Death Takes Away Another Old Comrade (1932)

Obituary from the December 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to say that Comrade G. Seach died in a hospital on November 21st, after an illness of several months. So little did he think that death was near, that the day before he died he was regretting that bad health had kept him from participating in the work of the organisation, but he expected to carry on again when he came out of hospital.

Comrade Seach was, perhaps, better known to older members of the Party. Before and immediately after the War he did a considerable amount of speaking, which finally brought on throat trouble. After speaking for twenty minutes, he suffered from bleeding of the throat. On this account he had to give up platform work at last.

He was a sturdy comrade and a valuable worker for the Party, and it is with deep sorrow we place him among the growing band of those who are only our memories. To his family we extend our sympathy.

A Mad World (1932)

From the December 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

(From the Star, October 13th, 1932.)

Over 20,000 British out-of-work settlers stranded in Australia are begging to be brought home. Forty children yesterday left British homes and orphanages for “down under.” It’s a mad world, my masters.

Newcastle-on-Tyne and Gateshead (1932)

Party News from the December 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

With a view to extending its activities to Gateshead, the Newcastle-on-Tyne branch has transferred its business meetings to the Gateshead district. The branch will henceforth be known as the Gateshead Branch.

A Class for the study of Marxian Economics is being formed, and non-members are specially invited. Full particulars may be obtained from the Secretary, Edmund Howarth, 95, Bewick Road, Gateshead.

Producing and paying (1932)

From the December 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent asks if it is correct that “Labour is the source of all wealth.”

The answer to this question is “No.” To say that “Labour is the source of all wealth” would mean that Labour of itself is some kind of inexhaustible reservoir from which wealth (articles of use—or use-values) can be extracted, and would leave out of account the part played by Nature. It is the sort of loose phrase that might be justified in casual conversation if the part played by Nature is left to be understood, but as a definition to be used in studying economic laws it is useless and likely to lead to unsound conclusions.

Nature provides the materials to which labour is applied, and Nature and Labour play an inseparable part in the process of wealth production. Marx criticised the phrase “Labour is the source of all wealth.” He wrote: —

“The phrase quoted is found in all primers for children, and is accurate insofar as it is left to he understood that the work is effected with the aid of the appropriate object and means. But a Socialist programme ought not to permit itself the use of such bourgeois locutions; it ought not to ignore the existence of the conditions upon which the meaning of the phrase solely depends.” (“Criticism of the Gotha Programme.”)

The correct statement of the source of wealth is that wealth is produced by the application of human labour to Nature-given material.

Another correspondent, while agreeing with the above definition, thinks that it contradicts our contention that rates and taxes are not a burden on the working class or, as he puts it, that the workers “do not pay for armaments.”

Here, again, is need for precision. The idea behind our correspondent’s difficulty is that if the workers produce all wealth, then they must pay for everything. The ability to pay is associated in his mind with the ability to produce. But this is a mistaken notion. The workers do not produce for themselves but for their employers. The whole of the articles produced belong to the employers, who sell them and receive the proceeds of the sale. Out of the proceeds they pay away various amounts, including the wages of the workers and rates and taxes. If the armament burden could be reduced the capitalists would benefit by paying away less of their profits in the form of taxes for armaments. Not so the workers. The workers have no means of paying for anything other than the wages they receive (supplemented by charity, social services, etc). If taxes are reduced, and if, as a consequence, prices fall, the workers’ cost of living also falls, and with it their wages. The workers produce the wealth but do not own it.

The tax burden which the various groups of property owners are constantly trying to pass off on to each other, cannot be passed off on to the propertyless class.

DON.

Demands which Have Not Effective Backing (1932)

From the December 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the final stages of the debate on the Means Test Bill in the House of Commons, Mr. Seymour Cocks, M.P. (Labour, Broxtowe), was reported as saying; “Men are unemployed, not through their own fault, but as a result of the economic system under which they live. That being so, the fault lies with society.”

In saying that much, Mr. Cocks stated a fact so well-known that it has become almost a platitude. Prominent men of other parties have said the same thing years ago. It is not necessary to belong to the Labour Party to become acquainted with a fact that is so obvious.

The capitalist system is undoubtedly responsible for unemployment, which is only a part of the general evil of poverty for which the system is to blame. When the workers are considering Mr. Cocks’s suggested remedy they should keep that fact in mind. His remedy is as follows: —

“We say they have a right to demand from society everything required to keep them in strength, health, and self-respect. This should not be looked on as State relief, but as compensation paid by society in default of providing work.”

There is, of course, no obstacle preventing the unemployed from making any demands they choose. The workers have been demanding this, that and the other thing, ever since they have had leaders, with varying degrees of non-success. Successive governments have permitted them to go on demanding. Most of the demands put forward by labour leaders, in the name of the workers, have been made on the Government in office at the time. But Mr. Cocks makes his demand on society.

In blaming society for unemployment Mr. Cocks is right; in suggesting a remedy that can only be sponsored by the capitalist class, he is wrong. If the social system is to blame, then society, as a whole, is responsible. The capitalist class because they are interested in preserving unemployment; and the working class because they fail to understand its cause and cure. While the working class submit to capitalist exploitation—the cause of poverty and unemployment—and by their votes give the capitalist class control, the latter, quite naturally, deal with the question along lines that suit their interests as a class.

To put the case in a nut-shell, unemployment is only a part of the greater and more general evil from which the workers suffer. But as a class, the latter outnumber the capitalists many times. Organised in the Socialist Party on the basis of their class they could easily swamp all capitalist parties, and gaining political control, establish Socialism, when all forms of poverty due to exploitation would be ended.

The responsibility is on the working class to bring this about. They are the class that suffers unemployment and the fear of unemployment. Only the class that suffers can bring about its own emancipation. Demands are useless unless backed by an effective force, and unnecessary when this force is on the workers’ side.

Mr. Cocks’s last statement, that, unemployment pay “should not be looked on as State relief, but as compensation paid by society in default of providing work,” shows that he is not opposed to the capitalist system in itself. He is quite prepared to leave the system intact in return for the right of the unemployed to demand the necessaries of life.

Right without might is an illusion of the sentimentalist. Might lies behind the guns of the armed forces, and it allows what “rights” it deems fit.

F. Foan

Sting in the Tail: Good news, bad news (1995)

The Sting in the Tail column from the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Good news, bad news

The publication of a 400-page Genome Directory as a supplement to Nature Magazine should be really good news. It is an attempt to provide a map of a large portion of the 100,000 or so human genes. Medical experts believe it could be a step on the road to finding the genetic causes, and eventually the cure, of many killer diseases.

But we live in capitalism, so this good news has a major downside to it. In America where many companies provide their workers with health care insurance as part of their wage, we learn how such advances are being used to cut the capitalists' health care liabilities:

“To avoid hiring people with ‘disease genes' some companies ask job applicants about their family medical histories or ask for samples of blood or cell tissue without revealing that they will be used for genetic tests " (Herald. 19 October).

Job losses inevitable

That proposed merger of Lloyd's bank and the TSB has once again had banking unions complaining about likely job losses. They pointed to the increased profits of the Big Four last year—up £1.5 billion to £5 billion, and Ed Sweeney of BIFU argued that:

“The shareholder will do very nicely and top executives will get fatter pay cheques. The least they can do is ensure staff there will be no sackings ” (Guardian, 11 October).

Those increased profits are mainly due to fewer bad debts and not to any growth in banking activity. Then there is fierce competition for business from building societies and now the insurance companies are entering into banking. Also, new technology means that banks simply don’t need as many workers now, so the pressure is on to cut costs.

Fair enough, unions must protest at job losses, but oh for even a glimmer of recognition from them that their real enemy is capitalism and not mere mergers, executives or shareholders.

Of cops and hookers

Members of the working class have to sell their abilities to work for wages and salaries. Some even have to sell their bodies.

“Prostitution is not legalised, yet in genteel Edinburgh there are about 400 women at work in saunas or massage parlours, earning £2,000 per month, according to a recent survey.

"Trying to stop prostitution is like trying to compress water: all you do is displace it. It will come squeezing out of the sides somewhere else, ’ says Tom Wood, assistant Chief Constable of Lothian and Borders police." (Independent, 26 September).

If the assistant Chief Constable had prefaced his remark with “Inside a buying and selling system like capitalism . . ." no-one could have disagreed. But he didn’t, so let us be quite plain about this matter.

The only way to stop prostitution is the establishment of the classless, private property-less society. Inside that system the 400 hookers and the even more numerous policemen can start doing worthwhile and dignified work for the first time.

Hell drivers

Ever felt a little queasy on the motorway as you passed one of those mammoth heavy lorries and wondered if it was swaying a bit on the road? Well start feeling really queasy for a report in the Observer (22 October) makes frightening reading:

“Lorry drivers forced to work illegal hours by unscrupulous employers are to blame for up to 200 road deaths a year. Haulage firms, prompted by the recession to cut costs to the minimum, are pushing drivers to break the law or face dismissal."

When you read that between 600 and 1,000 people die in accidents involving HGVs every year in Britain; that 20 percent of these are caused by lorry driver fatigue and that up to 40 percent of the drivers have been asked to exceed the legal limit of 10 hours a day, you may come to the conclusion that the sway you detected was because the driver was half-asleep at the wheel.

It is just another example of capitalism lowering costs to boost profits and to hell with people’s lives.

“Support” — Tory style

Last November we mentioned on this page that the Young Conservatives were “set for the chop” because they had become an embarrassment to the Tory Party. This provoked an indignant letter in the January issue from a YC who told us:

“The Young Conservatives are not for the chop; both the Prime Minister and the Party Chairman have pledged their support for the organisation. ”

What this “support” amounts to was revealed in the Guardian (13 October). Tory’ Central Office has closed its youth department and the YCs now have to share the services of “one tenth of a person” at Central Office with Conservative Students.

Often, when the Tories have wanted to kill off some state benefit or allowance but without causing a row, they have left it to, in their own words, “wither on the vine”. The YCs are looking like a bunch of mouldy grapes to us.

Beyond cynicism (1995)

From the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The battle against capitalism seems to me to be an impossible task. You say socialism can only be established by the majority wanting it—this is true but capitalism will never let that happen. They control television, media and education and they are experts in propaganda tactics. Leaflets, posters, talks, meetings, etc. are not powerful enough. The capitalists know this and that is why they let you operate.

If socialism did spread here in the capitalist western world and the capitalists saw it as a real threat they would stamp it out immediately, by any means necessary, remember they have everything to lose. But they wouldn't even need to take any drastic measures, it would only take a few propaganda programmes on TV and a few articles in the tabloids anyway. The majority are easily manipulated, conditioned and controlled.

The majority are not even concerned with politics or life on a global scale, most people are more concerned with materialism, wealth, sex and violence. I know I must sound like I lack faith in the human race but I must admit I do. When do you realistically think socialism on a global scale can come about? Are we talking decades or hundreds or thousands of years?”

This doleful missive of defeatist pessimism has been sent to us by a reader from Surrey. It is fair to assume that he is not consumed by high expectations for the future. In this he is not alone. Most people today are hopeless, in relative degrees of dejection about the future of society. They have come to expect the worst, and all too often experience worse than the worst that they expected. We who are socialists, filled with a passion fed by understanding that history does change and the future can be different and better, would be foolish to ignore the political sighs of such Jeremiahs as our correspondent. For hopelessness itself is the enemy of positive action and the anticipation of failure to build a decent society makes real such failure. The cynics should not be ignored or sneered at as fools. Negativity is not answered by the constructive intones of derision, but on the basis of scientific logic and historical vision; nothing less will do.

This has been a century of cruelly extinguished hopes. The embarrassed blushes of those who applauded the “justice” of the Stalinist purges and heaped praise upon the state-capitalist hell-holes which posed as “socialist states” will not conceal the false faith in the Religion of Leninism which pseudo-socialists promoted, so distorting everything that the real hope of socialism offers; the workers who rejoiced gullibly in 1945 as British industries were nationalised as “public utilities” have had to see how in half-a-century the profit motive, which was always built-in to state-managed capitalism, has crushed the hopes of the public who were tricked into thinking that industries belonged to them; those who believed that scientific reason would culminate in a rationalised capitalist system this century have had to watch in sheer horror as millions of humans were pushed into the gas chambers and the gulags, as bombs of unimaginable destructiveness wiped out whole cities and populations, as the gross inhumanity of the mass torture of millions through slow starvation has proceeded while food is destroyed lest profits fall. To cultivate boundless optimism amidst the ruins of hope and the realities of capitalism’s manifest evils is not a task for the faint-hearted.

False hope of piecemeal reform

What has been the most pernicious lie of this century? It is that hope for the future lay in the gradual, imperceptible, but certain amelioration of capitalism through the process of reform, The false hope of piecemeal improvement of an essentially cancerous system captured the imaginations of millions, exhausted their energies in the reformist struggle to humanise the profit system, and then left them dumbed by frustration. Whether the changes were to come through the division lobbies of Westminster or by gaining control of local councils or trade union committees or by humanitarian slogans or empty “green” appeals for a nicer, gentler world, the system which puts profit before need has persistently spat the hope of humane capitalism back in the face of its advocates. The progressive enthusiasm of millions has been stamped out in this way.

Dare we imagine how different it would have been if that energy—or even a half or a tenth of that energy—which has gone into reforming capitalism had gone into abolishing it? With a movement great in number, if still a minority, how much stronger would we be if our fellow workers had not experienced that bitter disillusionment of failed reformism and the indignity of abandoning principles for the sake of short-term gains? Should we who struck to undiluted socialist principles— the world for the workers with production solely for use, and nothing less—be the ones to bow our heads in defeat when the policy of Reform, not Revolution, has so miserably failed?

Yet how easy it is to step out of the shadow of reformist frustration and commit the two errors of our hopeless correspondent. First, deny that workers are intelligent enough to ever see through their own oppression and exploitation. Claim that they are suckers and suckers they will forever be. Second, attribute to the small class of parasites who now own and control the earth and its abundant resources huge powers of persuasion and coercion. Imagine that the capitalist will eternally have a confident smile on his face and you can be sure that he will. These are not verifiable observations, but the sigh of a battered wage-slave who begs to be persuaded that his miser)' for the future is unfounded.

Is it really true that workers will put up with this system forever? One percent of the population in Britain alone own a quarter of the marketable wealth and five percent own more than half. In several other countries the statistics of class inequality are more stark; in all modern nations do such figures of class division apply. Will the overwhelming majority of the world’s population forever consent to live and die for the profits of a small minority? We know that the workers of the world form the overwhelming majority of the population, and we know that it is the workers’ intelligence and hard work which keeps society going (from the building site to the operating theatre), and we know also that it is the nature of human intelligence to explore ever more and expand ever further.

Indeed, the propaganda of those who have a vested interest in workers’ political ignorance has been remarkably successful so far, but against what has it had to contend? The organised voice of principled socialists has been so small that the fraudulence of religion and the misinformation of education and the trickery of the tabloids have had an easy run. This will not be so when the considerable numbers of those discontented under capitalism move from self-defeating schemes to improve the system to a scientific movement to remove the system. The history of organised socialists is even shorter. It is a mistake to deduce from such limited experience that workers will never apply their intelligence to removing the cause of their problems. It is not a case of having “faith” in humans, but of learning from history that humans are characterised by a tremendous ability to adapt their social environment to fit in with their need to survive in greater contentment.

Seeing through the lies

Will the capitalists be able to stem the flood of working-class socialist consciousness by simply putting an article in the Sun or running a scare story about socialists on the TV? It is precisely when the socialist movement is growing that such tactics will be counter-productive. The more lies an intelligent human is told the more he or she will rebel against the liar. It is now, at a time of majority political ignorance, that such tactics may work, not when workers are getting up off their knees. Take the example of the Christian religion in Britain: for years it dominated the minds of peasants and workers because the victims were ignorant and therefore scared to criticise; once criticism began the efforts of the religionists to defend their mumbo-jumbo by accusing materialists of gross depravity and claiming that they had never stood for nonsensical beliefs (which they always had) led them into even greater discredit.

As for the claim that the capitalists might use violence to stop the establishment of socialism, well they might, but what chance would they stand against a conscious movement of well-organised workers? Killing its opponents is hardly likely to win converts to the cause of capitalism; on the contrary, it will create ever more dedicated enemies. What evidence is there that the armed forces and police, who are only wage slaves in uniform, would allow themselves to be used to murder their brothers, sisters, parents and friends whose sole crime would be to stand for a world in which nobody would be so degraded as to have to become a state killer or a cop? The suggestion that the simple alternative to such class war would be for the capitalists (many of whom may come to realise that they as humans have much to gain from a society of humane equality) to publish a few articles in the tabloids and thereby wipe out the political intelligence of the entire movement which has threatened them is an incredible scenario. Sure, those who are deluded can be made more deluded by the media of delusion-making; but can a whole movement which is so strong that the media needs to attack it be forced to regress intellectually as a result of the cunning efforts of the Murdoch press?

Evidence of history

The cynical loss of faith in humanity is not a matter upon which socialists can offer consolation to our dispirited correspondent. Our expectations are not based upon faith. Faith is a substitute for reason. The question of historical change is not a matter of optimistic or pessimistic moods, but of examining real material social relations. Are the relations of contemporary society in line with how we could live, given the development of the forces of production to a level where we could produce enough goods and services of a high quality for everyone— indeed, for several times the cuncnt population of the world? Clearly, these are outmoded social relationships. Wage labour and capital are obsolete obstacles to the realisation of decent and materially satisfied lives for all of us.

The evidence of history, as Marx so ably explained, is that when there is a conflict between the forces of production and the relations of production the latter fall in line with the former. Production for profit is out of date, it is harder and harder for defenders of this system to think of policies to make it sound attractive or even workable. That is why all political parties supporting capitalism now speak more than ever with one voice: the unconfident monotone of the ideologically bankrupt. Production solely for use is long overdue. Socialists do not believe that the pattern of historical development will be different in our own age from the long past when those with an interest in change have ultimately opted for change.

Of course, the socialist transformation of society is different from all previous ones. It must be the work of the majority acting for themselves by themselves. There has been no shortage of diversions along the way. Pitiful has been the wasted energies of workers who, instead of uniting uncompromisingly for the socialist alternative, have gone for reformist or statist or other futile options. But such is history: we socialists are made of stronger stuff than those who would give up on the entire human species just because the greatest change in human history' has taken a few decades being talked about but not yet enacted.

And how much longer must we wait? Our correspondent, thousand-year diary in hand, seeks to know the date of victory. He is already an expert on the dates of failure. No doubt he had counterparts in South Africa who told black workers that it would take decades—nay, centuries—before they would win the vote. And surely the bar-room dissident in Bucharest, Moscow or Prague who suggested that with force of numbers the workers could deny power to their state-capitalist dictators was regarded width more than the occasional cynical sneer. How easy it is to plot a prosperous future for this misery-causing system; to be sure, nobody will mind and nobody will care if such banal hopelessness proves prophetic. There are no prizes for predicting that the future under capitalism will be lousy. But the prize to be gained by transcending the rut of cynical inaction is the world and its abundant wealth which will be ours—the property of all—as soon and as long as the majority cease to be in mental bondage to the illusion of the impossibility of their own freedom.

Steve Coleman