The "Prosperous" Working Class (1957)

From the February 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are often told by people who do not really understand its meaning, that poverty no longer exists. Largely they mistake poverty for destitution, and think in terms of pre-war days of dole-queues, hunger marches, and the general hardship suffered from not being able to afford sufficient food, clothing and shelter.

Workers who feel secure in their jobs at the moment must bear in mind that the era of full employment was started by the last world war, when a vast amount of industry was smashed up, and the world market at the end of it had six years dearth of consumer goods to make up, and, all the while, massive preparations have gone on for World War III.

If our measure of prosperity is to be that we have all got "jobs,” it still leaves Capitalism, with a great deal to answer for. In the first place, our jobs are not really “ours ” at all, because they can be taken away from us, and today, just as before the war, how long they last depends on how long our employers can sell, at a profit, the things we produce.

Neither poverty, nor destitution, has been abolished, and these evils of Capitalism only smite the useful people of society—the working class. Poverty is not something which depends on what Government is in power, it is a permanent condition of the wage-earning class.

Poverty can be recognised in the existence of hire-purchase; it can be seen amongst the crowds of window-shoppers looking in at the things they cannot afford; it is the reason why workers “save” for holidays, Xmas, clothing or furniture; why they live in low-rent homes; take out insurance against their old age; shop more in Brixton than in Bond Street; buy one necessary thing, and forego others; and generally live from pay-day to pay-day.

There are many other instances of the condition of poverty, but the above will be sufficient to take any heads from the clouds, in order to take a closer look at the world we workers “live’ in. Destitution is always a threatening possibility to wage-earners, as their only source of income is through finding hirers, and, as we shall see, all kinds of dire consequences can follow when the hired are dispensed with. The old age pensioners, the disabled, and the sick, ca still be found destitute, on the pittance doled out by the “Welfare State.” .

One example of the prosperity we are all supposed to be enjoying, comes from a report in the Daily Express of 15th October, 1956. In Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, the Chamber of Trade is starting a “Black Book” of customers who do not pay. “The idea is to protect traders from people who run up accounts at one shop, and then open accounts at others, when they cannot pay off the first In another town, housewives may be secretly investigated, and find it difficult to open accounts at a second shop, after exhausting credit at the first.” 

Mr. Raymond Broad, President of the Chamber said:—

“ Many people who formerly paid cash now want credit. Things are getting more difficult for traders."

" Some women in Axminster have been going 10 miles to Honiton, to run up new bills. But a woman who leaves her grocer, when he asks for his money, will find her new grocer more cautious,’ said Mr. Herbert Jeffery, Secretary of Axminster Chamber of Commerced."

We are sure to be told that people who cannot pay the grocer must be buying television sets or motor-cycles but, after 17 years of full employment, for workers to have to choose between paying the radio shop or the grocer, is poverty.

The Daily Express, a day later, carried an even more remarkable story. After we have been told, by Eden and others, of the terrible fate in store for "us,” if “we” lose the Suez Canal, the Express gives an account of what happened to the family of a reservist, who was called back while the Canal dispute raged. The income of Mrs. Bedford was "chopped from £14.16.0 a week, to 16/- for children’s allowances. Food ran out. Her three little daughters, Anne, aged five, Christine, three. Denise, two —began to fret, and then weep with hunger.” The mother “broke open the gas meter at her home in St. Paul’s Road, Middlesbrough. She was found out. Yesterday, she was conditionally discharged, on payment of 15/- costs. The electricity authorities have cut off the current, because she has not paid the last bill.”

It is indeed ironic that the same Capitalist State machine, which took the man away from his work, was responsible for cutting off his electricity, and imposing the Court costs on his wife. Even more remarkable, in view of the story of the Canal being vital to our survival, and the fact that we are told that the public own nationalised electricity.

The eventual allowance from the Army was £4 0s. 6d. per week, and, being a member of the working class, with no property income, Mrs. Bedford had “9d. left out of the allowance, after she had paid:—

Rent                  £1    8   9

Clothes on credit      £2    0   0 

Furniture, H.P. ... 11   0

Total                   £3 19  9

This woman had a child “ recovering from polio,” and “was expecting another baby.” Before her allowance arrived, she had taken sheets and blankets off one of the beds, and gone to the pawnbroker with them. “ He allowed me 18/-. With that, I bought bread, margarine, and milk, and gave them to the kids. They were ravenous.”

The fact that workers do not own the Empire, the oil, or the Country, is often tragically brought home. As the S.P.G.B. pointed out at its formation,“ the machinery of Government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the Capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers.” (See clause 6 of our Declaration of Principles).

The last example we will give here, is of how the “benevolent” State treats wage-slaves from whom profits cannot be made, as they are too old. It is from a letter to the Sunday Graphic for October 14th, 1956:—

“There are large groups of humans, men and women, who suddenly cease to belong economically to the everyday world that swirls around them, almost over them. They grope and scheme for a little food, a little warmth, and, above everything else, a little security.”

The writer is a pensioner, aged 71, with a semi-invalid wife.

“ We receive a weekly sum of £3 18s. 6d., for all our needs. After budgeting for rent, gas, coal, and clothes, it leaves 6s. a day between us and starvation. And the dread of the winter is on us. The little extra something an old body craves in the winter, is beyond the few shillings needed for sheer necessities to keep alive.”

After going to a rally of the Old Age Pensioners’ Association, and listening to the speeches by the High Sheriff, a padre, and others, about what must be done, "Hope surged again,” and, after the collection was taken, “I trudged back home. My twopenny bus fare was in the plate. The heart and soul shrink from the dreary, hopeless future that stares bleakly at us. For how much longer now? Who knows? Who cares?”

As Socialists, we care about the poverty suffered by workers. We also know how long it will last. It will last as long as the working class are content to work for wages; for as long as they look for solutions to their problems within Capitalism.

Whilst a minority owns the means of production, and profit remains their goal, older workers, who have slowed down, will always have to make way for younger, faster ones. Consideration of human suffering and hardship is a luxury which Capitalism must always place as a poor second to profits. It is only with Socialism that the peoples’ needs will count first

When the means of production are held by society in common, the fruits of our social labour will be available for use. Goods of all kinds will be freely distributed without the barrier of money.

If only workers, young and old, would ponder the possibilities of this sure but simple solution, instead of allowing competing reformist parties to deceive them into the continued support of Capitalism, the misery, poverty, destitution, insecurity, and war threats, with which our whole lives are cursed at present, would be banished for ever.

Harry Baldwin

The myth of consumer sovereignty (2024)

From the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his seminal work, Stone Age Economics published in 1972, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins controversially suggested that hunter gatherers, though conspicuously lacking in those sundry accoutrements of what we call ‘civilisation’ – like money, fast cars, an 80-inch flat- screen TV and a semi-detached terrace in the suburbs – may nevertheless have constituted what he called the ‘original affluent society’.

This was a startling claim, to say the least. It certainly challenged what we conventionally mean by the term ‘affluence’. As Sahlins noted:

‘By the common understanding, an affluent society is one in which all the people’s material wants are easily satisfied. To assert that the hunters are affluent is to deny then that the human condition is an ordained tragedy, with man the prisoner, at hard labor, of a perpetual disparity between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means. For there are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be “easily satisfied” either by producing much or desiring little.’

‘Producing much’ is what Sahlins called the ‘Galbraithean way’ to affluence – named after the economist, J K Galbraith, who had written a book in the 1950s called The Affluent Society – although Galbraith himself was somewhat ambivalent about the whole subject of affluence.

As he saw it, the age-old problem of scarcity had been largely overcome. The emphasis on increasing productivity and output, he argued, may have been apposite in earlier times when large swathes of the population had little option but to endure grinding poverty. However, this was no longer the case in the post-war era of mass production and consumer plenty. Hence, society’s priorities needed to change – from delivering yet more affluence to dealing with the challenges that affluence threw up – such as glaring inequality and environmental destruction. Amongst other things, concluded Galbraith, this called for more Keynesian-style government regulation of the economy, more investment in the public sector and so on.

As a consumption theorist, Galbraith was very much influenced by earlier writers in that tradition – like Thorstein Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), for instance. Galbraith argued that the conventional wisdom regarding the role of consumers had become outdated – that is, the idea that the ‘consumer is king’. According to this, whatever the consumer wants, businesses obligingly provide.

For Galbraith, the boot had since transferred to the other foot: it was now the producer who was king and the consumer, the subject. The consumer was, for instance, now more of a price-taker than a price-maker, a tendency that would have been reinforced by the increasing concentration and centralisation of capital in fewer hands. In short, the increasing domination of the economy by giant corporations.

Because of their large size, these corporations were not so much constrained by market competition when it came to setting prices. Nor for that matter, by the single-minded quest to maximise profits. That might well still be the primary goal of small businesses or, indeed, the shareholders of large corporations. However, suggested Galbraith in another book entitled The New Industrial State (1964), the former were in decline while the latter had largely lost control to a specialist planning and technical elite – dubbed the ‘technostructure’ – intent upon promoting technical efficiency and expanding the corporation out of undistributed profits.

In that sense profits still mattered; the corporation would prefer, for example, to finance itself rather than depend on bank loans and this obviously required that it be profitable. But the point that Galbraith was making was simply that the pursuit of profit was not of such overriding importance as it once was and that other objectives had entered into the frame alongside profit-making. With hindsight, however, things have not turned out quite like Galbraith imagined, with ‘shareholder capitalism’ now back firmly in the driving seat.

Dependence effect

For him, all these various developments also gave rise to something that he called the ‘dependence effect’. By this he meant consumer preferences had become more dependent on, or conditioned by, the corporate imperatives of big business. These latter were to increase sales and thereby make the fullest possible use of the large-scale productive capacity they had built up and so reap the benefits of scale economies. In other words, to some extent, these imperatives were technologically driven. While the resulting price reductions might, in the short run, seem to adversely affect the revenue stream of a business and hence its profits, in the long run it enabled the business to undercut its competitors and so capture a larger slice of the market.

However, what this also meant is that more demand for these products had to be created, or stimulated, in order to justify and maintain a high level of output. Price cutting would help in that respect but, in addition, boosting demand necessitated resorting to intensive advertising and ‘salesmanship’. In short, by generally promoting a culture of emulative and acquisitive consumerism.

Strictly speaking, the aim was not so much to satisfy the wants of the consumer as such. Rather, it was to ensure that the consumer remained perpetually unsatisfied and forever in a state of wanting more. In short, it was to promote the idea of ‘consumption for the sake of consumption’ (mirroring ‘production for the sake of production’).

Galbraith argued from what he called a commonsensical premise that the more amply a person´s wants are supplied the less urgent will those wants become. However:

‘If the individual’s wants are to be urgent they must be original with himself. They cannot be urgent if they must be contrived for him. And above all they must not be contrived by the process of production by which they are satisfied. For this means that the whole case for the urgency of production, based on the urgency of wants, falls to the ground. One cannot defend production as satisfying wants if that production creates the wants.’

In other words, the institutions of modern advertising and salesmanship ‘cannot be reconciled with the notion of independently determined desires, for their central function is to create desires—to bring into being wants that previously did not exist’.

Predictably enough, Galbraith´s arguments were excoriated by hostile critics like market libertarians for whom the concept of consumer sovereignty was something sacrosanct. It was key to their model of competitive market economy that works to maximise economic welfare in strict accordance with the wants of rational actors expressed through the market. Since these are essentially both rational and sovereign it was not for anyone else to question or frown upon such wants – whatever might be the social or environmental costs of satisfying them.

Any suggestion that consumer preferences might be moulded by institutional forces emanating from outside or beyond the individual themselves was regarded as anathema, an affront to the individualistic worldview of the market libertarians. If individuals were so easily manipulated, what is to prevent them making irrational choices, perhaps leading to some or other suboptimal outcome that might tarnish the good reputation of the free market?

Rejecting the very idea of a ‘dependence effect’ thus committed these market libertarians to the view that our wants (whether urgent or not) must necessarily always be ‘original’ to the individual themselves – or, to use Galbraith’s expression, will always spring from their own inner disposition alone. Suggesting they can be conditioned or shaped by some external force or factor had one further consequence. It could potentially call into question that most sacred of dogmas upon which much mainstream economic thinking hinges – namely, that our wants are insatiable. For if we can be persuaded to buy more we can also be persuaded to want less and therefore to buy less. Clearly, that would not be in the interests of the business community.

Manipulating wants

For Galbraith, that is precisely what this community was in the business of doing – persuading consumers. As he argued, if wants were genuinely original or innate to the consumer then what would be the point in advertising at all. The consumer would seek out and find the product that might satisfy their particular want of their own accord. The fact that the product is so relentlessly publicised strongly suggests that the purpose of the advertisers is to expand the consumer´s wants or even to supply them with completely novel wants that they did not even realise they had.

Naturally, this has prompted a counterargument from Galbraith´s critics that advertising can be justified on the grounds that it is merely alerting us to the existence of useful products we might otherwise have overlooked. However, this counterargument strikes one as being somewhat disingenuous.

To begin with, there is the sheer scale of advertising to consider. It seems absolutely disproportionate to what the market libertarians claim its purpose to be. It does not seem credible, to put it mildly, to suggest that businesses, ferociously competing against each other for a bigger slice of the market, would spend such vast sums of money merely to provide a public service, as it were – of informing the consumer of the availability of these products and thereby enabling them to better satisfy their wants.

Galbraith might have been naïve if he imagined that advertising could somehow be pruned back to a bare minimum in a competitive market economy. But his critics were no less, if not considerably more, naïve in their understanding of what advertising is about. Its purpose is, very clearly, more to persuade than inform. This is evident in the very of techniques of advertising itself. These involve repetition, reinforcement and the copious use of emotional associations, fantasy, irony and downright innuendo. Such techniques are demonstrably manipulative in style, often preying on people’s vulnerabilities and sense of self-esteem.

In the early days of advertising there was, arguably, rather more in the way of factual or informational content to adverts but those days have long gone. The dark arts of the advertisers have evolved way beyond that since then. Advertising today, suggests Andrew Simms, is about mind control. Like air pollution it seeps into every nook and cranny of our lives. Indeed, it is reckoned that the average American citizen is exposed to anywhere between 4,000 and 10,000 adverts every single day:

‘Advertising works by getting under your radar, introducing new ideas without bothering your conscious mind. Extensive scientific research shows that, when exposed to advertising, people “buy into” the materialistic values and goals it encourages. Consequently, they report lower levels of personal wellbeing, experience conflict in relationships, engage in fewer positive social behaviours, and experience detrimental effects on study and work. Critically, the more that people prioritise materialistic values and goals, the less they embrace positive attitudes towards the environment – and the more likely they are to behave in damaging ways.’

More ominously, Simms goes on to refer to the findings of neuroscience on the effects of advertising on the human brain: ‘advertising goes as far as lodging itself in the brain, rewiring it by forming physical structures and causing permanent change. Brands that have been made familiar through advertising have a strong influence on the choices people make. Under MRI scans, the logos of recognisable car brands are shown to activate a single particular region in the brain in the medial prefrontal cortex. Brands and logos have also been shown to generate strong preferences between virtually identical products, such as fizzy drinks – preferences that disappear in blind tests. Researchers looking to assess the power of advertised brands concluded that “there are visual images and marketing messages that have insinuated themselves into the nervous systems of humans”’ (Guardian, 11 October 2021).

If we accept that the purpose of advertising is more to persuade than to inform then this puts our market libertarians in an essentially untenable position. It means having to concede that our wants are not necessarily those that are original to ourselves and that, consequently, we are not at all like the sovereign individuals depicted in individualist mythology, driven by impulses that arise entirely within ourselves. It means having to acknowledge that we are, indeed, social animals capable of influencing and being influenced by others.

Given the manipulative nature of advertising it follows that weakening or removing its influence would result in a situation in which consumer wants would indeed more closely approximate those of our hypothetical sovereign individual. Therein lies a delicious irony – the fact that market libertarianism through its endorsement of the practice of advertising would appear to be in league with those very forces that threaten our individual sovereignty and our ability to rationally think for ourselves.

Untenable position

Faced with the incontrovertible evidence that advertising does indeed contrive to expand our wants or introduce new ones, some market libertarians have adopted a somewhat different tack than that of outright denial. This might be described as an exercise in damage limitation.

A case in point was the prominent free market supporter, Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek contended that it was a gross exaggeration to suggest corporations could determine consumer preferences through the power of advertising alone. That is undoubtedly true although it misses the larger point. The inculcation of consumerist values in the population is not something for which any one particular agency or institution can be held solely responsible. It is woven into the very fabric of life under capitalism.

It arises from the system´s competitive dynamic and its built-in disposition to grow without limit. The relentless accumulation of capital that competition compels finds its correlate in the no less relentless drive to boost market sales by means of which the economic surpluses to finance that accumulation can be realised.

Robin Cox

Hire Purchase (1955)

From the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

“To Have and Have Not”

It is often said that Punch is the great social historian of the last 100 years. Since comic journals thrive on aptness rather than humour, they do in fact provide a minor guide to changes in manners and morals.

A joke that has entirely disappeared now is the one about “the instalments on the furniture.” Continually, in magazines of the 1920’s little boys blurted out that the settee wasn't paid for, and men called to take back the chairs when guests had come to tea—the psychology being that, 25 years ago, to buy on hire-purchase was to have a guilty secret.

All different nowadays, of course. There are even good, wise reasons for instalment buying: for example, if the thing goes wrong the firm will see to it. Hire-purchase is an accepted social fact. Last year, half the radio sets, seven-tenths of the furniture and bedding and vacuum cleaners and TV sets, and nearly all the refrigerators and washing machines sold in this country were bought on hire-purchase. “Cash only” shops are the exceptions now, and very recently the instalment system has spread as far as air travel and holidays.

That is not to say all reprehension of hire-purchase has ceased. Generally, there have been two sorts of objections to it. The one voiced by most working people in the past was strictly practical: “I’m hanging no millstone of weekly payments round my neck,” said the poor, poverty-hardened man in Love on the Dole. The other objection was that to have something before paying for is wrong—apparently a moral view but in fact only cash customer’s attitude. The people who largely held that view were the better-off, professional and black-coated workers; since the war their position has declined, and so consequently has their moral objection to hire-purchase. Many of the “swell” shops, in fact, now advertize hire-purchase facilities.

Hire-purchase trading has gone on for at least a century. Before 1914 it was mainly a hole-and-corner business (nevertheless, plenty of suits were bought at a shilling a week). Its growth between two wars went with the mass-production of cheap luxuries—gramophones, bicycles, radio sets; the first legislation to regularize it in this country was in 1938. The great boom in instalment buying came after the second war, however. Some idea of its extent is given by the banks’ statement of their loans to hire-purchase finance companies. The total in February, 1955, was £30,493,000, compared with £11,188,000 in February, 1954. The sum actually was greater, since many loans for general trading went mainly into hire-purchase; and in the same period several of the companies made capital issues.

Few shops finance their own hire-purchase trading—in fact, only the very big ones. Most of them borrow from hire-purchase credit companies, which often buy the goods themselves, receive the instalments themselves, and leave the shopkeeper as little more than an agent. There are several organizations for checking on prospective buyers. Every hire-purchase customer has his particulars filed (including how he pays); investigators discover all they can about him, and the information is filed for future reference. In America, according to a recent Picture Post article, the files include; “. . . intimate details and frank character assessments. Facts include positions and salaries of all members of a family, bank balances, litigation records, all past time buying deals, estimates of business or professional prospects, value of house or mortgage position, or amount of rent and how paid, local reputation and probably social habits. Police records are included.”

Hire-purchase buying is dear. It has to be. There are the book-keeping and the postage and the enquiry fees and the advertisements (last year the Gas Council and Hoover Products each spent about a quarter of a million pounds on advertizing); the “free” maintenance is really, of course, covered in the cost. The rates of interest range from five to ten per cent. At least, those are the nominal figures: calculated on a diminishing debt they are much higher—over two years, the usual period for furniture, they actually average out at something like 20 per cent. The number of bad debts is said to be small, and hire-purchase firms try everything before resorting to court action, which usually is fruitless for them.

Outside the main stream of instalment trading, there are innumerable related concerns; for example, the cooperative societies’ “mutuality shares,” where vouchers are issued to be exchanged for all sorts of goods. Then there are the clothing clubs, and a host of door-to-door easy-payment salesmen—many of the latter charging rates of interest which are exorbitant even by hire-purchase standards, and having no advertizing or accounting costs to speak of. Incidentally, cars do not figure in hire-purchase as much as would be imagined; most are bought by bank overdraft and re-mortgaging houses.

From the economists’ point of view, instalment buying is simply the form taken by the demand for certain sorts of goods today. Thus, when the number of new contracts fell last year in America, the Government hurriedly urged traders to get things back to normal. And in this country the recent restrictions on hire-purchase were headlined by the Manchester Guardian as “Plans to Limit Demand for Goods.” A fair enough estimate; with the minimum deposit raised to 15 per cent., the demand for furniture has fallen to not much more than half what it was a year ago.

To see hire-purchase as something which—vide Fyfe Robertson in Picture Post—"puts real wealth, which otherwise would not be acquired so quickly, into consumers’ hands and raises living standards,” is to grasp flight appearances, however. It is easy enough to point to all the television sets, but television is only the newest replacement for the piano, and pianos were a far greater luxury in their heyday. Before the wireless era, one cost as much as a television set today—that is, anything between £40 and £70, at a time when money wages were much lower.

But to consider living standards in terms of luxuries is to succumb to advertizers’ patter. The fact is that working people obtain luxuries only at the expense of other things. How can a family with £8 a week get them otherwise? The other things may, of course, be minor luxuries themselves—drinking, pictures, smoking; a small boom in smoking cures has accompanied the big one in hire-purchase. They may, on the other hand, be necessities—food and clothing; or the “solution” for a good many families is the wives’ going to work. Whichever way it is, there is not much to confirm the idea of better, more gracious living for the working class.

“Luxuries” is the wrong word, anyway. There is nothing luxurious about buying clothes by instalments, knowing they will be half worn-out before they are paid for: “pay as you wear” has the sound of eternity. True, furniture is more durable—it is outmoded instead of wearing out in two or three years. A favourite sneer of precious suburban aesthetes is that working people lack taste. An ignorant untruth, as the beautiful little gardens in the dingiest surroundings show; but in any case, there is no scope, for modishness when things are bought over two years to last for 20. Most people, in fact, buy furniture only once in their lives—as the hire-purchase advertisements, with their single-minded appeal to the newlywed testify.

Probably the best example of this sort of thing is the way in which television sets have superseded one another since the war. Each latest model, gaining its owner the maximum of prestige, has been rendered inferior long before the final payment. There cannot be much feeling of luxury about having given up smoking to buy a set with a nine-inch screen five years ago and finding it primitive by today’s 17-inch standards.

The truth is that hire-purchase is a monument to poverty, not a pillar of prosperity. People can buy more things, by whatever method, only if they have more money. For a year or so after the war there was no hire-purchase; it began as the briefly spectacular spending of the gratuity era faded. It is hard to believe that anybody enjoys paying instalments—indeed, these commitments add to the tension of modern living. There is no alternative except going without, however. It is all very well to think people can save up to buy, but it doesn’t work out like that—and in any rase, it means going without just the same. The rise of hire-purchase and the decline of the pawnshop are probably not unconnected.

The average gross wage of male workers today is just under £9; for women, it is just over £5. According to the Chancellor of Exchequer in November last year, there were 8,600,000 receiving less than 96s. a week. Compare those figures with pre-war ones, remembering the cost of living today as 2 1/3 times what it was in 1938. In that year, 63.2 per cent, of the families in Britain received under £5 a week, and 11.8 per cent, between £5 and £10. About the same time, John Strachey did some calculations—slightly tortuous, admittedly—in “The Theory and Practice of Socialism” to show that “the real earnings of the working class in 1934 were only 91.1 per cent., of what they were in 1900.” The only conclusion is that the buying power of working people is much the same as it has always been—small; hire-purchase is the latest manifestation of the smallness.

One other aspect of hire-purchase needs to be mentioned. It helps to discipline the working class. The man with heavy commitments—or the American worker who values his “credit rating”—is the man who must keep his job at all costs. Bernard Shaw’s Andrew Undershaft preferred religious workmen because they were sober and honest and amenable; nowadays his ideal would be the employee buying a dining-room suite. The recent Government Economic Survey mentioned that more than a quarter of industrial operatives worked overtime last year, and it is a sad but fair comment that more than a quarter probably want to work overtime this year, too.

Ours is the age of mass-production. One would imagine it to be an age of plenty, but it is not so. It is a queer reflection that, in this world of science and power, the majority of people have to buy trashy products bit by bit and perhaps abstain from necessities in the process. Profit is often imagined as the greatest incentive to progress; in reality, it is the fetter. The hire-purchase system is a fresh pointer to the outstanding contradiction of capitalism: the inability of a productive system which has industrialized the world to perform the only real function of production—the satisfaction of people’s needs.

Robert Barltrop

Are You Satisfied with Your Pay? (1956)

From the March 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ask any body of workers if they think they are getting enough pay, the pay they think they are worth, and it is safe to say that nine out of every ten would answer No! They nearly all think they ought to get more, and would get more if things were run properly. They nearly all have a vague feeling that things aren’t run properly. They are annoyed that nobody—this includes the trade unions, the employers, the political parties and the Government—does anything about it and they all have some notion about what ought to be done. Some point to the impossibility of keeping themselves and their families “decently” in face of the cost of living—in their view it ought to be the duty of the employers or the Government to see that everybody has enough to maintain this “decent” standard of living.

Some think that things would be all right if wages were raised and their employers' profits lowered. But if they happen to work in a firm or an industry where sales are falling and profits are small or non-existent they look to the Government to give subsidies or do something to improve the sales of the article they produce. Lots of workers blame or envy other workers. The labourers envy the craftsmen, while the craftsmen and foremen complain that they do not receive wages sufficiently above the labourer’s rate to compensate for their skill and responsibility. Many teachers have a special resentment because, as they allege, they receive no more than do dustmen. University graduates think that a proper wages policy would recognise more the importance of having a degree, and scientific workers think that the scales are unjustly weighted in favour of administrative workers. Feminists clamour for the male “rate for the job” and provoke some of their male colleagues into demanding “justice” for the married man with dependents. The queue of the disgruntled stretches indefinitely and encircles the globe.

They are all there, the bank clerks and postal clerks, the parsons, the lawyers, the doctors, the dentists and nurses. The shopkeepers, too, have their grievances against the manufacturers and are looking with envy now at the furore created in France by the shopkeepers' dingy saint M. Poujade. Then there are the pensioners, the police the soldiers, the prison warders—and the Red Dean’s revolting choristers at Canterbury. At the end of the line are the non-workers the small unhappy band of surtax payers and millionaires who swear that high taxation compels them, if they are to live the lives of conspicuous wastefulness fitting to their station, to overspend their incomes and eat up their capital; a practice as loathsome to a Capitalist as is cannibalism to a missionary.

And for every group of complainants there is an aspiring trade union official, politician, or economist with a glib solution. The solutions are too numerous to list here. They are seemingly as varied as the occupational groups from which they spring but they all have one thing in common. They all assume that there is, or could be, in the world of Capitalism a defensible social principle by which wages could be fixed at a “proper” level. They all ignore the facts of Capitalist life. As practical solutions they are all so much trash.

The Law of the Jungle

Capitalism knows no social principle of distribution according to need, or responsibility, or skill, or training, or risk, or so-called “value of work,” or “usefulness to the community.” If Capitalism has anything that' approaches a principle it is that income shall be in inverse proportion to work. If you own capital in sufficient amount you never need work at all, and the more you avoid work in order to enjoy luxurious living the greater the esteem and attention you will have bestowed upon you.

The Socialist knows why this is and how the system works. Society’s means of living are owned by the propertied class, the Capitalists who are in business to provide themselves with their kind of income, profits. They employ the working class in order to make profit out of them, a proceeding the working-class are forced to accept because they are propertyless. The Capitalist pays as little as he can for the kind of worker he needs. All the worker can do is to bargain and struggle to get as much out of the employer as circumstances permit and what circumstances permit depends on whether the Capitalist needs the kind of skill the worker has to offer. If the employer needs a certain kind of skill and if the number of workers having that skill is limited the employer will1 have to pay accordingly for it, he will have to pay more to the skilled than to the unskilled worker. But if owing to the decline of a given trade, or the invention of a machine, which replaces craftsmanship, skilled operatives are not in demand their wages will fall.

In the depression of the nineteen thirties apprenticed engineering craftsmen, skilled coal miners, university graduates, and agricultural labourers, were a drag on the market. Capitalism had no need for all there were of them and their wages fell. During the war Capitalism had need of coal and food, of engineering and chemical products, and all these groups had their chance to push up wages beyond the rise of the cost of living. “Merit” and “human needs” and “usefulness to the community” and all the other fine-sounding phrases, have nothing to do with it. What counts is whether the worker is useful to the Capitalist, and the only usefulness the Capitalist knows is usefulness in making profit. The only argument he has to listen to is the fact of inability to get sufficient of the workers he needs, and the amount of strike pressure trade union organisation can bring to bear to prevent him getting enough workers at the wage he offers.

Is it crude, callous and inhuman? Of course it is. It is the law of the jungle, the only law Capitalism knows.

And has Socialism any alternative to offer? Indeed it has, but by Socialism we mean the Socialism of Socialists, not the spurious State Capitalist nostrums offered by the Attlees and Bevans and the clique who run Capitalism in Russia.

All over the world the cut throat Capitalist wages system operates and only Socialists have as their aim the replacement of Capitalism by a Socialist system of society in which there will be no wages system, no propertied class and working class, the one living on income from property and the other on wages. Under Socialism people will work cooperatively to produce what all need and all will freely take what they need out of the products and services cooperative effort achieves.

Of course the pseudo-Socialists named above all pay lip-service to the ideal of abolishing Capitalism and the wages system but whether or not they understand what they are talking about they show by their actions and programmes that they do not intend to seek that solution. They all in their time bleat about the need for bold, far-reaching action but all with one accord recoil from the Socialist objective they profess to desire.

For the working class of the world the choice is simple, either to take the organised political action necessary to introduce Socialism or to continue with Capitalism. The one thing that cannot be had is to impose on the Capitalist jungle some socially acceptable and satisfying wages policy.

Edgar Hardcastle

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

News in Review: Rising Prices (1961)

The News in Review column from the December 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rising Prices

Remember those big balloons splashed all over the hoardings about ten years ago?

Remember what they said?

This was their message: The Conservatives will stop the rise in prices.

An effective appeal, at the time. Money wages had shot up to undreamt of heights, but the voters were disappointed to find that prices accompanied them upwards. This wrecked the pre-war mirage of a glorious prosperity based on high wages.

For this reason, among others, the Tories came back in triumph to Westminster. A lot has happened since then and a lot has been forgotten; especially promises about reducing prices.

So the Financial Secretary to the Treasury had no need to tremble when he recently informed the House of Commons that, taking the purchasing power of the £1 as twenty shillings when the Tories got back in October, 1951, that same £1 note was now worth only 14s. 6d. A strange result of ten years of bringing down prices!

Naturally, the government have any number of excuses for their failure to keep their election promises. Most of them amount to the argument that they have been helpless in economic conditions outside their control.

This, of course, is not valid. The Conservative promise in 1951 that they would stabilise prices was in fact a claim that they could control Capitalism's economic tricks. Like others before them, they have failed.

Not that the government need worry. The workers have forgotten the rosy promises of 1951 and are now being bemused by the prospect of the £1,000 a year dustman. Capitalism will really start shaking when the workers despise all promises as worthless.

Strike at Margam

We might have expected some juicy headlines about the striker at Margam Steel Works, who turned up at the labour exchange in his Jaguar and parked it in amongst the smart cars of his fellow-strikers.

The pictures and the stories in the press were presumably intended to undermine the strikers’ case by suggesting that men who can afford to run a car have no need to strike.

This argument ignores one or two facts.

The bricklayers at Margam were engaged in unpleasant and dangerous work which put their health in great hazard. The Steel Company of Wales had agreed to the bricklayers doing this work under the “job and finish" rule and had allowed this rule to spread to men on a few other types of work.

Then S.C.O.W. decided that they were losing out on the deal and tried to change the rules. )

The company cannot be blamed for attempting to defend their interests. Neither can the bricklayers be criticised for resisting an effort to impose a severe wage cut and a dangerous worsening of their working conditions.

For this sort of conflict is inevitable in Capitalism, with its population split into two groups whose interests are opposed.

The Margam strike, and the strikers' fast cars, drives the point home. Workers must always fight for their interests under Capitalism—even under what is called Affluent Capitalism.

Nothing makes any difference to this —not even the ownership of a car.

Fifty Megatons

Why did the Russians do it? It is an absorbing, if chilling, occupation to speculate upon the reasons for the thirty and fifty megaton explosions.

Was it to prove a point for Krushchev in the current struggle in the Kremlin over the diversion of industrial resources? Was it designed to get something moving in the perilous deadlock in Berlin? Or to make the Chinese sit up and take notice that Russia is much the more powerful country?

The bombs could have been let off as a move in any, or all, of these conflicts. It will be a long time, if ever, before we find out the reason.

One thing is certain now, for all to see. The conflicts are typical of Capitalism in the 'Sixties—and so are the bombs. And this could mean more bombs, more radioactivity, perhaps even bombs dropped in anger.

Is this the world gone mad, as the nuclear disarmed think? In fact, there is a terrible sanity about it. Capitalism has always had its wars and. political disputes—who can expect it not to have the necessary weapons to settle its disputes?

But Capitalism has also always had its workers who are willing to support the system, although they may bemoan the horrors which it continually produces.

It is no getaway for them now to say that the bomb tests are a great, inhuman mistake, or the work of a callous government

Capitalism means fear and insecurity for the people of the world And this will go on until the people realise it and do something about it.

After the Motor Show

The Motor Show has been and gone. The bright lights of Earls Court are dimmed and the hectic publicity is over. Now come the harsh realities of trying to sell all the cars that were so enthusiastically praised.

As at all Motor Shows, there was the usual optimistic talk of large orders and encouraging sales. The big car-hire firms carefully saved their orders to coincide with the Show, as they do every year, and all the manufacturers expressed satisfaction with the Show. Nobody with any knowledge of the trade was deceived.

Apart perhaps from Jaguars, who did very well, all the manufacturers know that the struggle is going to be hard and that it will probably get worse before it gets better—if in fact it does. Motor sales have now reverted to their previous seasonal pattern and for the second winter running sales have gone into decline.

Of the Big Five, BMC and Ford are probably the least affected, but they also have their troubles. BMC's best seller is the Mini-minor, but they themselves have admitted that the ratio of profit on these is small. They have to sell a lot to make the balance-sheet look reasonable, let alone brilliant. Yet in overseas markets. at least those in which there is no favourable tariff to help, them, Mini-minors are too dear to compete effectively with the home products of similar size. Price is also a handicap to Fords, but they have apparently decided nevertheless that the only way to get a foothold in such markets is to cut their prices. They have admitted, for instance, that they are selling some Anglias at cost so as to make an impression on the French market It is more likely that after paying transport costs they arc selling at a loss.

And Abroad

All the other big national producers have also held their Shows and are faced with the same problems. France had no less than three completely new small cars at the Paris Show which can only mean tremendous competition within the country and added threats to those outside. Volkswagen had their new larger car on show at Frankfurt, but are nevertheless continuing to turn out the old model at the fantastic rate of 4,200 a day. In yearly terms this is something like 800- 900 thousand, about the same as the whole of British production will be this year. Italian car production is also rising rapidly, whilst at the same time they are thinking of steps to keep out steadily mounting imports. All these countries have plans similar to those of the British manufacturers to expand output.

One thing they must all be wondering is how they are going to dispose of this output. It will be interesting to see how things develop during the next few months. There may be surprises in store.

U.S. & Common Market

One of the most surprising news-items of the month has been the report that the United States may have to consider joining the European Common Market. Further information is that President Kennedy intends to press for a freer trade policy and get rid of restrictive trade laws.

Yet only 15 years ago European Capitalism had almost been written off by the U.S. Even the vast quantities of dollar aid that were poured into Europe were given more as an emergency stop-gap against Russia than in any expectation of a revival. Western Europe, in the eyes of American Capitalism, was “finished.”

But the old-in-the-tooth Capitalists of Europe were not finished. One hundred and fifty years' experience of exploiting the working class was still there to form the basis for revival. Now the countries of the Common Market are a threat to American Capitalism and, if Britain also joins, this threat will really be formidable.

The United Stales is in fact in a very similar position to that of the U.K. a few months ago. British Capitalist is now trying to get into the Common Market and, if it succeeds, the new lineup will only step up the pressure on the U.S. to follow suit.

What a change in the short space of 15 years! When people ask us how long it will be before Socialism is established. do they ever stop to think how quickly things arc now changing under Capitalism?

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.

Abundance and poverty (1960)

From the September 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

The point is often made, and in the material sense has some truth, that workers in some of the Western countries have never had it so good, and in relationship to the “Hungry Thirties” in Britain, it looks good. Unemployment in this country is very low, and the majority of workers in comparison to the Thirties are not so badly off. Capitalism is, of course, in a boom period that in some countries seems to go on for ever. If this is true, and we accept it for the sake of discussion, does this mean that our case has lost its validity? The answer is no. Socialism is a world wide system of society and we cannot reiterate this too much, so let us look at comparisons of wealth.

In America, surplus wheat which is rotting in storehouses, costs the Administration $370,000 a day rent to store after the Government has bought it at fixed prices. There is also a world surplus of sugar of some 13.7 million tons. On the other hand, 1,700 million people are today living without sufficient food and shelter, according to the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations. Again, the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief reports that food production in North America is up 20 per cent, and surplus wheat amounts to 1,382,000 bushels a year, and yet in the Far East there is less to eat than before the war. It follows therefore that the problems of the underfed and under-clothed is also our problem, wherever workers may be throughout the world.

There are both sympathisers and opponents of our case who say we do not support the struggles of these peoples to improve their conditions: this is not true. We support them in the only way that we can—with Socialist propaganda, showing that the movements to which they often give support are nationalistic in outlook and that they are aiming at changing masters and not the social system. A classic example of this is India, where they threw off the yoke of British Imperialism, but the Indian workers remain wage slaves.

Our task is not one of defending capitalism, in whatever guise. If we were to deviate from our purpose, of the establishment of Socialism, we would completely lose our identity and become another reformist party, one of the many who have made promises that could never be kept, within the framework of capitalism. No, the only solution lies in the understanding by the working class of the working of capitalism and the need for a classless, moneyless society.

Wheat farmers in America may not even be aware of the needs of society their first concern must be the profit made by sale of their corn. Wheat can rot in the storehouse of the North American continent and Indian workers can starve rather than sell the food at a loss. That is the stupidity of a profit making system. Socialism can and will provide the material and cultural needs of society as soon as the working class abolish for all time throughout the world a system that can produce super-abundance and poverty hand in hand.

Workers in the western hemisphere may think they are having it good.  Many families who run a car can now join the harassing and killing queues that line our roads every weekend or in the evenings they can watch .the “goggle-box" that churns out in the main a load of rubbish. And in the background the frightening spectacle of rockets with nuclear warheads that can traverse the world. Real wealth in human labour power that is dissipated on Blue Streaks, rockets or nuclear powered submarines could be put to the job of solving the real needs of the backward peoples, food, clothing and shelter and the right to live sane and intelligent lives.

The truth of the matter is we never had it so bad, and until workers realise that the problem of the eastern workers is fundamentally the same as that of his western counterpart, the capitalist world will blunder from crisis to crisis. To African workers we make a special plea. You are throwing off the yoke of imperialism and taking on the characteristics of national capitalism. Don't ask or expect us to support the various movements for Colonial freedom. We will not jump onto any nationalist bandwaggon in order to gain your support. Your problems in the last analysis are the same as ours. We want you to have a better life, and this you can only attain in a Socialist society.

Johnny Edmonds

Letter: Juvenile Delinquents (1958)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Greenford, Middlesex.

30/7/58.

Dear Sir,

The article by G. R. Russell on the above subject will do little to further the cause of Socialism as both Sir Hartley Shawcross and Mr. Ewen Montague spoke the truth.

I live on a Council Estate which is really well laid out, grass plots and verges, tree lined roads, and good gardens and there is a Park less than five minutes away where the children can play any game they like. The houses are well built, have parquet floors, central heating, half tiled kitchens, lavatories and bathrooms. The tenants include teachers, store managers, civil servants, etc., etc. Hardly a house (except my own) has less than £15 per week coming in.

One would think that under such circumstances the children would play in the Park and other open spaces provided, but do they? Oh no, its the streets, sitting in the gutters and on the grass plots under the shadow of notices prohibiting such action.

Not long ago three of the boys watched a family go out and promptly broke in, stealing money and articles. Opposite me, a house was being built privately; a work hut with glass along one side, was erected and within five minutes of the owner leaving not a pane was left intact. Later bricks, neatly stacked, were scattered to the four winds and later still, the entire glass in the windows had to be renewed three times. They even broke in and knocked holes in the dividing walls.

Was all this due to “environment” of either parents or children? Was it hell. It was due to lack of parental control and failure in home and school to teach the difference between “Mine” and “Thine.”

Yours faithfully,

B. S. Anderson.

Reply.

The article to which our correspondent refers (“Juvenile Delinquents Again.” July S.S.) commented on the question posed in the Yorkshire Post as to whether the current “light regard for morals or a weakening sense of responsibility” may be encouraged by “something in the nature of the society we have built up.” Our contributor, in his article, answered the question with a yes! and dismissed as superficial Sir Hartley Shawcross’s and Mr. Ewen Montague’s attitude of laying the blame on parents without mention of “ environment and conditions of poverty.”

It is true that our contributor illustrated his case against the capitalist environment in which we live by examples of bad housing and sunless streets, etc., but the case is not against merely the worst conditions but against capitalism itself.

Our correspondent’s examples taken from an area where the workers are more highly paid and better housed does not meet the Socialist case.

To start with, we would want to know much more about the problems of the parents who live there than the bare statement that most of the homes are believed to have £15 a week coming in (not exactly a princely sum to meet the cost of a family anyway). How many wage earners are there to a household; how many of the wives have to go out to work; what are the outgoings on rent and mortgages. A recent article on the similar troubles of the new town of Stevenage may give us a clue. It is a brand new town, with brand new houses, but, says the local Catholic priest. “Families are up to the neck in debt and their big worry is only whether they can keep the HP. going on the telly” (Empire News, 10th August, 1958). The same article instances a family of six with an income of £13 18s., but after paying for rent, food and other outgoings (including 57s. for rent and 17s. 6d. HP. repayments on T.V. and carpets) all they have left to buy clothes “and daily titbits,” etc., is 31s. 3d. a week.

But these are only a small part of the “environment” with which we, as Socialists, are concerned. The children of rich and poor live in different kinds of houses and neighbourhoods, but they all, and their parents too, live in a world given over to wholesale waste, personal and governmental, and to destruction, instability and the ever present threat of war.

Our correspondent wants the parents and teachers to shoulder their responsibility of teaching the difference between “mine” and “thine”; but how will this solve the problem? He asks them to hold with conviction and pass on to the young, the faith that respect for property is of paramount importance for their happiness. But how can the adults or the young find this a sufficient doctrine against the background of capitalism which constitutes the environment in which they live.

Editorial Committee.

Mixed Media: Richard Hamilton at the Tate Modern (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the October 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Richard Hamilton at the Tate Modern

There was a major retrospective of the work of Richard Hamilton at the Tate Modern in 2014. He is acknowledged as the inventor of 'Pop Art' which he described as 'popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business.'

The exhibition reconstructs his installation Fun House, originally shown as part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s 1956 show This Is Tomorrow. It incorporates film, music, distorted architecture, op art and Hollywood film imagery and pin-ups such as Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Marilyn Monroe, and Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet. It is an homage to 'Americana', as well as a celebration of the new youth and 'pop' culture of 1950s capitalism.

In his 1956 collage Just What is it that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? Hamilton has a muscle-man provocatively holding a lolly with the word POP and a woman with bare breasts wearing a lampshade hat, surrounded by emblems of the affluence of 1950s capitalism from a vacuum cleaner to a large canned ham. Capitalism is portrayed as 'cool', it was riding high in its 'golden age' of the post-war economic boom, the reformists believed capitalism could work in the interests of the working class, and Macmillan proclaimed 'people have never had it so good.' Hamilton particularly admired the German electrical company Braun and its Chief Design Officer Dieter Rams whose 'consumer products came to occupy a place in my heart and consciousness that Mont Sainte-Victoire did in Cézannes', and in 1964 he began to base works on Braun's marketing images.

After the failure of Keynesian capitalism in the 1970s, Hamilton was horrified by the 1980s capitalist restructuring under Thatcher, and the reintroduction of unfettered free market capitalism. His 1984 installation Treatment Room is inspired by the bleak, clinical style of the capitalist state reflected in the DHSS office or NHS hospital waiting room. A TV monitor where the X-ray machine would be repeats footage of Thatcher from the 1983 Tory Party Conference. His War Games (1991-92) used TV news footage of the 1991 Gulf War which portrayed the war as a sport for viewers and reminds us of the BBC Newsnight coverage with Peter Snow's sandpit and models. Later Hamilton portrays 'war criminal' Tony Blair as a gun-toting cowboy against a backdrop of military inferno in Shock and Awe (2010).

The Hamilton retrospective has some salutary lessons: you cannot 'reform' capitalism to work in the interests of the working class, and war is endemic to capitalism due to competition between capitalist groups for raw materials such as oil in the Middle East.

Steve Clayton

Your Share in the Wonders of the Age (1956)

From the May 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard 

What Is and What Could Be

At school and in the books and papers that we read we are always being told of the wonderful technical developments of the age we live in. The politicians who oppose Socialism give the theme a propaganda twist by arguing that it is capitalism that gives us these things and we would be foolish to give up the social system that does so much for us. The worker of a century ago, they say, did not have the benefit of all the marvels that the worker in 1956 is free to enjoy. But this is the heart of the matter: is the worker of today free to enjoy them? Let us examine two of the fields in which invention has been most spectacular—transport and communications.

Certain facts are beyond dispute. A hundred years ago there were no motor cars, no high-speed luxury liners, no supersonic air-travel; no telegraphs, no telephones or wireless, no radio or television. Messages can now be flashed round the globe in a few seconds, you can travel far and fast in comfort, news and opinions can be radioed anywhere and picked up by all who have sets, though this means only a smallish minority of the world’s population.

What then is wrong with the argument of defenders of Capitalism? They leave two things out of account. One is that under Capitalism you can only have what you can afford to pay for. The other is that the savage class struggles and international conflicts that Capitalism incites prevent most of these freedoms from being used for the good of mankind. Under Socialism the use of all these technical developments would be freely available to all; under Capitalism they are used, for the most part, as appendages to profit-making industry and commerce, and subject all the time—even for the rich who could afford them—to the demands and restrictions imposed by the greatest of all industries, preparation for war.

Is this an overstatement? Let us see. Let us take first the postal, telegraph, telephone and cable networks. The great bulk of all their traffic is for business and State purposes not for the enjoyment of the private lives of the mass of the population; it is mostly business traffic and would disappear under Socialism. This is even true of the least expensive of them, the postal services. Apart from Pool entries and Xmas cards workers rarely use the posts, and more rarely still the telegraph and cable services. Most of the telephones are business lines or the residential lines of the well to do. A small minority of working class homes have unshared lines but for most workers, using the telephone for personal calls means using the “communal" telephone in apartment houses or the street kiosk, with of course a considerable volume of calls made on the firm’s lines in office hours. Even in U.S.A., where telephone development has gone farthest, large numbers of subscribers put up with the inconveniences of shared lines because they are cheaper. In Russia, telephonically most backward of the Powers, the number of workers who have their own lines is a tiny minority of the working class.

And the chief cause of this everywhere is that the workers' wages do not extend to meeting the cost of an unshared telephone except at the expense of some other comfort or convenience.

The Workers’ Choice

It is the same with motor cars, television sets and travel. Workers are free to choose from all the rich variety spread before them but only within the narrow limits of their wage packets. For many it is only by living in a slum or cramped and dilapidated houses that they can afford their television set, or their old crock of a car that endangers their own and other people's lives on the roads. Why are there 1,500,000 pre-war cars still in use except chiefly because of cheapness? Have a car and a T.V. set and cut down on holidays, clothes and other expenditure: that is the common choice. A News Chronicle reporter, inquiring of five London dealers about people buying new cars found the dealers surprised that money was forthcoming in spite of the raising of the deposit to 50 per cent. He asked some of the purchasers how they did it. “I spoke to four who had, between them, cut smoking, sold the T.V.. sold furniture and economised on food. Two of their wives had gone out to work.” (News Chronicle 2/4/56).

The brewers even complain of falling sales of beer that have accompanied the buying of T.V. sets and travel abroad. Go away on holiday and take the rest of the year to save the money by going to work on cheap early morning tickets packed like half-alive sardines.

You can travel by luxury air-liner all over the world if you have the money: but most workers have never travelled by air, and most of those who have do so only in the Armed Forces when Capitalism is at war. You can holiday abroad, if you have long enough holidays, and if, as a worker, you resign yourself for the rest of the year to going without other things in order to save up the money. The great majority of British workers have never been abroad except for war, and have no passports.

And what of the freedom of movement and communication as progressively narrowed by governments for military and other reasons? Freedom to settle in other countries is more restricted now than for many decades. Trains, cars, ships and planes can easily carry you across frontiers, subject, however, to the restrictions and immigration quotas and entry permits imposed by governments. Hence the widespread and often cosily activities to secure illegal entry, and the dangerous traffic of human beings fleeing across barbed and mined and guarded frontiers of the iron curtain and other countries.

The Marvels of Communication

You can communicate with people living all over the world, provided that, for many countries, you pass the censorship on foreign mails and telegraph calls. The air is free to broadcast—except that a very large port of the world’s radio equipment is now devoted solely to the jamming of foreign broadcasts.

After a century of technical development of communications the flow of information and propaganda over many frontiers is now limited to balloons! (It will probably rise to still higher efficiency and employ the pigeon post).

It may be objected that at least “free" Britain does not engage in these retrograde practices. This objection overlooks the restrictions of entry to this country and the censorship in some colonies; and the new development of British jamming of broadcasts in Cyprus and the Middle East

And here at home the S.P.G.B. has for 20 years been steadfastly refused any opportunity to put the Socialist case on the air by the B.B.C.

This is how Capitalism works in all fields. Under Capitalism the working class have invented, discovered, and produced, all the technical marvels, but Capitalism fetters and distorts them all for the profit-making and military needs of the Capitalist groups of the world.

Edgar Hardcastle