Running Commentary: Being prepared (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Being prepared

Ignoring the persistent evidence from the by-elections, the Labour Party is doggedly drawing up its plans to be the next government of British capitalism.

They are well aware that every government faces the difficulty of holding back pay rises. Past Labour administrations have tried to do this through exhortation, threats, legal controls and financial sanctions. Their policies have often brought them into spectacular conflict with the workers and sometimes with the unions as well.

Each time they are in opposition they claim to have learned from these experiences. Never again, they swear, will they attempt a frontal assault on workers' living standards; in future they will organise prosperity for everyone through wage restraint with the unions’ agreement, a peaceable surrender without a shot being fired or an angry word spoken at the Despatch Box.

Harold Wilson called one example of this tactic the Social Contract and the implied promise to bring order into wage negotiations where once there had been fractious chaos helped him back to power. Of course things didn’t work out as Wilson had promised and his successor Callaghan had to muddle through the winter of discontent.

But despite these grim memories, Labour is undaunted. They have a liaison committee with the TUC which has recently negotiated an agreement on wage control with the principal unions. It is all there in a working paper and the policy is called, not the Social Contract any more, but the National Economic Assessment.

This latest piece of trickery promises to give the unions new “rights" while emphasising their “responsibilities” to take account in their claims of economic priorities as identified by the National Economic Assessment.

In simpler terms, this means the unions would agree to hold back their claims if they conflicted with the priorities of a future Labour government. And no one can now be in any doubt about what those priorities are — a more profitable British industry, more competitive British exports, a more intense exploitation of British workers.

Out of office, and looking very unlikely to be in power again for a very long time, the Labour Party is still laying its plans to run British capitalism. Their problem, as ever, is that although this can be done in only one way — in the interests of the British capitalist class — it must be made to look as if it will benefit everyone


Jolly Swagman

If Barry Humphries got it right, Australia is a place populated by excessively bone-headed, obsessively macho sports. And if that is true the well-publicised reputation of their new Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, as a one-time bibulous, roistering womaniser may have helped him win the recent general election. Votes have been cast, and elections won, on flimsier grounds.

But more to the point was probably Hawke's promise to attend to the problems of the Australian economy with policies which would unify the people there. Australia is no longer a golden land of opportunity, beckoning to British workers exhausted by the exploitation and the weather and mistakenly believing that all their troubles would vaporise under the Australian sun. Unemployment there now stands at ten per cent and prices are rising sharply. For the Australian worker, life gets harder and harder.

Hawke’s predecessor, Malcolm Fraser, was a Prime Minister in the Thatcher mould. He did himself no good by imposing a wages pause without consulting the trade unions or trying to win their co-operation.

As we all know from experience, Labour governments aim to do it differently. While it is their object also to keep wages in check they at first negotiate on this with the unions. If they get an agreement, it is usually given some deceptive name like Harold Wilson’s Social Contract, which is supposed to convince us that frozen wages under a Labour government are less icy than the same thing under the Tories.

Bob Hawke, who came up through the trade union movement in Australia, will quickly use his experience and standing to get the unions' compliance in wage restraint. The Australian workers will be told that this is in their interests because, of course, a Labour government would not have it any other way.

Another example of the style in which Hawke will "unify” the country was his statement that the Prince and Princess of Wales will be given a dignified welcome when their imminent visit to Australia takes place. These two parasites personify the dominant class in a grievously divided society; they stand for privilege above the majority’s poverty. To welcome them is to condone a disunited society.

Like all Labour leaders. Hawke came in on a wave of optimism and on the prayer that things will be better hereafter. He has made an unusually rapid start in exposing these hopes for the futilities that they are.

Best forgotten

In the city of dreaming spires, a raging controversy disturbs statuesque scholars at their books. Was Michael Heseltine, when he was a student at Oxford in 1954, a supporter of the campaign to ban the hydrogen bomb? If he was it could be highly embarrassing to the man who now has the job of putting the government case against CND.

According to the Guardian, everybody who was anybody at Oxford at the time was in the campaign. Historian Raphael Samuel, who was then secretary of the university Communist club, says that Heseltine was more than just a member of the committee against the H bomb — he drafted the petition opposing the bomb and was scorned as a stooge of Moscow as a result.

Jeremy Isaacs, who so benefited from his time at Oxford that he now masterminds the production of drivel on Channel 4, says Heseltine attended a meeting but refused any further involvement. Tory MP Julian Critchley does not remember the future Defence Secretary being involved.

And Heseltine himself? "I really don't recall . . .” he said. “If the petition called for multilateral disarmament, well we are all in favour of that."

This problem with the Defence Secretary's memory is unsettling. He is, after all, the politician responsible for the nuclear warheads and delivery systems which have gone on growing worse and worse in spite of all those protests from angry undergraduates. We don't want him ordering them to be fired off in a spasm of absent-mindedness.

But Heseltine's forgetfulness is also understandable. It is common for people who are interested in reforming capitalism rather than abolishing it to become zealous about all manner of causes and campaigns. There is no lack to choose from: nuclear weapons, war, famine, poverty, dictatorships. massacres, demands to free some people and to lock others up . . . 

No self-respecting reformist refuses an invitation to sign up in support of such causes, unheedful of the fact that this is a waste of time which could be contributed to the struggle to abolish the root cause of all the problems.

And of course much of this zeal is expended at universities, where there is youthful energy associated with adolescent delusions about possessing élite intellectual qualities. It is quite understandable, that among all that excitement they should fail to remember every campaign they put their name to, and how and when and why.

If Heseltine was against the bomb in 1954, it need not disturb him now when he wants to keep it. Both attitudes are indefensible and both are best forgotten in favour of the idea of a basic change in society.

Double Act

The Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act is a misnomer because it does not prevent terrorism and. since it has lasted for nearly ten years, begins to look anything but temporary. So unsuccessful is the Act in stopping terrorism (which means guerilla acts committed by the other side) that, according to Home Secretary Whitelaw, 1982 was a very bad year for bomb incidents in England. So untemporary are its provisions that Whitelaw intends to introduce another Bill to replace the present Act — and presumably to give it permanence.

In the recent debate on renewing the Act for another year the Labour Party were quite clear that it is an assault on civil liberty. Whitelaw’s shadow Roy Hattersley protested about the harassment of Irish people which the Act encourages — “. . . part of a movement towards a more authoritarian society. That move is wrong in principle, and as far as combatting terrorism is concerned, wrong in practice".

Labour MP Reg Freeson weighed in with his description of the Act: “. . . the very kind that political terrorists in this country or any other wish to see a democratic state give way to”.

There is of course some validity to these arguments; for example the Act allows the police to arrest and to hold suspects for long periods without charging them or bringing them into a public court. According to Hattersley, some 85 per cent of those arrested and held under the Act are released without being charged.

But the points were just as valid in 1974, when the Act was rushed through parliament in the hysterical aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings. It was no less a threat to personal liberty, no less a political weapon for the IRA, then than it is now.

The only thing to have changed is the party which is in power. It was a Labour government, with a “liberal", "civilised” Home Secretary in Roy Jenkins, which passed the Act and which had it renewed each year until they lost power in 1979. In those days Hattersley felt able to vote for the Act.

In the case of Freeson there may well be another motivation. His constituency has a large number of Irish voters and he is under some pressure in reselection. And of course when they are out of power the Labour Party has always felt free to criticise many of the measures which they took when they were the government.

This latest squalid manoeuvre may win Labour a few votes from workers who are ignorant about where their interests lie. For the likes of Hattersley and Freeson, that is justification enough.

Disarming critics (1983)

From the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Michael Heseltine, who did not get where he is today through any diffidence about upsetting people, is robustly enjoying his job as the government’s scourge of the nuclear disarmers. He could hardly be expected to jeopardise this happy state by publicly debating with CND although the reason he gave for refusing — that CND have closed minds — has the deterring implication that Heseltine has an open mind on the issue and that it is not therefore beyond possibility that he could be converted to CND. That would mean more than the end of his pullulating ambition to be Prime Minister; he would have to exchange all those elegant pin-stripe suits for a demo-battered anorak and trim his hair so that it is no longer a ready handhold for a policeman dragging him away from a protest lie-down.

But until that happens — or at least until the next general election — we must endure Heseltine's audacious claim to be both a leader of the peace movement and a last line of defence against the menace of a Russian dictatorship. For it is unlikely that the government feels it has anything to fear from CND; more to the point is the decision of the last Labour Party conference to support unilateral nuclear disarmament, which may have given the Tories an electoral weapon to extinguish the last twitches of life from Labour’s ravaged body. This situation has its irony, for every Labour government since the bomb first went off have been firm supporters of British nuclear weapons and only the silliest of Labour Party supporters are likely to believe that this gruesome tradition is not safe with Michael Foot who, since that embarrassing conference, has industriously applied his oratorical gifts to fudging the issue.

The Thatcher government, like its Labour predecessors, base their case on the deterrent theory, which appeals to anyone who is able to set aside difficult things like historical facts. The theory begins with the crude nationalist assumption that it is always the other side which needs to be deterred — in this case Russia, no longer a staunch ally in the war to save the world for democracy but a ruthless aggressor:

  . . . as early as 1949 Russia was plainly showing her belief that Soviet ideology must dominate the world, and her readiness to use military force to achieve that. (Government film, The Peace Game.)

No nuclear power has yet admitted to having weapons which are aggressive; they all claim that their bombs are defensive and a contribution to world peace. It has been like that from the very beginning; Truman did not describe Hiroshima as an avoidable disaster but as an "overwhelming success”. The first Russian bomb in September 1949 was greeted by Moscow’s British mouthpiece, the Daily Worker, as "tremendous news” which would encourage "peace loving people everywhere”. When the first British bomb exploded Churchill "warmly congratulated” all those concerned, not forgetting Attlee and his Labour government who had initiated it. In 1964 the Chinese government was exultant about its bomb:

  . . . a major achievement of the Chinese people . . . The development of nuclear weapons by China is for defence and for protecting the Chinese people from the danger of the United States launching a nuclear war.

Then there are the statistics about how many tanks, guns, aircraft, bullets, the Russians and the rest of the Warsaw Pact states have. According to The Peace Game, they outnumber the NATO forces 2½ to one in tanks, nearly 3 to one in guns, well over 2 to one in aircraft. To adjust this imbalance, and so to prevent a "conventional” war, the NATO powers say they need a strong nuclear force:

  . . . the last war was the worst we have ever experienced. It is wars like that which we are trying to prevent with the nuclear deterrent . . . (Margaret Thatcher, Sunday Telegraph, 20 February 1983.)

But it is not just "conventional” wars which nuclear weapons are supposed to guard against; Heseltine sees them as also stopping the "unconventional”, nuclear type: "If we want to be safe from nuclear attack we must possess a nuclear deterrent that is effective”. (Party Political Broadcast, TV. 23 February 1983.)

The confidence in that statement imbued Heseltine's entire performance that evening; he put the deterrent case in a few pointed words: "History shows one nation will only attack another when it is too weak to defend itself". But he then rather spoiled the effect by instancing the Argentinian attack on the Falklands, perhaps forgetting that this was an example of a non-nuclear, and therefore weaker, power attacking a nuclear, and therefore stronger, one. This gap in Heseltine’s argument was soon smothered with a blood-stirring shot of a Union Jack being run up a flagpole. Patriotism is often a handy substitute for logical argument.

But there can be no substituting for reality. The deterrent theory has masked an arms race unprecedented in human history. Since those quaint days of Hiroshima. when there was a bomb which could kill only in tens of thousands, the weapons and their delivery systems have been refined and strengthened to the point when they have the power to kill in millions. Thirty-six countries now have the bomb or the capability to produce it. The world nuclear stockpile represents the equivalent of four tons of TNT for everybody on earth. This, in a rare flash of candour, the nuclear powers call overkill and it exists not to protect human freedom or to make us happier or more secure but to protect the interests of some of the minority class in society who. although their numbers are relatively small, own the world in the sense that they monopolise the means of life.

If the deterrent theory works then major war will have been eliminated, the nations will go on developing more and more horrific weapons and stockpiling enough of them to kill us all several times over but all of this will be a sort of game because there will be no intention, or opportunity, to fire them. Capitalism will have undergone a character change which would have no precedent in human history. Wealth will still be produced as commodities, with the minority class continuing to own the means of production but what has hitherto been an inevitable result of this — international conflicts — will no longer be inevitable. The capitalist class will still have interests to defend but will suddenly lose the will to do so.

The less credulous — or perhaps the more aware — will find it easier to believe that the deterrent must eventually fail; capitalism cannot exist without conflict and sooner or later there will be such a clash as will make the use of nuclear weapons unavoidable if one power or group of them is to hold its own against its rival. If that happens. say the supporters of deterrence, there will be a massive riposte ending in mutual destruction — as if that would be some consolation, among the atomised ruins of our lives. There will in any case be very little time for those who believed in deterrence to realise how wrong they were; the refinements of all those deterring weapons will ensure that they are delivered on target with the very minimum of delay. So what is the theory worth?

Well in spite of what Heseltine said the fact is that Argentina should have been, but was not, deterred from attacking the Falklands by the knowledge that they might provoke a nuclear response from Britain — and there is of course some evidence that the Task Force did carry nuclear weapons. When the 1939/45 war — the sort which Thatcher says she wants to guard against with the bomb — started, there was an expectation, based on the experience of air raids in the first world war, the Spanish Civil War and the Sino/Japanese war, that there would be a swift, crushing air strike which would lay waste to many British cities and kill about 600,000 people. Such was the fear of this that trenches were dug in the parks and commons, 38 million gas masks were issued and plans were laid to evacuate 2 million people from the officially doomed cities. But this did not act as a deterrent to the British government declaring war, when they felt that the interests of their capitalist class left them no choice. When the German air attacks came they did so in spite of the fact that by then the deterrent was operating in the other direction; the British were building the bombers and the organisation which was to wreck far, far worse destruction on German cities and their people.

For the deterrent theory to hold good, it must be assumed that war is an ordered, rational affair which is governed all the time through a series of sage, balanced assessments of reality. Why then did the Germans attack Russia in 1941, landing themselves with massive problems of supply and communication, to say nothing of the hardships of the winter? The motivation for that attack took little account of such obstacles; in 1941 Hitler enthused: “Where is there a region capable of supplying iron of the quality of Ukrainian iron? Where can one find more nickel, more coal, more manganese, more molybdenum?” And a little later he told his generals: "II I do not get the oil of Maikop and Groznyi, then I must end the war".

The war was embarked on over the German expansion into the mineral fields and the markets of the world; from that point it was escalated to a climax in the ruins of Stalingrad, Berlin and Hiroshima. It was a procession of chaos, with its own grisly momentum and with episodes — for example the German policy of antagonising the people of the countries they conquered when a more successful attitude would have been one of reconciliation; for example the profitless destruction of Dresden by the Allied air forces — which fall outside even the requirements of war. If that war had been plannable, on some historical blueprint, it would hardly have moved beyond a stalemate. Today there are still the same basic conflicts of capitalism; only the sides have been shuffled. the uniforms changed, the regions of conflict may have shifted, the armouries are ever more frightful. In a recent advertisement designed (presumably) to encourage young people to join the Royal Navy, we are reminded of the development of the oil and gas fields in the North Sea, which did not exist twenty years ago:

   As a Royal Navy Officer your job would be to keep watch on them; ready to deploy surface and airborne units as well as the Royal Marines company specially trained for anything which might threaten their safety.

Perhaps it is a measure of the confidence which the nuclear powers place in the deterrent theory, that they do not spread the knowledge for the production of the bomb more widely. The effectiveness of a deterrent must be in direct proportion to the number of countries which have it. If every state had the most destructive weapons available then they could all deter each other into a perpetual stalemate. In fact no nuclear power has welcomed the development of the bomb by its rivals. The Russian bomb, said Harry Truman, emphasised “. . . the necessity for that truly effective, enforceable international control of atomic energy which this government . . . support”. When it became apparent that the British were about to explode a test bomb, the Daily Worker damned it as “. . . an unmitigated curse . . . a coward's weapon, designed for the unrestrained massacre of the civilian population". As the Chinese tested their first bomb the Foreign Office, with typical pin-stripe restraint. expressed “deep disappointment".

Capitalism has not changed its character; war cannot and will not be spirited away through the so-called deterrent any more than by an equally miraculous bout of CND-inspired pacifism among the nuclear powers. This social system provides no confidence that the interests of its people are of any consequence beside those of its master class. In fundamental terms, nuclear weapons are significant only as a development in the methods by which modern private property society carries through its conflicts. Here, for example, is how US Vice President Bush — whose finger is a mere coronary away from the Button — describes the attrition theory of the 1980s, in words to warm the cockles of the heart of the late Earl Haig:

  You have a survivability of command and control, a survivability of industrial potential protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict on you. That's the way you have a winner. (Observer, 6 February 1983.)

Before it gets to that, those citizens, might act; the fact that they have the power to do so, and to stop it all, is obscured by the false securities of both the deterrent theory and the exhalation of their fear and anger in futile demonstrations. The world's citizens could set up and operate a social system in which war could not happen; beside that overpowering fact, the debate between deterrence and disarmament is reduced to an irrelevance.

Ivan

Letter: Lenin and Marx (1983)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

I am writing to criticise Stephen Coleman's article. “Lenin’s Distortion of Marxism" (Socialist Standard, January 1983). I have two main criticisms to make. The first concerns the selective use of quotation. The author contrasts the best of Marxism with the worst of Leninism. For example, the author chooses to ignore passages in Lenin's works where Lenin repeats almost word-for-word Marx’s idea of communist revolution as working-class self-emancipation:

. . . the emancipation of the workers can only be accomplished by the workers themselves (Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 9, page 29.)

And while (quite rightly) criticising Leninism's advocacy of "state possession of the productive and distributive machinery, as opposed to common ownership and democratic control", the author ignores passages in Marx’s writings where Marx too advocates state ownership:

  The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State. . .
. . . in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable:. . .
. . . 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State;. . . (Marx/Engels, The Communist Manifesto.)

Lenin certainly did not “distort" this “Marxism"!

My second criticism concerns the author's statement that "The failure of the Bolsheviks to establish socialism 'from above' was inevitable because the material conditions did not exist in Russia to allow anything but capitalism to develop". The SPGB believes that one of the essential preconditions of the establishment of communism is the existence of the technological means for the production of abundance (means which capitalism brings into existence). Since “socialism in one country" is an impossibility, communism must be a world-wide system, established more or less simultaneously in all parts of the globe. Therefore an essential precondition for the establishment of communism is the existence, at a world-wide level, of the potential for abundance. And since the SPGB has campaigned for socialist revolution as an immediate possibility since the day of its formation, one can conclude that this world-wide potential for abundance has existed since (at least) 1904. In and since 1904, and indeed even today, there have been/are geographical localities where, considered in isolation from the rest of the world, the potential for abundance has not existed — but this does not affect the fact that in the world as a whole a potential for abundance has existed since 1904. Therefore it is totally contradictory to argue that in 1917 (i.e. at a time when a world-wide potential for abundance did exist) material conditions were such that nothing but capitalism could have developed in Russia (i.e. in one geographical locality considered in isolation from the world as a whole). Initially the Bolsheviks did not seek to establish communism "in one country":

The final victory of socialism in a single country is of course impossible (Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 26. page 470.)

Initially the Bolsheviks sought a world revolution to establish world communism, and in 1917 such an aim was quite feasible — it was what the SPGB was seeking.

It is only after the failure of a world revolution to occur that arguments about material conditions in specific geographical localities (e.g. Russia) come into play. Stephen Coleman fails to situate the events of 1917 in a world context and thus arrives at misleading conclusions about the reasons for "the failure of the Bolsheviks”.

Mark Shipway

Manchester

Reply
We agree that Lenin's works contain many references to Marx's ideas about capitalism, socialism and revolution. The intention of the article, Lenin's Distortion Of Marxism, was neither to affirm nor deny that Lenin understood the basic ideas of Marx. Lenin’s article entitled The Three Sources And Three Component Parts of Marxism (Collected Works, Vol. 19. pp. 23-28) demonstrates quite clearly that Lenin was acquainted with the main tenets of Marxism. His writings prior to the Bolshevik coup d’etat contain a number of sound Marxist ideas as well as a number of views which were clearly derived from the Russian peasant Narodnik tradition, indeed. Lenin was not the only Bolshevik to "repeat almost word for word” certain of Marx’s statements. The collected works of Stalin, for instance, abound with lengthy textual quotations from Marx. However, repetition of a valid idea is only commendable if the political actions are in line with the ideas expressed. Lenin, Stalin and the other Bolsheviks adopted a terminology which conflicted with their practical application of anti-socialist policies.

It is suggested by Mark Shipway that Lenin's advocacy of state capitalism was based on Marx's proposed communist programme at the end of the second section of The Communist Manifesto. Marx advocated these measures in 1848, at a time when capitalism, in its modem industrial form, was sweeping through Europe, because he took the view that there had to be a transition period between the conquest of political control by the working class and the organisation of society on complete socialist lines. The notion of the transition period was the product of an age in which the potentiality for developing the productive forces to a level required for socialism had not arrived. All of Marx's predictions about "the first stage of Socialism" (such as his reference to “labour vouchers" in The Critique Of The Gotha Programme) are now, in the light of the technological developments in the last hundred years, completely obsolete and irrelevant to modern revolutionary thought. In their Preface to the 1872 German edition of The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels recognised that the measures quoted by Mark Shipway were even then somewhat outdated:

  However much the state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in this Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would in many respects be very differently worded today.

So, what Marx and Engels advocated in 1848 (which Shipway quotes) was qualified by them in 1872. We agree with our critic that “the selective use of quotation” is to be avoided, especially when Marx's persistently repeated statement that the state, in any form, will always exist as a machinery for class coercion, is ignored for the sake of a unique quotation — later repudiated by Marx — in which state control is proposed as a transitional programme. The fact which cannot be denied is that ‘Marx opposed state capitalism (see his comments on Bismarck’s nationalisation measures) and Lenin advocated state capitalism (see his comments on the German state-directed war economy).

It was not the worldwide potential to produce enough for everyone which was lacking in 1917 and it has never been stated by the Socialist Party that Bolshevism failed because such technological pre-conditions for socialism did not exist. The Leninist attempt to establish socialism — even if they did believe that Russia would be a catalyst for the rest of the world — was bound to fail because Lenin thought that socialism could be imposed upon a non-socialist working class. The Bolshevik conception of "a world revolution to establish world communism” envisaged a series of insurrectionary seizures of power by vanguards which would impose socialism on a population knowing little or nothing about what was at stake. In short, the condition lacking was mass class consciousness.

It should be emphasised, in conclusion, that the Socialist Party's critique of Leninism is not based on a purely academic or historical concern. The relevance of Lenin's distortion of Marxism, as was made clear in the article referred to, is that many modern "Marxists” reject most of the revolutionary ideas of Marx and accept the authoritarian conception of revolution as expressed by Lenin. At the end of the day Mark Shipway should ask himself whether socialism is an object worth working for and, if so, whether the Socialist Party, with its critical adherence to Marxism and its opposition to Leninism, has the correct ideas about revolution.

Editors

Imagine . . . (1983)

From the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing in human history is inevitable. We are not living and organising society according to any pre-ordained schemes. We are masters of our own history, not slaves of it. We can do what we choose. But you know that these are not the sort of ideas that we are encouraged to develop. On the contrary, we are encouraged to think of ourselves as slaves to the present order of things. This process of learning to believe that history has come to a halt, and that “you cannot change the way things are”, is often described as learning to “be realistic".

Where this point becomes particularly noticeable is in discussion about war. The society we live in produces war. There is a split between the minority who own and control the means of life and the majority of us who produce the wealth. A split, that is. between those who produce but do not possess and those who possess but do not produce. The economic rivalries among the wealth owners over market territories, areas rich in mineral resources and strategic locations on the trade atlas are often fought off the conference tables on the battlefields. Society based on competition and property is a war-producing society. This is the current state of affairs. We are born into a social setting where there are armies and bombs and Stock Exchanges and governments. But just because such things cluttered the world into which we were born is no reason for us to consent to them, nor believe that they are part of some “reality" which, although we can imagine it not existing, can never actually change.

Although another world war is not inevitable, if the present state of society is allowed to continue then it is a distinct possibility. The profit system is an unstable and volatile method of organising society, and armed to the back teeth as many states are, the recipe is being mixed for a nuclear exchange. Falling into the trap of regarding the way things are as largely unalterable, many commentators fortify the fallacy by using the language of inevitability.

Wintex-Cimex 83 is not a package ski tour, nor is it one of those instant relief nasal decongestants. W-C was the codename of a “paper” nuclear war game organised last month by NATO. This operation saw ministers from all over Europe frenetically telephoning each other and sending telex messages in rehearsal for a full-scale nuclear war. The fact that grown men and women are able to calmly and efficiently go through a paper rehearsal of what “on the night” would amount to a massive social carnage represents a hideous contradiction between our ability to plan and act co-operatively and what these abilities are actually being used for today.

The British Medical Association recently issued a report on the predicted state of Britain after a nuclear attack. The report paints a grim picture. Decaying corpses will litter the streets and millions of initial survivors — burnt, irradiated and starving — will die slowly and in agony. Doctors will not be able to help them and there will be no equipment or drugs to ease their deaths.

  Food stockpiles within 10-20 kilometres of an explosion could be exposed to fallout. Farm animals are sensitive to radiation. But insects and vermin are much more resistant: flies, cockroaches and rats could proliferate, spreading disease . . . survivors would face epidemics of typhoid, cholera, typhus, malaria ... a full-scale attack would result in about 38.600,000 deaths and 4,300,000 casualties. . . (The Report of the BMA Hoard of Science and Education Inquiry into the effects of Nuclear War.)

The doctors who composed this report after two years' research drew no political conclusions. But if we are capable of examining the dangers in this way then we are also capable of dismantling not only the weapons which menace us. but the social system which gives rise to them.

Apart from the socialist point of view, the responses to this issue are varied but all have the common thread of accepting the structure of society which produces the need for wars which produces the need for weapons. Peter Blaker is the Tory minister for the Armed Services. His recent response to the subversive noises about a peaceful world was to take a jab at "woolly minds in woolly hats”. If minds that desire a peaceful society and do not regard the production of bombs as a wise route to it are "woolly", one wonders what exactly predominates between the ears of Blacker? A solid lump of granite perhaps?

Another conservative with ideas to contribute to the debate about how to secure peace is Lord Hill-Norton. Admiral-of-the-Fleet Lord Hill-Norton last month proposed a plan to raise a 750,000 Dads' Army carrying their own weapons and defending the shores of England. “Defence”, remarked the Admiral, "begins at home”, which is of course something we will remember if it ever comes to the day when we have to whitewash our windows and hide under the table.

The reason organised peace movements this century, and before, have failed is that they have all consented to the power structure which creates war. War is neither democratically begun, nor democratically prosecuted. It is therefore facile to contend for wars to be fought on the terms of, say, the CND “no to cruise missiles”, or “no to trident”. These pleas, no matter from how many mouths they come, are lame. Apart from this, many of the phenomena which frighten people into CND to try and stop happening actually exist now: starvation of millions of people, lack of sanitation and hygenic water for thousands, riots, totalitarian regimes and military conflict all over the world.

As the Tory Party becomes increasingly associated with war-mongering policies and militarism there is a danger that the ideas of the Labour Party will be regarded as better and more beneficial to us. In fact the party under which the atom bomb was developed in Britain, and which recruited workers to fight for the bosses in two world wars, has not got any answers to the problem. The interests of workers and capitalists are diametrically opposed. The idea of nationalism has been supported by the ruling class because it deludes the workers into believing that within one territory. under one flag, they have a united interest with the bosses. Nationalism is divisive among workers and is used to help work up antagonism between workers from different places for them to fight the cause of their masters. Yet the Labour Party has always engaged in the promotion of nationalism. One recent example appears in the latest draft of their election campaign document, which will soon appear as part of their manifesto.

  Labour is determined that our country shall play a full part in the struggle for peace . . . Labour will pursue and win international support for policies designed to stimulate trade, investment and growth and we shall work inside the appropriate institutions to end the financial chaos which now threatens the stability of so many countries.

It is not "our” country; it is theirs — the capitalists’. In Britain the top 2 per cent own 64 per cent of the land (Inland Revenue Statistics 1980) and the top 13 per cent own 91.3 per cent of all housing. Workers of the world have no country, we only have a class. We are not interested in “stimulating trade" or “investment". We do not wish to streamline the efficiency of our own exploitation. We want a new social system. We do not want to sort out the "financial chaos” of capitalism, and try to make the system run well. This system can, by definition, never work well for us. It is working well for the bosses which keeps this system going.

We want a system based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of producing wealth. From each according to ability, to each according to need. Imagine it. All developments have at one time been merely ideas or dreams scoffed at by those who did not think historically. “The sun travels around the earth . . . the earth is flat . . . man will never fly . . . man will never split the atom . . . stand on the moon . . ." History is ripe for socialism and there are clear reasons for its urgent establishment.

The voice apologising for capitalism and defending "reality" grows quieter and less confident as we give up adjusting to fit painfully in with reality and start adjusting reality to suit our self-determined needs.

Gary Jay

Letter: The rusted mirror (1983)

First edition hardback cover

Letter to the Editors from the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following letter and essay appear exactly as submitted. While we cannot agree with some of the points made, the writer's perceptiveness contrasts sharply with most of what usually passes for social criticism.

Dear Editors

Recently at my school we were set an essay to write: its theme being the good and bad aspects of the world today, with reference to The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, which we are reading at the moment. Incidentally, this book is set in the future which has reverted to the past after a nuclear holocaust — or "tribulation" as it is known in their world.

I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about the posed title; writing an essay which was depressing but, I felt, true. I admit my conclusions from the essay were highly influenced from reading some copies of your magazine, which I was sent on inquiry. I was not entirely pleased with the final product, but I was definitely convinced that my principles were right.

As I am still convinced. I am sending a copy of the essay to you; I hope you enjoy reading it. I certainly enjoy reading the Socialist Standard and will continue to do so. Please accept my appreciation for being able to learn a lot from your magazine, and also for being able to quote it in my essay to strengthen my standpoint.

Yours for socialism 

Charlotte Brown (age 14)

Hatfield. Herts.

Talking about ‘The Old People”, i.e. those in our world, it is said “Nobody knows . . . where they were right and where they were mistaken”. Give your views on the good and bad aspects of our world.

I would like to begin this discussion with a comment on a quotation from The Chrysalids. In it, Uncle Axel says of the word “tribulation": "A word, a rusted mirror, reflecting nothing. It'd do the preachers good to see it for themselves. They'd not understand, but they might begin to think”.

This phrase is useful, as I believe it can be used in the context of world leaders of today; that they wish to attribute all the wrong in the world to certain phrases when really, if they could only realise that their “mirror was rusted", they would be able to be more constructive.

This is, then, my first point about a bad aspect of our world: that the people who are able to improve conditions (whether they should be in this position or not), seem to be unwilling to do so. As thousands of people in the world starve to death many politicians say that this cannot be stopped by financial aid since this would cause inflation. So thousands of people continue to starve. This sort of attitude (that of "let it be") is also present in other problems: unemployment, evil dictatorships, poverty, repression, etc. And then there is, of course, the arms race. Much negotiation seems to be impossible because of the threat of nuclear war. Millions of pounds are spent daily on weapons — the instruments of destruction — while people in the world struggle to survive, let alone manage to enjoy their natural environment.

Before I discuss the world’s problems in greater detail. I feel compelled to suggest a reason for so much of the misery present in the world. I have valiantly attempted to think of another reason for the pointless aspects of the world. None is forthcoming. I condemn world capitalism for a lot of the bad aspects of the world. This quotation, taken from a socialist publication, I feel illustrates my point well (all quotations in this essay are taken from the Socialist Standard):

  The Official Coroner’s Statistics for 1981 reported nearly 5.000 suicides in Britain that year an average of one every other hour. Of those they leave behind, in one hour, six were made redundant in Britain alone, and in the world as a whole 3,500 people starved to death.

This statement clearly shows the insanity of the world at present. I do not pretend that I am "world wise" and have experienced any of the evil things that exist in the world. But I hope that I am capable of realising their existence. Speaking of Britain specifically, here are the things which, in my view, are causing unhappiness:

Unemployment. This predicament is affecting 4½ million people in Britain in 1983 (this figure includes "housewives"). People struggle to live on the small amount given to them through social security. They struggle with boredom and frustration, ever-present in an unemployed person’s life. They struggle to remain sane and rational. They struggle to find other employment. And they struggle to stay optimistic that there is a job for them. But they struggle in vain — their lives are not self-controlled.

Employment (Yes!) and “the Rat Race”. Even people in employment have to face difficulties. Apart from having the worry that perhaps tomorrow there will not be a job for them, they are often underpaid and over worked. Jobs can be stressful physically and mentally. Many people slog at a boring job all of their lives, going from home to work, then back home again, to demand supper from the woman of the household (whether working or not) and then to collapse in front of the television — the substitute for what really should be happening to them, for example, seeing oil tycoons "living it up”, or endless advertisements for holidays in the sun. I shall give another quotation, which describes perfectly the reality of "the rat race":

  After a tiring, often frustrating and humiliating day at work and a crowded, stressful journey home, thousands of workers in Britain eat a meal at roughly the same time and flop in front of the television set. What they see and hear must not disturb their recreation this period of rest and recuperation which, together with a night's sleep, enables and encourages them to go to work tomorrow and tomorrow.

Violence. In Britain (Scotland. Wales and England. at least), there is no official war. The army trains but on this isle never has to make its practice reality. So what I am referring to here is the violent attitude of Britain. The "triumph" of the Falklands War proved that British people accepted having their money spent on weapons and death. 70 per cent of the British population, according to reliable surveys, wish capital punishment to be re-enforced in Britain. This is not limited to the death penalty — many people also believe that criminals should be publicly whipped and humiliated. One group of people stated that they thought capital punishment was justified, even if it was not a deterrent against crime. People (especially men) resort to violence towards people they know because of their frustration with themselves or, more truthfully, their situation.

Violence breaks out on the streets, be it in the form of shop burglary, muggings, rape or victimisation. Most of these acts of violence can be explained because of people being emotionally insecure, or because they need money, or because they need someone to be responsible for their own misery. Although I do not condone people acting violently, or encourage them to do so, I can understand why they are forced to do so. Because Britain is a violent nation. Whether violence is approved of (for example, in wars) or condemned (as in muggings), it is noticed.

Prejudice. Violence leads to another bad thing present in Britain: prejudice. Prejudice towards women, or men, towards white people or black people, towards Indians or Jews, towards Catholics or Protestants, towards young people or old people, towards poor people or rich people, towards clever people or stupid people. It is all bad and unjustifiable. I admit that black people often have cause to hate white people, or that the Irish people often have cause to despise the British people, but my opinion still remains the same: it should not exist. But it does exist because our society is so unfair; for it not to exist would seem odd. Some people have reason to hate their "opposite", while others do not. But whatever the prejudice, it results from the fact that someone is "better" or "worse" than yourself, and should be hated for that reason. No one seems to accept that differences do not equal "better" or "worse". Prejudice is an attitude of a capitalist doctrine.

As I have mentioned the main problems of Britain I am unable to spend so much time on the problems of the rest of the world. In most cases, problems in other countries are far, far worse than in Britain. Many nations have no system of democracy whatsoever; they have to suffer under evil dictatorships, and people are punished for possessing any views of their own. Many nations are extremely poor, and the people of these countries consistently suffer from famine and starvation. Many nations are troubled with wars of religion; religion rules their lives and often prevents them from seeing the truth. Many nations are unfair to certain groups of people; especially to women, who are still second class citizens in the majority of countries in the world.

Many nations have civil wars raging; they also have unfair imprisonment, sadistic "lawful” punishments, and torturing. Many people in the world are too ignorant to be able to alter their situation.

My conclusion from all this is that most problems have their roots embedded in certain attitudes: that being able to destroy another is more important than to be able to feed another, that people are never equal and should never be treated as such. It is an evil situation that these attitudes are so embedded. I hope that soon the rusted mirror will be able to shine, but most of all to reflect.

Are there any good points, then?

Comparatively, yes. This means that I am more fortunate than my ancestor, and that I am more fortunate than my foreign neighbour. At least I am able to give my views. No doubt some will disagree with them, but no one will be able to stop me declaring them. I am warmer now than I would have been before electricity. I am more healthy than I would have been a hundred years ago. The whole texture of living is undoubtedly richer than the past; it is also more interesting. It is the attitudes of today which are harmful.

I have a better chance of getting a job (as a girl) and of being accepted as an equal being. I am certainly more enlightened about many things than my ancestor, although not really because of education but because of the opportunity, not to only survive but also to think. Newspapers. books, television programmes and radio are all available to teach me. I always have enough food.

But what about the rest of the world? Well I believe, despite all the evil present, that modern advancements will make it easier for us to abolish evil. We can communicate with people thousands of miles away. We do have the ability, now more than ever before, to give everyone enough to eat. enough clothes, good living conditions. to make the best use of the world's resources. Why. then, when our knowledge is so exceptional, can we not use it correctly? Because of the awful attitudes about war and peace which exist. Destroy world capitalism and I believe we have destroyed the nuclear threat, poverty. starvation, violence, war. and so to a certain extent unhappiness.

  You want to eat, to live in a decent home, to be fully mobile, to enjoy the pleasures of the world — but the world refuses to let you.

50 Years Ago: Decline of the German Social Democratic Party (1983)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Long before the war the British ruling class learned how to incorporate radical politicians and labour leaders in the parties of capitalism. The German capitalists in 1918 jettisoned the Kaiser for a similar end. Fifty per cent of the German voters had registered their disillusionment and war-weariness by voting for the reform programmes of the Social Democratic Party German capitalism thereupon "digested” the SDP and watched it stabilise German capitalism in the troubled post-war years. The military and civil associates of the Imperial Kaiser humbled themselves to the upstart labour leaders because they had to have someone who could control the workers and keep them loyal to the fundamentals of capitalism. So, for fourteen years, the Social Democrats, either in coalition or in ‘‘friendly opposition” worked out their policy of bargaining for reforms as price of their support. The outcome was inevitable. They have shared the fate that has always overtaken "Labour" politicians and parties when they accept responsibility for the administration of capitalism. Discontent with the effects of capitalism cannot for ever be stifled by Labour promises of better times or apologetic assurances that things might be worse. The membership and influence of the SDP declined year by year until it has shrunk to a third of its former size. Part of the loss was picked up by the Communist Party, but in the meantime a new group has arisen, led by Hitler. At the election on March 5th he received 17,266,000 votes (43.9 per cent), and his allies, the Nationalists, received 3,132,000 (8 per cent), giving him a clear majority. The Social Democrats received 7,176,000 (18.3 per cent) and the Communists 4.845,000 (12.1 per cent).

(From an editorial “The Rise of Hitler — A Warning to the Workers”. Socialist Standard, April 1933.)

Failure of Keynesian policies (1983)

From the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the depression of the thirties, with unemployment rising to peak levels and governments toppling because of their inability to do anything about it, most economists and many political parties were overjoyed to adopt the theories of J. M. Keynes, which held out to them the guarantee that capitalism's principal troubles were over. This is not surprising since Keynes promised continued full employment — the end of depressions with their accompanying massive demonstrations of working class discontent, the removal of one of the causes of war, and the arrival of lots of other good things. Keynes, they said, had revolutionised economic thought, blotted out the growing interest in Marx’s theories, and made capitalism safe. In 1944 the three parties. Tory, Labour and Liberal. all part of the war-time National government. formally endorsed the main Keynesian doctrines in the government White Paper, Employment Policy, which set out the principles to be followed by post-war governments.

The attitudes of the three parties have partly changed since then. While the Labour Party, the Liberals and their allies the Social Democratic Party are still unrepentant Keynesians — as also are some Tories—the main body of the Tories, under Thatcher's leadership, have thrown Keynes over and adopted the theories of Professor Milton Friedman.

Some leaders of the Labour Party went through a phase of doubting their saviour when Callaghan the Labour Prime Minister and Healey the Chancellor of the Exchequer adopted the “monetarist” policies now followed by the Thatcher government. It is for this reason that the present leader of the Labour Party, Michael Foot, gives 1976 as the date of the abandonment of those Keynesian principles which, he says, "for a quarter of a century or more, worked with such beneficial effects" (New Statesman, 26 November 1982).

The Keynesian argument is that if the demand for goods is maintained at a high level, industry is kept busy and unemployment will remain low. The "demand management" cure for rising unemployment is therefore for the government to increase its expenditure and investment, meeting the additional cost by borrowing: this will, the Keynesians say, increase the number of jobs. It is crucial for the Keynesian argument that the increase of government expenditure and investment should not be offset by a simultaneous fall in the investment by private industry. The Keynesians claim indeed that increased expenditure by the government will positively stimulate investment and activity in private industry.

The Keynesians have an early showpiece, supposed to vindicate Keynes, in the Roosevelt New Deal in America. A Keynesian admirer of the New Deal is Dudley Dillard, sometime Professor of Economics at Maryland University who wrote about it in his The Economics of J.M. Keynes (Lochwood & Son, London. 1948). In his book Professor Dillard compared the Keynesian policy of the New Deal with what happened in Great Britain at the same time, under the anti-Keynesian National government. His specific claim for Roosevelt is:

The economic expansion between 1933 and 1937, despite occasional minor relapses, was one of the most rapid in the history of American business cycles. The speed of this recovery was undoubtedly conditioned by the depths to which activity had plummeted in 1932. It was, nevertheless, a remarkable recovery which was nurtured by fairly large-scale loan expenditure (p. 127).

So how successful was the New Deal with its Keynesian policies? Unemployment in America was 24.1 per cent in 1932, the year when Roosevelt became President, and 25.2 per cent in 1933. By 1937 it was down to 14.3 per cent, though it rose again in 1938 to 19.1 per cent, which is nearly double what it is in America in 1983. In Britain at the same time, with a government running a non-Keynesian policy, unemployment fell from 22.1 percent in 1932 and 19.9 per cent in 1933 to 10.8 per cent in 1937. and it was 13.5 per cent in 1938. So, as Marxist theory would lead us to expect, the trend of unemployment was much the same whether the policy was Keynesian or not.

And what about the Keynesian argument that increased government expenditure stimulates private industry? In the pre-depression year. 1929, “government expenditure, including capital expenditure” was $22 billion, and “gross private domestic fixed investment” was $39.5 billion. In 1938 the former had risen to $34.2 billion but the latter had dropped to $21.5 billion. As the one went up and the other went down. Dillard admits that private investment “remained abnormally low". He and Keynes met this with the plea that it might have been different if the Roosevelt government had increased its expenditure still more. It is difficult to counter arguments of the “what might have been" variety, but it is worth remembering that in Germany where the government in 1920 not only increased expenditure but multiplied it enormously (also in the belief that it would create jobs) in 1923 about 25 per cent of the workers were out of work and nearly as many again were on short time.

Michael Foot believes that Keynesian policy was a success for 1945 to 1976 in Britain. But did it work as he thinks it did? Unemployment for years after 1945 was abnormally low. In fact it was considerably lower than Keynes expected from his Full Employment policy. But was it the result of Keynesian policy? One Keynesian, Joan Robinson, in her Problems of Full Employment (1950) said it was not. “Employment after the war would have been high in any case.”

Another Keynesian, Alvin Hansen, in his Guide to Keynes (1953) said the same: “Full employment was however primarily the result of the war and post-war developments, not of consensus policy”. And Aneurin Bevan, Minister in the Attlee government, attributed the low unemployment to Marshall Aid. These hundreds of millions of dollars enabled British industry to obtain materials the lack of which was hampering production. Bevan said, in 1948: “Without Marshall Aid unemployment in this country would at once have risen to 1½ million.”

So it wasn’t Keynes but Marshall and the American government who kept unemployment abnormally low for some years after the war. From the mid-fifties until 1976, in spite of Keynesian policies, unemployment has been on a more or less continuous upward trend. It touched 575,000 in 1958, 747,000 in 1963, a million in 1972, and 1½ million in 1976, and so on to the present 3⅓ million. Keynesian policy had nothing to do with the very low unemployment in the early post-war years, and nothing to do with the subsequent steady increase.

A major factor was first, the war-time destruction in Japan, Germany and some other countries which pul them for all practical purposes out of the world market, and later on their return to the world market in strength after their industries had been rebuilt and modernised, largely with American finance. They came back as cheap producers able more and more to undersell British products.

In 1955 British capitalists’ share in world exports of manufactured goods (based on 11 industrial countries including Japan and Germany) was 19.8 per cent. It had dropped to 13.8 per cent in 1965 and to 10.6 per cent in 1970. The fall has continued so that for the first time British imports of manufactures now exceed exports. And with this change of conditions unemployment in Britain went on rising, well before the start of the great depression in 1979. So Keynesian “demand management” is based on fallacious theory and its two showpieces, Roosevelt’s New Deal and Foot’s golden age of 1945-76, demonstrate that it does not work.

Two other aspects of the doctrine deserve mention. The 1944 White Paper looked forward to more or less stable prices, and Keynes himself looked to slowly rising wages “while keeping prices stable" (General Theory, p.271). What we got was continually rising prices, so that the level in 1976 was more than four times what it had been in 1945.

Lastly. Keynes held that many wars are caused by “the competitive struggle for markets” and they would be ruled out by the adoption of his full employment policy (General Theory, p.381). It is therefore interesting to notice that the Labour Party, Liberal Party and Social Democratic Party, while all professing to accept Keynesian policies, are all busy with schemes for increasing the competitiveness of British exports against foreign rivals, by such devices as lowering the exchange rate of the pound. In the House of Commons on 10 November 1982 Roy Jenkins, Leader of the SDP, said that “Britain’s lack of competitiveness was the central problem requiring solution”, and he agreed with the Labour Party spokesman, Peter Shore, that “a reduction in the exchange rate could make an important contribution".

According to Keynes, his full employment policy makes it unnecessary to go in for the war-promoting, competitive struggle for markets. Is the explanation that the three Keynesian parties do not now believe that full employment works, and are hanging on to it only because they have to oppose Thatcher’s policies and believe that the empty promise of full employment may still be a vote-catcher at the next election?

Edgar Hardcastle

White Law (1983)

1965 cover.

Book Review from the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

117 Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation under the South African 90-Day Detention Law by Ruth First (Penguin. 1982).

Originally published in 1965, 117 Days has been reissued following Ruth First's death last year in Maputo, Mozambique. She was killed by a letter bomb which, according to Ronald Segal in his preface to this new edition, was issued by “those guards of the South African regime . . . not swaggering in their uniforms but in a seemingly safe package which had been treated to blow her apart". Ruth First was well known to the South African authorities before her imprisonment in 1963 because she had published accounts of the use of forced labour on the farms of the Transvaal and exposed the conditions under which migrant labourers worked in the gold mines of South Africa.

First was arrested under the General Law Amendment Act of 1963. A person could be arrested without warrant if they were suspected of having committed or intending to commit any offence under the Suppression of Communism Act (1950), or if suspected of sabotage or in possession of any information relating to such an offence. The person could be detained for a period not in excess of ninety days or until that person, in the opinion of the Commissioner of the South African Police, had satisfactorily answered all questions during interrogation. The act became known as the "90-Day Law".

Ruth First was arrested under suspicion without warrant and without facing trial. After her initial arrest she was released just within the period of ninety days, only to be immediately rearrested. She spent a total of 117 days in solitary confinement undergoing repeated interrogation. She had already been banned "from writing, from compiling any material for publication, from entering newspaper premises . . . I had worked for five publications and each had, in turn, been banned or driven out of existence by the Nationalist Government". She had in her home, at the time of her arrest, a copy of Fighting Talk, a publication she had edited for nine years and possession of which was punishable by imprisonment for a minimum of one year.

First was originally imprisoned in Marshall Square. The conditions under which she was detained are described in horrific detail and with touches of irony:

   I, a prisoner held under top security conditions, was forbidden books, visitors, contact with any other prisoner; but like any white South African Madam I sat in bed each morning, and Africans did the cleaning for the “missus".

Even the bucket of hot water for washing, a concession for “Ninety-Dayers". was brought to the cell by the African inmates until a shower was finally installed in the prison during her two months at Marshall Square. She was then moved to Pretoria Central Prison for the next twenty-eight days before being returned to Marshall Square.

Although never charged. First was aware that the Security Police knew of the magazine at her home and that she had attended meetings at Rivonia with Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and others. Interrogation took a number of forms and ranged from threats such as "this is the first period of ninety days; there can be another after that, and yet another" to cajolements such as “we’re not holding you, you’re holding yourself. You have the key to your release. Answer our questions, tell us what we want to know , and you will turn the key in the door".

Ruth First’s portrait of prison is not limited to her experiences but covers the experiences of many others including Looksmart Solwandle Ngudle, who committed suicide during imprisonment, and Isaac Tlale who revealed evidence concerning his own torture during “90-Days" imprisonment and of the torture of Ngudle:

  Looksmart by his death and Tlale by his courage had lifted the lid for the first time on the systematic resort to torture of Ninety-Day detainees by the Security Branch.

First focuses attention on the South African prison system’s concern with vengeance. She herself attempted suicide during her second period of detention. Her conclusion is that "these amateurs in political sleuthing who seized books because they had ‘black’ or ‘red’ in the title had developed into sophisticated sadistic mind-breakers in the matter of a few years”. This is a savage indictment of the South African policies of apartheid and the suppression of any ideas conflicting with the status quo in that country.

Philip Bentley

Pin-stripe power (1983)

From the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Civil servants have always had many detractors and few defenders. Among the latter was Bernard Shaw, with his back- handed tribute that “even those public departments that were bywords for incompetence and red tape were far more efficient than the commercial adventurers who derided them”, and Sir Leo Chiozza Money who, with experience to guide him, presented an argued case on the same lines of comparison with private industry. Among the criticisms may be listed that the numbers of civil servants needlessly keep on increasing and that they enjoy a privileged position in respect of pay, holidays and pensions and finally, that it is they and not the government who run the country. The criticisms are mostly based on ignorance of the facts and disregard of the purposes for which capitalism needs a civil service and the interest capitalists have in running the service as cheaply as possibly.

The numbers of civil servants have indeed increased enormously, from 21,300 in 1832 to 521,000 in 1982. As the population is now four times what it was in 1832 this means that, relative to population, the civil service has been multiplied by six. (These figures all exclude the postal and telecom services whose staff were, until 1969, civil servants, and the industrial civil servants employed in government dockyards and the Ordnance factories.) But the increases have all been the result of the government taking on additional functions called for by capitalism as, for example, in the fields of Income Tax. Customs & Excise, Education, Factory Acts and latterly the social services.

Governments have always been aware of their need to overhaul and reorganise the civil service periodically, to bring it into line with new functions and to keep the cost down. This began with a Report on the Civil Service in 1853 and a corresponding report in 1854 on the Post Office staff, and has been followed by several other enquiries including three Royal Commissions in this century, 1912, 1931 and 1955. Further enquiries and reorganisations have been undertaken under the present government. Some of the recommendations of the 1854 Report have a modern ring. It proposed paid holidays for lower grade Post Office staff—not in their interest, but in that of efficiency. The principle was laid down that it is possible to recruit suitable staff at low rates of pay by holding out the inducement that some of them may get promotion to a more highly paid grade. It observed that “subsistence allowances" to meet necessary out-of-pocket expenditure arising out of the job were not intended to be an undercover method of getting more pay.

The idea that civil servants are privileged appears to be based on the suspicion that this half-million strong army is a self-governing body which fixes its own pay and conditions in defiance of efforts of Parliament and government to control them. There was some justification for this in respect of the smaller body of civil servants before 1853. Each department had its own arrangements, appointment was by patronage or influence or the actual sale of jobs, and there were no qualifying examinations. This was progressively altered between 1853 and 1870, by which time most features of the modern system had been established. Successive governments and committees of enquiry have considered all sorts of methods for fixing pay and conditions, including leaving them to market forces, so that pay need only be enough to attract a sufficient number of applicants

Of course the civil service would, if it could, be "privileged" but no government or committee has accepted the claim made by civil service unions that the government should be “a model employer" in the sense of setting a "good" example to all other employers.

The idea of fixing civil service pay in relation to movements of outside pay, which had long been operated in the Post Office, was recommended by the Tomlin Commission in 1931 and in a much more elaborate form by the Priestley Commission in 1955. Under the latter comparison is made grade by grade with outside comparable work, taking into account not only pay but hours, annual leave, pensions and so on. Two particular points of criticism have been that full account in making the comparisons has not been given to the fact that civil service pensions are kept in line with the rise in prices ("index-linking”), and that in the depression little or no weight has been given to the civil servant's security of employment. Both have been under review.

Have governments then been unable to control the size and pay of the civil service? Actual events show otherwise. All awards of the arbitration tribunals have been subject to what is called "the overriding authority of Parliament", meaning that the government reserved the right to disregard an award. When the Thatcher government, at the end of the abortive strikes of civil servants in 1981, promised arbitration it was "on the understanding that the government reserves the right . . .  to ask the House of Commons to approve setting aside the Tribunal's award on grounds of overriding national policy". On occasion awards have been disregarded, arbitration itself has been suspended, as also the agreed application of the "fair comparison" operatives. Civil service pay was subjected to the "economy" cuts in 1931 and the present government has fixed overall limits on expenditure. From time to time the numbers have been drastically reduced as between 1945 and 1960 with the loss of 80,000 jobs and again under the Thatcher government with a reduction from 571,000 in 1977 to 521,000 in 1982. More cuts are threatened.

If Sir Chiozza Money were alive today and making his comparison between the size and efficiency of the civil service and the position in industry he would certainly want to look into what happened in the fourteen years 1953-1967. For those years the government Statistical Office published figures showing the changes that had taken place in respect of the staff employed in manufacturing industry as a whole. The staff were divided for this purpose into "wage-earners" and “salary-earners" and presumably a large proportion of the latter were doing jobs similar to those of the clerical civil service.

While during those fourteen years there was hardly any increase in the number of civil servants, manufacturing industry showed a fall in the number of wage earners from 6,160,000 to 5,780,000 but the number of salary earners in manufacture went up from 837,000 to 2,040,000, an increase of 1,203,000.

No doubt the employers would say that the increase resulted largely from the masses of paper work thrust on industry through legislation on taxation, factory acts, and the provision of information to government departments; but it is factors like these which have explained the increase in the number of civil servants in those periods when the civil service was growing.

All of the above relates to the civil service as a whole. A different interpretation of civil servants "running the country" concerns only the permanent officials at the top of each department who are in direct contact with the political heads, the Ministers. Professor Brian Chapman has defined their role as being "To advise, warn, and assist those responsible for State policy and when desired, to provide the organisation for its implementation. The responsibility for policy decisions lies with the political members of the executive, and customarily civil servants are protected from public blame or censure for their advice". In the modern British civil service it has been accepted that, whatever their own political views may be, those permanent officials will give their advice objectively, irrespective of the politics and policy of the government. (In America the "spoils" system has operated, under which the incoming administration appoints its own political supporters in place of the old lot.)

In practice governments have not always been satisfied to rely on the permanent officials either to carry out their internal administrative responsibilities or their work of advising Ministers, as when Thatcher appointed Derek Rayner from Marks and Spencer to secure economies of staffing and Professor Walters as adviser on economic matters.

Ministers in charge of departments are there to see that the permanent officials carry out cabinet policy. They work under considerable disadvantage. They are not, and are not intended to be, expert in the work of the Department, and may be shifted, at the will of the Prime Minister, from one Department to another. That they immediately make speeches about the work of their new department is possible only because the permanent officials provide them with informed briefs.

Opinions on how the system works vary greatly. Some politicians have said that they have had the fullest co-operation. Others (the late Richard Crossman is one) have complained of greater or less degrees of obstruction. The Times, (20 December 1982) pin-pointed the problem in relation to the Defence Department when John Nott resigned and a successor had to be chosen: “There is undoubtedly a mammoth administrative challenge if the Secretary of State is to run the three services, rather than the three services running the Secretary of State". In the Defence Department and all other departments the government has its remedies. It can change the Minister, choose the men it wants to be the top permanent officials and of course it controls the finance.

So what remains of the charge that government policies are determined by the permanent officials in the Civil Service? The case with which different governments adopt different policies, and the same government goes in for U-turns, shows it to be baseless. The same, or the same kind of. permanent officials were there when steel was nationalised by the Labour Government. de-nationalised by the Tories and re-nationalised by the next Labour government. The same applies to the “privatisation" policies introduced by the Thatcher government. The permanent officials went along with Labour and Tory Keynesian policies for thirty years after 1945 and then fell in with monetarist policies when the Thatcher government came to power.

If there are Labour Party members who complain that the old Keynesian rubbish did not solve the unemployment problem, and Tory Party members who complain that the Thatcher government's old monetarist rubbish has likewise failed, they really cannot blame the Civil Service permanent officials. They brought it all on themselves, as the determination of both parties to perpetuate capitalism.

Edgar Hardcastle 

Bleak age — 1983 (1983)

From the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Answering questions recently in Parliament about Conservative intentions towards the Welfare State, the Prime Minister spoke of government determination to give individuals and their families more choice and freedom to exercise responsibility. According to the proposals drawn up by senior Cabinet Ministers, this means encouraging families to reassume responsibilities taken on by the state. The idea that the Welfare State takes care of all our needs is in stark contrast to the suffering of the growing numbers of people forced into dependence on social security, for at least part of their income. If a figure of 140 per cent of the supplementary benefit level is taken then around a quarter of the population is living in poverty or close to it. For those in doubt there is the evidence of the DHSS final report on deprivation.

In 1972 Sir Keith Joseph, then Secretary of State for Social Services, made a speech in which he expressed concern that, despite the growth of “affluence” since 1945 there was still widespread prevalence of personal and social problems. He suggested that a lack of appropriate parenting skills might be partially responsible. As a consequence of that speech the Social Science Research Council and the Department of Health and Social Security set up a Joint Working Party to carry out a programme of research into transmitted deprivation. The final report by Muriel Brown and Nicola Madge was published last July. Despite the Welfare State is the result of nearly ten years of enquiry involving 37 studies and including surveys of existing statistics and literature. (There are 17 pages of references.)

The original subject was problem families but the scope was widened to cover many aspects of deprivation and ways it might be transmitted across generations. Various “separate" states of deprivation affecting many families were studied including low income, bad housing, unemployment, poor health and family problems. People experiencing an overlap between these states are suffering multiple deprivation! One estimate gives over one million families in this condition. Not surprisingly “those individuals or families who are deprived in income or occupation are most likely to have other deprivations”. Inadequate living accommodation contributes to ill health, which in turn adds to the difficulties of coping with family relationships. People on low incomes have no alternative to seeking help from state social agencies. Studies failed to reveal a common identity for "problem” families.

The measurement of social deprivation is both inexact and controversial but “quite definitely substantial in amount”. The Report gives a conservative estimate of roughly ten million people suffering poverty, four million of those in families with children. About one-quarter of the workforce hold unskilled or semi-skilled jobs “with attendant deprivations of insecurity and poor work conditions”. 1.8 million households are living in physically unsatisfactory housing conditions in terms of overcrowding, shortage of amenities or general unfitness, and "a small minority” (about 50,000) are officially regarded as homeless in any one year.

For the families concerned poverty means an actual shortage of necessary goods, including food. Not starvation but limited diets, going hungry and missing meals. “Many surveys” indicate severe shortages of furniture, especially beds. A smaller proportion of those on low incomes own or have use of fridges and washing machines. Among poor people a drop in income level is a major cause of debt. Failure to pay fuel bills and keep up with hire purchase payments can mean the disconnection of electricity supply and the loss of goods. Rent arrears are a factor in homelessness. There is chronic anxiety and despair with the added fear, especially for single parents, that the consequence of debt or acute financial difficulties may mean children taken into care. Approximately seven out of ten families whose children were fostered, adopted or placed in residential homes "had been judged to have a precarious or very precarious financial situation at the time of reception into care”.

In summarising the studies made by the Joint Working Party Brown and Madge deal sympathetically with the deprivation and disadvantages suffered by several million people. They are unable to fully explain it. finding that there is no single form of deprivation and no single cure. They believe that “there will always be some worse off than others”.

Everyone on a low income is not considered to be suffering special hardship. All those in low-skill occupations, unemployed, in the “worst of housing”, with large families, single parents, do not have problems which make them turn to the social services for help. (Not being “problem families” they are really outside the areas considered by researchers.) This does not mean that they do not have problems or that the difficulties of “problem families" are not the result of poverty.

All forms of deprivation occur most frequently within the lowest “socio-economic groups” but similar problems are experienced by families not in low-skilled occupations. This does not invalidate the relationship between income and life-style opportunities and expectations. But looking at problems in relation to individual families and classifying people into separate socio-economic groups according to occupation and income level, ignores the common economic identity of these groups. People who need to work, no matter how their skills and payments differ, all belong to the same class.

The working class does all of the work of society, produces the social wealth, but does not own the means to produce that wealth. On the other hand the capitalist class which owns the means of production, and therefore what is produced, does not need to work — or to claim social security. The motive for production is sale and profit and for the working class access to what is produced is limited by the amount of their wages — or social security benefits. This fact restricts choice for the majority in all areas of life. It hardly needed a ten-year programme of enquiry to discover that people on the lowest incomes are likely to have most problems coping with life, and the greatest difficulty in improving the position for their children. Whether or not particular deprivations are transmitted across generations of individual families, poverty-based problems are certainly experienced by successive generations of working class families.

All the aspects of deprivation and disadvantage investigated by the DHSS Joint Working Party are related to the role of the working class, in a social system which lacks the motive to provide for human wealth, dignity and contentment. Capitalism needs a varied workforce, people to do all kinds of work, including menial unskilled work which requires little training. It is not necessary for everyone to be qualified to do the highest paid jobs. And while there is “a great shortage of trade" some 3½ million people are unemployed.

Members of the working class unable to work, whether through unemployment, sickness or old age, are dependent on the state social security system. The hardship which they may face is an aspect of the relative poverty of the whole class. Workers looking at the deductions on their own payslips, for income tax and national insurance contributions, are far from sympathetic to any increase in their contributions as a means to improve social security benefits for others. Myths about the generosity of state welfare provision, and its abuse, are widely accepted, together with the idea that the poor have only themselves to blame — or they are not poor at all. When David Donnison was Chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission, complaints about supporting layabouts and scroungers, which arrived by the hundred each month, were "rarely on headed notepaper from leafy suburbs" but were mostly from “ordinary voters and taxpayers" (The Politics of Poverty).

If the DHSS report is not enough the mass arrest of claimants, during the infamous Operation Major at Oxford, further revealed the opportunities for "getting rich" on social security: 175 people were accused of drawing £67.20 board and lodging allowances, by giving bed and breakfast addresses at which they were not staying. In March a judge dismissed the case against one man who had changed to cheap accommodation which did not include breakfast. According to the DHSS his money should have been reduced to £52.75! Who would turn to the DHSS, in the hope of getting meagre and qualified help, if they had another option?

Government exploration of possible changes in the welfare state is not concerned with remedying the failure to end poverty, but with finding cheaper ways of running welfare services. About £2 billion has been cut from benefits affecting pensioners. families, the sick, disabled and unemployed, but social security now accounts for 29 per cent of all government expenditure. During a debate in the House of Lords last November Lord Trefgarne (Under Secretary of State for Health and Social Security) said that the government was committed to protecting the needs of those who relied on social security benefits, but that the success of the economic strategy meant limiting the growth of social security as far as possible. (The Times, 25 November 1982.)

Piecemeal reform, within the existing social services, is seen by the authors of Despite the Welfare State to be the only realistic solution to deprivation. Even without a recession reforms cannot end working class poverty. But there is an alternative.

Pat Deutz