“ My country is the world” (1965)

From the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

"I vow to thee, my country —all earthly things above 

Entire and whole and perfect the service of my love.

(Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, 1859-1918)

Nobody who has been to school can have escaped the regular doses of patriotism which are administered there. The sentiments of Spring-Rice's hymn—which is sung at many a school assembly—are widely accepted, in some form or other.

For example, all capitalist political parties agree that there are some things on which the shadow boxing has to stop; one of these is patriotism. Whatever slant each of them may put on it, they are all agreed that everyone should be proud of his nationality and should work for what they call the interests of his country. In the last general election the Conservatives said in their manifesto that they aimed to ”. . . gain the vitality to keep our country great." The Liberals lamented the fact that “Britain has lagged behind since the war . . ." The Labour Party promised to “. . . rekindle an authentic patriotic faith in our future . . .”

This general agreement also means that anybody who questions the values and the reason of patriotism is often regarded as a little odd, mentally undernourished, somebody who has got the world out of perspective. Yet all facts and reasonable argument show up patriotism for an empty sham, a propaganda weapon which is used to persuade people to do things against their own interests and to obscure where their interests actually lie.

Patriotism is adaptable. It can be stretched to include a number of countries which have united—or which have been united by another power—and which previously had their own, separate patriotism. Thus when Germany became united in the 19th. century there had to be created a German patriotism, to include and dominate those of the states which had been unified. In the same way the leaders of the new states in Africa are trying to create patriotism out of a mixture —and often a clash—of tribal loyalties. They are trying to instil into the people of their countries a pride in being a “ Kenyan”, or a “ Ghanian ”, or a “ Zambian ” worker; a respect for the country's flag, its National Anthem and a love of country to work, fight and die for.

The speeches of these leaders throb with patriotism. Last January, President Kaunda of Zambia promised military measures to “. . . protect our country and preserve our national identity.” When Kenya became what was called a one-party democracy last November, Mr. Ngala, leader of the swallowed up Kenya African Democratic Union, said that he had disbanded his party because ”. . . we consider the cause of Kenya to be greater than any of our personal pride, gains or losses.”

There is a certain bitter irony in this. For it is in the new countries that people should have learnt of the dangers of patriotism. The native peoples of Africa should have learnt this, in the days when they were invaded, carved up and suppressed by the super-patriotic Empire Builders of North West Europe. The same lesson should have been absorbed by the people of India, Pakistan and the new Far Eastern States— and by the people of Israel, many of whom have had their own personal experience of the logical end of patriotism, in the concentration camps of pre-war Germany.

Just as patriotism can be extended to embrace a number of united nations, so it can be contracted when a country is divided. The East German government, for example, works to keep Germany permanently split and to foster an East German patriotism. The guards on the Berlin Wall are encouraged to forget what they were once told about German nationality, and to shoot any of their fellow Germans who try to slip over to the West. In the same way, the North Koreans are now encouraged to treat the people in the South as their enemies; the same thing applies in the war which is going on in Vietnam.

Patriotism needs to be adaptable, yet in essence it should be inflexible and dogmatic. It was Stephen Decatur, in a speech in Virginia in 1816, who gave the famous toast—”. . . our country, right or wrong,” which does not allow for any modification. The unquestioning acceptance of patriotism has made men endure exceptional horrors, it has persuaded them to accept the most degrading of indignities, and to impose the harshest of brutalities upon others. The men in the trenches in 1914/18 suffered the mud and shellfire and the slaughter in the cause of country. The Nazis cut their swath of death and fear across Europe under the inspiration of their patriotism. The men who set fire to Dresden, and who killed Hiroshima, were acting under the same impulses—and the same delusion.

Here again we have an example of the way in which the proponents of patriotism cynically vary their attitude as it suits their purpose. The Allied bomber crews who wiped out the refugees in Dresden were doing what is called their patriotic duty—they were obeying an order, without doubt or question. Yet this is exactly what most of the men who have stood trial in the war crimes courts did. These men have not, of course, been charged with offences against their country; they have been prosecuted for what have been called crimes against humanity. Thus, although the victor countries of the last war insist that their own soldiers should obey orders because it was patriotic to do so, they also insist that German soldiers should have refused to obey their orders in the interests of humanity. They ignore the fact that, to be consistent, patriotism should swamp humanity.

What sort of arguments are used to support patriotism? One that is popularly accepted, especially in wartime, is that it is something to do with a country's scenery. The official propaganda of 1939/45 encouraged us to join up, eat less, save more, by showing us pictures of placid villages, rolling downland, welcoming white cliffs. Anyone who lived through that war can remember the Ink Spots vocal group adding to this propaganda (and presumably to their bank balance) by crooning about an old cottage in a peaceful valley of corn, ending up with the song’s message, and its title—This Is Worth Fighting For.

There are three things to say about this. The first is that all countries have their beauty spots and that if it was right for an Englishman to go to war because of the Sussex Downs then it was equally right for a German to fight because of the Black Forest, or an Italian because of the architecture of Ancient Rome.

The second thing is that a lot of the scenic beauty of this country has been destroyed since 1945; not by conquering Germans but by the enemy which is always there, in peace and war. It is the profit motive of capitalism which tore up enormous areas of countryside for opencast coal mining. It is the same motive which has been responsible for, among other things, the outrages of the big airports, for the housing sprawl into places which not so long ago were green and pleasant, for the high voltage power grid which is now threatening to violate the South Downs. The National Trust estimates that at least five miles of outstandingly beautiful coastline is each year being spoilt by property developers, who see the chance to make big profits as untouched bays and headlands are opened up by new roads, and motorways.

The third thing is that, even though there is a lot of beautiful scenery in this country, the vast majority of people have little chance to enjoy it. Most of us have to work for our living, which means that we spend all day, almost every day, in the heat and noise of a factory or the monotony of an office. Or perhaps we are salesmen, frantically chasing orders, However we get our living, it absorbs the bulk of our time and leaves only the fag end of it for any other activities. And when work is done we go back to the cheap poky place we call home. Millions of us go back to slums, which after all are as typical of a country as its rural scenery. (One First World War writer thought that the trenches were better places to live in than the slums that thousands of soldiers had left to go to war.) But no patriotic posters ever showed the Gorbals or Salford, and somehow these places got left out of the Ink Spots' records.

This, in a way at least, is consistent. The basis of patriotism is pride. No matter what their economic conditions may be—even if they live in a slum or are chronically out of work—patriots are proud of their nationality. British patriots are proud of being British, and do not bother themselves with wondering whether the impoverished peasant in Vietnam is proud of being Vietnamese. In the last war, the same sort of person thought that any decent German should have been ashamed of his nationality. Patriotism is always supposed to work in only one direction.

But anyone who is proud of being British should ask himself whether he takes pride in everything for which this country has been responsible. Is he proud of the fortunes which were built up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which erected many of the stately homes which we are supposed to include in our national heritage, from the proceeds of slave running and piracy? Does he take pride in the pitiless hardships of the enclosures and the evictions in Ireland, in the savage exploitations of the Industrial Revolution?

The list is a long one. The conquering of India. The penal settlements in Australia. The blatant attempts to crush the young Boer Republic, Suez. And the end has not been reached. The depredations committed by the British ruling class, and by those of other countries, crowd the pages of history and continue to make the story of capitalist conflict. There is nothing in any of them for anyone to be proud of.

In fact, pride is completely out of place in relation to nationality. We are entitled to feel proud about something which we have achieved, but things which are beyond our control should not be matters for pride. We are not proud about the weather, nor about the fact that we were born at a particular time. In the same way, nobody should be proud because he happens to have been born in such a way that he can call himself British, or German, or any other nationality.

The short, simple fact is that patriotism and logic do not mix. Perhaps that is why patriotic fervour is so often so belligerently expressed, and why it can so easily lead to the extremes of racial intolerance, to the theories about a “ Master Race ” and to the “ Final Solution" which is not final, which has nothing to do with any problem, but which is modern barbarity run wild.

This is the grimmer side of patriotism. A more popular one is that of a Blimpish nostalgia for the halycon days of Omdurman and the North West Frontier. It is common, now, for so-called progressive thinkers to poke fun at this, forgetting that under the skin the modern satirist is as patriotic as any choleric Victorian colonel.

No satirist ever hit on the basic tragedy of the thing, which is that patriotism debases a perfectly laudable motive. There is nothing wrong with the notion that the interests of a group are greater than those of any individual in it. Patriotism prostitutes this by restricting the size of the group into small parts of the human race and by bolstering itself with false ideas of superiority which in the end work against the interests of the whole.

Social progress depends upon the denial of patriotism. The majority of people in the modern world are members of the working class whose problems and interests are not confined within national barriers. These people have no country, no national interests; patriotism is poison to them. What they do have is a brotherhood with workers in other countries, which unites them in the need to establish a world of freedom. Thomas Paine once wrote, “ My country is the world,” and that is not a bad way of putting it.

Ivan

What Are Your Wages? (1965)

From the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do you suffer from that common ailment: too much week left at the end of your money? Most of us do. The doctors, the teachers, the shipworkers, the provincial busmen and many others are all struggling, at the moment of writing, for higher wages. In a few weeks’ time other workers in other jobs will be engaged in the same sort of tussle. As a matter of fact, we have become used to this pattern, since the war, of “rounds” of wage increases. The economy of this country has been “booming” fairly steadily, and unemployment keeps fairly low. But it is rather a strange fact that, in spite of all the increases that have been won in that time, our wages are still inadequate. There is plenty of evidence of this. The fact that the hire purchase debt in Britain passed the £1,000 million mark in 1964 shows just how much people can not buy without getting into debt.

Why is it that this struggle for higher wages is always going on, even in countries like the U.S.A. where workers are the highest paid in the world?

If it weren’t for the money, most of us would stop work tomorrow. After all, wages are the common means of getting work out of men and women. You can hear some of them call it “bloody slavery”. They are not trying to be accurate-only to express their feelings. There is very little real slavery in the world today. It is a very old-fashioned and inefficient system of getting work out of people. The big empires of the past were built up on slave labour; and there was a brief flare-up of it again in America when the virgin land of the new continent was being opened up to agriculture. The slave was caught or bought, like a horse or a machine; and he was fed or flogged when necessary in order to get the maximum of work out of him. Slaves were not really regarded as people: they were denied citizenship; and their owners usually had power of life and death over them. But the quality of work they could do was generally very low; and there is a snag to owning slaves: they have to be fed and housed even when there is no work for them to do.

Although there has always been a certain amount of it, getting work out of people for wages is fairly new as a universal system. Almost everywhere in the world the slave empires were overthrown by the much less highly organised system of feudalism. The feudal serf was a “free” man owning his own bit of land; but to protect themselves from attack serfs clustered round the strong-arm men, the lords of the manor; and they paid for their “protection” by working on the land or fighting the battles of their lords. In the time that was left over, they were able to work their own strips of land. A tenth of what they produced was demanded from them by a highly organised church, which operated in league with the lords to prevent serfs from running away. It is debatable, therefore, whether serfs were much better off  than slaves.

With the rise of capitalism, however, the serfs were gradually freed entirely-by having even their strips of land taken from them. They were no longer forced to work for anybody—except by the pressure of starvation. As it was, they offered themselves for work eagerly, even desperately at times, for there was no other way of getting food, clothing and shelter, except by wages. At last, in capitalism, the system of buying and selling became universal. Everything was for sale. Anything could be bought. The problem for the great mass of humanity was that they had nothing left to sell except their ability to work.

Most of us feel we have the right to live. The trouble is that hardly any of us have got “private means”. We can only get the means to live by “selling ourselves”. It is rather like prostitution; but we have no choice. Because of this, a lot of workers talk about the “right to work” almost as though it were the same thing as the right to live. They take part in marches and demonstrations when jobs are scarce, insisting upon their right to work. They feel offended if they are told that they are demanding the right to prostitute themselves. Actually, of course, workers have no legal right to work. Nor will they ever have. All they possess is a commodity—the ability to work. Millions of people throughout the world own nothing else.

This is what distinguishes them as a separate economic class, the working class. They constitute about ninety per cent of the civilized population of the world. Of course, in the more advanced countries they may own their own house and their own car; but economically their class is determined by the fact that they have to prostitute themselves throughout their useful lives in order to keep these things and live from day to day.

Obviously, if workers are sellers of the ability to work, there must also be a class of buyers. Occasionally and briefly, one worker may buy the services of another to do a job; but as he only has his wages with which to pay wages it cannot be general. Only those who possess the wealth which can be worked upon to produce more wealth, can really afford to pay wages. But why should anyone want to hire us—especially if they already have the wealth, and we have none? Why should anyone pay us wages for the use of our mental and physical energy? There can only be one reason: to increase their  wealth further by our work. And not only that: to increase it by more than the cost of our wages.

Wealth used in this way to make more wealth is called capital; and those who use it in this way are called capitalists. So the bulk of humanity is divided into two classes: sellers and buyers of labour power; workers and capitalists.

So wages are really the price paid for our ability to work. The very existence of wages proves the division into classes, wherever it is found. Every week or every month our pay packet or cheque reminds us of the fact that we belong to the class which can only secure the right to live by offering themselves for work by prostituting themselves to those who find it convenient to buy their abilities-the world’s capitalists.

Such a situation inevitably produces conflict. In buying and selling, the seller always tries to raise the price, while the buyer tries to reduce it. There is no let-up. And the very point of conflict is the wage packet itself. The quickest and surest way for the capitalist to increase his profits is by cutting wages. And yet the worker’s wage is his only means of living, so that he has no choice but to struggle-not only to raise his wages, but to prevent them being depressed.

A Fair Day’s Pay

There were times in the nineteenth century when some wages for adult men with families were as low as sixpence a week; and it meant, of course, that the women and children were forced out to work as well to keep alive. All this is gone now—at least, in Britain. Similar things are still found in the newly capitalist countries, and in places like Hong Kong; even, surprisingly enough, in the U.S.A. But here, for the last few years, the talk has all been of “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.”  Harold Wilson has been the most recent public figure to use it, in a demand for greater effort from the working class of Britain. By this, he identifies himself with all other politicians, whether they claim to represent the working class or not, because this is a slogan used purely on behalf of the capitalist class.

There is really nothing “fair” about the wages system at all. It is always loaded overwhelmingly in the capitalists’ favour. Although they often do increase their profit by fighting off wage demands, this is not the main method of making profit. Capital finds it profitable to employ labour even when wages are not depressed. And this is generally the case in Britain today. Wages are inadequate, of course, but they are relatively about the highest that they have ever been.

How, then, does the capitalist make profits? Purely by using the wages system. Actually, the wages swindle is very simple, but very effective. And, what is more, it is perfectly legal. If you can get hold of enough capital, you can start operating it tomorrow-if you can get hold of enough capital.

This is the way it works: the capitalist simply hires a man’s abilities for the day, or the week, or the month; and then he gets as much work out of him as he possibly can during that time. Now, ever since the dawn of civilization it has been possible for a man to produce more than he needed for his own keep. That is what made slavery a possibility in the first place. And, since factory organisation, and then mechanisation, and now even automation, the possibilities have risen. But the capitalist does not pay for the actual value that the man adds to the raw materials by working on them. All that he pays for is the man’s keep. Loosely speaking the worker may have produced enough by Monday or Tuesday, to pay for his keep; but the capitalist keeps him turning out wealth until Friday, simply because he has bought the worker’s labour power for that period.

If the workers complain that this system is not fair at all, it is easy to point out to them that this is a buying and selling arrangement. They have something to sell: their ability to work. And the capitalist is prepared to buy it. Profit is simply the difference between a man’s wages and the value of what he actually produces. All this vague trade union talk about the workers having a right to a share in the profits simply shows a total lack of understanding of what profits are and what wages are. The workers have no right to a share in the profits at all, in the capitalist system.

How Much Are you Worth?

There is no direct connection at all, then, between the amount that a man produces and the size of his wage packet. Neither is there any real connection between his wages and how hard he works. This is often difficult to see because of the piece-work systems, bonus schemes, and high overtime rates, all of which make it look as though the harder you work, the more money you make. If there really was such a connection, it would mean that that Dr. Beeching, with his salary of £25,000 from British Railways, was working about thirty times as hard every day as the average worker – quite impossible.

By the time that most of us get home after a day’s work, we are pretty well exhausted. It takes a real effort to get washed and changed to go out to a cinema or the pub. And now that television has brought the cinema to us, millions of us are content to sit in an armchair for three hours and then go to bed. We have put out, during the day, all the physical, emotional and mental energy we are capable of, without running ourselves down into illness. Even this happens fairly often with many people.

So we have done our fair day’s work; and we have got our fair day’s pay. And there is a direct connection between them. This commodity that we have to sell-our ability to work is used up at the end of the day. We have sold it. And it costs money to renew it-money to keep up a certain standard of food, clothing, shelter and recreation to make us able to face another day, or another Monday morning. What is more, we were reared with a certain amount of care in the first place, educated at a certain cost, and probably trained, too.

All of this makes up the true cost of production of our commodity-the ability to do a certain type of work. This is what our wages pay for-the cost of producing our labour power. This is all that is ever meant by “a fair day’s pay” – enough for us to keep on producing the ability to work for the capitalist class, throughout our lives, until our commodity loses most of its worth through old age. It has also paid for the cost of producing children to provide another army of wage-slaves to take out places when we are gone.

The wages system has proved so successful that it has spread to all the major countries of the world, and is still spreading. And, in between the wars and slumps that it causes, it works like a charm. The surplus that the workers produce is largely used to buy more machinery and plant and materials to extract more surplus from their efforts, and to bring more peasants and primitives in “undeveloped areas” into the system. The new machines produced by workers in one industry serve to step up the amount of profit made out of workers in another. The buildings and plant set up by one generation are there to extract surplus value from the next.

All the time, and all over the world, the workers are building up more and more wealth none of which belongs to them. By their very work they deprive themselves more and more of the wealth which is in the world, and so set the capitalist class higher and higher above them, with greater and greater powers of oppression.

And most workers accept this system of legalised robbery. (It is only legal because capitalists made the laws.) They accept it every time they press for their “right to work”. They accept it when they talk of “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”, and when they think that “co-operation between both sides of industry” is a good thing, they are showing their approval of being robbed.

Of course, they are being brainwashed into accepting it. They don’t realise that they can abolish the wages system. They are usually so relieved and glad to get their pay packet or their cheque, when it finally comes, that they forget they are holding in their hands the proof that they have been taken for suckers once again in the biggest swindle of all time.

S. Stafford

The “Welfare" State (1965)

From the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is sometimes claimed that the case for socialism is now no longer relevant as capitalism has managed to reform itself through such means as universal education and factory and welfare legislation. The underlying assumption behind such claims is that socialists hold that under capitalism the owning class can only be a bunch of rapacious and selfish despots holding sway over a wretched mass of labourers who live in utter destitution amid filth and squalor. This was something like the position in the period between the rapid growth of capitalism in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the time when the governing classes—then landlord and capitalist got round to tackling the situation in the interests of the further development of capitalism.

The socialist analysis of the so-called Welfare State goes back to the pioneer of scientific socialism,. Karl Marx himself. Capital appeared in 1867. By that time the institutions of the Welfare State were not very advanced. In Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State D. Roberts describes their growth in the period 1833-1854. The Parliament elected after the passing of the first Reform Act of 1832 had to deal with the various social problems which the Industrial Revolution had aggravated: growing rural pauperism, the sad state of education, the utter squalor of prisons and the working class areas of towns, the employment of women and children for long hours in the factories and mines. During this period government inspectors were appointed for factories, schools, health, prisons, mines and railways; the Poor Law and church systems were reorganised. The first Factory Act was passed in 1812; state aid to education was also first given in 1833; the first Mines Act was in 1842; the Public Health Act was passed in 1848 and housing was first regulated by an Act of 1851. By the 1850’s the governing classes had overcome their prejudices against State intervention for social reform.

Social reform came to be accepted as a necessity as conditions changed. This then was the extent of the Welfare State during the period of capitalism about which Marx wrote. Besides the employment of women and children and besides the filth and squalor in which the working class then existed Marx also described, as he says in his preface, “the history, the details and the results of English factory legislation.” Drawing an analogy with soil preservation Marx pointed out that the various Factory Acts “curb the passion for a limitless draining of labour power, by forcibly limiting the working day by state regulations, made by a state that is ruled by capitalist and landlord.” His conclusion could not be clearer: factory legislation, he wrote, was “just as much the necessary product of modern industry as cotton-yarn, self-actors and the electric telegraph.”

From about 1870 onwards the various social reforms were consolidated in a number of measures: the Education Act of 1870, the Public Health Act of 1875, the Artisans' Dwelling Act of 1875, the Mining Act of 1877 and the Factory Act of 1878. In this period also the law on trade unions was reformed. A Workmen’s Compensation Act was passed in 1897. Old Age pensions were first paid in 1909 and the National Insurance Act of 1911 introduced unemployment and sickness insurance for the first time. It was during this period that the SPGB was formed and the back-numbers of this journal contain a very useful analysis of these schemes. The issue for May 1914 explained their character very clearly:

Collective capital is expended through Government departments, with the object of placing at the disposal of individual capitalists an improved commodity on the labour market—workers whose labour will bear richer fruit in the shape of surplus value.

By this time reforms of all sorts were passed by every government whatever its political complexion. The government had now assumed the task of seeing that institutional and administrative arrangements kept pace with industrial changes. In 1925 the pensions scheme was made contributory. A number of Acts—Addison, Chamberlain, Wheatley—were passed granting housing subsidies and allowing slum clearances in the period between the wars. Poor Law assistance was however still administered locally. In 1942 appeared the famous Beveridge Report, Beveridge examined the various welfare services and advocated many changes in the interests of efficiency. The proposal which received the most publicity was that for a national minimum income below which no one should fall, i.e., the transfer of poor relief to the central government. In a pamphlet issued at the time, Beveridge Re-Organizes Poverty, the SPGB pointed out that the Beveridge proposals

will level the workers' position as a whole, reducing the more favourably placed to a lower level and putting the worst placed on a less evil level. This is not a “new world” of hope, but a re-distribution of misery.

After the war many of Beveridge’s proposals were implemented: a National Assistance Board was set up to ameliorate destitution and the chaotic hospital system was co-ordinated into the National Health Service. The much-vaunted Welfare State was complete.

Modern capitalism demands that the State spend capital on maintaining and improving the wealth—and profit—producing capacities of the working class. The NHS, the State education system and even the NAB are State capitalist organisations which work with labour power as their raw material. Although expenditure on such services is an economic necessity under modem capitalism it is not suggested that the relationship between the economy and the Welfare State is direct and mechanical. As a matter of history the present structure of the welfare services is the product of political struggles of varying intensity for over a hundred years. A great deal of idealism and devotion as well as a great deal of calculated self-interest has gone into all the campaign for education, factory and welfare measures under capitalism.

And indeed some aspects of the health and physical environment of the working class have improved considerably: infant mortality has been cut, some killer diseases eradicated, housing and factory conditions bettered. On the other hand, as well as putting more into the worker, capitalism has demanded more out of him more intense work as well as the faster pace of life generally. Aneurin Bevan used to refer to the NHS as “pure socialism” as it gave people free access to medical treatment. However there is nothing to be gained from seeing welfare services as something which they are not. They do not give the worker something for nothing. They are not free handouts.

Reforms—social, economic and political—are necessary all the time to keep the capitalist system running smoothly. They do not represent a challenge to the system or a concession from the system, rather are they demanded by the system. All such reforms, in education and welfare, have left the working class propertyless and non-owners of the means of production. They do not challenge the basis of the capitalist system which is this non-ownership of the means of production by the working class. Poverty is the negation of ownership. Thus the working class still live in poverty.

Today, proposals for the reform of the welfare services are once again being mooted. Douglas Houghton, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the present government, has been given the responsibility of reforming these services. Like Beveridge he has the task of reorganising poverty, that is, of seeing that expenditure on the welfare services is spent as effectively as possible from the point of view of the productive efficiency of the working class: no one must get too much and no one must get too little. He also has the task of working out more efficient ways of dealing with those whose labour power is either worn out or of such low quality as to be useless : those who used to be called the “aged poor" and others who live in destitution pure and simple.

The working class should not be interested in reorganising poverty. Their aim should be to end the present degrading status of those who work. Under capitalism the producers are treated as mere productive instruments. This is a necessary consequence of the ownership of the means of life by a minority, which means that the producers are propertyless, owning nothing but labour power. Only under socialism where all will have free access to the means of life will people be able to live and treat each other as human beings.

Adam Buick

Capitalism and work (1965)

From the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under Socialism the entire means and techniques that humanity has developed for producing wealth will become the common property of the whole community. The whole of Humanity’s heritage as a tool making innovator handed down from flint stone axe to electronic cybernetics will be unreservedly taken over by the whole community for the satisfaction of its material needs. This condition by itself pre-supposes democratic control and social equality within all aspects of world-wide production. Socialism will reconcile the harvesting of what the community needs with the assertion of individuality through work. Thus people will not perform work by selling their labour on the labour market for a wage or salary. Work will be the means by which people will express within the community. Socialism means co-operation, with the individual determining their contribution to society through all their diverse skills and aptitudes.

No proposition is more likely to inflame the prejudices of defenders of the wage labour system than the demand for “… a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common.” These prejudices take the form of a variety of objections frequently voiced at Socialist public meetings. Part of this prejudice is that people by their nature are lazy and have a natural repugnance for work. That production is only ever possible at all when people are forced to engage in work activity by bringing pressures to bear on them. The defenders of commercial interests and the indignities of wage labour claim that people will only work under the inducement of money incentives and when laziness is penalised by the worker being cut off from a livelihood.

It is often argued that people’s “natural laziness” rules out as impracticable any revolutionary demand for a society free from commercialism, the profit motive, class divided society, and the social coercions of wage labour. This objection is a hollow prejudice that seeks to impose a quite false and perverted limitation on humanity’s social possibilities. In order to explain the prejudice itself and why, within Capitalist society, work itself is brought into disrepute, it is necessary to place the whole question of work within modern society into its true social perspective.

The framework within which work is performed in Capitalist society is comprised of the fact that wealth is produced and distributed through the buying and selling of commodities. A small section of the population monopolise and control the means of production, the factories, mines, transport etc., and this monopoly of the means of life is used by them to extract a commercial profit from social production. From this economic basis two inescapable facts of every day life emerge. Firstly, the work performed by any category of worker, whether they be labourer, technician or professional, enhances the privileged position of a social minority; the profit that accrues to this minority class takes precedence over general community needs. Secondly, the only access to a living open to any category of worker who contributes through his or her work to production and distribution is by selling his or her mental capacities for wages or salary to an employer.

Capitalist production rests upon involving those who contribute to production in subservience and economic exploitation. Exploitation is an inevitable corollary of work in a commercial society. Work in these circumstances cannot be the fulfilment of the workers’ interests through their creative efforts, but its direct opposite, the activity by which their exploited status is maintained. The ends to which their work efforts are directed are alien to their interests as individuals and alien to the interests of the working class as a class. Work under Capitalism means selling labour power in a labour market, but in the conditions of day to day reality it is impossible to abstract the power to work from the personality of the person working. Commercialised labour involves the commercialisation of humanity itself.

Under Socialism the fact that work will be the means whereby individuals will assert themselves within society through creative activity will in itself characterise the nature of social production. The expression of individual talent will not be stultified by the crushing economic factors which operate in present day society, where the object of production is for sale at a profit. The organisation of the labour force under Capitalism is determined by stringent economic factors which are both commercial and military; it is geared to the profit motive and the military defence of the profit motive. From the viewpoint of catering for actual material needs a vast wastage of labour takes place under Capitalism. The functions of Advertising, Insurance, Banking, the Armed Forces, the Armaments Industry are all examples. This is not an organisation of Society’s resources adjusted to human needs but is one adjusted to social ends that are alien to human needs and which would under Socialism become redundant.

Under Capitalism then, work becomes an activity imposed on workers by forces external to themselves. It is the division of labour in the cause of profit that imposes itself on workers and forces them to comply with its requirements. People become the adjuncts of machines, servants of the “belt system”; workers engage in work that is physically and mentally destructive and which involves a life time of personal frustration. Workers under Capitalism must compromise their individuality, must tell lies and perfect a multitude of deceitful techniques. Like someone who sells. eternally cheerful under all circumstances, they must lead double lives, only becoming their true selves during their leisure time. Work in these circumstances cannot be a creative activity that enhances the workers’ personal sense of fulfilment; it is the hall mark of their social inferiority and merely the means of reproducing their subsistence from week to week or month to month. Work is not an end in itself but a distasteful and repugnant means to another economic end.

The division of labour in Capitalist society not only places in the name of work, a burden of economic duty on the working class, but debases work even further through the economic factors that condition it. A system geared to the marketing of commodities is pre-occupied with cheapness and saleability. The skills of carpenters for instance are bent not to the flowering of their talents, but to speed, the saving of time, skimping of material and the inferiority of the product in design and finish. The person who, in their leisure time, does carpentry for a hobby, in an atmosphere that is free from the requirements of speed and cheapness, would not dream of making an inferior joint, whilst knowing that the more elaborate joint, consuming more time, was really necessary. That person would regard such an economy as not only an abuse of the job in hand but an abuse of themselves, a self-inflicted insult to their own skill. The double standard is common in many workers. As units of labour within commodity production they must act as economic categories and accept all the priorities of Capitalist economics, including speed and cheapness. It is only when they are outside money inducements and the economic necessity of reproducing their subsistence that they are able to take pride in performing uncorrupted work. Capitalism degrades work and makes impossible what William Morris called “The expression of man’s joy through his labour”. Marx himself saw work in a Capitalist context in the same light. “… The work is external to the worker, that is not part of his nature, that consequently he does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself… His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need but only a means for satisfying other needs… Finally, the alienated character of work appears in the fact that it is not his work but work for someone else, that in work he does not belong to himself but to another person.” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.)

To ignore the social context in which work is performed and to raise people’s “natural laziness” as an objection to Socialism is to crown ignorance and prejudice with distorted pessimism. Like any other social phenomenon, the question of work can only be understood in relation to the whole social environment.

Under Socialism work will spring spontaneously from individuals themselves and the contribution that they make through Society, in whatever field they choose, will at once form the basis of social cohesion and at the same time endow their individual personality. The interests of the individual will be in harmony with the interests of the whole community.

Pieter Lawrence

The Passing Show: TV trash (1965)

The Passing Show Column from the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

TV trash

How often do you wash your hair? How often do you have a bath? If someone (other than perhaps your doctor) asked you those questions, you'd probably tell him to mind his own business. Such matters are considered personal enough not to discuss them generally in public.

However, that’s in the everyday run of affairs. But if there was money in it, you might well swallow your pride and tell the questioner what he wanted to know. And if the exercise were repeated often enough and lucratively enough, it’s possible you would forget you were ever annoyed and would even offer other personal but just as worthless titbits, such as the number of times you blow your nose in a day. I could go further, but I won’t.

Why am I mentioning this? It's just that one Friday evening a few weeks ago, I had the misfortune to sit through one hour of concentrated rubbish put out by I.T.V. under the title Ready, Steady, Go! As far as I could tell, it was a collection of pop groups and “ singers ” bleating, moaning, groaning and grimacing to the accompaniment of twanging guitars and the shouts of hysterical teenagers; Usually they merely mime to a background recording, but this time it was a “live” show, and having seen samples of both now, I’d say the more objectionable by a short head.

With Keith Fordyce as the compere trying hard to sound wildly enthusiastic over the nerve racking extremes of sixty minutes sheer row, and his assistant Cathy McGowan, calling everything “ fab ” and “gear”, the high spot—or punch line if you prefer—came when the Rolling Stones appeared and their Mike Jagger answered puerile questions about his bathing and washing habits. At the end of the programme, such was the frenzy of his audience, that he was saved from being devoured only by the intervention of some strong arm men, no doubt retained for the occasion.

It would be stupid of course to blame television as such for trash like this—just as logical as blaming weapons for the outbreak of war. It would be putting the cart before the horse. Like so many things in this world, T.V. has a vast potential for benefiting mankind, but is twisted and debased to suit the needs of a profit making system of society. And this applies just as much to the staid old B.B.C. as it does to the cruder and brassier I.T.V. So if there is a vast teenage demand for Beatles, Animals, Jerks, Kinks, Pretty Boys and Rolling Stones, then T.V. has to sink to the occasion. No matter if some of the characters look like Rowton House rejects; their records sell, don’t they? In their millions?

Indeed they do, and while that sort of condition obtains, all sorts of people will swallow whatever pride they may once have had, in the frantic race for the fast buck. A survey a few years back pointed out the size of the teenage market, running into hundreds of millions of pounds a year, something which certainly didn’t exist before the war. So no wonder we have manufacturers sitting up and taking notice, making things specially for the “teenage character” and changing the styles at a bewildering speed to maintain the myth of teenage exclusiveness, trying to keep the youngsters sufficiently obsessed with themselves to bolster sales.

Gramophone records are no exception to this rule. Generally the pop recordings are of poor quality, and not intended to last. Teenage restlessness in the demand for “new” numbers and boredom with the old. will be encouraged by the disc companies. It’s good for turnover and sales, but reduces the level of performance to an all time low with each new group or record to appear. Hence the spectacle of Ready, Steady, Go, Jukebox Jury and others.

The tragedy of it all is that teenagers are so unaware of all this. They really do believe that they are “different" from the rest of us and that the current hullabaloo is merely a recognition of this at last. In fact their wage status in society guarantees their “sameness” with everyone else and places similar restrictions upon them. They are being taken for a long and bumpy ride with a rubbish tip at the end of it.

Doctors' dilemma

Not so long ago there was no National Health Service in Britain. You just had to scrape the money together to pay the doctor if you were unfortunate enough to need his services. And of course, a stay in hospital meant hospital bills, although how many workers managed to pay them is another matter.

The family doctor was often held in awe and reverence—a pillar of respectability, financially very comfortable and independent. That was obviously the impression that East End slum dwellers gained, perhaps because the doctor always wore a clean shirt and looked smartly turned out. They did not realise just how great a struggle some medicos had to get by. but the going must have been tough at times, particularly in the depressed areas. A. J. Cronin gives us a glimpse of this in some of his novels.

Well, whatever delusions we may have had about the G.P.’s status before the war, there is certainly no room for them now. Most of his “ independence ” was swept away when the postwar health service was set up, and doctors in general can be seen now for what they are—and always were—working men and women. True, their income on average is still much higher than many other workers, but what of that? There have always been differing grades of training and pay under capitalism and here is an example. Their training is years long and their working hours atrocious. A Guardian article of March 9th for example told of resident hospital doctors often working a hundred hours and more a week.

And just like other workers, the doctors have to battle with their employers (the government) over wages and conditions, which is really what all the rumpus was about a few weeks back. The British Medical Association—the doctors' “trade union"—threatened to withdraw its members from the health service if the government's pay offer was not improved. This was not a strike, it was claimed, although just what other name it could be given was not stated. However, the government seems to have climbed down and granted some at least of the doctors’ demands. For them, however, the lesson of organisation has been a long time in the learning. The assiduously cultivated image of medicine being a calling rather than a job, with its practitioners’ sole aim to serve their patients, will be equally long a-dying; and this presents them with a dilemma.

To retain the all-important public support for their cause, the old picture is of help, but it can act as a double-edged weapon. The government has been quick to realise this and use it to the full in its negotiations with the B.M.A. As so many other workers have found, it is the strike or the very real threat of it, which gets things moving if they can be moved at all. And then bang goes public sympathy.

In the event, the medicos took the only course open to them and risked public hostility. Strikes are a constant feature of capitalist society—they are part of the fight which goes on all the time. And people usually get hurt in a fight, not just the direct participants but onlookers as well. It is one of the regrettable facts of capitalist life. End capitalism and you end the fight—for doctors as well as for the rest of us.

Eddie Critichfield

News in Review: Summerskill speaks (1965)

The News in Review column from the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Summerskill speaks

The indignation of Lady Summerskill was on public view recently when on television she accused the Tate Gallery of pandering to a "pseudo intellectual snobbery” when it paid £60,000 for a painting by Picasso which she claimed was “ quite meaningless.” The money, she claimed, would have been much better spent on a hospital or a new operating theatre.

We don’t doubt that Lady Summerskill sincerely feels that she has lined up her social priorities in the right order, but then choices of this kind don’t really have to be made. There is no reason why either art or hospitals should carry a price tag at all. Her indignation is diminished by the fact that she herself accepts the phoney economic limitations that Capitalism places on the provision of both these necessary facilities.

30 years after

The recent Royal visit to Ethiopia, which was front page news in the British Press for a few days, carried the mind back vividly, exactly 30 years, to the days when Abyssinia filled not only British but world newspapers. This was in 1935, when Italy launched its brutal war of conquest against this strange survival from the ancient world. The news of bombing raids and poison-gas coming over the radio, provided a sickening curtain-raiser for the world-wide tragedy that was to follow.

For a year or more Abyssinia was the centre of passionate political debate, and the subject that dominated all street-corner meetings. It was the rallying point for the “Popular Fronters’’ until the Spanish Civil War pushed it back into the shadows. One can also recall the mass of misinformation, about Abyssinia, that poured from Communist and Fascist platforms alike—from speakers who one suspected, had only just heard of the place. Perhaps the crowning irony was the spectacle of the Emperor Haile Selassie, autocrat, with a system of government that made the late Tzar look like a revolutionary, becoming the idol of the Left and a champion of Liberty.

Can it be only 30 years since these events took place? The face of Africa has changed so rapidly in the last generation, that it is difficult to realise that Abyssinia was once the only independent state left in Africa, after the great European powers had carved up the continent. Mountainous and land locked, nobody particularly wanted it but Italy, desperate for glory to impress its proletariat, and for land to dump its surplus production.

Today Africa is covered with newly independent States, and it is those which are still under European control that make news. Capitalism is advancing, behind the rash of new flags, smashing tribal economics in its path, and producing the pattern of life so familiar to us. Ethiopia, with Italy’s old colony of Eritrea thrown in to give it a sea coast, has emerged as a kind of centre for the Pan-African movement, with Addis Ababa as an African Geneva.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is the fact that the new African leaders, loud in their condemnation of Imperialism, are prepared to accept “ His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Elect of God, and Conquering Lion of Judah,” as one of themselves.

Wilson's chat

It was on the evening of 24th. February last that Mr. Harold Wilson, his silver hair carefully flattened into place, spoke to us all on television.

First, there was the little joke about Madame Tussauds, to prove that the Prime Minister is human. Then the smile, faint though it had been, vanished and Wilson piled into us.

We need, he said, a revolution (how many other politicians have said that, without actually meaning a revolution, nor perhaps even realising the import of the word?) in industrial techniques and national attitudes.

No more of the attitude that “what was good enough for grandfather is good enough for me.” No more “strikes arising from some real or imagined grievance."

No more “arguments about which of two men shall bore a hole in a sheet of metal... when "—and here Mr. Wilson's eye was level, his voice threatening— “waiting in the wings there are automative hole borers whose designers have not programmed them to argue about demarcation disputes."

The Tories watched and studied this broadcast very carefully. If the Prime Minister had said a word out of place, if he had been in the slightest bit “controversial," the Opposition would have claimed the right to reply.

But Mr. Wilson cut the ground from under their feet. The Conservatives could find nothing in his broadcast to argue with. The reason for this is plain.

No employer, no Tory, would disagree with the Wilson strictures on strikes, industrial disputes, —clock watching—even the sideswipe at expense account lunches. Indeed, some of them probably realised that Wilson attacked strikers much more effectively than the tweedy, remote fourteenth Earl could ever hope to.

In fact, Wilson ignored the minor differences between his party and the Conservatives and concentrated upon their grounds of fundamental agreement—upon their united support of the interests of the British capitalist class.

It is true that the broadcast gave the Tories one cause for concern. Wilson assiduously engaged himself that evening in building up the image of himself as what they call a national leader and therefore was, perhaps, winning votes from those workers who like to have a Big Brother at the head of their master class.

This is an apt comment on the standing of the Labour Party today. They have come a long way since the times when they professed to stand for the interests of the working class and in Harold Wilson they have found the man to bring them to the inevitable end of their journey. For now they are openly a national party of British capitalism, trying to boost British technology, British exports, British influence with no more nonsense about the class struggle.

Wilson himself made the point when he went for “ ... men pinching a few minutes here, an hour there ..." The significance of this is that men can only “pinch” time from their employer because they have already sold it to him—because they have sold to him their working ability, measured in minutes and hours.

Into Europe?

Anyone who has his nose to the ground cannot have failed recently to detect a familiar scent.

The British capitalist class is once more showing interest in joining the European Common Market.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home, addressing the Young Conservatives last February, spoke of cementing “an agreement with Europe . . . economic and political and in due course it will cover security..."

Mr. Wilson, while outwardly he cannot so quickly discard his anti-European hat, is showing signs that he is attracted by its opposite. If he decides to wear this particular hat there will be, of course, no heartburning as a result of yet another abandonment of what were once presented as inviolable principles.

Foreign Secretary Mr. Michael Stewart has recently said that Europe should be "... an equal and influential member of the Atlantic partnership."

These friendly noises could mean that the British capitalist class are once more seeking other ways out of their immediate difficulties than national and Commonwealth ones. In this, of course, their hopes are illusory; the Common Market has not solved the economic problems of its members.

If Britain does try again to join Europe, there will follow the old battle between those interests (agriculture, for example) which see their economic fortunes safest in a massive tariff wall against foreign competition and those (motor cars, for example) whose mouths water at the prospect of penetrating the European market on tariff terms equal to the German and French industries.

Then there is the brooding figure of de Gaulle, who has fashioned French policy on the resolve to build a Europe independent, as far as it can be, of American influence, with France as the dominant power. 

This policy has no place, at present, for powerful competition from Britain. Here, once more, will probably be the biggest stumbling block to any British attempt to sign the Rome Treaty.

If Britain should sign, nobody should be deluded about the motives for it. An attempt to join the Common Market will doubtless be heralded by numerous politicians as a step towards human unity and the brotherhood of man.

When we have discarded this frill of lies, we shall see that a revival of interest in Europe is due, as The Economist put it, to ". . . realities, not sentiments . . . powerful pressures . . ."

They might also have added that the realities and the pressures are those of the balance sheet. The British capitalist class will try to get into Europe only if they are convinced that their general interests, in terms of profit making and maintaining, are safer that way.

Whether they are right or wrong in such assessments is beside the point. What is very much to the point, however, is that the people who make the profits, and who are exploited and degraded in the process—the working class—should for once not be misled by the frills and should face the realities.

Malcolm X

According to his autobiography, Malcolm X expected to die violently, but probably most people expected that, if this happened, it would be by the hand of a white man.

The assassination provoked an outburst of hysteria and apprehension—even regret from people who were only recently denouncing the doctrines which Malcolm X had expounded.

The murdered man moved in a world of violence. His mother, he said, was conceived after a white man had raped his grandmother. His father was also murdered, his skull smashed in and his body flung under the wheels of a street car.

It was only after the seemingly inevitable career of crime and drug addiction that Malcolm X became interested in the Black Muslims—an event which, he wrote, gave him “a little feeling of self-respect."

He soon became prominent in the movement, attracting a lot of publicity with his teachings that the Negro should be strong, disciplined and ready to answer violence with violence. A few months ago he came to the Oxford Union to defend his own interpretation of Barry Goldwater's famous remarks on extremism.

It is perhaps surprising that there was not a Malcolm X before. The oppressions and indignities to which the American Negro are subjected are so extreme that it was predictable they should develop their own, counter-extremist, organisation.

If history is any guide, it was also predictable that this organisation should split, and that the struggle between the two factions (the Black Muslims and Malcolm X’s Organisation of Afro-American Unity) should be as bitter and as ruthless as that against their common adversary.

We have seen this before. We have seen it in Cyprus and in Algeria and many, many times before that we saw it in Ireland, in the days when Michael Collins was shot down on the far South road from Skibbereen to Cork.

In many ways, the United Slates today is a cauldron of savagery and hatred. In an ugly situation, the Negroes themselves offer scant hope. The summit of their ambition is in fact to be exploited on equal terms with the white wage slaves who now stand just a little above them on the social scale.

There is no reason to believe that, if the Negroes got the vote, and won full civil fights in the United States, they would use their new opportunities to end the social system which degrades workers of all colours all over the world.

The Negroes are desperate, and in their desperation they have turned to organisations which sometimes are little better than a black Ku-Klux-Klan. They show little interest in the fact that race prejudice is only one part of the monstrous wall of ignorance which shields and supports the oppressive capitalist system.

As long as this continues, there will be small comfort in the American future. The shots which killed Malcolm X signalled that the Negro movement in the United States has served some sort of apprenticeship, and is now ready to go out into the world and shed blood in earnest

SPGB Meetings (1965)

Party News from the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Party News (1965)

Party News from the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Manchester area and North West England

Owing to various circumstances, Party organisation and activity in this area has lapsed over the past few years. We now hope to be in a position to review the situation and try and get something going. What we have in mind is a one day Conference in Manchester within the next month or so. to assess our strength and fully discuss what activity can be arranged.

All members of Central Branch will receive a circular in due course. I would however, like all sympathisers and readers of the S.S. who would be interested in Socialist activity to write to me c/o Head Office. Any suggestions of what you have in mind would be very welcome to enable me to prepare a full report.

Cyril May, 

Central Organiser.

Glasgow

Readers of the Socialist Standard in the Drumchapel area can obtain their copies from Menzies, The Main Shopping Centre, Drumchapel.

50 Years Ago: Industrial or Political Action (1965)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

The idea that the workers have "power over industry” is exquisite foolery. What "conceivable force” gives them any such power? That is a question the Industrial Unionists cannot answer. The most they can do is to come out on strike, which, instead of controlling industry, is mere cessation of industry. Let them attempt to carry on production against the will of the owners of the means of production and they soon find the "power which the workers daily have in their hands while in the workshop” is not much of a protection against the policeman's baton, or the soldier's bullet.

Human physical power is resident in the bodies of mankind. For collective economic purposes it requires organising on the economic plane; for collective political purposes it must be politically organised. But for military purposes it must be organised on military lines. Now the master class have organised this “physical force’’ on all three planes—for their own ends. Their economic organisation exists only to produce their profits; their political organisation exists to maintain their position and their interests; their military organisation exists as the supreme instrument for maintaining their privileged position.

To talk about the power of the workers in the workshops. . . . loses sight of the fact that it is precisely to prevent the workers getting or exercising power in the field of industry (which they can only do by seizing the instruments of labour) that the armed forces of the nation primarily exist. It is for this reason that the workers cannot look to economic organisation to supply the “physical force to back up the ballot”. The armed forces of the State are not to be opposed but are to be controlled, through the conquest of the machinery of government, and used for the overthrow of the capitalist system.

From the Socialist Standard April 1915.

The Lesson of Vietnam (1965)

Editorial from the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent statement made by U. Thant the Secretary-General to the United Nations, must come near to taking the prize for cynicism. Introducing his latest proposals for a negotiated settlement in Vietnam he stated: “I am sure that the great American people, if they only know the true facts, will agree with me that further bloodshed is unnecessary and that political and diplomatic negotiations alone can create conditions that will enable the United States to withdraw gracefully”

Such a remark may of course be naive, if it were not for the fact that people do not rise to world prominence in the savage world of international politics if they are that starry-eyed.

Needless to say the United States has not the slightest intention of withdrawing, gracefully or otherwise, from South Vietnam, anymore than China and Russia intend to cease intervention in the North. And the “Great American people”, like the working class of other countries, will go on supporting their ruling class in this, and making the same excuses that they have done in the past.

One of the most tragic misfortunes that can befall a people today is to find themselves living in the no-mans-land between two great powers. To be in the path of the giants is often to be crushed underfoot, as the graveyards that sprawl over the hillsides of Korea show. This tragic fate has been the lot of Vietnam for many years now. The facts are easily accessible and there is no need for us to repeat them. And to the horror of open warfare must be added that of corrupt and vicious local government. American foreign policy, like that of other capitalist powers, sees nothing wrong in supporting nasty puppet governments, some of which look bad even against a background of international double-dealing. South Vietnam is no exception.

In addition to the normal reasons for capitalist powers hanging on to territory Vietnam, like Korea before it, has become a line of demarcation from which neither side dare withdraw, and which, they declare, will be held at all cost.

It is now nearly twenty years since the second world war ended and the world was plunged into “peace". During that time there have been a continual series of “police actions” and “internal problems” like Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Hungary, Suez and a host of others. These incidents have not been glorified with the name of war and are supposed to have been in the interests of their victims; only the casualties are mounting into millions, if this pattern continues, and there is no reason to suppose that it will not, the horrors of peace will soon outstrip the horrors of war. Meanwhile the statesmen dither, they make speeches, they make journeys. They confer. These activities, we are told, are going to bring peace sometime or other.

“Peace” often means that the warring powers conclude they are spending too much on a comparatively minor conflict and decide to call a halt. The statesmen forget that they ever adopted apparently intransigent attitudes. They hie off to some well-publicised spot and there put their signatures to what they call a peace treaty.

This may suppress a particular conflict. But the bigger clash of interests, which is inevitable as long as capitalism lasts, is untouched. Not war, nor so-called peace, will abolish the problems of international conflict.

That can come about only by a fundamental change which by altering the basis of society will wipe out the evils which capitalism brings in its train. The lesson of Vietnam is the same as ever. Only Socialism can bring a world of peace and plenty.

Youngsters (1965)

Book Review from the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Generation X by Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson, Tandem Books, 3s. 6d.

The authors' avowed intention is to get young people talking about war, sex, marriage, drugs, politics in fact, everything that makes the jolly old world go round. Recent developments in mass communication mean that problems are more concentrated, more universally shared, quickly absorbed, used up and cast aside. This, say the co-authors, is the young persons' problem; the pressure of social and scientific development at the expense of biological time.

According to which random selection of this book is sampled, one could emerge with an attitude of great hope for a glorious future in the hands of an up-and-coming generation, or leave one's money to a dogs' home and hightail off to a Trappist Monastery. The authors' claim that their collective work destroys the myth of the existence of the so-called average teenager is made good.

Hamblett and Deverson interviewed characters ranging from stalwart christians to thugs so mentally sick that they see salvation as a big punch-up; a young high-class tart who aspired to marriage and children; the deb, who thought the world was fab; haters of the status quo; one dreadful youth who wanted to sponge on his parents and others for the rest of his life. (The pity is he lives in Stoke-on-Trent, and not Blegrave Square, so he will not get very far in his vocation.)

Not one of the young people interviewed seemed to be aware that teenagers having no great family liabilities, are a golden egg for the purveyors of certain forms of merchandise. They frequently expressed a fear of war, and blamed their parents for the world's mess. They did not hint that this attitude was common in the 1920s and that the youth of those times supported a second world war, and enrolled in movements like the Nazis, which would have left the maligned Edwardians aghast.

They regard their youth as a time for enjoyment, without a damn for the future, or as a personal Gethsemane before entering the adult age. The long years of wage earning are not looked forward to by the lower income groups but there is a sense of resignation, a need to find a "nice" partner later on, and settle down. This same adult world they see as false, hypocritical and unctuous. The Bomb is blamed for the sense of restlessness and indifference; way out sensations, drugs, sex and speed are candidly recognised as forms of escape from this possible doom. Is it just the Bomb or is it a vague realisation of the frustrations of working class life that awaits these young hopefuls?

All sorts of the youngsters expressed sympathy for coloured folk, and some put the opposite view with an extremity of violence. Few showed any signs that the sum total of their ideas is vastly different from their parents'. Fears of the future, contempt of past generations for their follies, a desire to adjust to new techniques unrestrained by past morality, are nothing new. Young and old have yet to learn that the way to a new society free from poverty, race-hatred, war and class antagonism is by the abolition of private property. This can only be attained by understanding the nature of the problems and the social relationships we experience, and by acting accordingly—in short by political organisation and action.

The mass of ideas expressed in Generation X spring from a support, no matter how qualified, of propertied society. When all is said and done it's much ado about nothing!

Jack Law 

The Philanthropists (1965)

Book Review from the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (Panther Books, 7s. 6d.)

Robert Noonan spent the latter part of his life at Hastings working, when work was available, as a house painter and decorator and sign writer. He was a member of the local branch of the Social Democratic Federation. During the first decade of this century he devoted his leisure time to writing a novel which, in his own words, was to be " . . .  a readable story full of human interest and based on the happenings of everyday life, the subject of Socialism being treated incidentally." 

Noonan completed his task in 1910 and soon afterwards entered hospital, where he died of tuberculosis early in 1911. He left his manuscript to his daughter who, like many girls of her time, went into service, taking the manuscript with her. Three years later, following a chance conversation with a member of the staff of Punch, the work was brought out of her tin trunk and published under the author's title, The Ragged trousered Philanthropists and in his pen name, Robert Tressell. 

The earliest editions were abridged or, more correctly, emasculated.. Chapters were left out and the remainder rearranged, phrases were altered and deleted, characters omitted and a tragic ending imposed to meet the commercial demands of the publishers and pander to current literary and political conventions. 

Years later a group of enthusiasts recollected the missing chapters, reconstructed and rearranged them in the form the author originally intended. A more complete edition, with only one chapter missing, was published in 1955 and it is this fuller edition that is now published in paperback form. The original manuscript was presented to the TUC in 1959 and is now held at Congress House, London. 

A book that can command continuous editions and reprints for over fifty years must surely qualify for the title, of a Classic. Thousands of workers have claimed that their political ideas were first stimulated by reading it. 

In the story the author casts himself in the role of Owen, a house painter who devotes every opportunity to explaining to a group of workmates how they are exploited in all directions. Despite their abject poverty and insecurity of livelihood they defend capitalism with heat, using arguments that have long since disappeared from the vocabulary of all but the most stupid of anti-socialists. . 

Those who remember working class conditions during Edwardian days will know that Noonan writes fact into his fiction. He weaves into his story chapters on charitable organisations, religious bodies, unemployment, a parliamentary election, a workers' social outing, the Clarion cyclists, Public houses, public meetings and the seduction of a worker's wife, much of which was omitted from the earlier editions. 

But Noonan did not expound Socialism. When he does propose an alternative to capitalism it turns out to be the woolly reformism of the Social Democratic Party, now in part inherited by the modem Labour Party. The characters that Noonan portrays as Socialists are advocates of nationalisation as the solution to the workers' problems. They visualise a benevolent State operating industry in the interests of the whole of the people, reducing working hours, removing undesirable institutions and increasing wages so as to provide an equitable distribution of wealth. Noonan ridicules religious organisations but accepts the idea of a Great Spirit as creator of natural raw material.

It is astonishing that a man who so obviously realised that it is the private ownership of the means of wealth production from which stem the social evils about which he wrote so satirically, should halt his thinking on the threshold of the socialist alternative. 

We have read this novel a number of times and with this recent reading we find that age has not staled it. We still smiled at the antics of the workers on their beano, we were still sad at the death of Philpot and we were still angry at the stupidity of Crass and the schemes of Sweater and Sir Graball D'Encloseland. With all its faults and limitations we shall probably read it again someday.

W. Waters