On the principle that only the rare and unexpected happening is “news”, and as prices have been going up for about twenty years it is at first sight surprising that newspapers still give so much space to reports of higher prices. Maybe the editors and reporters constantly hear politicians promises that there will be no more rising prices, and each time a promise is broken they are so shocked that they feel impelled to tell their readers about it. But this, if true, would only show how unobservant newspaper men are, because broken promises are even more common and less noteworthy than jumps of prices. But the latter are common enough.
The International Labour Office publishes each month in the International Labour Review a record of price movements in about ninety places in different part of the world and the.overwhelming majority of them show prices moving upwards.
In this country the average retail price level is nearly a fifth higher than it was six years ago and in the group covering rent, rates, house repairs, etc. the increase is over 40 per cent.
Among the recent price increases have been the jump in the prices of meat and potatoes, both attributed to temporary shortages. Meat prices were reported to have gone up by 10% to 20%, while potatoes now cost more than twice as much as a year ago.
Naturally the indignation reached Westminster and came into the fight at by-elections. At West Lothian the Communist candidate Mr. G. McLennan spoke about it.
If the boss cuts your wages by several shillings a week you would immediately reach for your jackets, but the Tories have brought about a real cut in wages through price increases. (D. Worker 7.6.62.)
According to the Daily Worker reporter who listened to this speech, “Gordon McLennan had a good reception when he criticised the steep raise in the prices of potatoes, other vegetables, meat and butter No-one can object to the logic of the statement that when prices go up, and until the workers can win a compensating wage increase, their wage will buy less, just as it would if the wage itself were reduced.
But the same logic seems to have escaped the Daily Worker in its editorial comment on the 30 per cent increase of meat prices in Russia and 25 per cent increase for butter. Instead of sympathising with the Russian workers and denouncing the Russian Government for copying the Tories the editor (2 June. 1962) found himself sympathising with the Russian Government for having to make the “difficult” decision to put up prices rather than spend less on armaments. The editor called it a “temporary" sacrifice on the part of the town workers and described it as being “a redistribution of income among the working people, by which those in the countryside will benefit while those in the towns will temporarily make sacrifices".
This would sound reasonable if Russia were a country in which equality of income prevailed with everyone on approximately the same standard; but that is not a fact, only the promise made and broken by Lenin, and conveniently forgotten by his successors.
On the contrary, Russia is a country of extreme inequality and, unless the situation has changed in recent years, among the comparatively rich are collective farmers and traders, who stand to benefit from the higher prices.
In any event the increase of meat anJ butter prices in the towns means a very different thing for the Moscow men and women street sweepers on a wage of about £12 a month, and the Russian “space and atomic scientists . . . bringing home wage packets of more than £20,000 a year” (John Mossman, D. Mail Moscow corespondent, 5 June, 1962.)
If you want to know whether there is any hope that prices, after climbing up for 20 years will climb down again, the answer is that it could happen, but for the workers it will not produce any benefit. Prices were falling for about 15 years from 1920 to 1935 and the workers were just as badly off as now and curiously the economists and businessmen and politicians were then hoping and praying that world prices would rise again particularly for foodstuffs, so that the world’s farming populations would be able to buy more British factory products and make industry busy again.
The world is still full of economists and politicians who say that a price system is a necessity as well as a convenience of twentieth century society, but who in practice are always complaining about the way the price system works; demanding that it be interfered with, either by government action to hold prices down or by government subsidies to increase the price paid to the manufacturer or farmer.
Unlike the non-socialist parties, all of which have their particular proposals for interfering with the way the price system works, we as socialists have no proposals to make except that the price system should be abolished along with capitalism for which it is a necessity.
The theory behind movements of prices is that if left to find their own level in the market a shortage of supply will send up the price and encourage the production of additional supplies to make good the shortage. Conversely an over-supply by depressing the price, will drive some suppliers out of business and make the price a profitable one again.
Socialism, with production carried on solely for use, without sale or price or wage or profit, will have no need for mechanism to adjust production to consumption in a reasonable fashion through the market. Meeting need will be the measure to which the volume of production will be directed, not with the idea of constantly adjusting supplies up and down to market demands (as happens under capitalism) but aiming always to have a sufficient margin of surplus and capacity to meet changes of consumption.
Edgar Hardcastle
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