Press Exposure: It's War (1995)

The Press Exposure column from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

It's War

A few weeks ago the Times was abruptly transferred from the famously intimidative and influential Thunderer into a give-away newspaper. Anyone could go into a newsagent and pick up a copy for nothing. In fact they could go there and pick up all the copies and walk out with them—which, considering the price which old newspapers now command, might not have been a bad idea.

This was not the result of Rupert Murdoch doing his misguided bit towards introducing a system of free access to wealth. What actually happened on that unusual day was that the entire print-run of the Times—which, in expectation of a surge in demand had been doubled—was bought by the Microsoft computer firm who then gave them away. Well, not exactly gave because the operation was part of the huge, expensive publicity drive for Microsoft’s new Windows 95, which is going to make life so much easier for us as long as we don’t mind the continuance of a few minor problems like war and famine and poverty and homelessness . . .  It was also an episode in the circulation war which has been raging for the past two years between the newspapers, in which the Times and the other Murdoch papers are the most aggressive and the most successful.

"Giving away" the Times was an extreme example of the price-cutting which has been the weapon most often used in the circulation war. The Murdoch papers began this, two years ago, by straightforward reductions in the price of the Sun and the Times. Since then it has taken the more complex form of a discount on the price of a Sunday paper provided you buy its stablemate on a Saturday and fill in a coupon (which, unless you are careful, can also result in bringing you a shoal of junk mail as your name and address are passed on to numerous mailing lists). So anyone whose form-filling skills enable them to complete the coupon can get the Sunday Times and the Observer for 50p each and the Independent on Sunday and the Sunday Telegraph for 10p each. Of course they may not then be able to find time to read them all, nor to mention all that junk mail, but they will have done their bit for the circulation figures.

Attrition

At times the price-cutting has resembled the attrition of the First World War trenches; in fact to some observers it has been not far off mass suicide. The Murdoch papers, for example, may have lostaround £100 million over it and the total loss for all newspapers is estimated to be as much as £200 million. But, unlike what went on in the trenches, Murdoch can show some significant advances. Over the past two years the circulation of the Sun has gone up by 16 percent and of the Times by a staggering 94 percent. On other sectors of the front, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph (where the losses have been about £45 million) have crept forward by some 4 percent, while the Guardian and the Daily Express have both been forced into retreat. To put this into perspective: overall sales have increased by just over 3 percent and for the Sunday papers they have dropped since 1984 from about 18¼  million to 15½ million now. Which does not say much for the liberating and expansive results supposed to flow from what is known as free competition.

Price-cutting has been part of a pincer movement on newspaper finances, the other jaw of which has been the soaring cost of newsprint, now 50 percent higher than it was at the end of 1994. (Which is why it would have made good sense—the sort of initiative which Rupert Murdoch should approve—for some thick-skinned operator to snaffle all those "free" copies of the Times and flog them to the nearest scrap merchant)

It is not surprising that out the smoke and noise of battle the best chances of survival are with those who are wealthy and diversified enough to withstand temporary losses—or even to provoke them in order to damage the opposition. The two big groups now are Murdoch’s News International and the Mirror Group, which control 11 of the 21 better known national newspapers, commanding about 63 percent of the market. It is worth remembering now that the so-called Murdoch revolution which moved the newspaper works out to the bastions of Wapping, smashed the trades unions, sacked thousands of workers and tamed those who survived, was justified on the grounds that from it would emerge a freer industry in which smaller, independent newspapers would flourish.

Profits

In case anyone is any doubt about how big they are, in August News International announced a doubling of their profits to £778.7 million. A lot of this was due to the sale of the group’s stake in satellite TV but is was also helped by the £57.5 million higher revenue from newspapers (although this was cut by the increased cost of newsprint). Additional unease came from higher advertising rates—usually a reflection of confidence about circulation figures—which in the case of the Times and the Sunday Times are notably successful part of their operations.

So in all-in-all Murdoch’s group is in buoyant mood. This, after all, is what capitalism is all about—competing for markets, screwing the best deal possible in a disputed situation, treating human beings who are employed by you as figures on balance sheets. It is also about that most important function of the press— deceiving people in the mass that this is the best, historically the highest and most efficient, way to run society when in fact it is the most effective and ruthless way of exploiting people, of repressing them and when the time comes disposing of them.

Ivan

These Foolish Things: Monopoly money (1995)

The Scavenger column from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Monopoly money

Most members of the capitalist class avoid drawing attention to themselves. For example, one of the largest owners of property in London is the son of a German banker, Otto Wisskirchen. This discreet young man, educated at Lancing public school, has so far bought shops and offices in London worth nearly £400 million. But he is only one of a number of German capitalists who have, between them, bought £2.5 billions-worth of central London in the past five years.

Salary slaves

Research by the Institute of Personnel and Development reveals that 42 percent of senior management and a third of middle management said work pressures meant they were failing to take all their annual holidays . . .

After a strong start to the year, recruitment of managers and senior specialist staff has fallen to disturbingly low levels . . . the last time the higher-paid job market showed a similar downward pattern was in 1989, when a severe recession followed. Blaine Cavanagh and Michael Dixon, Financial Mail on Sunday, 16 July 1995.

There's a law against it

Recent Home Office figures show that the use of illegal drugs is escalating out of control in Britain, in spite of strenuous efforts by police and customs officers to prevent it. Registered addicts (only a small fraction of the total) have increased by twenty percent to 34,000 and deaths of addicts by 7.5 percent. Last year the number of those applying for medical treatment shot up to 6,000.

Rich for the Law

The Lord Chancellor is trying to save money on the historic lodgings used to accommodate High Court judges on circuit. These arc often listed buildings, costly to maintain, and staffed by butlers, cooks and housekeepers.

There are 33 lodgings costing £4 million a year. The dearest has been Lincoln, occupied by only one judge for six weeks of the law’s 36-week year. This works out at £24,098 per judge-week.

Lord Mackay has no plan to change this system which bolsters the majesty of capitalist law, but he would like to reduce the average cost to a modest £2,500 per week’s use.

The (un)Free Market

When economists sing the praises of The Market and its ability to regulated capitalism’s running of society, they conveniently forget the universal scope the market provides for dishonesty, and the huge superstructure of law and enforcement needed to deal with it.

In 1986, the Financial Services Act provided for the setting up of the Investors’ Compensation Scheme for those who became casualties of the investments market. But the investment companies involved had to be authorised firms already controlled (avowedly) by one or more of the following: Financial Intermediaries’, Managers’ and Brokers’ Regulatory Association; Investment Management Regulatory Organisation; Life Assurance and Unit Trust Regulatory Organisation; Personal Investment Authority; Securities and Futures Authority.

ICS paid out £25.4 million in 1994 to 2,276 such investors from money provided by the investment industry, but the recent life assurance scandal threatened to disrupt the compensation scheme; and the Treasury had to back ICS with a guaranteed £17 million. 

The Scavenger

No Words, No ears (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

People these days walk down the street talking to themselves. Some are in the business of earning a living. Others are off their heads. The distinction is a fine one.

The mobile phone is surely the quintessential image of a society in which nobody talks to anyone, but needs to pass messages to everyone. As humans we walk down our street with heads lowered in ease we are approached by a neighbourly smile—a sure sign of madness in the contemporary capitalist conurbation. As labour-power commodities, going about our business of making rich pigs falter, we talk endlessly into little pocket-sized machines which wire us up invisibly to our slave cages.

On a morning train between Liverpool Street and Cambridge I suddenly had a horrible vision, worsened by the fact that my eyes were open and what I thought I saw was real. More people (or “customers” as we must now known them) were talking to their phones than to each other. A little boy talked to his tired mother, asking why trees were green, but she told him to shut up and then bribed him with a Mars bar. Having attempted without success to talk to the man opposite (something along the lines of “It’s a lousy bloody day, isn’t it? What parasitical crook are you off to make profits for?”) I watched him press his magic buttons, activate the compulsory nasal tones of the travelling twat in middle management, and proceed to talk gobbledcgook all the way to Harlow about sales figures and the need to beef up quality control. Upon arrival in Cambridge he opened an attache ease and very carefully, one-by-one, opened and closed each of his files, glancing only once and with the contempt of a busy man at the novel which was my anachronistic connection to someone else’s mind.

Now, there can be bad novels (such as every one ever written by Jeffrey Archer) and there can be good uses for mobile phone (such as calling 0171-622 3811 in one of those emergencies which we all have when someone asks a tricky question about the break-up of feudalism and you need to get a back-issue of the Socialist Standard in a big rush). But, these points accepted, can it not be said that books and reading are signs that we are human, and capable of consciously realising our own humanity, whereas the mobile phone, with its alienated purpose of allowing commerce to be intrusively articulated everywhere from the cricket stand to the honeymoon suite, is a sign that the profit system is robbing us of the very’ character of our uniqueness as a species: the ability to communicate thoughtfully? Have you ever heard a mobile-phone-user reciting beautiful verse or treating a friend to a song via the mysterious innards of the cordless leash? No. they are too busy nodding verbally to every want and whim of the boss. They connect to a ventriloquist, but never quite realise what that makes them.

Then there are the head machines, purchased cheaply to ensure that the mind in transit is always blocked out by a thumping beat. Take a Walkman and be sure that your mind will never wander. Did Marx ever think that convincing wage-slaves of the need for freeing themselves would involve having first to teach them how to lip-read? On the train from Cambridge back to Liverpool Street where another man in another grey suit and grey face talks greyly into the greyness of another conversation with the commerce that now runs through the air like a plague, another woman with another small boy (not the one who wondered about the trees, for this mother has put a dummy into her boy's mouth, as if preparing him for future life) has her cheap earphones overflowing into the jabbering atmosphere. Listening into your neighbour's conversation these days offers a choice between sales curves and drum machines.

Back in Liverpool Street, a sort of unofficial border zone between the City of London and the East End, I head eastwards to buy a salt beef sandwich (on rye, plenty of mustard) with a sweet-and-sour cucumber. Walking past a doorway there is a woman declaring vociferously to herself that the messiah has come down to earth and is currently living in a bedsit in Brick Lane. Passers-by ignore her or stop to sneer. I stop to ask her whether the messiah would care to enter a public debate at a location of his choosing—the cost of the hall and the collection would be shared. But she persists in ranting to herself and my curiosity is overwhelmed by hunger.

One-way communication is a waste of time. No, worse, it is anti-human. Be they evangelising to themselves, plotting sales or listening to machine-made drum beats, they are so far from communicating as to be speaking the language of the deranged—the new universal language of capitalism. 

Steve Coleman

Letters: Do-It-Yourself, Majority Revolution (1995)

Letters to the Editors from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do-It-Yourself, Majority Revolution

Dear Editors,

Obviously your magazine has a very jaundiced and prejudiced view of the Green movement (Editorial, April Socialist Standard).

Most members of the Green Party, a large proportion of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, and none of the various Earth First! group’s activists support capitalism in any form. For a long time now we have seen in market forces the machinery for planetary and human destruction.

People in the Green movement are currently involved in housing and worker’s co-operatives. LETS schemes and permaculture (permanent agriculture) projects that will be examples of how things can be done. We are positively involved in building an alternative. An increasing number of Green folk are involved in the English regionalist-direct democracy scene as well.

We take a proactive stand against centralism and increasing powerlessness of the people. We have not heard your party take a stand publicly. Are you afraid of merging with other radically-minded people while networking with them. Perhaps losing your powers of staying aloof above everyone else!

As to your own brand of ’’socialism" working while others do not, this sounds much like washing powder commercials, "my soap is better than yours" playground childishness. Your political party holds that only it can build “utopia" (literally translated means not a place). I would as an anarcho-socialist contend that being party-political and then opposing the established order is very hypocritical.

I would personally avoid the football-style competitions of major and minor league parties. Instead I and others are trying to shadow institutions' powers, and therefore empower ordinary people to make decisions for themselves and their friends, in a face-to-face direct democracy manner.

This probably all sounds bourgeois to you pure socialists. "How dare politically uneducated people take the glory of genuine revolution from under our noses. Only the SPGB has the answers to the world's problems."

The sad thing is when we are establishing people’s assemblies in inner city boroughs and rural parishes, alternative cooperatives enterprises and land rights campaigns taking back stolen commons (e.g. Reclaim the Land), your party will still be debating in dusty rooms above public houses and making proclamations about your coming electoral glory while contesting a handful of seats. At this rate it will take about 150 to take all the available constituencies. Oh how sad it is.

Tom Paine, 

Staffordshire Earth Action Network

Reply:

You’ve got it wrong. We don’t say that it is us, the Socialist Party, who are going to establish Socialism. What we say is that socialism can only be achieved when a majority want it and organise for it, and that it is this majority, not us, who alone can achieve it (naturally we, the present membership of the Socialist Party, hope to be among that majority). The socialist revolution is a do-it-yourself, majority revolution not a party-led revolution.

We also say that, to achieve socialism, this majority will have to organise politically, to take control of state power out of the hands of the present capitalist ruling class (we can't just leave them in control of it, as your strategy implies), and that this will involve, yes, contesting elections and putting up candidates against the politicians who represent their interests (the Majors. Blairs and Ashdowns of this world) and so the formation of a socialist political party. We don’t suffer from the illusion that we are already that part; the most we would claim is that we are the very early beginnings of such a party; and even that might turn out to be an illusion, not that we would care as long as a mass, no-compromise socialist political party eventually emerges from somewhere.

Nor is socialism some ideal society thought up by us and marketed as our patent solutions to society's problems. The idea of a society of common ownership and distribution according to need without buying and selling and money goes back a long way in human history, right back to the original human societies which were actually organised on this basis.

Thanks to the development in the meantime of human technological knowledge and productive capacity it is now possible to (re-)establish a society on this basis, but this time on a global instead of a limited, tribal basis. In fact it is not just possible. but necessary if the problems the world is facing are to be solved.

In dismissing this (which we call “socialism" but which others in the course of history have called “community of goods", "communism”, "pure communism", “the co-operative commonwealth", "making the Earth a common treasury for all" and. yes, ‘‘utopia’’) as just one proposal from one particular political party you are not just factually wrong. You are in fact dismissing an age-old social tradition whose putting into practice today is the only way of providing a framework within which the problems that Greens have highlighted can be solved, and not just palliated as you are trying to do.

If you want to reject the idea of a world community of common ownership, democratic decision-making and production directly for use as “utopian", and to dismiss education and agitation in favour of it as a diversion from the more important tasks of growing organic vegetables on municipal allotments. re-opening public footpaths and opening macrobiotic cafés (not that we’ve anything against these, in fact good luck to you), that’s your prerogative. But at least be honest with yourself and realise that you are not doing anything to get rid of the profit system, but only trying to make things within it a little less miserable and which anyway will in all likelihood be sooner or later undermined by the workings of the profit system and its market forces.

Editors

Building the Party

Dear Editors,

I am writing to tell you about Marxism 95. The meetings I went to were very good (especially the discussion after the talks), but on leaving these talks I was faced by an army of SWP members asking me to join (this even happened after the first meeting—as if going to one meeting organised by the SWP would leave me, or anyone, rushing to join—but faced with this pressure, who knows?). When I answered “No” when I was asked. I was literally pulled over and asked "Why not?”. When I tried to explain that I was still finding out about them I was told "If you want a real change join the SWP" and “Join today and if you find that you have made a mistake, just throw away your membership card." —Of course it is not as simple as that, but they told me that it was.

Another point I would like to comment on is a talk on the Saturday by Bernie Grant MP, who is a member of the Labour Party. I was in no doubt that he is on the left of politics—but not the left of Socialism, on the left of Capitalism because Labour are certainly a capitalist party and in my opinion there is a massive gap between capitalism and socialism. When I brought this comment up after the meeting, the three or so SWP members that I was with admitted that Labour are a capitalist party and said that Bernie Grant would probably be in the SWP but "he can have a bigger influence and meet more people in the Labour Party". I then said maybe I should join the Conservative Party so I "could have a bigger influence and meet more people". They told me that was not the same, but I think that it is.

Adam Jaffer, 

Coventry

Socialism in a single country?

Dear Editors,

As a newcomer, while supporting the goal of socialism globally, I question your rejection of the idea that it cannot or should not occur in one country beforehand, especially as this appears incompatible with the declared principle of a "speedy termination" of capitalism.

Given that formidable beneficiaries and advocates of capitalism world-wide are united in their determination to maintain their system, attempting to overcome them all simultaneously does not seem the best use of limited resources, nor does it provide a tangible stimulus to the world’s exploited to break free from lifelong restraint.

To use a demolition analogy: it's unnecessary to destroy a dam by exhaustively coating the entire surface with voluminous plastic explosive in order to shatter every part synchronously.

The same result is achievable by concentrating a limited charge in one place, so allowing what is constrained to first break free with such drive that the rest of the barrier steadily wears away in conjunction with an increasing rate of escape.

One nation succeeding through socialism would make the advantages so clear to others, so quickly, that any countermeasures to bolster the international profit system would be swept away by the dynamic surge for the same benefits.

A sufficiently developed nation could go it alone and meet all its needs and requirements through socialism without being isolated from the rest of the world (though even isolation— as duress to reconform—would fail since retaining global ties would be preferable rather than essential).

Any raw materials that had to be imported could be bartered for. And if necessary, by exporting surplus goods, foreign currencies could be obtained for maintaining world-wide communications and transport links etc.

Preserving these international relations would not be a betrayal of socialist values nor an act of reformation. It would be a means to and end. whereby the baby gains protection and its diet is supplemented, while also enabling all to observe it swiftly growing strong, healthy and contented.

Without any financial restraints, wastage of resources and dog-eat-dog disunity, the full benefits of common ownership could be realised throughout the pioneer nation, transforming and improving lives to such an extent that a socialist chain reaction would inevitably be triggered across the planet.

By insisting on simultaneous global socialism, or none at all, time might run out due to capitalism’s destructiveness before the former can be achieved. 

Max Hess, 

Folkestone, Kent

Reply:

We don't say that socialism should not be established in one country but that it can't be. If it could, then we wouldn't be opposed to this, but it can’t because capitalism is a world system. not just in the sense of being dominated by the operation of world market forces but also in terms of the underlying technical conditions of production and world-wide division of labour which socialism will inherit.

No one country could be self-sufficient not even the most developed country in the world, the United States, nor the largest Russia, nor the most populous, China, nor Japan, nor even a multi-country trading bloc like the Common Market And the idea of any other part of the world going it alone is just ludicrous.

What this means is that no one part of the world can opt out, at least not without suffering a drastic reduction in the amount and variety of goods and services available to satisfy the needs and wants of those living there. People would be deprived of products from other part of the world or would have to work longer and devote more resources than otherwise to producing them.

In these circumstances, even if private property and the profit motive were to be eliminated within its frontiers, the country concerned would hardly provide the attractive model you assume for people in other countries to want to follow.

You say that this drawback could be got round by bartering with the outside, capitalist world, but have you thought this through? The products to be acquired from the outside world would have to be paid for (whether in money or in kind) at the full market price. But these outside products would not be able to be acquired unless some products produced in the country had first been exchanged on the world market. For this to happen they would have to be competitive in terms of quality and price with the same products produced in the capitalist world, otherwise no other country would want to buy or barter for them.

So already, to participate in the world market, the isolated would-be socialist country would have to behave capitalistically, striving to keep labour costs down and so further restricting the already reduced standard of living of the population. As people would be unlikely to agree to this voluntarily a new ruling class to enforce this would be likely to emerge. The end result would be not "socialism in one country" but state capitalism in one country.

There is another point you overlook. Abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism is not like demolishing a dam. It requires the existence of an active and participating socialist majority. Without this there can be no socialism, so for socialism to be attempted in just one country there would have to emerged a socialist majority in just that country. But how likely is this to happen in practice?

We think it is highly unlikely. Given the fact that social conditions and problems are basically the same all over the world, and given that socialism is the idea of a world society where the resources of the Earth belong in common to all humanity, we can see no reason why socialist ideas, when they begin to catch on, should only spread in one particular country and not in others.

In our view it is much more reasonable to assume that socialist ideas will spread more or less evenly in all countries. In which case, apart from being impossible to achieve anyway but the problem of perhaps having to try to establish socialism in one country won’t even arise.

Editors

Totalitarian and run by criminals (1995)

TV Review from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

United States lawyer Linda Thompson is a worried woman. She is worried that the US government is a totalitarian regime, and that it is run by criminals who reject the American Constitution. Worried that one night agents of the US government will come and beat down her door and send her to a concentration camp. Her fears, and her proposed course of action to combat them, were examined in Sheena MacDonald’s The Vision Thing (Channel Four, 7 September, 8pm).

Linda Thompson is one of a growing band of Americans who have formed militias to safeguard themselves from the Federal government. Current estimates are that about 50,000 US citizens are in such armed militias, waiting to wage a civil war on Washington and all its works. Their reasons for doing this range from the understandable to the downright paranoid. Thompson was apparently chosen for this interview because of her willingness to die—and kill—for the cause. But on the paranoia scale she rated comparatively low by current standards, even if she admitted to being a conspiracy theorist. In America today the militias are full of people who believe that the United Nations is run by Communists intent on subverting the sovereignty of the US. Others claim that an international leadership cabal called the illuminati is working to introduce a totalitarian one world government. Others—neo-Nazis—secretly hope that somebody will, but are along for the ride in the militias anyway.

Unfortunately, the grounds for Thompson’s fears were not examined in detail. However, while the US is very far from being a totalitarian state in the traditional sense of the term, her fears are not totally baseless. The US government is corrupt. It has been run by many people who have later been proved to be criminals. And though some way from an authoritarian regime, the provision has been made for it should the need arise. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was set up some years ago to co-ordinate Federal edicts in the case of an unspecified "national emergency”, when it will be given powers to intern dissidents, set up forced labour camps (which are ready and waiting) and nationalise or regulate everything that moves (and plenty that doesn’t).

This is all a far cry from the bourgeois republicanism of the US Constitution, and it is this that worries Thompson and her ilk so much. What has not occurred to them, though, is that they are fighting a losing battle. A freedom-loving private property society is their goal, but private property society produces the state and government to regulate it And as things get more complex, as the state steps in to cushion the fall caused by market failures, as nation manoeuvres against nation, as government manoeuvres against its citizens to keep them in line and prevent too much dissension, the powers of government grow big. Very big. The state—despite the best efforts of the right-wing of capitalism’s political apparatus—begins to commandeer more and more of the national income.

Because of their political background and indoctrination (by the US state, naturally) the Linda Thompsons of this world are unable to separate cause from effect. They cannot yet see that it is the private property society they love so much that produces such monstrous regulation and interference, and the frightening provisions for a "national emergency" state take-over. No capitalist society in the world has ever existed without a repressive state to snoop on dissidents, imprison people, indoctrinate them and send them to war. Class society and repression go hand-in-hand, but Linda Thompson is blissfully unaware of this, seeking some golden free-market nirvana that has never existed, and which in all probability, will never exist.

Civil war madness

When it comes to trying to establish her free-market heaven through confronting the might of the American state machine with semi-automatic guns and outdoor drills in the forests of Indiana, Thompson is on another loser. The militias could stage a civil war for the free market, but they shouldn’t kid themselves for a moment that they would win it. Linda Thompson stated in the programme that she didn’t expect to live long. Given all this, it might turn out to be a self- fulfilling prophesy.

She and those like her see only part of the problem, not the whole of it. Society does seem to be rotting on its feet, the powers of government are frightening, and the more traditional remedies haven’t worked. New solutions are needed, and not the ones generally on offer.

Nowhere is the scale of the problem more evident than the very heart of bourgeois society, the United States. In Britain the new wave of capitalist reformers join the Shadow Cabinet. In America they buy semi-automatics and start up militias. 

Dave Perrin

Windows on Capitalism (1995)

Software Review from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Windows 95 by
 Microsoft

August 24 was "Windows Day", chosen by giant software company Microsoft to launch its new operating system, Windows 95. Accompanied by vast amounts of ballyhoo, an advertising budget of £100 million, acres of free newspaper publicity and a song from the Rolling Stones, Windows 95 is predicted to sell at least 20 million copies worldwide by the end of the year, further increasing the coffers of owner Bill Gates, richest man in America and one of the richest in the world (out-ranked only by a handful of kings and sultans). Computer stores opened all night so they could break open the champagne and sell the first copies at midnight. To judge from all the hype. Windows 95 represents a great leap forward for computer users. But is it, and (more important) does it reveal the efficiency of capitalism in developing new technology?

Windows 95 is an operating system, a program that allows the user to run word processors and other applications (from games to high-powered publishing tools). It certainly represents an advance over earlier versions of Windows and the previous operating system. MS-DOS. also marketed by (guess who?) Microsoft. As a simple example. Windows 95 means files can now be given any name at all. rather than being confined to a maximum of eight letters. You might wonder why Microsoft could get away for years with selling a product with such a daft restriction—especially when you learn that many other operating systems don't have such a limit. And indeed compared with what has long been available on some other computing systems, Windows 95 offers hardly anything that is new. Its likely success (as far as profit-making is concerned) is due far more to marketing skills and Microsoft's dominant position in the computing industry than to any technical excellence.

But the point of Windows 95 is not just for Microsoft to sell lots of copies. It is also intended to increase sales of some of Microsoft’s other products, such as spreadsheets and presentation software, to go with the new operating system. In addition. many buyers will find that they need a new computer with more memory and a faster processor in order to get the best out of it. And most insidious of all, Windows 95 comes together with the software for accessing Microsoft's own on-line mail and information system, Microsoft Network. If things go according to plan, this will almost immediately have more users than other such systems, not because it is in any way better but just because of Microsoft’s size and marketing muscle. No wonder some competitors have tried to take Microsoft to court in the US on grounds of constituting a monopoly.

The main thing all this shows is that so much of what passes for innovation and technical progress under capitalism has far more to do with hype and clever advertising than it does with real benefits to consumers. All the resources put into developing and marketing Windows 95 (and many other products) in no way represent useful work: much of it duplicates what has already been done.and is concerned with doing down competitors rather than creating a better product. Production for profit is wasteful and inefficient, and does not achieve what its apologists claim.

Paul Bennett

SPGB Meetings (1995)

Party News from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

There was a report of the October 25th debate with the Alliance for Workers' Liberty (Socialist Organiser) in the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard. As I mentioned previously I actually attended this debate. I remember it got rather heated and acrimonious, with both the audience members and the speakers getting a bit arsey. When they debated again in early '97 there was definitely some bad feeling left over from the previous debate on both sides.

The Passing Show: Bare-faced Cheek (1960)

The Passing Show Column from the October 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bare-faced Cheek

No one could accuse the world's ruling classes of consistency. The ruling class of each country is devoted to one thing, and to one thing only—the preservation of its power. Our rulers love to proclaim their attachment to high-sounding and immutable principles—but if their interests demand it, they will change their tune overnight. Recently there have been enough somersaults performed by prominent politicians to make an acrobat green with envy.

Here are some instances which occurred recently within a space of two days.

Principles v, Royalties

The ruling class of Morocco gained its independence from France some years ago. In its struggle it reiterated the right of every people to independence, the iniquity of one country holding another in subjection, and so on. More recently another former French colony in northwest Africa, Mauritania, became self-governing within the French Community. It has now decided to declare itself independent in November. One would think that the Moroccan ruling class would welcome this new step by the ruling class of Mauritania—the Mauritanians are only doing what the Moroccans have already done, and are acting on the very principles upheld by Morocco during its struggle with France. But not a bit of it! The Moroccan Government is breathing fire at the news. It has banned a Moroccan newspaper which supported Mauritanian independence, and has threatened to go to the United Nations. For the Moroccan rulers claim that Mauritania is really part of Greater Morocco. The Moroccan Government, which denounced France for wanting to hold on to its empire, is now planning an empire of its own. This despite the fact that Morocco and Mauritania have not even got a common frontier: Morocco would have to take over part of Algeria to give it access to its new province.

Why are the Moroccan rulers so eager to get their hands on Mauritania, even though they have to eat so many of their own words in the process? It's simple. Large and very rich iron ore deposits have been found in Mauritania, and the mining of them is about to begin by the Miferma company. The royalties payable on the ore are a prize worth trying for. And what does the Moroccan ruling class care about principles, when they see a chance of rich profits from the Mauritanian iron ore?

Terrorism

Another recently independent Mediterranean state has also given an example of inconsistency. Cyprus is now self-governing: the Cypriot ruling class has taken over, having ousted the British. The Cypriot leader in this struggle was Makarios. now President of the Cyprus Republic. The struggle was carried on by terrorism, which is the name now given by a ruling class to any kind of armed internal opposition to its rule. This terrorism, which forced the British to relinquish the island, was led personally by Grivas, Makarios's close ally in the struggle. But Makarios, having won his battle through terrorism, has now turned against it. He recently appealed for all guns and ammunition to be handed in to the authorities, and said: "I am not prepared to tolerate any kind of terrorism.” Terrorism having made him President of Cyprus, Makarios no doubt now sees that he had better deny any opponents of his the use of the same weapon.

Free competition

The American Government is worried about the high tariff wall with which the six European "Common Market” countries propose to surround themselves. The U.S. delegate to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade conference said recently (The Guardian, 2/9/60):

Whatever serves unduly to insulate the community market from the competition of world prices is out of harmony with our common GATT objective for the expansion of international trade.  . . .  The system will work to the serious detriment of the US and other third country suppliers — in fact, to the community itself. 

When it is to their advantage, the United States government supports “the competition of world prices.” But at home, it has a different policy. When big new projects are opened to tender, any foreign firm competing is handicapped from the start. Several British firms have recently found that although their tenders were the lowest for American projects, it was an American firm that got the contract. Which all goes to show that any capitalist country’s government must look after its own capitalists first. And in the process, as in this case, it must often speak with two voices—one for home and one for foreign consumption.

Mandates

Mr. Louw, the South African Foreign Minister, is concerned about the threat by stevedores and dockers in Tanganyika to boycott all South African goods. He protested to the British High Commissioner in South Africa that Britain, as the mandatory power, had obligations to ensure “freedom of transit and navigation and complete economic and commercial and industrial equality.”

For the South African government to quote the League of Nations mandate in support of its protest must have called for nerve of the highest order. For South Africa itself was given a mandate by the League of Nations — the mandate over what had been German South-West Africa. After the second world war it incorporated South-West Africa into its own territory. To all protests it replied that the League of Nations had ceased to exist, and that its mandates had ceased to exist with it. Therefore it no longer had any obligations to help the inhabitants of South-West Africa to self-government, and indeed was entitled to grab the whole country for itself. The question of South-West Africa has been raised over and over again in the United Nations, and on each occasion the South African government has denied absolutely that a League of Nations’ mandate could any longer have any validity. And now the South African government itself has appealed to a League of Nations’ mandate in support of its protest over Tanganyika!

It seems that to be a minister or a government spokesman in the modern world, the prime necessity is bare-faced cheek.

Alwyn Edgar

The Friendless TUC (1960)

From the October 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year’s Trade Union Congress in the Isle of Man was very fully reported in the Press, more fully than in some past years, but comment was almost everywhere disapproving and disappointed. Taking the comments at their face value the reader may imagine that the newspaper proprietors and editors and the politicians are the friends of the rank and file trade unionists and are genuinely sorry that the leaders, individually, and the TUC collectively, are not making a good job of looking after the members' claims for higher wages and better conditions. It is only necessary to state it in these terms to see that there must be something wrong with this explanation, for we know well that most of the commentators habitually oppose strikes for higher wages and shorter hours, whether official or unofficial, and would be much alarmed if the TUC were to forget politics and devote its influence and organisation to promoting an all-round higher wage movement. They may say, or imply, that they sympathise with the delegate who tried, in vain, to get Congress to agree to devote more time to bread and butter issues, but workers know from experience that a change in that direction would meet with even more disapproval. The reason for their disappointment must be sought elsewhere, and an observation by the Times Labour Correspondent (12/9/60) indicates what it is. He wrote:

In the old days, union loaders could usually be relied upon to accept the decisions of the general council and could almost always carry their unions with them.- Now there is little sense of collective responsibility and leaders are frequently overruled by their own unions In the debates on nuclear disarmament this year the executives of three of the big six unions, those of the engineers, the railwaymen, and the distributive workers, were outvoted by their annual conferences.

This is the change that the government, the employers and the leaders of the big political parties find disturbing. In a time of full employment capitalism needs something to dissuade the workers from pressing to the full their relatively stronger position. A disciplined trade union movement controlled from the top and guided into paths of moderation and industrial peace is the ideal instrument from the standpoint of the owning class and the government; even better (because less crude and obvious) than the Russian type of State organisation masquerading as a trade union movement.

The argument that the TUC ought to concentrate on trying to get higher wages and shorter hours is a very sound one. but there is nothing to support it in the TUC's history and constitution. It was political at its foundation and has for the most part kept to that view of its purpose. The Webbs, in their History of Trade Unionism, show that the TUC came into being largely to handle the problem of the law affecting trade unions and when it obtained in 1875 a law to its liking, for which it gratefully thanked the government, "it became for ten years little more than an annual gathering of Trade Union officials, in which they delivered, with placid unanimity, their views on labour legislation and labour politics.” (Chapter VII.)

The Webbs show how Congress deliberately excluded from its discussions not only questions of trade union rivalries, but also all the controversial aspects of trade union activity. "Arising as it did between 1868 and 1871, when the one absorbing topic was the relation of Trade Unionism to the law, it had retained the character then impressed upon it of an exclusively political body.” It was the TUC that voted for independent parliamentary representation and promoted the formation of the Labour Party.

It began as a political body and so it has remained, in spite of periods during which, as in the 1926 general strike, it was reluctantly pushed into taking a leading part in industrial disputes.

A glance at the TUC's "Objects” will show how political it is. Alongside general phrases about promoting the interests of the workers and the unions, it has a list of particular measures, including "public ownership and control of national resources and of services,” nationalisation of land, mines and minerals and "nationalisation of railways.'' (Apparently nobody has noticed that the railways were nationalised long ago!). It also demands a legal maximum working week of 40 hours, a legal minimum wage for each industry, and "adequate State pensions for all at the age of 60.”

The interesting thing about the demands for legislation on wages and hours is that not only have they not been achieved, but it would appear that the TUC has long given up any serious attempt to press them or get a Labour government to do so. The object on hours used to be in the form of a demand for legislation for a maximum 44 hour week, but this was obtained years ago in most industries by the unions themselves. without legislation and without the aid of the TUC. And the TUC, like the Labour Party, has tacitly recognised 65 as the pension age and stopped asking for it to be lowered.

Much of (he General Council’s activity is concerned with direct contacts with government departments and governmental agencies and Sir Vincent Tewson makes a modest claim for it:

We therefore can and do talk to any government because we believe in and get the right of consultation. 1 think our views are respected and that they have some effect on the making of Government policy. 

(Daily Telegraph, 13/9/60.)

Clearly the TUC has as yet no intention of giving up politics and the delegates do not want it to do so.

All the critics agree that the trade union leadership has lost much of its influence with the rank and file in recent years, but few mention one obvious factor in this, which is that members have become suspicious that the leadership is too much in touch with the government, the employers and the professional economists, and too ready to accept their policies. In particular, trade unionists claiming higher wages and shorter hours, are tired of being told about the “national interest,” the export trade, the gold reserve, and so on, and the leaders' influence waned when they lined up with the Labour government’s policy of “wage restraint.” Sir Vincent Tewson, who defends that policy, has to admit that it “chafed,” and says: “The wonder is not that the formal restraint ended when it did but that it had been possible to maintain it for so long.”

In 1950 the General Council’s recommendation to continue “wage restraint” was defeated, but the outlook out of which it arose is still there. The TUC supports consultation with the government, cooperation with employers to increase production and the subordination of trade union policy to what are called “national” needs. And Labour Party spokesmen have admitted that another Labour Government would again try to get the unions to agree to “wage restraint.”

This is a continuing dilemma of the trade union leadership and particularly of the TUC. Apart from a few oddities who gape open mouthed at the supposed superiority of Russian State capitalism over other capitalism, the leaders accept British capitalism and start from the proposition that on Britain’s ability to produce efficiently and sell profitably depends the jobs and wages of British workers. As Tewson put it in the interview already referred to, “We found we could not stand aloof. The unions cannot do their job effectively unless there is a stable economy"; but while the great majority of the members may in theory share the leaders’ acceptance of capitalism and Britain’s position in it, they do not at all see what this has to do with their own particular grievances and claims. The more the leaders harp on restraint and responsibility the more the number of members who view them with suspicion.

Strange as it may seem to those who think this is an “affluent society,” masses of workers are overworked, hard up and harassed and are resentful of it as ever they were.

Edgar Hardcastle

Letters: Power (1960)

Letters to the Editors from the October 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Power

I am nineteen years old and I am interested in Socialism as a political train of thought. Two years ago while on holiday in Nottingham I attended an open air meeting organised by your Party. When questions were asked by members of the public each was answered satisfactorily except one. I would therefore be most grateful if you could answer this question for me.

In the planning of a socialist society some individual or individuals are necessary to plan this society, i.e., these people will be in superior position to the common workers, whose job it would be to fulfil the plan laid down for them. How would the society protect the common worker from being oppressed by this intelligentsia, who would certainly use their high position for their own selfish ends, turning a new formed socialist society back to the class ridden capitalist society? The crux of my question being how can man's selfish bid for power be retarded while still giving a man with greater brain power the incentive to work wholeheartedly not only for the good of himself but for the good of the whole society.

I hope you are willing to accept that the “I'm alright Jack’’ attitude is very prevalent throughout the world today, in all types of worker.

I hope you get the meaning of my question which I regard as a most important one. I would also be most grateful if you would send me a copy of your paper, the Socialist Standard.

D. G. G.

Fareham Hants.

Reply:

Our correspondent postulates the existence of Socialism without taking into account the conditions which are necessary to bring it into being. Socialism will be the work of the great majority of mankind, who will consciously establish it because they think it in their interests to do so. It will not be the responsibility of any minority, whether they are planners or somebody else. Because of this, the work of

Socialism's planners will conform to the Socialist desires of the rest of society and will be designed within the framework of the Socialist community.

Those people who under Socialism are responsible for planning production, transport, and so on, will not be in “ a superior position." For in a world where the production and distribution of wealth is a social procedure, every individual depends upon the rest of society for his welfare and existence. This will be the strength behind society's determination to have a privilege-free world. Social pretensions will be powerless against it—and they will have no validity, when everybody has equally free access to the world's wealth.

This, too, will be the incentive to work wholeheartedly in a Socialist society. Capitalism, with its anarchic and acquisitive nature, fosters the narrowly selfish attitude to which our correspondent refers. Free from the necessity to strive for social superiority and from the many other restrictions of capitalism, mankind will be able to give of their best. They will do so in the knowledge—and with the intention—that the wealth of the world belongs to the world's people, without distinction of any kind. When society wants that, nothing can prevent them having it or, when they have it, take it away from them.

Editorial Committee. 

State Capitalism

After coming into contact with the SPGB through the pages of the American Western Socialist, I am left with the following doubt. Does the SPGB wish to see a regime of full scale nationalisation (i.e.. State Capitalism) instituted, or would industries be controlled by workers’ soviets?

As an anarchist, I cannot see that a centralised state bureaucracy can ever give true public control. Industry must be organised and run by elected workers' councils. What is the SPGB's attitude to this?

J. A. D.

Darlington. Co. Durham.

Reply:

Our correspondent correctly points out that full scale nationalisation is capitalism directly organised by the state machine. Socialists are opposed to capitalism in any form, including state capitalism. The method of controlling industries is determined by the type of ownership to which they are subject. Thus, it is of little importance whether privately owned industry is organised by private companies, as in many cases in this country, or by a central bureaucracy through so-called workers’ soviets, as in some cases in the USSR. Both types of organisation administer privately owned industries in the interests of their owning—or capitalist—class.

When Socialism is established, the control of industry will still be in line with its ownership. It is impossible, at the present, to give a detailed picture of the organisation which a Socialist community will use for controlling industry. That will depend upon the conditions prevailing at the time. But, because the means of wealth production will be commonly owned, we can say that they will be democratically controlled in the interests of the whole of mankind.

Editorial Committee.

Seamen and Socialism

It is long since I troubled you with any screed of mine, but 1 feel impelled to break a restraint of several years by making some comment upon your bewildering illogicality, as it seems to me, in certain directions.

Under the heading “Seamen on Strike” you write “One simple method of safeguarding the community’s welfare, keeping the ships sailing and making everybody happy, is to grant the seamen’s wage demands.” Indeed! But is this recipe for everybody’s happiness not a little naive, encouraging “demands” on the parlour-game principle “Think of a number (or demand) and then double it." Since when has it been good Socialism to accept the view that any good, let alone universal happiness, can come out of a wages system?

On the very same page you say that “ not so long ago " a farthing would buy a pocket-full of sweets. So it would, if not a pocket-full, a fist-full. Sweets— and food—was incredibly cheap before the first great war, and so was labour. You make the point that a worker’s wage today in command of real wealth remains much about the same. This, in spite of the precarious outcome of “full employment” in so-called key industries, overtime, and married women’s labour. Plainly, “demand” for anything less than Socialism is “not enough.” Then why confuse the issue merely to satisfy that class-war feeling? It’s phoney! As for the £40 a month and all found, I can only speak of the stewards you mention, but I have just come off a liner (an exploiting passenger, of course) considerably lighter in pocket. Why should you expect me to fall for that fudge? The workers, like everyone else (and who are they?) want all they can get and I don't blame them—or us—but don't ask me to idealise the ”gi-me" game. I gave all to a cause once, with no personal expectations. So did many pioneers of the SPGB. We didn't moan.

Now, isn't it about time the SPGB told the world what it means by Socialism? Yes, I know all about the statement of Principles, I had it in draft in my own hands some 50 years ago. But what does it mean? I ask modern artist friends of mine what their apparently crude abstract designs mean and they fob me off with jargon and more jargon. I ask you for details of how each takes from the common store without money and without price. Must the answer be the same? Just how, is all I want to know, but don’t misunderstand me. I, too, believe it possible to really socialise the main things of life gradually and I do not rely on any “ dawn ’’ appearing or the “ setting up'' of specialised and centralised bureaucracies for the purpose. I could develop the theme with plenty of early Socialist literature to my aid. Believe me, I do not propose to present every worker with a Jaguar on “ demand ’’—the problem disturbs me, for why not a helicopter apiece? 1 can “ visualise ” some “ store." Treat this as a little pleasantry if you like, but what do you really mean? No jargon, mind!

Lord Amwell.

Belsize Park, N.W.3.

Reply:

In the first chapter of our pamphlet “ Questions of the Day " we have told in some detail what Socialism is. Lord Amwell asks “for details of how each takes from the common store without money and without price.” We are puzzled at his difficulty. In a family, for example, each takes what he needs of what is there without either money or price. Likewise, from what is produced today each could take what he needs of what is available for each without having to pay for anything, providing it was all commonly owned.

As the question comes from Lord Amweli there are certain things we can take for granted. For instance, that we are concerned with a society in which everything that is in and on the earth is the common possession of all mankind. and each stands on an equal footing with regard to what is produced and distributed.

Before such a society can come into being the vast mass of the people must understand what Socialism signifies the kind of society that they are bringing into being. Hence they will know that the greater the quantity and variety they can produce the more in quantity and variety will be available to each.

The same kind of hands and brains that are concerned with production and distribution today will be available in the new society—but with greater freedom and opportunities. Consequently the provision of the necessary productive and storage facilities to meet society's needs in the requisite places will present less difficulties than they do today, where the profit consideration enters into the problem. Thus people will go to the appropriate stores and take what they need of what is there, in accordance with assessments of needs and the means to fulfil them—problems which are within the capacity of human brains that have been able to devise gigantic buildings, faster than sound planes, radar and space rockets. For instance, people go to super stores today, take what they need and pay for what they have taken. Tomorrow they will go similar places, take what they need and walk out.

Those who bring the new society into being will be reasonable enough not to expect more than society is capable of producing. Likewise, they will only want what they need, not what will be the envy of their neighbours. A person can only eat one meal at a time, sleep in one bed, sit in one car. The multiplicity of these things would only be a nuisance and a sign that the accumulator needed the attention of a doctor. Helicopters have been mentioned. It is surely obvious that everyone would not want a helicopter, a motor car, a racing stud, a yacht, a TV set, a private radar, a trip to the moon, a private salmon river, or a house papered with gold leaf and diamonds. People yearn for these things today because they signify security and importance, in the eyes of their fellows. In the new society such an outlook would be meaningless. The members of it would want comfort, happiness, the pursuit of occupations that gave them pleasure, and the harmonious co-operation of their fellows. A helicopter would not be needed as a possession, but as a means to get from place to place in a hurry. Today a man calls a taxi if he wants to get to a friend or the station in comfort and quickly. Would it not be possible to arrange to call a helicopter tomorrow? Members of the new society would not be unreasonable in their demands, harmonious co-operation would assure this, and unlimited human ingenuity would be used to solve any problems that arise.

In the beginning, before society has settled down in the new form, there may be those who, unable to throw off the heritage of the past, may want to satiate themselves with possessions. But what of it? They will gain nothing by it except satiation and will soon get tired of useless accumulation, like the child gets tired of a surfeit of toys.

With reference to the remarks about the seamen's dispute, the sentences quoted have been taken too literally—in a sense that the context shows was not intended. They were just flippant digs at the arguments put forward by the employers and their supporters.

Editorial Committee.

Telegram sent to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1960)

From the October 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Telegram sent to the British Association for the Advancement of Science at their September 1960 Conference in Cardiff.

TODAY YOU WILL DISCUSS WORLD POPULAT1ON PROBLEMS. MAY WE EXPRESS TO YOU OUR CONVICTION THAT THE PROBLEMS OF MASS STARVATION AND MALNUTRITION AMIDST POTENTIAL PLENTY CANNOT BE SOLVED UNLESS PRODUCTION IS CARRIED ON SOLELY IN ORDER TO SATISFY HUMAN NEEDS, UNFETTERED BY ANY CONSIDERATIONS OF FINANCIAL OR NATIONAL GAIN.

IN OUR VIEW IT IS UTOPIAN AND IRRATIONAL TO ATTEMPT TO SOLVE THESE PROBLEMS EXCEPT ON A WORLD-WIDE BASIS OF COMMON OWNERSHIP OF THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION. MEN MUST ORGANISE TO ABOLISH ALL CLASS AND STATE OWNERSHIP OF THE MEANS OF LIVING  – MONEY. THEREBY. BEING RENDERED REDUNDANT. AT LAST MAN COULD GRAPPLE WITH HIS PROBLEMS IN A TRULY HUMAN AND SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT. THE VISIONS OF BACON AND MARX WOULD BECOME THE REALITY.

 

SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN.

On the Scrap Heap (1960)

From the October 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is stale news now that a year ago this month, the Tories managed to win the general election. This was their third consecutive victory and, with an increased majority, was almost unprecedented in British politics. It would also be stale news to list the promises which they and the other parties made in their bid for power, but one thing seems certain. The electorate swallowed Mr. MacMillan’s impertinent assertion and agreed with him that they were indeed having it better than ever before. The Prime Minister’s words have not yet begun to stick in the throats of his supporters; except maybe for some millions of old folk. Many of these no doubt gave their vote to the Tories and are still living on their pensions and Mr. MacMillan’s promises of better things tomorrow or the day after. 

“A share in the rising prosperity of our country . . ." What a delightfully vague and empty phrase that is. Most old folk will remain pretty much the same as they were before those words were uttered—alone, unwanted, and very poor. B. E. Shenfield, quoting official sources in his book Social Policies for Old Age, points out that about a quarter of the pensioners in Britain today are so impoverished that they are eligible for National Assistance. So much for the “share.” A microscope would be needed to find it.

Frailties of old age are sooner or later the lot of all of us who manage to live long enough, and no one will deny that the task of caring for the aged calls for a skill and devotion second to none. Geriatrics, a branch of medicine dealing with care of old persons, has not been established more than about sixty years and the hard and unstinting efforts of the pioneers such as Dr. Nascher in Vienna and Dr. Warren in this country, are only in recent times becoming generally known. Some idea of the enormity of the work facing medical staffs is given by Dr. Kenneth Hazell when he says that 85 per cent. of the 56,000 chronic hospital cases are persons 65 years of age or over. (See Social and Medical Problems of the Elderly).

But when this has been said, there remains the inescapable fact that the deterioration associated with growing old is accentuated and the work of doctors severely hampered by poverty. Here, for example, are some of Dr. Hazell’s own impressions gained after visiting countless old people in their homes. His words do not make pretty reading, and to many of us they will have a familiar ring. Somewhere we have heard them all before—and we shall hear them again in the future.

All too often, he says, the houses visited were in the back alleys of city slum areas, built many years ago and “entirely lacking in architectural beauty.” They were usually of the “two down and two up ” type with outside lavatory, no bathroom, and merely a cold water tap in the scullery. It is the pitiful lot of many poor souls to be confined literally for years in these damp and cheerless hovels where even a short illness can prove fatal, not just because you are old, but equally because successful treatment is hindered by such dreadful conditions. Typical is the case of one man of 81, living alone in a cold damp bungalow, whose slight chill developed into severe bronchitis within two days, and who was saved only by timely removal to hospital.

Trying to make do on next to nothing, it is little wonder that many suffer from severe malnutrition. W. Hobson and J. Pemberton have published the results of a study conducted in Sheffield and have stated that some old patients weigh as little as 4½ stone on admission to hospital. It is in the big cities, they tell us, where cases such as these are most common, and along with Dr. Hazell. they remind us that starvation and deficiency diseases are certainly not things of the past, although overwhelmingly it is the poor who suffer from them.

One of the many bitter ironies of Capitalism is that our isolation grows as we get older. One would have thought it well nigh impossible to be alone and unwanted among a rapidly expanding population, but the horrible truth has to be faced that in Britain today about a million single old persons are living alone. Because of this, they often remain without care or attention of any kind, even after sustaining an injury or becoming otherwise ill. One of the worst cases in recent times was that of a man who lay dead in a house for several weeks before anyone thought fit to investigate. When the police eventually broke in, they discovered that his wife had been with him all the time, but in the words of the coroner, she was too old, ill and mentally deranged to realise what had happened.

Such sad tales are not isolated cases. The whole story of working class old age is indeed a dismal one, but the blame for it cannot be laid at the door of any one government or party. The best that any of them can do is no more than to skim the surface. They cannot make any essential alteration to the position of this growing minority of near-destitutes. Various parties have tried to deal with the matter over the past fifty years or so, starting with the Liberal Government's pension scheme in 1908. The next few years saw various changes and extensions, and in 1946 the Labour Government's National Insurance Act, which increased pensions to 26s., was supported by Tories and Liberals alike. Since then, further increases have taken place, yet in 1960 the problem presses as heavily as ever.

Trevor H. Howell, M.R.C.P., has written an illuminating book on old age, called Our Advancing Years. At the end of his second chapter, he says: “We have now come to a time when old age alone is no longer a cause of acute poverty." But old age never has been a cause of poverty, acute or otherwise, and pensioners are not poor because they are old but because they are old workers. This is at the heart of their plight. Aged capitalists have no need of pensions, national assistance or any of the hundred and one charities which feature in our private properly society.

For they are the owners of the private property and it is the lack of ownership by the majority which makes and keeps us poor. Old age merely accentuates this—what one could call the ultimate in a state of poverty which has been with us throughout our working lives, characterised by the struggle to make both ends meet and with the mockery of pensions to remind us that we have lost the battle after all.

An alleviation of our poverty we may get from a pension, the abolition of our poverty, never. Poverty is with us all the time and in this so-called affluent society it is still true that about 10 per cent. of the population own about 90 per cent. of the accumulated wealth. The rest of us have a pretty limited access to the means of life through our wage packets, and with the approach of old age, even these cease. Capitalist society is not really very interested in the old ones, and for an obvious reason. It is simply no longer profitable to employ them

In face of such an uncomfortable truth the reformers can do precious little, for they work within the framework of the very setup which has created the tragedy of old age. In fact, it has been alleged that the advent of the welfare state has seen a sharpening of the problem. In recent times one charitable organisation has even been obliged to leave ill old men on street doorsteps in an attempt to get them into hospital.

There is surely an urgent need for working people to reach an understanding of their position in the capitalist scheme of things and to appreciate the need for the removal of a system which insults us with pensions and countless other futilities, and which is quite incapable of really satisfying human needs. It is capitalism which turns what could be a period of reasonable contentment into a time of loneliness and despair. The Socialist answer is worthy of serious consideration—by young and old alike.

Eddie Critchfield

Finance and Industry: Devaluation of the Pound? (1960)

The Finance and Industry Column from the October 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Devaluation of the Pound?

In the early days of capitalism the business men and economists invented the theory that if each capitalist got on with the business of selling goods and making profits production and distribution would flow smoothly and all would be well for everybody, including the workers. Like all such theories it was no more than their attempt to justify their profit-making activities against the critics and it became increasingly difficult to defend in face of the evidence that the flow was never smooth and at intervals was chaotically otherwise.

Then grew up the idea, from the same quarters, that with more study and the accumulation of facts and figures, capitalists and governments could foresee trends and avert unwanted developments. This, too, has proved to be a myth and a case in point is the frequency with which governments find themselves induced to vary the values of their currencies because of international trade difficulties. The point is that these revaluations are never the result of free choice. The pound has been devalued several times and now another devaluation is being discussed. The pound was once worth 4.86 dollars, then it was reduced to 4 dollars, and then, in 1949, despite the repeated denials of the British government, it was suddenly dropped to 2.8. And in the nineteen thirties Roosevelt cut the dollar to about half its gold content.

Now, Mr. C. L. Day, writing in the London and Cambridge Bulletin (supplement to the Times Review of Industry, September, 1960) gloomily forecasts the possibility that the low level of British exports will have to be met either by policies which will increase unemployment or by devaluing the pound.

The City Editor of the Daily Mail (7/9/60) concedes that Mr. Day may be right in his forecast because he "has an excellent record in this respect." but can derive no happiness from the prospect.

It may well be. But surely we can try a little harder and suffer a little more to preserve the value of our currency before we shrug our shoulders and admit defeat by devaluing the pound again—about the best way of making sure that nobody ever wants to hold pounds any more.

And, of course, the assumption that such a move would solve anything by giving a boost to exports depends on what other countries do; if world trade becomes stagnant they may all be doing the same, including the U.S.A. One forecast we can safely make is about the attitude of the government and employers if a devaluation is decided upon sometime: they will be urging the workers not to press for higher wages. In 1949 when the Labour Government took that step they knew that the effect would be to raise the cost of imports and raise the cost of living and Sir Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchequer, made his famous or infamous declaration that workers must not ask for more pay to meet higher prices.

Speaking in the House of of Commons on September 27, 1949, he said:—

"Especially and specifically there can, in our view, be no justification for any section of workers trying to recoup themselves for any increase in the cost of living due to the altered exchange rate. That is a general burden spread over all and must be accepted as a very real and essential contribution towards the avoidance of vast unemployment."

Fortunately the workers did not take much notice of his appeal: if it happens again they should in their own interest take no notice at all.

The Oil Industry 

Ever since Malthus there have been “experts” telling us that at some time in the future world resources will not be sufficient for the needs of a bigger world population, but none of them have been able to show that world resources have been insufficient in the past or present, or explain why capitalism has all along failed to meet the reasonable needs of the vast mass of the population. It is not nature, or lack of efficiency in production that is responsible, but the structure of the social system, which in industry after industry periodically produces too much for the market and too little for the needs of those who have not the money to buy. At present world markets are glutted with too much coal and too much oil, millions of tons of unsold coal, oil refineries working below capacity and tonnage of idle tankers running into hundreds of thousands.

The City Editor of the Sunday Times (21/8/60), Mr. William Rees-Mogg, tells how the oil situation came about. It is the old story of capitalists absorbed in their own problem of producing to make profit irrespective of what is happening elsewhere, of governments determined to promote their own oil industries no matter what the effect on markets, and planners making forward plans in the dark. Mr. Rees-Mogg lists four specific reasons:

"The first is that the Suez crisis concealed from the industry the fact that it had reached a stage of over-investment. At what should have been the top of the investment cycle another great wave of investment was added on. The second reason, and a most important one, is that the American oil companies looked abroad for oil to supply their home market: then the cuts on imports forced them to try to sell abroad what they had found abroad. During the 1950s it also happened that local nationalist feeling made each country want its own refinery; as a result there are too many refineries. Finally, nature was generous and oil exploration, particularly in North and West Africa, found enormous new fields.”

About the planners he writes;

The result is that there is more oil, more coal and more electricity at lower cost than anyone foresaw. As recently as 1956 the standard view, taken, for instance, in the Hartley Commission Report, was that there would be a general fuel shortage lasting as far ahead as could be foreseen. That has already been proved false.

Russia too!

In the early days Russian economists used to maintain that in that country self-sufficiency was the aim and production was planned for the needs of Russian industry only. Now Russian trade departments are busy scouring the markets of the world for outlets for surplus commodities, from motor cars to oil. A special correspondent of the Times (8/9/60), who holds the view that the trade drive is only partly political in its aims, quotes from a recent Russian novel what he accepts as a picture of what has happened:

"A Russian novel which has just appeared devotes a chapter to the embarrassment of local officials in the Volga oilfields who are faced with an unexpected abundance of oil for which insufficient outlets exist. This presents a new problem for Soviet planners. By long tradition, they are conditioned to urge the industrial chiefs on the spot to increase output to the maximum extent, rewarding them generously with bonuses for “overfulfilling the plan.”

The planners now appear to suffer from overfilled storage tanks, and measures must be taken to check the flow, which has consistently exceeded expectation. For example, the oil plan for 1960, as laid down in 1956, envisaged an output of 134m. tons, but production in 1960 is, in fact, likely to exceed 144m. tons. If these output figures are indeed unexpectedly high, they must have outrun the growth in refining and storage capacity, and it is reasonable to suppose that the foreign trade agencies of the U.S.S.R are under heavy pressure to dispose of extra quantities of Soviet oil abroad, additional to amounts which were originally earmarked for export. "

A sideline on this is provided by Mr. Stephen Parkinson, who recently led a delegation of British business men to Russia on behalf of the Institute of Directors. Writing in the Director (August, I960) he reports that the Russian officials they met “could not resist talking about greater trade possibilities and making one or two acid comments about their failure to sell Soviet oil to Britain’’—the British government has so far turned a cold eye on Russian offers to sell oil here well below the prices of the British and American companies.

Mr. Parkinson also had something to say about the Russian sense of humour which he finds is rather like the British. He tells of Russian officials he met: “Nor were they backward in pointing to what they considered to be the advantages of Socialism over capitalism, but it was all done with good humour and often to lighten the tedium of a long meeting.”

If Russian officials say, and Mr. Parkinson accepts, that Russian State capitalism is Socialism, it is funnier than any of them think.

Edgar Hardcastle