During the course of the coal strike last year. Margaret Thatcher was quoted as saying that "the country will not be held to ransom by a tiny minority — 200.000 at the most — who are trying to impose their will on the other 55 million. Everyone in Britain tonight knows who the job-wreckers are" (Sunday Times, 15 July 1984). For once she spoke some truth. In Britain today, a "tiny minority" — one per cent — own more accumulated wealth than the poorest 80 per cent put together (Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, 1980). This parasitical minority own and control the productive machinery of society, in industry and in agriculture. If we work, it is for them, and on their terms. When they decide that it is no longer financially profitable to employ us — whether in a pit or a polytechnic — they have the legal and social right, within capitalism, to bar us from even setting foot in these places of work.
Since a small minority own the means of wealth production while the rest of us merely operate its machinery, there is a conflict of interests throughout the world between bosses and workers, employers and employees. This conflict exists just as much in countries such as Russia, where exploitation has been nationalised. Arising out of this conflict of interests between those who have to sell their ability to work in order to live and those who buy it in order to profit, there is a class struggle. We should make no mistake about this: the class struggle involves all of us, however much some may try to turn their back on it. And as in any other conflict where two sets of interests cannot be reconciled, it is vital to establish beyond doubt who or what our real enemy is.
The real enemy of workers is not to be found among the smugly arrogant Thatcher and her cronies, or in their pathetic counterparts who compete with them from the opposition benches in the House of Commons. Neither is our true enemy to be found embodied in "the butcher” himself. Ian MacGregor. These are only representatives of the real sickness in society — the market system. It is the capitalist system of society, which exists in different forms throughout the world, which must go, taking all of its stooges with it.
What is capitalism? Firstly, it is a global system, as will be the socialist system which replaces it. The price of diamonds is fixed regularly on a telephone hot-line between Moscow and Johannesburg, in spite of the hot air spoken by politicians in those cities against one another. Secondly, capitalism is defined by the fact that in each country a minority class own and control the productive machinery — the industrial and chemical plants, the land and farms, the transport and communications . . . Whether it is private or state ownership, ownership through shares or through government bonds, whether this minority class is made up of businessmen or bureaucrats, makes no difference. Production is everywhere geared towards profitable sales in the world market, not towards human need.
Capitalism, then, is based on a power relationship between the boss and the worker. The worker produces wealth for the employer, and on the employer's terms, since production involves the use of the raw materials and machinery which are monopolised by the owning class. But no capitalist can live on a diet of one thousand cars or thirteen thousand video recorders a week. These goods are only of use to him or her if they can be turned into cash, by being sold on the market. The employer has to convert these products into cash in order to be able to reinvest it and expand the scale of operations, and also of course for the purposes of private consumption. This means that employers will only allow production to take place at a level which allows the products to be easily sold. As soon as the market will not bear any further output, production is halted. So from the point of view of the working-class majority in society, there are two things wrong with the present class-divided system. Firstly, it is a system of legalised robbery, in which the wealth we work so hard to produce does not then belong to us. We have to struggle to buy back the shoddy, cheap, second-class goods with ration cards called wages. Secondly, this domination over society by the parasitical minority serves to restrict production, particularly for basic needs such as food and clothing, because the market system dictates that production must cease as soon as it fails to be profitable. And each factory closure signals that the material interests of the employing class are imposing themselves on the rest of us, in the most stupid way. At the moment their "trade cycle" happens to be running through one of its periodic lows and the rest of us are expected to brave out, and even take the brunt of, this "recession", as if it was sent down from heaven to test our mettle.
Take the example of United Biscuits. Their annual report for 1984 shows a profit of about £75 million and a return on capital of about 19 per cent. Earnings per share (the amount by which the share price had risen) were 15.8p. and a dividend was paid in addition to this of 7.5p per share. Sir Hector Laing, the chairman, has over 2 million shares in the company, so his dividend last year was £156,176 and the overall value of his shares rose during the year by a further £329,011. This gave him an unearned income of over £9,000 a week. The average pay of his wage-slaves was less than that in the entire year. This unearned income would continue to go to Sir Hector even if he left for the Bahamas and was never seen again. For actually turning up to work he receives his "earned" income or salary of £96,000, a mere £1,800 each week. Worth chewing over next time you have a McVitie's digestive biscuit, some KP nuts or visit a Wimpy bar, all of which are in Hectors stable. Meanwhile, his chairman's report does make some reference to his hirelings:
Unit labour costs showed a decline over 1983 and we are now back to 1980 levels. . . In summary, 1984 was a particularly successful year for the Company (page 11).
Another very grateful man who has also increased his hold over the lives of the rest of us recently is Lonrho's Tiny Rowland:
The Lonrho chief executive. Mr Tiny Rowland, splashed out £1.2 million to increase his shareholding in the business yesterday as the international trading conglomerate over which he presides reported a record £135 million profit for its past financial year. The purchase of almost 661.000 shares at 182p each lifted his personal stake in the group to 45 million shares. At current stock market prices the holding representing 17.1 per cent of the equity — is valued at £82 million. (Guardian, 1 February 1985)
The dividend paid out by Lonrho of 11p per share would therefore have given Rowland an unearned income of about £100,000 a week. He expressed his attitude of appreciation for the thousands of people this wealth is squeezed out of in his full-page statement published in the same day's newspaper:
Finally, I would like to thank all employees worldwide for their hard work, loyalty and enthusiasm, without which we would not have been able to report such fine results this year.
This small-print credit, such as is given to the extras who appear in a film extravaganza. is small compensation for the people who are being milked in order to fatten the many bank accounts of this smug parasite.
In fact, on an average wage, the total amount we will receive in an entire lifetime is less than the amount received by some of these employers every two or three weeks. If we put by a fiver a week as savings, then by the time we had saved an amount equalling the current estimated £4 billion fortune of the thirty-year-old Duke of Westminster, 15,000,000 years would have passed.
So much for the claim that we are living in a classless society. But the aim of establishing a classless society is still the only aim which is politically worthwhile. How can it be done? Class is not a question of how you speak or dress, but of whether you own the factory or have to work in it because somebody else owns it. And this can be extended to the office, the schools, the railways, the hospitals and every other field of work. To abolish class division is to abolish the private and state ownership of the world’s productive resources, and to replace this with genuinely communal, democratic control by us all. The active force in creating a classless society must be the working class itself. We are the living, thinking, suffering part of the productive machinery of industry. When a factory is closed down, it does not let out a cry of despair. But the workers who are thrown on the rubbish heap at the same time have the ability to organise for an alternative way of running society. And those who do have jobs, whether they are manual, clerical or "professional", have the same interest as one another and as the unemployed, in working together for such a change.
In a socialist society, the population will not be divided by class. Obviously, some people will be delegated to perform organisational or administrative tasks, but they will not have a socially privileged status or a condition of life dependent on the deprivation and subordination of others. It is in any case a fact that the current owners of the world at present rely on their employees to perform all such tasks on their behalf. The social role of the employer has become entirely redundant, so that all a socialist transformation will involve is changing the basis of production itself. Instead of organising production to be geared towards market sales, as they reflect the minority interests who profit from such sales, we shall instead gear production towards satisfying human needs, without the hindrance of the profit obstacle and its demand for profitable "viability".
It is only on this basis that we can even begin to solve the absurd contradictions which have been a hallmark of capitalist society, such as the market "surpluses", the mountains of butter and the lakes of wine, in a world in which millions die of hunger. But before we can get rid of capitalism and replace it with the sane alternative based on common ownership and democratic control of resources we must first understand capitalism clearly enough to firmly reject it in all of its many guises. We must unite in a clear recognition that the employing class is on our backs, holding society back through their outdated system of the market, of profits and prices. They are suffering bouts of indigestion from their indulgence in the proceeds of our work, but it is we who pay the price. We must not expect the employing class to behave otherwise. Workers must, in the words of the first Socialist Party Manifesto, published in 1905, "give up the superstition that the robbers can be friendly to the robbed".
Clifford Slapper
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