Human beings have the capacity for historical hindsight. We can look back critically at the slaves of ancient society and agree that they were misguided in believing that their situation was “natural” and “proper". We now know that there was nothing innately inferior about slaves, that they were simply born into servitude. We have also passed that phase of society where the social structure was a rigid hierarchy in which the serf looked up to the knight, the knight to the Lord of the Manor and everyone looked up to the monarch, though few would ever see one. We can watch Upstairs, Downstairs and laugh when Hudson the butler speaks about the need for everyone downstairs to be aware of their “station in life", so that a bedroom servant could be rude to a scullery-maid but not to the cook. If we look at our own period in history with the same awareness of change and the impermanence of social ideas, we can see that there is nothing natural or necessary about the wage-slave status of the majority.
The Tories have been particularly vocal about denying this idea. They say that there must always be rich and poor. Many supporters of the Conservative Party claim that they have “no political philosophy”; they insist that if you desire change in one form or another you are “political" but if you merely happen to agree with the way things are, and accept the prevailing, popular ideas, then you are apolitical. But look at the political ideas on which conservatism is founded.
Conservatives believe in “Self-reliance". This amounts to equating poverty or insecurity with inadequacy, being unable to make your own way. Margaret Thatcher has spoken about her support for “Victorian values". What does she mean? The values of a society where the abject destitution of the majority and the sickening conditions of the workhouses were kept in being by indoctrinating the workers with docility and humility from birth? The values which said that it was the job of the masses to work hard and keep quiet and the right of the minority to enjoy great wealth and remain idle?
In its 1979 Election Manifesto the Conservative Party said:
No one who has lived in this country for the last five years can fail to he aware of how the balance of our society has been increasingly tilted in favour of the State at the expense of individual freedom. This election may be the last chance we have to reverse that process, to restore the balance of power in favour of the people.It was Disraeli who referred to a Conservative government as an "organised hypocrisy” and that may be a fairly appropriate term when it comes to this business of democracy. You could perhaps imagine Margaret Thatcher choking on her champagne if there was any immediate prospect of the people actually taking power away from the wealth owners who now exercise it. And you can't help but think it peculiar, that the government which has recently guided the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill through Parliament (dramatically to increase police powers of arrest and forced searches) should be so concerned with weakening the power of the state. “Individual Freedom” is a phrase which often sounds good, but in fact boils down to the freedom of the poor to suffer their lot, the freedom of the unemployed to get a job if they wish, and the freedom of the majority to fantasise about becoming millionaires while the wealth owners are left free to enjoy their parasitic status.
What else are the Tories in favour of? They listed “five tasks" in their 1979 Manifesto and we can see now how far these tasks have been completed and what the consequences have been.
The first task was "to restore the health of our economic and social life by controlling inflation and striking a fair balance between the rights and duties of the trade union movement". Although price rises have tended to flatten out, wage rises have been largely below this rate and workers have sustained a drop in their standard of living. We have seen this government give a smiling thumbs up to the Polish workers who were trying to augment their trade union powers against the wishes of the bosses of Polish state-capitalism, while at the same time introducing the Employment Act to restrict trade union power. What was it Disraeli said about hypocrisy? During the water workers’ strike at the beginning of this year Thatcher, speaking in Glasgow, said that “honesty, thrift, reliability and hard work and a sense of responsibility for fellow men are not simply Victorian values but part of the enduring principles of the Western World". She urged the striking workers to respect a “puritan work ethic" instead of trying to “deprive the community of one of life's essentials". You might wonder whether Thatcher ever pokes her head through the doors of Buckingham Palace, or the Hilton lounge or the gentlemen’s clubs to lecture the inhabitants about the puritan work ethic. When the government spends money on bombs, telling us that nurses and kidney machines are not as important, does she berate herself for attempting to "deprive the community of one of life’s essentials”? The similarity between the right-wing Conservative and Kremlin attitudes to free trade unions is, if you'll pardon the expression, striking. The recent report of the Tory Centre for Policy Studies recommending legislation to prohibit strikes in essential industries is just the recipe for keeping the workers down which is favoured by Andropov and Jarusekski.
The second task was to “restore incentives so that hard work pays". As you know, working hard for the boss all your life means not only that you are left with next to nothing to spend at the end of your days, but that you are usually too exhausted to enjoy what little you have. The only way hard work pays is when you happen to have a lot of people working hard for you. Hard work pays? Elizabeth Windsor gets £3,260,200 a year. She must work hard. R.V. Giordano, the director of BOC, gets £450,000 as a salary. He must work hard. The Duke of Buccleuch owns 258,000 acres so he must have worked pretty hard, plus he’s got all that gardening to do.
It is an old dodge of politicians to blame the cause of social problems on the government of the day and then, if those carping politicians ever themselves become the government, to switch the blame (correctly) on the uncontrollable forces of the market. Tory politicians are no exception to this rule. We find them in 1979 blaming the Labour government for social problems in Britain: “Their favourite but totally false excuse is that their appalling record is all due to the oil crisis and the world-wide economic depression.” After a couple of years they were themselves using exactly the excuse they had found unacceptable coming from Labour: "There’s been a world recession, not our fault — Germany, France. Europe are suffering as well — some suffering even worse . . . there are other countries that have even worse unemployment than we have, some less, all are struck by world recession” (Guardian. 7 March 1983).
The third task was to "uphold Parliament and the rule of law”. The upholding of the law usually has different results depending on your class. Take two examples: “An unemployed woman who stole a purse containing 50p was jailed for eight months” (Daily Telegraph, 28 February 1980), whereas "The Duke of Westminster’s cousin William Grosvenor was given a 12-month suspended sentence and fined £1000 for conspiring to defraud the Inland Revenue . . . he admitted helping to hide the £8.500 cost of champagne and whisky, grouse shooting party at Glenfiddich in otherwise genuine tax-deductible bills" (Daily Express, 24 January 1980). Wealth is produced by labour. Yet those who are most productive own least. This society works on the basis that those who produce do not possess and those who possess do not produce. All legal systems legitimise the massive institutional theft of wealth by the ruling class. The wages system is legalised robbery because we get back less than the value of what we put in. Apart from this primary purpose, the law has to be used to control the frustration which is a daily occurrence in capitalism. With a worsening recession and austerity the Tories are condoning greater police violence to cope with riots and a proliferation of brutal robberies. But a point which is not fully comprehended by those salivating Tories at their annual Conference who speak about the need for harsh punishments and more discipline is that you cannot create content with a truncheon.
The fourth task was to “support family life, by helping people to become home owners raising the standard of their children’s education and concentrating welfare services on the effective support of the old, the sick, the disabled and those who are in real need". This sounds sincere. In fact it does not altogether match up with what the Tories did in practice. Family life. well yes, unless you are in an Asian family in which case you may come a cropper of the Nationality Act which limits the entry of parents, grandparents and fiancées to live with the rest of their family. Own your own home. yes. but they forget to mention that paying the mortgage does bear certain similarities to paying the rent. Last year 27,000 people lost their homes as a result of being unable to keep up the mortgage payments. Today 87 per cent of the population own only 9 per cent of the land. 60,000 families are officially homeless and about 1.5 million families are waiting to be rehoused (Shelter). We are living in a society where property company boss Sir lan MacTaggart can sit in one of his £1000 a week marble-floored penthouses (Daily Express, 24 June 1981), pick up a newspaper and read about 18-year-old Linda Jackson who gave birth to a stillborn baby because of freezing conditions while she was having to live in a tent on the banks of the River Dee in Chester (Daily Express, 4 December 1980). You cannot have such a thing as a property-owning democracy because the idea of property (“This is mine, the rest of you cannot have it”) is opposed to the idea of democracy. By the same token, “equal opportunities" in a property society do not count for much. Anyone is free to send a child to Eton (for about £4,000 a year) for that child to have a prosperous life. Anyone is free to pay £250 a day for private hospital treatment. It is just that the majority of us begin this unnecessary competition for "success" with the handicap of being in the working class.
The fifth task was to "strengthen Britain’s defences and work with our allies to protect our interests in an increasingly threatening world”. What the Tories, like the other pro-capitalist parties, fail to make clear here is the precise nature of "our interests”. The only interest most of us have in Britain is that this is where we pay rent, receive dole, or sell ourselves to the boss. Where we consume the culture of Terry Wogan, Crossroads and baked beans. The economic interests of Charrington-Coalite, who virtually own the Falklands. were scarcely mentioned during or after all the unnecessary bloodshed in the South Atlantic. The Tories are emphatic about the need for bombs "to keep the peace" and about the need to protect ourselves against our enemies. Norman "on-your-bike" Tebbit is a man who cannot really count logic or consistency as among his strengths. While spending much energy arguing against the heavy-handed interference of the state, Norman recently urged parents to keep their children away from school when plays about the Hiroshima bomb and the need for peace were due to be performed. He presumably considers that young minds should not really become acquainted with what happened at Hiroshima and why we should take steps to avoid travelling down the same road again. Negligently overlooking the government propaganda anti-Russian leaflet for schools, How to Deal with a Bully, Norman then further confused his opposition to the peace plays by saying "I prefer politics to be kept out of schools”. With such a clear liking for having his head in the clouds, Norman would have perhaps done better to have remained an airline pilot.
The solution to the social problems of the majority is a dramatic change of social organisation to socialism. This is not the decoy duck which the Tories set up to shoot down. It is not “Less freedom . . . Nationalisation . . . Levelling down . . . high spending . . . high taxes . . (Fifty Questions & Answers, What Socialists Believe In. Conservative Research Department). Neither is it Labour’s "new” plan to re-organise capitalism, with "a priority to create jobs (more exploitation) ... a five-year national plan (Stalin would have been proud) . . . and plans to abolish the legislative powers of the House of Lords" (Labour's Plan, The New Hope for Britain).
Socialism means the common ownership and democratic control of the means of producing and distributing wealth. It means acting to put an end to the need for wars and starvation. An end to eating synthetic food, living in inadequate accommodation. An end to the culture of tension, television-trances and Tcscos. Thatcher says "stand firm” as she harangues us about Victorian values. We are not amused.
Gary Jay
No comments:
Post a Comment