Capitalism ignores human needs. In the name of efficiency it wastes energies and stops or restricts production; in the name of market freedom it erects a barrier to free consumption; in the name of economic rationality it produces the most irrational contradictions. Food is dumped in the sea: people starve to death. Sick, inhumane, and historically outdated, the capitalist system goes on creating its disgusting social contradictions—and will continue to do so until workers decide to reorganise society on the basis of production for use instead of profit.
Consider the construction of housing. The skill and technology to provide every human being with decent accommodation has existed for decades; no person need live in the street or in a slum or, indeed, in the modern slums, designed by architects who have been instructed to design homes consistent with the poverty of their future inhabitants. Every man. woman and child could live in decent accommodation, but the facts of capitalism are far from allowing that to happen. Let us take a good look at these facts:
- In England and Wales alone there are 1,207,000 occupied dwellings which, according to the Department of the Environment, are unfit for human habitation.
- There arc 994.000 homes in England and Wales which lack one or more of the basic sanitary amenities.
- According to the government, 800,000 families are living in overcrowded dwellings.
- The fact of officially homeless families runs into tens of thousands. These families are often broken up, placed in hostels or left to find room in the overcrowded homes of relatives.
- Every night many thousands of workers live in the street, often with no more than a cardboard box to protect them from the cold. These street-dwellers are not “eccentric tramps", but unemployed youngsters who had come to urban areas in search of jobs, impoverished men who cannot afford rented accommodation and women who lack jobs or family support.
These are facts which the government produces; the Socialist Party merely reports them. Read the most recent report of the Building Research Establishment or the government-compiled House Condition Survey. As facts, they not only demonstrate that we are living in a society of serious deprivation, but that there are no workers who can even be secure from such threat as long as homes are built for sale or rent rather than solely for use. A worker who lives in “decent" rented accommodation today could lose his or her job tomorrow and be forced to live in slum housing or, if money runs out. on the street. But not only the unemployed live in poor housing: faced with the choice between running a car, taking a pleasant holiday or having to pay the mortgage on a decent home, many an apparently affluent worker has to accept inferior housing.
Even those workers happy with their homes are ever insecure. In the recession, with self-styled members of the "middle class” falling deeper into financial hardship, mortgage payments to the Building Societies are not always kept up and so more than 5,000 homes were repossessed in 1983 as a result of mortgage payment arrears. The recent rise of 2.25 per cent in mortgage rates was the second biggest increase ever. As unemployment rises, particularly within the professional and managerial sector of the working class, so will the number of “home-owners” (mortgage- payers, in fact) who will have to seek inferior dwellings. Others will struggle to pay off the mortgage at the expense of the upkeep of their homes, thus paying for the privilege of living in a pleasantly situated slum. None of this need be so: unfit dwellings. insanitary conditions, overcrowding, vagrancy, choosing between pleasant shelter or a holiday, repossession of homes— these are all features of a system which does not build houses to live in (that would be too simple for the wise minds of the economists), but to sell on the market with a view to profit. It is only because shelter is a commodity rather than an entitlement that the housing problem exists. Indeed, there is no housing problem in our society—there is a social problem arising from the capitalist system, which is not to do with bricks, cement and labour, but with rent, interest and profit.
Never before has the construction industry been able to use such advanced techniques as are available in the mid-1980s. Ask any building worker and he will tell you that, technically, it has never been easier to build decent structures. New materials, mechanised tools and computer design methods make it possible to provide really pleasant dwellings in the time it used to take to produce only shoddy products. In short, the productive forces present no problem to the construction industry. So, are we producing more homes than ever? No. Is what is being produced better than ever? In the vast majority of cases, no. Are efforts being made to intensify the rate of construction of homes so that the conditions outlined above can be eradicated? As an answer, let us examine a few more facts:
- Approximately half a million workers in the construction industry are on the dole: they are not "needed" to build houses.
- Housebuilding annually has fallen to its lowest level since the early 1930s. There is no "demand" for houses.
- There is currently a brick surplus: they have produced more than they can sell. There are more unoccupied homes in London—where thousands are homeless—than there are families needing homes. The homeless cannot afford to pay for the use of the unoccupied shelter.
Accounting for deaths
To those who want to know how it can be rational for nearly half a million building workers, most of whom are skilled, to be thrown on to the scrapheap of the unemployed, the simple answer is that they have been sacrificed to the god of profit. In order to maintain (or increase) profits the construction companies had to employ less workers to do as much (or more) work. For example, in 1981 John Laing (the third biggest contractor in Britain) reduced its workforce by 16.7 per cent, and Wimpey (the biggest) threw out 15.3 per cent of their workers. In addition to laying off workers, the construction firms have made profitable use of the so-called youth training schemes, which are no more than means to provide cheap labour power to the capitalists at a time when young workers have little choice of job. The capitalists who own the construction industry have also used the recession to go as far as they can to destroy the trade unions in their industry. Many firms—particularly sub-contractors who have for years made fortunes out of treating their workers like dirt—will not consider an applicant for a job if he possesses a union card. The increasing tendency to use non-unionised labour has meant that there are wider discrepancies than ever between workers doing the same jobs on different sites. The trade unions, for their part, have been forced virtually to suspend their campaign against lump labour: these days even some of the most militant building workers of past years are often forced by economic circumstances to accept jobs at below the union rate. UCATT officials admit that as long as there is mass unemployment in the construction industry their power to organise is severely limited. One consequence of this is that construction workers are often employed in highly unsafe conditions. Indeed. it is another irony of this mad system that at a time when there is more legislation than ever on the statute book defending safety conditions for building workers and when the technology of construction is safer than ever, the number of accidents in the industry is increasing faster than it was a decade ago. This is happening because of the need to complete jobs quickly and without care, because non-unionised workers are forced to accept dangerous hazards at work, because many of the young wage slaves being brought into the industry have not done apprenticeships and make mistakes, and because it is often cheaper for an employer to run the risk of paying compensation than to go in for expensive safety measures. In short, the cost of a life is a price which the accountants can afford to allow for without letting profits suffer. That is why. according to UCATT, there were more workers killed in the construction industry last year than were killed in the entire Falklands war.
Before the First World War Robert Tressell wrote what is still the finest account in English of working-class life in the building industry: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. All these years later it is still a favourite among construction workers—and the tragedy is that after decades of what the lying capitalists call “progress" the conditions are still very similar. One condition which is strikingly the same as ever is the constant concern of capitalists to produce shoddy (and therefore cheap) buildings where they can get away with it. Capitalism is a system which sticks art (pictures of old Dukes wearing blond wigs and tights) in the galleries and claims to revere creativity, but when it comes to useful production shows contempt for craftsmanship and enterprise. It is very easy for idlers like the Prince of Wales to make pious noises about the ugliness of modern buildings while he roams around from palace to palace, but the socialist concern with architecture is not to have more attractive showpieces in central London (the opinionated Prince was sounding off recently about the new extension to the National Gallery), but to have pleasant structures where it really matters: in places where the majority of people live and work. Of course, it would be utopian to imagine that capitalism could allow beauty to take priority over profit: it is not likely that the architects will be called in (by Royal command) to design pleasant working conditions for the workers on the line at Ford or to replace the squalid council estates with homes fit for humans. The majority of workers can only afford to rent or buy relatively dull and badly designed accommodation. Under this system you get what you pay for. That's why those who build the mansions spend their wages on the rent of second-rate homes while the parasites who own the construction companies live in mansions—usually with a spare cottage in the country for weekends.
What will a socialist society do to the construction industry? Firstly, the purpose of the new social order will be to produce for need and not for profit. So, there will be no concern in the minds of those involved in construction work other than to build what people need. No person need ever again be homeless; no person need live in a dwelling which is unsanitary. Secondly, socialism will end wage slavery, where the labour power of the producers is a commodity to be bought by the highest bidder: builders will produce according to their ability, without receiving wages, in the confident knowledge that they, like all men and women, will have free access to all of the goods and services which humanity can create. Thirdly, there will be no need to produce inferior buildings for "inferior" people to live in. Socialism, which will be a classless society of common ownership and democratic control, will produce the best for everyone. As a matter of fact, it often involves more effort to produce inferior buildings than it would to produce decent ones: one of the perverse features of capitalism is that hours and days are wasted by “experts" working out ways to create rubbish when it is easier (but costlier) to create a decent product. Fourthly, socialism will not allow men and women to endure intolerable hazards for the sake of productivity. That is not to say that there will not be accidents, in a society of production for use. but—and this is the opportunity which socialism offers—there need never be another builder killed because construction is organised on a purposely unsafe basis. Finally, socialism will offer the builder the respect which he (and she, let us not forget) deserves as an artist. In a capitalist society the artist is respected for the useless products of his creation— the more ornamental and useless the more “artistic” the creation must be. In socialism we can start taking pride in useful creations: homes, offices, factories, ships, hospitals. Even today you will often meet workers who take pride in saying that they helped to build that housing estate—but they had no control over its design, they were forced to make it a second-rate product, or if it is worth taking pride in you can bet your Jubilee Mug that they cannot afford to live in it. So, instead of a society of palaces for parasites, why not let us build a society of the best for all? Why not, in other words, join the biggest construction industry ever seen: the movement for world socialism?
Steve Coleman
1 comment:
That's the August 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard done and dusted.
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