Heads or Tails?
The Secretary of State for Energy, Mr. Benn, is quite a revolutionary—or so he would have us believe. He has been looking at the position in which the government find themselves and has discovered that the Chancellor faces a “dilemma.” The Chancellor does not stand alone, however; alongside him are the entire Labour government including Mr. Benn. The dilemma they face is a fundamental one, and Mr. Benn will no doubt receive a great deal of praise from his colleagues for mentioning it.
Socialists, as opposed to Labourites, have always taken care to point out that the means of wealth production and distribution are owned and controlled by a minority in capitalist society. This minority have interests which are opposed to those of the majority who must work for a wage in order to live.
The Labour Party, along with the other major political parties, is not unaware of the class division between owners and non-owners, but they put forward the view that the opposing interests can in some way be reconciled while retaining the existing basis. It should come as no surprise to Benn, then, to discover they face a dilemma—their entire approach is founded on a contradiction.
If any Labour Chancellor ever chose to reflate to bring down unemployment and the balance of payments went into deficit, investors would lose confidence and the country’s financial security would be in peril. If, on the other hand, the Chancellor held down public spending to create financial security and production fell, there would be a loss of jobs, investment would cease and unemployment would rise even higher.The Times, 4th October 77
Send him victorious
Ministers do not usually make it so clear that whichever government policy is adopted the result will be a mess; it must be a new sort of election pledge. But Benn seems to think he can stand back from the dilemma as if it is nothing at all to do with him. He wants a structural change in society: no more should decisions be governed by “market forces, the monopoly of the banks and by big business monopolies.” What then does he propose?
There was no need for the people of Britain to live forever without hope of escape from either mass unemployment or inflation. To implement the policies needed for this structural change, he added, the Government must get it across that what was needed was an overall majority in Parliament.
Simple isn’t it? Three hundred or so Labour MPs could go about their business of running capitalism and at the first sign of “market forces” rearing their ugly head, Benn and his colleagues could pass legislation to their hearts content outlawing them all.
China and Marx
A palimpsest is a parchment on which the original writing was rubbed out and something else written in its place. Scholars find them among mediaeval manuscripts, but they are produced in profusion in modern times. On 29th September a Guardian editorial gave the following information.
The official newspaper in Peking, the People’s Daily, has been taking a closer look at what Karl Marx really meant rather than simply at what he said. It has proved a fruitful exercise. Marx’s own words, in a critical essay published in 1875, were "Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen." This has generally been taken to mean “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. . . The small but possibly crucial change is to substitute the notion of work for the notion of need. “To each according to his work is by origin a Socialist principle”, the People’s Daily says, “and belongs to the Socialist economic system . . . Let us firmly implement the Socialist principle of ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work'.” Those who work harder should earn more: all else is “idealism run wild and metaphysics rampant”.
The Guardian goes on to make some snide suggestions for other alterations to Marx’s well-known phrases, implying that this is what you get in Communist countries. So it is, of course: in fact the change of wording brought forward by the People's Daily was made many years ago in Russia. What the Guardian failed to point out is that “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work” is simply the law of capitalism: with the Guardian’s full support, it has long operated here.
Change of View
The monopoly of credit, to borrow one of Major Douglas’s phrases, for throwing bricks at the National Front march in Lewisham on 13th August has been claimed by the Socialist Workers’ Party. The September issue of Grassroots Black Community News had a two-page illustrated article on the affair that gave a surprisingly different version.
The writer, Dilip Khan, said he noticed the absence of newspaper sellers (“I mean the lefty ones”) and “the number of Black youth making their way to the arena.”
The people had really come to fight . . . I have expected to hear Tariq Ali’s Oxford accent when instead up popped General Darcus Howe on top of the public toilet with a microphone in his hand. The crowd however was in no mood for speeches . . .
The article describes how when the march came along “the scene exploded with bricks, sticks, pink flour bombs, tiles, slates, being hurled on the Front and Babylon [the police] alike”. It ends:
I made my way back to New Cross tired but happy. Happy at the tremendous fight put up by Black youth. Happy to see local white youths or rather children passing bricks along to the brothers and pleased to see that for once the long hair, dirty jean lefty brigade stopped intellectualizing and analysing began to act.I am sure the NF will have to think twice before displaying similar imprudence in a Black area. The youth and more and more older Black people have shown that they are prepared to come out and stone these racist vermin back into their holes.
So were the SWP the vanguard—or, as in the above version, half-despised accessories?
Alan D'Arcy
Blogger's Note:
The September 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard carried an article on 'The Battle of Lewisham' by Robert Barltrop.
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