What is progress? (2026)

Book Review from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every so often a book comes along that causes us to question something many have considered a self-evident truth. The ‘truth’ questioned by Samuel Miller McDonald in his recently published Progress. A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea by (William Collins, 2025, 424pp.) is that the story of humanity has been one of gradual and, more recently, rapid amelioration in the conditions of life. There has been a growing understanding that the hunter-gatherer period of human existence (i.e. the first 290,000 of the 300,000 years of our species’ existence) was characterised by a egalitarian, non-hierarchical and relatively peaceful lifestyle. At the same time it was a comparatively hand to mouth (‘immediate return’) existence and it might be thought that the increase in wealth brought about by the shift to settled agriculture starting around 10,000 years ago would have improved this – and increasingly as time went by. The author of this book argues that not only was this not the case, but that over the last ten millennia (and especially during the last five) the lives of human beings have actually got worse, even during what is usually seen as the vast leap in living conditions of the last 100 years or so, during which period life is usually seen as having improved beyond all measure for most on the planet. While not failing to recognise such developments as state health services, eradication of many fatal diseases, ability of workers to take industrial action, health and safety laws, advances in gender and race equality, and overall higher living standards, his challenge to this narrative is that some benefits to some humans on the planet have caused untold suffering – and even extermination – to very many others as well as to countless non-human creatures and to the planet as a whole.

Hierarchy and empires

In a work that is widely sourced and painstakingly referenced and, as a comment on its dust cover states, ‘spans cultures, continents and millennia’, MacDonald sets out to illustrate his thesis in two main ways. He does it firstly by pointing to how the coming of agriculture upset the equilibrium of previous human societies bringing with it with hierarchy, domination of the few and unequal access to the means of living and resulted in countless oppressive empires, in untold suffering for millions through the practice of slavery, in destructive wars that killed many other millions and still persist, and in the theft in recent times of the lands of Indigenous populations who were also subjected to indescribable cruelty and, in many cases, extermination. Examples he gives, with significant and vivid detail, are the ruthless Roman rule over its Empire, the Viking invasions of the British Isles with its accompanying plunder and slaughter, the ultra-violent expansion of the Islamic and Mongolian Empires of the Middle and Near East, the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, and the European takeover of the Americas and the barbaric treatment and near annihilation of its native peoples.

He gives particular prominence to this last phenomenon, which he calls ‘the genocide of the Americas’, which, he says, ‘represented potentially the greatest loss of human life and cultural diversity in any single event up to that point, eradicating tens of millions of lives and dozens or hundreds of cultures [and] killing billions of animals in the process’. He also suggests that the attempt to conquer Europe by Hitler’s Nazis and their industrialised murder of those millions regarded as ‘other’ (Jews and gypsies in particular) is likely to have taken its inspiration from the American treatment of the continent’s indigenous peoples, ‘justified’ as it was by the USA’s founding concept of ‘manifest destiny’. In this context he quotes with approval the words of Howard Zinn: ‘Indian removal was necessary for the opening of the vast American lands to agriculture, to commerce, to markets, to the development of the modern capitalist economy.’ It should be added that, at the same time, the author does not fail to draw attention to and condemn what he terms ‘the cults of Stalinism and Maoism’ in the Soviet Union and China which claimed the lives of millions more.

Parasitism vs commensalism

His other principal point of reference concerns the effect of ongoing economic growth by humans on the biosphere. In bringing about apparent improvements in living standards for some, this has, he argues, progressively damaged the ecology of the planet, wiping out species which are part of the natural environment and causing what may be irreparable damage to its necessary biodiversity. He points to the rapid acceleration of this over the past two centuries and to the fact that, despite widespread consciousness of it, there are no signs that it is abating. All this he attributes to what he calls ‘parasitic systems’ (a concept used with great frequency in this book), that is systems whose purpose has been (and continues to be) to extract as much as possible from the biosphere without serious thought for the consequences and which have done this by ‘hijacking human beings’ natural cooperativeness’. The focus of these parasitic systems is, he tells us, ‘growth’, economic growth, the only type of development that human society, and particularly those who currently dominate it, see as ‘progress’. He sees this as a disastrous practice, ‘a mass, collective delusion’, and so, as per the title of his book, ‘humanity’s worst idea’.

The author’s argument that ‘progress’ has inflicted devastating collateral damage on humans, non-human creatures and the environment alike is nothing if not cogent and powerful. But where does he (and we) go from here? What, if anything, does he have to suggest to replace the ‘progress’ mantra, which in the modern world is nothing other than the economic growth every government declares to be imperative? Having hinted in various parts of his book at alternative ways in which human societies might move forward, in a final 40-page section entitled ‘After Progress’, he proceeds to go into this in more detail. Broadly he argues for a society with a ‘mutualistic’ form of relationship between individual humans as well as between human society and the natural environment, one that needs to be ‘non-extractive’ and ‘non-exploitative’ Or, if that is not always entirely feasible, he favours at least relationships he calls ‘commensalistic’, where humans benefit by exchanging their particular skills with one another while being careful that nature should come to no harm.

Better not more

What does this mean in social and political terms? While at one point declaring himself in favour of ‘democratic socialism’ and having made it clear that this has nothing to do with the kind of ‘socialism’ associated with the old Soviet Union, or with China (seen as being ‘state capitalist’ and entirely undemocratic) or with Cuba (described as having ‘welcomed economic liberalisation without any of the apparent benefits of political liberalisation’), he is at pains not to propose any single or existing ‘model’ of society as something to imitate or to build on. And he dismisses any notion that human society should (or could) go back to its earliest stages where the conditions of life and the pro-social nature of humanity combined to provide a self-sufficient, egalitarian existence. However, he does see a future where ‘growth’ and the colossal cost it exacts from both humans and the natural world are replaced by a society that uses the advanced technology now available to create a settled and satisfying existence for all – a society of better rather than more, one perhaps reflecting his description of the earliest human societies as ‘rich in leisure time, generous and egalitarian in its distribution of resources, abundant in communion with people and wildlife’.

Profit – the core of capitalism

How can this be brought about? On this the writer, perhaps understandably, offers guidelines rather than prescriptions or recipes. Broadly he seems to favour not widespread political action but, for example, ‘agro-ecology’, ‘land-based resistance movements’ and pressure for universal basic income, which activities he sees as already taking place on a significant scale and presaging well for the future. He sees no point in pressing governments, growth-obsessed as they inevitably are, to take action to do things such as mitigate climate change, since any such declared ambitions will always be destined to fail or just have the function of political theatre. But while he – understandably – seems, on the one hand, to have no faith in the governments who manage the capitalist system to enact meaningful change, on the other he seems also to see a distinction between different ways in which they might run it. That is to say that he consistently declares abhorrence for what he calls ‘neo-liberalism’, the kind of free-market capitalism he describes as ‘lubricated by relationships based on self-interested transactions’ where the function of the state is the simple one of oversight of the market’s predatory operations. Rather he indicates more of a preference for the kind of capitalism in which there is greater state control both in ownership of industry and surveillance of the privately owned sector.

The trouble here – and this is something that does not seem to be clearly perceived – is that the core of all versions of capitalism is the profit motive, which is inherently extractive, prejudicial to the majority, and unsustainable. Any form of capitalism, with its money system and buying and selling, can only, whatever the preferences or intentions of those in charge of it, to be run along lines of growth and profit. And in all cases the role of a government is to be the executive committee of the owning class. It cannot bring about – or even start to bring about – the production for use society that MacDonald would clearly like to see. It seems futile to argue therefore, as he does, that ‘a guided decline in some forms of production would be helpful’, since such a thing could not happen under any government without the needs of profit and ‘progress’ demanding it.

A total break

So while this book is a powerful indictment of modern capitalism – and of the other hierarchical systems that preceded it – what is far less persuasive about it is how it points forward to a transcendence of it, i.e. how the author proposes to get to a different kind of social arrangements for humanity where we can, in his own words, ‘pursue a non-parasitic mode of human ecology and political economy’ [and] ‘democratic, participatory and community connection’. He states quite correctly that ‘a total break is needed’, that ‘mass, collective delusion must go’, and that ‘we need to have a new conception of our place in our ongoing history’. But for that to happen what is needed is democratic action, ideally via the ballot box, by a socially conscious majority to establish the kind of cooperative society that he is clearly looking for, one of free access to all goods and services where human needs and the health of the planet are the driving force – in other words ‘progress’ in its most positive sense.

Howard Moss

Proper Gander: Processing progress (2026)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 2020s is a particularly unsettling decade to be living in, and the whole of the 21st century so far hasn’t been the utopia which our forebears might have expected it to be. Cultural historian Matthew Sweet explores this current bleak mood by asking What Happened To Progress? in his BBC Sounds documentary series. The premise is that there is a ‘polycrisis’ in the realms of technology, the economy, the environment and global politics. As none of these are working in a way which benefits most people, our attitude towards progress has been affected. Sweet and other academics, writers and specialists give their views around how ‘one of the foundations of our economic system – progress understood as endless growth and rising prosperity – is looking pretty brittle right now’.

According to artist James Bridle, we have come to think of progress as being a line on a graph, swooping upwards and to the right. The background assumption has been that our children will inherit a better world where they can be happier, healthier, wealthier and wiser than ourselves. As other contributors explain, this concept of progress hasn’t always been part of our collective psyche. In previous societies, expectations for the future were more aligned with the cyclical patterns in nature, or had a ‘rise and fall’ narrative. Classicist Edith Hall reminds us that acquiring knowledge led to a fall in both the Adam and Eve story in Abrahamic religions and Pandora’s Box in Greek mythology. There’s a consensus among the contributors that our modern understanding of ‘progress’ emerged during the 17th and 18th centuries, through the philosophical works of figures such as Francis Bacon, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. Progress became more practical with the technical achievements of the 19th century. As author John Lanchester tells us, resources were seen as limitless as economies expanded through industrialisation.

There were improvements in many communities’ living standards, healthcare and literacy which carried on into the 20th century. Sweet says that the First World War ‘broke the link … between technological and moral advancement’, with the slaughter enabled by the knowledge to manufacture ‘tanks, submarines and razor wire’. As a response, multi-national institutions were formed, such as the League of Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement and the United Nations, although these haven’t led to world peace, and war is now more of a threat than ever. As well as weaponry, Artificial Intelligence is another instance of how the results of scientific progress prompt fears about their impact, although climate change is described as the ‘ultimate example’. Contemporary uncertainty around progress comes from the tension between realising it isn’t a simple upward curve and a need for its reassurance, as described by psychoanalyst Adam Philips. Philosopher John Gray expands on this with a lively definition of progress as ‘the crutch, … balm, … therapy, … talisman … to stave off dread or even despair’. Our expectation of progress, as writer Philip Ball says, is out of kilter with how the natural world and society function.

Karl Marx’s views about how society functions are cited occasionally through the series, such as his ‘rival proposal’ to Kant’s ‘fanciful’ idea about a peaceful coalition of states. Historian Margaret MacMillan promisingly describes Marx’s Capital as being about progress to ‘a world in which there are no national borders, no classes left’. But this is only briefly mentioned, confusingly (but predictably) alongside references to Lenin and the so-called ‘communism’ of the USSR and China which had different aims entirely. On the other occasions when Marx is discussed, he’s presented as a poet, with an evocative reading of the ‘all that is solid melts into air’ quote from chapter one of The Communist Manifesto.

What Happened To Progress? is edited so that each contributor only speaks a few lines at a time before the emphasis is changed by someone else. Although this means that a range of perspectives are given, there isn’t the space for explaining in much depth. As indicated by the disparate references to Marx, the fundamental role of the economic structure of society in creating the material conditions for ‘progress’ isn’t explored in any detail. Many of the contributors’ observations and stances would snap into place with the context that progress and our understanding of it are moulded by how capitalism has to function. Goods are produced, services are operated and governments are run according to what is advantageous to the minority who own industries and wield power. Profitability for the few is directly or indirectly the defining factor in whether an innovation takes hold. This means that progress is shaped by what is in the interests of the capitalist class rather than by what benefits humanity in general.

The consequences of this are shown by the ‘polycrisis’ in society and the weakening of our belief in progress. As this notion became established through the advancements of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, it came from an era when capitalism was a progressive force in developing society’s infrastructure. But we have already reached the point where technology and administrative structures can potentially provide a decent standard of living for everyone. The decline in a belief in progress reflects how capitalism is no longer progressive. The documentary winds down with the contributors considering whether we should reject, retain or reclaim the idea of progress, with John Lanchester wondering whether we’re now on a ‘shift to something else’. In our view, to get the world out of its current rut, this would have to be a collective shift to replace capitalism with a social system where progress can mean improvements for all.

Mike Foster

The Doughnut revisited (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In last month’s Socialist Standard we discussed Kate Raworth’s book Doughnut Economics. As it happens, on 1 October Raworth and co-author Andrew Fanning published an online paper ‘Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries monitors a world out of balance’ in the journal Nature. This updates and widens the scope of previous work in this framework.

Things have not improved since the original work was done: ‘Billions of people are falling short of meeting their most essential needs, whereas humanity’s ecological imprint on the living planet is now overshooting at least six of the nine planetary boundaries’. Previously four of the boundaries had been crossed, ecological limits which it was essential to keep within.

The boundaries are measured in terms of indicators, with more than one indicator for some boundaries. Ozone-layer depletion has been stable since the early 2000s, but the other indicators for which information over time is available show a worsening of conditions. For instance, four indicators have more than doubled the extent to which they exceed acceptable limits: CO2 concentration and radiative forcing (both of which relate to the climate change boundary), and hazardous chemicals and phosphorus (relating to chemical and nutrient pollution).

The inner ring of the Doughnut deals with meeting people’s needs. Here two indicators have deteriorated significantly, food insecurity and the existence of autocratic regimes. Others have improved, but only slightly, with 10 percent of the world’s population being undernourished in 2021–2, compared to 13 percent in 2000-1. A rapid improvement would be needed to eliminate this problem by 2030. The proportion lacking access to safely managed drinking water only went down from 39 percent to 37 percent over the same period.

Has there been progress overall? Global GDP doubled between 2000 and 2022, but ‘only modest improvements were achieved in reducing social shortfalls worldwide, whereas ecological overshoot increased rapidly, disrupting the critical planetary processes on which all life depends’.

So the Doughnut’s method of examining whether society is coping with meeting everyone’s needs while keeping the planet in a sustainable condition shows very clearly that the present system, capitalism, is unable to meet either goal. A system based on profit cannot solve these problems, and only a change to a world based on production for use will be able to do so.

Paul Bennett

Editorial: Progress is socialism (1982)

Editorial from the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Socialist Standard in June devoted a page to a sort of dictionary, a brief guide to an understanding of the way capitalism distorts and abuses the language we speak. A society in which the useful majority are deprived of the full fruits of their labour, as part of their relationship with a parasitic minority, has a political urgency to do this; it is part of a justification of the legalised robbery, repression and murder of millions of useful human beings.

Thus what is called peace is in fact a state of continuing but undeclared warfare and of industriously building up a more fearsome means of destruction. What is called prosperity is a condition in which tens of millions suffer varying degrees of deprivation, from simple poverty to outright destitution, homelessness and starvation. What is presented as truth is really a mixture of differing depths of deceit, from casuistry to outright lies. The list could be extended almost indefinitely.

One particularly striking example of this is the word progress, which is abused and misused with such persistence that any sensitive person would do well to take guard whenever they hear it uttered. Not so long ago, in the mouth of Tony Benn (then Minister of Technology), progress was represented by supersonic airliners which would boom their shattering way over our aching heads. It is motorways which carve their concreted, frantic route through countryside which once offered a green respite in the workaday life. It is nuclear power stations, which threaten to seep their radioactivity into the atmosphere for us to inhale and absorb. Or it is a human made potential volcano like Canvey Island. Progress is concentrated industry, urban stress, pollution, speed, a more pressured exploitation in employment.

Occasionally, some worried voice — or some ambitious investigative journalist — will compose a questioning piece on the effects of “progress”. Is asbestos production progress, remembering its devastating effects on the human lung? Is lead dosed petrol an unmixed benefit, considering what it does to our brains and other vital organs? Under pressure, industry might be compelled to admit that what they call progress is not wholly good for us. But the argument will not be allowed to rest there; progress, it will be claimed, is innately beneficial and has some rewards in store for us and must therefore be endured, much as clerical hacks preach to us on the benefits of enduring earthly burdens to prepare us for the mythical joys of heaven.

It would also be claimed that "progress'’ must not be obstructed because it enhances profitability. Concorde threatened to torture us because it was hoped to be a money spinner for the British and French aircraft industries. Motorways are supposed to provide faster and cheaper transport of commodities; nuclear power stations, we are assured, can turn out low cost energy to industrial users. And so on.

This justification is specious if for no other reason than that profitability will also put the brakes on progress. Capitalism has a history of more efficient, safer, happier methods of production which have been left to moulder simply because they did not fit in with the current scheme of profitable operation. It also has a history of the destruction of wealth already turned out — notably of food while millions of people are starving — and of means of production and distribution left idle when it is not profitable to put them to use. In the present recession, for example, factories, steel mills, coal mines are being shut down and ships and aircraft are being laid up because it does not pay to keep them going.

Thus this profit-motivated social system acts as a restraint on production. Capitalism does not encourage material progress; it hampers it. It is an obstructive, reactionary society and those who are concerned for human progress should pay first attention to this massive fundamental reality.

Capitalism does not operate in this way through an accidental obscurantism, which could easily be adjusted or eliminated. It is basic to a system of class ownership of the means of production and distribution, and to the production of wealth as commodities, that progress will be obstructed when it does not meet the system's profit priorities. If there is to be real, permanent progress, there must be a real, permanent change in society. Such a change can come about only through a basic social  realignment.

By this we mean a social revolution. The only effective way of dealing with capitalism's problems is to abolish it. This can be achieved in only one way — by the replacement of private ownership of the means of living with common ownership of them. This revolution will establish a new society in which wealth will be freely available to all human beings, to satisfy their every need and desire. Socialism will have no differing qualities of wealth; there will be no reason for anyone conceiving, designing, or producing anything which is less than the very height of their abilities. In socialist society, everything we make will be the best we are capable of.

Socialism will thus liberate all human talents and skills. There will be such an explosion of abundance, beauty and satisfaction as to be inconceivable to us now, in this cramped and crippled life under the social relationships of capitalism. Socialism will be a massive advance in human society and will lay down the path to further achievement. It will be progress — historical, social, material and moral. In that understanding, it is clear that progress is something we have yet to experience.

And we should not overlook another, heavily significant advance for which socialism will be responsible. Humans will no longer speak in language distorted by the political need to justify an unjustifiable social system. Socialism will liberate and purify the means in which we communicate with each other. As part of the human intercourse in a society of freedom and abundance, words will take on a new richness. Socialism will be progress.

Fifty Years of “Progress”. (1909)

From the July 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Socialist Examination of a Capitalist Statement.

Flights of Fancy.

The Daily Chronicle could scarcely find words to give expression to its admiration of the Blue Book recently published by the Local Government Board, wherein, we are told, the great prosperity of the worker since the introduction of Free Trade, is clearly shown. Wages have risen, prices have fallen, and that great social sore, pauperism, has decreased. In fact, after a perusal of the figures we are almost led to believe that within the next few years all the social evils that now afflict us will have been entirely eliminated, almost, that is, unless we happen to be in possession of further facts and figures.

We are informed by the Daily Chronicle that since 1849 the percentage of paupers to the population has decreased.

Now the total number of persons in receipt of poor relief during the year 1906-7 was 2,076,316. Every day during the year, taking the average, 25.1 per thousand of the population were in receipt of relief. While there has been a decrease since 1850 in the number of outdoor paupers, the number of indoor paupers has almost doubled. When referring to this question the Press were very careful to avoid giving an explanation of the decrease of outdoor pauperism. The cause was fully explained by “F. C. W.” in the issue of March ’06 Socialist Standard, wherein he says

“The Poor Law was further strengthened by the Amendment Act of 1844, but it was not (says the “Encyclopedia Britannica”) until 1867 that the local administration bodies took the matter up with much enthusiasm. The Pauper Inmate Act of 1871, and the Casual Poor Act of 1882, made conditions of relief more onerous by increasing the compulsory stay of vagrants and by other means. Ashcroft and Preston Thomas say in their work ‘The English Poor Law System’ p. 285, ‘The marked increase of indoor paupers (accompanied of course by a still more marked decrease of outdoor paupers until recently) is due to the movement beginning about 1865 in favour of the workhouse principle. It is clear that in the case of this class of paupers (able-bodied adults) it was mainly by the rigid enforcement of the workhouse test that this improvement was secured.’ ”

The Return to Naked Fact.

There are now many other ways by which the workhouses are being relieved, such as, for instance, the Church Army and Salvation Army Homes, and Dr. Barnado’s Homes (which boast of having 8,000 children always under its care) and the rest of the 1,800 charitable institutions dispensing funds to the amount of ten million pounds per annum.

When the Pauper Inmate Act and the Casual Poor Act had been in operation some time, there was another large increase in pauperism. The “Twelfth Abstract of Labour Statistics” issued by the Board of Trade states that

“on every day throughout the year 1892 the average number of persons in receipt of poor relief was 953,719, this number rising steadily each year with but very slight fluctuation to 1,103,724 in 1906, being an increase not only in the number but also relatively to the increase of population.”

If the Majority Report of the Poor Law Commission is adopted and the suggested alterations in the Poor Law are enacted, then we shall again be told that pauperism is decreasing, while as a matter of fact the relief of the poor will have been transferred from public institutions to private charity, which we are told can be so developed and organised that out-door relief will become unnecessary.

Turning from the question of pauperism our attention is diverted to “the record of rising wages under Free Trade,” as the Daily Chronicle has it.

Two sides to the story.

Now it is true that there has been an increase in the rate of money wages, but that is no criterion of an actual rise in wages or of an increase in the purchasing power of the wages received. Turning again to the “Twelfth Abstract of Labour Statistics” we find that since 1895 (the first year for which comparative tables are given) the increase in the retail prices of the necessaries of life, apart from the increase of house rent, which is by far the most important factor in the expenditure of the workers, has kept pace with the increase in the rate of wages, which is in many cases based upon the price paid per hour. But the same publication informs us that the number of hours worked per week have been greatly reduced, to say nothing of the increase of unemployment. So when we take all the facts into consideration we find instead of an increase in wages we have an absolute decrease.

The Daily News makes a very poor attempt to minimise the extent of the unemployed problem by attributing the great increase during 1908 to the engineering and ship-building disputes, and this in spite of the fact that the Board of Trade and Labour Gazette tells us in every issue, that persons on strike or locked out, sick or superannuated, are excluded from the figures.

The health of the workers is the next subject that confronts us. We are reminded that the number of cases arising from such diseases as enteric fever, diptheria, small-pox, etc., have been greatly reduced, in fact some of them have actually been stamped out. If, then, there has been such a large decrease in this class of disease, we must ask the reason for the alarm of the friendly societies at the “enormous increase in the number of applicants for sick pay.”

Unemployment brings Sickness–

The Evening News of June 3rd asks “Are modern conditions of life undermining the general health of the working people of this country ? Mere warnings of medical men,” it continues, “unsupported by statistics, do not count as evidence, but the testimony of the great friendly societies which are in close and constant touch with the workers is a more weighty matter.”

On this question Mr. J. Luther Green, president of the Hearts of Oak Benefit Society, says,

“The matter is most serious and is causing the greatest concern to all friendly societies. . . . The causes of the alarming increase in sickness liabilities are probably to be found in the changed industrial conditions, the constancy of the evil of unemployment, the operation of the Compensation Act, and the increased pace and pressure of life. . . Distress arising from unemployment has been especially noticeable during the past year. Cases have come under the notice of the committee where the sickness has been solely the result of unemployment. Distress is followed by privation and health must of necessity be impaired.”

It appears that while the membership of the above society has increased, since 1903, 12½ per cent., the number of claims for sick pay has increased 24 per cent., and the amount paid in sick benefit by over 33 per cent., in spite of the adoption of more stringent methods to eliminate the fraudulent “invalids.”

But the Hearts of Oak is only one of the many benefit societies, so we must take a broader view of the subject. Reviewing the returns of the 14 leading benefit societies we find an almost corresponding increase in sickness, and we agree with the president of the H.O.O. that the great increase is due to insufficient nourishment and the increased pace and pressure on the life of the worker. Every worker knows that the pace and pressure in the factories, workshops and offices is far greater to-day than it was even a few years ago, while the age at which he is thrown upon the industrial scrap-heap, when his vitality and energy have degenerated, is earlier; and so witnesses the record, in the Blue Book, of the great decrease in the number of persons employed over the age of 65.

Employment Wounds and Death.

With the speeding up of machinery and increasing pressure upon the worker grows the the increase of sickness, insanity and the “accidents” upon the industrial field, the number of the latter in 1907 reaching the enormous total of 160,731, being almost double the figure for 1898. The number of fatal “accidents” rose from 3,810 in 1898 to 4,453 in 1907, and the number of non-fatal accidents increased from 79,633 in the former year to 156,278 in the latter ! a total far in excess of the combined British and Boer casualties in the late South African war.

The increasing development of capitalism renders it far more difficult for the worker to raise himself from the ranks of the wage-slaves until now it has become almost an impossibility even in individual cases.

The increase in unemployment and the longer period the worker is in the labour market, makes life ever more insecure. While in employment he is compelled, where possible, to deprive himself and family of many of the necessaries of life in order to accumulate a little to tide over the ever-expected period of “out-o’-work,” an attempt that more often than not ends in failure. 

In conclusion, then, and taking into consideration all the facts attending the position of the workers, we can safely say that instead of enjoying greater prosperity, their position in society continues on the downward grade, Liberal and Tory reformers notwithstanding. And so their only hope is in the complete change, the Revolution, i.e., Socialism.

H. A. Young

Mass Production and Mass Minds (1954)

From the October 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

Have we developed a mass-mind as a result of the development and extension of mass production? There certainly seems evidence to support the contention. Mass-production has not only affected the factory worker but also the office workers, who now normally specialize in one small part of the accounting system, as invoice typists, comptometer operators, filing clerks, etc. Again with the extension of the multiple shop and departmental store the assistants now spend their working lives handling a very limited range of commodities. This trend towards greater degrees of specialization is consistently the case throughout society and seems to keep in step with the development of mass production.

Fifty years ago, a man’s occupation could be fairly accurately guessed by a glance at his clothes. The navvy wearing corduroys and with his lunch wrapped up in a spotted red handkerchief, the workman with a choker round his neck, the farm labourer with his distinctive dress, the cab driver, etc. Their occupations could be easily seen. But with the development of mass-production it would seem as if our tastes are similarly affected. Choice of clothes, for instance, seems to have become standardised. The felt hat, collar and tie, are worn by men irrespective of whether they have a “white-collar job.” Even the differences of dress between national groups have largely been obliterated. When we are in the cinema we find difficulty in guessing the nationality of men and women we see' in the new films by reference to the clothes they are wearing.

Millions choose the same leisure-time occupation of filling in football pool coupons. Holiday camps where many of the amusements remind one of a factory are becoming the thing for a growing number of people. The most widely read newspapers are those that could be criticized most. Book-printing has become a mass-production business turning out large numbers of escapist publications with a mushroom like existence. In this trade an author has a number of noms-de-plume. Under each one he writes a constant stream of books which are but variations of a single theme which his readers have come to expect

All of which seems to underline the charge that the last 50 years of technical development have succeeded in creating a population who think en masse. This is not merely a national phenomenon but applies to the whole world of capitalism. It would seem at first sight as if the group herd instinct of primitive man has developed into a world-wide herd instinct

But further examination of the subject may make us form a different diagnosis of this developing pattern of human behaviour.

There was a time when primitive man was unable to identify himself apart from the herd. Then there were taboos. Experience in the form of continual sickness or death of the members of a tribe living in a certain place might indicate that such an area was unhealthy and, without understanding the reasons for such calamities, the tribe would institute a taboo preventing their people from living in the area. The reason for this prohibition would in the passage of time be forgotten and the taboo would then assume a magical significance. By the method of trial and error taboos were enforced without the need for thought. But contrast this state of affairs with what goes on to-day. Ask any worker why he is interested in football pools and he will probably make a reasoned and logical statement to the effect that he could badly do with the prize money that is offered and that this is about the only chance he has of acquiring such wealth. Moreover interest in football results create a hobby for him, perhaps the only one he considers he can afford. It will also be apparent that an individual decision was made to “invest in” the pools in each case and that that decision was reached only after some thought. The mass-produced newspapers clinch the argument of the existence of the mass-mind as far as some are concerned but if the contents of the papers that were read 50 years ago were compared with those of today perhaps different conclusions would be reached. For instance, the argument used then to rally working-class support for war was crude and jingoistic. But now the workers are called upon to defend trade union rights and democracy against the dictators who are represented as enemies of the working-class. The ruling-class, in the arguments that they use now today in their newspapers, pay tribute to the advanced level of working class power of thought.

As regards the books that are read, while it is true that a vast quantity of escapist material is printed, it may come as a shock of surprise—and pleasure—to learn that the classics have a popularity nearly as great, as The Times of 28/11/52 points out. This trend has been stimulated by the reprints that mass production has turned out at low prices. There is in addition a great sale of scientific and instructional books of which many have been best sellers. Even popular magazines, which are so criticised by the pessimists, are found to contain instructional and scientific articles covering a wide range of subjects. Fifty years ago such articles would have appeared only in the technical journals of that particular field of science. These popular magazines, which look like proof of a mass-mind, are really evidence of spreading interest among the people.

If 100,000 people are ready to buy a book on the nature of the universe, there is a mass demand at the bookshops. This mass demand is not a proof of falling standards; it means that thousands are being educated, who, 50 years ago would have been left in the illiterate mass.

Minds are creative, mankind today thinks, and thoughts cannot permanently be suppressed by dictators, concentration camps or lying ruling-class propaganda. People are educated primarily to think for the purpose of making them more efficient wage-slaves but the process does not stop there.

Fifty years of technical development have surely had an effect on the mentality of man, but the change that is taking place may well encourage the efforts of the Socialist movement.

Frank Offord

Is this progress? (1961)

From the December 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is, as we know, a vast Industry of Words which works flat out to justify and sustain the Capitalist system of society. One of the comfortable assumptions which this Industry uses to oil its wheels is that the present time (whenever that may be) is one of enlightened civilisation. A Japanese steel company, for example, advertises its products to Western businessmen in the following terms:

The glow of the golden ’Sixties. The promise of the ’Sixties is a challenge to the imagination. How will the people benefit from the marvellous advances that are foreseeable?

And so on. The advertisement may not be intended for a wide readership, but the point it tries to make is pretty general. The present is a good time to be living in. The past is rather doubtful —mistakes were made, foolish things were done, or foolishly left undone. Now, we have learnt our lesson.

How true is this? Was the period between the two World Wars, for example, any better than that since 1945? The 'Twenties were certainly a classical period of cynicism and disillusionment. Strangely the boys in Fleet Street and Tin Pan Alley, who are good at such things, have always found it difficult to revive any popular nostalgia for the period. Perhaps it is because the frantic dances, the weird hair styles and clothes and what they called the “new morality" — although goodness knows there was nothing new about it—were the reactions of a generation bewildered by one of the most dreadful wars in history.

The tiniest village in England can show its memorial to a shockingly long list of young men who died in that war. And they died in such awful ways. They drowned in the mud at Paschendaele, they were slaughtered by the Turkish infantry at Gallipoli. It was so different from what everybody had been expecting when the British workers swarmed cheering into the streets on August 4th, 1914. Few among those delirious crowds could have foreseen the long, bloody anguish that quickly deprived them of all desire to cheer.

The Twenties saw what politician’s promises are worth. During the war there was no lack of well-kept ministers to assure the people who were actually doing the dying that they did not suffer for nothing. Some of the emptiest of the promises and the silliest of the blather have gone down in history and are still remembered with sardonic smiles. For there are still plenty of men who can recall coming home from the trenches to join the long queues at the labour exchanges, There are still bitter memories of the Means Test—so much so that the very name has political danger—and of official tricks like the "Not Genuinely Seeking Work” clause which were meant to deprive the unemployed of even the pitifully small dole. The Twenties were a time of brutal Capitalist reality. Who can be surprised that people were bewildered and cynical?

As the years turned into the Thirties there opened the long list of international conflicts—the invasion of China, the attack on Abyssinia, the German expansion in Europe—which led up to the Second World War. And the Thirties had the supreme example of cynicism and despair.

It is difficult adequately to explain why Fascism was so popular in Germany and not in other countries in which conditions were broadly the same. Whatever the explanation for this, there is one thing which can be said. Fascism, with its reliance upon the strong man leader theory and its extreme racialism, is the desperate product of despair. An unemployed man, or a man who cannot find a home for this family, is easy prey for the first rabble rouser who will point a finger at the Negro and say that he is filling all the jobs and living in all the houses. Or perhaps the Jew comes under the lash because, says the racialist, he owns the country and so controls what goes on in it. This is so obviously a doctrine of ignorance and despair that simply to state it is to expose its weaknesses. But when ignorant workers are having Capitalism’s problems thrown in their faces, and when they are shocked and bewildered and desperate, it is just the sort of theory that can find favour with them. That is part, at any rate, of the explanation for the rise of Fascism in Europe and of the astounding, dreadful things that it did there.

It is not wonderful, then, that some people recall the years between the wars with a shudder, as rather like a bad illness which came to its crisis in 1939. Many political commentators—and the Labour Party, naturally—like to write off those years as the devilish work of That Man Baldwin who, they say, was content to suck his pipe and gaze at his pigs in Worcestershire while the rest of the world decayed around him. Baldwin was certainly an unflappable Prime Minister, a long time before the word got pinned on to Supermac. He was an astute politician who played the game as dirtily as he had to. But to blame him for a whole period of brutality is to side step the facts. Because when Baldwin wits gone, hated and derided, the world went on the same merry way.

The Second World War may not have shocked, in the social sense, as harshly as its predecessor did. But it lacked nothing in barbarity. There has, for example, recently been published the details of the great wartime bombing controversy between Tizard and Lindemann. These men were highly trained scientists who hardly seemed able to avoid arguing. One of their bitterest clashes was over the question of whether the Royal Air Force should have bombed German civilians. Neither of them argued that it would be callous, even by their lights, to deliberately attack a civilian population. They fought over whether the air force was capable of doing the job and whether, if it was done, it would have any considerable effect on the German war effort. There is no need to suppose that either man had an emotional case; both of them went into it armed with cold calculations in terror and destruction.

While this was going on, the politicians were soothing us with their promises, some of which are supposed to have been fulfilled in the so-called Affluent Society. ''Affluence" means that workers, apart from a few million in the USA and Canada and a few hundred thousand in this and other countries, are fairly secure in their jobs. Some can buy a car—sometimes even a new one. They can take on the lifetime burden of a mortgage on a house—because they have given up hope of getting one by any other method. How affluent can poverty get?

And do not let us forget the shadow under which the Affluent Society has. grown up. Almost since the end of the last war, the world has been split into two great armed camps in dispute over the exploitation of markets and the possession of raw materials. The politicians have made countless threatening speeches. The Russians have let off their massive bombs and promised us that we have only seen a half of it. The American Secretary of Defence has replied that his country's military power is virtually irresistible. The Affluent Society eats its food and breathes its air only after they have been soiled by the fallout. The world is as full of fear as ever.

There are plenty of organisations to complain about this. At a recent conference of the World Parliament Association. the organisation's secretary-general drew some tempting pictures of the benefits which he thinks would result if some of the £1,600 million a year being spent on armaments by the British government were diverted to other uses. For £150 million every family in the country could be decently housed within twenty years. For £200 million the roads could be improved, possibly to save 20,000 lives a year. Anybody can do this sort of arithmetic. The point is, why don't governments divert their country's money into houses, roads, and so on?

We all know the politicians' answer to that one. Of course, they murmur, it is all very regrettable. Nothing would please us more if we could pack up making all those beastly guns and bombs and build houses instead. The trouble is we have got to live with the Russians (or the Americans, depending upon who is answering the question) and they've got a big army. If we don't watch out, they'll start moving into parts of the world where we are boss at the moment. We must have armies and weapons, you know, to stop that sort of thing.

What this means is that Capitalism is bound to throw up its disputes because it splits the world into competing economic groups. The armies, the guns, the aircraft and the bombs are there to influence the dispute and if need be to fight it out. The late Aneurin Bevan summed it up when he appealed to a Labour Party Conference some years ago not to vote to ban nuclear weapons. Such a vote, he said, would mean that if he were to become Foreign Secretary he would have to go “naked" into the conference chamber.

The nations of Capitalism must arm themselves, must coldly work out the damage and death potential of their weapons, must perpetrate some of the most barbaric acts the human race has ever experienced. Sometimes human credulity breaks under the strain of it all and we are swept into the crazy, hard- boiled Twenties. Or bewilderment fertilises ignorance and breeds the maniacal savagery of racialism. The desperate, bloody story goes on, period after period, changing perhaps its form, but never its miserable content. The Twenties and Thirties may have been bad times, but nothing that has happened since has made them look worse by comparison. Capitalism Past is no better than Capitalism Present.

Ivan.

Economics and Ideas. Their Influence on Political Institutions. (1925)

From the April 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

In one of the most valuable passages in his writings, Marx says: “The sum total of (the) relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness” (Intro., “Critique of Political Economy”).

By thus conceiving society as made up of a foundation structure and a superstructure, he achieved an advance of great value for the future progress of sociology. Yet no one was more fully aware than Marx that a society is an organic whole, that, though its several aspects for purposes of understanding can be separated in thought, in concrete reality they are interwoven and interdependent.

The relation of the economic basis to the superstructure is readily made clear by considering man’s social institutions as means adopted for the solution of the manifold problems that have faced him in the course of his history. His economic institutions are a solution to the problems of physical self-maintenance under given geographical, technical and historical conditions; his moral, disciplinary, political and military institutions are a response to the problems his economic system has created, and meet secondary needs made imperative, because he has become as dependent upon his economic methods as a lion upon its teeth and claws.

The chief of these secondary social problems are those arising from the division of social labour and function, and from the distribution of wealth. Where working and leisured classes have become inseparable from the economic arrangements in society the problem of repressing and overpowering the resistance of the subjected calls for permanent social machinery of coercion under the control of the exploiting class. When private ownership of wealth has become established the problem of protecting and enforcing this “right” necessitates special disciplinary institutions. Class-antagonism and private property thus underlie the structure of the state and the exact form of its structure varies with the nature of the class division and the forms of property prevailing.

Ideas in History.

Many of his ill-informed or dishonest critics have declared that Marx belittled the role of ideas in history, whereas, in actual fact, he explained their source and showed their very real social function, thus allowing them a significance and value which they could never have in a philosophy of history that regarded ideas as spontaneous generations of the “world of the spirit,” having no roots in the physical conditions of life.

To every institution and social habit there corresponds a definite group of ideas. The very base of the economic system—its productive technique—has its mental as well as its material aspect. Inseparable from the actual instruments of production is the technical knowledge necessary to make and use them. How vital this knowledge is may be vividly realised by imagining a modern machine in the hands of savages. They might break it up for spear-heads or nose-ornaments or perhaps worship it—but they would certainly not use it as it was made to be used. On the other hand, should the machines of a modern community be suddenly destroyed, if the technical knowledge remained it would be possible to reproduce them, though the process might be prolonged and difficult.

Economic relations and the institutions of the superstructure have their mental aspects also, which Marx terms the “social consciousness.” It consists of the general system of beliefs, assumptions, moral judgments and sentiments current in a community. In the literature of an age this consciousness finds expression in its best defined and most systematic form.

Just as little as the savage can comprehend and make use of the machine, can he understand and play a part in the social arrangements of civilised life. His ideology belongs to a different system of institutions, and he finds in the strange environment of civilisation his most sacred sentiments scorned and his cherished beliefs as to what is possible and impossible, right and wrong, contradicted before his eyes.

The beliefs current in a society may be said to be the outcome of its intellectual problems arising from the material conditions. They answer the inescapable questions as to “why” and “how” to the full satisfaction of the people who hold them. They “justify” and provide “reasons” for accepted customs and institutions.

The opinions and superstitions of an age naturally appear to that age the essence of truth and reason and, if, as usually the case, social institutions fully accord therewith, then they are held to be the only ways of living that are natural, practicable, reasonable and just. Thus the “vicious circle” of ideas and institutions completes itself.

A social system consists of a body of interdependent institutions and ideas. The productive institutions form the basis but, just as the foundation of a piece of architecture would be incomplete and useless without the edifice that it upholds, so the basic economic relations do not and cannot satisfy all human needs and are never found, because they cannot exist, without a supplementary superstructure.

Evolution and Revolution.

Like all things, however, a social system is a growth. Gradually, from relatively formless and indefinable beginnings it acquires an increasingly complex and coherent structure as a result of constant modifications and adaptations to the problems of its existence.

It is in observing the growth of a system that the primary nature of the economic sub-structure is most vividly apparent. Invariably it is found that the technical and other material conditions of production change first ; that corresponding with this goes a change in the economic relations of the members of society, followed, sooner or later, by the adaptation thereto of the intellectual, moral, political and legal edifice.

This “sooner or later” is important, for it is the delay in adaptation that is responsible for the historic eras of rapid revolutionary transformation which mark history off into the fairly sharply defined social epochs that enable us to speak of the “succession of systems” without contradicting the truth of “the continuity of social change.”

One cause of the intermittent nature of social evolution lies in the conservatism of the human mind. Man withstands change and clings to old habits of thought and behaviour long after their original necessity has gone, and until new necessities cause a stimulus to movement too powerful for his further resistance. In class-divided communities, however, another highly effective factor is the control exercised by the dominant class over the institutions wielding moral and mental influence and over the political forces of coercion. By the use of these instruments the ruling class endeavours to stem the tide of social change that will dislodge it from its pre-eminence. Up to a certain point its powers prevail, but the governing class can only postpone, it cannot escape the day of its nemesis.

When through industrial evolution the needs of the productive system are no longer met by the legal and political forms prevailing, the problems pressing for solution enforce themselves upon the consciousness of masses of men, and particularly upon the class who control and live by the newer economic methods. After a more or less prolonged period of conflict with the dominant class, during which revolutionary theories are elaborated, the class of progress acquires political strength to break the resistance of the class of stagnation, to achieve the social adaptations in which its interests lie and to usher in a new social order.

Of the several great systems in social history one of the best defined and widespread is that known as “patriarchalism,” which the reader will find well yet concisely described in Jenks’ “Short History of Politics.” Wherever patriarchal conditions of life are found, whether amongst the early Jews or Greeks or, amongst the Arabs and Hindus of to-day, we discover productive and property institutions, family relationships, customs, traditions and religious forms of great similarity. A further system that arose out of patriarchalism and developed on a basis of chattel-slavery is that best seen in the Graeco-Roman civilisation. Another very definite type exhibiting considerable uniformity all over Mediaeval Europe and existing in recent Japan was the feudal system. Lastly, we have the form of society which dominates at the present time perhaps the greater part of mankind—the capitalist system.

“Our Civilisation.”

Modern capitalist society is sometimes described simply as a form of production, but this is a mistake, for in it are involved all those institutions, usages and conceptions peculiar to present-day civilisation.

Wherever modern industrialism takes root there we invariably find springing up its corresponding superstructure, because the problems that it propounds are everywhere very similar and everywhere have been met in substantially the same way.

On its political side, undoubtedly the outstanding feature of bourgeois society is—representative government. One by one, as modern industry has seized them in its grip, we have seen age-old “despotic” states—Japan, Turkey, Persia—adopting the political machinery of the more advanced capitalist groups. There is in fact no case on record of capitalist production achieving any considerable development without representative institutions being set up.

In its social consciousness—its general fabric of ideas—modern society is very characteristic and differs markedly from hitherto existing systems. One of its striking features is the universal adoration for such abstract ideas as “liberty” and “equality,” for the principle of “individualism” and for the idea of “progress.”

It is well to remember how completely foreign to earlier historic systems such institutions and ideas are. Even where some degree of similarity seems to exist—as in the democratic councils of tribal communities—this disappears on examination, The democracy of the clan and the tribe was based upon blood-kinship and common and equal rights in the sources of subsistence. The community was a small exclusive brotherhood, hostile to outsiders and maintaining its coherence and identity by a rigid regard for custom and tradition, rendering the idea of individual independence unthinkable. The tribesman conceived himself as an inseparable part of his group. The tribe thought and acted almost as a unit and, in its assemblies, only unanimous votes were effective.

Bourgeois democracy, on the contrary, involves the idea of the “rights and liberties” of the individual. Before this idea could arise, the concept of the individual as an entity separate from society, had first to be evolved, and this was only possible or could only become a general conception after the individual had in reality become the unit of society by the dissolution of tribal, village and family bonds and corporate life.

The detailed regulations and formalities enforced by custom and religious tradition that governed the productive and every other sphere of activity in patriarchal and, to a lesser degree in feudal society, would seem ridiculous and intolerable to one who’s life had been spent in the competitive, “free” world of capitalism, with its individualism and its doctrine of “mind your own business.” Conventions and traditions still exist—they are a necessity to social life—but capitalism gets along with what would seem the absolute minimum were it not for the fact that their hold appears to grow day by day.

Moreover, it is down at the very basis that emancipation from convention is most complete, for, in present-day production, the age-old domination of custom has been utterly swept away. Untrammelled industry, free commerce, unrestricted exploitation of man and material, are the economic ideals of capitalism, and they have been as nearly achieved as concrete realities will allow.

The slogan of to-day is not “walk in the ways of thy fathers,” but, “go-ahead,” “evolution,” “progress.” The very conception of “progress” and its elevation to a moral principle is a product of capitalism and something new to history. As Clodd says in his “Primitive Man” : “Progress is a modern idea—a Western idea. The Orientals, from whom we may now except the Japanese, hate it. As Sir Henry Maine says in his ‘Popular Government,’ ‘the entire Mohammedan world detests it. The multitude of coloured men who swarm in the continent of Africa detest it. The millions on millions of men who fill the Chinese Empire loathe it, and, what is more, despise it.’ ” (P. 195.)

R.W. Housley

(To be continued.)

The Passing Show: Never in the right (1964)

The Passing Show Column from the September 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Never in the right

Some of our older readers may have lived through the earlier years of this century. Perhaps they can recall the bitter struggles between employers and workers. Strikes and lockouts. Strikes to improve wages and conditions. Strikes very often against lowered wages and deteriorating conditions. One other thing they may also remember is that, whatever a particular strike or lockout was about, the workers were never in the right. They wanted shorter hours? O.K., then, they were lazy. They wanted more pay? O.K., then, they were greedy. If a dispute was in a major industry, such as docks, coal mining or railways, they were irresponsible, led by a bunch of rabble rousers and “holding the nation up to ransom.”

Sometimes the strikes were successful—or partly so. Sometimes, very often in fact, they failed. The struggles of the engineers in the early Twenties, for example, did not prevent pay reductions. Nor did the General Strike of 1926 stop the coal-owners lowering the miners' wages and lengthening their working day. After the collapse of the general strike, the miners fought on for nine bitter months and were beaten to their knees at the end of it. But if the capitalist press of those days was worth believing, the strikers were all in the wrong.

In those days, with a falling market and a large pool of unemployed, it was almost a foregone conclusion that the capitalists would fight tooth and nail against every union demand. The lockout was the weapon they sometimes used. But in the years immediately after the end of the second world war, it was a somewhat different story. Six years of destruction had left a large market to be filled, and with Germany and Japan out of the running for the time being, the call was for an all-out export drive. There was a severe labour shortage, and workers were in a strong position to press for higher wages and conditions.

This time, however, there was another snag—the Labour Government, who appealed for less strikes and plenty of hard work. The production drive was all-important, and to down tools then was a stab in the back for the "workers' government ” and for Britain. And as usual, when workers did come out the government and press were at one in condemning them. The union leaders often listened to the government’s pleas and many of the strikes were “unofficial," one could have been forgiven for sometimes wondering whether the men were fighting the employers or their own leadership. In the latter part of the Labour Government’s term, wage rates were actually lagging behind prices.

What is the position today, some thirteen years and several Tory governments later? Believe it or not, you are still wrong to strike. Now “we” have to keep costs down in a highly competitive market. We have to increase productivity so that there will be more for all, yet we mustn’t ask for more wages to get some of the extra which we have turned out. Higher wages mean higher prices—a lie spread equally by Labour, Liberal and Tory politicians. Always it is the same dreary story. Be patient and accept less today, and you will double your living standards in twenty-five years. Always it is—tomorrow.

In the Labour Government days, it was a “wage freeze.” Under the Tories it has been given the more sophisticated sounding name of “pay pause.” For some time the government has been taking a tough line against wage increases and has been hardening its attitude towards its own employees in this respect. The postmen were the latest victims of such policy and by the time Mr. Bevins had got round to making an offer, their patience was just about exhausted. And nobody can truthfully call the postmen impatient. Their last strike was well over sixty years ago.

What was the reaction of the press this time? For once they could not find a communist-inspired plot. Neither could they call the men greedy, for even by accepted standards their pay rates compared unfavourably with outside industry. Neither were they lazy—an average of thirty hours overtime is worked every week to keep the mail moving. The papers, then, were “ sympathetic,” but still the cry was “ don’t strike.”

Listen, for instance to The Guardian editorial of July 11th:—

  When arbitration is offered in a complex dispute about postal wages. it is hard to claim sanctity for the "right” to delay a nation's mails. . . . What can a woman waiting for a letter from her son do to give postmen more pay?

Or again The Daily Telegraph of July 23rd:

  Yesterday's decision by the executive of the Union of Post Office Workers that a complete strike will be called . . . constitutes a grave challenge . . . not only to the Government but also to the nation. . . . It must be evident by now that his (Mr. Smith's) union is entirely concerned with the best way in which it can sabotage the country’s business, and so hold the country to ransom. Ransom is one thing, and proper wages quite another.

Not one word, you will note, about the delaying tactics of the government, of the offer of yet another “review" to follow the last “enquiry.” Undeniably, it was the positive promise of a strike that forced the pay offer up to six per cent. No wonder The Guardian had to admit: “The plain fact is that the postmen do not trust the Treasury.”

So postmen, you were “wrong” to come out on strike for a day and to threaten an all-out stoppage later on. But you got a pay increase. A good thing you did not heed the mealy mouthings of the newspapers, for you would then have been "right.” but two per cent, worse off.

P.S.--Thc G.P.O. profit last year was £30.7 millions.


What is Progress?

The Oxford Dictionary defines the term as: forward movement, advance, improvement, increase. But progress has also come to have another meaning in the modern world, and it is fashionable to equate it with change—any change.

Under this heading the apologists for capitalism would list the mounting volume of cars on the roads (" one for everybody who wants one” is the government’s bleat), the advent of noisy jet aircraft, and the sprawling of the industrial towns into the once peaceful countryside. They would ignore the increasing noise, dirt and smell, the rush and tear of it all. and the frightful toll of frustration and nervous illness. Anything which kept capitalism moving fast and expanding is, to them, progress.

It is hardly surprising, then, to hear the Belgian industrialist Baron René Boël talk about progress in terms of the profit motive. The Baron is president of the European League for Economic Cooperation, and his words are reminiscent of the views of some of the early capitalist economists. Speaking in Manchester on July 15th, he said:—

  Just as the worker is entitled to payment, so the shareholder is entitled to remuneration for the services he renders both to the enterprise and the economy. An important part of the money he receives . . . is used to finance further economic and technical progress. Profit is today an essential factor in progress since it provides the means of achieving it and measuring it.

There is quite a lot that Baron Boël left out of his assessment, of course. He didn't tell us just what sort of payment the workers are entitled to. His ideas on that would no doubt differ markedly from those of workers. Neither did he go into the harmful effects of the profit motive on the mass of the population. Last but not least, he did not even hint at the ugly black war clouds which gather periodically as a direct result of this “progress.” Had we taxed him with it, he would no doubt have muttered something about “human nature,” or “communist plots ” and left it at that

The words of Baron Boël are only to be expected from a man in his position of social privilege, but he is not alone in his thoughts. Tragically, they are echoed by most workers every day of their lives. Our proposition of a classless, moneyless society is just as much anathema to them as it is to him.


Tory Competition 

Tory propagandists are never tired of telling us how beneficial free competition is. They don’t like state control they say, although they have made little effort to denationalise most of the nationalised industries. “Take the fetters off free enterprise and lower prices will result” is one of their rallying cries. Yet the years of Tory rule have seen considerable price increases.

Are the Tories really in favour of unfettered competition—just like that? Of course, they’re not. The first and foremost task of any British government is to protect and advance the interests of British capitalism. This will certainly mean that they will try to make British industry more competitive on the world market, and generally moan about tariff barriers erected against it by other countries, although at the same time they erect the same sort of barriers at home. This is aimed at keeping the price of foreign goods up so that British goods of the same type are not at a disadvantage in the home market. It is known under the fanciful heading of “establishing stability.”

One industry to suffer against foreign competition has been cotton, and it was only a few years ago that the government was paying out some thirty million pounds to induce some of the less efficient firms to cease production. Now, in a further attempt to deal with the problem, the Cotton Board has produced a plan for a levy on imported cotton goods “which would bring their prices up to an agreed proportion of similar goods of domestic manufacture." This is proposed to replace the existing restrictions, which are due to expire in 1965. Secretary for Industry Mr. Heath is said to have agreed that “some means should be found of establishing stability in the industry”; the Board’s plan has been published at his request.

What Mr. Heath is after is the continued profitable existence of the British cotton industry. If that means paring down the threat from foreign rivals and keeping their prices up, then that is what will be done, it shows also that government interference (“guidance ” they call it) will be used just as much by the Tories as by any other party, if they think the needs of British capitalism justify it. And then their talk of free competition and lowered prices will be quietly forgotten.

Eddie Critchfield

This Prosperity (1937)

From the April 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

The depression is over and prosperity is here once again. This is the good news discovered by politicians, bankers and captains of industry and passed on to the workers in speeches and articles up and down the country. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, in a speech at Birmingham on January 29th said that the Midlands are “enjoying a greater prosperity than had ever been known in the history of living people.” (The Times, January 30th, 1937.) Mr. Colin Campbell, Chairman of the National Provincial Bank, Ltd., in his survey of the country’s affairs at the annual meeting of his bank, sees "prosperity firmly based on well-distributed purchasing power.” (Economist, January 30th, 1937.) Indeed, the bankers and economists are becoming alarmed at the comparative shortage of skilled labour and consequent ability of the workers to secure wage increases. The question occupying their minds is when the next slump is due to break and whether by any means they or the governments can prevent it.

Prosperity for Whom?
It need hardly be said that the prosperity which so impresses the spokesmen of the propertied class is the prosperity of that class: hence their view that higher wages due to scarcity of labour is an ”evil.” They can talk of "prosperity” with registered unemployment at 1,700,000; with 4,500,000 people, according to Sir John Orr, inadequately fed because they can only afford to spend an average of 4s. a week on food, whereas the normal Army food allowance is 7s. 3½d. a week (Daily Herald, February 13th, 1937); with millions of workers inadequately housed and overcrowded. The Times (December 22nd, 1936) admits that house building in Glasgow is actually declining, although “in that city one-third of the population is overcrowded.” “Prosperity ” with 70 per cent, of the adult population in the Rhondda Valley drawing unemployment pay or public assistance; and with an army of 1,223,478 persons in England and Wales in receipt of Poor Relief at the end of September, 1936. In Scotland there were a further 316,674 in receipt of outdoor relief alone. (See Ministry of Labour Gazette, January, 1937.)

Mr. Neville Chamberlain and his associates can bear the poverty of the working class with Christian fortitude, not to say indifference and contempt, while at the same time they are able to find £1,500- millions for new armaments over the next five years.

From Gladstone to Chamberlain 
Elsewhere in this issue we reprint an address written by Marx in 1864 in which he tore to shreds the complacency of an earlier Chancellor of the Exchequer, a similar narrow-minded representative of property, Mr. W. E. Gladstone. The one was a Liberal free-trader, the other is a Conservative protectionist; both were able to hide the facts of unemployment and needless misery under a cloud of tawdry principles of “sound finance,” and under mocking assertions of better times here and now or better times to come.

It is instructive to compare the two as examples of the type of propertied men thrown into prominence in the capitalist era, a nice blend of unimaginative brutality and dull, book-keeping efficiency.

All that divides them is their belief in or rejection of free-trade, an issue of no concern to the great mass of the population. Both so wedded to capitalism as to be unable to conceive of a rational alternative system, both dazzled by statistics, and unaware of the nature of the capitalist system they nominally controlled.

Three-quarters of a century of “ Progress ” 
What has this capitalism brought to the working class in the 73 years since 1864? Malnutrition, unemployment, pauperism and insecurity still stalk the land in spite of a yet more “intoxicating augmentation Of wealth and power,” entirely or nearly entirely confined to the propertied class. If the condition of the worst-paid workers and the unemployed is somewhat better than then, the extent of unemployment is greater, and insecurity has now come to be a permanent nightmare for grades of better-paid workers who used to believe themselves immune. It is still as true as ever that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of industrious workers are worse fed and clothed than convicts, and at or below the level of the workers who are receiving public assistance. Mr. Gladstone went into ecstasies over trade figures and tax returns. What would he have said had he lived in our time? Imports and exports in 1863 together totalled £444-millions; in 1034the total was £l,127-millions, after having reached nearly £2,000-millions in 1929; Yet even in the latter year unemployment was well over 1,000,000. In 1863 there were 80 very rich persons having taxable incomes over £50,000 a year. In 1928-9, according to official tax returns (Statistical Abstract, 1936, p. 200) there were no fewer than 575. Even during the depression in 1933-4 the number was 279. So little have death duties and income tax and social reforms interfered with the normal tendency of capitalism to make the rich richer that in 1932-3 there were more people (84) with incomes over £100,000 a year than there were with £50,000 a year in 1863.

The continued increase in powers of producing wealth has been used by capitalism to widen still further the gulf between rich and poor. Great Britain has multiplied its foreign trade, added over a million square miles to the Empire, and still the fact remains, as Marx pointed it out then, that there are hard-working thrifty men and women who have to sacrifice cleanliness and comfort in order to get a bare sufficiency of food. It has been brought home only recently again that better housing (at higher rents) for ex-slum dwellers has- meant less food and a higher death rate.

Nothing will be done by the Ruling Class

One harmful notion widely believed at present is that now for the first time the Government and public opinion are aware of poverty and undernourishment, and therefore something will be done.

It is true that in recent years there have been many official and unofficial inquiries into malnutrition, wages, unemployment, and so forth and therefore the ruling class cannot so easily be ignorant of the facts. But it will mean next to nothing. Apart from genuine concern about the low physique of recruits needed for their armed forces the ruling and propertied class will not sacrifice their wealth in order to raise the standard of living of the workers. They will yield nothing that is not forced from them by the pressure of the working class.

Do they know in 1937 that many millions of workers are under-nourished ? So they did in 1864 as Marx points out. They did nothing then, nor will they now.

Once the momentary stir has been allowed to subside the facts will be forgotten or denied by our rulers, or hidden under Chamberlain's ecstasies about prosperity. Just as The Times could boast in 1865 that the preceding years of working class misery were “an epoch of unbroken peace and unparalleled prosperity" (Evening Standard, January 13th, 1937), so our rulers will do again in defiance of continuing poverty.

The need of our times is a working class which refuses any longer to trust to capitalist promises, and determines to take action for its own emancipation.

Apply to the world of to-day the following pregnant passage from Marx's address. There could be no better statement of the truth of the Socialist condemnation of capitalism: —

   “In all countries of Europe it has now become a truth demonstrable to every unprejudiced mind, and only denied by those whose interest it is to hedge other people in a fool's paradise, that no improvement of machinery, no application of science to production, no contrivances of communication, no new colonies, no emigration, no opening of markets, no free trade, nor all of these things put together, will do away with the miseries of the industrious masses; but that on the present false base, every fresh development of the productive powers of labour must tend to deepen social contrasts and point social antagonisms."

Edgar Hardcastle

How about some real progress? (1969)

From the August 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Man on the Moon
Perhaps it would be better if, after all, we left the moon alone. It is lovely to look at and does nobody any harm, and in any case there are plenty of problems to be tackled here on earth, before we start spreading out into space. Yet even the most fervent Luddite, the most obstinate flat-earther, much feel a chill of excitement at the thought of men out in black space, circling the moon, observing it, stepping out onto its surface.

There is near-unanimity of opinion that space flights, moon landings, and the rest are a 'good thing' and anyone who has doubts on the matter is immediately classified as a neurotic, reactionary crank. It is true that space vehicles can make a valuable contribution to weather forecasting, communications, and geology, if only because of their unique position for observation. Another result of that unique position is. of course, that space vehicles have distinct, and frightening, military uses — for both observation and combat. It is no coincidence that the world’s two space powers are also the world’s two greatest nuclear powers and that the other positions in the league table of space achievements roughly correspond to the positions in the nuclear power league table.

It might seem churlish to point this out, in face of the glamour of the moon shots. But is it so bad, to try to keep calm amid the hysteria and to wonder whether all technological advance is useful, why some of it happens, whether society has its priorities in order, and whether we should all fall flat on our faces in worship of the great god Progress which is supposed to feed and succur us, which we are supposed to rely on and to be unable to deny?

Sometimes, as communities all over the world have discovered to their cost, 'Progress’ means the destruction of what was once a comparatively peaceful environment. It means an airport setting down thundering jets into once tranquil countryside, a motorway or a pylon line slashing through downland, a nuclear power station on remote, rugged coastline. In other places, green and quiet streets are turned into car parks and road ‘improvements’ bring heavy traffic pulsing constantly past bedroom windows. These are examples of that ‘Progress' which, apparently, should not and cannot be stopped. Or should it?

Basis of morals
There can be no apology if the first thing we say in answer to that question is that ‘Progress’ can no more be considered in separation from its social background than can any other facet of society. And the social background for all of them is the same. The superficial aspects of society — its laws, morals, organisation, concepts, and so on — spring from its basis and conform in their nature to that basis. Capitalist society, which we live under today, is based on the private ownership of the means of production. It is bound, therefore, to have a legal and moral code based on the rights of private property. In the same way, concepts such as ‘Progress’ are influenced, indeed fashioned, by the needs and priorities springing from private property.

What this means is that, as capitalism is a society of commodity production — of wealth produced for sale and profit — ‘Progress’ will be encouraged only if it helps towards profitable production and sale. The organs of capitalist opinion are fond of presenting examples of 'Progress’ to us — like drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea — as adventures undertaken solely for the benefit of humanity. The truth is that in cases like this the capitalist class are hoping for cheap and profitable production and that is why they enthusiastically devote considerable resources to the project.

But it is a different story, when the prospects of making a profit are less rosy. A recent issue of The Guardian (July 3, 1969) stated that the Water Resources Board has turned down a project for the large-scale production of fresh water from sea water because it would cost about twice as much as the systems used at present. The Board docs not know when desalination is likely to become ‘economic' and therefore ‘acceptable'. The point is that, at a time when water is in seriously short supply, progress in its production is being held up, not by technical or productive obstacles. but by the same old bogey of capitalism — the economics of cost and profit.

In another way. this applies to the entire boom in ‘Progress' which has recently taken capitalism by storm — automation, computers, container traffic, and all the other things which are supposed to be part of a great effort to improve our living standards. In fact the boom has been promoted by the simple fact that for a long time, with certain temporary exceptions, the advanced nations of capitalism have had to face a shortage of labour and they have applied the classical remedy of trying to reduce their labour requirements. Again, profitability and not 'Progress’ has been the decisive incentive.

One of the more unfortunate aspects of this is that, in its obsessive haste for profits, capitalism will often launch out on a bit of 'Progress’ purely because at the time it seems the quickest and cheapest method of dealing with a problem. In the long run the results can be disastrous and even, if we are to worry about the interests of the capitalist class, dearer and less profitable.

A recent example of this was the poisoning of the Rhine with a pesticide effluent. This was a much-forecast backlash of the ‘Progress’ in agricultural methods which uproots hedgerows to create a near-prairie in which heavy machinery can operate more profitably and which saturates the land in a variety of pesticides and fertilisers which wreak havoc on the natural balance of the earth and which can turn fertile lands into a dustbowl. There are plenty of informed warnings about the consequences of these policies; but farming, just like any other productive operation of capitalism, is carried on for profit, which means that all other considerations, including speculations on the safety of the future, take a back seat.

In the same way, medical science often joins in the great rush for 'Progress’ by producing medicines which have the sole usefulness of propping up sick workers more quickly than they have ever been propped up before and delivering them back for work on the production line with unheard-of speed. It is not unknown for some of these medicines — for example some antibiotics — to be exposed, after vast amounts of them have been pumped into willing and grateful workers, as of limited usefulness and, in some cases, as actually dangerous. But at the time it seemed the cheapest and quickest method of ensuring uninterrupted production . . . 

Shoddy goods

Are we, then, against Progress? The simple, hoary answer to that is that Progress cannot be stopped; indeed it is clearly desirable that man should progress in the sense that he should always be seeking to control and improve his environment. The question is, how is this to be done?

The first useful step to take would be to realise that the present social system, for all its mouthings about ‘Progress’, is in fact a fetter upon it. Capitalism holds back advances in our productive powers because it demands production for a market. This usually means production at standards well below our capabilities; it means shoddy goods aimed at capturing the market and being produced as cheaply as possible. It can also mean restricting and holding back production or a new development for fear of overstocking a market and causing a price collapse. Capitalism’s incentives are wrong; it judges everything in terms of profit. It is, therefore, bound to misuse 'Progress’, even when it allows it. Anyone who is interested in 'Progress’, then, should also be interested in the fact that it is crippled by capitalism.

Social progress must come first, to create the conditions in which our abilities can be given their head to enrich human lives. In the new society Progress will be reality instead of a word calculated to make any sensitive man release the safety catch of his pistol. 

Ivan