Political Notes: The Poor and the Rich (1987)

The Political Notes Column from the May 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Poor and the Rich

Dismal news for the purveyors of the grand Tory concept of the share-owning democracy. Since the Trustee Savings Bank was privatised in October 1986. over 700,000 shareholders have sold their stake. The number of shareholders has fallen from 3.15 million to 2.45 million and there has been a sharp rise in the numbers of companies and institutions owning more than 10,000 shares; of these, 95 hold more than 500,000.

Two things are suggested by these figures. One is that a great many people who bought the shares did so in order to sell them again quickly, to bring in an immediate profit. They did this because they are members of the working class who went through with the deal on borrowed money to get a small, immediate gain. The other follows: TSB is substantially in the hands of the capitalist, investing class. Workers who were misled into thinking that sinking a few pounds into privatised concerns changed their class status should think again.

The capitalist class as a class do not invest capital in order to quickly relinquish their ownership. They accumulate capital, they exploit the workers and they live — very comfortably — off the proceeds of that. They do not depend on a wage for their living, jacked up with an occasional windfall like a pools win or cashing in a few shares.

Another piece of news illuminated how this class live, how they disburse some of the proceeds of worker exploitation and what standards of judgement they apply when they do this.

In Geneva a couple of weeks ago there was an auction of the jewellery which had been owned by the late Duchess of Windsor. Some readers will recall that she was married to the man who once declared that something must be done about the plight of unemployed miners in South Wales, although he never made it clear what he had in mind to be done. While he was expressing these newsworthy sentiments he was also filling up his future bride's jewel caskets with some impressive baubles — like a flamingo brooch of rubies, diamonds, emeralds and sapphires and a 31 carat diamond.

The sale was, said the Daily Telegraph, a High Society assault. Prominent among the moneyed storm troopers was Sam Moussaieff, who spent about £6 million. Asked how much he had spent, the amiable but forgetful Moussaieff replied that he thought it was £2 million ". . . but if it's much more that's a problem for my bank manager".

This rich and vulgar member of the ruling class might have some interesting things to say about workers who presume to count themselves among his class when the most they can afford is a brief but apparently heady fling into the TSB. And his bank manager would probably agree.

Making it Simple

There are plenty of people who believe it is a simple matter to pick off social problems, one after another, by projecting resources in their direction.

It certainly sounds simple. Hypothermia in the elderly? Increase pensions with a special Keeping Warm Grant. Penniless single parents? Introduce a new generous state benefit for unmarried mothers and fathers bringing up the kids on their own. Slums? Give massive government hand-outs to pay for the places to be renovated.

This would be more convincing were it not for the fact that these sorts of remedies have been tried before. Pressure groups who do a great job analysing particular aspects of poverty always come to the conclusion that the solution is for the government to spend the problem into oblivion. And of course in many cases the pressure groups made their point, so that the system of state benefits is a tangle of allowances and adjustments each one of which, when it was introduced, was supposed to mean the end of the difficulty.

However, the success or failure of these measures can be judged by the fact there is still seen to be a need for them. Hardly a week goes by without some organisation somewhere publishing a report which couples an analysis of some problem with a demand that extra resources should be allocated to solving it.

Among the most recent of these was the august British Medical Association, whose Board of Science concluded, according to the Guardian of 28 March, that unemployment, poverty and deprivation are all linked to ill- health. Just before that the Health Education Council had reached a similar conclusion.

Those who have been concerned about the effect of capitalism on human well-being will wonder why it needs an investigation, in 1987, to tell us about this. However, it is clear that in these reports there is at least the germ of enlightenment — the beginning of recognition that sickness is not an accident or a matter of individual failing but is influenced by which class a person belongs to. This can be developed and expanded; if sickness is class-related it follows that a lot of illness is preventable — but only by doing something about class society.

And what is involved in that? The only effective action is to abolish classes, to abolish the social system which gives rise to them. This is a radical, revolutionary measure which means fundamental social change to a completely different set of relationships, a completely different way of running the world. Its radical nature is probably the very thing which makes people wary of it; the majority prefer reform to revolution, opting for tinkering with social problems rather than abolishing them.

So we shall still, for a while, have to keep reading these reports. Until people decide to do it the simple, obvious way.

Excessive force

At the beginning of June last year a convoy of self-styled "travellers" attempted to get to Stonehenge with the intention of holding a pop festival. They were prevented from reaching their destination by a massive police operation involving police from a number of different forces and a series of road blocks. It resulted in vehicles belonging to the travellers being damaged and impounded, and 537 of them being arrested. There were many complaints about the violence of the police operation by the travellers themselves and from people who were appalled to see television pictures of police behaving violently to women and children, dragging people out of vehicles and smashing windows with their truncheons.

Nine months later the supposedly independent Police Complaints Authority has published its report in which they concede that some police officers did use excessive force against members of the travellers' convoy. But they conclude:

  In the act of making the arrests some officers clearly used excessive force, but it has not been possible to identify them amongst the 1.363 officers involved and therefore disciplinary proceedings which demand a clear identification of officers are impossible.

The difficulty of identifying police officers responsible for violent incidents is becoming a familiar story. It's strange how the police seem to have very little difficulty in identifying suspects from among crowds of rioters or football spectators or on a picket line? Of course, part of the problem might be that unlike their opponents, the police in the Stonehenge incident entered the fray wearing full riot gear including helmets with face visors which, it would seem, not only protect them from the sticks and stones which, it is always alleged, are thrown at them, but also from later identification when things get nasty.

But to focus on individuals responsible for using "excessive force" is to miss the point. For disciplinary action against a few "over-zealous" policemen would not stop the police from using violence. Because ultimately, despite all the rhetoric about "the rule of law" and "policing by consent", the police operate through the threat or actual use of force. The police are part of the coercive machinery of the capitalist state and as such have a right, given to them by the capitalist class, to use violence. The arguments can, therefore, only really be at the margins — about how much violence is reasonable in a given set of circumstances and what constitutes "excessive force". So long as the Police Complaints Authority are left to decide those questions nothing much is likely to change.

Be Unreasonable

Through the jungles of morality, the search goes on for the Reasonable Person. It is led by Tory MPs who want to bring back capital punishment for killings which a Reasonable Person would consider evil and to wipe out from broadcasting any matter which a Reasonable Person would find distasteful.

Many people might consider every person killed in a war, or who dies from hunger or avoidable disease, to have been subjected to an evil murder. Then again such people might think politicians and media operators who look for advantage in stirring up public hysteria to be extremely offensive and distasteful. But of course that sort of person is clearly unreasonable — not at all what the searchers are looking for.

As every Reasonable Person knows, a Reasonable Person believes that private property society has always existed and must therefore go on for ever. They think human beings are essentially greedy, deceitful and belligerent and can be kept under control only through savage punishment — which means that class society, in which a minority lives like parasites off the labours of the majority — is perfectly natural. They give obeisance to leaders, on the assumption that we are all so stupid that we need royalty, aristocrats and politicians to tell us how to run our lives — who must also tell us, because otherwise we wouldn't know, what is evil and what is virtuous. They are patriotic, with firm suspicions about the eccentric failings of all foreigners, who are fit only to be slaughtered in war. They believe that their bosses employ them as a favour and that they should in return do a fair day's work for a fair day's pay.

Unreasonable persons question all of this. They are acutely aware that this social system which relies on the support of Reasonable Persons degrades, exploits, represses and murders millions of people. They know that almost every instance of human suffering in the modern world is not only unnecessary but could be substituted by freedom, security and happiness.

That is why they stand, unreasonably, for the free expression and exchange of ideas they know that in that way the case for a new society is most available for discussion. That is why they are in a movement which has no use for leaders to tell them what to do and what is good or bad for them — which applies especially to a bunch of pompous, dictatorial. self-righteous Tories.

A Look at China

The April issue of New Internationalist concentrated on China and the reforms there over the last ten years. For anyone wishing to learn some basic facts about China, it is well worth reading.

Perhaps the most interesting feature is the inclusion of a number of interviews with Chinese workers. An unemployed teenager rails at the posh hotels in his home town being barred to Chinese. He lives on his wits, selling jeans made in other parts of China at over twice their retail value by passing them off as foreign-made.

One article discusses the position of women. Though no longer confined to the home, they are still mostly subordinate to men, with household chores lumped on top of full-time jobs. Women's financial demands on would-be husbands show that the values of Chinese society are material rather than spiritual (as naive Maoists once claimed): a bicycle, TV, watch, sewing machine, and his own house. Prostitution and polygamy are also in evidence.

Another piece reveals graphically how the idealism of the "barefoot doctor" service has foundered on the realities of the Chinese economy. Not that the original idea, with barely-trained part-time doctors, was anywhere near a decent health service. Now state-run hospitals have increased their fees, and private doctors are becoming more numerous. Those who cannot afford to pay are left to suffer and preventive medicine loses all priority. The major cause of ill-health — poverty — remains, and explains why a majority of children in the countryside still suffer from rickets and worms.

As so often in New Internationalist, the weakest part is the editor's contribution, which contains the following remark:

  in a world where anything from Tito's Yugoslavia to Hawke's Australia. Hoxha's Albania to Wilson's Britain is routinely called "socialist", it is probably not very useful to argue over whether or not China merits the term.

But it is not so much useful as essential to realise that China bears no resemblance to a socialist society, and that the appropriate term for a class society based on wage labour and production for profit can only be capitalism.