News in Review: Two classes (1963)

The News in Review column from the December 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

At Home

Two classes

We are still, the government anxiously assured the voters in the recent by-elections, living in the Age of Affluence. Very well. As the Conservatives promise that their new government will bring in a more vital, more prosperous Britain, as the Labour Party bid for our votes with a vision of this country as a vast test-tube, what is the latest from the poverty and riches front?

The Co-operative Permanent Building Society reported that half the people who buy homes through them earn less than twenty pounds a week and that a quarter earn less than sixteen pounds a week. Two-thirds of the houses bought through the Co-op. cost less than £3,000. Anyone who has lowered himself into the perilous pit of working class house ownership will appreciate what these figures mean in terms of size and quality of houses and of struggle to pay off the loan on them. House owners are supposed to be among the most affluent of the working class but the Co-op's report shows that none of them live in a castle and that buying a house relieves nobody of the usual working class battle to get by.

Housing of another sort cropped in one more of those conferences—this time of the National Housing and Town Planning Council. Dr. Eric M. Sigsworth, lecturer in economic history at the University of York, said that there will be three million unfit houses or slums in this country by 1973. Now this is after the promised speed up in slum clearance. Perhaps they would clear more if they slowed down?

Many workers think that the road out of poverty, bad housing and the like, is one of loyal obedience to their employer. Among other firms, the Ford Motor Company have encouraged this idea. They give silver and gold badges to the men who have done long service, and who have kept essential machinery going when there was a strike on. They also give these men certain staff and pension privileges. But Fords are now in the midst of another efficiency drive and what account does that take of loyalty? The drive has meant that four of the gold and silver badge men have been sent back to the factory floor, which means that they have been demoted and that they have lost their privileges. If they did not like the way the company was repaying their long service, the lour men could have accepted dismissal. Which must have caused some hard, rueful, thinking in the loyal heads of Dagenham.

Everything very normal, in other words, for the working class. Nothing changing, either, for their social betters. The will of Sir George Usher, an industrialist who died last October, showed that he was worth over £2 million at the end of his life. Each of his sons inherited over a million pounds which must have come from somebody's hard work, but not theirs.

The Finance Accounts for the United Kingdom 1962-3 showed that it is still a paying business to be a figurehead for British capitalism. Annuities paid to the Royal Family amounted to £166,000 during the year. Not bad for reading out speeches which somebody else has written for you, shaking hands and generally doing as you are told.

Will the household budgets of any readers of the Socialist Standard be affected by the increase in the fees of Eton? Anyway, it is instructive to hear about them and to ask whether every child really has the equal chance in education the politicians are always promising. Eton has gone up to £554 a year. If you can't run to that you can try for Harrow or Winchester (both £498) or Charterhouse (£492). Or there is always the local Council Primary, which costs a little less and has other differences besides.

Getting to know you

It is a common fallacy that a Minister who is familiar with the problems which his department has to deal with is able to solve them that much more easily. And, of course, it gives a boost to people's morale if a Minister appears in their midst, looks at their conditions and clicks his tongue in sympathy. They forget that when he gets back to Whitehall he is so often quite powerless to do anything about the conditions.

So it has come about that successive Ministers of Housing have always made an early tour of the worst of the slums as if looking at them would make the slums go away instead of increasing, as they in fact do. And so it was that Lord Hailsham (as he then was), when he was put in charge of the unemployment problem in the North East, went straight off to tour the area—cloth cap and all. But any personal experience which Hailsham might have gained about the North East was wasted, because Douglas-Home replaced him with Edward Heath.

Now Mr. Heath is supposed to be a very astute man. Did he, then, abandon the pretence about the usefulness of a personal appearance? One of his first appointments was to fly off to the North East to see for himself what unemployed men and their families, and idle shipyards and factories, look like.

Labour and the TSR2

One of the latest babies of British capitalism, proudly wheeled out by its doting parents, is the TSR-2.

This aircraft, it is claimed, can do almost anything by way of airborne destruction. In its ability to perform the most horrifying deeds, in the range of its destructive power, in its diabolical versatility, the TSR-2 is something like a precocious, delinquent child.

These horrors are going to cost something like a couple of million pounds each. Commenting on this, Mr. Denis Healey, the Labour M.P. (who put the cost at £20 million each), asked what this sum represented in terms of schools, hospitals, and so on. This is a common complaint, whenever the amount of money which capitalism spends upon weapons is discussed. Yet what do the Healeys expect? Capitalism has a list of priorities to which it allocates its resources and human comfort is not near the top of it. This was as true under the Labour government which Mr. Healey supported as under the Tory one which he attacks.

Indeed, Mr. Healey showed how small are the differences between his own party and the Tories on the issue of armaments when he went on to say that the TSR-2 is a waste of money, which could better be spent on military helicopters and other transport aircraft and on the Buccaneer, a naval strike ’plane which is already in service.

The best, then, that the Labour Party offers us on the matter of armaments policy is to look after the purse strings more carefully than the Conservatives have done. They will try to make sure that every penny the British ruling class spend on their weapons gets value for money.

And perhaps they will succeed. Perhaps, under Labour, there will be no more Blue Streak fiascos. British capitalism will still have fearfully destructive armaments, the waste of human knowledge and resources will go on, but it will all be presided over by a Labour M mister of Defence who will make sure that it is done at the market price and not a penny over. Does this encourage us to believe the hypocritical Labour claim to stand for peace and progress? It does not.

Abroad

Guiana must wait

It was by something like a slick trick that Colonial Secretary Duncan Sandys brought the recent British Guiana constitutional conference, which was supposed to discuss ways of granting the colony independence, to a close.

The British government has rejected the idea of early independence for British Guiana. Instead, another conference will take place after fresh elections next year. The significant thing about the election is that they will be run on a proportional representation scheme which will probably break up the present party groupings. At the last elections the Peoples' Progressive Party, led by Doctor Jagan, got 43 per cent. of the votes, but 60 per cent. of the seats, while the opposition Peoples' National Congress, with 41.5 per cent. of the votes, got just over 36 per cent. of the seats.

This sort of result is common in the direct electoral system which British Guiana, and this country, has worked to. The fact that Mr. Sandys thinks that proportional representation is a good idea for British Guiana does not mean that he is thinking about advocating the same thing for Great Britain. The two big British parties do too well out of the present system for that.

The latest Sandys plan was, bluntly, a tongue-in-the-cheek trick lo impose Whitehall's own wishes upon British Guyana. Dr. Jagan described it as “ dastardly and unprincipled," which is just the expression which other people might have used about the Doctor's own action last year, when he called in British troops to suppress a rising in the colony.

In spite of Jagan's fulminating, the people of British Guiana seemed to have taken the news quietly. It would be good news indeed if this meant that they have come to understand that capitalism is full of diplomatic double-crossing and that in any case the Guianese working people have no more to hope for from independence than they had under British rule.

Sadly, this is unlikely at the present.

Jews in Russia

From the Soviet Union comes more indications of the recent trend there of persecution of the Jews.

The latest example comes in the October 20 edition of Izvestia which reports, and comments, upon the alleged crimes of a number of men but most prominently upon two called Shakerman and Roifman, both of whom are Jews.

These men are accused of embezzlement and bribery, of setting up a profitable racket in the produce of State factories and farms. The full story reminds us of the vast enterprise of Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22; they are said to nave been running a knitwear factory which embezzled machinery and with wool which they had diverted from collective farms. The produce, say the prosecution, was sold on the black market.

Izvestia is furious about these allegations, and raves that the men had amassed thirty million roubles in cash and a hundredweight of gold, diamonds and platinum. The paper has also assumed that the accused are guilty before their trial is complete.

Whether these men are criminals or not, there is mounting evidence of a campaign in Russia to use the Jews as scapegoats to excuse the country’s recent economic difficulties. This is a nasty subterfuge which has often been used in the past. Ignorant workers who are suffering the brunt of capitalism's problems are usually only too ready to blame some racial or religious minority for their troubles.

There need, then, be no surprise that this is happening in Russia. In any case, how is it that economic crimes arc possible in a country which is supposed to be Socialist? How can a country where everyone stands equally offer the chance for a criminal to amass enormous wealth while the rest of the people suffer hunger and other hardships? How can a society where wealth is owned in common have any sort of a market, black or white?

It is impossible to answer these questions, and to explain anti-Semitism in Russia, unless we face the facts. The Soviet Union is not a Socialist country—even supposing that such a thing as Socialism in one country were possible. It is a capitalist country and one where precious little democracy exists at that.

When we have got that straight, every thing else about the USSR falls neatly into place.

Business

Investment, profit, wages

The big mergers in Top Industry continue. Imperial Chemical Industries, who last May put up £10 million with Courtaulds to finance the acquisition of Tootal, have now lashed out another £13 million on Viyella International Ltd. Viyella have interests in spinning, weaving, dyeing and printing.

Viyella were not planning on any big capital investment in the near future but will obviously be able to use ICI’s money. ICI are probably interested in Viyella’s use of synthetic fibres, which now account for about half of its business. Industry is always seeking for ways of safeguarding its interests, but capitalism upsets its plans. Even a giant like ICI is no exception to this.

J. Lyons & Co. Ltd., the teashop firm, is another in the merger field. Its latest venture is in frozen food, the home market for which is estimated to be worth about 72 million a year.

Lyons are tying up their frozen food branch (Frood) with that of Associated Fisheries (Eskimo) and Union International (Fropax). This merger, it is hoped, will result in a combine which will initially command 16 per cent. of the market.

The move is presumably aimed against Unilever’s Birds Eye group, which at present claims two-thirds of the British retail market.

Capitalism is described, by its defenders. as an efficient social system. Yet it would be dillicult for them to find anything efficient or beneficial in the waste of the continual war which rival companies must carry on against each other over the carve up of a market.

The object of it all is, of course, bigger and bigger profits. A company which has succeeded in this past many expectations is Marks and Spencers, which since the war has been transformed from a rather dull chain store group into a bright, hard selling, and very profitable, concern. The very epitome, with its staff welfare schemes and its split second, split penny operation, of a “progressive’’ capitalist company.

The sales of M&S rose to £95.5 millions in the six months up to September this year. This was a record and with the Christmas rush to come, sales are expected to reach £200 million for the year —for the first time in the company’s history. To mark the occasion, shareholders got an extra 1¼ per cent, on their interim dividend.

And what about the people who make these sales, and mergers, and profits, possible? What do they get out of it? The wages of the working class are a constant worry to their employers, for the simple reason that higher wages mean lower profits, and vice versa.

That is why governments are always trying to control wages. Usually this control is described by a smooth phrase which is meant to persuade the workers that their wages are not being held down, and that nobody is trying to do so. Some industrialists, although they recognise their need for wage restraint, think that it should be done more subtly than has been the case in the past. This is what Lord Robens, Chairman of the National Coal Board, said on the subject when he spoke at last month’s Annual Conference of the Institute of Directors:

Whether we like it or not, the most sensitive spot in all our industrial relations is the size of Friday’s pay packet. That is why I deplore the continual use since the war of such phrases as "wage restraint,” "wage freeze,” and "pay pause" . . . .

A national productivity drive hasn't a hope of success if it is accompanied by phrases like that.

Their very sound puts a chill down a workman’s spine and they merely create ill-feeling and bitterness between management and men . . . 

Some sort of "guiding light” is essential if we are to rationalise the present chaos of wages settlement.

Inevitably, we must ask whether Lord Robens, when he was an M.P. supporting the 1945-51 Labour government—and later a member of that government—ever expressed so freely his dislike of the term ‘‘wage freeze”. He had plenty of chances too; it was the Labour government which invented it. Presumably, in the days when the Labour government was fighting to check wages, and using every euphemism in the book to do so, Alf Robens preferred to hold his peace.

Blogger's Note:

The aforementioned novel, Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, was reviewed in the November 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard by 'Ivan' (Ralph Critchfield).

King Coal makes a comeback (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

British capitalist class

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

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

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

State capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Profitable basis

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

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

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

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

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

Adam Buick

Notes by the Way: £3 10s. 5½d. a week (1958)

The Notes by the Way Column from the April 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

£3 10s. 5½d. a week

Miss Schulz, of the Oxford Institute of Statistics, worked out that it would be possible to feed a family of five on £3 10s. 5½d. a week on a diet corresponding to the pre-war “Rowntree” diet which in 1936 cost 21s. 7d. Readers of newspapers who heard about it were for the most part very indignant and blamed Miss Schulz.

Miss Schulz, like the late Seebohn Rowntree, was dealing with the cost of a “minimum" diet for a “working class” family.

The angry critics should be aiming at a larger target. They should be asking themselves what justification there is for a system of society which accepts the double standard of "working class" as distinct from human beings, and which concerns itself with calculating a minimum diet at a time when half the world is slipping into depression because it cannot sell its excess supplies of foodstuffs. They should ask why there should be people who can afford only £3 10s. 5½d. (or less) while other people can toss this away on a little dinner party for two or three.

Donald's Good Man Goes Wrong

From time to time the long-suffering workers have to put up with a special brand of confusion spreaders, the "progressive" clergy. One of them is the Reverend Donald Soper, idol of non-conformity, supporter of the Labour Party, regular contributor to the Tribune, self-styled Socialist and professed pacifist. His idea of Socialism is State capitalism. Hence, for example, his declared objective of “the preservation and extension of the Welfare State, so that those who are unavoidably out of work, will still belong to the community and will not be left to rot in the 'freedom and flexibility' of idleness" (Tribune, 7th March, 1958).

He spends much of his time criticising the aims and activities of his own party and clearly sees no inconsistency in supporting the war-making, capitalism supporting Labour Party while preaching pacifism and, in words, denouncing capitalism and supporting Socialism.

In line with his professional preoccupation with "sin" one of his contributions to confusion is to see the different capitalist national groups in terms of good and bad men. He evidently sees the “older and fatter" bandits of capitalism as “bad” and the up and coming, but as yet leaner bandits as “good.” It was inevitable therefore that his heart should go out to dictator Nasser and the other representatives of the exploiting class in Egypt. When the British and French governments started war over Suez he addressed a protest meeting at Caxton Hall (14th August 1956). He claimed to speak as a Socialist and pacifist and progressive Christian. But instead of putting the Socialist case against capitalism as the cause of war and as an exploiting system, all he could do was to condemn the aggressor capitalist groups and praise the defending capitalist group. Instead of calling on the workers to oppose capitalism (and its wars) he called for encouragement of the Egyptian capitalist figure-head, Nasser.

“I wanted to say in the name of Christianity that this Nasser ought to be encouraged and not be repressed, because I believe the root of the matter in him is good, and because it is good it is our business to evoke it by corresponding good and not to repress it by threats of violence."

But those who take sides between “good” and "bad” representatives of capitalism are asking for trouble. Just lately the good Colonel has been putting the imperialist squeeze on Sudan. Here was a chance for Soper to make an indignant protest. But we looked in Tribune in vain. Instead of loud protests there was a deafening silence.

Tribune had been rallying round Bourguiba of Tunisia, another “good" man, under attack from the “bad” French. Now Bourguiba threatens to break off diplomatic relations with Nasser, because, so he alleges, Nasser’s government has been conniving at a plot to assassinate him (Manchester Guardian, 7th March, 1958).

Apart from praying, what is Soper going to do about it?

Blood is not as thick as oil

While we are on the subject of assassination plots we should not overlook the fact that Nasser is said to be on the receiving end as well as being an instigator, for the Syrian partners in the newly united Egypt-Syria claim to have evidence that Saudi Arabia’s ruler paid £2 million to have Nasser bumped off (or was it only £1 million?). This should be a lesson to those who, rejecting the Socialist explanation of international groupings and rivalries, interpreted the evolution of Middle-East capitalism in terms of the blood bond and Moslem faith of Arab peoples. We now have Egypt and Syria facing Iraq and Jordan, with Saudi Arabia maintaining hostile aloofness. Oil and pipe-lines are the key to the situation, not race and religion or a supposed common hostility to imperialism.

The centre of interest is now moving westwards along the North African coast owing to the first developments of reportedly enormous quantities of oil under the French Sahara; with the Algerian armed rebels standing across the outlets to the Mediterranean. That is what keeps a French army of hundreds of thousands desperately trying to make the oil safe for French capitalism and for the British and other oil interests that have a hand in it.

Attitudes to the H-Bomb

As the gradations of opposition, half-opposition, half support and full support to the H bomb come to expression in the multiplicity of new organisations and declarations, it becomes a major task to know where they all stand. At one end there are the ”rely on the H bomb” lunatics; then the make but don't use or test, the make but don't test, the test, but don't use, the have but not in American planes, the keep but suspend work on, the do this now and the do it after Summit talks, the rely on good old conventional weapons, etc., etc.

The arguments between them are particularly sterile because of the tacit acceptance by all the contestants of the capitalist system of society. They can all knock the other man’s case to pieces, but none of them put up a Socialist alternative. Mr. J. B. Priestley is a case in point. In an article “H-Bomb Hotchpotch ” in the Daily Herald (5th March, 1958) he makes mincemeat of his opponents, but comes down to this in the end:—

“If this country walked out of the nuclear arms race and declared that it would defend itself if necessary with anything a man could lay his hands on, from shot-guns to bombs made out of corned beef tins, it would be a safer place than it is to-day; and certainly safer than Mr. Sandys and friends—who are gambling everything on the belief that nothing can happen . —can make it to-morrow."

Brave words, but it is a safe bet that if it happened, Mr. Priestley would be calling on us to die gloriously with our shot-guns against all the modern armoury of weapons (and probably denouncing the government of the day for not having provided better armaments) with never a thought that war because of capitalism is just as senseless whatever the arms and whichever capitalist group came out victorious.

If Priestley were a Socialist, adding his voice to the international Socialist stand against capitalism everywhere, in opposition to every capitalist government and party, he would be doing something really useful on behalf of humanity.

Labour Government and Strikes

Workers who support the Labour Party and have expectations that the next Labour Government will be different from the last should take note of the speech by Mr. Alfred Robens, who is tipped off to be their Minister of Labour. The following report appeared in the Daily Herald (21st February, 1958):—

"Originally, when private ownership of industry was widespread, a strike was intended to damage the profitability of a company and the private pocket of the owner.

“But times have changed.” Mr. Robens told a London meeting of the Industrial Co-partnership Association.

“We have moved into a managerial society in which shareholders are quite remote from actual management.

“Therefore the strike today does not affect the individuals who are managing in the way which it may have affected those individuals 50 years ago. The managing director’s salary goes on as before.”

"But it did hold up orders and caused people to be chary of investing in an industry with a black record of stoppages.

“The result is that the strike has a long-term boomerang effect of holding up investment in an industry, and so not enabling it to become more modern and reducing its profitability,” added Mr. Robens.

“It. disturbs the confidence of the customer, and it can have nothing but a harmful effect not only on the company, but on all those employed by it.”

Capitalist Culture comes to Florida

In the Manchester Guardian (1st March, 1958) Mr. Alistair Cooke told the sad story of American “progress.” 

"Until the great prosperity came along many of the smaller keys were ravishing; quiet tropical refuges of hardwood and limes and wild flowers and herons, brief reminders of the natural luxury that limestone and warm winds can breed in the middle of an aquamarine ocean. But the "developers” have been here as everywhere, and here, too—on the once lovely Marathon Key, for example—suburban Los Angeles seems to set the universal pattern : trailer camps, hot-dog stands, Joe’s Miracle Bargains in second-hand cars flaunting their strings of bulbs against the indigo night sky.

The harbour at Key West is much the same, and a town that once looked like the perfect setting for a romance by Tennessee Williams or a small domestic tragedy by William March is now the garish frowzy camp of souvenir pedlars and chrome motels and neon-lit saloons. Sometimes the sky darkens over and God pours out a deluge of punishing rain. The streets swirl and the sewers gurgle for a while in running floods. Then, after lunch, the sky is cloudless again. It is 80 degrees, and either by sea or sky the horizon is the gate of Paradise. But the aeroplane coach service and the real estate men together have converted one of the last and beautiful relics of the Spanish Empire into a Coney Island. There is no hiding place down here.”

Edgar Hardcastle

News in Review: Mr. Robens (1960)

The News in Review column from the August 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Robens

The Labour Party rank and file and the Mineworkers’ leaders have received with mixed feelings the news that Mr. Robens, a Labour Party leader, is to be elected Chairman of the National Coal Board. The majority of the Mine Workers’ leaders at their Conference at Llandudno were vociferous in their attack on the proposed decentralization that is now being discussed by the Management side of the industry. Mr. Sam Watson however suggested that Robens' name should be kept out of the discussion as the Conference should have confidence in a man who has spent his life in the working class movement, and he should be preferred to a retired General, Admiral or a Tory.

Putting aside all the discussions on the rights or wrongs of the appointment, one should view the set-up in its true perspective. After all, the retiring Chairman, Sir James Bowman, ex-Mineworkers’ leader, has been a party to the closing of uneconomic pits for at least the last two years. In fact, the East Fife coalfields of Scotland have become almost a depressed area, and this year it is proposed to close another 40 pits. And he also spent his life in the “working class movement.” With all the changes that will have to take place in the industry, it is important that the Chairman should have some understanding of the running of it and also some understanding of the best approach to the union.

Mr. Robens is undoubtedly a good choice from the Board’s point of view. Firstly, he has the association with trade unions as an ex-official of a union and Labour M.P. and also as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Fuel and Power in the Labour Government. He clearly has a knowledge of the administrative side of the industry. So, to sum it up, Mr. Macmillian has appointed himself a good chairman, and Mr. Robens has got £10,000 a year. What, of course is not mentioned by the Press is that nationalisation is just another form of capitalism and whoever is chairman of the N.C.B., his job is to run the coalmines and make them pay.

Cuba

Until recently, America has been paying inflated prices for Cuban sugar for the privilege of refining and marketing oil in Cuba. The current fracas was touched off by the American proposal to limit imports of Cuban sugar. As to be expected, the old imperialist game of fishing in troubled waters is being played with great gusto by the Soviet Union. Their agreement to supply crude oil to Cuba will serve the dual purpose of getting rid of some of the surplus oil that is steadily accumulating in the Caucasus and getting one foot firmly stamped down on America's doorstep. Undoubtedly, having the “enemy” so close to the American mainland will upset the U.S. defence system. The Cuban dictator, Dr. Castro, is taking full advantage of the situation and whether America will tolerate this remains for the moment a matter of conjecture. Only one thing is certain, Whatever the outcome, the poverty stricken peasants and workers of Cuba will remain the poverty stricken peasants and workers of Cuba.

Japan in Turmoil

From recent events in Japan it would appear that the more help one gets the less grateful one becomes. When it is considered that Japan’s economic recovery was primarily due to U.S. assistance and America’s need for overseas military bases, one would have thought Uncle Sam’s representative, Mr. Eisenhower, would have had no difficulty in a courtesy call to a “ great sister democracy.” The visit was to have been marked by the signing of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty which would extend the Japanese agreement to U.S. military bases. Despite the precautions taken (which included the President’s “ bullet-proof bubble-top car,” 25,000 police, 2,000 firemen, 38 fire engines, 15 ambulances and four radio cars), the trip was called off.

We are not particularly concerned with the reasons for the cancellation of the visit. It is certain that considering the nature of the mass demonstrations, many of the Japanese have memories of the consequences of military alliances, particularly since it is the only country which has had experience of nuclear warfare and its effects. The point must be made, however, that mere demonstrations against the effects will not solve the problems facing the Japanese people. The history of capitalism is littered with broken treaties and alliances. The Japanese capitalist class whom Prime Minister Kishi represents, and who have benefited greatly by their close relations with America and its enormous post-war loans, have every interest in establishing and developing once again their so-called “defensive forces.” These armed forces and the fact that Japan is the most highly industrialised power in Asia with a dearth of natural resources and an increasing population, will ensure more success in their demands for greater “freedom of action” and the usual demand for a more independent “foreign policy” which in capitalist terms means the rat-race for a share of the world’s markets. To the Japanese working class we suggest that treaty or no treaty, they have still got capitalism and the constant threat of another holocaust, nuclear or otherwise.

The Labour Party

The decline of the Labour Party since its 1945 election success has now reached a level that has caused some speculation in the Press as to whether the Party is finished as a political force In their articles on the subject, the writers usually attribute the troubles of the Labour Party to the lack of unity within its ranks. In capitalist political circles, unity is an expedient for winning elections and not a factor brought about by an understanding and acceptance of basic principles. How often in the past has the SPGB been urged by critics to unite with the various capitalist left-wing parties as a means to further the cause of Socialism? This despite the fact that the political outlook of the parties are in direct opposition.

The present dilemma of the Labour Party arises out of the apathy of the working class towards policies which sufficed to lure the workers into returning a Labour Government in 1945, but failed to deliver the goods. The arguments ranging round Clause 4 show that the main plank in the Labour Party’s policy—nationalisation—has been tried and found wanting as a solution to the workers’ problems.

Homes—at a price

Are you desperately searching for a flat? Are you dissatisfied with your present housing conditions? Do you feel perhaps that you would like to improve upon your existing living quarters? Do not delay, but instantly get in touch with Ralph Pay & Taylor, agents for builders Rush & Tompkins (absolutely no connection with Slapiton & Leavitt of Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist fame), who are just about to start building a block of 12 luxury flats and a penthouse in Hyde Park Gardens with splendid views across Hyde Park Evening Standard (30/6/60). The flats will sell for about £40,000. However, if you’re interested in the penthouse, which will cost more, you’d better put your skates on, because Mr. Whitney Straight, deputy Chairman of Rolls-Royce, is understood to have first refusal.

Nationalisation and Profits

A little simple arithmetic gives the game away. Last year, the British Transport Commission piled up what they call a working deficit of £12.6 millions. But this deficit was declared after taking account of the fixed interest which the Commission must pay on its stock. This stock, of course, replaced private shares many of which had not paid a dividend for some time before the nationalisation of the railways and other transport undertakings by the Labour Government. The fixed interest charges, with other central expenses, came to £42 millions. Now £12.6 millions away from £42 millions leaves £29.4 millions. And that is the profit which the Transport Commission actually made last year. It is fairly safe to assume that no privately owned railway—or any other company—which made £29 millions, would deliberately land themselves in the red by paying £42 millions out in interest. But that is precisely what British Transport Commission—like many other nationalised industries—have done. Which is an indication that, whatever nationalisation may be, it is not a kick in the teeth for the shareholders.

Clean Sweep

Hoovers have something of a reputation for American business ruthlessness. This was a popular explanation for their recent declaration that 800 of their workers were to be sacked as redundant. It was certainly common among the two and a half thousand Hoover workers who struck in protest at the proposed sackings. Hoovers blamed the redundancy on to the hire-purchase restrictions which the government had just imposed. But that is only part of the story. In fact, orders for products like washing machines had been falling for some time before the restrictions came on; production had started to decline well before the last Budget. In addition, foreign competition has been strong, as a glance in the window of any electrical goods shop will reveal. Hoovers estimate that 10 per cent of the washing machines and 8 per cent, of the vacuum cleaners sold in this country in 1959 were imported.

This could mean that last year’s boom in what are called the durable consumer goods industries has blown out—and Hoovers, who benefited so extraordinarily from it, have been the first to suffer. There is one other point worth noticing. Hoovers employ some expensive brains so that they can be forewarned against slumps. The company’s last Annual Report said that 1960 would be “. . . another satisfactory year although not at the same level as 1959." This is not the first economists’ forecast to be upset by . the inherent anarchies of capitalist society.

Inside Prison

Recently, the Home Office announced the Government’s plan to spend £12m. over the next three years on a new prison building programme. It is hoped that the new prisons and other penal-institutions will ease the present need to incarcerate thousands of prisoners three to a cell.

One feature of the new buildings that has been claimed as a step forward is the proposal to build lower perimeter walls.. In future these will be concrete walls only 6 ft. in height though just within these walls will be an inner 12 ft. chain fence surmounted by barbed wire. But for the most part, prisoners will continue to be confined within punishment houses, such as Wandsworth, Brixton, Reading, Strangeways and Dartmoor, all jails many years old.

A great deal has been made of these proposals and they have been taken as the policy of an enlightened administration, but in fact they are further evidence of the Government’s commitment to dealing with offenders against propertied society with repressive punishments. In perspective, prisons are a horrible scar across the face of modern society filled with the worst failures of our cruelly competitive social system, persons who in the main start out with enormous handicaps of ignorance and poverty. At best prisoners are robbed of all dignity and locked up in degrading circumstances. At worst they are starved on a diet of bread and water, sometimes flogged and occasionally have their necks broken on the scaffold.

A basic hypocrisy of capitalism is that it legalises the exploitation of the mass of mankind and supports the social privilege of the propertied class. The individual is usually held responsible for crime and very few suggest as the cause the failure of our own society. When all men are elevated to the dignity of an equal relationship in regard to wealth, the rebellious act of crime and the irrational institutions of punishment will not exist.

News in Review: Nkrumah falls (1966)

The News in Review column from the April 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nkrumah falls

After Nigeria, Ghana. After Ghana— where?

The African continent is crowded with newly independent states with leaders who, having come to power on the promise of freedom, have established dictatorships. Some of these have been described, with breathtaking audacity, as “One Party Democracies” or something similar. But whatever lies are used to excuse them, the fact is that these countries are dictatorships where only one political party is legal and where opponents of the regime are usually imprisoned or exiled.

The Africa which was once the plaything of the imperialists is now in a turmoil under its suppression. It may well be that Nkrumah is not the last dictator there to lose his office.

The history of independent Africa must be a great disappointment to the supporters of organisations like the Movement for Colonial Freedom, who were once so insistent that freeing Africa from European rule would give the continent a happier, more democratic way of life.

It was obvious from the outset that these organisations did not understand the problem they were dealing with. It was clear that the alternative to rule by the colonial powers was simply rule by a native government. At the best, this was the replacement of one type of suppression by another.

Sometimes it has turned out worse that that. In Dr Banda’s Nyasaland, for example, the government recently pushed through an Act which revived public executions—something abolished by the British when they occupied the country.

And sometimes, of course, it has meant outright dictatorship, with a leader surrounded by sycophants and living in continual fear of his life. This was Ghana under Nkrumah.

The African states have not yet absorbed a lesson which some of the older capitalist powers have found useful. A political opposition has its uses. It acts as a brake on a government's excesses, it is a method through which a country’s capitalist class can exert pressure on a government, and by publicising facts which are inconvenient to a government it actually keeps that government in touch with reality.

Nazi Germany, as many of its military, industrial and scientific leaders have since testified, suffered as a capitalist state because of the intricate, intolerant nature of the Hitler dictatorship. And it is hard to believe that Nkrumah would have gone to Peking if he had reason to think that his power was being undermined.

The fact that he did not realise this was, in very great part, due to the lack of an opposition in Ghana. Had there been one, it would have reflected the growing discontent with Nkrumah’s regime and with the country’s increasing economic difficulties.

The absence of a safety outlet meant that the whole thing exploded and Nkrumah, the great dictator, the redeemer, the man who thought that a dictatorship would keep him in power and would make him Africa’s man of destiny, has been hoist with his own petard.

Lord Robens said it

Lord Robens, who is chairman of the National Coal Board, is the best friend the miners ever had. Who said so? Lord Robens himself.

A couple of months ago Robens was made a Director of the Bank of England —a job which, as everyone knows, was created with the special intention of being friendly to the miners.

This elevation came after some years of Lord Robens busily closing pits and sacking tens of thousands of workers in the coal mining industry.

Of course, this process was never vulgarised with the name “sacking”. The Bank of England probably called it rationalisation. Politicians like Mr. Wilson probably call it modernisation. Lord Robens, presumably, calls it being the Miners’ best friend.

The mineworkers, however, have been doing a bit of rationalisation of their own with results which have made Lord Robens feel less than friendly.

Many of them have noticed the large scale sackings which have been carried out. They have also read in the newspapers that the National Coal Board has plans for more closures, more redundancies. Not unexpectedly, a lot of them have decided that the Coal industry holds no future for them, and they have been getting out of it.

During 1965 a total of 38,000 people left the Coal industry. But this was twenty thousand more than the Coal Board intended; they had planned to sack only eighteen thousand. The rest left on their own accord, which has caused Lord Robens to complain:

  The run out at this pace was something of a disaster for us. It has had a very adverse effect on the financial turn-out of the Board.

Now it is obviously very inconsiderate of the miners not to sit down and wait until the Coal Board decides to clear them out, and to jump the gun by going out and finding another job before everything is ready for them to be sacked like docile, boss fearing workers should be.

Perhaps they are applying the same standards as Lord Robens applies to the workings of the mines. He is interested in making a profit; they are interested in a secure wage. Perhaps they are disillusioned with nationalisation, which Lord Robens, when he was plain Alf and a member of the post war Labour Government, supported but which he is not so sure about now:

  He (Lord Robens) was in favour of rationalisation of the coal distribution trade but no nationalisation. (The Guardian 8/3/66).

Whatever the truth of this, one thing is certain. The miners who are leaving the Coal industry are doing no more than try to protect their interests in a social system which continually attacks them. Whether they succeed or not they cannot be criticised for taking the action; capitalism is a world where everyone fights for himself.

Least of all can the miners be criticised by those who so assiduously uphold capitalism, as politicians, as employers, as leaders of capitalism’s symbols of commerce and privilege. In this respect, Lord Robens lives in a very fragile glass house, and he should be the last person to throw lumps of coal.

Communist confusion

The Communist Party, which has never been famous for clear thinking, is deeper in confusion than ever.

To start with, they are hopelessly split over the quarrel between China and the Soviet Union. These two countries were, after all, once supposed to be in inseparable comradeship in the struggle for Socialism—and here they are squabbling over all the classical capitalist issues like frontiers and trade routes and spheres of influence.

For the Communist who takes seriously the claim that Socialism exists in Russia and China, the choice between the two must be next to impossible.

Then there are events like the recent trial in Russia of the writers Daniel and Sinyavsky, for allegedly criticising the Soviet regime. The Communists are in more than one mind about this.

Should they automatically condemn the two writers, as they have done in similar cases in the past, as enemies of the people, saboteurs of freedom, imperialist agents and the rest of the terminology which we all know so well by now?

Or should they agree with John Gollan, Secretary of the Communist Party in this country, when he said that “The handling of this affair has done a greater disservice to the Soviet Union than the works of Sinyavsky and Daniel”?

For a Communist who has always dutifully believed that the Soviet can do no wrong, and that the Russian government is incapable of prosecuting a man unless he is guilty (even before he has been tried) the choice here must be very difficult.

And what about the Communist Party's decision to abolish the Daily Worker and replace it this month with a paper called the Morning Star?

Is there not something honourable, to a Communist, in the word worker? Should he not be proud to sell a paper with it blazoned across the top?

Or is the Communist Party now trying to cover the association which it has always claimed with the working class movement? Has it gone in for a bit of market research and discovered something which was obvious anyway—that the history of the Daily Worker had made it, for many members of the working class, a bad joke?

Perhaps the name Morning Star is simply part of the Communist Party’s efforts to get in on the latest craze of modernisation. At their rally last month at the Festival Hall, the Communist Party were claiming loudly that they were the real modernisers of British capitalism.

They were demanding more expenditure on schools, a nationally integrated transport system, reduced arms spending. And naturally there were the usual inducements of magnificently generous pensions, family allowances and so on—generous in direct proportion to the unlikelihood of the Communist Party getting power and having to implement them.

All of this must have been very confusing to any member of the Communist Party who strayed into the hall under the impression that he belonged to an organisation that had something to do with Socialism. It must have been confusing to those who remembered the wartime days when the Communists wanted more spent on arms, and the days when, far from supporting modernisation, the Communist Party was opposing the Attlee government’s productivity drive.

Yes, all very confusing—unless we grasp a basic fact. The Communist Party, whatever it claims for itself, does not stand for Socialism and never has done. It is merely another, if rather peculiar, party which supports capitalism.

And that is exactly the reason for their changes of policy—and for the splits and arguments and confusion they cause among the party’s misguided supporters.

A boring business

Everyone knows that at election time political parties promise all sorts of rewards to people who vote for them— provided, of course, enough of them vote to get the right side into power.

From another point of view, though, the electorate deserve some sort of recognition for the tremendous effort they make to find something to distinguish the Labour Party from the Conservatives and, having found it, to make enough of an issue of it to persuade themselves to vote one way or the other.

At one time, perhaps, this was a little easier. There was a time when the Labour Party breathed the fire of revolution—or at any rate when they wanted to nationalise a few industries, which they passed off as Socialism. There was a time when the Tories stood for red-blooded Private Enterprise and for the British- Empire-On-Which-The-Sun-Never-Sets.

These were at any rate clear differences between the two parties, even if they were superficial. But even that has changed now.

Ever since the Labour Party came to power after the war, they have inexorably travelled the road which their nature and their policies laid out for them. They have grown more and more like the Tories. They have tried—how they have tried during the past few years!—to convince the electorate that they are no more than an alternative method of running capitalism, with no more nonsense about social revolution.

This has had its effect. Mr. Wilson has been openly referred as the best Conservative Prime Minister we have. Very few serious political correspondents pretended during this last election that there were

any real differences between the two sides.

  . . . no one could maintain that there is a black and white difference either in the politics or the competence of this Labour Government and its Conservative predecessor. (Robert McKenzie in The Observer). 

  If a Tory Government were returned it would either have to pursue similar economic policies or instigate an about-turn. If the first applies we might as well stick to the present lot. If the second were to happen, we should have complete confusion. (William Davis in The Guardian).

For the average voter, who wanted nothing more than to support a capitalist government, the election came down to a few simple questions.

Did he want a government which said it would build another aircraft carrier or one which said it would not? A government which said it would nationalise steel or one which said it would not? A Prime Minister who said he stood for action not words or one who said that this is a time for decision?

These were the limits of the argument between the Labour and Conservative parties. On the other issues their differences were hardly discernible and in any case both of them naturally reserved the right which all capitalist parties reserve, to change their minds when they are in office.

So the election was really all a massive sham, a choice between two similars. It was also, for anyone who is interested in the welfare of the human race and who realises the potential which lies behind the votes at an election, a terrible, frustrating bore.

The Review Column: Sonic Booms (1967)

The Review Column from the September 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sonic Booms

Let no one deceive themselves that the sonic booms over various parts of the country last July were inflicted as part of a test of people's reactions.

Firstly, it soon became clear that Wedgewood Benn's Ministry of Technology had not bothered to set up any machinery to gauge reactions to the booms, secondly the booms were nothing like what can be expected if supersonic airliners are allowed to fly overland.

If the development of other types of aircraft is any guide, the operators of the supersonic planes will want to fly them all day and all night, everyday and every night. The prospect which this conjures up is nothing like the single isolated crack of a small jet fighter in the middle of a summer afternoon, described by Wedgewood Benn as ". . . at an intensity well below that of supersonic airliners”.

Of course the booms provoked a lot of protest, but Wedgewood Benn, under fire in the Commons, had the answer to them all: 'Substantial sums are being put by this country into advanced aircraft, the financial success of which will in part depend on whether the aircraft fly from other people’s territory.'

The Concord, then, is no more than a typical product of capitalism. A lot of money invested in it; side effects unpleasant, probably dangerous; competition the driving force behind its production; no profit incentive to solve the problem of its effects.

In this situation, the comfort and safety of people on the ground are only a secondary consideration. There is reason to believe that the booms last July were not tests of our reactions, but the first step in getting us accustomed to the idea of them, in preparation for the days when they are banging off in earnest.

And this, let us remember, is what capitalism calls progress.


Aberfan

The Aberfan Tribunal promised that there would be no whitewashing. They produced a report full of memorable phrases (“bungling ineptitude"; "subterfuge and arrogance by the National Coal Board"; “eight years of folly and neglect”) and they laid the blame for the disaster, on the National Coal Board, its headquarters, its divisional board, and four of its officials.

In this, the tribunal followed the accepted pattern of all enquiries into disasters. Somewhere, somebody—a railway signalman, an airline pilot, a ship's captain—makes a mistake or breaks a rule. It is all too easy, afterwards, to point the finger.

Very few people care to wonder about the context in which the ‘mistakes' are made, the rules ‘broken’.

Only in passing, for example, did the Aberfan tribunal deal with the basic cause of the disaster, which was the very existence of the slag heaps, up on the mountain above the doomed village.

Tipping waste from coal mines is, after all, the simplest and cheapest way of disposing of it. In South Wales, the valleys cannot be used for the tips because that is where the pit heads and the houses must be built. So that the stuff is dumped onto the mountains, where it is a continual eyesore and menace.

Of course they could stop tipping but, as the tribunal said on this very point ". . . the reflection that to stop tipping could bring about the closure of the Merthyr Vale Colliery may well have led to the quick suppression of those doubts . . ."

Of course they could deposit the stuff underground but this, said the tribunal, was neither “technically feasible now nor economically practicable" (The Times estimated the cost of removing tip complex alone at £3 million).

Thus the tribunal accepted the economic confine within which capitalism’s industry operates. It accepted that anything which is not economically practicable must be rejected, it accepted that people must live in the constant need to work for their living. It accepted that, although a certain amount must be done to mitigate the hardships of this social set-up, in the end we must make the best of it.

The economic practicabilities of capitalism have a lot to answer for, in coal mining more than in most other industries. Aberfan was only the latest, if one of the most unusual, of the disasters caused by the ‘economic’ production of coal.

Lord Robens (as the Daily Telegraph of 7th August was unkind enough to recall) once said that the Labour Government in 1950 “washed the blood off the coal” which was normally on it when the Tories were in power.

After Aberfan it may be convenient to blame individual workers, employees of the National Coal Board. The true culprit is capitalist society—and there is still, after all, blood on the coal.

Sandys’ Racialism

One of the first to exploit the irrational fears the Detroit riots created was Tory former Minister Duncan Sandys. In a statement he called for a stop to all entry into Britain of what he called coloured people and added, for good measure, “including relatives of those who are here’’. We don’t know if Sandys has prepared a series of amendments to the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts which will provide immigration officials with a precise standard for judging who are to be considered coloured and who not. We doubt it. For Sandys seems just to be concerned with encouraging hostility between people with lighter and people with darker skin pigmentation.

Perhaps the most revolting part of Sandys statement read:

  The breeding of millions of half-caste children would merely produce a generation of misfits and create increased tensions.

The words breeding, half-caste and misfits seem to have been carefully chosen—with a view to stirring up hostility to so-called mixed marriages and their offspring. What precisely does Sandys mean by misfit? He may be subscribing to the old racialist myth that what they call race-mixing leads to physical and moral degeneration. Or he may just mean that such children will be subject to prejudice. Or perhaps he deliberately meant to be ambiguous; to suggest one thing while having a let-out if challenged. If he means that these children would be the victims of prejudice, we can only assume from the fact that his words encourage such prejudice that he thinks it a good thing; that he favours a virtual caste system under which the so-called whites are on top and the so-called blacks at the bottom. We can only suggest that as a former director of Ashanti Goldfields and other goldmining companies in Ghana he should be careful about biting the hands that have fed him for years. He should also be careful about talking of sending people back. Somebody might take his fancy French name as a reason to send him to Normandy.

Robens admits it again (1970)

From the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lord Robens, the chairman of the National Coal Board, has again stated that the nationalised coal industry is run on state capitalist lines. He told the annual conference of the National Union of Mineworkers in Douglas on 9 July:

  In 1961 the Tory Government produced the White Paper called "Financial and Economic Obligations of Nationalised Industries". With this, the old Morrisonian concept of the socialist philosophy of public ownership gave way to State Capitalism; which even the return of a Socialist Government did not change.

The last Labour government (which Lord Robens as a member of the Labour Party supported) was not socialist. Nor were the nationalised industries run on socialist lines up until 1961. Herbert Morrison’s philosophy was merely that these industries should subsidise the private sector rather than try to make profits themselves. Oddly enough Morrison once himself denounced one public corporation, the Port of London Authority as a form of capitalism (Daily Herald, 30 July, 1923)

Robens Admits It? (1968)

From the May 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lord Robens, who was a Labour MP from 1945 until in 1960 he became Chairman of the state capitalist National Coal Board, told an NUM weekend school in Blackpool on 31 March:

Recalling to miners the nationalization of coal, gas and electricity industries, he said: ‘I do not believe that in 1945 those of us who were nationalizing these industries would have done it with so much enthusiasm if someone had told us then that they were going to turn into state capitalism'. If they had Labour MP’s at the time would not have jubilantly sung ‘The Red Flag' in the corridors of the House of Commons.

But they were told. They did not listen but carried on doing ‘something now'. Long before 1945 the Labour party and its supporters were warned by the Socialist Party of Great Britain that nationalisation was not Socialism, or even a step toward it, but merely state capitalism. In December 1945 the Socialist Party brought out a pamphlet, Nationalisation or Socialism? explaining just this. Another pamphlet. Is Labour Government the Way to Socialism? published the following month, made the same point:

Not nationalisation, which is just another name for State Capitalism, but Socialism which involves the abolition of capitalism, is the objective for which the working class must strive. The Labour Party is the party of State Capitalism. It is not a party serving the interest of the working class.

The Passing Show: What it Means (1962)

The Passing Show Column from the January 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

What it Means

In The Times recently there was a reference to President Nasser’s nationalisation policy, under the name of "Arab Socialism"; and on the same day (27/10/61) there was a report of a speech by the President of the Senegal Republic in which he referred to “ the Negro-African form of Socialism.” So much confusion is caused by reformist politicians in every part of the world wishing to masquerade under false colours that it was not surprising to read (in the same issue) the following report of a meeting of the so-called “ Socialist International ” (which is in fact a collection of Labour Parties):

  A particularly able speech was made by a delegate from the Action Group of Nigeria, who, he said, had recently announced that they were going to embrace democratic socialism, and were now hotly discussing what that meant.

For the benefit of the Action Group of Nigeria, democratic socialism means nothing that socialism does not already mean. Socialism, being a system voluntarily entered into by society as a whole, and being without any coercive forces, is by definition democratic. In the same way, it is pointless to talk about Arab socialism or Negro-African socialism; one might as well talk about Birmingham Socialism or Tooting Socialism. Socialism is in its essence international, and knows nothing of racial or national differences.

All that is needed to complete the confusion is for the Labour Parties of the Common Market countries to join together and start talking about “Common Market Socialism.”

Apes

Reviewing a recent book (African Genesis, by Robert Ardrey) a Sunday Express writer triumphantly records the author’s conclusions about monkeys and apes (22/10/61):

  He shows clearly that their most powerful inborn drive is, first, for status; next, for territory (both family and tribal); and, only third, for sex. Thus such things in men as ambition, patriotism, and a yearning for a house of one’s own are not—as many fashionable thinkers have tried to make us think—an artificial product of an artificial civilisation. They are natural and inborn, especially in the higher animals.

Even if, for the sake of argument, we accept what Ardrey says about apes, his premises clearly do not support his conclusions. It would only be possible to reason in this way if man was descended from the monkeys or the apes: but, in fact (although this may be news to the Sunday Express) no scientist has ever maintained that this is so. What all scientists do now maintain is that man and the other primates are descended from a common ancestor. So what has to be explained is why man has left all the other animals far behind, while the monkeys are still swinging in the trees. And if the main interests of apes are, first, status, and second, grabbing more territory, that would go a long way towards accounting for the great gulf between man and monkeys. Men have developed in the way they have simply because they co-operated—they lived together amicably in tribes and owned property in common. As Engels says (in Chapter 2 of The Origin of the Family): 

   For man’s development beyond the level of the animals, for the achievement of the greatest advance nature can show, something more was needed; the power of defence lacking to the individual had to be made good by the united strength and co-operation of the herd. To explain the transition to humanity from conditions such as those in which the anthropoid apes live to-day would be quite impossible; it looks much more as if these apes had strayed off the line of evolution and were gradually dying out or at least degenerating . . .  Mutual toleration among the adult males, freedom from jealousy, was the first condition for the formation of those larger, permanent groups in which alone animals could become men.

No satisfaction

Who said this? "There were literally thousands of jobs in industry which gave no satisfaction to the worker and never could . . .  as a result among the great working class areas of the country” men were getting no "sense of fulfilment . . . from the tedium of their day-to-day jobs.” 

It was no Socialist, agitating for a new society; it was the head of the state-capitalist board which now runs the coal-mines—Lord Robens. He was speaking at the recent national conference of the Institute of Personnel Management. It would be difficult to think of a much stronger argument against our present form of society than this—that the workers get no sense of fulfilment from their jobs, which occupy so large and so central a part of their lives: yet here we have one of our leading operators of state-capitalism saying just that.

If Lord Robens really believes this, it is about time he thought of resigning his job and joining the Socialist Party, since that is the only way he can help to bring about a change in the situation.

Alwyn Edgar