Letters: Women Workers (1979)

Letters to the Editors from the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Women Workers

Following discussions with a member of the SPGB, I perceive a contradiction in the Party’s approach to the struggle to bring socialism.

The Party acknowledges and encourages the struggle of all workers to win higher standards of work and life, although the ultimate goal of workers must be the abolition of wage labour. Many things stand in their way. For women workers, in particular, enforced childbearing has been the single greatest barrier in their fight for better employment, better education and leisure. Why then has the Standard been silent on the struggle of women to achieve this particular revolution in the quality of their life and work to win free contraception and abortion on demand?

Your lack of interest in this workers’ movement (as confirmed by a three-year avoidance of this or any other issue important specifically to women in the Standard) suggests that you either deny or do not understand its centrality. If either is the case, then the SPGB must lose credibility with women workers who fight to build socialism in their own lives.

But perhaps I have been misled by your spokesperson.

Verna Smith

London WC1

Reply:

You rightly point out that the Socialist Standard has not dealt with free contraception or abortion on demand (except for a general article on the women’s movement in the November 1978 issue) for the past three years, but it is something which will be analysed in a forthcoming issue. Regrettable though this absence (not avoidance) is, we claim that the basic message of our journal — the abolition of the wages system — is the ‘central issue’ for all workers.

Our aim is free access to all that society produces; socialism will obviously make available means of contraception and abortion. But we do not support campaigns to ‘demand’ these. To do so would attract support from non-socialists people interested in reforming capitalism rather than abolishing it. In any case what you must ask yourself is whether these are realisable aims under capitalism. Suppose these services are provided — a possibility, since it would be in capitalism’s long term economic interest despite the initial costs. Do you think they would be any more adequate than the other inadequate ‘free’ health services which allow people to die waiting for them? Or do you think they would remain immutable rights at times, such as now, when the inevitable crises of capitalism force governments, of whatever name, to introduce cuts in ‘social’ or ‘health’ services?

Since capitalism operates only on the basis of providing goods and services according to cost/profit considerations, surely it is capitalism which is the ‘single greatest barrier’ to women workers — as well as to men. The removal of this barrier should be the immediate goal of all of us.

Editors.

Inflation and Crises

In the article ‘Brave New Tory World?’ (Socialist Standard, July) your writer mentions that governments can control inflation. Can you explain how they do this and how inflation relates to the crises and depressions mentioned which governments cannot control?

P. J. Simmons

Hayling Island, Hants.

Reply:

Governments cause inflation by putting into circulation an excess amount of currency (notes and coin). This was prevented in nineteenth century Britain by the gold standard, which linked Bank of England notes to gold. By law, the notes were convertible on demand at a fixed rate (£1 represented about a quarter of an ounce of gold). At a given level of production a certain amount of gold-linked currency is needed; if it is replaced by inconvertible paper currency of a large amount, prices rise accordingly. Wherever and whenever such excess issue has taken place inflation has resulted; wherever and whenever governments have restricted the issue of currency, prices have stabilised or fallen. A rise in the general price level is not synonymous with, but the result of, inflation.

Crises and depressions, on the other hand, are endemic to the capitalist mode of production and unrelated to monetary factors; they are the consequence of conditions in the field of production and marketing, or basically, of the class ownership of the means of production and of production for sale and profit. While every company is planning to sell its products in the world market, so are similar companies and governments in every country. They do not know the size of potential world demand for all their products, and they know still less about the total supply there will be when these unrelated plans for expanded production are completed. They hope for a profitable share of the market, but they cannot know. They all gamble on the future. And every now and then the gamble produces chaotic conditions that disorganise all markets and slow down all production.

Governments have thought, mistakenly, that printing more money (inflation) could reduce unemployment and avoid slumps . .. but that’s another question.

Editors.

World View

I was interested in the reprint of parts of Un monde sans argent: le communism (July 1979).

It is possible, as you suggest, that the authors may have developed their ideas independently of the SPGB. Capitalism, to say the least, tends to give rise to its opposite, and there have been small groups of ‘socialists’ advocating a free, stateless, moneyless world in France and some other European countries for decades.

Nevertheless, tiny as the SPGB is, I know of French workers familiar with it. Indeed, a friend of mine who lives in Paris has in her library a copy of Philoren’s Money must go, and for over two years she lived and worked in a hospital only a stone’s throw from Clapham High Street!

If the group — if it still exists — envisages a non-parliamentary establishment of socialism, they may in the end be correct; all I am prepared to say is that it can only come about on a world scale by a majority who have a fairly good idea of what it will involve and, most important, desire such a society. Speed the day!

Peter E. Newell 

Colchester