50 Years Ago: The Cry of the Workless (1955)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

These results arise naturally from the conditions of employment to-day. The owners of property are ever on the look-out for means of augmenting their possessions. They employ their capital in industrial operations simply for the purpose of deriving from its use profit or interest. So long as they get their profits increased they care little for the conditions under which the work in their factory, in their mine, or on their railway is carried on. They never seek to know whether those working for them are living happy and contented lives. For them the worker is an abstraction—the materialisation of some portion of their capital in exactly the same way as another portion of their capital shows itself as raw material, as auxiliary material, as factory building, or as finished product. He sees the worker figuring on his periodical balance-sheet as “Wages,” and cares nothing that “Wages” means so many sentient human beings capable of thinking, loving, functioning even as he does.

Why then should he hesitate, when the markets are glutted, when his “wages” have been transformed into more goods than the market can consume, when goods cannot be sold because hungry men and women have not the wherewithal to buy food, when ill-clad children cannot have clothing provided for them because there is too much in the shops, to turn adrift those he no longer wishes to employ because they are no longer profitable?

And the result is invariably that, during periods when the markets are teeming with food and clothing, the workers are sent adrift and cannot purchase the things of which they are so sorely in need.

The only solution to this state of affairs is to abolish Capitalism. The whole trend of events is in the direction of Collectivist production and the inquirer into things political and economic can see that the capitalist, having ceased to be useful, is using the whole governmental machinery to safeguard the interests of his class. 

The worker must learn that he has to look to himself and his fellows to work out the emancipation of the working-class. Only by combining to capture the political machinery and to use the power thus acquired for the overthrow of Capitalism can he hope to obtain, once and for all, a full and complete solution to the unemployed problem.

From the April 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Bevan and the Labour Party Leadership (1955)

Editorial from the April 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Bevan has declared that what he said and did in the row that caused his censure was "not a challenge to the personal authority and position of Mr. Attlee as leader of the Party. Differences are on policy and only policy.” (Daily Herald, 12/3/55.) As the Attlee and Bevan standpoints in the H-bomb debate in Parliament on March 2nd differed by only a hairs-breath the statement is surprising; unless he was speaking of policy in general not just the H-bomb issue. And if that was intended to mean that Mr. Bevan does not aspire to the leadership it is hard to reconcile it with his views and behaviour. The Labour Party’s policy and form of organization require a leader, and though the leader does not formulate policy he can and does exercise much influence on the policy votes at annual conference and in the Parliamentary party. Mr. Bevan believes that he has a policy different from that of the Labour Party’s “Right-Wing” (as he now describes it), and his own description of the kind of leader the Labour Party ought to have bears a clear resemblance to himself. What then could be more natural than that he should seek to further his policy, side by side with becoming Party leader? Mr. Bevan, speaking while the Labour Government was still in office but after he had left it, depicted the kind of leaders required. They must, he said, be men of courage, guts and character; not experts or men from the “top drawer of society,” but men “who had spent their lives in the Labour and trade union movement and who not only understood Socialism with their heads but knew it with their hearts.” (From a speech at Cumnock reported in the Manchester Guardian, 18 June, 1951.) From this it seems more than likely that he measured himself for the Party leadership and found it an admirable fit.

The opinion of a leader-writer in the Manchester Guardian (17/3/55) is that the difficulties began when Bevan failed to get the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s job.

“It is just four years since Mr. Bevan began to show his displeasure that he had been passed over when the time came to choose a new Chancellor of the Exchequer. A little later he pranced out of the Labour Government. From that he passed on to organising his private group within the Party, and two and a half years ago was told (by 188 votes in the Parliamentary Party to 51) to disband it and to stop his attacks on his colleagues. Since then the story of the Parliamentary Labour Party has been of one long succession of disturbances connected with Bevanism.”

The Bevan Business (1955)

From the April 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bevan and the H-Bomb

Mr. Bevan’s quarrel with Mr. Attlee in the House of Commons on 2 March, when he and some 60 other Labour M.P.s abstained from voting for an amendment that had been agreed beforehand at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, was serious because of the number who followed Mr. Bevan’s lead. The violence of the dispute certainly cannot be attributed to any wide gulf between the Bevan and Attlee standpoints on the H-bomb. Only a month earlier one of Mr. Bevan’s principal supporters, Mr. R. Crossman, M.P., had not only supported the Attlee line in favour of making the H-bomb but had declared that this, along with the Attlee attack on American policy, had “reasserted his command of Labour in Parliament” and was “nicely balanced for the purpose of achieving Socialist unity.” (Sunday Pictorial 6-2-55). Mr. Bevan’s revolt was as much a repudiation of Mr. Crossman as it was of Mr. Attlee. Mr. Bevan's reason for his action was that Mr. Attlee would not give a satisfactory answer to a question about the precise circumstances in which the Hydrogen bomb should be used. Mr. Bevan’s question to Mr. Attlee was:—

"If the Russians invaded Europe with conventional weapons, would the Party officially support a government that counter-attacked with hydrogen bombs? ” (Daily Mail, 3/3/55.)

But it must not be thought from this that Mr. Bevan is a pacifist or that he refuses to support war. His quarrels with Mr. Attlee have not been in that field. A correspondent writing in the Manchester Guardian (8-3-55) recalls that during World War II., when Attlee was in the National Government under Churchill. Bevan did indeed campaign against the government but it was for the early opening of the second front.

He was in the 1945-1951 Labour Government that built the Atom Bomb and that imposed peacetime conscription, for the first time in a 100 years. He supported the Korean war and the re-armament drive. He was Minister of Labour in March 1951 when the Ministry published a booklet “Wage Incentive Schemes,” the Foreword of which urged the adoption of piece-work and other incentive schemes in order to reduce costs and increase output, the need for which “has become, even more urgent in face of the unavoidable diversion of a substantial portion of the labour force to the carrying out of the Government’s defence programme.”

He said himself in June, 1951, “He did not believe in having no armies . . . (Manchester Guardian, 18/6/51.) And in an article in the News Chronicle (9/3/55) he admitted that in view of his past record he had no logical case against the hydrogen bomb:—

“Those of us who concurred in the making of the atom bomb and tolerated the saturation bombing of the last war have no moral or logical case against the hydrogen bomb. All three are methods and weapons of imprecision, that is, it is known they will destroy the civilian population and all the civil installations of the enemy."

What he asked therefore was that “we should pause before carrying the logic of our past behaviour to its furthermost extremities” (News Chronicle, 9/3/55). He wanted negotiations immediately with the Russians.

He also wanted, or so we may gather from his question to Mr. Attlee on 2 March, acceptance of the view that the hydrogen bomb will never be used by the British Government against an attack which itself does not include use of the hydrogen bomb.

As this is in effect an attempt to ensure that the next war will not be much more unpleasant than the last we are not grateful to Mr. Bevan and we don’t think that his plea that he is being “practical" has been made out.

* * *

Top Level Talks

One of the issues on which the Government, the Opposition, and the Bevanites are in principle agreed though heatedly differing as to timing, is that of top-level talks between U.S.A., Russia and Britain, with the possible addition of China and France. They are all agreed that there should be such talks and that these should not be conducted by the professional diplomats, the Ambassadors, or even by Foreign Secretaries, but by heads of States, Eisenhower, Churchill and Bulganin. The idea behind the plan is that something for the good of humanity can be achieved at informal talks between heads of States that cannot be achieved at the United Nations, which was specially set up for “friendly talks,” and that cannot be achieved by diplomats taking their orders from heads of States. None of the leaders who favour top level talks have so far explained what is the supposed magic in them. And it isn't as if they have not been tried before. A century and a half ago Czar Alexander had “top level" talks with Napoleon and with the heads of the Prussian and Austrian States, and cooked up the notorious Concert of Europe, through which the ruling class in the different countries hoped to stifle revolutionary movements. It set the pattern for all subsequent international gatherings in that the protestations of mutual love and harmony were only the cover for projected double-crossing by the top-level participants. Do top-level talks stop war? In this generation we have had the example of the top-level talks between Chamberlain and Hider at Munich which were the prelude to the 1939 war.

And the Press in mid-March was convulsed by the disclosure of what went on at some other top-level talks, those at Yalta in 1945. At those talks the three great Powers (except when two of them met to double-cross the absent one) were concerned in disposing of the world in much the same way as the Concert of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon and with as little foresight, wisdom and humanity. The Daily Mail's comment is typical of many in the British Press:—

“What we have read of the American version of the Yalta Conference leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. But why there should be any shock or astonishment at the disclosures of President Roosevelt’s attitude we do not know. It is not news that he tried to 'gang up' with Stalin against Churchill . . .  His naive belief that Stalin was a democratic idealist and Churchill a ‘wicked imperialist' helped to bedevil the post-war world. We should have been safer today, and Communism less of a menace, but for that” (Daily Mail, 18/3/55.)

The attitude of Attlee, and even more that of Bevan, to the present proposal is particularly illogical. Their professed belief is that if Churchill meets the other two face to face the war threat may be dispersed, and that this is impossible or, at least much more difficult if they don't meet face to face. Do Attlee and Bevan believe that Churchill's charm may smooth away the friction between the Russian and American ruling groups and that Churchill, Eisenhower and Bulganin have qualities of wisdom denied to their deputies? If so this admiration for the three leaders has been conspicuously absent from Attlee’s and Bevan's speeches and writings. From these we had gathered that the continuance of Churchill as Prime Minister is a menace to the well-being of the population.

The belief in the likely fruitfulness of top-level talks plainly rests not on a substantial basis of logic or on happy results of past experience, but on the despairing feeling that we must clutch at this straw because there is no other hope left for humanity.

Bevan not a Socialist

Debating whether Bevan will succeed in winning over majority support in the Labour Party, the Daily Mail (16/3/55) concedes to him that he is “ a dynamic figure, a powerful speaker, and the exponent of the pure doctrine of Socialism." The last claim is nonsense and we suspect that the Daily Mail leader writer knows it as well as we do. Mr. Bevan’s alleged Socialism did not deter him, any more than it deterred the rest of the Labour leaders, from running British capitalism for six years after the war, with all that entailed from the use of troops in strikes to the preservation intact of the capitalist social structure. Only the muddle-headed think that the change over of certain industries from private to state capitalism has something to do with Socialism or affects in any way the structure or stability of capitalism or the wealth of the capitalist class. The Manchester Guardian (17/3/55) is nearer the mark is its assessment when it says that the attraction of the Bevanite movement 

“lies in its beautiful sentimental vagueness. The Communist, the pacifist, the believer in the innate virtue of the Soviet State, the hater of American ’capitalism,’ the general 'do-gooder,' all see something of themselves reflected in the glowing rhetoric of Mr. Bevan. Yet, as Mr. Attlee has pointed out, Mr. Bevan himself does not differ doctrinally from the official policy he condemns. But he appears to differ and that is enough."

He may be, as is claimed, a great orator in the Churchill class but if so it may still be true of him as he said of Churchill

“The mediocrity of his thinking is concealed by the majesty of his language." (Daily Herald, 3/3/55.)

Edgar Hardcastle

Five Minutes On Socialism - No.1 (1955)

From the April 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

To look at the world pattern of today is, to many, merely to look at not so much a picture but a crazy jumble of jig-saws pieces which do not fit altogether or resolve themselves into a comprehensive whole. The expert and the man in the street are equally mystified as to the method to be adopted to sort out the mess. Though the expert continues to manufacture devices and the man in the street may strive to follow his advice, nothing seems to work out for the better of everyone, everywhere, all the time.

Risking the charge of being presumptuous, the Socialist puts forward the statement that, understanding the nature of society, Socialists alone can create harmony from chaos, plenty from want and a full life for all rather than the futile husk of existence that the vast majority of the world's people undergo at the present time.

At the moment insecurity and possible annihilation seems to be the lot of the over and underprivileged alike and so it is that the Socialist message is for all who accept the classless, nationless, and exploitationless world that alone will bring mankind a greater measure of happiness than it has ever known before.

Like all movements that have and continue to affect society and the individual, Socialism contains a philosophy. Its philosophy is materialistic and though it may share its materialistic thought in some measure with other groupings, that are not otherwise Socialist, it cannot be associated with them in any other way.

Socialism, apart from its philosophic content is an economic theory and it is from an analysis of the methods by which men have conducted themselves in order to maintain their physical existence that Socialists have evolved the theory of historical materialism.

It can be said that the whole of the industrialized and civilized world carries on the business of living (and dying) in keeping with the economic basis of Capitalism; this, despite the fact that in some cases the national machinery of government proclaims to have eradicated Capitalism as in Russia or that it is in process of doing so as in China or in other cases where the nations' "leaders" claim that a mixture of Capitalism and Socialism is at work as in Britain.

Socialists in Britain and elsewhere in the world refute the idea that Socialism prevails in Russia or anywhere else, together with the inane assumption that Socialism can exist alongside Capitalism in any country. These two views are, among others, some of the things which distinguish Socialism from its imitators. We shall continue to discuss some of the features of the so-called Socialist economy of Russia and China in our next five minute talk.

W. Brain