Letter: All middle class now? (2009)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

Eddie Shah was the subject of a Cooking the Books column in the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard and, presumably, a copy of the article had fallen into his hands.

All middle class now?

Dear Editors

 

 It must be difficult not to write about stereotypes, but I was never against unions – just the way they operated in a modern democracy. I just felt instead of calling a strike at every opportunity to flex their muscles – which is the headbanger approach – the funds they had should’ve been used for re-training redundant workers, helping other workers set up cooperatives when companies had failed, create savings for workers and their families injured in accidents, etc; and so on. What really pissed me off was that the union bosses during our dispute – and I since discovered in nearly all other disputes – went on paying themselves handsome salaries and driving their big modern ‘I’m not a union official, I’m an executive’ cars whilst they waltzed around between meetings as their members froze on the picket line.

 It’s all bullshit created on the back of the working class’ aspirations. Truth is we are a middle class society now, as we were becoming during my dispute, but it paid the power brokers at the top of the Labour movement and the trades unions to keep the old class war going so that they could retain their power bases and their trappings of success.

 So I object to being told I was an employer who wanted to run my business without trade union interference. In our case, when the trade union tries to control who you can and can’t employ, that’s the day that people stop running businesses and get out – which would be great for a wealth creating nation, I think not.

 The freedom you have to write your periodical without fear of imprisonment, censorship and even death, is something hard fought for by a capitalist society, or by writers in a suppressed state who fight for the freedom of a democratic state. There are times journalists shouldn’t forget that. A free press is the only watchdog of those who would govern us in both a democratic and an authoritarian state.

 The trouble with socialism is that it has its head buried in the satanic mills of a hundred years ago. It needs enlightening. It needs a new vision, not a descent into the madness of a suppressed anarchy that never had a chance of catering to a world of technology and freedom of the mass as well as the individual. There are no new visions, yet the world is crying out for them.

Eddy Shah

PS. I presume your writing your stuff on technology we introduced during the dispute. Or are you clacking over an old Underwood typewriter and cursing every time the keys stick? Just think, you could’ve achieved that if the unions had won in 1982. Welcome to the world of the middle class.

Reply:

We too are critical of the knights of the round table at the TUC’s Congress House but from a working-class point of view. Unions should be run by their members and officials should not have big salaries, big houses and big cars as many do. We say “working class” deliberately as, for us, this is composed of anyone obliged to get a living by going out and trying to sell their mental and physical energies to some employer. This of course applies to most of the so-called “middle class”, as many of them are discovering the hard way as they lose their jobs or see their final salary pension scheme closing. And it is capitalism that forces workers to resist new technologies as a way of trying to protect their livelihoods. If we had socialism nobody would be put in this position. – Editors.