So They Say: Worker Priorities (1977)

The So They Say Column from the June 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Worker Priorities

One of the difficulties faced by those who believe that capitalism can be adapted to operate in the interest of workers is that they find themselves voicing the same views as those who actually reap the benefits, the owners of capital.

  Unless we start to achieve proper production levels, we are contributing to the downfall of our industry. (Joe Gormley, NUM leader. Daily Telegraph, 5th May ’77)

He does not mean “our industry”, however. Miners do not own the mines. The Daily Telegraph described his view as “down-to-earth common sense!” Elsewhere in the same newspaper, Terry Beckett, chairman and managing director of Ford’s, was expressing his views as an owner.

  British productivity was substantially worse in many operations compared with Germany . . . We therefore need a positive trade union attitude to management's initiatives on improved productivity . . . there is no doubt that our companies and our workforce have to be efficient and effective.

He is looking over his shoulder for trade-unionists to fight this battle for him. But before Gormley, or any other of his ilk, encourages his members to believe that they have mutual interests with the owners in running capitalism, it should first be made clear that workers as a whole have an overriding interest of their own. Not to support the private property system every time it creaks, but to dismantle the entire thing and establish a world of common ownership.


Capitalist Priorities

The main thrust of Beckett’s remarks was directed against “the motor industry’s bad strike record”, and the blame for this could be laid at the door of “technology”:

A handful of men could stop a whole line and bring 10,000 to a halt.

The “technology” he says is to blame—the machine line—is one of capitalism’s “effective and efficient” advances, in fact beloved by Ford’s. It is designed and introduced to intensify production. What he is really blaming is the “handful of men” who can leave such an expensive capital investment lying idle. Ford’s are then unable to reap surplus-value from the other 10,000. However, according to Beckett, there is a straightforward solution to any and every problem which workers experience. He advocates the mind-over-matter theory: whatever else, stay at the machine. Problems? Forget them:

  There was an obsessive concern with wages, prices, unemployment, living standards and funding the social services in Britain. People were hopelessly confused on what could be done to improve the position. Only good rewarding work [on a machine line?] could bring good rewarding pay. Britain had pussy footed around the issue of profits for years. The whole country needed to accept the necessity of profit with enthusiasm.

(Daily Telegraph, 5th May ’77)

More equal than others ?

We note that Mr. George Costakis must be an extremely hard-working man. The Russian Embassy in London informed the Socialist Standard last year that “material wealth is distributed in the socialist [Russian] society according to the principle of, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work.” Mr. Costakis, 64, worked for many years “as an administrative officer in charge of Russian employees at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow” (Daily Telegraph). He has recently been given permission by the Russian Minister of Culture to take 80 of his 300 paintings out of the country.

 The Costakis collection has been conservatively estimated to be worth £2m on the western market . . . Contrary to Western belief, private collections are perfectly legal in Russia, and the late Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet propagandist, had a valuable collection of Picassos.

(Daily Telegraph, 11th May 77)

True to form

Those who suggest that nationalization has something to do with Socialism will note that the Post Office (“our” Post Office) has made an “excess profit” of £100m. on the telecommunications side. The proposed £7 rebate to each subscriber does not appear to be a very generous “dividend”, however, according to the Post Office chairman Sir William Ryland.

  But what is distributed now as a rebate will have to be recovered sooner or later from the customer or the taxpayer to help fund our large programme.

(Daily Telegraph, 5th May 77)

But was the £100m. profit a fantastic accident in the first place? Sir William Ryland does not think so:

  I make no apology for the success of the telecommunication services in moving from large losses to a healthy profitability . . . It is a fine achievement of immense proportions, something of which we should all be proud . . . Profit must be the heartbeat of the economy.

Safe Bombs

The science editor of The Times, Pearce Wright, had an interesting piece on 2nd May. The title above his column read: keeping nuclear bombs out of the wrong hands.

And what then, are the right hands? Perhaps the scientist knows something we do not. We had understood that nuclear bombs were designed to kill people.

Central Paradox

India currently has a record stockpile of 18 million tonnes of food—mostly wheat and rice—and is experiencing difficulties in storing it satisfactorily The expense of creating indoor space has meant that approximately one-third of the stockpile is lying under tarpaulins in the open air. In turn this can lead to deterioration of the grain by humidity and rain, and also by infestations particularly of rats. Within the next two months, officials reckon that the stockpiles will exceed 20m tonnes.

  But while farmers are pressing the new Janata (people’s) Government for higher intervention prices — which are set by the Government when it buys for storage — there remains the central paradox of overproduction in India: stockpiles exist side by side with more than 600 million people, two fifths of whom are too poor to buy sufficient food. Whether the stockpile is too much is uncertain. A senior official of the Food Corporation once actually proposed huge wheat exports.

Madness? Just another glimpse of capitalism’s “unacceptable face”.

Smooth Talker

Elsewhere the president of the European Commission, Roy Jenkins, eloquently expressed his side of the European “problem”:

  The basic problem here of course is that as long as you have a structural surplus of milk products generally and butter in particular, you have got an almost insoluble problem. You have got to try to get rid of it [butterJ somehow, and yet selling it at very low prices, which are the only prices at which you can get rid of it, to other countries, particularly if attention is concentrated on one country, arouses a considerable political storm.

The Times (Europa report), 5th April 77

If there is something to be got “rid of’ here, surely it must be the social system which creates the “central paradox” and along with it, its oily apologists.

Muddlers

The Labour Party’s home policy committee clearly feel that variety is the spice of life and are preparing a sort of variety-act, apparently because there’s nothing better for them to do.

  Labour’s policymakers decided last night to wage war on private landlords and agreed at the same time to start work on producing a ‘mid-term manifesto’ that will not meet with the approval of Mr. Callaghan.

The Times, 10th May 77

We suppose they imagine this a useful exercise. If they seriously wish to project something that Callaghan will disapprove—they could suggest Socialism. Regrettably though, the Labour policyfakers themselves are scared stiff of the idea.

Taking it easy

Daily Telegraph writers and ignoramuses in general are not backward in coming forward particularly when there is a suggestion that the workers are all sloping-off, or leaning on the proverbial shovel. Get your backs into it, seems to be their motto. One of them, Howard Hicks, wrote a piece in the 5th May issue “on the evils of falling productivity”.

His advice came as no surprise—“Wake up, workers of Britain!” We could increase productivity enormously. he assures us, “without dying of fatigue,” which is of some comfort; but he gets oven funnier:

 I do not believe that a country which has been breeding people with stamina, courage, determination and native genius for a thousand years, can continue to go dormantly downhill after about 20 years of apathy and soft living on borrowed money, and lack of dynamic out-spoken leadership.

How Hicks is talking about workers: what is the “soft living” he means? Two or, if you are really soft, three weeks a year on the infamous Costo Mucho beaches wedged in among the other fish-and-chip eating softies muttering, “This must be paradise”? After two or three weeks of that, no wonder that the blighters won’t work. But there is another side of it which appears to have escaped Hick’s attention. There are those among us, so the Telegraph's shipping correspondent would have us believe, who take things to extremes. Work harder? this lot don't work at all!

  The Cunarder Queen Elizabeth 2 is to make a 96-day Pacific cruise next year with the highest fare costing £88,550 for the best accommodation Mr. Victor Matthews, chairman of Cunard. said: Our two penthouse suites are the first to go. We have no trouble selling them and there are many people who want to spend this amount of money . , . People taking the penthouse in the past have entertained at a very high level— as much as £1000 a day.

Daily Telegraph, 15th April ’77

For the information of cheapskates, the lowest fare available is £5,350, but the report does not make it clear whether bread and water is thrown in for this amount. Howard Hicks, in his search for “dynamic and out-spoken leadership”, should move quickly. There’s a fair chance that a number of our leaders will be at sea next year.

Alan D'Arcy