Political Notes: Abandon-ships! (1981)

The  Political Notes Column from the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abandon-ships!

Many muffins must have been choked over, in the tea shoppes of places like Tunbridge Wells, at the news that a Tory government may be thinking of scuttling the Royal Navy. In such places there is a perceptible effort to get time, if not to stand still, at least to be reined in. Retired admirals perambulate the streets in hazy dreams of those days of the great, grey battleships looming out of the Channel mists, of royal reviews of line after line of floating fire-power at Spithead or Scapa Flow.

Such people—although they would rather die among the muffins than admit it—have a marked affinity to Labour lefties. Both types vote for their party in the belief that it will not face up to the realities of capitalism. The only difference between them is in the differing realities that they believe will be evaded. And both undergo a nasty shock, when their delusions are blown aside.

Tory governments have done a lot of this blowing. Since they came back to power in 1951, they have not shown any great reluctance to move with the times. Under their rule British capitalism, as it had to, has pulled in its horns. The old British Empire has been dismantled, the armed forces reduced in keeping with the new, restricted influence in world affairs. Eden’s lunatic adventure into Suez in 1956 was a hiccup in this process, soon put right by the saner, smoother MacMillan who worked hard to get the Tories to accept what he saw was inevitable.

Now there is very little left, except for the dreams in Tunbridge Wells—and the Royal Navy, which once expressed in its flags, its guns and its vast ships the world wide expansion of British capitalism, has very little left too. There is no reason for a Tory government not to face this fact. It would be near madness for them, at a time of recession, to spend a lot of money on a navy for which the British capitalist class has little use, simply to placate some of its wilder supporters—in Tunbridge Wells or the Bacup working men’s club.


Mitterrand’s soft ‘socialism’

Francois Mitterrand, the new president of France, is treading a tightrope at the moment, trying on the one hand to retain his popularity with French workers by offering them sops such as increased minimum wages and security benefits, and on the other hand to remain respectable to the French Establishment.

Perhaps Prince Charles will have given him a few tips on how to do that when he went to see him recently. Certainly, his announcement that he will fully maintain France’s arsenal of nuclear weapons for the defence of French property will have reassured a number of people with property interests there.

This opportunist posing is not quite as curious as the headline which appeared in the Sunday Times on 24 May: “Mitterrand softens his socialism to win electors’’. Socialism means the abolition of all property and profit, and the planning of production for use on the basis of common ownership. It is not by its very nature something which can be “softened”, watered down or dressed up to “win electors”.

It is a harmonious social system which would solve the world’s present social problems. Mitterrand stressed right from the start of his campaign that he wishes to modify the present system, not end it. It can only be ended when the majority reject the inflated promises of all capitalist politicians, regardless of their labels. Do not trust anything, including this journal. We can only suggest the cause of our problems to you. The solution lies with us all. The need is to organise democratically, without leaders or promises.


No choice

An awful lot of venom is currently being excited, and expressed, in what is politely known as political debate. The unemployed—or rather those of them restless enough to demonstrate about their plight—shriek their loathing of Margaret Thatcher. To the Tories and to not a few Labour supporters—Tony Benn is a wild eyed fanatic who wants to legislate some nameless dreads into our lives. All of this is based on the theory that political leaders can initiate the crises of capitalism. If that theory were valid, capitalism’s history would be different, for if leaders can initiate a crisis they can just as easily terminate it. Yet this they never seem able to do.

Then again why is it that this turbulent, endless search for the perfect leader — or the perfect combination of them — never succeeds, so that there is always a clutch of the wretched people being reviled. spat upon, bombarded with stale eggs? Why is there always some threat, potential or actual, to set back the programmes for peace and plenty? There can be only one consistent and satisfactory answer. Political leaders do not initiate crises: they only respond to them. So it is more useful to regard their personalities in that light, as shaped by events rather than being able to shape them.

But such rational, supportable views of politics would deprive the competition between the capitalist parties of much of its excitement, a lot of which revolves around a personal dislike for the others' leaders. Except that there is an alternative to this futility—a proper understanding of the basis of capitalism and thereby of the ideas, political and religious theories, the philosophy and the morals, which spring from that basis. Such knowledge is much more exciting—because it is much more powerful—than parading the streets shouting for the demise of some leader or other. It is knowledge to change more than leaders—it will abolish them, and change society itself.

Hunger marching in the 1930s (1981)

Hunger Marching in Britain, 1934.

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was an awesome predictability about the comparisons drawn between that People’s March for Jobs in May and the Jarrow Crusade in 1936. Awesome because the comparisons were blind to an important fact: this is a sick society and its history is not so much repeated as regurgitated.

The 1981 March, much publicised, had some impressive sponsors—like Harold Wilson, whose second government saw unemployment begin to rise to its present level and who was always inveighing against “overmanning” in industry and was fond of referring to redundancies as “shake-outs”. Like garrulous Brian Clough, who doesn’t mind sacking footballers if they don’t play up to standard. Like compulsive protester Peter Main. Yes, it was impressive and exciting, and thoroughly predictable.

The Jarrow marchers were selected for their physical fitness: they marched in ground sheets and flat caps, fed at wayside soup kitchens, and had their boots mended at the local Co-op. One participant (Sunday Times 26/4/81) remembers it as “. .. a holiday . . . they were feeding like fighting cocks. And they got 1s 6d (9p) pocket money at a time when the Means Test Commissioners said you could keep a child on a shilling (5p) a week”.

That stark memory says a lot about conditions in the thirties. In Britain the effect of capitalism's global depression was the crumbling away of the foundations laid down in the Industrial Revolution—the coal mines, textiles, iron and steel and shipbuilding. (In 1932, 62 per cent of shipyard workers were unemployed.) Thus what had once been the boom spots of British capitalism became its Depressed Areas, where the plight of the workers was particularly wretched:

  Most of our children are suffering not so much from tuberculosis as from starvation. Seventy-five per cent of the cases admitted to the Society’s sanatorium were suffering from undernourishment. (Dr. O'Hara at the 1933 meeting of the Durham County Society for the Prevention and Cure of Consumption.)

But the government were not impressed. John Boyd Orr, who found that in 1935 30 per cent of the British population were trying to survive on a seriously deficient diet, remembered:

  Mr. Kingsley Wood, the Minister of Health, asked me to come and see him. He wanted to know why I was making such a fuss about poverty when, with old age pensions and unemployment insurance there was no poverty in the country. (As I Recall.)

Any surprise at Kingsley Wood’s denial of something which was all to obvious should be tempered by the consideration that he was, after all, a politician—and governments had for some years been busily turning the screw on the unemployed. In 1931 an unemployed man received 85p a week, with 45p for a dependent wife and 10p for each child. “Unemployment benefit”, insisted Ramsay MacDonald, “is not a living wage; it was never meant to be that’’. MacDonald’s rare flirtation with the truth can be explained on the grounds that at the time he was arguing for a reduction in the benefits. This was introduced a few months later by MacDonald’s National Government, under an Act passed by his earlier Labour Party administration.

One result of the cuts was that many people were disqualified from receiving state benefits as of right and were left at the mercy of locally based Public Assistance Committees (PAC), whose decisions were often distinguishable only by a variation in harshness. In January 1935 there was another turn of the screw, when unemployed benefits were placed under the central control of the Unemployment Assistance Board (UAB). This change led to even lower allowances than those under the PAC; Tory MP Robert Boothby summed it up: “The new administration is brutal. I can use no other word”.

But the UAB were fretting about the profligacy of the unemployed on those generous allowances. Their 1935 Report was shocked at one who, having inherited some money “. . . immediately took his whole family for an expensive seaside holiday”. One remedy for this sort of behaviour was in places called “residential instruction centres and camps” where, under the watchful repression of ex-army officers, young men were disciplined back to “employability”.

The Times (22/3/38) was ecstatic about the camps (some of its readers had been writing in to say how well this very matter was being handled in Nazi Germany):

  . . . hundreds and thousands of young men . . . do not show any disposition to bestir themselves to get themselves out of unemployment and into employment . . . there is a slackness of moral fibre and of will as well as of muscle . . . the breakdown of morale can only be made good by applying compulsion.

Strangely, no lack of moral fibre was descried—and the UAB did not fret about—the country house parties remembered by Harold Macmillan (Winds of Change) where: “There were no rules except the necessity of appearing at dinner . . .Otherwise, in a large company the groups organised themselves for golf, tennis, walking, talking or quiet reading”. Nor in the world of Tory MP Henry Channon, who had married into the Guinness family and who complained in July 1935: “I am tired of being ‘tiddly’ by night and ‘gaga’ by day: the season has lasted long enough”.

By then marches by unemployed workers had become an established routine of protest. At the spearhead was the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), led by Communist Party member Wal Hannington and widely regarded with the sort of hostility and contempt expressed for the flying pickets a few years ago. “Hannington and the revolutionary riff-raff of London” was the Daily Telegraph's (1/11/32) description. The NUWM was proscribed by the Labour Party and the TUC, was under continual police surveillance and the subject of many a worried Special Branch report.

In spite of this the NUWM organised numerous marches and protests, many of which were on the receiving end of violent repression from the blue uniformed guardians of capitalist law and docility. At the peak of the violence, in October 1932, a crowd of tens of thousands in Hyde Park was attacked by the police, who then stole—there is no other word for it—the petition brought by the marchers to London. Later NUWM demonstrations were on a lower key; in 1936 they finished an orderly march with a rally in Hyde Park, where Attlee and Bevan spoke from the same platform as Hannington. There was nothing to cause alarm, except to any workers class-conscious enough to understand what Bevan meant when he proclaimed, “This demonstration proves to the country that Labour needs a united leadership”.

But the NUWM protests, although they were bigger and more violent, they have been historically overshadowed by the Jarrow Crusade. This latter march sprang from the 1934 closure of Palmer’s shipyard in Jarrow, which threw 80 per cent of the town’s workforce on the dole. Both the Labour Party and the TUC, although they now lay claim to the Crusade as part of their glorious history, condemned it at the time as a publicity stunt by Jarrow’s Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson. The march was orderly; almost the loudest noise it made came from the mouth organs in the lead, until they got to London and saw King Edward VIII in the Mall. At this they forgot any indignation they might have felt about their poverty as against ruling class privilege and. said the Special Branch, “cheered lustily”.

Benignly, the Home Office agreed that, as “. . . the marchers show every sign of being orderly, it would be a good way of encouraging them and placating them” if they were to be entertained to tea at the House of Commons, where much of their misery was discussed and legislated upon. That was about all they got, and Ellen Wilkinson was scathingly rebuked by the Labour Party NEC at their Annual Conference that October. One Jarrow councillor said ". . . you have drawn a blank” but that was not entirely true. Because the marchers had not been “available for work” while they were away from Jarrow the UAB, overlooking the fact that there was no work to be available for, reduced their benefit by up to 55p a week.

Little more could be claimed for the protests than the restoration of some benefit cuts. Unemployment remained stubbornly high; Jarrow did not come back to life. Until the war in 1939 enforced a change, the UAB continued as the scourge of the unemployed. And now, nearly fifty years on. the failure is starkly illuminated: it is all happening again because we are almost back where we began, with 2½ million unemployed.

This is no accident. Wal Hannington (Unemployed Struggles 1919-36) claimed some massive demonstrations in 1931—30,000 people in Dundee, 50,000 in Glasgow, 40,000 in Hyde Park, and much more. Yet that same year the British working class voted overwhelmingly for capitalism to be run by the National Government—the very government who were imposing the cuts in dole money, the police repression of the hunger marchers and all. The total government vote at that election was over 14½ million against just over 7 million for the equally futile, equally culpable, opposition such as the Labour Party.

So capitalism was allowed to continue and now, 50 years on, there can be no optimism that the protesters would have it any different. Like the battlers of the NUWM, like the pathetic men from Jarrow, the 1981 marchers demanded the unobtainable—capitalism without its inevitable ill-effects. One of their leaflets urged: “Unemployment is a human tragedy . . . People must act now . . . Say no to unemployment. . . Demand a return to full employment”.

These ringing phrases could only have reinforced the demonstrators’ confusion, when their overwhelming need is to grasp that working class life under capitalism is tragedy, whether they are in or out of work. There is no dignity in the degrading experience of a person who sells their labour power as the only way of getting a living. It is futile for workers to say no to unemployment, for an economic recession does not happen through a mistake, because someone has not listened. And even if they—the politicians, the economists, the experts—had listened, they would still be powerless to end the recession, to put all the unemployed out of their misery of idleness into the misery of active exploitation.

There is much, much more to it. Those who protest about the effects of capitalism would do better to look for a more radical approach—or else contribute towards generations to come suffering the same sore feet, the same sore heads—and the same bitter disillusionment.

Ivan

The Shamefaced Middle-Class (1981)

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Britain today, the richest ten per cent of the population own sixty per cent of the wealth. The other nine tenths of the people share between them less than half of the wealth. And yet it is precisely those nine tenths who, not having any substantial property or unearned income, are forced to work for a living, and so to create all that wealth. These figures were quoted in the 1979 report of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth.

The few who own all the factories, offices, plant and property, can therefore accumulate more and more by employing thousands of workers, while the bottom nine tenths have practically nothing but their ability to work. So about ninety per cent of the population are employees, they work for wages or salaries, and accumulate practically nothing. The wages and salaries paid to employees are generally consumed by every-day living expenses. Even high-paid managers are only getting a “living wage” if their salaries are eaten up by paying a mortgage, running a big car and so on, for these expenses are all part of their job. Only seven per cent of adults in Britain own shares, and more than eighty per cent of privately owned shares are held by one thousandth of the population. (See The Wealthy, CIS Report, 85p.) The Supplementary Benefits Commission has found that nearly three in five unemployed people have no money at all after one month out of work.

Who are the working class?
What is class? Some try to define it subjectively, saying that it is “up to the individual" to try to say what class they think they are in, if any. This produces chaos: Gallup polls in 1953 showed half the British people questioned, and nearly nine tenths of Americans questioned, claiming to be “middle class". What are they in the middle of? Class needs to be objectively defined—not by what clothes you wear, where you live, your accent or what job you happen to do, but by your real economic position in society, conditions of life, how you are able to live.

Nine tenths of the population are forced by economic necessity to go and look for a job, to work for a living. Hundreds of years ago peasants were driven from off their strips of land into the growing towns, and forced to hire themselves out as wage-workers. They are the ancestors of the workers of today, of the managers and the professors as much as the miners and dockers. Tools were replaced by machinery, work-rooms by factories, and small shopkeepers and craftsmen were squeezed out by the competition of the early manufacturing capitalists. Class today is still determined by people’s relation to the productive machinery of society: do you own the factory, or do you work in it? Do you organise the production of wealth or do you sit back and receive it as profit dividends? People who are cut off from ownership of the means of production are forced to work for wages and salaries which are worth less than the total wealth they produce. The owners, who do not depend on wages or salaries for their living, depend on getting the surplus which results.

All those who have to work for a living are in the working class, and share a common interest to improve their condition of life. A salary is only a monthly wage; Arthur Scargill’s proposal that all miners should be paid salaries would not actually improve their conditions. Many employees do not directly create wealth, but they administer, mend, teach, distribute and ensure the smooth running of the profit system which benefits their employers. They belong to the class which builds all housing from palaces to pigsties, makes all food from caviar to carry-outs. We are all turned into mere commodities on a shelf: pasted-up pieces of card in the labour agency windows. We have different prices pinned on us, because what has been necessary to make, mould and maintain each of us will itself vary.

The employer may want some of the labour power to be more trained than others. But the principle is always the same: selling our ability to work for a weekly or monthly price. According to the Royal Commission report referred to above, “Average earnings in different occupations have come to differ much less" (page 11). If you didn’t inherit great wealth, then all you can do is create great wealth but it won’t be yours, it will belong to the employers, the shareholders or government-bond holders who own the means of wealth production. According to Class in a Capitalist Society by J. Westergaard and H. Resler. (Penguin, 1975):

  The crucial common component in the life circumstances of the mass of wage earners is their dependence on market sale of the labour. How crucial is evident from the wide range of other terms in life which they share, and which clearly separate them, by a gap incomparably greater than the internal divisions among them, from the minority for whom the wheels of private capital turn.

A social class is a group of people who share a common economic and political interest, because they share the same basic position in human society. The working class is the vast majority in modern society, who between them own practically none of the stocks and shares, land, companies and raw materials. The “middle class” is a myth—as can be seen by looking at the people most commonly described in that way.

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

Is there a middle class?
1. Managers. More than a hundred years ago Karl Marx clearly summed up the position of most managers:

  An industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and NCOs (foremen, overseers), who command during the labour process in the name of capital. The work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function. (Capital, Vol. I, Pelican p. 450.)

In the recent national Census, this type of worker was covered by the category “employee supervising other employees”. A kind of industrial police, managers are given some measure of power over other workers, and are expected to maintain profitability, doing the shareholders’ dirty work for them by getting the most work for the least money out of the other employees. But the main point is that they are still just employees, dependent on their work and their wages for their living. They are also often particularly burdened with debt, through struggling to accumulate wealth after the manner of the chairmen and managing directors they idolise, by saving, borrowing and biting off more than they can chew.

They have not realised that capitalists build up wealth through the work of others; workers are exploited through their own work for companies they do not own. The Royal Report on Income and Wealth shows that people with less than £20,000 are generally in debt for about thirteen percent of what they own; for those with more than £200,000 the average debt is only about five per cent. Managers suffer the insecurity of all workers; they are threatened by redundancy. If profits begin to fall, it can be the more expensive “labour units” at the managerial end which are knocked off the pay-roll first. By the end of last year there were about 120,000 on the Professional and Executive Register of unemployed, and the Sunday Times published an article entitled: “The Redundant Executive”:

  Executive redundancy can be a brutal business. Firms often like the victims to go as quickly as possible, fearing an outburst of anger or resentment. Others shy away from the whole business and call in consultants to do the dirty work. Having built their careers around loyalty to the firm, redundant executives are often deeply wounded . . .The really loyal man with twenty years’ service can be a tragic figure, out of touch with the job market and inexperienced at winning in a job interview. He will be exceptional if he can even type his own job application letters and he will be shocked to learn that at 45. he may be considered too old. (14/12/1980.)

A course for redundant executives run by the Professional and Executive Recruitment section of the Manpower Services Commission, advises that they should “cast loyalty aside”, and suggests. “In panel interviews, remember you are a pawn in their game” and “If offered a job, ask immediately for written confirmation”. This is the kind of humiliating indignity which being in the working class involves.

2. Administrative and “White-collar” workers. The division between manual workers and “brain” workers is generally a false one. Could manual workers build a house without having brains? Could clerks work without manning the increasing bulk of manually operated office machinery? Recent action by workers in the Banking Insurance and Finance Union, the Council of Civil Service Unions, teachers, journalists, French magistrates (Guardian, 23/1/81) and even Finnish ecclesiastical workers (Guardian, 25/3/81) proves the point that all those who have to work for wages and salaries are in basically the same position. They must organise together to improve their conditions, by forming trade unions to maintain wage rates and by joining the political movement for a classless society. People who for years have clung on to the idea that they have a “middle class’ respectability are finally forced through economic pressure to concede that they, too, have to use the strike weapon to defend their living standards.

3. Shopkeepers and the Self-employed.
Most shopkeepers are really distributive workers, who work full hours running their shops, and have to struggle increasingly hard to compete with the ever-growing multinational supermarket chains. Although they are not directly employed by the large companies whose products they sell, they play a vital part in getting the goods from the production line to the consumers, and they are allowed to have a commission, a small cut of the profit involved, which rarely adds up to much more than the average salary of an accountant or an engineer. Few shopkeepers are able to retire at an early age with a financial empire to support them. In fact, they have no substantial property; they are members of the working class, struggling to hold on to a false independence. No lasting security or independence can be achieved without the ownership of substantial capital. Some of those officially described as “self-employed” are in fact capitalists, at the heads of enormous companies, so that the richest fifth of “self-employed” people receive more than half the total self-employed income (Income and Wealth report, page 18). But this does not alter the fact that generally, self-employed people depend for their living on their own daily work, and not on the work of others or the accumulation of capital. So they share the insecurity and poverty of the rest of the working class.

4. University graduates, artists and others. The small proportion of workers who go through university are being trained for particular kinds of jobs: mathematicians to analyse profitability, engineers to design productive machinery, historians to justify the existence of the profit system. They are all necessary to the owning class of employers, although at the moment provisions for universities are being cut back on the grounds that they are not absolutely essential to the production of profit in industry. If graduates cannot find jobs, they are reduced to the dole like any other worker. The Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services recently reported that there were 55,000 graduates looking for jobs. Since only a small fraction of people go to university, this is roughly the same proportion of unemployed as the general level.

According to the Central Services Unit for Careers, fifteen per cent of arts students who graduated in 1979 were still unemployed by the end of the year. One university careers adviser makes it clear what class most students are in:

  It’s this discrepancy between the occupations for which arts graduates feel they are qualified, and the jobs they tend to end in, which causes a lot of unhappiness . . .The more idealistic will sometimes refuse to compromise, and may finish by having to learn the hard way. (Guardian, 6/1/81.)

Who are the capitalist class?
The capitalist class is a minority group which owns and controls the machinery of wealth production and distribution in modern society. It is highly exclusive and generally hereditary. The capitalist has power over the lives of the rest of us, because he or she possesses the land and factories which are needed to make the food and shelter we need if we are to live. They make sure that the transport, the schools, the industrial plant, the seas, are all run to provide them with profit out of the labour of others.

The capitalist class includes people like Rupert Murdoch, whose newspapers. The Times and The Sun are read by millions of workers every day. “Tiny” Rowland, who buys chain stores for millions of pounds, while most of us can’t even afford to go shopping in such places as Harrods and Barkers of Kensington. It includes Sir James Goldsmith, Sir Keith Joseph, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, Peter Cadbury, Lord Sainsbury and anyone else who receives an unearned income of rent, interest or profit from owning land, financial or industrial capital. Wages and salaries may vary from £50 to £400, but each million pounds invested can yield an unearned income of thousands each week.

It is almost as if the capitalist class inhabits a separate world. Not having to spend time working for money, they are able to go shooting, hunting, ski-ing, travelling . . . asked in a recent television interview whether he meets people with much less money than himself, the outspoken millionaire Rupert Dean said “Not if I can help it”. Inside the showrooms of Bonhams, Cartier, Sotheby and Christies, behind the oak doors of the Turf, Boodles, Whites, the Royal Yacht Squadron and in dinner parties at Claridges, the Dorchester and Annabels, the parasite elite eat, drink and spend lavishly. They do not experience our menial cares and worries about money.

The Duke of Westminster, aged 28, recently inherited nearly 200,000 acres of land across the world, including 300 acres of Mayfair and Belgravia valued at £1,000,000,000. To him, it wouldn’t matter whether you are a manager, a poet, a printer or a gardener: you are a worker, to be hired to increase his wealth. At his wedding last year, he was reported as saying: “It’s absolutely true that we won’t have to worry about rents or mortgages or anything like that”. When Lord Brownlow’s four-year-old son inherited £3 million in 1979. he said that “he will remain a very normal little boy”: it is “normal” for children of capitalists to get more for their birthday than a worker on £100 a week would earn in six hundred years.

At Christies on 30 March 1981, Dr. Marino Chiavelli spent £1,364,000 on seven paintings (The Times, 1/4/81). These are to decorate his 48-room Johannesburg villa and his London eighteenth- century mansion. The night he was interviewed he was leaving London to visit Switzerland, The United States and South Africa, but he had time to explain that he owns about a dozen companies in the construction and crude oil businesses.

The way ahead
The capitalist class and the working class live totally different lives. Some workers are just paying NHS contributions, others pay BUFA private contributions; the capitalist's insurance for the future is a lasting hold over the bulk of the earth’s resources. The Duke of Westminster is not employed, but he doesn’t need the dole either. You can't get the sack from the security of property. It is the minerals, companies, share portfolios, lands, properties and industrial plant of the capitalist which provide real security and dominate society. A hundred years ago, clerks could hope sometimes to become partners in the small family firms they worked for. Now, ownership has become concentrated, and divorced from managerial work. Small firms are forced out of business or swallowed up by larger ones.

Units of production grow, and production takes on an increasingly socialised form, with millions working together to produce wealth. There is no room for snobbishness in the expanding class of employees who hold the key to a socialist future. Social mobility is a myth. To save up to buy the Duke of Westminster’s London land at the rate of ten pounds a week, would take two million years. World capitalism causes war, poverty and insecurity; but it is perpetuated by the futile ambitions of some workers who shirk class unity for the sake of their false hopes of becoming capitalists themselves.

Clifford Slapper