Silly Moo (1977)

From the May 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mrs Thatcher made some remarks on Socialism that were reported in The Guardian on March 15th. While we realize that she has a vested interest in obscuring the realities of Socialism as much as possible, her address (to the Zurich Economic Society) shows either an appalling lack of understanding of our economic problems or an equally appalling wish to distort the causes of those problems.

Socialism is a system of common ownership, free access, production for use and not profit, without a wages system, and of necessity world-wide. Capitalism, however, is a system in which a minority own and control wealth and its production, whilst the vast majority of the people are forced to sell their labour-power for a wage in order to live. Thus there cannot be any doubt that Socialism has not failed; it has never even been tried! In Britain the Labour Party seeks not to implement Socialism but merely tinkers about with the capitalist system to try to make it run as efficiently as possible, whilst in the USSR that abomination called Russian Communism is nothing but capitalism run by the state.

No, Mrs Thatcher, we are not “facing the crisis of socialism — economic failure, . . . tensions . . . decline etc”. We are facing yet another crisis of capitalism, and will go on doing so as it staggers from crisis to crisis until people wake up to the fact that the only solution is to end this pathetic system.

And to say that “the economic results of free enterprise were better because of the superiority of its underlying moral philosophy . . . from its emphasis on the individual and his capacity to choose”. Good grief! Tell that to the world’s starving millions, tell that to the poor and homeless in this country, tell that to the unemployed, tell that to the people who have seen two depressions and two word wars in their lifetime, and tell that to the people who will die in the next war for capitalism’s resources, markets and trade routes! In short you have precisely as much choice as you have money, which for the vast majority means no damn choice at all.

“The ordinary Briton has no clearly articulated theory to tell him why free enterprise is superior” because no such theory is possible. But he has “felt the shortcomings of” capitalism, private and state, and must soon see that Socialism is the key to the future.

D. W. Roberts