Finance and Industry: Who are the share-owners (1962)

The Finance and Industry column from the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who are the share-owners

Last month we reported on the new campaign being organised to encourage British workers to buy more stocks and shares. We also quoted the estimates made by the organisers about the number of shareholders in the country.

The New York Stock Exchange has now provided details of the number of shareholders in the United States. These are estimated at about 17 million, an increase of over 10 million in the last ten years.

The U.S. correspondent of the Financial Times, giving these figures, comments that in happier times they might have been a cause for congratulation, but that recent events have given “people’s capitalism” a rather tarnished look. Judging by the panic and disillusionment that hit many of these small investors in the recent Wall Street shake-up, he is certainly right.

High pressure salesmen

One result of this shake-up has been the questioning of the methods that have apparently been used by many U.S. Stock Exchange firms to get business. They have been using a large army of part-time salesmen to go round getting people to buy stocks and shares just as they would soap or toothpaste. Some of them have even been selling extremely doubtful issues in such industries as electronics, automatic vending machines, etc., which have turned out to be virtually worthless. We wonder how many of the 17 million have been accounted for by this sort of dubious activity?

Beyond the curtain

In view of the way production and distribution are carried on in Russia and her satellites, Socialists would not suppose that the trading and financial problems there would differ essentially from what we have here.

It suits ill-informed writers in the Press to keep plugging the theme that it is quite astonishing that capitalist Russia should behave like a capitalist power—but what else would they expect?

In the early part of July, a two-week international summer school of bankers was held in Moscow to enable the foreigners to learn about the Russian banking system. (Last year they met in Oxford). The British visitors numbered 35 and represented the big five joint-stock banks as well as the Bank of England and the merchant banks. More than 50 countries were represented, including the U.S.A. and many of the newly formed African and Asian countries.

Innocents who suppose that things are really different in Russia may wonder why Russia needs to encourage such an affair. But Russian industry is engaged in producing goods for sale at a profit in home and foreign markets and has just as much need of a vast banking and finance apparatus as has the rest of the world. It has not at all been able to escape the necessity of finding markets for exports and has been no more successful than its Western rivals. If Britain has problems which lead some industrial groups to favour entry into the Common Market, Russia has her own difficulties in COMECON (The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, established in 1949 by Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Yugoslavia and Albania).

An article by Norman MacKenzie in the New Statesman last month maintains that these countries have been unable to achieve the degree of common planning already attained by the six European countries in the Common Market—hence Krushchev’s apparent anxiety lest Britain’s entry into the Common Market and the further development of the Market may make great difficulties for the exports of the Comecom countries, including Russia. Mr. MacKenzie’s view is that each of the Comecom countries is concentrating on industrial self-sufficiency rather than on integration into the whole group. One outcome has been that “with the exception of Poland, these predominantly rural countries are now chronically short of food.”

One ironical accompaniment of the relationship between Russia and the other Comecom countries related by Mr. MacKenzie is that their internal price systems are so complex that when they enter into trade agreements between themselves they have to make use of world prices as a common basis of measurement, which “explains why the trade attaches of communist embassies in the West spend so much time collecting invoices and catalogues which are sent to Moscow for analysis.”

The mailed fist

It is the fashion these days for managing directors, Ministry of Labour officials and politicians to congratulate themselves and everyone else on the harmony and amity that is supposed to mark industrial relationships. To the extent that things have changed it is mostly the result of years of low unemployment and shortage of labour—employers have had to hide the mailed fist a little. But Mr. Peregrine Worsthorne, of the Sunday Telegraph, recently scented a wind of change. He noted that the Wall Street Stock Exchange collapse alarmed the workers at the Ford Motor Works at Dagenham with whom Mr. Worsthorne had been talking.

This is what he had to say about it:

“The men I talked to were frightened and malleable, as if they had been suddenly awakened from a deep sleep, and scarcely knew where they were. If the mood at Ford’s is any guide, now would seem to be the time to put industrial relations on a sounder footing. At the risk of being called all sorts of unpleasant names, I should like to suggest that this means, in blunt terms, putting the working man in his place, which is a very much lower one than he has been encouraged to enjoy for 15 years.”

Don’t say you haven’t been warned!

Going up or down?

On the whole economists and politicians claiming to understand the workings of the economic system have lived in a mood of sustained optimism for the past twenty years, based on the sanguine belief that things would never get really bad again because there is more knowledge and experience available than there used to be. Bernard Harris, writing recently in the Sunday Express, on prospects of a slump in America like that in the ‘thirties, dismissed it, not precisely because there aren’t danger signals, but because “the cause of business fluctuations is better understood. The techniques for dealing with them are better developed.”

But there are dissident voices. Mr. Enoch Powell, who has been “saving the country” by resisting the nurses’ demand for higher pay, went on record two years ago to the effect that the Government’s techniques for handling the crisis of 1958-9 had had no effect whatever. (As he had resigned from the Government he was exercising the right to be critical of what his ex-colleagues were doing). And Mr. George Schwartz has been wondering in the Sunday Times whether we aren’t “back to the old trade cycle” (Powell’s view appears to be that we never left it.)

Mr. Samuel Brittan in the Observer goes further than Powell, who thought the Government’s actions had no effect, because he (Brittan), thinks they make the problem worse:

“Government financial measures have in recent years actually accentuated the trade fluctuations that they were supposed to control.”

The Financial Times (June 15) pointed out another difficulty about prescribing cures for whatever ails the patient, namely, the difficulty of diagnosis. How do you prescribe for an unhealthy state of trade if you can’t decide what is its state?

“At present British industry is operating on a plateau, and one can make out an almost equally convincing case for saying that the plateau is sloping downwards as upwards.”

East-west trade

For many years after the war, and particularly when the Western governments rigidly prohibited the export to Russia and her allies of products and materials useful for armaments, never a trade union conference went by without resolutions being moved demanding more trade with Iron Curtain countries. Many workers who were enthusiastic about it had a somewhat mixed idea of what it meant: to them “more trade” meant more British goods being sold abroad without its counterpart of more foreign goods being marketed here. (Some supporters of joining the Common Market have the same blurred vision.)

In the last year or two, with more exports from Russia and Eastern Europe coming into world markets, zeal for East-West trade has cooled off considerably. British coal miners who had supported the idea had never anticipated that it might take the form of the large quantities of cheap Russian oil hastening still further the decline of coal as a fuel for manufacture and domestic lighting and heating. And workers in engineering concerns doing big business in exports were not counting on the steady increase in the amount of machinery and equipment that now figures in Russian exports. A recent, development has been the Russian invasion of the watch market. Soviet Weekly (June 28, 1962) tells how Russian exports of watches have increased from 12,000 in 1938, to 250,000 in 1955, 1,147,600 in 1957 and 4½ million in 1961. They go to 50 countries in all parts of the world and “in price and quality Soviet watches are challenging the long-standing pre-eminence of the Swiss watchmakers in this field.”

Edgar Hardcastle

Tobacco smoking: the end of the road? (1962)

From the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tobacco has been known to us for quite a long time, cigarettes not nearly so long, but long enough for the smoking habit to be very well established by the time the Royal College of Physicians issued their report on lung cancer earlier this year. Although it is probably true to say that medicos have never been really happy about the effect of smoking on health, it is only in recent years that they have felt able to pin some of the blame on it at least for stomach irritation, chronic bronchitis, heart attacks, coronary thrombosis, and last but not least—lung cancer.

The Royal College’s report Smoking and Health, published last March launches a swinging attack on the smoking habit—cigarettes mainly—but it is not the first of its kind. In 1950, Professor Hill and Dr. Doll published results of their first investigation into the incidence of lung cancer in relation to men’s smoking habits. Then at the beginning of 1952 the American Cancer Society began a survey of nearly two hundred thousand men between the ages of fifty and seventy. Its grim findings were announced to the American Medical Association convention in 1954.

Tobacco shares fell at the news, but Alistair Cooke, writing in The Manchester Guardian at the time, was a little hasty when he assumed that it would “. . . induce profound melancholia or even penury in the American cigarette manufacturers.” Sales of tobacco have continued to rise since then, with cigarettes reaching an all time high in 1961. In that year also, there were 22,000 deaths from lung cancer in Great Britain alone.

In the twelve years since the Hill and Doll report there have been similar independent surveys conducted in at least eight countries. All have reached the same broad conclusions, so that the R.C.P. report this year only set the seal really on the impressive weight of evidence which has been building up in the meantime. It is difficult to say at this stage how seriously this latest report will be taken; there is still a very strong social habit to be taken into account. But that is not the whole story. It is really only the fag end.

The tobacco firms are rich and very well established. Some idea can be gained of the persistent money spinner that tobacco is, when it is realised that in this country alone last year £825 million went to the Government in revenue from this source. Almost exactly the cost of the National Health Service, as one noble Lord put it. Which gives us a glimpse of the dilemma facing our rulers—powerful tobacco interests and a huge tax income on the one hand and a rising lung cancer rate on the other.

Maybe they can take some solace from the fact that others before them have had to tread a similar path. Over the centuries since its discovery and the beginning of its use in England, tobacco has been violently attacked and just as stoutly defended, but its consumption has increased and with it the tax yield. Even James I, who campaigned vigorously against the weed in such works as A Counterblast to Tobacco (1604) was not slow to slap on an import duty of 6s. 8d. a pound the following year. Some say that James’ antagonism toward tobacco was really an expression of his hatred of Sir Walter Raleigh. Be that as it may, and whatever his original motives for imposing the tax, he was cute enough to realise its possibilities. By 1613, he had rescinded his earlier tax and in 1624 made tobacco a Royal Monopoly.

Nicotiana Tabacum — common tobacco — native of Central and South America, is now grown the world over and accounts for about three-quarters of all that is smoked. It was introduced into Europe about 1530. There is still some dispute over which of the colonists in the time of Hawkins and Drake brought the plant to England. What we can say is that smoking slowly took hold here between 1565 and 1590. Ironic that today it should come under such heavy medical fire, when in those days it was thought to have great curative powers and in many places took root because of this belief.

The first cigarettes known to be manufactured in England were by Robert Gloag in 1856. He opened a factory in Walworth, London. This form of smoking gained rapid popularity (probably because of its comparative cheapness) and the various cigarette firms, familiar to us all, were well established by the turn of the century. Seventeen of them combined in 1902 to form The Imperial Tobacco Company Ltd., as a counter to the threat of American competition. They were strong enough to win the “tobacco war” with the American manufacturer James Buchanan Duke, and secured his withdrawal from the English market.

As the market for tobacco, and particularly cigarettes, expanded, so did the government’s interest in it as a course of taxation. This applied even more in times of war. During the first world war, for example, the duty was raised enormously and eventually reached 8s. 2d. a lb., where it remained until 1927 when there was another jump to 8s. 10d. Again, the second world war gave a tremendous fillip to taxation and at the end of it, the duty had reached 35s. 6d. per Ib. Successive governments have continued the practice since then.

Which is just about where we came in. All governments have to levy taxes to finance their administration of capitalism’s economy, and they are not particularly worried about where they get them from. Tobacco has been a sure source of income up to now and cigarettes take the brunt of this because they form at least 4/5ths of the tobacco consumed in Britain today. So although strong medical suspicions have been voiced for over ten years, cigarette consumption has continued to rise and the government has continued to cream off some of the profits.

It must be a bit perplexing for our politicians to have to set about discouraging a widespread habit which they have themselves helped to foster in the past. Remember the huge quantities of “fags” distributed free to the forces during the last war, and how they were considered vital in boosting morale? But 22,000 deaths in one year and the rate still rising cannot be ignored. Let the tobacco companies gripe if they like. The more astute capitalist politician will have his eye on the threat to production if the incidence continues to rise. And remember that it is not uncommon in the younger age groups now, the ones who matter so much in the productive scheme of things. That is why the anti-smoking propaganda has been directed so conspicuously at school children, and not old age pensioners.

Just how successful the government’s campaign will be is anybody’s guess. The smoking habit is certainly well established, but if it threatens the overall interests of the capitalist class they will try to do something about it. What will happen to the tobacco firms then? Some may go broke, but there will be other fields of profitable investment. Labour will be transferred elsewhere, and the government will start looking in other directions for its taxes.

But by then we shall probably have other problems to worry us anyway. Poor health, after all, is not something for which smoking is solely to blame. Inferior diet, poor working conditions and the sheer strain of modern living are constantly wearing workers down. Add only three of the factors which are to that the fact that medical research itself is never very high on the priority list of expenditure, and you have an idea of the magnitude of this problem. To say that it is social is to stress the obvious, and despite the best intentions of the medical profession the task of tackling it can hardly begin until capitalism is well on the way out.

Eddie Critchfield

The Passing Show: The pace-makers (1962)

The Passing Show Column from the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

The pace-makers

The present uproar among those employed in the “public sector”—nurses, teachers, civil servants, and so on—at the fact that they are the chief sufferers from the Government’s pay policy, is particularly interesting to those who remember what the Labour Party and reformers generally used to say on this subject. It was once a settled belief among left-wingers that any industry or service run by the State or by a municipality would give its workers better conditions than any similar private industry or service, and that private employers would have to improve the wages and conditions they offered in order to keep their workers. So that the nationalisation of an industry would not only benefit the workers in that industry: it would benefit those in other industries as well. See, for example, Bernard Shaw in The Transition to Social Democracy, reprinted in his Essays in Fabian Socialism:

“At the very outset of the new extension of municipal industries, the question of wage will arise. A minimum wage must be fixed . . . The worst sort of sweaters will find that if they are to keep their ‘hands’, they must treat them at least as well as the municipality.”

And so forth. When these arguments were fashionable, Socialists were pointing out that since the State, and the municipalities, and the State boards, were and could only be committees representing the general interests of the capitalist class, it was useless to hope that they would give any “better wages and conditions than individual capitalists. And judging by the recent agitation among “public sector ” employees, it seems that not only are those employed by the State and its agencies no better treated than similar workers in private employ—they are actually falling behind in wages and conditions.

But no doubt the nationalizers will still be trotting out their “better wages” arguments for years to come.

Strike in Saskatchewan

When we say that all workers by hand or brain have fundamentally the same interests, we are told that white-collar and professional workers are somehow quite different from manual workers— for example, doctors and the rest would never strike. This theory was never in accord with the facts—doctors and nurses have gone on strike more than once in Continental countries in recent years, and they threatened to strike, and nearly did strike, in this country on the introduction of the National Health Service. Now, of course, the theory has been swept away finally by the events in Saskatchewan. There the great majority of doctors have gone on strike against the Government’s attempt to introduce a medical service having some points in common with the British system. What matters here is not whether one sympathizes with this particular strike (we emphatically do not), but the simple fact that the strike has happened and has continued several weeks. Doctors, in fact, are workers just like the rest of us. In their struggles over conditions of employment they can and do use such working-class weapons as strike action even, as in this case, for the wrong reasons.

Cruel and violent

As a judge recently sentenced a man of twenty to five years’ imprisonment, and other youths to shorter terms, for wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, he is reported to have said: “The iron bars and bottles and other weapons with which some of you were armed show how cruel and violent human beings can become.”

Well, well. There is news for the judge.

Human beings can become even more cruel and violent than that.

An iron bar can kill a man. A high-explosive bomb can kill a thousand. An atom bomb can kill a hundred thousand. And the latest H-bombs, we are told, can kill several millions.

But for these large-scale killings, no one is put in the dock. Violence is only deplored when it is not in the interests of the ruling class.

Yet if five years’ jail is the fit sentence for injuring one or two other men, what sentence can the workers pass on the capitalist system?

The only possible sentence is total abolition.

Top people

A new book Anatomy of Britain, by Anthony Sampson, gives several indications of the wealth of Britain’s upper class. On the distribution of wealth, he says :

“One recent survey has thrown light on capital wealth. Lydall and Tipping, writing in the Bulletin of the Oxford Institute of Statistics in 1961, estimated that the top one per cent of British adults owned 43 per cent of total net capital—whereas in America (in 1954) the top one per cent owned only 24 per cent of personal wealth. The authors estimated that 20,000 people owned more than £100,000, and that their average holding was £250,000. (While at the bottom there are 16 million people with less than £100 each, and an average of £50.)”

Mr. Sampson quotes the Ministry of Labour, I960, figures that 30,000 men and 275,000 women are in private domestic service, among whom (according to one domestic agency) there are 600 butlers. He goes on to quote an estimate of “the cost of service in a well-appointed household”:

Butler:                                       £500

Two footman at £350:               £700

Odd man:                                  £250

Head housemaid:                      £300

Two housemaids at £250:         £500

Cook:                                        £400

Kitchenmaid:                            £250

Lady’s maid:                             £300

Chauffeur (non-resident):         £650

Three daily helps at £150:        £450 

Total:                                      £4,300

Keep (residents only):           £2,000

Total:                                      £6,300

If only someone would mention these figures to the Labour Party leaders, they might stop talking about the “social revolution” they are supposed to have put through after the war.

Alwyn Edgar

The Confessions of a Tory MP (1962)

From the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Cyril Osborne, Tory MP for Louth since 1945, often blurts out his thoughts on the state of the country without much regard for the embarrassment it must cause to his Party. He is a stockbroker, a company director, and an executive member of the Association of British Chambers of Commerce; he has a special interest in trade and finance.

He is gloomy about the present, and pessimistic about what comes after. Speaking to the staff conference of the Wholesale Textile Association at Oxford on July 9 he struck out in all directions; with force if not always with accuracy, if we judge by the report in the Times: “The Western capitalist system,” he said, is facing its gravest crisis since 1931, and “the communist powers” are not in better shape.

He found that in most countries excess manufacturing capacity has been built up in many basic industries, and “no one seemed to know how to increase consumption without starting galloping inflation”:

“They were all trying to export more and at the same time cut down on imports. President Kennedy was beaten by the problem and Germany’s exuberance was slowing down. The whole Common Market is losing its value, while Canada is down and out. Neither Government nor Opposition in this country is sure what is the right answer.”

Discounting some exaggeration, Mr. Osborne’s description of trade conditions in the Western world is indisputable. There are an increasing number of firms and industries here and across the Atlantic that are working far below capacity; not because they could not expand output by getting more workers out of the hundreds of thousands of job-seekers, but because they can’t find enough buyers who will offer profitable prices for their products. In some big industries, coal and railways, shipbuilding and aircraft production, the number of jobs is falling as sales decline.

It is a telling point Mr. Osborne makes that the countries are all trying to increase exports while curtailing imports, forgetting that one country’s exports are another country’s imports. (Mr. Osborne probably does not know that Socialists were making the point before he was born). And Mr. Osborne is at least getting a little nearer to the truth when he doubts whether the remedy is to be found in the Common Market, or in Kennedy’s policies, or in Canadian dreams of greatness, or in the way they run their trade in Russia. According to him, “the communist powers” are anxiously watching to see if we can find the key to the problem.

But first a word or two about Mr. Osborne’s personal and Party responsibility. He tells us now that the workers (and “the management”) have got to work harder and expect less, and put up with the loss of jobs that will follow the bankruptcy of many inefficient firms and that even so it is uncertain whether recovery can come “without the cruel harshness of an economic slump”: in other words, back to the nineteen thirties and the depression years.

He finds the root of the trouble in the outlook of this generation, “that has been told it can vote itself anything it desires.” But who told them that if they voted a Conservative Government back into power it meant voting to double the standard of living in this generation, and meant “Prosperity and Peace,” and “prosperity and opportunity for all”? Who told the electors in 1959 that 1951, when the Tories came into power, “was a turning point in British history”? Turning away from what to what? Surely it wasn’t supposed to mean turning to the grim outlook Mr. Osborne now threatens us with?

And it is transparently clear that Mr. Osborne knows no better than those he slates how to put things right. He wants the workers to work harder and expect less so that prices will be lower and British goods improved in quality. But just as it is impossible for all the world’s exports to expand if all the worlds’ imports are being cut—which Mr. Osborne sees—it is likewise impossible to make trading conditions better by having each worker producing more and buying less.

And while British industries are lowering prices and raising quality and producing more, what are the rest of the world’s manufacturers supposed to be doing? They will all be chasing the same elusive solution.

But note just how silly Mr. Osborne’s solution is. The problem, as stated by him, is “how to increase consumption” since many industries have excess capacity which will not be used unless consumption is increased—and his remedy is that consumption should be decreased (The workers must “expect less.”)

We have to correct one of Mr. Osborne’s errors, his belief that no one seems to know how to increase consumption without starting inflation. Socialists know very well how to do this and have been trying to get workers to heed it for a long, long time. All it needs is to bring the production and the consumption together. The world’s population needs, and would like, to increase its consumption of all kinds of things by very large amounts. The world’s resources of human labour, nature given materials, and machinery, etc., could vastly increase output of the things people want. Let Mr. Osborne tell us why the two should not be brought into direct relationship, with production solely for use without the complexities of buying, selling and profit-making that the Western and Eastern powers agree in supposing to be necessary.

Edgar Hardcastle

The Soviet State - part 1 (1962)

From the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russia is a mysterious country in many ways. Its internal power struggles are submerged, dramatic affairs in which we usually realise that one man has fallen and another taken his place only by their relative places on a rostrum or in the line up to greet Krushchev at an airport. What news comes out is carefully filtered.

Nevertheless, we know enough about Russia to be able to say that the social system which exists there is Capitalism. This means that it is basically the same system as in England and America, although it would obviously be foolish to say that it corresponds in every way. When feudalism was the recognisable social system in many parts of the globe it, too, took different forms in different countries, but basically it was the same social system in all of them.

The Russian Government claims—and its claim is supported by the Communist Parties of the World—that the Soviet Union is a Socialist country. The Soviet Constitution states, for example, in Article 1 that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics “is a Socialist State of workers and peasants.” And Article 4 adds that:

“the economic foundations of the U.S.S.R. consist in the Socialist ownership of the implements and means of production, firmly established as a result of the liquidation of the Capitalist system of economy, the abolition of private property of the instruments and means of production, and the abolition of the exploitation of man by man.”

But it is not constitutions that determine social systems. Capitalism in Russia does not rest on a legal constitution, but on the social and economic relationships which operate there. The evidence that has come from Russia in the past and is still coming now, shows clearly that certain basic features of Soviet society correspond to what we recognise as Capitalism. In fact, the so-called “evidence” for the existence of Socialism there is mainly a listing of the superficial differences between Russian Capitalism and some of the other Capitalist powers. These differences mean a lot to the ardent supporter of Russia; a critical analysis puts them in a less convincing light.

To begin with, we have to chop away some of the confusion which Communist party leaders have so assiduously spread over the years. Writing in Economic problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., Stalin said:

“absolutely mistaken . . . are those comrades who allege that, since Socialist society has not abolished commodity production, we are bound to have the reappearance of all the economic categories characteristic of capitalism: labour power as a commodity, surplus value, capital, capitalist profit, the average rate of profit, etc. “(Page 21).

He went on to justify these apparent contradictions by claiming that in Russia commodities, money, banks, and so on, “. . . while they lose their old functions and acquire new ones, preserve their old form, which is utilised by the Socialist system” (page 59), and that “. . . it is chiefly the form, the outward appearance, of the old categories of Capitalism that have remained in our country, but . . . their essence has radically changed in adaption to the requirements of the Socialist economy” (page 60).

This sort of argument is dishonest enough to explain away anything. Stalin, of course, had the last word—any comrades who remained “absolutely mistaken” long enough probably went under in one of the purges which were so often necessary to protect what we were told was Socialism in Russia.

What are the fundamental criteria by which we recognise the capitalist social system ? They are: wage labour and commodity production; and capital investment and accumulation.

Do these things exist in Russia? The Soviet state is the centralised monopoliser of the means of wealth production, to which the workers in Russia have to sell their energies for money. It therefore employs the Russian workers and pays them wages just like other employers in other countries. Thus the relationship between the Soviet state and its workers is one of capital and labour. Members of the Communist Party may not think that this fact in itself proves that Capitalism exists in Russia, but Karl Marx, to whose theories they pay lip service, would certainly have thought so. In his Wage Labour and Capital, he summed up his argument with “wage labour presupposes capital—capital presupposes wage labour.”

Capital is accumulated in Russia by the State and invested in state enterprise. Now the State can only do this if it is appropriating the surplus-value, or the results of unpaid labour time, of the workers it employs. This surplus value may not be distributed in dividends in the same way as in other Capitalist countries, but this makes no difference to the basic situation. In this country the State take a sizeable portion of surplus value by way of taxation upon the Capitalist class; in Russia, it also takes it directly from the workers it employs. The Soviet State does impose some taxes—capital can thus be accumulated in either way.

Raising productivity

In his book Industry in the U.S.S.R. (Moscow, 1949), E. Lokshin wrote:

“Socialist industry has incomparably greater possibilities than Capitalist industry of raising the productivity of labour, of constantly lowering production costs and thus increasing accumulations.” (Page 100.)

But before making this statement, he was careful to prepare the way for it by quoting Stalin:

“History up till now,” said Comrade Stalin, “has known three paths of the formation and development of powerful industrial states. The first path is the path of grabbing and pillaging colonies . . . The second path is the path of military conquest and the exaction of large indemnities from one country by another . . . The third path is the path of usurious concessions and usurious loans from capitalistically developed countries to a capitalistically backward country . . . All these paths were inacceptable to the Soviet Union . . . The Communist Party and the Soviet Government led the Land of Soviets along a different course, of industrialising the country by drawing on its interior sources of accumulation” (our emphasis).

These statements of Stalin’s may be true in themselves, but Lokshin’s defence of the Soviet Union is typical in that he uses them to give a completely false comparison between what he calls “capitalist methods of accumulation” and the method which is used in Russia—”interior sources of accumulation.” Capital can only be accumulated from the exploitation of labour. So what else can Lokshin’s “interior sources” be other than the unpaid labour of Soviet workers?

No one can deny the dissimilarities between Capitalism in this country and Capitalism in Russia. The capitalist class in Russia is not as distinct as in this country and “Western style” private property is largely non-existent in the Soviet Union. But it does not follow from this that Capitalism has gone from Russia, and with it the exploitation of man by man. It does mean that in Russia the state is the biggest property owner and exploiter of all.

For exploitation has nothing to do with conditions of work, nor with the value of wages. Exploitation is an integral part of the relationship between employer and employee, whereby the employer can appropriate surplus value for the accumulation of capital, by paying the worker less than the value of what he has produced or assisted in producing. Thus it is possible for a worker with a relatively high wage to be exploited at a higher rate than a worker with a lower wage.

It may be argued that the State uses some surplus value for the creation of things like roads, schools and hospitals. But this is only the accepted function of the State in a highly organised society. The capitalist class in this country needs a centralised authority to do these things because it could not possibly do them without such an authority. In Russia, the State has the same functions, but with a difference. It has the field to itself.

Ian Jones

                                                                           (To be concluded)

Capitalism in the Caribbean - Part 3 (1962)

From the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 2.

The First World War gave the West Indies sugar industry a real fillip, but the slumps which followed caused the sugar owners to amalgamate and look for ways of cutting costs—as always, their first thought was to lower wages. Sugar workers were forced to form trade unions to resist the attempts of the sugar owners to depress their already very low standard of living and in 1935 the sugar workers of Antigua went on strike.

Trade unions had already been formed in other industries, notably the oil industry in Trinidad. Blood was shed during riots in the oilfields in 1937. The Trinidad oilworkers’ union is strong and well-disciplined: a well-planned strike in 1960 forced some notable concessions from the oil companies in the face of a recession in the oil industry.

There were disorders in other islands, and governments soon realised that it was wise to encourage rather than to hinder the formation of trade unions. To meet the challenge, both from their workers and from rival capitalist groups in other parts of the world, West Indian capitalists joined together in strong amalgamations. Thus were formed the various cane-growers associations, the Banana Producers’ Association of Jamaica, the Trinidad and Tobago Co-operative Citrus Growers’ Association, etc.

West Indian leaders on the economic field eventually became political leaders: men like Bradshaw in St. Kitts, Bird in Antigua, Grantley Adams in Barbados, Bustamante and Manley in Jamaica, and Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler (who was behind the 1937 oilfield riots) in Trinidad. Economic struggles, therefore, formed the basis for political struggles, fought mainly on a racial platform with special emphasis on anti-colonialism. These political movements were supported by the utterances of men like Marcus Garvey (a Negro from Jamaica who served his apprenticeship with Booker T. Washington) who eloquently and powerfully advocated during the thirties a Negro “Back to Africa” movement.

Through the energetic action of politicians such as Bustamante, Manley, and Marryshow of Grenada the British Government conceded constitutional reforms, culminating in the formation of the West Indies Federation in 1958. This meant full internal self-government based on universal suffrage in certain islands, the British Government retaining control of defence.

The identification of trade unions with newly emerged governments is fraught with danger for the West Indian working class. During the recent Trinidad elections, for example, one or two quite large trade-unions held demonstration marches in support of Dr. Williams’ Peoples’ National Movement party. It may be. however that West Indian workers are too politically sophisticated to be completely taken in by demagogic politicians to the point of surrendering trade union and political advantages won after so many years of struggle.

The wind of change has blown through the West Indies as it has through the African continent; the eagerness with which the Colonial Office has fanned this wind in the British Caribbean towards the formation of the West Indies Federation indicates that the British ruling class would rather deal with a single West Indian Government than with several. But West Indians have apparently proved to be too nationalistic. In a referendum held towards the end of 1961, Jamaica seceded from the Federation, and thus set off the collapse which quickly followed. Now, a looser federation of eight of the islands, including Barbados and the Leeward and Windward Islands, is in prospect. The present tendency is for unit governments (at least in the British islands and British Guiana) to try to go it alone. Political leaders in the larger islands such as Jamaica and Trinidad, the only really economically viable island in the Federation, are reluctant for sizeable proportions of taxes realised in their islands to be utilised by a Federal Government to assist the poorer, smaller, islands’ economy, when the money could be used in development projects in their own countries.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, whether it be in terms of a host of small units trying to go it alone or of varying degrees of federation, the problems of the West Indian worker wherever he is will be basically the same as those of his fellows in other parts of the world. He is, unfortunately, no more seized with the ideas of Socialism than his counterparts elsewhere, but sooner or later he will find that these ideas are the only ones worth considering in his search for an end to his present poverty and insecurity and for a better and happier future.

Michael La Touche

                                                                               (Concluded)

Entertainment and Profit (1962)

From the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Theatres, cinemas and football clubs have all recently felt the draught as their support and so their receipts fell. Pubs, Restaurants and Dance Halls have gone through the same agony. Where, they must have wondered, have all our supporters, patrons, clients, gone? Surely not all of them are televiewing?

One football club got so worked up about this recently that they took a census to find out the reason for their falling gates. They discovered some of their missing supporters in the strangest of places; in the local shopping centres, fetching and carrying for the wife. The wife, apparently, is at work all week and so she has to buy as much of the week’s food as she can in one go on Saturday afternoon. Who can blame her for cutting up rough if the old man wants to enjoy himself watching football while she has to push and shove her heavy laden way through the crowds? So no football, no dozing, no telly even for him.

Of course, there are any number of reasons offered for this. Some say that football, or the theatre, or what-have-you, are not what they used to be. Others say that they are not up to the standard of other countries (how unpatriotic!). And there are those who simply shrug and blame it all onto the telly.

These are at best the superficial reasons for changes in public tastes. To find the basic reason we must look at the motive for the birth and presentation of various types of entertainment. Today, we live in a Capitalist world in which all social endeavour in terms of research, invention, culture, service and work is carried on with the object of returning to the Capitalist more from his business than he puts into it. This is assured by the simple method of allowing the working class, who produce all the wealth, to receive only a part of it in their wages. But, sometimes, as we know, there is no profit in certain lines of business. One industry may be undermined by the development of a cheap substitute for its product. Another will fail because it cannot stand the pace of competition. So they decline, sometimes washed down with crocodile tears in the City columns.

The entertainment industry is no exception to this rule. It, too, must have, its profits—and it is often not too particular how it gets them. Jazz clubs, dance halls and coffee bars are not worried whether the working class teenagers who keep them going are missing their homework, or skipping evening classes, to do so. Publicans would rather see us drinking in their bars than attending a Political or Trade Union meeting, or a lecture on archaeology if it comes to that. And entertainment, with its various branches vying with each other for our custom, must keep producing the novel and alleged improvements to keep us interested.

Yet however interested we become, we can never avoid the fact that the biggest and best part of our day is spent in being exploited in the factory or the office to make huge fortunes for the lucky shareholders. This does not leave much time to enjoy our entertainment, however good or bad it may be.

Joe McGuinness

50 Years Ago: Organisation (1962)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

. . . Often there seems to be an idea—an entirely erroneous idea in the writer’s estimation—that as capitalism (or at least the present phase of capitalism) appears to be drawing to a close, the next step must inevitably be the establishment of Socialism in its stead. There is, therefore, no need, so it is considered, to do anything more than sit with folded hands, waiting for the downfall of capitalist society and the springing up, full-armed, of the new system of society.

. . . It does not actually follow that Socialism will be the outcome of present-day capitalist society. If you have a discontented people, poverty-stricken, degraded by continual toil and suffering into mere human machines, ripe for any change from their present existence of physical and mental penury, you have within that people all the possibilities, not so much of an elevation to a higher type, but rather toward an atavism even more degrading physically, more destructive intellectually, than at present.

The essential thing is, of course, that there should be implanted in the minds of the workers knowledge of the fact that their position as workers must be altered from the present state of slavery to a state wherein they shall be free to order their lives as they may best determine. But this knowledge once having been attained, it then becomes quite as necessary to know how to live. After all, life is not only the eating of good food, the wearing of good clothes, the sheltering in good houses, with a minimum of work and a maximum of leisure. All these things are, or should be, simply the means to an end in themselves . . .

. . . So it can be seen that the necessity of organisation becomes doubly imperative. Firstly, in order to build up a body of men and women whose main idea shall be the ending of capitalism and the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth. Secondly, that the men and women thus organised may have the opportunity of keeping themselves in touch with every phase of life, thus forming, indeed, an educational centre in the real meaning of the word education . . .

[From the article, 'The Need For Organisation', by F. J. Webb, Socialist Standard, August 1912]

How the Workers are Butchered on the Rand. (1913)

From the August 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

Putumayo is not such ancient history that one person here and there, with an exceptional memory for grisly tales of barbarity and suffering, can with an effort recall something of the facts of that interesting case. The present writer endeavoured to show that the wave of indignation which swept over the land, from the Cabinet Ministers in our immaculate Parliament to the poet (!) (now deceased) who once stirred the nation’s soul with a deathless poem calling upon the British bulldogs to “Hurry Up for Pity Sake !” (the merit of which poem was handsomely acknowledged by it being printed on red cotton handkerchieves and sold at a price within the means of all who had a nose to wipe thereon) might well have been let loose over equally deserving happenings very much nearer home.

That statement did not meet with universal approval. It seemed incredible to some that those smart, jovial, silk-hatted gentlemen who rush to and fro between Park Lane and Throgmorton Street, and who carry so gracefully the knighthoods and honours heaped upon them by the Liberal Government, could ever be guilty, could even fall under suspicion of being guilty, of any such atrocities as those with which those strange-named servants of a British company turned the peaceful Putumayo into a river of blood and tears in a “Devil’s Paradise.”

Recent happenings in South Africa, however, in which British miners, and British soldiers, and British (!) capitalists, and British knights, and the highest of high officers of the British Crown, are concerned, show clearly enough that in all essentials, the “cultured” ones of our Western civilisation are quite aa capable, given the materials, as any Portuguese half-breed in the pay of British capital, of creating a “Devil’s Paradise” of their own, with British blood and brawn, on the soil of the British Empire.

All the humbug of that sly old servant of Satan, W. E. Gladstone, who covered his machinations in the interests of the ruling class with a slime of “moral” cant, in which the “wrongs” of the Balkan people quivering under the spiked and envenomed heel of “Abdul the Damned” were in particular made to be a mat, jealously guarded and preserved, for him to clean his begrimed boots on, has been, it seems, bequeathed in trust and with compound interest, to the Liberal party. While they are busy fulminating against the “White Slave Trader” at home, they are, with brutal cynicism, crowning the blood-reeking fortunes of South African millionaires with titles. So that the political funds of the “Great Liberal Party” may benefit, they make murder respectable by covering it with the cloak of knighthood. 

Those who do not know how, and at what cost of working class suffering and misery, these South African fortunes have been amassed, are invited to think over the scanty particulars reproduced from a Press which, under a system, fails to suppress much that they would for the simple reason that sensation (and advertisements) is their life’s blood.

“‘However healthy a Transvaal rock-drill man may appear to be on his return to this country,’ Dr. Haldane told the Departmental Committee on Industrial Diseases in 1907, ‘he will probably be dead within a year or two.'” (“Pall Mall Gazette,” 7.7.13.)

“The death rate of one section of the men who mine the gold—the machine men or rock drillers—is over 230 per thousand from one disease—miner’s phthisis—alone. Such a death rate from a single occupational disease must be unparalleled in the whole industrial world. It can only be compared with King Leopold’s Congo Free State.

“Speaking before a representative meeting of mining engineers in Johannesburgh in September last Mr. Koetze, the Government mining engineer, said : ‘Sooner or later every worker underground in these mines will contract miner’s phthisis.’

“The practical result of commissions of inquiry have been recommendations that water be used to keep down the dust which causes the disease. These recommendations have been urged upon the mineowners, in each case with the same result—utter callousness and neglect.”

These extracts were written by Dr. G. L. Ugmara, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., and were reproduced in the “Morning Leader” for December 2, 1911.

“No less than 10,000 people die in these mines every.” (Mr. Merriman.)

“Miners’ phthisis is said to be due to the inhalation of fine dust which arises not merely from rock-drilling without the accompaniment of water, but also from the blasting operations with explosives. Last year more than 1,000 of 3,000 men examined by the Medical Commission were found to have phthisis. No rock-driller could work in the mines for sixteen years and escape it. Death took place as a rule before the age of forty. Here is a table which showed at that time how inevitable is the doom of any man who undertakes this work :—

Years of service Percentage of men affected

    2½ 25

    4½ 55

    6½ 70

   10½ 80

   13½ 90

   16½ 100 ” 

“Daily News.”

“Then all the miners and the population know that the mine owners are responsible in the same way for the death among the Kaffirs, which Mr. Sauer, the Minister for Native Affairs, has characterised, as regards the natives from tropical countries, as little short of murder. There was no need for any limitation in the phrase. The probability is that over 100,000 natives have been killed in the mines since the war.” (Mr. R. L. Outhwaite, M.P., in “Reynolds’s,” 6.7.13.)

There can be no escape from such a mass of evidence supplied by the capitalists’ own tools and fellows. Ten thousand victims in a year ! It would take a continent of Putumayos to equal this stupendous crime. When the war was raging we were told that they were “painting the map red,” but never in those days of open and avowed slaughter were such libations of blood poured out to the “Imperial idea” as have been run out, as from a vast broken cask, every year since, to satisfy the blood-thirsty vampires of Park Lane, in the ultra-respectable West End of London.

It is the story of Whitehaven retold in more callous letters. There miners were hurled to death because it would cost their safe and comfortable masters something to ventilate the mine in accordance with the first clause of their own Mines Act. On the Rand thousands of working-class lives are thrown away annually because it would absorb some of the knighted owners’ profits to spray with water in the process of rock-drilling, and to allow time for the dust to settle after a “blast” before the men returned to the “face.” It is the story of rubber retold, on a scale more in keeping with the dignity of the yellow commodity.

It cannot be pleaded that this wholesale murder of black and white is the work of a few of the capitalists alone. It is aided and connived at by the whole master class as such. How the British Government imposed a “hut tax” upon the natives whose land they had stolen, and sent a military force to enforce the payment of the paltry sums that could never pay the expense of collecting them, in order to drive the blacks into the mines to earn the money in which alone the taxes were payable, may not be entirely forgotten by some who do not especially treasure the memory of these curious incidents. It reads and looks and smells remarkably like some of the means resorted to by the “brigands” who cost virtuous England the price of a special commission and a House of Commons inquiry. Ten thousand victims a year ! Oh, the stinking hypocrisy of the howl that greeted the revelation of the Peruvian atrocities !

The war which was engineered in order that the mine owners might squeeze another four million pounds profit per annum out of the writhing and quivering carcasses of their white and black slaves was the work of a Tory administration, but it was reserved for a Liberal Government to make the Transvaal a “self-governing” colony, in order that they might be able to say when miners were to be butchered on the Rand : “We cannot interfere.” Strange, is it not, that when the Outlanders were supposed to be writhing in agony under the indignity of being without the franchise, the fact that they were under a foreign Government did not prevent the full armed might of the British Empire being used to “see them righted,” but now that these miners are being massacred in cold blood by troops provided and paid by the British Government, under the direction of a high officer of the British Crown, on soil painted red” with the blood of ten thousand British soldiers, nothing can be done because the Transvaal is a self-governing British colony !

I say nothing about the lives lost in the so-called rioting. Where life is held so cheap it seems little enough to make a bother about. But whose estimate of working-class life is it that counts ten thousand workers lives as of less importance than the cost of providing safe conditions for the mining of 40 million pounds worth of gold ? Think of that great army of workers—men of your own class—who must march to death to produce one year’s output of gold from South African mines. Ten thousand of them, black and white. For every million pounds 250 lives. We have been nurtured on grim and haunting pictures of the unspeakable Arab slave-caravans, but was ever anything more appalling enacted in all Africa than is enacted by these silk-hatted brigands of Park Lane, West ?

Fellow workers, very guarded must be the language of the revolutionary who would criticise those who engineered a great war in order to grab the mines, who have butchered you on a hundred shambles from Peterloo and Featherstone to Llanelly and the Rand, who waste your lives by raising the loadline of ships, and by refusing to adopt automatic couplings on the railways, who murder you by thousands for the mere cost of ventilating coal mines at home and spraying the dust in the mines of South Africa. To speak too plainly of these things is to ask to be sent to prison, for those who set so little store on your lives have taken every cunning care to so hedge about their victims with laws and armed force that they must die almost unheard. Hence much must be left to the reader’s imagination. But attention is directed to that clause in our Declaration of Principles which declares that the “armed forces of the nation exist only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers”. Its contradiction, in the face of every military action since the war, from Sir George White’s (the “hero” of Ladysmith) smashing of the coal porters’ strike at Gibraltar to the latest gun-boat demonstration at Leith and cold-blooded butchery in the streets of Johannesburgh, is here challenged. It cannot be seriously and truthfully contradicted.

If this is true, then it is true also that the hope of the workers lies in obtaining control of those armed forces by capturing political power.

That is the way out—the Socialist way. First to deprive the murder class of political control by ceasing to elect them and their Labour allies to Parliament—electing Socialists instead—then by expropriating them and establishing the Socialist Commonwealth. There is no other way.

A. E. Jacomb

Public Safety V. Railway Profits. I. The Cleaner. (1913)

From the June 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

That Fateful Letter.

The workers in general, and railwaymen in particular, have heard a great deal respecting the “safety of the public” and the “welfare of the country” from the masters and their hangers-on just lately. We also saw the letter of Mr. A K. Butterworth (General Manager N.E.R.) to driver Knox; and, unfortunately, since then one or two “accidents” have taken place which might well make the man in the street wonder whether a train is altogether safe to ride in.

We have in front of us a very big and important question, and it would be impossible in a short article to treat it in all its branches. I propose to deal with a section of the railway workers and their conditions of service, about whom the people know very little ; and, as is always the case in like circumstances, a section that is lied about by the prostitute Press and orators of the master class, in the hope of turning public opinion against them. I refer to the men employed in what is known as the “Running Section” of the Locomotive Department of the lines. Let me explain.

The Loco. Dept. consists of all men connected with the Loco, shed work, and also the “running” section, but these latter are classed separately from the rest of the employees because they are employed to “run” the road. The men are doubtless better known as drivers, firemen, and cleaners.

A glance at the title of this article would seem to open up a question of safety in the mind of the thoughtful reader, and I have no hesitation in saying that, as at present run, safety is not the first consideration of the railway magnates. It is profit they think of first, and the services are not safe for many reasons, all of which have a direct bearing on the making of profit.

If safety was the first consideration of the companies, obviously the men who actually work the trains, viz., drivers and firemen, would be assured of a decent living so as to keep them fit for their perilous duties ; also the machines they work would be kept thoroughly roadworthy and in the pink of condition. This, however, I know from experience with two of the leading companies in this country, is not the case.

The men are sadly overworked ; their machines, many of them, are not properly road-worthy, and their wages, especially considering their responsibility, are low.

What We Shall See.

Before going any further it would, perhaps, be as well to look into the conditions of service of the men, as these conditions have a direct bearing on the safety of the services. In doing this we shall have to start with the lad who, after passing a medical examination at the hands of the railway doctor, and an eyesight test at the hands of the Loco. Superintendent or his deputy, starts in the service as an engine cleaner. This is the lad who will be a fireman at some future time, and then driver.

The safety question will not be greatly dealt with in looking at the conditions of the cleaner, for he is not yet “on the road.” Nevertheless it is necessary, I think, to examine the conditions under which he works, if only to see what qualifications he has for taking up the duties of fireman when his turn comes. We shall see that no provision is made to properly teach him the various parts of his engine, and that his daily work becomes a bore to him through the speeding up to which he is subjected.

On most of the trunk lines the lads start at 18 or older, so as to take their turn on night work. They begin by cleaning shunting engires. and are usually on for 10¼ working hours and start at 17s. a week as a rule. These engines are nearly always in a very bad condition, and the lads have to work hard—many such engines running a fortnight without having a “wiper” put on them.

An Irishman's Rise.

About twelve months of this, and then comes the first promotion—to local passenger engines, which are kept almost as dirty. The lads as a rule get 2d. a day rise then, and work in gangs, the work amounting to 1½ engines per man per night (very little or no day work is the rule when on these engines), so that the cleaners are no better off for their extra 1s. a week.

The lads then get another “promotion,” and go on tender engines. Further speeding-up is now resorted to by reducing the working hours to 9, in which time the lads have to clean the mammoth locomotives of to-day. A number of companies have the “contract” clearer, who has always the same engine to clean. It is, however, impossible to clean the biggest modern engines in 9 hours—indeed, they would in some cases take nearer 20. So a great deal of the engine is “left.”

The “contract” cleaner has no appointed time on duty. He has to vary with the “turn” of his engine, which means turning out at all hours of the day or night. A holiday is an unlooked for privilege, and even a day off in the summer is more than many dare ask for.

The man, having his regular engine, takes a pride in it, and would kick up a noise if he were barred going on his machine because it has only a “light” trip “on” it, which often is the case. It is a rule that if an engine looks anything like “respectable” it can “run round,” thus overworking the cleaner by making him “tear off” two or three trips instead of one.

I may say here that the wages of these men are the highest paid for cleaning (the G.N.R. in London district formerly paid 3s. 10d. per day) but they are rapidly disappearing, and are now almost a thing of the past.

Dirt and Dividends.

The directors and shareholders demanding a greater return on their investments, expenses have to be cut down, regardless of safety or anything else. So a number of companies clean their engines by piecework, at miserable rates, and the wages of the man then depends upon how be “stands” with the foreman. (This system has recently been introduced on the G.N.) Another system extensively employed is to have the work done by day work by gangs, the men getting different engines daily. Under this method no pride can be taken by the cleaners in the machines.

Under both the last-mentioned systems the “contract” man is done away with because he is not cheap enough. Engines go out two, three, or four days without a clean, so it is impossible for a driver to make a minute inspection of the parts to see they are not broken. This, which is a very important matter affecting the “welfare of the public,” and the fact that an engine may “run hot” and delay several trains, besides causing a great inconvenience on and off the shed, and a host of other things, are thrown to the winds in the interest of increased dividends. If a machine fails and the driver cannot give a "satisfactory” explanation to the Loco. Superintendent, he can be fined and thus help to swell the coffers of the human vampires that live upon him.

To sum up, the highest standing wage a cleaner can depend upon is in the neighbour­hood of 19s. a week on the trunk lines, for which he puts in at least 54 hours. In the country the wages paid are much lower.

The state of the engines proves conclusively that there are not nearly enough men, and what men there are are immensely overworked, with plenty of dirt, night-work, inconvenience to self and family, bad smells on shed, and the lads often working feet deep in hot water. In addition there is a good deal of bullying from the foreman, who is generally a man who has failed on the footplate.

A Premium on Ignorance.

The average period a man does cleaning is about four years, and from the way he is overworked there is no chance for him to learn much about his engine. Nor is he given a rules-book order to enable him to make himself acquainted with the rules of the road (the Midland does give rules-books after six months). There are, however, “educational classes” on some companies (e.g., the G.N.), but they are not successful, and the attendance is small. The men have to attend in their own time, and with their state of overwork, and that great curse, overtime, it is not to be wondered at that very few attend the classes, the lecturers at which as a rule are drivers.

In working hours the lads are sent home or fined for trifling offences, and kept in abject slavery, so their mind is turned against their work. As a result of these conditions they can not take it up with the interest necessary to become good enginemen and to befit them to be in charge of trains. It is, therefore, little wonder that, at the end of four years or so, when the lad goes up to “pass” for a spare fireman, he often fails in the exam.—which means more shed slavery, or, what is the rule on a number of lines, the sack.

Those who get through, however, owing to the unscientific way they are trained and the low wages paid, are not fit, from the point of view of public safety, to be in charge of an engine—which, by the way, is quite in accordance with the standing orders of capitalism and the production of profit.

And the unscientific training of enginemen through their period as cleaners, is pretty well certain to last until the system that trains men for profit instead of for usefulness and safety is swept into oblivion.

J. Sevier

[To be Continued.]

Public Safety versus Railway Profits. II. The Fireman. (1913)

From the July 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

[Continued from last issue.]

 

We will now look into the conditions of the spare firemen and firemen of the trunk lines, and in doing so we shall be concerned with men that are actually working the trains.

The spare fireman is a man that has been “passed” to act as a fireman when needed, but who is not always engaged in firing. When he is not doing so he is booked “shed duty as required,” and as often as not goes back to cleaning or other shed work. We can briefly pass him bye, because when firing he is under the conditions of a regular fireman.

His working hours are ten without a break, as a rule, and his pay is anything from 3s. to 4s. a day when employed firing. But he must exceed five hours in order to get this. When on “shed duty” the wage is something less (usually 3s. 6d.), which is another instance of the shameless robbery of these men, seeing that it is not through their fault that they are “put back” in the shed, or “cancelled.” Once a man is passed for firing he should be treated and paid as such.

As a rule the spare fireman’s week is six days. Occasionally, however, it is seven days. He is usually on shunting work, but is sometimes put on long trips—a common practice on the M.R. The period of spare-firing is about two or three years, then the man undergoes a further exam. for a regular fireman.

His promotion generally follows in the order of seniority, but the company “reserves the right of choice for promotion irrespective of seniority”—a clause which obviously leaves plenty of room for jobbery.

Once a man is passed as a regular fireman he is always at work on engines, either on or off shed ; so in looking at his working conditions we shall commence to get to grips with the indictment that has already been levelled at the companies: that the men are overworked and underpaid, which are circumstances not consistent with public safety.

Let us briefly look at his conditions. Ten hours constitute his working day. This, for a man standing over a furnace which (according C. I. Bowen Cooke, of the L.N.W., in his book “British Locomotives”) developes a temperature of 5,027 degree Fah., is excessive.

To give some idea of the nature of the work let me quote from an article, “A day’s work on the footplate,” which appeared in that capitalist, organ, “The Railway Magazine,” Oct. 1909, and in which the author says : “With 14½ on (a moderate load) I fire up every two minutes, and sometimes oftener.” That this is no exaggeration is shown by the fact that on some of the big engines the coal consumed is about 50 lbs. per mile.

Before leaving the shed the fireman has to make up his fire, assist in oiling, clean and trim his lamps, fetch oil for his driver, and in many cases clean his “front” and otherwise assist his driver to get the engine ready to back on the train. By this time he must be “squared up” and have steam up to anything between 140 to 225 lbs per square inch.

To get the engine ready to leave the shed half an hour is allowed ; to get “on train” from shed another half hour generally, but sometimes only a quarter. In “British Locomotives” Mr. Cooke (Chief Mechanical Engineer L.N.W.) says (p. 353): “Firemen should come to work before booked, and make all preparations with comfort to himself and his driver”—a thing all firemen have to do, for to get an engine ready in a proper manner to ensure safety in the time allowed is impossible, and many firemen “sign on” as much as half an hour before booked in order to make these preparations.

After an engine has run a trip one way “the fire must be cleaned, etc., in readiness for the return journey.” (“British Locomotives,”.p. 370). In the running, when not actually firing, “the fireman must assist his driver in sighting the signals.” (Rule 139.) This is the way that he “learns the road.”

After the return journey is completed and the engine is “on shed,” it has to be “put away,” which means thoroughly cleaning all the parts affected by fire, “turning” the engine, filling the tank, and locking up the tools, etc., reporting any losses of same. For this he is allowed half an hour, which is quite inadequate. He then “signs off,” and is at liberty for nine hours (eight on the L.B.S.C.) from that time. But “in cases of emergency” he may be called out before he has had nine hours off. No matter what “turn” he is booked, after nine hours have expired from his “signing off,” he is the “property” of the company employing him, and is liable to be “called out” at any time. If he is not at home when he is required he is cautioned or reprimanded, and often fined or suspended, for “not being available for duty when required.”

The man’s turn, as a rule, varies daily, and he does not know what turn he will be until the previous day (the Midland and the L.N.W. keep their men fairly well informed of their turns). As aforesaid, his working day is ten hours, but often circumstances compel him to work overtime, especially when starting his career as fireman on the main line, for which, of course, he is paid. Often a fireman does twelve hours or so, then has nine hours off, for two and three days together, the result being that he is tired before commencing his day’s work. This, by the way, being consistent with the companies’ ideas of “safety,” to say nothing of Rule 6 and the dangerous way he may have to cross running roads during the day’s work to carry out the detestable rule 35.

Anyway, his week must not exceed six, or sometimes seven, days (which is quite enough), so after his nine hours off periods he is given a rest of something like sixteen to twenty hours, but only nine of them are his—he is company’s property for the rest of the time, for which he receives nothing.

Of course, anyone with a whit of sense can see that the “men only drive and fire for about four hours per day and are paid ten” (“A Day’s Work on the Footplate,” “Railway Magazine,” Oct. 1909), and the statement of Mr. J. Gooday (Gen. Manager G.E.R.) and his directors, who consider that the “time the men are on duty counts only in the actual running” (“Railway Magazine,” March 1907), is mere piffle, and is only intended to poison the mind of the man in the street, who regards such statements, emanating from such journals and gentlemen, as gospel truth.

It will be seen that the life of a fireman is worry from beginning to end, with bad rest, bad coal, bad engines, bad conditions generally, and bad pay—with which I will deal later.

Now we come to conditions which are rather peculiar to most sons of toil, but which play an important part in dividend making as applied to the Loco. Depts. of the trunk lines. I refer to “lodging,” one of the biggest curses that can befall the loco. man, whether driver or fireman. The sum allowed for a “lodge” is 1s. 6d., and if it exceeds twelve hours, 2s. 6d. The latter price, however, is easily wangled by “calling out” the man a minute or before the twelve hours have expired.

The “main line” men are affected by this, on some lines more than on others. On short lines it is unknown. The men working the long distance goods trains are generally safe for a “lodge out,” because they can only get one way by the time their day is up. They, therefore, on their scanty wages, have to keep two homes going, to say nothing of making a smoke as the result of the bad coal supplied. (See “British Locomo­tives,” p. 346.)

The fireman’s wages vary from 3s. 6d. to 5s. 6d. per day, according where and by whom he is employed—a good average through the country being about 30s. a week. A main line man might get somewhere about 35s. if he is lucky; but besides “lodging,” time worked that he is not paid for, and time at home “waiting” after his nine hours are up for which, as I have said, he gets nothing, and many other expenses connected with the calling, he has to run something like 950 miles.

The wages are nothing like sufficient, neither are there enough men by half, as the long-distance engine working and “lodging” will show. And engines work daily double journeys of 180 odd miles.

The usual term of firing is from twelve to sixteen years, and it is a period of excessive robbery from beginning to end. And while such conditions prevail, and such a set of men are worked as they are, the “welfare and safety” of the travelling public is impossible.

J. Sevier

[To be Continued.]