Letter: Wanted — A Prescription For Socialism (1973)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wanted — A Prescription For Socialism


Dear Sir,

This letter is meant as a complaint — a pretty strong complaint.

I subscribe to the Socialist Standard. I read in the inside front cover the declaration of principles — all very tidy and compact. There is one thing missing, a vital statement of practical policy.

By this, I mean the change that will have to take place from our present day capitalist to the socialist society of the future.

If real socialist power was won in Parliament eventually, what events would we see follow? How would the means of production be converted into the common property of society and how would democratic control by the whole people be enacted? These, I think are vital questions — if Socialism is a viable proposition, then we need to have concrete answers to these fundamental questions. Perhaps one day you will have a little space in the Socialist Standard for them.

R. Ackerman, 

London, E.1.

Reply:

The precise events that would follow the winning of political power by a Socialist working class would be up to them to work out in the light of then existing circumstances. A small number cannot prescribe the future will of the majority; the arrogance of doing so can lead to the all-too-common dictum “This is how it will be — whether you like it or not”. The matter is entirely in the hands of the future Socialist majority. Our practical policy at the moment is to do all we can to hasten the growth of the necessary Socialist majority without whom there can be no Socialism. We can say, however, that the use of political power to convert the means of production into common property and to bring them under the democratic control of the whole people will be done quickly and democratically.

Editorial Committee.

London's Ring-Roads: How to Solve the Traffic Problem (1973)

From the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ultimate argument for capitalism has always been that at least it works. The problems can be acknowledged, but while efforts to solve them are made the basic task of running society has to be accomplished; and in this capitalism passes the empirical test while Socialism remains untried. Unfortunately, it is quite untrue. Profit, the nest-feathering for which capitalism exists, is irreconcilable with social well-being or simple efficiency. The effect is that of a Fred Karno circus where the acrobats fall down, lions eat tamers, prancing horses have the botts and blazing hoops won’t light; but the ringmasters explain continually that with a change of management the greatest show on earth will get things right.

Thus, the politicians promise and plan for productive growth of which the system is incapable. Houses and flats are built by the million and the need for homes only grows. Schools everywhere like glittering palaces, and the attainment of literacy still elusive. The technical achievements fall flat, knackered by built-in obsolescence and cost-paring: each new wonder — motor-car, TV, household machine — leads at once to proliferation of repair shops in testimony to the models’ failure to work. The vision of space-travel is of men on their backs under non-starting rocketcraft all over the universe, with tow-in-and-mend stations on every star. Whatever capitalism does is done with atrocious inefficiency, its non-viability a comedy with tragic results.

Motors, Motors Everywhere

An outstanding example of this is the present-day struggle to accommodate road traffic. Generally, authorities find only one solution to attempt: the building of more and bigger roads. A new scheme for London was published at the end of February — a “box” of ring roads through the outer suburbs, girdling the city and linking the motorways which radiate from it. The existing ring-roads, North and South Circulars, have long become permanent traffic-jams in which the eight-miles-an-hour pace of Edwardian horse-traffic is seldom achievable. The box will take twenty years to build. It involves, of course, widespread destruction of homes and surroundings. At Blackheath on the south side it will go underground, not to spoil the select character of the area. To the north the intended route is through Epping Forest, which was rescued in 1870 from being nibbled-away by private enterprise to be eaten instead by governments and public corporations.

The question is: what is achieved? There are inevitably objections to the scheme, chiefly from the people whose lives will be affected by it. One argument says that the new roads are not necessary. Jeremy Bugler, writing in The Observer on 25th February, proposed that making more roads simply incites traffic congestion and that the occupants of sixty-nine cars could be put in one bus. Answers like these add to the confusion of capitalist practice. For one thing, the prime purpose of highways — and the most pressing today — is the commercial one of transporting goods. For another, the implication that people ride in cars unnecessarily for psychological ("status”) reasons is only a part-truth. The underlying fact is that the purchase of cars, their fuels and components is thrust relentlessly at everyone. Attributing the outcome to psychic weaknesses is to add insult to salesmanship.

Objection and Reconstruction

No doubt the new roads are necessary, in the same way that London’s Third Airport is necessary: given what goes on in capitalism. Indeed, the objections to the ring-road plan closely resemble those to the sites named in the airport controversy. The ruination of historic and attractive places; hardships and losses created; the noise and nuisance a major highway brings; and agreement that the thing is needed if only it is put somewhere else. The great weight of objections, too, comes from the better-to-do — conscious, apart from anything else, that they have bought better surroundings than most people get. The inference is that areas where poorer-paid workers live could be demolished without regret. In itself, that is true enough (the only thing to do in a sane society with great chunks of working-class housing, not necessarily old, would be to blow them up). But the well-off can, if they lose their fight, choose other agreeable surroundings. For the poor, the position is still as Engels described it in The Housing Question in 1872:

  I mean the practice which has now become general of making breaches in the working-class quarters of our big towns . . . from considerations of public health and for beautifying the town, or owing to the demand for big centrally-situated business premises or owing to traffic requirements, such as the laying down of railways, streets, etc. No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is always the same: the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else and often in the immediate neighbourhood.

Augean Stable on Wheels

From such an upheaval, something effective should result. The strong probability, however, is that before ten of the twenty years are up the inadequacy of the half-build road system will become a major public argument; that new schemes will be announced for relief highways and other radial roads; and that palliatives for the traffic problem will redound in the Sunday papers. A new dilemma is emerging now from motorways and ring-roads in that the approaches to them become protracted snarl-ups, the gain in movement creating a compensatory loss. There are several instances where a town’s by-pass road has grown so congested that traffic takes the town instead; the authorities’ response has been to drive it back by shutting-off the town route, making congestion worse.

One needs only to look at any urban area to see the problems and contradictions. The destinations and amenities the car is believed to bring to hand are inaccessible from it: workplaces, shops, stations, public lavatories surrounded by traffic prohibitions make the approach more tortuous than by pedestrianism. The most characteristic example is a public telephone in its commonest place, a busy spot. The motorist cannot get near to use it, but when he does so on foot conversation is made near-impossible by the noise of the traffic.

Impotence

Needing the free flow of traffic, capitalism lacks the competence to obtain it. The brothers Goodman in their book Communitas give a plan of what a traffic-orientated commercial city should be like. The metropolis is seen as a gigantic department store, with the highways as its corridors (elevated or tunneled as well as at ground-floor). Intermediary streets are abolished; the highways lead direct to the central container where homes, workplaces and institutions can all be driven into. Round this automobile city is the recreation land, stadiums and holiday camps and imitation wild parks. The authors’ point is this the way to do it if you want that sort of thing. Yet capitalism urgently wants that sort of thing, but cannot manage it.

The reason is simply the conflicting pressures which refuse any coherent development. Whatever the public and the journalists may think, every local councillor knows that “planning” is simply scrabbling for the least unsatisfactory compromise available at the time. The limiting factors include the contrary demands of commerce and industry; the strength of the property market; government policies over housing and population distribution; and, of course, cost. One of the aims of nationalization was to reduce these self-conflicts in capitalism (incidentally, one of the earliest nationalizations, in effect, was bringing highways under corporate control to facilitate traffic movement), but it has done little or nothing. So far from executing an ideal communal will, the nationalized industries and undertakings have to compete in the melée with everyone else.

Another Kind of World

Can Socialism do better? The cause of all the chronic dilemmas and idiocies of capitalism is organic: its structure on the class ownership of the means of production. There can be no hope of solutions or efficiency until this fetter is broken. Given its replacement by common ownership, social cohesion and planning of the environment we want become possible for the first time.

Some immediate changes in town life on the establishment of Socialism are apparent. With the end of the use of money, numbers of buildings or their uses become obsolete. Banks (and the accountants’ and brokers’ offices which invariably live over them); labour exchanges and social security buildings; rates and rent offices, insurance offices, betting shops, estate agents’, solicitors’. There is the immense multiplicity of shops, for competition not convenience: supermarkets, electric wares and furniture stores juxtaposed down the Hight Street, each selling exactly the same as the others and vying for trade with special offers. The nationalized boards’ own showrooms, where electricity and gas are flogged as if in mortal combat with the popularity of rush-lights and turf-burning. Add, too, the socially wasteful services — repairs and replacements for rubbishy products and those made to “agreed standards”. To visualize the town with all these gone is to see a surprising difference in its shape, but the greater difference is in its function. Other, still more radical, changes can be envisaged: a new conception of housing, for instance.

The Real Alternative

The frequency and use of the motor-car arise from this general pattern of social life. A comparison can be made between Jeremy Bugler’s desire to get commuting drivers out of their cars and into buses, and the quite different conditions which would exist under Socialism. In the first, the suggestion is for legislation: to ban cars from town areas, or to promote bus services by subsidy, or both. In Socialism, the kinds and conditions of work would be very much different from those of today. Commuting, the life of hurrying from work to watch TV and sleep in the same way that a boxer returns briefly to his corner between the rounds, might be chosen by the specially dedicated but would no longer be enforced on millions. Housing comes into it as well. When giant office blocks are built on the most expensive land in the centre of cities and housing developments on the cheapest at the outskirts, movement becomes the least economic and the most troublesome.

Likewise, road transport. One can subtract a great deal which for obvious reasons will cease to exist under Socialism, and the craziness out of which money is made — “carrying coals to Newcastle” is a cliché for the height of uselessness, but they actually do it for capitalism (no doubt in forty-ton lorries). Whenever an alternative to lorry transport — the rehabilitation of canals or railways for example — is perceivable, it has to be discounted on the grounds of cost.

The question of the roads in general is one of social organization and motivation. With those changed fundamentally, new functions and attitudes appear; the motor-car will have a different evaluation. But where problems do arise, the resources and intelligence of society can be applied to solving them. Mankind can choose, and that is the essence of a responsible, free society. Marx and Engels saw Socialism as ending the division between town and country. That does not mean the town consuming the green fields; but it may mean pastures where a ring-road box has been.

Robert Barltrop

Greater London Council Elections: The Socialist Programme (1973)

Party News from the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Click on the image to enlarge.

This Election Is About Capitalism

Don’t get bowled over by the possibility of ‘free’ transport. By the threat or promise of Labour taking over all the rented property in London. By the promise that the Ring Road will actually improve the environment. This election, as with others in the past, is to decide which Party is now going to run capitalism. We reject this. Our candidates will seek your support only on the clear-cut issue of Socialism.

Labour, Tory, Liberal, Communist and the others are in favour of a system where you will remain members of the working class. They support capitalism, which basically is a system where the means of wealth production are owned and controlled by a small minority of people, the capitalist class, and where the vast majority — you, the working class — have to work for a wage or salary in order to exist. It is a pernicious system. It is based upon buying and selling, with profit as the motive for production. Where money is the determining factor and ‘Will it pay?’ the first question. How often have you read of a ‘good’ scheme which cannot get off the ground because of the cost? It is a system that generates waste, greed, corruption, suspicion; it throws up social problems like an erupting volcano.

Housing, slums, transport, roads, medical centres, open spaces; these will all appear yet again in the manifestoes of the other parties as problems which must be urgently solved, and for which they all have the solution — if only you will vote for them. But all these parties have had the ‘solution’ in the past; the only trouble is that it has never worked; capitalism has seen to that.

The Greater London Council is part of the political machinery for running capitalism and as long as you are prepared to continue voting for the parties which support capitalism then so long will the system last and so long will you bear the brunt of social problems. If you are prepared to live with a system that deprives you of a creative and happy life, then go on voting as you’ve done in the past.

But we think you have the potential, not only to envisage a different type of world, but to take the necessary political action to get it. Let there be no misunderstanding. We are not putting forward candidates who will make you any promises. We are not saying that we have better leaders than those of other parties. In fact, we have no leaders, but do have a set of ideas, which although at first glance might be new to you, we feel sure you will on reflection agree have something which is worthy of your consideration.

We have already mentioned that our issue is that of Socialism, and when we use this word we mean something specific. Socialism is a world-wide community with common interests. Where the land, and all the means of production will be owned by mankind as a whole, with democratic control. Where the sole motive for production will be the satisfaction of your needs. Simply put — bread will be baked because people want to eat it — just that. Money will play not part at all in this society because there will be no need for money. Decisions by the community will be taken on their merits. The wages system will be abolished along with all the other stupid trappings of the present system. Socialism will be a system of co-operation; where each will give according to ability and take according to need. Mankind with its knowledge, harnessed to the riches of the earth, is capable of producing abundance. Why be satisfied with a world of shortages?

Socialism cannot be introduced by waving a magic political wand. It will be the outcome of understanding and hard work; your understanding, your hard work.

We are not asking you to vote for the Socialist candidates because you are fed up with the others or because you think we should be given a chance. We only want your vote if you agree with our case, our object and declaration of principles.

Take a momentous step for your future by making further enquiries about the Socialist Party of Great Britain; by reading our literature and making up your own mind, whether at last in this election, you will have nothing more to do with capitalism, but will throw in your weight and resources with the Socialist movement.

Westminster

Why Are We Contesting

Fellow Workers,

Capitalism is the system of society which dominates the world today. It is a system where, either privately or through the State, the capitalist class own and control the means of production. It is a system of riches and poverty, of slums and palaces, of wages and profits, strikes, unemployment and war.

Under capitalism the vast majority of people are members of the working class who live by selling their abilities to work — for wages. It is through the exploitation of the working class that all the wealth of the world is produced.

Capitalism denies workers access to the wealth they create beyond the extent of their wages. Truly it is a system where wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, where the market and the profit motive are supreme. Capitalism is administered by politicians given power mainly by working-class votes. Everything the Greater London Council does is overshadowed by capitalism. The GLC is part of the administration of capitalism. Every sphere in the vast scope of its activity is restricted by cost consideration and ultimately decided by the overall effect on the profits of the system as a whole. Whether it be houses, hospitals, health, or education, where the money is coming from is always the first question.

Human need must come second in a society that lives on profits. Capitalism has never been any different. The only possible solution is to change society.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is the only Party contesting these elections on this fundamental basis. Whether they are called left-wing or right-wing, Labour, Conservative, Liberal or Communist, every other party is a reformist party. That is to say, all of their schemes, plans and promises are aimed at adjusting capitalism— not getting rid of it. If you think “they are all the same once they get in” this is because you vote on the basis of promises — promises to keep capitalism going.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is contesting these elections because we understand capitalism — and we want Socialism. The vote is the means whereby the working class will gain control of political power; it is therefore a barometer of working-class understanding. When a majority have ceased to be deluded by personalities and promises, they will vote for Socialism.

Socialism as an idea has been twisted and misrepresented by the Labour Party, the so-called Communist Party and the various Trotskyist groups. Socialism does not mean Labour governments, nationalisation, or the type of system in Russia or China. These are examples of state capitalism. Socialism means a way of life where the whole world and its resources will be held in common by all mankind. A classless world community with production solely for use and free access according to need. No longer will wages, markets and profits blight and restrict our lives. People will co-operate to produce an abundance — and then enjoy it.

Socialism will be run democratically; that is why we have always stressed the need for understanding.

Your vote can help decide whether the misery of capitalism will continue.

South West London

Let's Have Free Access 

The real issue at the forthcoming election is not whether to elect a Conservative or Labour councillor. The real issue is quite simply that of which kind of society are all of us to live in. We in the Socialist Party of Great Britain believe that only a fundamental change in the basis of society will solve the problems that affect almost everyone. It is therefore not because we wish to take over the administration of the Greater London Council that we are campaigning in this election: we are rather taking the opportunity of spreading knowledge of our ideas and aims. We do not ask you to vote for us in return for the promise of some petty — and perhaps actually harmful — reform; we ask you to study our ideas, and, if you agree with them, to make contact with our local branch so that you can find out more about them.

And what is this fundamental change that we stand for? Briefly, we wish to establish a system of society where every single person will be able to take freely from the store of social wealth whatever he or she needs. Such a system — which we call “free access” — means quite simply what it says: there will be no restrictions (such as are imposed today by the size of your wage-packet or salary cheque) on the amount of goods or services which any individual consumes, enjoys or uses. We maintain that an abundance of wealth, which such a system implies, could quite easily be produced if production were motived by the desire to satisfy people’s needs, not by profit as at present. Profit acts as a barrier to production, since if a thing cannot be sold at a profit, it will quite simply not be produced, no matter how many people would like it. And we have all read in the newspapers of fruit and so on, which has already been produced, actually being destroyed in order to keep prices up and to serve the interests of profit. Again, think of all the people (bank clerks, ticket collectors, in short all those whose work is concerned with money) who do not produce socially useful wealth; under a system of free access their abilities, and those of countless others too, including those unemployed at present, could be put to producing goods which people really need. What we stand for, then, in this election as at all times, is a world-wide system of society where there is no money, no government, no war, and where the production of wealth for use alone, is democratically controlled by everybody.

We make no apology for introducing ideas such as these into a local council election, since we believe that it is the existence of a wages system and production for profit which causes the problems about which other parties will be campaigning to gain your support. Housing, for instance, cannot be planned in the interests of all as long as most people find the type of accommodation they can afford limited by what they earn. We maintain that, whoever sits on the council, decisions such as those concerning house- and road-building are bound to be made above the heads of and against the interest of the vast majority of the people concerned, simply because the very basis of society means, firstly, that only a small minority of people take vital decisions, and, secondly, that these people have to act in the interest of profit rather than in the interests of the people whose lives are involved. That is why we are not just another party trying to run the present system in a slightly different way — we wish to change the system fundamentally, since this is the only way to solve the problems which both you and ourselves suffer from.

If you agree with the views expressed above, we ask you to do two things: firstly show it by voting for the Socialist candidate; second, and far more important, take steps to acquaint yourself further with the case we have put forward in this address — the case of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Haringey

Letter: The Harsh Realities of School (1973)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Harsh Realities of School

The following has been received from a correspondent who is a teacher, and is published without comment by us since it largely speaks for itself.

If the schools I have taught in are fairly typical of English schools (and I have no reason to think that they are not) then they certainly operate under the same social stratification as capitalism itself whose essence is that of privileged and subject orders.

“Keep them (i.e. the students) properly in their stations” (the words of one learned headmaster). “Don’t reason with ’um just thump urn.” (A teacher’s approach in the event of any difficulty). Recently one child complained to the head of a department about one of the teachers. The result was not any questioning by the teacher about himself or the head of the department about the teacher, but rather a disgust and indignation on the part of these two and other members of the ruling élite about the fact that this child should have dared to complain (where is his respect? etc.) and a caning for the child. These actual examples, by no means unusual as far as I can see, seem to sum up the approach of most of the hierarchy (i.e. staff) of today’s schools. Now by no means all teachers would follow these principles if confronted with them directly by some questioning person, but when it comes to practice, my experience says that they are not untypical.

The strict and cruel discipline practised in most schools today is explained away on the grounds that it is good for the students. I find this hard to believe. Most teachers lead in this cruelty, but a sub-strata of bullies exists in the form of prefects. The attitude of “we got pushed about when young and it did not harm us” seems to be the only justification for making life a torment in schools by the ruling bullies. Why is it good for a child to stay out of doors when the staff run inside complaining of the cold? Why should a child not eat in class? What harm does that do? (alright, crisp packets do rattle, but that’s an extreme). Why should students be made to walk down the corridor in regimented fashion? Why is chatting when work has been set not allowed? Surely young people have got a lot to learn purely from discussion with each other. There are a multiplicity of whys in mind and in the minds of those unfortunate ones subject to the fetters of school.

There are of course many answers that can be given to these questions. At school children are being regimented and trained to accept the system of society as it exists at present. This involves disciplining oneself to hard work. Hence homework every night is given. Examination success is claimed as an indicator of one’s intelligence and therefore aptness for certain jobs. What good the passing of a history exam does for one working in a tax office I have yet to ascertain, apart from disciplining one to sit there and work for a goal. People at school do not learn or enjoy themselves to any large extent because the teachers are forced to keep a syllabus (most of them agree with this). Young people in school may train in their minds to recite that piece of work in an exam at the expense often of ruining any enjoyment in that subject. School seems to have the knack of being able to ruin any genuine or potential enjoyment a person may have if allowed to follow his/her own interests.

Adults often say that their school days were the best days of their life if only they had been old enough to appreciate them. This is, however, only a comparative analysis. School days seem good only in the light of what work is like after leaving school, and then probably only because of the compensation of long holidays. School as it exists is to the child much like work is to the adult. The school attender however has probably more pressures upon him/her. Students at school are pressurised by parents, teachers and the law to go to school each day. They have no choice. Neither, until they attain the age of 14/15 in most schools, do they have a choice in the subjects they study. This constitutes the best years of one’s life? Society, one feels, to throw up such value must be in a mess.

As one child said in a debate in school “just put bars on the windows and then people will believe it’s a prison.” Hopefully, however with the coming of Socialism the shackles now upon both students (young workers) and workers will be released and freedom for the individual (after all, teachers, let us not forget that under-16-year-olds are individual human beings) will replace it.

Cath.

"Huffing and Puffing" (1973)

From the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Futile Talk by a Trade Union leader

The president of the Mineworkers’ Union, Joe Gormley, is making stroppy noises about the Government. He says: “The time for huffing and puffing is over” . . . "The Unions must put their feet where their mouth is” . . . “If you can’t abide the Government’s policies, then you must change the Government” — and that, he says, “Must mean the Trade Union Congress calling a General Strike”.

All this in the News of the World (18 February), which is appalled and calls on responsible trade-union leaders to “drag Mr. Gormley back from the brink”. He doesn’t think the Tories will win the next election, although he carefully avoids mentioning which party might win in the event of a Tory defeat.

The election (to be forced by a General Strike) will be about “rising prices”, “land speculation” and “property racketeers”. Obviously, Mr. Gormley had an election programme along these lines in mind. One wonders why the vociferous Gormley, who prides himself on his outspokenness and says it sometimes makes him unpopular, is so coy about this.

It is patently obvious that the only possible outcome of a Tory election defeat is a Labour Party victory and a Labour government. If Gormley is under the mistaken impression that this will in any way improve the lot of the workers, or increase the freedom of the trade unions, we must remind him that it was the postwar Labour government which prosecuted gas workers (who are on strike today under Tory rule without being prosecuted). The gasworkers were sentenced to a month’s imprisonment, later changed to a fine of £50 each.

Another of the ineffable Joe’s pipe-dreams is the notion that a Tory election defeat (and therefore Labour victory) can satisfactorily deal with rising prices, land speculation, and property racketeers. It was a Labour government which in addition to printing too many bank-notes, like the Tories, deliberately devalued the pound, or inflated the currency, increasing prices.

That a responsible official of a very large Union can so try to deflect attention from the Union’s real business (getting an increase in wages) shows how much they still have to learn of the economics of capitalism. Wages are also a price, and every trade-unionist wants this price to rise. The stupid folly of the TUC in allowing the Government to kid them that higher prices are the result of wage increases is doing much harm to the trade union movement.

As an organized political party seeking political power through the ballot, the Socialist Party of Great Britain have this to say to Gormley. Your talk about General Strikes to bring down governments is a counsel of folly and despair. If the organized trade-unionists made up a majority of the electorate (which they do not) then they could do this constitutionally anyway, but if they did it as an organized group they would be acting as a political party, not a trade union. But trade unions are not organized on political principles, but on trade or job qualifications.

Having defeated the Tories and returned a Labour (or TUC) government, they would then be faced with the job of all governments — running the country; and we have forty years of experience and six previous Labour governments to tell us exactly what they would do. Even if Joe Gormley himself were appointed Prime Minister, he would do what every PM does: protect capitalism, because he would not have been elected and have had no mandate to do anything else. He would have been elected to patch up capitalism (rising prices, etc., etc.).

As Mr. Wilson told the TUC once: "The job of a Government is to govern.” How much more money and time is the Mineworkers’ Union going to pour into the futile and useless Labour Party? For more than forty years they backed nationalization of the coal mines. This was eventually implemented, and notices were stuck up outside coal-pits saying: “These mines now belong to the People.” And organizations like “Age-Concern” now say that more elderly people are dying of cold than ever, because they cannot obtain enough of “their own” coal. Miners are still striking for increases in wages, as they did when the pits were privately owned.

Finally, about the General Strike. A General Strike, like all strikes, is a merely negative action. It is workers refusing to work, sitting down, or going home. It may remove or bring down a government. If the general-strikers (as in Italy now) are not Socialists, they will re-elect a non-Socialist — that is, a capitalist — government and the whole daft business starts all over again. For this reason, we have always consistently opposed the idea that capitalism can be damaged by political strikes. No mere strike action can help the establishment of Socialism, which is a positive measure where everybody does something to help. Of course, trade unions will have a hand in this.

The General Council of the TUC has given the answer to Gormley: “A total and continuous stoppage was ruled out because it would not be possible.” (Guardian, 28 Feb. 1973). Perhaps Joe Gormley will now stop “huffing and puffing” about political general strikes.

Horatio.

Human Nature: Man's Hope (1973)

From the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

When putting the case for Socialism, one often hears the objection: Yes, a marvellous idea if it wasn’t for human nature. You see (they often continue), we agree man isn’t naturally evil, but he has been so indoctrinated with the competitive idea of the need to survive now, that Socialism is all very nice in theory, but in practice is just not on. You are hoping for Utopia, you are living in a dream world. It will never happen if you live for ten million years.

With these daunting comments ringing in my ears, I set out to examine the facts as dispassionately as I could. First of all, if men are clawing to get one up on the other bloke: how come some will sacrifice everything to relieve others’ suffering? How come if we are taken ill in the street someone will call an ambulance or administer first aid? Some will even discard opportunities for success in order to devote themselves to some service with little or no material reward.

Oh, the objectors will continue, we agree there are some saintly individuals, but the majority couldn’t care less. If this were true then clearly the future would look black; if we all have to be saints before we can have Socialism, then clearly it will never happen. At this point I recall the experience of an English schoolteacher who took an appointment to teach in one of the new African states, where the bush people were still living in a near-primitive state. On the first days the teacher tried to interest the children in simple lessons but the children could not understand the discipline of the classroom. All her attempts to assemble them in classroom were met with charming indifference as they ran out into the sun. After some experimenting, she found it was possible to interest them in painting, and so they sat under the trees and painted what they saw around them (I believe an exhibition of their work was later put on in one of the London galleries).

But to return to the point at issue. After the lesson, the teacher handed the children the paints and told them to keep them. They smiled vaguely and handed them back. “Mine and thine” was unknown to them; there was nothing in their nature to make them want to hoard or steal. “It was not in their nature.” They were not saints and they were not sinners. Like Europeans, they simply reflected the way they were brought up.

Man is by nature a social animal. He needs to be sociable; much of the disturbed behaviour one witnesses today is born of the fact that man has to compete to survive but it is in fact against his nature. Human nature is man’s hope, not his harbinger of doom.

P.J.M.

50 Years Ago: On Eliminating The Unfit (1973)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

You will remember the immortal lines of Edward Lear :

“They went to sea in a sieve they did ;
In a sieve they went to sea.”

And then, after extravagant and variegated adventures, in the last verse he informed us:

‘‘In forty years they all came back,
“In forty years or more.”

I mention this to introduce you to the great thought that has struck Professor Arthur Thomson! He thinks we should all go into the sieve again; and, unlike kindly Edward Lear, he doesn’t want us all to come back. 

#    #    #    #

The readers of “John O’ London’s Weekly’’ for March 17th were informed, under the large heading, “Mankind Must Be Sifted,’’ of the pickle we are in.

  'There is too little sifting. If ten biologists were asked what feature in modern civilisation gave them most anxiety . . . we are inclined to think all would agree in placing first the relative slackness of selective processes working in the direction of progressive evolution.'

Now to his remedies, his sieves :

  'The multiplication of the radically undesirable must be checked.  . . . selection which takes the form of insisting on efficiency requirements. The more of this the better when the requirements are reasonable, and when they tend to make life more difficult for unreliable types whose multiplication is not in the interests of the race.'

#    #    #    #

Notice how the changes are rung on desirable and undesirable. By whom and for whom? Why is the question never once raised as to who and what are the defectives; whence they come or how they arise. I have seen it stated by another of the professorial fraternity that in spite of all hereditary taint 99 per cent. are born perfect. What happens after birth?

#    #    #    #

The employing class as a whole never says, “Low wages mean stunted men, starved women and defective children." It never says, “Long hours and intense toil mean premature age, empty lives and high accident rates for the toilers.” But they do mean so. For every defective born there is a hundred made by capitalism. For the defective born there is a hope of cure; for the defective made there is none—except Socialism. 

(From an article "Any More For The Sieve?" by W. T. Hopley in the Socialist Standard, April 1923.)

The Semantics of State Capitalism (1973)

From the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Xinhua Zidian (New Chinese Dictionary), published in Peking in 1972, defines the word ziben as "means of production controlled by capitalists and money used to employ workers. By means of ziben the capitalist exploits the worker and obtains surplus value." It also defines the word zijin as “material and money which a socialist country uses to develop the national economy."

Now, the interesting thing is that both these words, ziben and zijin, would normally be rendered in English as “capital": indeed, they have been defined in this way in earlier dictionaries published under the Chinese Communist government. Could it be that in attempting to make a distinction between them, the government is in fact admitting that the same process takes place both under capitalism and in their so-called “socialist country”? In other words, the control exercised over the means of production by a minority is used to “obtain surplus value”; the phrase "develop the national economy" could equally be applied to either of these two systems (only by their respective apologists, of course), though in fact it is not two systems that are being described but just one—capitalism.

Paul Bennett

The Economics of Unemployment (1973)

From the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is much confusion about the causes of unemployment and almost as much about how many unemployed there actually are. Early last year when the official figures stood at about a million several unofficial estimates put it much higher. The official figures told us how many men and women there were who were available for work and were on the Register. But what about those who for one reason or another were not on the Register? One estimate was that the real total was a million and a quarter. The Observer (23 January 1972) thought it was a million and a half and the same newspaper (20 February 1972) estimated that there were two million fewer people at work than there had been three years earlier. Harold Wilson (Financial Times, 8 April 1972) capped it with his own estimate that if you included all the people who were not looking for a job because there were no vacancies, the real figure “was nearer three million than the government’s figure of one million”.

There is nothing new about this kind of discrepancy between official figures and unofficial estimates in times of heavy unemployment and, provided it is borne in mind, the official figures do give a sufficient indication of how the level of unemployment alternately rises and falls as trade and production decline and expand.

Karl Marx from his study of nineteenth-century capitalism gave a summary description of what goes on:

The enormous extensibility of the factory system, the way in which it increases production by leaps and bounds, and its dependence upon the world market, necessarily give a febrile impetus to production, with a glutting of the markets, a subsequent relative inadequacy of demand, and therefore a paralysis of industry. The life of industry becomes one characterized by a succession of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, overproduction, crisis, and stagnation.

(Capital, Vol. I, page 456. Allen & Unwin edn.) 

Earlier economists had maintained that this kind of trade cycle did not and indeed could not happen. Later critics of Marx, who were compelled by events to admit that it did happen, then maintained that it was not necessary and that it only required certain kinds of corrective action to be taken to prevent it.

Try these Pills

Every variety of “corrective action” has been tried and all have failed because they all come up against certain inescapable aspects of the capitalist system. In a very abstract way it could be said that if all branches of all industries in all the world were planned to be kept in line with market demand and if technical improvements which reduced costs in one country were shared with all other countries and if wages, prices and levels of efficiency were the same everywhere, the trade cycle could be eliminated; but it is only necessary to state this to see that it is impossible. Individual capitalists fight for their own interests and national groups of capitalists have overwhelming economic and military reasons not to be submerged in such an all-embracing scheme. In practice nobody treats seriously ideas of that kind.

In the sphere of what is considered practicable the cures for unemployment fall into a few main groups. One is for the government to prop up ailing firms or industries with subsidies, or to promote employment in particular regions by the same means. These schemes are however not preventives of unemployment but ways of keeping the unemployed on the pay roll and off the dole queue. In effect they are payments to particular employers to employ people they otherwise would not employ. They are a burden on the rest of the capitalist class since they have to be paid for out of taxation. Frances Cairncross (Observer, 28 May 1972) in an article on the cost of promoting employment in the “development areas” in the ten years 1960 to 1970 stated that it was over £2,000 million and “the average cost of each new job created came to £678”; in spite of which unemployment in those areas jumped from 85,405 in June 1961 to 206,740 ten years later. “Looking at those figures, one might well ask whether regional policy was anything more than an expensive attempt to keep marginal constituencies in the backwoods sweet.”

Fewer Hands Make Less Work

A second idea for curing unemployment has been the Labour Party and trade-union belief that workers would be given job security if industries were taken out of the hands of private employers and nationalized. Hugh Scanlon, President of AEUW, voiced this in an attack on the General Electric Company. He pointed out that in the past three years GEC had cut their labour force in Britain from 245,000 to 181,000 while their profits increased (Financial Times, 14 December 1972). He described the company as “the largest unemployer of labour in this country". He seems to be singularly ill-informed. For years the nationalized industries — coal, gas, railways and electricity supply — have been reducing staff by tens of thousands; now joined by the Steel Corporation’s estimated 50,000 redundancies. The forces pressing the nationalized industries to cut staff are exactly the same as those affecting private industry, the need to be competitive and profitable.

The most spectacular of the schemes to obviate the trade cycle has of course been the Keynesian idea that the government can take action to keep up the demand for goods by its own investments and by stimulating consumption and private companies’ investment — the policy of Full Employment. Now that it has manifestly failed it is hard to believe how confident the Keynesians were that it would work. A typical claim was that made in 1946 by Barbara Wootton (now Lady Wootton) when she wrote: “It is now generally accepted, even at the highest academic and political levels, that there can be enough jobs to go round.” (There are still a few "true believers”. Michael Foot, MP, said on the radio, 24 January 1972: “By following Keynes’ doctrine it is a simple matter to make work.”)

Falls on Deaf Ears

Events of the past two years have shown how right Marx was when he pinpointed the fact that what alone will induce the capitalists to increase production is the confidence that what they put on the market will be sold at a profit. No amount of exhortation by the government and assurances that the banks will advance money to aid them will have any effect, and increases of the governments’ own expenditure make no difference if at the same time companies are holding back on investment.

In a speech on 4 February 1973 Prime Minister Heath was chiding businessmen for their reluctance “to expand and invest”, but he and the Chancellor of the Exchequer and other Ministers had been saying the same for the past two years, back to 1971. On 5 December 1971 the Observer published the results of an enquiry into the extent to which industry was, or rather was not, expanding its investment; under the title “Anthony Barber has been begging industry to invest . . . no-one is listening.” They quoted Barber’s claim in the House of Commons that “never before has a government taken so much action to stimulate employment”.

Mr. Barber was so right in telling the Commons this. He has cut taxes, stepped up spending, urged bewildered nationalized industry bosses to get out and spend, and maintained a brave front about economic progress. But Barber missed the point. No one, especially in industry, is arguing about how much he has done. What they are sweating about is whether it is working.

It was left to the City Editor of the Daily Mail to make the appropriate cynical observation on the situation:

Businessmen are not going to invest their own money or shareholders’ funds just because men are out of work or the Government asks them to.

(Daily Mail, 28 Feb. 1972)

He added that businessmen would not change their line until “prospects of better profits emerge”.

Now indeed, helped by the sacking of thousands of workers and the tightening up of work processes, expectation of profit has risen again and unemployment has fallen. But it comes after several years of stagnation which, if the Keynesian idea had been valid, would never have happened in the first place.

Edgar Hardcastle

The Overthrow of Non-Democracy (1973)

Book Review from the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Democracy at Gunpoint: The Greek Front, by Andreas Papandreou. Deutsch.

Andreas Papandreou, the son of the veteran Greek republican politician George Papandreou and now a leader of the opposition in exile to the Greek colonels, here gives his personal account of the events leading to the Greek military coup on 21 April 1967.

The book starts off alright, but towards the end degenerates into a series of quotes. What makes it interesting for Socialists is that Papandreou clearly shows that even before April 1967 Greece was not a proper political democracy, i.e. a country where the State machine, including the armed forces, was under the control of a popularly-elected government. There was indeed a popularly-elected government, but this never controlled the Army. Not that most postwar Greek governments, being composed of conservative politicians favourable to the King and the Army, wanted to.

Papandreou describes the political structure that emerged in Greece after the war in these terms:

. . .  a secret para-governmental machinery composed of army cliques had developed a solid hold on the reins of State power.
. . .  a constitutional dualism gradually emerged, with the institutions of a democratic régime existing within the overall structure of an authoritarian State.

So in pre-1967 Greek political democracy was a façade. And when the threat of a parliamentary government that would try to establish a genuine political democracy in Greece appeared, the façade was dropped and naked Army rule established by military coup.

The 1964 elections gave the opposition Centre Union, led by George Papandreou, a parliamentary majority. Andreas, who was himself for a short while a Minister in his father’s Centre Union government, describes this party’s programme thus:

The Centre Union represented the party that was committed to making Greece a modern European state. Politically, we were committed to changing Greece from a garrison state to a modem democratic State.

Clearly a threat to the Army/Palace Establishment (and CIA, since America equipped the Greek Army and relied on it to play a key role in NATO). By various political intrigues, including the bribing of some Centre Union deputies, the Establishment was able to bring about George Papandreou’s resignation as Prime Minister and to replace him by a series of their puppets. But, in the end, fresh elections had to be agreed to. The date was fixed for 27 May 1967. The Centre Union, this time made even more determined by its experiences to break the power of the Establishment and to set up a political democracy in Greece, was expected to win again.

On 21 April some Colonels staged a military coup. Actually two coups were being planned; one by the King and one by these Colonels. The Colonels were first off the mark. An unsuccessful royal counter-coup in December led to King Constantine going into exile. But both groups of plotters had the same basic aim: to prevent the Greek armed forces coming under the control of a popularly- elected parliament and government.

This Greek coup has become part of the Leftist argument against our policy of trying to establish Socialism peaceably through the use of existing democratic political institutions. But, as we have just seen, the political situation in pre-1967 Greece was not at all like it is in, say, Britain or France or America or other places where there is a workable, though limited, political democracy. Parliament in Greece did not control the coercive side of the State machine. It was a façade. A coup in such a situation to stop the State machine coming under parliamentary control has no relevance whatsoever to the chances of a majority Socialist working class using a State machine already under parliamentary control as an instrument to establish Socialism.

Adam Buick

The President and the People: Looking Back on Lyndon Johnson (1973)

From the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even Presidents of the United States cannot live forever. Within weeks of each other, two who in their time supervised a great act of organised mass destruction died, quietly at their homes.

A final human touch, this; and human touches are among the expectations which people have of their leaders, at the same time as they hope for elements of the superhuman. Lyndon Johnson specialised in folksy speeches; during his time as Vice President he gave out bail-point pens to the people of West Berlin and he was always one of the world’s champion handshakers. In his superhuman rôle he promised to unravel the tangle of Vietnam and to fashion America into what he called the Great Society — something which, unsurprisingly, is still awaited.

Truman was known as the small town haberdasher come to the Presidency, having greatness thrust upon him. His daughter Margaret was a singer of sorts and as such always good for a joke; Truman once offered to fight a reviewer who had been unwisely frank about one of her performances. At the same time, he was expected to juggle successfully with the new, fearsome crises of a nuclear-armed world capitalism and to survive politically under severe pressures.

The Right Place & Time

An adviser to Richard Nixon informed him in 1967 about the road to political success:

Potential presidents are measured against an ideal that’s a combination of leading man, god, father, hero, pope, king, with maybe just a touch of the avenging Furies thrown in.

Sometimes a President survives the inevitable disappointment of these hopes, as Truman did. Sometimes, like Johnson, he goes under, ending his days sick and apathetic perhaps ready only to die.

Statesmanship is, as we all know, one of the qualities which all presidents are required to possess and to exercise. If the word has meaning, it must be one which includes a large measure of cynicism and political calculation and involve taking decisions which may later be reversed by what will also be known as acts of statesmanship. Truman pushed America into the Korean war (which by the time he died had been renamed a police action) which was hailed as a great example of statesmanship. His successor Eisenhower, happening into the presidency just as the war was exhausting itself and both sides were accepting the need to negotiate, was able to end the hostilities and thereby get himself also hailed as a great statesman.

Greatness Thrust Upon Them

Johnson took on the job of expanding the American involvement in Vietnam which Kennedy had begun, which marked him down as a statesman. In 1968, when American workers were growing sick of the war — not so much because of the killing and destruction but because of the apparent inability of America to crush so puny an opponent — Nixon made a statesmanlike promise to end the war. It took over five years for him to get a cease-fire — at any rate on paper if not on the battlefield — but having got that Nixon is assured of his place as one of capitalism’s great statesmen.

Words Appeal

In all of this the working class develop a political blind spot which they can learn to turn so that it blots out any facts which may disturb the golden image of their leader. Of all American presidents, none is more loved than John Kennedy, who was young and good-looking and who had an elegant wife and appealing children. Very human; and all rounded off by his violent end, bleeding onto his wife’s expensive clothes. So Kennedy is forgiven his venture into the Bay of Pigs, his perilous gamble in the Cuban missiles crisis, his beginning the American involvement in Vietnam. He is forgiven his failure to ease the problems of poverty which he made so much of in his election campaign; soon after he died Johnson reported to Congress that a fifth of American families were living in what even he was prepared to describe as poverty.

It need hardly be said that Johnson presented his report as a sort of fertiliser in which a fresh crop of promises could be cultivated. A few months later he gave out the slogan which clung to him for a long time:

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice . . . The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and enlarge his talents.

Changing the Tune

And so on. And so on. And on. Johnson’s conversion to a crusader against “racial injustice” was as abrupt as his elevation to the Vice-Presidential candidacy. As a Senator he was never in any doubt about where he stood when voting on laws which were aimed at curbing the excesses of the racists of the South. Between 1940 and 1960 he voted on such issues 39 times, always as one would expect a good, solid, prejudiced Southerner to vote. He was six times against abolishing the poll tax; twice against anti-lynch laws; twice in favour of racial segregation in the American forces. And so on. And on. And on.

When he became President, Johnson applied all that he had learned about political arm-twisting, and used all the power of patronage he had built up during his time as Senate leader and Vice-President, to push through Congress the anti-discrimination laws which had baffled Kennedy. Johnson did not necessarily like what he did but, as he once shouted at a Senate subcommittee . . this is happening!” He was giving way to the inevitable, to the progressive grind of modern capitalism which the South has resisted for so long. As a simple Senator for Texas Johnson could, indeed he must, pander to the racial bigots and killers of the South, no matter what that meant in terms of negro terror and suffering. When he was in the White House he was acting for American capitalism as a whole and, again with no thought for human suffering, he was forced to do things simply because they were happening.

His success in these ruthless battles and manipulations confirmed the Johnson reputation as a masterly politician, one of the world’s greatest exponents of compromise and double dealing. When he crushed Goldwater in 1964 he might have thought to be set fair for an endless passage of triumph. But Vietnam, for one, proved a problem typical of capitalism — beyond the most skilful negotiator. Johnson’s failure here, and the intensifying fever of American society in the Sixties — the crime, the race riots, the economic crises — finished him. The uproar of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago epitomised the result of Johnson’s presidency and what he, the great unifier, had done to his party. The pay-off came hard in 1972, when the Democrats chose a certain loser for their candidate, a symbolic lamb to the slaughter. Johnson died soon after the debacle of last November.

Selling the Goods

It is usual for political commentators to analyse a politician’s failings in terms of his personal failings, or defects in his advisers, or sometimes even simple bad luck — in fact in any way which evades the facts. They can never explain, why problems which baffle one leader are apparently so easy to another. Why bad luck afflicts one President but not another. Why none of them seem to learn from the failures of their predecessors.

The simple explanation of the inability of politicians to deal with the situations confronting them and to keep their promises to the electors is that they are attempting the impossible. America might, as the protesters demanded, have kept out of the Vietnam war, but it is hard to see how they could save done so without denying the presumptions upon which a modern, powerful capitalist state must work. Johnson might have been able to legislate racism out of existence, if it were possible to wipe out three hundred years of history and the economic drives on which it was based. Nixon might now be able to abolish poverty, if capitalism suddenly stops being a society in which everything is made to be bought and sold.

No politician can ever confess to the impossibility of the tasks he sets himself. The gap between promises and reality must be bridged by other means. Sometimes, as we said, it might be by a little bit of luck, like the bit which enabled Nixon to claim, in time for the election last November, to have solved the financial problems of American capitalism. Mostly, the gap is bridged by a more calculated method, which brings the public relations and the advertising men into the picture.

Eisenhower, whose image was of the simple, honest soldier who wanted to serve the people of his country in peace as in war, was one of the first to engage a regular advertising agency to promote him as something the American working class might buy. The Republican national chairman of the time, Leonard Hall, put it without any delicacy:

You sell your candidates and your programmes the way a business sells its products.

The Presidents they Want

Nixon, under a cloud in the 1956 election, kept his place as Eisenhower’s running-mate by a blatantly tear-jerking television appearance with his family and his dog. Probably he never forgot how effective a publicity method television can be. His campaign in 1968 was an object lesson in the skilful use of it, to persuade the voters away from reality. And who better to help in this than the admen, who get their living in that way? Advertising, said Daniel Boorstin in The Image, " . . has meant a reshaping of our very concept of truth.” That’s nice, that use of the word “reshaping”. Nixon had admen to help him to do his bit of reshaping.

The occasional exposures of the techniques of political promotion ignore the fact that behind the leaders who are promoted stands a mass of accepting and condoning voters, members of the working class who suffer under the social system they expect the politicians to modify to acceptable human standards. In many ways, this is the root of the problem. American workers, like workers throughout the capitalist world, support a society which must impoverish and degrade them. At present it is painful for them to face the reality of their support for capitalism — to face their own responsibility for Vietnam, for the riots in Watts, for the city slums and the rural destitution.

Yet to face reality, and to live up to our responsibility, is all that it needs. The world has everything now to make it a place of peace and abundance except the political will to make it so. That means people, it means human beings — which is where we came in.

Ivan

The Enemy on the Left! - Jean-Paul Sartre (1973)

The Enemy on the Left Column from the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Apart from the conventional left, the Labourite and Communist elements, the pseudo-socialist political scene is also cluttered up with a plethora of fringe-leftists who call themselves Trotskyists, Maoists, International Socialists etc. and who (insofar as one can follow their varying lines) claim to be lefter-than-left or more socialist than thou. (Alice's answer to the Mad Hatter is perhaps relevant. She could not have more tea because she hadn't had any yet. Similarly, these proliferating groups cannot be more socialist than the Labour Party which is not socialist at all. Though it is true they could not be less, either.)

It is difficult to keep up with these endlessly splintering groups and practically impossible to gather what they really stand for but perhaps one can begin by mentioning an interview in the Guardian recently with Jean-Paul Sartre "widely acknowledged as the greatest living philosopher". (Not so long ago, the title of world champ was claimed for Bertrand Russell whose most philosophical moment had occurred when he mooted the dropping of an atom bomb on Moscow. Not bad for a life-long pacifist. If only Marx was still around to re-write The Poverty of Philosophy.) This French genius, hero of the would-be revolutionary students, now, it seems, calls himself a Maoist. What he was doing all his leftist life, before Maoism was thought of as a creed, the interview does not make clear. One recalls that at various times he has quarrelled with the French Communist Party and at other times he has supported them — including times when the Stalin terror has been at its most ferocious; but you can't really expect leftist philosophers to bother themselves with such trivia as the fact that 200 million Russian workers were held in a tyrant's grasp and untold numbers were being frozen and worked to death in forced-labour camps. One also recalls his association with Russell in the so-called Tribunal to try America for war crimes in Vietnam (of which there was no shortage, of course) which really boiled down to support for the victory of that kindly, freedom-loving "communist", Uncle Ho.

The interview, though it occupies four columns, never gets round to asking the Great Man why he is a Maoist or indeed what kind of an alleged socialist that animal is supposed to be. So one can only fall back on the assumption that the Maoists stand for the sort of régime that exists in China today: where Mao makes it clear, both in word and in deed, that he is himself a Stalinist. So we have the farcical position that the revolting students of 1968 who called the French Communist Party "Stalinist shit" are now personified by a philosopher who stands for Chinese Stalinist shit. A rose by another name indeed. But of course that sort of muddle is the inevitable fate of those who lurch from one fashionable nostrum to another without ever giving themselves the time to work out the real lesson of the present jungle world, in Russia, or China, or the West — that capitalism is the enemy and only an understanding proletariat can do anything about it.

Clearly, the workers will never learn that lesson from a Professor of Maoism. Instead of getting knowledge in their heads, their heads will be broken by the brutal arm of the state. For our Maoist makes it clear he does not hold with the "legal action" of voting and although he does not spell out what means the workers should adopt, it is clear that our Maoists are enemies on the left indeed.

L. E. Weidberg 

'The Good Old Days' - Glasgow in the Nineteenth Century (1973)

From the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The accommodation in which my family lived up to my teens was a crumbling Glasgow tenement at whose age I will not hazard a guess, though some idea of it can be gained from the knowledge that the lavatories were added many years after its original construction.

I recall my mother telling me that there used to be dry latrines in the back-courts which were emptied by men with leather-lined wicker baskets. This information, even then when I was ignorant of social problems, filled me with disgust: to think that men should find it necessary to take up such employment in order to gain cash sufficient to purchase the bare necessities of life.

Doubtless some of those early sewage workers considered themselves better off than their neighbours, for they had a steady job with little chance of being made redundant. As an added bonus they at least were outside in the streets away from the "dark satanic mills" and the ever-watchful eye of a charge hand ready to threaten with dismissal any lazy workers who fell asleep on the job during their 14-18 hours' shift.

Although it is true that these sewage workers risked contracting some disease in such unhygienic and noisome employment, were they any worse off than their neighbours who worked in a factory where machinery lay unguarded, and a moment's inattention (common among workers fatigued with long hours of labour, and bad diets), could result in their being caught up by the gigantic strength of the machine and "rent asunder, not perhaps for his own good; but, as a sacrifice to the commercial prosperity of Great Britain" — as Henry Morley so satirically puts it in his article Ground in the Mill? Morley tells us of:

The boy whom his stern master, the machine, caught as he stood on a stool wickedly looking out at the sun-light and flying clouds. These were no business of his, and he was fully punished when the machine he served caught him by one arm and whirled him round and around till he was thrown dead.

There were, of course, workers who protested against such conditions. In lots of cases they were marked as trouble-making radicals in some black book, and dismissed at the first opportunity presented to a vengeful employer fearful of workers learning the power of combination and political action. The sacked workers' places would be quickly filled from the ranks of the Irishmen and Highlanders who, forced from the land that their fathers had lived on for hundreds of years, all in the sacred name of improvement, found it necessary to flock in their hordes to the cities like Glasgow in the hope of earning a living from the newly-emerging industries: filling to over-flowing the tenements in that city, making it necessary for the ruling class to erect more because of the epidemics which broke out, threatening the health of the rich in their comfortable mansions.

We must not think that the Glasgow tenements erected in the tremendous boom period that was the Industrial Revolution were built because the capitalists were full of altruism for the working class. In 1840, for example, W. P. Allison in a pamphlet criticizing the Scottish Poor Law, wrote: "The higher ranks in Scotland do much less for the relief of poverty than those of any country in Europe." The tenements were erected firstly to ensure a profitable income in rents and fees to the capitalists, and secondly to have the labour convenient to the large factories or industrial sites. When the "five minutes horn" sounded, the streets would become alive with men and women rushing to clock-in before the gates were closed, and they were either "quartered" or sent home for being late.

Just opposite the tenement in which we lived was a vast piece of waste ground known as "The Foundry". This was formerly owned by the firm of John Neilson & Co., who built the first iron-ship, "Fairy Queen", in 1831. C. A. Oakley in his excellent (but expensive) book The Second City informs us that the ship was "transported through the streets accompanied by great crowds [of unemployed?] and launched by steam-crane at the Broomie Law", on the edge of the River Clyde. 

Since the route from Garscube Foundry to the Clyde led downhill through the new working-class tenement areas, the sight of the ship must have been a mixed blessing, for in Glasgow when a ship was launched large numbers of hands were laid off work till their masters required their skills once more to use in their labour process — only in those days there was no Social Security payment (given out of the surplus-value created by workers) to keep them from dying of hunger if they were unemployed with no cash to buy food, for this was the period when men with no legs were exhorted to stand on their own feet.

Thomas Carlyle in his tract on Chartism made a slashing indictment of this attitude, saying:

The master of horses, when the summer labour is done, has to feed his horses through the winter. If he said to his horses: "Quadrupeds, I have no longer work for you — go and seek cartage" — They finally, under pains of hunger take to leaping fences, eating foreign property, and — we know the rest.

But this was the age in which the theories of Thomas Malthus found favour, who said that population growth tended to exceed food production; and sad though it might be, some would have to suffer deprivation lest the delicate balance of nature be upset.

It is not as if food was scarce in those days. Proof of this can be found in William Cobbett's Rural Rides. In it he tells of folk starving in the 1830s while livestock in abundance fed in the fields for the rich — because insufficient profit could be realized in the markets for meat. Under the capitalist economic system goods are not produced simply to feed, clothe or shelter people. In many countries even today workers who cannot afford the prices asked for goods can tighten their belts on their empty stomachs; lie down in their under a hedge, and die. If they should attempt to seize the food which lies in shops and warehouses, the law-enforcement officers will beat and shoot them down in fulfillment of their job as protectors of property.

It was a great boast of the Church of Scotland that they could provide for the poor out of the offerings placed in the poor-box at the front door. Since the distribution of this charity was in the hands of domineering Elders, doubtless many workers in Glasgow went hungry rather than submit to their will, until sheer desperation drove them into the invidious position of "rice Christians". He who would sneer at such an attitude as "obsequious" should realize that the threat of starvation to a man and his family can make even the most proud humble himself at the feet of him who can relieve the hunger.

One of Glasgow's most famous citizens was Thomas Chalmers, whose name is mentioned by Marx in Capital. He was a preacher with a tremendous gift of oratory (he must have had, for he actually made the rich cry — surely a most difficult task?). He originated a scheme for aiding the poor for which, for some strange reason, he has become famous. He undertook to "relinquish all claim to the fund [for relieving the poor] raised by assessment", and provide for the poor of his own parish by the church-door collection alone. W. Gordon Blaikie in his short Life of Chalmers tells us:

Hitherto the cost of the poor in the parish had been at the rate of £1,400 per annum, whereas the collections amounted to only £480.

Under the diligent hands of Dr. Chalmers the original requirement of £1,400 was reduced to £280. He did this by sending his Elders into the teeming slums, that were a blot on the face of Glasgow before the College was razed to the ground to make way for the railway station that was set up on that site. These Elders used their "spiritual" authority over the relatives of the poor (themselves desperately poor) and exhorted them to face up to their family responsibilities, and support their destitute relatives so as not to make them a burden on the rates or church.

Let u seriously consider this question, putting aside any bias we may feel towards religion and those who imbibe it. Was Chalmers's scheme to relieve the poor a success? Did his efforts really aid the poor materially? No better answer can be given than that supplied by the gigantic Edward Irving, who was Chalmers's assistant in Glasgow during the period before and after the 1820 radical insurrection. In Mrs. Oliphant's Life of Edward Irving, one of Irving letters to a friend says "I have visited in about 300 families - and have seen them in nakedness and starvation." He writes in another letter of

their wants, their misfortunes, their ill-requited labour, their hopes vanishing, their families dispersing in hope of better habitations, the Scottish economy of their homes giving way before encroaching necessity; debt rather than saving their condition; bread and water their scanty fare; hard and ungrateful labour the portion of their house.

It is little wonder that John Galt in his interesting book Annals of the Parish (interesting because it shows the ideas that were commonly held in those times) says in his description of the Glasgow weavers: 

It cut me to the heart to see so many fine young men, in the rising prime of life, already in the arms of pale consumption.

The phrase "the good old days" is used to make the myth of an era when life was good and men happy. Capitalism has never provided, and cannot provide, such a time.

H. Cunningham