of rates, landlords being able to pass it on owing to the acute shortage of accommodation; and everyone knows that the Tribunals have only touched the fringe of the problem for the unfortunate tenants of furnished rooms, many of whom are afraid to lodge a complaint for fear of being turned out a few months later.

Here are a few news items on the increase of rents. 

“Rents of many houses and flats are jumping because of stiff increases in rates. Uncontrolled flat and house prices are soaring.” (Sunday Express, 1/6/47).

“Six hundred homeless families applying for council houses at Maltby, South Yorkshire, have to answer a wages quiz to make sure they can pay the rents. Rents of pre-war council houses range from 9s. to 11s.; new houses between 14s. and 16s. a week.” (Daily Express, 25/6/47).

“The rents for council houses being built here [Tunbridge Wells] . . . are claimed by Labour Councillor John Hutchings to be so high that two-thirds of the 1,238 families on the Royal Borough’s waiting list will be unable to afford to live in them . . . The rents for two types of houses have been confirmed at 26s. 6d. and 27s. 6d., inclusive of rates. The rents for the 14 largest houses, worked out on the same basis, will be 32s. 9d. a week.” (News-Chronicle, 5/6/47).

Another item of expenditure is fares. In 1942 Mr. Bevin, at that time Minister of Labour and now Foreign Secretary, had something to say about the workers’ inability to afford both the rents and the fares, then being charged.

“It would be essential for the cost of habitation to be reduced. Rent and transport took too big a slice out of the wage income of our people.” (In a speech to the National Chamber of Trade News-Chronicle, 16/7/42).

That was the promise, now for the performance. After several war-time increases of fares by London Transport and the main line railways the Minister of Transport announced in Parliament on August 5th, “all railway charges will be raised to 55 per cent. above pre-war with effect from October 1st next.”

The moral of all this is that Labourism does not solve the workers’ problems. Socialism is the only hope.

Humour most foul (1947)

From the September 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

In these hard times of restrictions in nearly everything that makes life worth living humour is a precious relief from work and worry. We are, therefore, greatly indebted to the Labour Party for contributing a gleam of gaiety to the times. It has produced a large four-page sheet, printed on nice paper, entitled The Labour News Special, complete with jokes and pictures and selling for the modest sum of one penny. The following extracts from this sheet may provide our readers with a relish for their unappetising meals; they are taken from an article entitled “Nationalisation to the Rescue—The Epic Story of the Mines” :

“The Labour Government’s Socialist policy has been proved right. For years the enemies of progress have pilloried the word ‘ Socialism,’ held it up to ridicule, abused it, distorted it into unrecognisable forms in order to fend off the day when the common people should take their affairs into their own hands.

“That day has at last come, and now it is possible to know the truth about Socialism.

“Here is the truth.

“The first heavy industry to be socialised was coal-mining. On 1st January, 1947, the coal mines became the nation’s property.

“From that date the tempo of coal production began to increase with amazing swiftness and men began to flock back to the mines.”

After a reference to other basic industries in which “these same socialist principles apply,” such as the Bank of England, Civil Aviation, Cable and Wireless, etc., the article concludes :

“With control of these basic industries the nation will stand four-square to all the storms and uncertainties of present-day conditions and will be able to plan its economy for the good of all the people.”

Well! Well! Well! But what is the meaning of Mr. Attlee’s repeated doleful forecasts if impending economic disaster; Mr. Strachey’s forecasts of yet more severe food restrictions, and the vicious official outbursts on slacking and absenteeism in the mines for which severe penalties are threatened? But perhaps after all this is only another joke, maybe in rather bad taste !

“O Sweet Content, O Sweet, O Sweet Content.”

Gilmac.

 

Footnote

Inset into the article referred to above is a picture of a coal cutting machine, under which is the following information:

“This is the miracle machine—The Meco-Moore coal cutter and loader at work on the coal face. Fourteen men operating it can take 300 tons at a shift, the output of 30 men working by hand. One of Labour’s first jobs is the introduction of more of these machines into suitable mines and the modernisation of many old and neglected pits.”

It must be heartening to those invited and forced into the mining industry to know that some day they may be displaced by machines !

Gilmac.

Money Must Come In. Our Crisis (1947)

Party News from the September 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

Except for very special purposes, it is many years since we have had to appeal to Socialist Standard readers for donations to Party Funds. We have to do so now. Our financial position at the moment is not critical in the sense that party activity is slowing down for want of money. The Party is, in fact, more active than at any time since it was formed. And it is because the Party is so active that our income is beginning to show signs that it might fail to meet the cost of the work the Party is doing and wants to do in the very near future.

Here is the position. During the war, whilst we were able to keep going, war-time circumstances tended to slow down expansion of propaganda and the publication of literature. Funds tended to accumulate. Every pound “saved” measured opportunities unfortunately and unavoidably missed. But such opportunities were not lost. When the war came to an end we found that our membership was nearly double pre-war. And so it remains. New Groups and Branches began to be formed. More propaganda was undertaken and more pamphlets were published. Full-time speakers were sent out to help the new Groups. We entered two Parliamentary elections. As we expanded so financial reserves began to decline. We were spending money for purposes for which it had been donated. We could not have our cake and eat it; and nor would we have it so. More money means more socialist propaganda. At the moment we have two very important projects that must be fulfilled. A new pamphlet on The Racial Question, and a new edition of the Communist Manifesto annotated by the Party in commemoration of the centenary of its publication. We need your help.

We earnestly urge all who are sympathetic to increase their contributions to the Party. It will be wisely used. Never did the Party more deserve it. Never were there more young, promising new speakers striving to fit themselves as able propagandists. Never were there more debates or better meetings, never more interest and enthusiasm for our case than today. Never was socialist propaganda more desperately necessary. Comrades and friends! Send in your donations quickly and send them regularly.

Funds Organiser.

SPGB Meetings (1947)

Party News from the September 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

At Home and Abroad . . . (1971)

The Home and Abroad Column from the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

At Home

 

The big question raised by the OZ trial is of course: what is pornography? What is it in society that depraves and corrupts to such an extent that those responsible need to be punished and shut away where they can do no more damage? Any adult who has ever been a child, remembering their own sexual fantasies and confusions, must wonder whether they would be corrupted by the kind stuff in OZ and the rest of the underground press. It might even be argued that such matter, by its very blatancy, is the very opposite of corruptive. But what about other forces in society whose pernicious influence is undeniable? We are not discussing here anything which even appears in any magazines, but the real, everyday experiences of life under capitalism. How else can we describe the men responsible for incidents like the My Lai, if not corrupted by the war? What effects does poverty and repression have on our lives, if not to deprave us? Is bad housing the kind of environment calculated to solidify or to destroy human relationships? What has happened to the ‘morals’ of a man who debases himself to the boss for the sake of a bit of promotion or a pettyfogging rise? Capitalist society is essentially depraved and it corrupts everything in it, including its people. No court with the wigged judge will ever try the system but it has been examined, found wanting and condemned. We should lose no more time in locking it away into the prison of unpleasant memories.

One of the great tragedies of capitalism is in the fact that, again and again, workers are misled into believing that they are doing something to end the system when in reality they are doing nothing of the kind. Faced with the reality, the incident usually becomes written into historical myth, which dies very hard. Such were the Spanish Civil War, the General Strike, the successive Labour Governments. The latest candidate in this dismal line is the so-called workers’ take over of the Upper Clyde. Part of the delusion here is that the shipyards collapsed as a result of a Government failure to subsidise them, when in fact they collapsed because they could not live up to the basic capitalist requirements of making a profit. Whoever runs them will be faced with that reality. And if the ‘take-over’ fails the workers will also face the greater bitterness stemming from the promise and the delusion. Yet we know from experience that failure will only strengthen the myth; It will be explained in terms of accident or treachery or the like. The ‘take-over’ of Upper Clyde is tailor-made for the fairy tale story books of the left wing.

 

Abroad

 

President Nixon, it is reported, is disappointing many of the people who backed him in 1968 for the presidency by his policy of negotiations with China. It is no new thing for a politician to win power on promises, both explicitly and implied, which he goes back on after he has won. Very often the promises are easily seen, at the time of making them, to be impermanent and impractical. In the nature of the thing, we are more accustomed to leaders of the left being involved in this sort of double cross, but there have been notable exceptions from the other side. In this country, there was Macmillan after Suez and with his policy on Africa. Abroad there was the classic case of de Gaulle, who so outraged the people who helped him to power that they tried several times to kill him. And now Nixon is upsetting his friends by fashioning his policy to meet the real demands of capitalism rather than political theories. There is some amusement to be had from observing the reaction of the disappointed supporters, who in each case thought about betrayal and turned for salvation to another leader. The left wing are of course well familiar with this tactic. Nixon’s angry followers are now thinking about supporting Ronald Reagan for president in 1972, as if he would be able to run American capitalism on assumptions other than those applied by Nixon—and as if he is any more consistent and had in any case not already been straightened by the President. The search by capitalism’s supporters for the honest, consistent leader who will never go against his word is never ending—until capitalism itself ends.

 

Politics

 

As the months go by the government of Edward Heath is increasingly shown up as equally bankrupt and impotent as its predecessors. As each successive blow falls — Ulster, Upper Clyde, Unemployment, Rising prices to name only a few — the Labour Party’s excitement heightens, with its hunger at approaching power. One report has it that constituency parties have been alerted to face a general election in the near future. This may be wishful thinking, a generous dose of which is essential to keep any capitalist party ticking over. What can be said now is that any general election will be presented to us in familiar, lying terms. The Labour Party will claim to be able to make capitalism work in our interests when they can’t. And we will be told that the issue of the election is something like the Common Market or law and order or nationalisation versus free enterprise when it fact it is, as always, capitalism or Socialism.

Let’s have common ownership, not Common Market (1971)

From the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

A pathetic spectacle provided by the reformist parties and their satellites as they work themselves into a lather over the issues thrown up by capitalism. They fall for it every time. Whether it be the balance of payments, export-chasing, or gold reserves, at the drop of a hat they form up into positions and start to do battle for the capitalist class, whose interests alone are involved.

Capitalism has always provided plenty of distractions to take working class attention away from the real issue, and every time the self-styled leaders of the workers have proclaimed them as vital issues that will lastingly effect the future course of history.

The Common Market is just another distraction. The arguments for and against joining are equally irrelevant. One thing is certain, that the real issue has not been and is not being debated by the pundits of the “left” and “right”.

Capitalism often produces strange bedfellows, but when the mutual commitment to capitalism of both “left” and “right” wing groups is understood, it is not surprising to find the so-called Communist Party and National Front in the same camp, and the Trotskyists trailing along as usual behind the Tribune set, with Enoch Powell thrown in for good measure. The Labour Party front bench, which maintained a precarious unity while in power, have gone their different ways. Wilson complains loudly about “knives” and “hatchets”, but is not listened to by Roy Jenkins, Michael Stewart or Lord George Brown. The petty demagogues line up in a power struggle inside the Labour Party, as Michael Foot seeks to purge pro-market members from the shadow cabinet.

The two sides bicker incessantly about the “terms”, about New Zealand, and the possibility of better pickings for British capitalism elsewhere. None of these things is of the least concern to the working class. And, by working class, we do not mean the wage-slaves of just Britain and Europe, but of the entire world. What then is the real issue?

Throughout the world the means of production are concentrated in the hands of an owning minority — the capitalist class. This means that the vast majority own nothing but their physical and mental abilities to work. They must sell these abilities for wages or salaries in order to live. This vast non-owning majority is the working class. There is an antagonism of interests between the capitalist class owners and the working class non-owners since the fundamental relationship of capitalism, that of employer to employee, rests upon exploitation. The interest of the capitalist class is to maximise their profits and accumulate capital through the exploitation of wage-labour. To serve this interest, the whole world has been turned into a market for the profitable disposal of commodities (or wealth produced by wage-labour under conditions of private property and exploitation). The entire globe is the hunting ground for minerals and other resources to feed the hungry machines of industry, to keep up the flood of commodities and expand profits. The rivalry between national and international capitalists promotes their military power and fashions their alliances. War, like poverty, unemployment, slums and hunger, is inseparable from capitalism.

Both the pro- and anti-marketeers work on the same false assumptions, namely, that the market economy is indispensable, and, that there, is a unified national or European interest which workers and capitalists have in common. Socialists totally reject these assumptions. The interest of the working class is to end the system that exploits them; to abolish the employer-to-employee relationship; to do away with commodity production and get rid of the markets profits mad-house. This will mean the abolition of the wages-system and of buying and selling. In short, the interest of the working class, is to get rid of capitalism. The real issue is one of ownership. The workers in the six countries which at present belong to the EEC own none of the vast industrial or other resources of those countries. They are wage-slaves, just like the workers in Britain.

The only market that awaits British workers, like their European fellow-workers, is the labour-market, and the dictum “hired when it pays, fired when it doesn’t” will remain in force.

Instead of accepting the bogus arguments being trotted out by both sides, for and against joining, workers should be asking questions like: In or out of the Common Market, will wealth continue to accumulate in the hands of a few and will food still be destroyed while people starve? In or out of the Common Market, will poverty and insecurity continue to blight the lives of many millions ,both here in Britain and throughout the world? In or out of the Common Market, will H-Bombs remain both within Europe and outside to threaten the existence of mankind? In or out of the Common Market, will the massive power blocs, America, Russia, China, Japan and Europe, continue to struggle for advantage with war as their last desperate card?

These are questions which put the Common Market in its real capitalist perspective.

There are those who oppose entry because they fear loss of national identity. The workers have always been taught to be proud of their master’s country. If the barriers of nationalism are weakened through the EEC, this would not be a harmful effect, though there is little sign of it happening. All that is taking place is a grouping together of States, which has happened before, in earlier stages of capitalism, in America, Germany and Italy except that the EEC has yet to go for full political union.

Modern capitalism operates with such massive plant and investment levels that grouping together is the only way to stay in the big league. The military strategy of modern capitalism, and the costly technology of modern warfare, also dictate the coming together of groups of nations. If nationalism on the old scale diminishes, a continental scale of nationalism will develop as the rivalry between the emerging groups grows hotter.

What is really relevant to the world context in which we live today, is not new groupings, but a society without frontiers. Not bigger markets and fatter profits, but an end to all markets and all profits. Not the concentration of ever greater wealth into fewer hands, but the common ownership of the Earth and all its resources. This is the real issue which faces the workers of the world.

Harry Baldwin