Universities Challenged (2011)

From the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Government White Paper on Higher Education (HE) entitled ‘Students At the Heart of the System’ has created controversy since its publication in the summer. As the new academic year begins, we take a look at its likely impact.

The White Paper is to form the basis for a new Higher Education Bill in 2012, after the current consultation period ends in a few weeks time. In truth it is the latest in a rather long line of papers and reports setting out a future for HE in the UK since the 1960s. In particular, it follows in the footsteps of the Robbins Report of 1963, the Dearing Report in 1997 and then – most recently of all – the Browne Report of 2010 commissioned by the Labour Government.

During this time, HE in the UK has seen developments that have been similar to those affecting university sectors in many other parts of the world. In particular, there has been a massive expansion in student numbers  – impelled by, among other factors, the conversion of former polytechnics and colleges of HE into what are sometimes termed the ‘post-1992 universities’ and the increased government funding that then allowed them to rapidly expand. There has also been a significant expansion in vocational HE beyond traditional areas of engagement like teaching, law and the ministry. This has been reflected in the growth of what some have considered to be more esoteric subjects like sports management and herbal medicine, and particularly in the development of Business Schools, which only grew to be of any significance in the UK in the 1980s but which are now commonly one of the biggest discipline areas in universities of all kinds.

Unsustainable

The previous Labour government famously set a target of 50 percent of school leavers going on to study at university and while this has never been reached, decent enough progress was nevertheless made, prompting some to complain of a ‘dumbing down’ of entry standards. In 1955 less than 5 per cent of school leavers went on to study in HE, a proportion that had risen to 12 per cent by 1980, to 19 per cent in 1990 and then to over 35 per cent for most of the years in the last decade.

This growth, like many things in the market economy, has happened for a reason. As capitalism has developed and its operations have become more sophisticated, the working class of wage and salary earners who operationally run capitalism from top to bottom have needed to have a different and often more developed set of skills than was required, say, a hundred years ago. While the economy of course still needs production workers, miners and other manual and physically skilled staff, capitalism has developed a vast administrative apparatus around buying and selling, the service economy and the state sector which is needed to ensure that this all runs smoothly.

Figures from the Office of National Statistics have shown that the percentage of workers in the UK employed in manufacturing and construction fell from around a third in 1983 to just under 20 per cent in recent years, confirming a long-term trend. At the same time there has been a significant growth in the service sector, in particular. This has necessitated government encouragement for more young people to seek out the type of education and skills supposedly provided by a university education. The problem has been that in doing this, the government has created a huge amount of additional expenditure to be funded out of general taxation, and as we have seen on a range of fronts in recent times, state expenditure tends to have its limits – especially as the burden of taxation has ultimately to fall on the profit-generating sectors of the economy (i.e. the private sector).

As more and more students have entered HE the cost of their tuition as well as contributions towards their living costs have become too burdensome for the state. This has over the last two decades led to periodic attacks on what many students of earlier generations took for granted. These attacks have included the removal of the right for students unemployed during the holiday periods to claim benefits for this, through to the full-scale assaults on the student grant system and the highly controversial introduction of tuition fees (with students loans to pay for them) mooted under John Major’s Tory government but carried out by Labour under Blair.

In this respect, the Government White Paper is but the latest in a long line of initiatives with a common thread and a common purpose.

Main features

There are several aspects to what is proposed currently and little if any of it is genuinely new. Indeed, what is most striking about it is how it usually develops existing approaches or applies other approaches already implemented by government in other fields. The main features of the proposals in this respect are these.

• Increase debt and reduce (or disguise) the burden on taxation. This is a continuation of what occurred under Blair and Brown when tuition fees and student loans were introduced.  The approach this time is more radical (if radical be the right word) as tuition fees will rise hugely from £3,375 to between £6,000 and 9,000 a year, depending on institution. This is to make up for the fact that in England at least (Wales and Scotland will stick to variations on their existing systems for now), the funding that government gives to support student tuition is to be removed almost completely. This will happen to all subjects except those already in receipt of higher levels of subsidy from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) because of their elevated cost levels e.g. science subjects, medicine and engineering. To achieve this change, a modification of the student loan system is to be introduced whereby those earning over £21,000 after graduation will begin to pay back their loan through the taxation system with interest charged at RPI plus 3 per cent. In many respects, this is becoming ever more like a disguised graduate tax, with the advantage for the government that those leaving the country after they graduate will still have to pay it back. Like most taxes – whether disguised or not – it  will eventually mean that wages will have to rise, other things being equal, so that people can pay it, in this way cutting into employer’s profits in an indirect and more subtle way.  Furthermore, the attitude of government to the huge (and about to become even bigger) student loan book is also revealing, as they estimate that the amount borrowers will be liable to repay will have risen to £70 billion by 2016-7. Few seemed to have noticed that the government has just asked Rothschilds to develop a plan for ‘how to monetise the loan book’ including ‘selling [the loans] outright to financial investors, or selling loans to one or more regulated companies set up to manage the loans’ (White Paper, p.24). Clearly the recent financial crisis and its causes has been forgotten already.
• Outsource/privatise where possible, introducing ‘competition’. Until recently, the only private-sector university in Britain was the University of Buckingham, though now BPP University College of Professional Studies (owned by the Apollo private equity group) has acquired taught degree awarding powers and others are lining themselves up to be granted university status. This is in part an attempt to provide competition so that existing universities don’t all charge fees at the higher end of the permitted range (as most are proposing to do at present) while being a philosophical nod in the direction of ‘free markets’. The main problem here is that fears about the quality of academic provision declining in these circumstances have some substance. The proliferation of so-called ‘degree mills’ in countries like the US and Canada has long been an issue (where students can effectively buy a degree) and the largest private university in the world by most counts, Phoenix University, Arizona, has seen its applications plummet in the last two years because it has been subject to legal action by no less than 10 Attorney-Generals in different states over its ‘deceptive practices’. Coincidentally, and perhaps unfortunately, it is also owned by the Apollo private equity group.
• Increase links between the universities and the private sector, binding the two ever closer together. Again, this has been happening for years and it is standard practice for universities to check when they are validating new courses that they meet the needs of relevant employers. However, the government is concerned by the recent decline in ‘sandwich years’ for students with business and in internships, and wants to see these encouraged. It also wants to see the links between research and private business developed and commercial opportunities exploited to the full. Interestingly, postgraduate courses already receive little by way of HEFCE funding and have had higher fees to make up the difference as it has long been assumed that much postgraduate study is sponsored by employers (something the government would like to see extended to undergraduate study too, wherever possible).
• Target state support rather than universalise it. Student grants to help with living costs will be targeted at the poorest families only and the old education maintenance allowance for 16-19 year olds studying before they get to university is to be abolished on the grounds of cost. Similarly, HEFCE funding is only likely to remain for those high-cost courses that students couldn’t otherwise pay for themselves out of their loans, and which employers would be reluctant to sponsor as this wouldn’t be appropriate or they would be too expensive, such as medicine, veterinary science, etc.
• Set up a complex regulatory framework to oversee it all. The Browne Report had recommended uniting HEFCE, the Quality Assurance Agency for HE (the university academic quality watchdog) and two other related bodies into the one organisation dealing with the oversight of HE. This will not happen now, and the complexity of the proposals, the loans, the targeting and the new entrants to university status means that the regulators will clearly have their work cut out.

The devil is in the detail

The details of much of this could change and probably will, but the general trajectory is clear: a business-led HE sector; an expansion of vocational courses; students in debt for most of their lives, wedded to wage-slavery just to pay off their loans (and that before any consideration of mortgages and likely personal debt). As there are over 120 universities currently in the UK it is likely that some will go bust (and the government has explicitly stated that it will not ‘underwrite’ the finances of the existing HE providers), especially given the likely falling away of full-time student numbers consequent on higher fees. And the drive for ‘efficiency’ in the HE sector will be pushed ever harder, with the government setting up the Diamond Review into how universities can be run more efficiently (if this doesn’t entail recommending that universities ‘outsource’ much of their central services like Finance and Human Resources it will be a surprise).

The most obvious and predictable effect of these changes is likely to be a move away from full-time HE by 18-21 year olds, reversing the decades-old trend for more school-leavers to go to university. The precise extent of this is likely to depend on the buoyancy or otherwise of the job market, with those who can often choosing employment and relevant training over university and a lifetime of debt. It is also not difficult to predict a rise in the coming years of students studying part-time and flexibly alongside their employment, in many cases linking one to the other through programmes of negotiated work-based learning, for instance (another one of the growth areas in HE in recent times) where people receive academic reward for their personal learning in and through the workplace.

A sane society

It is clear that many potential students have already been put off university for life. But of course, as the old saying goes, it doesn’t have to be like this. Education should be available for those needing it and people shouldn’t expect to have to commit themselves to a lifetime of drudgery to pay for it either. Indeed, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with studying a subject like history or art simply because you are interested in it, but this has become more difficult in recent years and will now be more difficult still as pressures from business and through the job market dictate that students have to study what will make them employable.

Nevertheless, one of the more interesting developments in the last ten years or so has been the whittling away of some of the old snobbishness and elitism that has existed in universities across the country. An unintended consequence of the rise in vocationally-oriented courses has been that some have discovered that what is often called the ‘knowledge capital’ of society exists mainly outside the Ivory Towers. To many professors this is a frightening concept that challenges their very legitimacy as ‘the experts’. But experiential learning – that is learning by doing, typically in the workplace – has started to come into its own, along with reflection on how people work and learn together this way. The deliberate division between learning passively in a seminar room or lecture theatre and learning through doing has sometimes been necessary but when reinforced systematically as has been the case in HE until recently it became a strangely lopsided way for an education system to operate – the ‘University of Life’ is indeed a valuable and important place and universities were in denial about it for quite some time. Stripped of the functionalism required by employers and the market, this could be a useful educational development.

We can certainly add to this that a co-operative society of the future would seek to ensure that a university education would be genuinely meaningful – not just for the participants but for society as a whole, being finally freed from the narrow constraints of the market and money, loans and liabilities. Situated within a society of common ownership and with common purposes for the dissemination of wealth and happiness it could indeed, finally, be part of a rounded University of Life.

Dave Perrin

". . . we put the axe to the root of crime." (2011)

From the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note: 

This excerpt from Engels' February 1845 speech was originally attached to the bottom of Ivan's article, 'The riots: not the way to help ourselves', in the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard.

‘Present-day society, which breeds hostility between the individual man and everyone else, thus produces a social war of all against all which inevitably in individual cases, notably among uneducated people, assumes a brutal, barbarously violent form — that of crime. In order to protect itself against crime, against direct acts of violence, society requires an extensive, complicated system of administrative and judicial bodies which requires an immense labour force. In communist society this would likewise be vastly simplified, and precisely because — strange though it may sound — precisely because the administrative body in this society would have to manage not merely individual aspects of social life, but the whole of social life, in all its various activities, in all its aspects. We eliminate the contradiction between the individual man and all others, we counterpose social peace to social war, we put the axe to the root of crime — and thereby render the greatest, by far the greatest, part of the present activity of the administrative and judicial bodies superfluous. Even now crimes of passion are becoming fewer and fewer in comparison with calculated crimes, crimes of interest — crimes against persons are declining, crimes against property are on the increase. Advancing civilisation moderates violent outbreaks of passion even in our present-day society, which is on a war footing; how much more will this be the case in communist, peaceful society! Crimes against property cease of their own accord where everyone receives what he needs to satisfy his natural and his spiritual urges, where social gradations and distinctions cease to exist. justice concerned with criminal cases ceases of itself, that dealing with civil cases, which are almost all rooted in the property relations or at least in such relations as arise from the situation of social war, likewise disappears; conflicts can then be only rare exceptions, whereas they are now the natural result of general hostility, and will be easily settled by arbitrators. The activities of the administrative bodies at present have likewise their source in the continual social war — the police and the entire administration do nothing else but see to it that the war remains concealed and indirect and does not erupt into open violence, into crimes. But if it is infinitely easier to maintain peace than to keep war within certain limits, so it is vastly more easy to administer a communist community rather than a competitive one. And if civilisation has already taught men to seek their interest in the maintenance of public order, public security, and the public interest, and therefore to make the police, administration and justice as superfluous as possible, how much more will this be the case in a society in which community of interests has become the basic principle, bind in which the public interest is no longer distinct from that of each individual! What already exists now, in spite of the social organisation, how much more will it exist when it is no longer hindered, but supported by the social institutions! We may thus also in this regard count on a considerable increase in the labour force through that part of the labour force of which society is deprived by the present social condition.’ 

Friedrich Engels, speech in Elberfeld, February 1845 

Holy Smoke (2011)

The Halo Halo! column from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1933 the Nazis attempted to obliterate what they saw as anti-German thinking with a book burning campaign. Fortunately ideas are not so easily killed off and book burning as a form of censorship was abandoned. Or so we thought. Then earlier this year along came the wacky Florida pastor, Terry Jones, who decided that the thoughts of a non-existent god in the Koran were a threat to the thoughts of his own non-existent god – and rectified the situation by burning the Koran.

Now another Christian preacher in Wales, the Rev Geraint ap Iorwerth, has been at it too. In a novel twist though he’s not been burning the Koran, or even the works of Marx and Engels. He’s been cutting out and burning the bits of the bible that he doesn’t like.

It’s true there is some nasty stuff in the King James bible. Particularly those bits justifying mass murder and slavery, and advising on the treatment of women. The Rev ap Iorwerth’s boss, however, the Bishop of Bangor, who presumably believes that God knows what he is talking about, is not impressed with the good Reverend‘s actions. “It’s not given to us to pick and choose. Sometimes the most challenging parts are those we need to wrestle with most”.

Well, good luck with that Bishop. We don’t have room for many suggestions, but how about getting stuck into the following. God’s view on genocide for example. Despite telling us “Thou shalt not kill” his instructions on how to deal with the Amalakites was “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” (1 Samuel. 15. 3).

His instructions on how to deal with ‘prophets and dreamers’ of other gods. “Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.” (Deuteronomy 13. 8-9).

God’s advice on purchasing slaves. “Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever”. (Leviticus 25.44-46).

And what to do if a woman is not a virgin when she marries. “Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.” (Deuteronomy 22.21).

So much for a loving God. The Rev ap Iorwerth must have had one hell of a bonfire.

Nick White

Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

$8 Million Gold-Plated Rolls Redefines Excess. Nothing says class warfare quite like an armored, gold-plated car that costs $8 million:

[Link.]

Psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner says the rich really are different, and not in a good way: Their life experience makes them less empathetic, less altruistic, and generally more selfish “We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, social behavior in every way, and some work on compassion and it’s the same story,” he said. “Lower class people just show more empathy, more prosocial behavior, more compassion, no matter how you look at it.

[Dead Link.]

On Saturday night, as rioters in Tottenham threw fireworks and bottles at police officers, one man shouted, “This is our battle!” When asked what he meant, the man, Paul Rook, 47, explained that he felt the rioters were taking on “the ruling class.”

[Link.]

“Violence in the streets, aimed at the wealthy. That’s what I worry about.” That was what an unidentified billionaire told Robert Frank of the Wall Street Journal a while back. Rich people are scared of global unrest, Frank reported, citing a survey by Insite Security and IBOPE Zogby International of people with liquid assets of $1 million or more (translation: folks who have or can get their hands on $1 million in cash fairly easily) that says 94 percent of the wealthy are concerned about “global unrest” around the world. He noted: Of course, Insite has an interest in getting the paranoid rich to beef up their security. Still, the numbers are backed up by other trends seen throughout the world of wealth today: the rich keeping a lower profile, hiring $230,000 guard dogs, and arming their yachts, planes and cars with military-style security features:

[Dead Link.]

Starving parents are marrying off girls for food as famine devastates Africa. Nearly half of kids in Kenya and Somalia had not eaten at all for a day this week, research reveals today and desperate mums and dads are selling girls as young as nine for just £100. Under-18s cannot legally marry in Kenya and child brides face terrible abuse, but World Vision UK’s Philippa Lei said: “Girls can traditionally be sold for a bride price, cattle or food. But now girls are being sold off much earlier.

[Link.]

“We are all human. God created us from one dirt. Why can we not marry each other, or love each other?” Halima Mohammedi, an Afghan teenager whose love for another teenager, Rafi Mohammed, set off a riot by flouting their village’s tradition of arranged marriages. “What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them.” Kher Mohammed, her father:

[Link.]

SPGB Meetings (2011)

Party News from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

South Africa—chrome and cricket (1975)

From the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is the perennial cry of Socialists that as long as the capitalist system remains intact it will, by and large, dictate the course of events and politicians find they cannot implement promises and policies; and find themselves doing things different from or even utterly opposed to all they are supposed to stand for. The Labour Party, in common with most leftist types such as those represented by The Guardian, has for years been screaming about the iniquity of apartheid in South Africa. And quite right too. It is an abominable system.

So at times they try and do something that will make a big noise and at the same time do nothing to upset the real objective of all governments — to make the system work as efficiently and profitably as possible for the capitalist owners of the country. A convenient opportunity along these lines occurred to the last Wilson government in 1970. Wilson and his henchmen joined with the Hainites and The Guardian to strike a mortal blow at apartheid. They actually succeeded in stopping a cricket tour — and by all the sound and fury generated, one could have been forgiven for thinking that this blow had brought down apartheid, the racialist government of Vorster, and perhaps the whole evil capitalist system into the bargain. Of course apartheid has gone on just the same and as long as governments, Labour, Tory or east of the Curtain, were prepared to carry on trading and investing, Vorster and Co. would survive the loss of a cricket tour.

However, among the promises which Labour’s election manifesto poured out, was one about the iniquity of investing in South Africa. Fresh investments that is: there was no question of throwing away the vast sums already invested, or of ceasing to trade with Britain’s third biggest customer. That would worry Vorster and his apartheidists, but it would worry British capitalism even more, so such real gestures were out. The name of the game is to kid the leftists (such of them, that is, who believe their own claptrap). Not to hurt British capitalism. As though that lot isn’t in deep enough trouble already!

And so again, the needs of running the system fly in the face of all the leftists are supposed to stand for. I cannot do better than quote from a long and almost literate letter from a Labour MP called Kinnock (Guardian, July 31):

“Last October all Labour candidates fought in support of a manifesto which said that a Labour government would take urgent steps to reduce drastically British economic involvement in South Africa . . . End all financial links . . . Bring about the withdrawal of all or part of existing investment and establish machinery to prevent any further investment . . . Now, ten months later, the government permits the British Steel Corporation to invest heavily in a chrome plant in S. Africa”.

Well said, Kinnock! You have in fact exposed the Labour government as a bunch of hypocrites who would not tell a black man the time if it conflicted with the interests of the British capitalist class. Only one trouble: these people are your kith and Kinnock. You can’t accuse the government without accusing yourself at the same time. You are a Labour MP (masquerading as a socialist like all your swindling clan), and you keep that government in power for the privilege of riding to the cushy jobs at Westminster on the bandwagon. So what does that make you?

In the leading article on the same subject in The Guardian (July 29) the humbugs of Grays Inn Road give their own views: “Chrome: the only decision.” Unlike Kinnock, who denounces his own Fuehrer, the great leftist mouthpiece tells us that Wilson and his gang were quite right to rat on the manifesto. “The Labour Left may not like the idea of giving aid and comfort to South Africa”: it is “making an unnecessary fuss.” Among the reasons for this remark from the paper which made such a screaming fuss over a blasted game of cricket is:— “British Steel is among the companies with better reputations as employers of black labour. It claims it has gone to some lengths to make sure that the 184 black workers it will employ will be paid a reasonable wage, above the poverty datum line.”

Now isn’t that just ducky? It’s all right to break your word and give aid and comfort to the apartheidists if you “claim” to . . . do what? To pay the blacks good screws for working in the chrome mines? Equal to those earned by those who write hypocritical leading articles? Not quite: “Above the poverty datum line.” An extra handful of mealy, from the mealy mouths of our do-gooder Press.

But that’s only half of it. The editorial goes on to say: “It is hard to believe that what the British Steel Corporation does with its blocked funds is going to make any difference to apartheid.” So the same creeps who fooled the idiot wicket-sitters that they were striking a blow at apartheid, who endorsed the Labour manifesto without demur, now have the impudence to tell us that investment in chrome is neither here nor there as far as Vorster is concerned. They may be right. Maybe Vorster doesn’t give a monkey’s whatever Wilson and his capitalist lackeys do or do not do. But for The Guardian to say so beggars belief.

The main reason for Wilson’s decision is that South African chrome is cheaper than the rest. The editorial keeps to capitalist basics on this. If the chrome is dearer in South Africa it is right to honour your principles and buy elsewhere. But if it is cheaper, why, then you are right to say: Let the blacks go hang, we are buying in the cheapest market. There is a delightful bit at the end. In the case of another precious commodity, uranium, Tony Benn (the sanctimonious twit who wants to shed his name — but not the wealth that derives from it) wrote a letter to The Guardian in Sept. ’73 (when he was not yet in power and talk was therefore cheap) “pledging himself to end Britain’s contract to buy uranium from the Republic”. But when his lot came to power, they found: what? Why, that it would cost more to buy elsewhere. So they have not honoured this rat’s pledge to end the contract at all. Money talks louder than principles with Labour leaders — and with Guardian leader-writers.

Last, in the New Statesman, that other rag which stands for Labourite capitalism masquerading as socialism, around the same date there was a leading article on the same subject. But they objected to the betrayal of the blacks. How nice of them. The blacks will be very pleased to see them denounce the Labour Party at the next election. (A likely story.) But they actually say that something or other that Wedgbenn has done has “fastened the chains of slavery still tighter” round the victims of racialism in South Africa. I wonder what the sages of Great Turnstile will say about Benn at the next election? Workers beware? He is another twister who will sell the workers down the river (white ones as well as black)? Another likely story. One can only conclude by borrowing a pun from Marx. Es lebe der wurst! Es lebe der Hanwurst ! Long live the sausage! Long live the clown!

L E Weidberg

Artists in Capitalism (1975)

From the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you have ever roamed the fields and lanes of the countryside and perhaps marvelled at the sight of the sun catching the trees, or the side of the hills, and finally set up your easel and started to paint, you will know something of the pleasure and joy of the amateur artist. This is work done for the satisfaction it brings, not for money. The growth and popularity of painting as a leisure-time activity has been accompanied and stimulated by a continuous flood of books and materials. There is a wide range of books and magazines dealing with numerous aspects of art, artists, art history, and techniques. All kinds of new and often gimmicky materials come on to the market; the motive for their production is profit, not for the purpose of helping artists produce works of art.

What is art under capitalism? Whatever people think it is, or ought to be, the overwhelming fact is that capitalism reduces it like everything else to the status of a commodity — something to be bought and sold. Consider the recent boom in sales of works of art. Capitalists visit plush galleries and auction rooms to invest in them in order to increase their wealth, or if they feel it is a safeguard against depreciation of their money. Or they may, as some do, buy them as a show of status (or even sometimes because they like them). But whatever the reason, it is only the capitalist class who can afford original works of art.

Capitalism on one hand saturates us with art in a multiplicity of ways. It comes in the form of cheap prints of old and modern masters to be bought in any number of different kinds of shops. It comes in masses of mass-produced ornamental commodities, and from the television screen like the very popular Sir Kenneth Clark series, programmes of individual artists, different schools of art, and a host of others. Yet on the other hand capitalism denies the vast majority any participation in creative activity.

Slaves of the Market

How does capitalism accomplish this denial of art?

Why is it that productive activity under capitalism is devoid of pleasure and art? It is because the worker is divorced from the means of production and his product. Hence there is no relation between the productive process and the needs of the producers as human beings. The workers are not engaged in producing useful things for the purpose of satisfying human needs. Profit is the goal of production; all effort must be harnessed to this end. This is the negation of human fulfilment and of art, an impossibility for their development.

The means of production and the product are alienated from the worker. They exist for him outside of his control, and they are only brought together with the needs of expanding capital, and so long as the worker continues to produce not only the value of his own wages but a surplus value over and above his wages. For the capitalist, his interest in the means of production and the product exists only for him as owner of private property, to use as capital and the increase of capital, not as a user of them for the purpose of creating useful things. Art can only result when it is a necessary function in the lives of people in society, when it plays a part in the production of the things society requires. That is, when man has control of his own production related to his needs. Capitalism requires the reverse.

What about the professional artists, those men and women who produce the work exhibited to be sold from the various galleries? What is their position in capitalism? The artist of today is subject to changing fashion, he must constantly be ahead of trends. He must produce for exhibitions (the market), try to anticipate the attitudes of the critics, and like a film star must constantly stay in the lime-light. He must be something of a celebrity, to be interviewed and photographed, otherwise he may be hurled back from success to join thousands of others who hope that one day they may achieve success.

Some artists have been moved to express some of the tragedies of capitalism, whether it be the loneliness and wretchedness of old age, the horrors of war, the mentally sick, or whatever else, and have left a record of this social system. An artist of this kind cannot help but express his experience and what he sees round him. If what he expresses is disturbing or ugly, then it is because his social conditions are disturbing and ugly; those are the conditions of capitalism. Then there are those artists who work in one of the branches of advertising or commercial art. They design the material which constantly bombards us from the television screen, the magazines, hoardings, and of course the stream of brochures and coupons that are stuffed through the letter box.

The world of advertising is the area of the art movement known as “pop art,” so called because it draws for its subject-matter on the techniques of commercial art, advertizing, comic strips, photographs of film stars, soup-tins and packaging showing brand names. Covering all the paraphernalia of what has come to be known as “pop culture” (all of which has become increasingly part of the environment of capitalism). Pop art is a very obvious example of ideas and their expression being the outcome of material conditions, in particular of the capitalist mode of production.

One of the ideas nurtured by capitalism which has spilled over as part of the ideology of pop art is that of the throw-away society, where commodities are made to be quickly cast aside and replaced with new ones. How clearly the profit motive shines through! This idea was echoed by Andy Warhol the pop artist in his famous remark “everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” It could be that there is a lesson to be learnt from pop art insofar as its treatment of the superficial and the banal highlights the degree of triviality which the condition of human life under capitalism has attained.

Part of Life

It has long been seen by some that art is divorced from everyday life, and attempts have been made to try and bring art to the common people (the working class). All these attempts are doomed to failure, as they only deal in effects, not with the cause. For art to play a part in the life of man, in his productive activity, a complete reconstruction of society is needed. Anything short of that inevitably must fail. Art cannot stand above the affairs of society; it must for its healthy development be part and parcel of the everyday activity of society.

Is there no hope then for art, for men and women to take part in creative activity as part of the work necessary to society, and the full development of its people (a completeness of development because, in the act of producing, the whole human being is produced, by bringing into play the intellectual and creative faculties?) So long as the cure is sought by trying to reform capitalism, sadly the answer must be no. When the means of life are owned in common the basis for truly human life will have been established. The practice of art will become part of life to take its place in enriching human experience and achievement.

P. Young

So They Say: Faint Headed (1975)

The So They Say Column from the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Faint Headed

The hot weather of the past few weeks has been having “subtle psychological and physical effects” on us all claimed the Sunday Times of 10th August. Most particularly they note that heat relaxes the nervous system and warms the blood — causing drowsiness. Perhaps this factor should be taken into account when considering the jaded statements put forward recently by Mrs. Thatcher and masquerading as ‘policy’ for the Conservative Party.

Conservatives detested unemployment as much as anyone else . . . We believe in the creation of wealth, in flourishing business and commerce because that means prosperity for all and good prospects in the years ahead.

(Guardian, 31st July ’75)

It may have escaped her attention that to become unemployed, a worker loses a job — or, as in the case of school-leavers, fails to find a job at all. It is currently estimated that the latter already number over 55,000 and that this figure will increase considerably after the holiday period.

The “flourishing business and commerce” organisations Mrs. Thatcher speaks of, simply do not have room to entertain what she may or may not say she “detests.”

London Brick has sold much of the huge stock it was left with when building ground to a halt last year, and because it fears the boom will be short-lived, it is reluctant to replace the workers it laid off last year and re-open the works it shut.

(Sunday Times, 10th August ’75)

The Conservative leader appears oblivious to a basic law of the social system which her party wishes to continue — Under Conservatives or Labour; No production without profit.

Ghastly Problem

She continued her weary way by extolling the virtues of the “entrepreneur” who “in creating wealth for himself, creates incomparably more wealth for other people” although we are not clear if “other people” refers to other members of the board — they could hardly be unemployed workers. Concluding she remarked with ambiguity

The greatest conservative Prime Minister of this century, Winston Churchill once had as his slogan ‘Set the people free,’ it is time we revived it.

(Guardian, 31st July ’75)

One who fits into this category of “entrepreneur” is Sir Jules Thorn, and he is just about to set his people free, although not in the way that Mrs. Thatcher would approve. His company, Thorn Colour Tubes is considering the imminent closure of their Skelmersdale plant. 1,500 workers will become unemployed as a result. The reason behind this is that the bottom has dropped out of the colour television market, coupled with the fact that cheaper Japanese products are mopping up a good deal of what remains. The voice of the virile and generous capitalist who seems to haunt Mrs. Thatcher’s dreams was clearly put by Mr. Harold Mourgue, the Finance Director at Thorns:

Closure was inevitable unless firm action was taken with Government help to end a brutal price cutting war in the British colour tube market . . . with the Japanese there is a ghastly problem.

(Guardian, 13th August 1975)

But isn’t competition for markets and “brutal price- cutting wars” what it’s all about? Well, yes it is — Thorn do not want the government to take the obvious step of introducing tariff restrictions against their Japanese competitors. Their concern on this point is heartfelt: “Thorn is against a tariff war, however.

This might eventually harm its own export markets.” 

They estimate that if their plant remains open it would run at well under half its capacity next year on the demands of the British market, so it would be reasonable to assume that when they enter the export market, no doubt with the gentlemanly policy of fair shares for all, they may be surprised to find that their own conception of what is fair, will inevitably be viewed by others as “brutal” competition.

Doubletalk

An accomplished variation of the three-card trick was performed by Mr. Paul Foot — the International Socialist — in The Times of 14th August. After quoting the words of a dispirited shop steward at Norton Villiers Triumph where the Labour government has failed to provide further financial backing, Foot draws the following conclusion

These are dreadful times for socialists who put their trust in Labour Governments.

This is coy stuff of course, one of the very last places a Socialist would put his trust is in the Labour Party. But there is method in the madness. He attacks the government in its attempts to run capitalism at a time, as he puts it, of “unprecedented capitalist collapse” for the following reasons:

Labours elected representatives become isolated from their power base, impotent to resist the demands of the system which they try to manage. They mouth the mumbo jumbo of capitalism.

All unsparing language of course, but we fail to recollect when this “power base” i.e. the Labour Party supporters, expected or desired other than the continuance of capitalism. In this discrediting the leaders specifically, the illusion could be created that they alone are deliberately perverting the desires of their supporters. He accuses the “helpless puppet” (the Labour Government) of recently being forced by economic conditions to “tear up two manifestos” but fails to note that each one of those manifestos was filled from cover to cover with “the mumbo jumbo of capitalism.”

Having pointed out that such an unlikely vehicle as the Labour Party has failed to introduce Socialism, he uses some loose logic to reject the whole parliamentary method

The parliamentary road to socialism has turned into another blind alley. The revolutionary road is beginning to open up.

The “revolutionary” road to Worker’s Control is what he refers to. However we recall that Foot’s paper, the Socialist Worker had little doubt on 16th February 1974 when advising before the oncoming election that “The working class has to respond with a massive anti-Tory vote. And that means a Labour vote . . .” exactly which “helpless puppet” they favoured.

High Life and Times

The chairman of the Labour Party’s Scottish Council had some savage truths to bring home to Glasgow’s working class recently. Times appeared to be exceptionally high for action.

It is high time we did something to woo the working class mothers away from the bingo halls, clubs and casinos . . . It is high time we were doing something about getting the men away from betting shops . . . I think it is high time the educational processes were directed towards encouraging them into better ways of using their leisure time and to carry on their wider education.

We will not dwell on the degree of reserve which these proposals might reasonably expect to encounter from an average man within a Glasgow betting shop, but draw attention to the useful life which Mrs. Roberta Jacqueline Trieze Kimberly leads. No bingo halls for her!

She makes three parachute jumps a day, five days a week: Takes daily tennis and shooting lessons, and also flying lessons seven days a week. It runs into money of course — somewhere in the region of £17,000 a year, but she still has time and money for others, her dog for instance, which costs about £500 a year to keep in food and toys. The figures have emerged because Mrs. Kimberly is to divorce, and has been obliged to file a claim for expenses ‘in order to continue living in her present style’. She is claiming £96,000 a year for this purpose.

The costs include . . . £20,000 a year for entertainment; £850 a month for clothing: and £290 a month for flowers . . . A claim of medical and dental fees covers over £1,000 a month.

(Daily Mail, 25th July ’75)

Her husband, Mr. James Kimberly, is heir to the Kleenex empire, and should any reader feel overcome by the sad news of their break-up, reach for the tissues — both of them will be delighted.

Alan D'Arcy

How Many Shares Have You? (1975)

From the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

How often have Socialist speakers heard the absurd defence of Capitalism that, because anyone can now own “shares” in companies, everyone is a capitalist. The argument goes on to claim that therefore the working class are no longer the deprived majority of society.

W. S. Gilbert would no doubt have retorted “if everyone is somebody, then no-one’s anybody”. And of course, even if it were true that most people own a handful of shares it would not alter one iota of our fundamental criticism of capitalism. Our criticism is that capitalism is incapable of solving the major social ills that it constantly creates. All it does produce are profits for the capitalist class and problems for the working class.

But the claim is false. It is by the possession of shares that the capitalist class in advanced western capitalism (a different arrangement prevails under Soviet capitalism — no less anti-social) claims most of its ownership of the means of production and of the commodities that are produced. Shares are either owned by individuals or by companies, unit trusts (the so-called “institutional shareholders”) and the like.

As far as individual shareholdings are concerned, there is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of the population don’t own any. In his book Unequal Shares A. B. Atkinson says that 5 per cent of the population own over 96 per cent of the privately held shares and 1 per cent own 81 per cent. That does not leave much for the rest of us. Clearly the majority of workers have never seen a share certificate, let alone owned one.

With institutional shareholdings the position is more complicated. A good deal of the shares are owned by companies whose shares are themselves privately owned. “But what about pension funds and the like?” the defender of Capitalism plaintively bleats. “They are held for the benefit of the workers, for retirement money, injury pay etc. In effect, these are owned by the workers.” Rubbish.

According to the Royal Commission on Income and Wealth (Report No. 1, 1975) only 12.2 per cent of the total number of shares quoted are owned by Pension Funds. These funds are established by large firms like ICI or Fords for sound economic capitalist reasons. And they are set up to benefit the companies (i.e. the shareholders).

Indeed it is a well established principle of British Company Law that all moneys must be used by the company for the benefit of the shareholders only. When the old News Chronicle was closing down in the early 1960s the directors wanted to pay some of the money realised from the sale of the company’s assets to the work force as compensation for their loss of jobs etc. The high court stopped them. Money given to workers was not being used in the best interest of the company it said. The only way the money could be lawfully distributed was to the shareholders.

So in order for these “pension funds” to be lawful, the company must show that they are in the best interests of the company’s owners. And they are. There are many reasons why it is of direct benefit to the company to have pension funds and it would take a whole issue of the Socialist Standard to explain them fully. But some of the more obvious ones are these: —

1. It is another bait for the work force, just as luncheon vouchers or sports facilities etc. are. Workers know too well the miserable pensions the state will pay them when they retire and “non-contributory pension schemes” are one of the things the employer can offer to supplement a low wage.
2. Once employed the worker is encouraged to feel that he has a “stake” in the company and that if he leaves he will lose his right to a pension or it may be reduced.
3. Above all, the money in pension funds belongs to the company. Admittedly it cannot actually be spent by the capitalist class, but then neither can machines. When profits are “ploughed back” into a business these are not lost to the capitalist class. On the contrary, they represent a greater accumulated share of capital than was represented by the company’s assets before. A pension fund is as much a part of the capital of a company as is the factory or the stock-in-trade, and this will be reflected in the value of the shares on the stock exchange.

Capitalism doesn’t give workers shares, it only gives them crumbs. Socialism will mean free access, not unequal shares.

Ronnie Warrington