Editorial: A grim New Year (1963)

Editorial from the January 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is with us again, this condition they have repeatedly assured us was gone for good. Unemployment at the end of 1962 was pressing stubbornly upwards and was expected to top the 600,000 mark with the turn of the year. Once again we are seeing a lengthening of the dole queues. Some sections of workers have been affected more than others, such as those in manufacturing and construction. There has, for some time, also been widespread unemployment amongst teenage school leavers.

In case we should be particularly startled by its reappearance in Britain, we should not forget that other countries have suffered more or less continuously for the past few years. The U.S.A., for example, has had around five million jobless for some time and in Canada some ten per cent of the labour force have been affected, Western Germany, Italy, Austria, Belgium and others—the list is hefty and depressing. Northern Ireland has had persistently high unemployment for a long time, despite the millions spent by her Government on industrial works and attempts to attract foreign capital.

Signs of strain, then, are appearing all over the capitalist world, and as far as British Capitalists at least are concerned, they have lost any confidence they may have had in an everlasting boom. There was a time not so long ago when they would have hoarded labour during comparatively minor trade setbacks, in the expectation of an early improvement. Those were the days when they were still scared of losing their skilled workers in conditions of almost chronic labour shortage. But how times have changed. “Surplus” workers are being sloughed off as profit margins shrink and the struggle to sell reaches cut-throat proportions.

A grim picture indeed! We have always been more than a little sceptical about stories of working class post-war prosperity. It has taken the present recession to tear away the flimsy facade and show once again just how insecure workers’ lives really are.

In its cynical efforts to make political capital out of workers’ misery, the Labour Party blames the Government bungling for the onset of the crisis, and thus reveals its own abysmal ignorance of the world in which we live. The Gaitskell set still urge Macmillian to “plan for expansion” under conditions of tightening markets and falling profits. They conveniently forget that it is precisely the previous plans for expansion which have gone awry. The present plight of the steel industry, for example, should illustrate this very well.

No, Macmillan and his crew are floundering in a sea of Capitalist chaos just as any other Government would have done. They know that the unemployment problem may cost them votes and they would like to solve it if they could. But it baffles them because it has its origin in the very system which they are administering. Capitalism is unplannable and inhuman. It is based on the private ownership of the means of life and the production of goods for sale and profit, and workers will be employed only so long as it is profitable for capitalists to do so.

We are seeing again the intensifying of human hardship side-by-side with surpluses of goods which the market cannot absorb. Which should just serve to remind us that Capitalism is still a system of bitter contradictions which no government can iron out. They will disappear only when capitalism itself is abolished and Socialism takes its place.