King Coal makes a comeback (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

State capitalism, just as the Socialist Party predicted all
 those years ago, has been a pathetic failure as far as workers’
 interests are concerned. Now private capitalism has 
returned to the mining industry

At midnight on 30 December British Coal’s 15 remaining deep mines in England passed into the ownership of RJB Mining, a privately-owned company with shares traded on the Stock Exchange.

The government had prepared the way for this change-back to private ownership by crushing the NUM, closing down all unprofitable pits (and not a few not-profitable-enough ones too), and watering down the safety regulations in this notoriously dangerous industry. Now RJB Mining hopes to be able to make sufficient profits by exploiting the remaining 8,000 or so miners to be able to pay a dividend to its shareholders and pay off with interest those who loaned them money to buy what was left of the industry.

Considering that for years the nationalisation of the coal mines had been top of the list of the miners’ union's demands the actual moment of denationalisation passed off without any fuss. There were no strikes, no sit-ins and no demonstrations.

When the mines were nationalised — forty-eight years previously, on 1 January' 1947 — it was a different story. Then the miners did celebrate the ejection of the private owners, a particularly vicious and vindictive lot who had been responsible for grinding them into the dust after the failure of the 1926 General Strike. A notice was stuck up outside every pit in Britain proclaiming “This colliery' is now managed by the National Coal Board on behalf of the people”.

British capitalist class

This wasn’t true of course, as the miners were soon to find out. The Coal Board’s job was to manage the pits on behalf of the British capitalist class as a whole. At first this meant producing as much cheap coal as possible for the rest of British industry. Later this meant producing cheap coal for profit in competition with other fuels like oil. At no time did it mean production to meet people’s needs. Not one lump of coal was ever produced to be given to a pensioner to stop them dying of hypothermia. As many thousands did throughout the period of nationalisation.

Working conditions did improve somewhat, but wages remained a bone of contention. How could they not, since the more the miners obtained in wages the less of what they produced remained as profit? A profit that was needed to pay compensation with interest to the former owners as well as to invest in new machinery and equipment.

The whole period of nationalisation was marked by conflicts over wages — from the illegal strike at Grimethorpe in 1947, through countless local disputes, to the successful national strikes of 1972 and 1974, to the heroic but doomed year-long national strike which ended in failure ten years ago this month.

State capitalism

Ironically, it was the Coal Board and not the NUM that first recognised that nationalisation had nothing to do with socialism. In 1968 Lord Robens, a minister in the Labour government that had nationalised the mines who was appointed NCB chairmanin 1961, told a NUM weekend school:

"I do not believe that in 1945 those of us who were nationalising these industries would have done it with so much enthusiasm if someone had told us then that they were going to turn into state capitalism ” (Times, 1 April 1968).

Someone did tell them We did. This is what we wrote in our 1945 pamphlet Nationalisation or Socialism ?:

“Only when industry and transport, etc, are owned and democratically controlled by the whole community can service to the whole community be a reality. Nationalisation or State Capitalism is not the solution of the problem. ”

It took the leaders of the miners' union ten years longer than Robens to realise the truth. It was not until his retirement in 1976 that Dai Francis, the Secretary of the South Wales Area of the NUM. was prepared to admit that "there was no difference between the old . . . coal owners and the National Coal Board. They were now turning it into state capitalism ” (quoted in H. Francis and D. Smith The Fed). Former NUM General Secretary Will Paynter hit the nail even more squarely on the head when, surveying three decades of nationalisation, he noted that “progress from private enterprise capitalism to state capitalism does not change the fundamental status of workers in society ” (The Miner, November-December 1977).

No doubt this explains the lack of reaction by the remaining miners to the return of the coal industry' to private ownership. They had learned by bitter experience that state capitalism was no better, if no worse, than private capitalism, so that a change from the one to the other wasn't worth getting worked up over.

Profitable basis

Socialism does indeed involve the management of industries "on behalf of the people”. But this was not what nationalisation did do, nor, as we pointed out in 1945, what it was able to do. Nationalisation represented the purchase by the state of an industry from its previous owners and the appointment by the state of a board to run it on a profitable basis with the workers remaining excluded and exploited wage and salary' earners.

Privatisation, on the other hand, represents the resale of an industry to private capitalists for them to run for their own private profit instead of it being run by a state board for the benefit of the capitalist class as a whole. As far as the workers are concerned, it makes no fundamental difference.

For industries to be run as a public service in the interest of all, they must first all be taken into common ownership at the same time, and without any compensation being paid to the previous owners, and they must be made subject to the democratic control both of those working in them and of the community in general. Such genuine common ownership is something quite different from nationalisation, or state ownership.

Production for profit will come to an end and there will be no exploitation, no property incomes either in the form of dividends or of interest on compensation or other government bonds, and no wages system. Instead, people will be able to cooperate to produce what is needed on the basis of the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs".

This is what socialism is and it hasn’t yet been tried. It is high time that it was.

Adam Buick

The Power and The Priests (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hardly a day goes by now without the Catholic Church in Ireland having to face some scandal or other. However, it is not only the wayward behaviour of some of its priests that has resulted in Irish people abandoning the church in droves and ignoring its reactionary teachings

One of the many fictions that prevails among Protestants in Ireland is that the Catholic Church always stood in the forefront of the struggle for independence from Britain. The reverse of this is true but acknowledging that would not fit in with the traditional Unionist slogan that “Home Rule is Rome Rule” — even though the slogan itself contains more than a germ of truth.

The historian Beresford Ellis rightly points out that the Roman Church played a key role in preparing Ireland for the Anglo-Norman invasion and it was Pope Adrian IV who, in 1154, promulgated a Bull authorising Henry II of England to invade Ireland. After the Reformation the Catholic Church in Ireland saw its role as that of facilitating the counter-Reformation and it was identified with conspiracies, mostly emanating from Spain, aimed at bringing about the defeat of the English Reformation. These activities were not aimed at the independence of Ireland; on the contrary, Ireland was now seen as an essential springboard for restoring Rome’s authority throughout the entire Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

The Roman Church was hostile to every succeeding effort by Irish nationalists to cast off “the English yoke”, especially during those periods when the national struggle was married to the struggle of the poor for the amelioration of their poverty. It opposed the Fenian movement and its opposition became hysterical when the Fenians established relations with the International Working Men’s Association. Indeed, Archbishop Moriarity opinioned that hell was not hot enough or eternity long enough to punish the Fenians.

Earlier, in the period 1845-8, when the potato crop was blighted and thousands of people were dying of hunger and its diseases, while the export of sheep, cattle and pigs, as well as most of the cereal crop continued unabated, the bishops reminded the starving of the “moral” duty to pay their rents. In 1848, a leading Catholic layman, Dr John O'Connell, the son of Daniel O’Connell, the famous Catholic Emancipator, said “I thank God I live among people who would rather die of hunger than defraud their landlords of rent.” The bishops were eloquently silent.

Boycott weapon

The events of 1879-82 are significant in that they paved the way for resolution of the land question in Ireland and the establishment of the material conditions that were to create modern Ireland. It is a classical example of how a subject class can oppose with peaceful means its oppressors and, if sufficient unity is achieved, win victory. The Land League forged the boycott weapon, not only giving a new word to the English language but also setting in train a social revolution that was to finally banish the worst features of landlordism from Ireland.

With notable exceptions, the Church was unhelpful. An earlier version of the Land League, the Tenant Right League had achieved a considerable degree of unity between Protestant small farmers in the north and their more impoverished Catholic counterparts in the south. It was potentially an exciting development but, when Lord John Russell, the British Prime Minister, responded to the Pope's attempts to establish new bishoprics in Britain with an anti-papist Ecclesiastical Titles Act, the Catholic clergy and some Catholic leaders of the Tenant Right League sacrificed the unity that underpinned the struggle of the Irish poor in order to promote the politics of Rome.

A few years later the bishops brought bitter division into the Home Rule movement with the outrageous vilification of Charles Stewart Parnell after it was revealed that the Protestant leader of the Irish National Party was involved in a relationship with a married woman. As effectively as it had split the Tenant Right League, it now shattered the unity of the National Party and inadvertently set the stage for the entrance of Sinn Fein.

In 1912-13, the desperately impoverished transport and general workers of Dublin were locked out by their employers for joining a trade union. Revealingly, Sinn Fein was promoting the political interests of the vicious coterie of Catholic capitalists who were savaging the poor and the Church did nothing to hide its bitter opposition to the workers. As a gesture of solidarity, English trade unionists (whom Sinn Fein opposed) offered to take some of the workers' children and ensure that they were provided for while the lock-out lasted. The Church went wild and priestly louts led attacks on the departing parade of hapless children. The excuse was that these unfortunates whose little bodies were suffering from the bitter rapacity of Irish capitalism might have their souls endangered by the Protestant and “pagan” English.

In 1916, the residue of the Irish Volunteers — the great majority of whom had gone to fight the Germans — combined with the Irish Citizen Army to form the IRA which staged the so-called “Easter Rising”. The ICA had been formed by James Connolly to protect locked-out workers from the thuggery of the paramilitary Royal Irish Constabulary three years earlier. Now, incorporated into the IRA, it was hijacked by Connolly into taking part in an insurrection to forward the Sinn Fein policy of legislative independence to promote the interests of Irish capitalists.

After the defeat of the insurrection the Catholic newspaper, the Irish Catholic, editorialised on the immorality of the Rising and opinioned that it was an act of treachery and that there was no reason to lament that its perpetrators (the leaders of the Rising had been executed) had met the fate that since the dawn of history had been reserved for traitors.

The subsequent establishment of the Irish Free State politically canonised the executed leaders and nowhere were they more lauded than by the hypocritical Catholic hierarchy.

Holy orders

It would take volumes to detail the way the Catholic Church wormed and bullied its way into the affairs of the newly-established Irish Free State. One example will suffice.

In February 1948, the Fianna Fail government of Eamon De Valera lost its Dail majority for the first time since it achieved power in 1932. The new government was a coalition, and a young medical doctor, a left-wing republican, Dr Noël Browne, became an enthusiastic Minister of Health.

Poverty and acute privation grew during the war despite Southern Ireland’s neutrality. In the nine years since 1939, taxable profits had risen by some 200 percent but real wages had actually fallen below their pre-war level. The war years had been preceded by the heightened poverty resulting from the British embargo on Irish imports in the early 1930s which had followed the refusal of the De Valera government to pay the annuities which Britain had imposed when the Irish Free State was established. Life was hard for the urban workers and desperate for small farmers and this proved a fecund breeding ground for tuberculosis, a poverty disease which was then sweeping Europe.

I had met Browne and can testify to the enthusiasm of his efforts to counter the medical consequences of poverty in southern Ireland. After much trimming by his cabinet colleagues, the Minister introduced a Bill in the Dail that provided for free healthcare for expectant mothers and children up to the age of five.

The Irish Catholic bishops went wild. These puny efforts to give some medical help to mothers and babies was “rank socialism” and could not be tolerated by “Holy Mother", the Church. The well- cosseted bishops, living like feudal princes, did not simply pass on their opinion that the state help for the poor was “socialism” (which the church universally had always vigorously opposed), they wrote to the Taoiseach, John A. Costello, an earlier fascist sympathiser, instructing him that the government would introduce the Mother and Child Bill "under pain of sin”. The Bill was abandoned but an amended scheme was introduced, despite clerical protest, by the succeeding Fianna Fail government.

Since then, a new reality, brought about by the needs of a burgeoning capitalism, has inhibited the more audacious arrogance of the Catholic hierarchy. For years, as the Republic first become a trading partner with Britain in the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement of the mid-Sixties, and later as a minor player in big-league EC capitalism, the Church remained a formidable agent of reaction. But television, with its insensate curiosity and its international programme fare, has had a part to play in breaking down the old walls of secrecy and false piety behind which many eminent churchmen traditionally sheltered. Again, the narrow world of gombeen capitalism has been overtaken by the brash presence of the multinationals and their religiously indifferent personnel. Reality was, and is, changing fast in Ireland, sometimes pushed by European law, and the Church is being exposed as a mere part of the “hallowed sepulchre" of its teachings.

Crumbling monolith

In Northern Ireland, especially in places like Belfast, the Catholic clergy have been happy to accept the bribes of the British government to act as a counterinsurgency agent. In an effort to combat the massive unemployment that, especially in more impoverished urban areas, plays into the hands of the paramilitaries, the Northern Ireland Office introduced Action for Community Employment (ACE) which provides temporary employment in non-profit-making enterprises. Shrewdly, the government used the Catholic clergy as a conduit for distribution of the ACE largesse in the Catholic community, thus, indirectly giving priests the power to assist those whom they favoured. Doubtless, Tory largess has won the Church a few friends. Undoubtedly, too, it has made them many enemies in the more embattled regions of the north.

We do not regard priests or bishops as being especially obedient to their own precepts of “morality”. Accordingly, unlike the media in general, we see no undue significance in their being increasingly exposed as liars, cheats and child molesters. Probably, in the past, many young men who aspired to the priesthood were able to suppress normal sexuality, often at the cost of personality deviance or alcoholism. Today there are few recruits to the priesthood; young Catholics have become disaffected as reality overwhelms theology. Regrettably for their victims, it appears that increasing numbers of the sad fraternity who seek opportunities for the expression of their sick proclivities are taking advantage of the scarcity and swelling the numbers of deviant priests.

Just as the advent of electricity reduced the sightings of leprechauns, so the heightened understanding of natural phenomena and its concomitant disregard of unevidenced beliefs — both by-products of modern capitalism — has destroyed the mystery and secrecy of the holy men who presume to “sin” outside the parameters of their own precepts.

The gullible will turn to the weeping statues. More will show their contempt for a crumbling monolith that, for the love of its god, heaped misery on humanity. 

Richard Montague

Crime and Politicians (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

What to do about crime is a question the capitalist parties 
are forever debating without ever coming near a solution.
They refuse to accept that capitalism causes crime

The Tories, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are all preoccupied with the problem of crime because crime is one of the principal concerns of the public. Even the smaller political organisations have been forced, by public demand, to address the question.

That demand is based on the proximity of crime — theft, burglary, mugging, armed robbery, car stealing, violence and murder, to name only the illegal variety — to the citizen. Crime is not now only something most members of the public read about; it is a frightening reality for most people, either as a personal experience or through association with a friend or neighbour. Nor is the illusion of security traditionally reinforced any more by the presence of the ubiquitous policeman a comfort. Despite massive increases in their numbers and vast sums spent on prevention and detection technology, the police response to run-of-the-mill crime is such that thousands of offences go unreported.

Like unemployment and the problems of the NHS, crime has become a potential election winner — or loser. As such, it occupies the attention of government and opposition while, in the background, specialists, like the police, criminologists, sociologists and other experts wrestle with the problem. Like poverty, homelessness, unemployment, health care and other acute problems of our present social order, no politicians, experts or academics would dare to suggest that they could ever solve the problem of crime; indeed, they all claim that crime results from our “human nature” and, therefore, all they can do is create mechanisms for containing the fruits of our human frailty.

Gutter media

The problems for the politicians and the experts is that they face a public opinion largely fed by a gutter, headline-seeking press which, like the criminals, benefits from crime — without taking any of the chances the criminals have to take. Recently Channel 4 had a programme on crime and its prevention in its series, Power and the People. Of the 300 people used in an experimental programme aimed at testing the citizen’s response to intelligent persuasion — as opposed to the brutal rhetoric of the gutter media — most of the suggestions for dealing with the problem of crime, offered by the majority of these voters, made the crimes they were discussing seem innocent and benign.

The floggers were there, the throw-away-the-key brigade, string-’em-up was well represented, cut-off-their-fingers seemed a cross-cultural response. Listening to the “solutions” offered by these opponents of crime, it occurred to this writer that, if the 300 had been a convocation of criminals, the innocent would be in grave peril.

Happily, and most instructively, after they had heard from the experts, police officers, criminologists, jailers and others, about the application of some of their “solutions” there was a swing of 12 to 15 percent towards more civilised views. The point is, though, that these people were a random sample of the electorate; the people with votes; the people who want something done.

It places the humane politician in a dilemma. If he, or she, has done their homework on the question, they know that all the knee-jerk “solutions” have been tried and found wanting. The death penalty didn’t stop sheep-stealing or reduce murders. An obvious, and an economically-effective, means of ending the intractable problem of “joyriding” would be to give the offenders the means, through employment or otherwise, of having a car, but that sort of solution would not win votes. Indeed, recently we saw the reaction of the gutter scribes of some of the tabloids and the so-called “quality” press to attempts by penologists to create some self-esteem in youthful criminals by exposing them to something that their station in life doesn’t allow them to contemplate — a holiday in East Africa.

But elections, for the politicians, are about winning. That means that political parties cannot be seen to be soft or innovative about crime — and many of the opinion-formers think that looking for its cause is being “soft”. In the Channel 4 programme referred to earlier, Labour leader Tony Blair was subjected to questioning about his attitudes to crime by people whose questions showed that they suspected him of being “soft” on the subject. He squirmed but his solutions, though more intelligently expressed, were essentially the same as those of Sir Ivan Lawrence, a typical Tory twit who had been questioned earlier. Blair may not have believed the nonsense he mouthed but capitalist politics are not about changing people’s ideas but with identifying with those ideas in order to get votes.

Of course it is easy to understand public reaction to crime — especially those most despicable of crimes carried out against the poor, the weak, against children or on the elderly. Actually, such crimes, though they get the big headlines, are relatively rare and represent a very small percentage of all crimes. The overwhelming volume of crime, some 94 percent, is against property and the offences at the top of the crime league, in monetary terms, are rarely associated with members of the working class. The really big money is in fraud, embezzlement, insider trading, insurance racketeering, tax evasion and the like.

Mammoth swindle

In these matters detection and convictions are low because there are grey areas between capitalism’s legal thieving and the illegal variety. An example of this appeared in the Observer on 15 May of last year and concerned a mammoth swindle carried out by insurance companies cashing in on Tory pressure on workers to join, or transfer to, private pension schemes. The Director of the Serious Fraud Office, responding to enquires about the insurance super-crooks said: “We have neither the resources nor the powers to investigate the whole area of personal pension transfers”. The same cannot be said about the resources and powers enjoyed by the army of snoopers the state employs to detect social security fraud.

Crime is a filthy business. According to Ken Smith, in his book Free is Cheaper, it employs about one million people, guarding, protecting, policing, transporting, arresting, convicting and incarcerating. The police, especially, are judged by the number of convictions they achieve and over the last few years there have been a succession of cases that have shown that police officers of all ranks are as ready to use thuggery, lies and deceit to achieve their purpose as are the criminals. In the upper echelons of crime, opportunity often plays a part in determining who is the criminal and who the victim but, at the low end of the crime scale are the really sad eases, the mugged, the terrified, the deprived and the injured. It is difficult for these victims to appreciate that the petty criminal is the product of the same system that made them his, or her, victim.

Free Access

Socialists do not need an answer to the problems of crime. We are organised to gain majority support for the abolition of capitalism, and the achievement of a society in which all human beings would have free and equal access to the goods and services they need. It requires little mental effort to appreciate that, in a society where everybody could avail of their needs the overwhelming burden of crime would disappear.

Space precludes a deeper examination of that other small volume of crime that does not appear to be directly connected with property but which usually results from the values and conditioning of people in a property society.

Capitalism without crime is just not possible. Most of the more repressive and brutal means advanced for its containment are not only angry, despairing and degrading ways of striking back at the criminal, they are utterly futile. While we have competition, profit, aggression, conflict and, of course, poverty, despair and alienation, we will have crime and while we have capitalism we will have all of these things.

Richard Montague

Letter: Meeting each others needs (1995)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Meeting each others needs

Dear Editors,

As I run a LETSystem in Canterbury I was amused to read Adam Buick’s article "LETS Abolish Money" in your December issue.

Despite Mr Buick’s evident dismissal of the very concept of LETSystem I was amused rather than perturbed, because even with the research that he had evidently undertaken it is clear that Mr Buick simply fails to understand either their ethos or their future potential. This is not at all unusual. LETSystems are so simple that a great many people have difficulty in understanding them.

Mr Buick dismisses LETSystems for being small, or rather for the twin reasons that they are small and that the range of goods and services that they offer is limited. That they are is undoubtedly true, but there is a very good reason for this. LETSystems are a new phenomenon. most individual ones are very young, even the oldest in Britain is no more than four or five years old. I don’t suppose that even Mr Buick was a towering and influential socialist intellectual at the age of five.

Having grown to a membership of 200 in less than twelve months the Canterbury LETSystem is beginning to attract the interest of "high street" businesses whose own involvement is likely to increase the system’s appeal, even to ordinary people (i.e. other than middle-class hobbyists and New Age dreamers).

As the system grows in size it will become more rather than  less able to pay people to run it and still be far more efficient than the conventional, money economy which requires approximately 10 percent of its workforce to be employed in "financial services".

There may well be an optimum size for any given LETSystem, the bigger they are the more services they are likely to offer and the stronger and more credible they are likely to be perceived, the smaller they are the more intimate they are and the quicker will a person's spending come back to them as earnings. But we do not need to arbitrarily impose limitations upon a system, its natural dynamics will enable each system to find its own optimum size, which may number in the hundreds, the thousands or even the millions.

Beyond these matters, which essentially pertain to the practical aspects of establishing and running a system. Mr Buick's most striking failure is his inability to understand the long-term potential that LETSystems have for converting the present-day market-dominated society into an egalitarian one where everyone’s needs can be met, their dignity maintained and where the environment can be protected. Trading with a LETSystem is not barter, Indeed, use of cash is actually closer to barter than is use of a LETSystem. The Pound Sterling is derived from an entity of intrinsic value — a pound of Sterling silver. So when you use cash you are exchanging one item of intrinsic value (or rather a paper representation of it) for another, which is precisely what bartering involves. By contrast, the credits that one earns or spends in a LETSystem are purely abstract measurements. That they are given a nominal value, usually in relation to the Pound Sterling, is solely to enable everyone to share a common valuation.

This purely abstract nature of their units of currency underlies one of the great advantages of LETSystems. Whereas if you are exchanging cash for goods or goods for cash you have to have one or the other with LETSystems you don’t. You can spend LETS units before you earn them, even before you are able to earn them. Given the strongly inculcated resistance that most people have towards going "into the red" new members of the Canterbury LETSystem are positively encouraged to spend, spend, spend!, for by doing so they are putting credits into other people's accounts which will further encourage them to spend and so increase everyone's opportunities to earn.

Within a LETSystem the sum total of everyone’s accounts at any one moment will always be 0. So for some people to be in credit it is necessary for others to be "in commitment", this differs from debt within the conventional economy because it is not seen as being irresponsible, it is necessary if trading is to take place.

It is this feature of LETSystems that will enable the market economy to continue to meet people's needs (or rather be the means by which people will continue to meet each other's needs) whilst causing it to cease to be a means by which some people can attain power over others.

Mr Buick’s statement that "A hoard of cash is no more useful than a large LETS credit balance" is an extraordinary one to come from anyone other than a contrite capitalist apologist, if some people have a large hoard of conventional money (in whatever form), given that there is a finite amount of it, other people must have little or none, and given that one must have it even to meet one's basic material needs, clearly those who have the stuff in large quantities have enormous power over those who haven’t. By contrast, given that LETS credits are purely abstract measurements with no limit and given that one can spend freely even with a “negative" balance no one with a large LETS credit has any power over someone else who might, at a given moment, be in commitment.

If, as Mr Buick proposes, the elimination of want is to be achieved by the elimination of the market system whereby people exchange goods and services to meet their needs, how will these needs be met? By a central economic authority with complete power over everyone's lives? Mr Adam Buick?

We can retain the benefits of a market economy whilst removing its current absolute dominance and less benign aspects, we can enable individuals and their local communities to secure greater power and responsibility for their own lives, we can remove the inefficiencies and environmental destructiveness of an excessively competitive society and so achieve the type of society that is the dream of many, whether socialists or not. by the very simple idea that is the LETSystem.

After a myriad of Utopian dreams have come to nought down the centuries we now have the means of creating a just and egalitarian society.

Anne Belsey, 

Faversham, Kent

Reply:

Your letter illustrates perfectly the point we were trying to make: the exaggerated claims of the benefits and possibilities of LETS made by some of its enthusiasts. You see LETS as a means towards creating "an egalitarian society where everyone’s needs can be met. their dignity maintained and where the environment can be protected". We are all for creating such a society, but say that LETS schemes will only ever play a marginal economic role.

For LETS to replace "the present-day market-dominated society” they would have to spread out of their present field of personal services, repairs, home cooking and gardening into, and the list is not exhaustive, farming, the generation of electricity. the provision of water, gas. sewage and telephone services. the manufacture of the cookers, fridges, heaters, cars, bikes. TVs. radios, computers (that LETS members merely repair not produce), not to mention the manufacture of the machines and equipment to make these consumer goods and the maintenance of a transport system to move them. They've got to take on and beat economically the public utility companies, the supermarkets, the multinationals and Big Business generally. We are sorry to have to break the bad news to you, but LETS schemes are not going to do this. They are never going to spread outside their present restricted field and even there they are never going to predominate.

This is because LETS are essentially an arrangement for conducting multi-sided barter amongst self-employed individuals. This means they are going to be restricted to the sort of things an individual can do. It also means that they have little interest for those in full-time employment with an adequate wage or salary. (For such people it is always going to be more convenient to pay someone to repair their TV out of the money they have earned than to commit themselves to a couple of hours extra work to exchange for this.) In addition, as the article stated, above a certain size LETS schemes become more cumbersome than resorting to ordinary money. This is not a defence of conventional money, merely recognition of a fact of life within "the present- day market-dominated economy”.

Our answer to the market economy is not to reform it as you want but to abolish the market. No, this does not mean some central economic authority deciding what people need. We envisage a self-regulating system of production for use. in accordance with the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs", with individuals deciding what their needs are. On the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of all land and industry, individuals would set the productive system in operation by what they actually took from the common stores to satisfy their needs under conditions of free access; this would then be transmitted to the stores' suppliers and from them to their suppliers and so on down the line and throughout the whole network of productive units.

Finally, don't get us wrong. We are not saying people shouldn’t join LETS schemes, nor that they are a complete waste of time within the present economic system. What we are saying is that they are merely one mechanism for surviving within the present system, on a par with housing associations, coops, building societies. Christmas Clubs, etc. People can join them if they want, but they should be under no illusion that they contain the germ for the transformation of society.

For this to happen, the large-scale socially-operated industry where the bulk of the wealth of society is produced today must first be taken into common ownership and democratic control. And this requires society-wide political action, not what our next correspondent calls "practical small-scale change” which leaves the commanding heights the economy in capitalist hands. - Editors.