Election Special: Where We Stand (1964)

From the October 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wages and Prices

Our capitalist world is topsy-turvy and generally unpredictable. Bold indeed is the man who dares to say what things will be like in twelve months, or even twelve days time. Nevertheless, there are some things on which we can speak with some certainty. We do not know which party is going to win this election, but whichever it is will have the question of wages and prices as one of its major preoccupations.

Wages are always a headache to employers and governments, and we do not have to look far to find the reason. If the manufacturer is to sell the goods which his workers have produced, he has to offer them at competitive prices, as high as the market will bear, but not so high as to leave the market to cheaper competitors. If wages increase too much his profit suffers, so he needs something to act as a brake on wage claims. Before the war the brake was there in the form of large unemployment, but this generally has been missing in the post-war years. As the purpose of capitalism is profit making, our rulers find themselves in a quandary.

Should they fight the unions over every wage claim? But that would mean bringing factories and transport to a standstill, at enormous cost in lost production and profits. So they have to try other methods, such as “wage freezing” under Labour and “wage restraint” under the Tories, both meaning the same thing. They will try to persuade the workers to forgo, or at least reduce, wage increases "in the national interest.” All sorts of arguments will be used in support of this line, all boiling down to the same theme. The less we have, the better off we shall be, even at a time when generally prices are rising.

But didn’t they all say how much they deplored the rise in prices and promise to put a stop to it? Yet the Labour Government went out on a tide of rising prices, for all its controls. Who will forget the garish Tory posters up and down the country, telling us that they would succeed where their opponents had failed? We can see how little their promises were really worth. In fact, just like the Labour Party before them, they have given the nod to price rises by currency inflation, in attempts to offset wage increases.

As far as workers are concerned, the struggle for improved wages and conditions must be pressed at all times, regardless of price movements and government propaganda. The alternative under capitalism is a worsening of conditions—there is no such thing as “stability.” But the only real solution is to replace capitalism with Socialism, which will mean the ending of both wages and prices and instead the production of goods solely for the use and enjoyment of all.

Housing

Our politicians are constantly talking about it. The newspapers print loads of articles on it. The telly shows us heartrending pictures of it. All as though it is something new, something that will soon be over and dealt with, given the right political party—Tory, Labour, Liberal.

They call it the housing problem.

But a hundred years ago and more they were talking about a housing problem. Far from being new, it's as old as capitalism, as old as the working class itself.

Let us go back a hundred years—to 1864. Hardly believable though it is, many of the houses that had already been standing for twenty or thirty years then are still with us now. Everybody has heard of Coronation Street—after whose coronation was it named? Not after George VI in 1937, nor after George V in 1910, nor even after Edward VII in 1901, but after Queen Victoria’s in 1837. And in Salford they have only just got round to pulling down Waterloo Place, built in 1815 and named after the victory over Napoleon!

Today in this country there are more than one million houses—many probably worse than those in Coronation Streets—reckoned to be unfit for human habitation. So low are the standards, anyway, that one million is certainly an underestimate.

In Glasgow, tens of thousands of people live three to a room.

In Liverpool there are 88,000 houses beyond any prospect of repair; in Birmingham 50,000 families are on the waiting list; whilst in Oldham it is estimated that no less than one house in four is unfit to live in. And in London, perhaps the worst area of all, many families of the homeless are reduced to walking the streets.

Our capitalist politicians all tell us, of course, how upset they are over the problem. The same as they were telling us years and years ago. Now the Labour Party reproaches the Tories for building only 300,000 houses a year: the Tories answer back and remind the Labourites that they have nothing to shout about because when they were in office they only once managed to get above 200,000!

But this does not stop them telling us what fine things they’re going to do if they are elected. What truly wonderful promises they have given us over the years! And still they have not even got to the stage of building enough houses to keep pace with those rotting away into slums, let alone starting to fulfil those high ideals they treat us to every time an election comes around.

Yes, there’s a housing problem alright, the same one that has been with us for the past hundred and fifty years. And the capitalist political parties are just as far from getting rid of it today as they were then. Promises, we shall get promises galore. If words were bricks we’d all be living in palaces by now!

But they’re not, and we shall still be hearing about the housing problems—the overcrowding, the million slums, the long waiting lists, the wandering homeless—when the next General Election comes round!

Education

In this election all other parties are making grandiose promises to improve education.

But anybody who wants the best education, for themselves or for their children, can get it now. There is, of course, a snag. It will cost about £370 a year, which is the price of sending a pupil to a typical public school.

The public schools give youngsters the sort of education which develops their abilities to the full. Only a minority, however, can afford to go to them. What about the rest?

For them, a state school where, as both the Newsome and the Robbins Reports have shown, the educational environment is unfavourable.

Why are there so many promises to improve education?

The Times Educational Supplement, commenting on the Newsom Report, said:

The need is not only for more skilled workers to fit existing jobs, but also for a generally better and intelligently adaptable labour force to meet new demands.

What these “new demands” are was indicated by the same periodical in their discussion of the Robbins Report:

The committee was impressed by the fact that plans for expansion (in Europe and America) often far surpassed present British plans.

In other words, education is being improved and expanded to provide workers with different skills from those of their fathers, so that British capitalism can compete more successfully with its foreign rivals. On this the Labour, Conservative, Liberal and other capitalist parties are agreed.

Workers are misled into believing that a better education will basically improve their condition. In fact, it will leave them relying upon their wage for their living, even if their job is a “technical” one for which they need a university degree.

The restrictions and insecurity of working class life will continue to afflict them. Just like their fathers before, they will have been educated for a job.

Education under Socialism will be free of the shackles which capitalism’s profit motive imposes upon it. We shall all learn about the world we live in, our abilities will be developed to the full. Then we shall be able to offer the best to, and receive the best from, life.

Technology

A great driving force in capitalism is competition. This often leads to the growing productivity that is a feature of the system. The fiercer competition becomes, the quicker is the pace of technological innovation and the more acute the need for scientific research. This is precisely the position today.

The growing competition which British firms are meeting in the world market has highlighted the need for various reforms if they are to remain competitive. These reforms are needed primarily in education and scientific research. The era of automation demands a higher level of skill and education among the population than at present. Thus education and technical training must be improved and expanded.

But this is not enough. To be efficient and remain competitive a firm must invest in research. At present, however, few firms can afford the large outlay that this demands. In other spheres overlapping of research takes place. Here the capitalists’ need is for some national organization to finance and co-ordinate research. This is why the “scientific revolution” has become an election issue. This is why both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party are emphasising the need for more universities, more science students, for better technical education in secondary schools, more research and other similar reforms. These reforms will come whichever party wins, for modernization is the order of the day.

But what will this modernization mean for the majority of workers? Technical progress under capitalism always presents a threat to some jobs. The measure of a firm’s efficiency at such times is the number of workers it can lay off. For the wages bill is a cost and costs must be reduced to a minimum if a firm is to remain competitive.

Many of the inventions which will result from this scientific revolution will be labour-saving, that is, job-killing. This means an increase, even temporarily, in redundancy. Old skills will be useless. The faster pace of machines will mean an increase in shift-working. It should not be thought that this threat is confined to factory workers. Computers and automation represent a threat to the jobs of thousands of managers, bank clerks and other white collar workers. All in all the total result will be the same old insecurity for all sections of the working class. This is the experience of American workers. It represents our future during the much-vaunted scientific revolution.

A trade union struggle against this threat will not be enough. Such a struggle, though necessary, can only be a rearguard action as everything favours capitalism. Something more than trade union struggle is required, namely, a political struggle to end capitalism. The Socialist Party offers a constructive alternative in Socialism. Only then will the fruits of scientific progress be used to satisfy the needs of humanity instead of, as at present, the greed of capital.