The Running Commentary Column from the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard
Tenants’ choice
The government’s housing bill is currently undergoing its report stage in the House of Commons. This piece of legislation represents yet another example of the way in which government twists the meaning of language, purporting to give tenants more "freedom" and "choice" by granting them the "right" to opt out of local authority control. Just how far language is distorted is evident in the supposedly democratic procedures laid down in the bill for voting on whether ownership of an estate or block of flats should be passed from the council to a new landlord.
Only local authority tenants resident at the time the prospective landlord made his or her application to the local authority to take over specific properties can vote. This initial application may have been made as much as six or nine months before the ballot is actually held. As a result the “electoral register" will inevitably be out of date. In fact, any tenants who have left the relevant property in the intervening period will still have the right to vote — as will tenants who have died — even though they will in no way be affected by the decision made. On the other hand, tenants who have moved into the estate or block in the months before the ballot will not have the right to vote.
The second perverse feature of the voting procedure is that anyone who does not vote who is eligible to do so will be assumed to be in favour of the property being transferred to the new landlord, and that includes any dead eligible tenants.
Finally the transfer of the property will go ahead unless more than 50 per cent of those eligible to vote, vote against. What this means in practice is that the privatisation of an estate or block of flats can go ahead even if no one actually votes in favour of it. And they dignify this farce with the name of "tenants' choice ”.
Life and death
Many workers find aspects of capitalism morally repugnant: the degradation, misery and exploitation that continually flow from a class society throw-up impassioned voices of criticism and protest. Take the following examples of the way in which workers are brutalised for the sake of profit.
A Japanese electrical company was reported in the Daily Telegraph of 11 April to have been worried that its workers were not competitive enough. To overcome this problem fifteen trainees were deposited on an uninhabited island three miles from the mainland for a three-day survival course. Reporters were told by an enthusiastic employer that "The trainees will have to exercise their imagination and will-power to survive . . . We need flexible people." The article went on to discuss the way in which school-children, on joining Japanese companies, are often sent to military bases for a crash-course in discipline, conformity, teamwork, competitiveness and patriotism. The writer concluded: "Parade ground drill, three-mile runs and saluting the National Flag attune young people to the sacrifice demanded on their life-time marriage to the company".
The same paper on 5 March revealed that the Lord Mayor of London recently sought to persuade City firms to send their young employees into the Territorial Army. As in Japan, firms have been told that training professional killers will instil into employees the competitive will to succeed. Ironically it was advertised as less expensive than sending City workers to Japanese-style weekend training courses. It also falls conveniently in line with ideas put forward by the National Employer Liaison Committee, set up by Thatcher herself, which wants to increase employers' support for the state's reserve armed forces.
In the last week of May the Daily Telegraph reported the death of a Sales Manager. He had worked more than 12 hours a day to meet the demands of his employers, who still were not satisfied with his performance. Before he killed himself they wrote to him stating that "Quality and customer satisfaction must become an obsession". For good measure they advised him that he would have to work harder for less money. The coroner concluded that "There is so much more to life than business schemes and profit". but did not suggest so informing the CBI.
Rigid discipline and the nurturing of aggressive behaviour are vital to capitalism. It requires such qualities no matter what the cost nor how unpalatable they are to workers involved. No moralising will make them disappear because the pursuit of profit must inevitably trample on human needs and brutalise individuals in the process. This is nothing more than a fact of life under capitalism.
Workers have two choices. They can go beyond the promises of politicians and the hollowness of reformism and organise politically to abolish capitalism. Or they can resign themselves to a lifetime of wasted effort working in charities, signing petitions, attending marches or writing harrowing books exposing this or that acute social problem. To do so will condemn us to stumble from one crisis to another and brutalise, degrade and maybe even kill us in the process.
Richard Lloyd
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