Letter: When did socialism start? (2003)

Letter to the Editors from the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

When did socialism start?

Dear Editors

Your exchange with Ron Smith (no relation) in the February issue was, as usual, well answered by yourselves but does pose the questions: When did socialism start and how and when do individuals accept the indisputable logic of its truth?

I can only relate my own story but it would be interesting to hear from others of their own experiences and enlightenments.

Born on the even of the 39/45 war into a large but poor family, father an uneducated window cleaner (and after serving abroad for five years with an aptitude for hard work and drink) and mother (a cleaner when financial needs demanded and time allowed) allegedly from a middle class family who, amongst all the poverty, educated all her children into the niceties of life including manners, respect and discipline.

Fortunately, as with my siblings, 11-plus took me on a free place to a local public school and until the age of 16, when family need for money demanded that I leave, I had my mind stretched, titillated and forced into action. At that time I had been an ardent believer in christianity for 10 years and was so until National Service in the Far East and other life experiences had convinced me of the futility of religion. Nevertheless attendance at a “posh” school and exposure to Christian beliefs and history did flood my subconscious with all the inherent inequalities, privilege and hypocrisy of private schooling and formal religion.

By the time I was 30 good business fortune had visited and I was happily married with three children living in a superb house in a select locality, driving the latest large saloon (hers) and dashing sports car (mine).

This lifestyle continued for the next 20 years and I do recall feeling on many occasions; why me, what have I done to be so lucky, what about all my ex-friends who are still grafting at their lathes, down the mines and existing day to day? A few pangs of guilt, feelings of general unfairness in life and then – back to the good life…

It all ended in 1990 when my lawyers, personal friends for many years, would not stand their corner in a large business deal in which they had been employed to protect my legal interests. They betrayed and deserted me which resulted during the 1990s in unemployment , life on income support for three years, self-built home repossession and homelessness.

Why me again? – but this time with the boot on the other foot! Why after all these years of being a “true blue” and avid supporter of the system (capitalism) have all my friends (sic) and acquaintances deserted me and left me for dead? It didn’t make sense but I now had the time to reflect and think long and hard about life, people, politics, systems and capitalism and out of this came the realisation that millions of people were being subjected to the harsh realities of capitalism every year in the UK alone. It wasn’t right, not fair, why so much hypocrisy and ruthlessness and why so many lies all the time? Where was the justice in our legal system and, if I was disenfranchised with all my accumulated knowledge of the workings of capitalism, what about all those people who had not enjoyed my good fortune, wealth and privileges?

Up to now Marx, Lenin, Morris, Communists, Socialists etc. were all unacceptable lefties who had no place in the world and whose ideas must be stamped out at all costs. Can you believe such arrogance, stupidity, lack of real consideration for others and shallowness in a supposed intelligent 50-plus-years-old man?

Looking for answers I started to buy the Big Issue and came across your advertisement in the small ads. Duly applied to be a reader and the first few issues were an absolute revelation to me! After years of mental turmoil and survival, all the thoughts I had had about a better world for all were springing out at me from the pages of the Socialist Standard. As the years have gone by and I have continued to enjoy your magazine and continued to research into how life could be! The mists of time have drifted apart and memories of an earlier learning period in my life have surfaced.

It strikes me that the similarity between much of the truth, logic and reason of socialism is akin to many of the teachings of christianity – less the mumbo jumbo of course (this mumbo jumbo is surely man’s add-on for personal greed and self-aggrandisement).

I put it to you – just a thought – could Jesus Christ, an ordinary man or a fictional character, be the first and best socialist? Love Thy Neighbour as Thyself – think about it! Surely to get socialism all we need to do is to live truly by that sentiment!

Finally, the capitalist sun is shining again for me but I am exploiting them now and much of my accumulation is voluntarily passed on to fellow workers in my current business venture – as you say, we all have to make a living under capitalism until socialism happens – just a pity that more of our resources are not directed to “marketing the brand”.

On the campaigning issue for a fairer and better life for all humanity (socialism), I talk and debate with anyone who will listen and lobby anyone – politicians, the corporate world, religious worthies et al – under the guise of Campaign for Morality, Fairness and Truth (with financial self-sufficiency this would be a full time job).

When will socialism happen, when will the majority understand logic and reason, is it a natural progression, are European integration, globalisation, the US current muscle-flexing activities all indicators that the world is becoming one and will this give socialism a better chance of happening in our lifetime or are we all pissing in the wind?

Recently I had a letter in the anarchist magazine Freedom suggesting that more co-operation between them, the SPGB and all other far left tendency organisations (Christians included) is the only way to avoid Armageddon – can I put that to you, too?

Trevor L. Smith, 

Bury, Lancs

Reply: 

We hope our previous correspondent is still there to read your tale of woe. It might teach him something about how the present system works.

Actually, the so-called golden rule – of “do as you would be done” (“Love Thy Neighbour as Thyself”seems a bit extreme and unpractical) – has nothing to do with the mythical (or possibly factual) character called Jesus. It’s a feature of all human codes of behaviour, whether incorporated into some religion or not (and, as you say, all religions are mumbo-jumbo), reflecting the fact that humans are social animals who depend on co-operating with each other to survive. No society in which everybody competes against each other and in which “anything goes” could survive. This is indeed capitalism’s ideal but, fortunately, it can’t achieve it as humans just aren’t like that. Even under capitalism humans’ basic social nature comes through and most of the time most people behave to each other in a decent way.

But this in itself is not socialism. It merely shows that, if anything, it is capitalism not socialism that is “against human nature”. Socialism is not a code of behaviour. It is a system of society, one based on the common ownership and democratic control by the whole community of the means for producing the things we need to live and to enjoy life. It is, as you hint, the next stage in social evolution and for which developments within capitalism – such as the building up of a world-wide productive system capable of turning out plenty for all – have paved the way. In fact, today, everything is in place for the establishment of socialism except one vital ingredient – the desire and political will to establish it.

This is where we in the Socialist Party come in. Our members have got together for the single purpose of helping the emergence of an understanding of and a desire for socialism. When this does emerge – fortunately it does not depend on our own meagre efforts but more on people’s experience of capitalism and its failure and inability to solve the problems they face – it is our opinion that will express itself, among other ways, through the ballot box. Those who want socialism will use their votes to send delegates to elected bodies with a mandate to use political control to end class ownership and usher in the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and to dismantle the apparatus of class rule.

We certainly think that all those who want socialism and are agreed that this is the right way to proceed to get it as quickly and as peacefully as possible should get together in a single organisation, a single socialist political party. But Freedom , the anarchist publication, does not stand for socialism; it seeks to cater for all those who want to abolish the state for whatever reason, including those who are resolute opponents of socialism. And even the minority among them who do stand for socialism (in the same sense as us) don’t think it can be achieved by democratic political action and advocate the suicidal policy of trying to take on head-to-head the fully armed capitalist state.

As to other “far left tendency organisations”, by which we take you to mean the SWP, Militant and the others, our experience is that they don’t stand for socialism but for state capitalism (nationalisation misnamed socialism) and the rule of a vanguard party (preferably themselves).

Besides, both Freedom and them have other priorities in that they consider campaigning for this or that reform – or, more often these days, against this or that measure proposed by the government – more important. If they were prepared to drop campaigning for reforms and to accept campaigning for socialism as the immediate priority then of course we should all get together and have a bigger and better socialist organisation, so helping to speed the demise of capitalism and avoid the miseries it has in store for us if allowed to continue.

—Editors

Voice From The Back: Down the sink (2003)

The Voice From The Back Column from the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Down the sink

Angela O’Hagen, the campaign and communications manager of Oxfam in Scotland was so incensed by the plight of the poor in Mali and the Dominican Republic that she wrote to the Herald (26 June) about it. “Encouraged by Europe’s Common Agriculture Policy, Europe’s farmers are producing mountains of milk that no-one has the appetite for. Instead of pouring the milk down the sink, we dump our left-overs on the developing world undermining local dairy farmers in the likes of Dominican Republic and Mali who cannot compete against our artificially cheaper milk.” No, your eyes don’t deceive you, here is a spokesperson for Oxfam regretting that milk isn’t poured down the sink! Truly, capitalism is a mad house.

Hobson’s Choice

“Digby Jones, the Director-General of the CBI, yesterday argued for businesses to keep an opt-out on the European Working Time Directive that restricts the working week to an average of 48 hours . . . Mr Jones said, “This is about choice. People should have the right to say ‘no’ to long hours and the directive rightly gives them that protection. But they don’t want unions and politicians telling them when they can work, or for how long.” Times (26 June) Why would anyone want to work more than 48 hours? Could it be because they need the overtime pay? Could it be because they don’t want to be overlooked for promotion or, more likely, to be sacked?

It’s not funny

Bernard Manning is a stand-up comedian who has been accused of being a “foul-mouthed racist bigot”, but, as a report in This Week (28 June) of his trip to India shows, he is not stupid. “It was effin’ awful . . . You’re either wealthy in India or you’ve got eff all. The hotel was absolutely wonderful, and people were living high on the hog, beautiful meals, swimming pools, but you get out the front door and . . . effin’ poverty. There’s no in-between. You’ve got women queuing up for water and they’ve got an atom bomb! The last effin’ thing they need in India is an atom bomb! They want reservoirs and plenty of water coming through the tap. Effin’ upset me I can tell you.”

A voice from America

In the New York Times Magazine (6 July) there is a photograph of a woman wearing a flimsy looking plastic bag on her head. Underneath her photograph are the words of Darline Stephens of Anniston, Alabama. “ I live about 5 or 10 miles from chemical weapons. We’re over there searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but we have them here in our hometown. I didn’t know this stuff was at the Army Depot all these years. I just heard last year. It takes seven years to burn the chemicals to get rid of it all. We didn’t really believe they were going to burn something that could kill us until they told us to get our masks. My family lives payday to payday, so we sure can’t say, ‘Let’s quit our jobs and move.’ I wish we could. The government does some ignorant things – they just give us a plastic mask? If you could send our boys to war with real masks, I don’t understand why we can’t have the same masks. Everyone in the rescue squad and fire department has high-dollar masks. I just don’t understand why they think some people’s lives are worth more than ours. My son and I are Christians, so we’re saved. He knows where he’s going if he dies.”

Mind the gap

“Almost half the world’s population, or three billion people, live on little more than £1 a day and the gap between the world’s poorest 20 percent and its richest 20 percent has more than doubled since 1960, the International Labour organisation said.” Times (7 July) So where does that leave the notion that the market system would lead to prosperity for all?

Worse than Thatcher

The Labour MP Michael Meacher, formerly the environment minister, revealed in the Guardian (15 July) that the gap in income between the bottom 20 percent and the top 20 percent has increased under Labour. “The share of the bottom fifth has slipped back to 6 percent while the share of the top fifth has moved up to 46 percent. Therefore, the rich now have a bigger share of the nation’s post-tax income than at any time under Mrs Thatcher.”

The myth of the permanent arms economy (2003)

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

In March this year Michael Kidron, a former editor of International Socialism, the theoretical magazine of the group of the same name that later became the Socialist Workers Party, died. In an obituary published in Socialist Review in April, Tony Cliff’s successor as leader of the SWP, Chris Harman, described Kidron as “probably the most important Marxist economist of his generation”. This is a gross exaggeration, even if Kidron does have a minor place in the history of the ideas discussed amongst Marxists for the explanation he offered for the period of capitalist expansion that followed the Second World War as being due to government spending on arms.

Kidron first expounded his ideas in an article in 1967, then incorporated them into his most widely read book Western Capitalism Since the War, published the following year. Although he can’t really have thought that this period of expansion would go on for ever, he still chose to call his theory “the permanent arms economy”. We in the Socialist Party never accepted this as an explanation for the post-war boom and, as the columns of the Socialist Standard in the 1960s bear witness, were severely critical of it. As it happened, within five years of the publication of his book, events were to prove Kidron wrong and us right. The post-war boom came to an end in 1973, despite arms spending continuing at previous levels, thus ruling it out as an explanation both for the boom and its eventual end.

Our main opposition to Kidron’s theory was that it set out to explain a non-existent problem: why capitalism’s supposed built-in tendency to collapse into permanent slump and stagnation did not manifest itself after the war. In 1932—in the middle of the great depression of the Thirties—the Socialist Party published a pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse  which we regard as one of our contributions to Marxian economic theory. The argument put forward in this pamphlet was that, while capitalism was an unstable system in the sense that economic activity under it proceeded in fits and starts, constantly swinging between booms and slumps, there was no reason to conclude that it had some economic flaw that would cause it to some day break down permanently. No slump would be permanent, because a slump itself sooner or later created the economic conditions for a subsequent recovery. Capitalism would not collapse of its own accord; it would have to be done to death, by the conscious political action of the working class.

At the time there were others who took a different view: either that capitalism was in the process of collapsing because productive capacity had come to permanently outstrip paying demand (underconsumptionism) or because the rate of profit had irreversibly fallen to too low a level.

The Thirties depression was followed by the Second World War, which both schools of collapsists saw, for different reasons, as a direct consequence of the slump and the only way out of it under capitalism. Most of those placing themselves in the Marxist tradition (including, if the truth be told, ourselves) thought that the war would be followed by another slump, just as the First World War had been. It wasn’t. In fact, it was followed by a long period of expansion punctuated only by relatively minor recessions. How was this to be explained?

We tended to explain it in terms of the specific facts of the period, such as post-war reconstruction and the expansion of the world market through the lowering of trade barriers. The Keynesians claimed that it was due to government intervention to manage the economy on the lines their founder had advocated. The collapsists had to think up a reason why the tendency to collapse into permanent slump and stagnation that they felt was built-in to capitalism had failed to operate. One such explanation was the “permanent war economy”. The underconsumptionists argued that it was government spending on “defence” that had made up for the supposed chronic lack of purchasing power. But arms spending was also offered, strangely, as an explanation by the fallen-rate-of-profit school.

It fell to Kidron to explain, on behalf of the Trotskyoid group to which he belonged (Tony Cliff’s), precisely how state spending on arms offset and even overcame the supposed tendency for capitalism to collapse due to the rate of profit falling to too low a level. Since the state had to obtain the money to spend on arms through taxes which ultimately fell on capitalist profits and other property incomes this theory was counter-intuitive, and so Kidron’s arguments had to be pretty tortuous.

In his article, “A Permanent Arms Economy”, which appeared in International Socialism 28 (Spring 1967), and which is trumpeted by the SWP to this day, Kidron started from a collapsist position:

“Common to most explanations of western capitalism’s stability and growth since the war is the assumption that the system would collapse into over-production and unemployment were it not for some special offsetting factor… This article shares the assumption”.

He went on to argue that the special offsetting mechanism was “a permanent arms budget”. His basic thesis was that, in government arms spending, capitalism had found a way of engineering growth without this leading to the drastic fall in the rate of profit that he believed, on a misreading of Marx, should normally have occurred. Government spending on arms constituted “a net addition to the market for consumer or ‘end’ goods” while, on the supply side, arms production, as non-productive consumption, was “the key, and seemingly permanent, offset to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall”.

Marx’s argument on the rate of profit had been different: that, since living labour is the sole source of profit, if it falls as a proportion of total capital, then, mathematically, the ratio of profit to total capital, i.e. the rate of profit, will also fall, unless offset by other factors. Marx was in fact aware that there would always be such ‘other factors’, so that for him any tendency for the rate of profit to fall for this reason would only be a very long-run and by no means continuous tendency.

That the capitalist market had expanded since the end of the war was an undeniable fact. The question was whether or not this was due to government spending on arms. The Keynesians argued that it was due to government spending as such, whether on arms or anything else. On the other hand, some economists were beginning to realise that the Keynesian argument that the post-war expansion had been caused by government spending was not true: the world market was expanding anyway due to other factors. Thus the Socialist Standard noted in November 1971, in an article “The End of Full Employment”:

“An examination of the causes of low post-war unemployment in Britain was made by Professor R. C. O. Matthews, himself broadly a supporter of Keynes, and published in the Economic Journal (September 1968). His conclusion was that, starting with the stimulus given by making good war damage of all kinds, a major cause was a prolonged investment boom and that ‘the decline of unemployment as compared with 1914 is to a large extent not a Keynesian phenomenon at all’”.

In seeing a species of government spending as having saved capitalism from its supposed tendency to collapse, Kidron had placed himself within the Keynesian framework. Which is why the theory of the “permanent arms economy” is better seen as a Leftwing Keynesian rather than a Marxist theory, as in fact Kidron himself was later to recognise (this theory has been revived today under the more accurate name of “military Keynesianism”). Kidron therefore had to face fellow Labour Party reformists (he, along with Cliff, was a paid-up member of the Labour Party at this time) who, basing themselves on Keynes, argued that a “permanent social reform budget”, with government spending on housing, education, hospitals, pensions, etc., would have the same effect.

Cartoon by Phil Evans from ‘More years of the Locust’

Kidron conceded that this was theoretically possible, but argued that this was not going to happen since any state that did this would put itself at a competitive disadvantage, as it would be diverting profits from being reinvested in the more efficient and up-to-date machinery and methods of production that would allow production costs to be reduced. This was true, and is in fact one reason why reformism within the framework of a single national state is never going to work. But it equally applies to state arms spending. This, too, is a diversion from productive investment that places states which spend more than average on it at a competitive disadvantage.

Kidron tried to get round this by arguing that arms spending was different from spending on social reforms in that, if one state spent more on arms, other states were forced to follow suit, so that none of them would be at a particular disadvantage. But he never could explain satisfactorily why this should be. While it was clear that America and Russia, struggling for world domination, were involved in an arms race, and that states like Britain and France that had pretensions about playing a world role had made a political decision to spend more on arms, there was no reason why all states should get into an arms race with each other. In fact, Germany and Japan did not spend the same proportion on arms as America, Britain and France, which gave them a competitive advantage and led to them being the “economic miracles” of that period; a fact we employed at the time to help us expose the fallacious theory of “the permanent arms economy”.

Today, the SWP likes to claim that the theory of the “permanent arms economy” did not imply that capitalism had found a permanent way of avoiding big slumps, but there was nothing Kidron wrote in the 1960s that suggested that the post-war boom he then believed had been caused by arms spending was going to come to an end in the 1970s. This was something added after the post-war boom had finally come to an end in 1973 (thus proving the theory wrong)—and it was added by Cliff and Harman not Kidron himself. By 1977 Kidron had come to recognise that he had been wrong to attribute the post-war boom to government arms spending; he now attributed it to the emergence in the West of “state capitalism”, by which he meant the state acting as a single national capital. And he concluded by admitting what we had always argued, that state spending on arms was a burden on capitalist expansion not a stimulant to it:

“ . . . it is hard to sustain the view that it was the permanent arms economy that fuelled the long boom. On the contrary, such expenditure must have worked towards stagnation. And if in reality heavy spending on arms coincided with an unprecedented expansion of capital, it can only be because the effects of arms spending were overpowered by the effects of something much more fundamental.” (“Two Insights Don’t Make a Theory”) .

So, in the end, Kidron did redeem himself from going down in history as a simple Leftwing Keynesian. The same cannot be said of IS and its successor, the SWP, which still clings to this discredited theory.

Adam Buick

Blogger's Note:

Kidron's Western Capitalism Since the War was reviewed in the October 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Has the Labour Party lost its way? (2003)

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

With trade unions and left wingers now talking about the re-formation of a Labour party, socialists ask why bother? The history of the Labour Party has been one long disaster for the working class. The short answer to the question of whether the Labour Party has lost its way is, no. Because what is currently the direction of its leaders has been part of its thinking throughout its existence. In power, as now, Labour has been a radical liberal party. This has not been a betrayal of its core principles or “values” but reflects its origins.

New Labour’s obsession with neo-liberal economics might seem like something of a new departure but the early Labour Party was tied to liberalism in a similar way. This argument should not be taken too far, as at least the collectivist currents in the early Labour Party made it feel like it was part of a movement to create a better society and many thought they were working towards a vaguely defined socialism. A collection of anecdotes of life in the Labour Party, Generating Socialism (Sutton, 1997; edited by Daniel Weinbren, foreword by Tony Benn, who else?) shows that many Labour members, however mistakenly, thought that socialism could be reached through Labourism. The optimism which could hold with Labour’s “rise” up to the mid-twentieth century, has turned into a marked pessimism associated with the supposed decline of the working class.

Nonetheless, the Labour Party was established not for socialist aims but to achieve political representation for working men. It was related to class struggle in that despite the trade unions’ reluctance to break away from the Liberal Party, industrial militancy and the Taff Vale decision which put their funds in danger meant that a strong feeling developed on the need for independent “Labour” representation in parliament. However, its socialist credentials were weak, as the Social Democratic Federation acknowledged when it withdrew from the Labour Representation Committee (which became the Labour Party in 1906) in 1901. Its social outlook was informed not by class-consciousness but, on its left-wing, by ethical protest at poverty and inequality as “wrong” and, on its right-wing, by an awareness that social dislocation caused by unregulated capitalism effected economic (capitalist) efficiency.

The Labour Party struggled to gain wide electoral support during its first ten years, gaining around fifty MPs by 1914. Its big break came with the first world war, which split the Liberal Party. Labour was active in the national government, supporting the war, but not tainted being tainted with its results. By the early 1920s, the Labour Party had emerged as the “progressive” party in British politics. While attracting such ex-Liberals at this time as Clement Attlee, it refused the affiliation of the Communist Party.

So why has the Labour Party been associated with the name of socialism? Largely because of its history of supporting nationalisation, often misleadingly called “public” or “social” ownership. This was the major problem for socialism in the twentieth-century—the standard dictionary definition being that nationalisation is socialism. The Labour Party’s commitment to nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange dates from 1905 but was adopted most famously in Clause IV of its 1918 constitution. Its acknowledgment that exchange would continue after nationalisation demonstrated that the wages system, and thus capitalism, would continue after nationalisation, albeit state-run. In effect Clause IV was translated as state ownership of the “commanding heights” of the economy. Quite what was hoped to be achieved by bringing industry into state instead of private ownership was not very clear apart from as a vague and fuzzy means to “greater equality”.

With central planning nationalisation was supposed to transform capitalism into something that could be controlled by the state. This did not happen of course. On transferring coal, steel, iron, fuel, power and transport to state ownership after 1945, the performance of British industry in the world market still continued to decline and the state sector remained an arena of industrial struggle. The remarkable blind faith of the Labour Party in nationalisation was reduced from the Attlee government onwards. Sadly, this decline in the faith of nationalisation has been represented as the death of socialism.

There are still some in the Labour Party and in the various left-wing organisations who claim that vast swathes of British industry should be re-nationalised. This is why many see “New” Labour as a dramatic break with “Old” Labour. Jim Mortimer (an ex-Labour Party general secretary) describes New Labour, in a recent pamphlet The Formation of the Labour Party – Lessons for Today (2000), as apologists for capitalism and the new Clause IV as “a symbolic change to mark the abandonment of Labour’s traditional advocacy of a widening area of social [state] ownership”. However, as socialists, we would prefer to see declining faith in nationalisation and the Labour Party as a positive development. The results of Labour governments are no longer clothed in the misleading garb of collectivism but show what they essentially are—managers of capitalism. Electoral imperatives, present from early in Labour’s existence, have triumphed over reforming rhetoric.

It is often argued that state welfare and social security provision are examples of Labour’s success in “doing something”, legislating against poverty and providing municipal housing and so on. Such measures have no socialist credentials but, on the contrary, were developed in their post-war form by the Liberal Beveridge. Moreover, regulating legislation has been a feature of all capitalist government since the Factory Acts of the 1840s. The simple case is that systems of social welfare do not change the exploitative character of capitalism or even touch the surface of its symptoms. Poverty has not been reformed away and poor housing, unemployment, job insecurity and related ill-health remain very real concerns for the working class. In fact, New Labour, rather than betraying Labour’s welfare extension tradition, has merely continued previous Labour retrenchment begun in the 1970s.

The democratic record of the Labour Party reads equally dubiously. It has always had a very limited acceptance of party democracy. The block vote, for example, allowed the trades unions to dominate the party conference, initially to the advantage of Liberal moderates but more recently to that of the left-wing, whereupon it was replaced. Also, Blair is not new in being a “strong” leader. Before 1922 the Labour party did not have a formal leader but a series of chairmen. After Ramsay MacDonald assumed chairmanship in 1922, however, the party adopted a leadership that exercised strong control over the party, especially as the Parliamentary Labour Party did not, and still does not, have to obey its conference. As has often been observed, the Labour Party has always had a strong cult of personality, of loyalties and bitter rivalries over who was best to lead a passive working class.

At its formation and in its early years the Labour Party had little connection with the growth of a socialist minority or even with the more militant sections of reformists. There were always some trying to build a “fairer” society but what emerged from years of effort was not a slowly evolving socialism but a Labourism which increasingly judged itself on its electoral success, which depended on its ability not to rock the capitalist boat it was trying to steer.

Those who want another century of reformist advance and retreat can go ahead and form a new Labour Party. Those who, learning from the failures of the past, desire the socialist alternative should join those who have rejected reformism and sought instead to make socialists and work for socialism-and-nothing-but.

Colin Skelly

Letter: " . . .a sad deluded group of romantics" (2003)

Letter to the Editors from the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

" . . .a sad deluded group of romantics"

Dear Editors

For a few years I have subscribed to the Socialist Standard and have come to the conclusion that you are either very cynical or a sad deluded group of romantics. It’s all very cosy sitting at your word processor telling us that we should be out there ridding ourselves of the capitalist class and that the world would be a much better place under your brand of politics. (All dictators believe this.)

It is a logical process for those people without resources to vilify people who have wealth. (Just as in Cambodia it became a corrupt thing to have learning.) Hence your tirade against those people who have the imagination and flair to accumulate for themselves some of the Earth’s riches. Capitalism is just a handy label for those who have the get-up-and-go to create wealth. Yes, they are shrewd people – yes, they will exploit others but how else are things to be done?

Get up from your word processors and take a good hard look at the world. You will observe there are varying types in this human planet. The majority is an amorphous mass of Underlings. Their main preoccupation is obtaining food, shelter and pleasure. Their imagination goes no further than these three basic needs. At the top of this heap are the Doers – the leaders – the people with the strength of purpose to get things done. They see this indeterminate mass of Underlings with their three needs so they set out to provide them.

So don’t give us all that nonsense about exploitation. The leaders are doing what is necessary. They don’t sit in offices churning out political daydreams. They get off their backsides and do. They are the Doers. They are necessary for society to function by providing food-halls, living accommodation and pleasure-domes. Do you honestly believe the Underlings would manage to do all this on their own? Listen socialists it’s a real world out there with people hungry for food, shelter and pleasure and capitalism is a means to that end. And so what if the capitalist creams off a bit extra for his efforts! Surely he deserves it!

Phil McCormac, 

by email

Reply: 

You omit one detail: are you a Doer or an Underling? We suspect the latter. In which case there is a book about people like you, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, set in a town called Mugsborough.

Mugs believe that it is capitalists, not workers by hand and by brain, who create wealth and that capitalists are doing us a favour by providing us with jobs. They believe that the world has always been divided into rich and poor, leaders and followers, rulers and ruled and that it always will be. They consider themselves and their fellow workers to be “underlings” incapable of running things ourselves.

Yet who, today, does run things from top to bottom? Who grows the food, who builds the houses, who mines the minerals, who transports them, who processes them, who fashions them into useful things, who does all the paper work for this, orders the supplies, draws up the designs – if not the people you call the “underlings”, we the majority class of wage and salary earners? The shareholding capitalist and the fat-cat company director are completely redundant as far as the actual work of wealth production is concerned – and new wealth can only be created by the application of human labour to materials that originally come from nature, not by speculating on the stock exchange or planning take-over bids. Their social role is purely parasitic: to cream off, as you put it, a part of the wealth created by the rest of us.

But don’t get us wrong. We don’t blame capitalists personally. They are just cogs in the system. If they didn’t exploit us, somebody else would. Either some other capitalist or maybe some state bureaucrat like in Cambodia or the former USSR. We blame the system. It’s based on the exploitation of the majority for profit. That’s why it must go and be replaced by a new and different system, based on common ownership democratic control and production of use, not profit.

What we are proposing is that the people who, today, run production and administration from top to bottom should get together and run things in their own interest, instead of as at present in the interest of a tiny minority. The first step towards this is to stop regarding ourselves as underlings, as eternal followers of those who regard themselves as our betters. Get up off your knees, Phil, don’t be a mug

—Editors 

News from the Madhouse (2003)

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Statistics

The United States, as the most powerful country in the world, must be the world’s leading producer of statistics. But for some reason the US has been very coy about producing any estimate of the numbers of Iraqis killed during the American attack. However, others outside officialdom are less reticent, and according to a Times (10 July) report on Iraq, “a group of British and US academics said that the civilian death toll from the war was at least 6000.” But the lack of official American figures does mean that all that suffering can be brushed under the carpet. An American writer in the Times (3 June) said that the Iraqi war was “pretty-close-to-bloodless”. The 2800 people killed in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre are fewer than half the probable figure of Iraqi civilian deaths. No American writer would ever describe the 11 September attack as “pretty-close-to-bloodless”. Of course, the twin towers attacks killed mainly Americans, while in Iraq it was mainly Iraqis who died. Perhaps that makes a difference.

Solitary confinement

But if you call your dead “victims”, instead of “heroes”, you may find people asking what is the point of supporting a system which results in so many dead victims. Describing them as “heroes”, or so the authorities hope, is a good way of getting people to rally behind the flag, and continue the merciless carnage which is part of capitalism. Private Jessica Lynch, for example, an American maintenance soldier, was in a vehicle at the back-end of an American convoy in Iraq, which lost its way and blundered into enemy territory. In an exchange of fire, she was badly injured, and captured by the Iraqis. She was taken to a nearby hospital in Nasiriyah, and her crushed arms and legs were put in plaster. The Americans discovered she was there, and decided the chance of rescuing a young, good-looking blonde was too good to miss. By that time Iraqi resistance was crumbling, but the desire for a propaganda coup was too strong. So special forces in helicopters, guns firing, stormed the hospital, capturing all the doctors and nurses and not really helping the patients, and triumphantly carried off Private Lynch.

According to the Times (21 June), the press was fed reports about her heroic resistance, fighting and killing Iraqis before being wounded several times herself. There are plans to make films about this exciting story. In fact, it seems, her gun jammed so she didn’t fire at all. Unfortunately, Private Lynch “has been unable to remember anything about the events which have propelled her into the public eye”, and, said the Times reporter, she is now “living in solitary confinement in the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington. Outside her door stands a military guard who prevents anyone except her medical helpers and her immediate family from seeing her. Each lunchtime Private Lynch goes to physiotherapy and works out alone.Other patients are banished from the gym for fear that the press will use them as a way to get to her.” A “hero”, kept in solitary confinement! It makes you wonder if they are helping her to remember what she has forgotten, i.e. all about her heroism. As the report said, “She is deliberately and falsely being portrayed as a hero in a war with few genuine heroes because the Americans would like to feel good about a war that has an ambiguous ending, and the entertainment industry needs to please them.”

Fishy story

In legal circles, there is a well-known story about a barrister, appearing for the defendant, who listened to the other side’s allegations, and wondered how on earth he was going to reply to them. At length his solicitor passed him a note: “No case; attack the plaintiff’s attorney.”

Ten Downing Street is acting on exactly the same principle in the aftermath of the Iraqi war. Much of the media—newspapers, radio, television—has been questioning some of the stories the government put out to justify their action in invading Iraq along with the Americans. Not having a convincing reply to many of these questions, Alastair Campbell (the Prime Minister’s main public relations adviser) decided to seize on one allegation broadcast on BBC television, to the effect that he had “sexed up” some of the information the government got from its so-called “intelligence services”, before issuing it as part of the government’s propaganda drive to persuade people of the necessity of war.

Whether this or that claim is one hundred per cent justified is of minor importance besides the government’s efforts to obscure the basic facts of the matter. America attacked and overthrew the Saddam Hussein regime because it needs to import a great deal of oil to keep its productive and distributive industries functioning. Saudi Arabia, with the world’s largest reserves of oil, is already firmly within the American sphere of influence; Iraq, with the world’s second largest reserves, was hostile to the United States, so had to be brought into line. Britain, and a few other countries, supported the United States because it is by a long way the most powerful country in the world. Some European countries have reacted to this enormous American power by stepping up their attempt to build a capitalist European federation which might in the future hope to rival the United States, and share in world leadership. Others, including Britain, think that a better bet is to go with the country which now has the leadership: in the jungle of world capitalism, the British rulers think, perhaps safety and prosperity lie in cosying up to the most ferocious predator.

Each group of capitalists, ruling in a particular country, does whatever it thinks is best for its own interests. Lots of advice is given, but the decision rests with each country’s ruling class. In Britain, there was a lot of feeling against going to war. Tony Blair, in his present role as right-hand man to the British ruling class, and administrator of British capitalism, ignored the widespread anti-war feeling, and did what he thought the British capitalist class would want him to do. So he went along with the American rulers, hoping that it would help to ensure the oil supplies which British industry needs and will need in the foreseeable future.

Whenever anyone makes an open, honest decision, he adds up all the possible reasons for and against, and arrives at a conclusion. When anyone reaches his conclusion first, and then has to make up his reasons afterwards, there are often a lot of problems. Tony Blair couldn’t announce that he was going to send British soldiers to fight in Iraq, which would involve killing and injuring Iraqi soldiers and civilians, as well as deaths and injuries among the British invading force, simply because he thought it was safer in the modern world for the British ruling class to ally with the single world superpower, and at the same time make sure British capitalism didn’t run out of oil. So reasons had to be made up afterwards. Hence the sudden discovery that Saddam Hussein is a nasty man, running a barbarous regime. Quite true, of course, but not enough to excuse a war which was almost impossible to square with capitalism’s own “international law”. The problems were, firstly, that the British government has supported and traded with this barbarous regime in the past, and, secondly, if that was the reason behind the war, Britain would have to attack many countries round the world, which have regimes just as tyrannical and murderous as Saddam’s. If only the “enemy” country would attack first, then the excuse for war would be obvious—resistance to aggression, which was trumpeted as a complete justification throughout the Second World War. But that wouldn’t do in this case, since America and Britain were going to be the ones committing the aggression. And it wouldn’t be very convincing to claim that Iraq, economically feeble after the Gulf War and the years of sanctions since then, was somehow going to get powerful enough to send an invasion fleet down the Persian Gulf and round the Arabian Sea, up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal, then through the Mediterranean and past Gibraltar, and across the Bay of Biscay before finally invading Cornwall.

What could be done? So in comes the killer excuse—Saddam has weapons of mass destruction: nuclear or chemical or biological weapons which could be sent on a rocket across Europe to land on Basingstoke or thereabouts—and which would be ready for action in only forty-five minutes! (Exactly forty-five, apparently—not forty-four or forty-six minutes: or, as W. S. Gilbert put it, “corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative”.) All this is jazzed up in two official-sounding dossiers, which seek to prove the imminent danger. In due course awkward facts start to emerge—some of the material was taken from an ancient thesis which a student had submitted for his degree (and put on the internet), borrowed without acknowledgement and improved to make it more exciting; and allegations about Saddam trying to import uranium from the Niger republic in West Africa, which turn out to have been based mainly on forged documents.

When all this comes out in the newspapers and the media generally, no wonder Ten Downing Street try to defend themselves by picking out some uncertain bits of the criticism and demanding apologies. But since the Labour Party convinced millions of voters at the last two elections of the gigantic lie that they could run the capitalist system for the benefit of the working class—the great majority of ordinary people—then perhaps these other terminological inexactitudes seem to be very small beer.

Alwyn Edgar

50 Years Ago: Capital’s Coronation (2003)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since we may not, without dire consequences to the life of the Socialist Standard, record our view on what has been called “the greatest show ever,” we may at least refer readers to what our late and lamented comrade Jacomb wrote on the occasion of the crowning of George Wettin as King George V. (See Socialist Standard for June 1911.)

Those to whom it may seem remarkable that in spite of 10 years of devastating war there should be such a tremendous increase of wealth as illustrated by the present show, should bear in mind that with production and consumption of war material at top scale and speed profits and fortunes for factory owners and shareholders who formed this vast congregation of titled gentlemen and bejewelled ladies, were correspondingly big and easily capable of defraying whatever cost participation in the show involved.

And what have those who produced this vast wealth and fought for king and country in the past great and glorious wars to end war, what improvement in their material position have they to show in these 30 years of peace and 10 years of war?

If in writing on the show in June, 1911, our late comrade Jacomb referred among other thing to

“. . . the bestowing of a meal upon thousands of little children whom hunger makes glad to accept even such a trifle from hands so heavy-laden with wealth that they cannot feel the weight of the charitable grains they scatter, . . .”

here is what a London daily paper reported in connection with the 1953 show:-

“At East Grinstead the children who go to the Coronation party will, after they have had their tea, be stamped on the wrist with indelible ink. This will prevent them from getting more than their share of the refreshments.”

(Article by “R”, Socialist Standard, August 1953)

Which way forward? (2003)

Editorial from the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thanks in large measure to proportional representation, the Scottish Parliament now has 6 (out of 129) MSPs from a left-of-Labour party, Tommy Sheridan’s “Scottish Socialist Party”. The SSP is a direct descendant of Militant and so has a Trotskyist past, and in fact includes the members in Scotland of Militant, the SWP and other such groups.

Many in England who don’t like the profit system look to the SSP as a model, hoping that the “Socialist Alliance” will be able to repeat its success south of the border. However, without proportional representation, they are not making much headway, trailing far behind the BNP as a party of populist protest (the BNP would be a major beneficiary of PR in England, just as the National Front was in France).

So, in England, a rival idea is being canvassed: that of refounding the – or a – Labour Party, as a group of trade-union sponsored MPs pressing for reforms of capitalism in the interest of trade unionists and workers generally.

Yet others, believe it or not, entertain the illusion that, after Blair goes, it will be possible to recapture the Labour Party and turn it back into a party committed to redistributing power and wealth to working people that they believe it once was.

What all three options share is a reformist approach: that what is important is to get people elected to parliament and local councils to pass measures aimed at improving the lot of wage and salary workers within the profit system.

There’s nothing wrong with contesting elections, but if Socialists are going to do this it should be done on a sound basis: getting elected on a straight socialist programme of common ownership, democratic control and production for use not profit, with a view to using parliament or the council chamber as a platform from which to spread socialist ideas (while still a minority) and to usher in socialism (when a majority, acting on instructions from a mass democratically-organised and socialist-minded movement outside).

But what is being proposed is quite different: getting elected with non-socialist votes on a programme of attractive-sounding reforms to capitalism. It was on this basis (tinged with a divisive Scottish nationalism: they appear to believe in “socialism in one province”) that the SSP’s MSPs were elected, promising a local income tax, free school meals, a £7.32-an-hour minimum wage, a 35-hour working week, which are reforms of capitalism not socialism. (In fact, neither the SSP, nor the Socialist Alliance, nor the Old Labourites have any clear idea of what socialism means; they hardly ever mention the word and, when they do, it turns out they mean state capitalism – nationalisation, or the wages system under state management.)

It is not as if the workers’ movement hasn’t been here before. This was what the Labour Party in Britain set out to do. On the Continent it was the policy of parties which, on the face of it, were far more radical than Labour in that they claimed to be Marxist and based on the class struggle. In practice, however, they were just as reformist as the Labour Party, and failed just as miserably.

The danger is that the same mistake is going to be made again. While some trade union leaders and activists want to re-found a Labour Party, others such as the SWP see the “Socialist Alliance” as a revival of the left and centre of pre-WWI continental “Marxist” Social Democracy – as an embryonic leftwing party calling itself Marxist but pursuing reforms to capitalism.

This might just be a tactic – another ploy by a vanguard to attract a following. But it’s a bad tactic that can only encourage illusions about what can be achieved under capitalism. It glosses over the fact that capitalism is not a system that can be humanised or reformed or transformed into something better. It is a profit system subject to economic laws which can only work in one way: as a system of profit-making and accumulation of capital in the interest of a tiny minority of profit-takers.

The failure in the course of the 20th century of every single Labour or Social Democratic government, in all of the countries of Europe, to make any progress towards socialism has demonstrated the soundness of the position taken up by the “impossibilists” at the turn of that century: that it is impossible to reform capitalism so as to make it work in the interest of working people. And that, therefore, it is futile and time-wasting and a diversion to try.

What those who want a better society should be doing – should have done – is to campaign to change people’s minds, to get them to realise that they are living in an exploitative, class-divided society and that the only way out is to end capitalism and replace it by a new and different system based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, with production to satisfy people’s needs, and distribution on the basis of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.

Once a majority have come to this realisation, they will know what to do: organise themselves into a socialist party to democratically win political control and use it to bring about a socialist society. That’s what socialist politics should be about.

American centuries, old and new (2003)

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The United States ended the twentieth century as the unchallenged global superpower, and its ruling class are determined not only to keep it that way but also, if possible, to extend their control over world events. The Free Trade Area of the Americas, for instance, which is due to be introduced in 2005, will enable the US to rule the roost in Central and South America, using cheap labour and preventing other countries from imposing import controls. Already, the North American Free Trade Agreement has helped ensure that most ordinary Mexicans are poorer than their parents were, to the benefit of US financial and industrial companies.

One particular vision of the future along such lines is contained in the documents of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) (see their website at www.newamericancentury.org*, from which the quotations below are taken). This is a think-tank and pressure group whose members include top politicans and industrialists; many past members are high up in the Bush administration, so it is in no way a fringe organisation. They argue that cuts in US defence spending (so-called) in recent years have made it difficult to sustain American influence around the world, so such spending needs to be significantly increased (recall that it is at present nearly $400 billion per year!). Armed forces that are ready for “tomorrow's battlefields” will serve the nation well and act as a deterrent against any possible upstart. In their own words:

“At present the United States faces no global rival. America's grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.”
“The willingness to devote adequate resources to maintaining America's military strength can make the world safer and American strategic interests more secure now and in the future.”

The PNAC were of course strong advocates of the US attack on Iraq, claiming that a regime change would lead to democratisation not just of Iraq itself but of the whole of the Middle East, “an objective of overriding strategic importance to the United States”

Not much critical scrutiny is needed to see through this language of strategic interests and a safer world: the aim is to control access to raw materials (oil in particular), to ensure the availability of cheap labour, and to enable military bases to be sited and maintained where the US rulers wish. At the end of the 1970s, the US was powerless to prevent or undermine the takeover of the Iranian government by the ayatollahs, and the ensuing rise in oil prices; this is just the kind of situation that the US rulers and their mouthpieces seek to render impossible in future.

It may be felt that the capitalists in PNAC simply wish to get their snouts in the trough and to gain their firms' share of the massive US military spending. No doubt this is part of the truth, and there is some degree of conflict between companies that benefit from the defence budget and those that do not do so but still have to pay taxes. However, there is no firm and unvarying line between corporations that have big government orders placed with them and those that miss out on this jamboree. Most big companies stand to receive some gain from increased military spending – or hope to do so – and they are the ones that have the biggest say in determining government policy. But it is not simply a matter of some having their greedy fingers in the big-spending pie: such policies really are undertaken in the interests of the whole ruling class.

This, then, is the vision of America's rulers for the coming century: an enormous US military presence on a global scale, laying down what other countries can do, intimidating them into acceptance of the US order, and bombing them into submission when they forget their place. A world of “free trade” where the biggest bully in the playground enforces treaties and agreements in its own interest. A world of massacres and dictatorships, where the American capitalists rake in the billions, and ordinary people, wherever they live, are just pawns on the profit-oriented chessboard. Already, as the military budget grows under Bush, US spending on health care and education is being cut: teachers are getting the sack, and thousands of workers are losing health cover.

The other side

For a contrasting view of the USA, we can look at Studs Terkel's book My American Century. Terkel, who was born in 1912 and is still going strong, is a superb interviewer and oral historian who is able to get people to talk in eloquent and often moving ways about their lives. My American Century is a selection from his publications over the years, from Division Street (1967) to Coming of Age (1995), and provides an unforgettable portrait of twentieth-century America, mostly through the words of ordinary people. It is worth reading just for the story of CP Ellis (from American Dreams, 1980). Ellis was once president of a local Ku Klux Klan branch; he had joined because the Klan gave him a chance to “be something”, which had been beyond him as a poor white worker. But gradually he came to see that the rich were using him and his Klan colleagues to keep ordinary workers, black and white, in their place, and that all workers had the same problems. When Terkel interviewed him, Ellis was a union official, elected by a predominantly black membership.

Terkel's own position can be seen from the heartfelt opening of his introduction to Working (1972):

“This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence – to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.”

Time and again, Terkel's subjects talk of the boredom and meaninglessness of work, of how they feel they are treated worse than the machines they operate, of how they have no control over their job and feel no pride in it. But some kinds of work are rewarding. Tom Patrick, firefighter:

“I worked in a bank. You know, it's just paper. It's not real. Nine to five and it's shit. You're looking at numbers. But I can look back and say, 'I helped put out a fire. I helped save somebody'. It shows something I did on this earth.”

But despite their frustrations, workers feel unable to find a real way of fighting back: as CP Ellis says, “Hatin' America is hard to do because you can't see it to hate it.”

Another remarkable theme is the way that workers look back to past times and see them as examples of solidarity and co-operation. There is quite likely some viewing the past through rose-coloured glasses here, but the way people value mutual help is clear over and again, especially in descriptions of the thirties:

“That period was the high point of my life. It was the Depression, when working people had a feeling for each other. We helped each other out in times of trouble.”
“A lot of times one family would have some food. They would divide. And everyone would share.”

Here's Tom Patrick again:

“I like everybody workin' together. You chip in for a meal together. One guy goes to the store, one guy cooks, one guy washes the dishes. A common goal. We got a lieutenant there, he says the fire department is the closest thing to socialism there is.”

Not quite – but workers who combine together towards a common goal in their own interests point far better towards the future than the plutocrats who want the whole world to become a means to their own wealth and power.

Paul Bennett

*Dead Link.

An ahistorical nitwit replies (2003)

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the March issue of the Socialist Standard there appeared a short item in the Voice from the Back column that has obviously annoyed a supporter of capitalism. It was criticising an article in the Observer of 9 February and has led the Observer writer to describe us as “ahistorical nitwits clinging to a fundamentalism every bit as odd as the Islamic variant”. To put our readers in the picture we will set forth what has been said, and will also put in our own tuppenceworth. It is up to you to decide.

In March we wrote:

“You can always rely on journalists to write nonsense whenever they are dealing with capitalism and socialism. Take the recent example of Will Hutton writing in the Observer (9 February). 'Socialism and social democracy are secular forms of Christianity whose insistence on justice, fairness and equality have palpable Christian roots, while Christian Democracy's embrace of market capitalism is qualified by its Catholic commitment to a just wage, just prices and just profits – and that work should be a source of human dignity.' It would be difficult to find a sentence with more nonsense if you spent a year searching. Socialism is a materialist view that opposes the slavish notions of Christianity. The source of all profit is the surplus value that the workers produce over their wages. To speak of 'just wages' is as daft as 'just robbery'.”

Will Hutton was sent a copy, to which he replied:

“I receive over 100 e-mails a day regularly – sometimes over 200. I don't know where to begin with the criticism. It rests on the belief that the values which socialism promotes somehow did not exist before socialism; and that socialism has a monopoly of concepts like justice – hence the mockery of the just wage. If early socialist thinkers had been as poor as this, the ideas would have got nowhere. Sadly today's champions are ahistoric nitwits clinging to a socialist fundamentalism every bit as odd as the Islamic variant. That is why they have so little influence. If you don't see the pedigree of values upon which socialism rests and is built, you don't deserve to be in the game.”

Wow! Take that you, bounder and other put downs. Now let's take a look at the real world. The Catholic Church's “just wages, just prices and just profits” and commitment to “human dignity” is a historical nonsense. Has Hutton heard of the inquisition? Or the Pope's support of Franco and Mussolini? The Catholic Church, like the Protestant Church is a whole-hearted supporter of private property.

More importantly than Hutton's strange views about socialism and christianity is that he doesn't challenge the basic premise of socialism that profit is derived from the unpaid labour of the working class. Hutton is a very talented worker who sells his ability for a wage or a salary to a member of the capitalist class. He is dependent on a wage or a salary, just like, this “ahistoric nitwit”. Men and women of the working class produce all the wealth of the world. Even silly articles in the Observer. The proprietor has got to fill the spaces between the adverts after all.

Richard Donnelly

School dinners and the class struggle (2003)

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party does not oppose reformism because it is against improvements in workers' lives lest they dampen their revolutionary ardour; nor, because it thinks that decadent capitalism simply cannot deliver on any reforms; but because our continued existence as propertyless wage slaves undermines whatever attempts we make to control and better our lives through reforms. Any fortune – whether in the form of money payments or subsidised services – that falls into our laps becomes an opportunity for those that live off our labour to lower their costs, and increase their profits. So long as there is a class divided society, it becomes impossible for us to enact measures to benefit the whole community.

A clear illustration of this consequence of class-divided society is the current proposal from the ultra-reformists in the (so-called) Scottish Socialist Party to introduce universal free school dinners. A more noble aspiration could scarcely be imagined – an attempt to eradicate poor diets and consequent poor health of children, in a cheap (they say £175 million) and efficient way, without the stench of means testing or qualification. By providing food, for all, through schools, they say, they could avoid the costs associated with administering most types of welfare, and it is fraud-proof and there is no way of transferring the benefit received to third parties.

It has the added advantage of being an age-old demand, one that "Old" Labour types have long held in high regard. With all this going for it, Socialists should have no complaints, surely? Socialists, however, point to the continuing condition of our class as wage-slaves, and affirm that whatever the gains from free school dinners, the wages system will take away in another form with another hand.

The reason why lies in the very form of wage slavery. We are, collectively, compelled to sell our capacity to work – our labour power – in order to get access to those things which we need in order to live as members of our community – our food, clothes, housing, transportation and the like. The value of this labour power is the cost of maintaining and reproducing our capacity to work – and this entails the cost of keeping and rearing the next generation of workers, our children.

This value is not found by some chemical process of deciding what we need to have to keep ourselves and our families, but is instead found through the struggle between ourselves and our employers, as they try to drive our wages as low as possible, and we try to prevent this or push up the price they pay us. It is not driven by the living costs of any one individual, but by the general costs of living in society.

These general costs of living form a pressure on wages, which can force them upwards, as can the level of class consciousness and understanding of the workers; whereas counter-acting forces, such as the availability of a particular type of labour, general unemployment and the use of state power, combine to create downwards pressures on wages. All of which is to say that our wages are set by class struggle. This is a continuous struggle in which every gain has to be defended, and in which there is no relenting.

If the price of one of our necessities of life falls, this will be reflected by a decrease in the upwards pressure on wages. Without a corresponding relenting in the downward forces on wages, our real wages would begin to dwindle towards a new level (either through direct wage cuts, or by allowing inflation – that is a decrease in the value of money – to eat away at our spending power). Free school dinners would be an example of this process in action.

Those workers with children would be relieved of the cost of providing those meals to their children. This would result in a decline in the monetary cost of maintaining themselves and their family, and thus a decrease in the upwards pressure on wages. The typical wage would then tend to fall towards something nearer to living costs of those of a childless worker. This would thus benefit the employing class, both through cutting the overall direct cost of wages, but also through ending the situation in which childless workers were paid unnecessarily from the point of view of the employers.

The employer could be prevented from gaining from this process by an increase in taxation – whether nominally on the workers' wages or directly on employers' profits; this would serve to cream off the difference between the old and the new prices of labour power. In this way, the free school dinners scheme could be made to pay for itself. This would, though, merely represent a redistribution of poverty for the working class, the intervention by the state into the labour market to ensure a more efficient allocation of the workers' ration, so that children get a protected share.

Indeed, there could be a strong capitalist motive for having free school dinners. Efficiency savings through only paying the wages that are actually needed by their workers could increase their profits (especially as the majority of workers do not have children of school age). As could ensuring a healthier future generation of workers, able to work harder and cost less in terms of medical care. All of which, of course, would be subject to the ongoing profitability of the capitalist system and its current need for labour. The costs of the dinners would have to be watched closely, managers constantly pressured to keep the costs of food provided to a bare minimum.

The SSP proponents of this scheme observe that their draft bill will include provisions on nutritional content. This does not mean that the ongoing pressure will disappear. King Canute passed the well drafted Tides' Direction (Reversal) Act over a thousand years ago, to little noticeable effect. The statute books are littered with Health and Safety legislation that goes ignored and unenforced because the political will and resources are not there to counteract the profit needs of the capitalists to encroach on their provisions.

That is, assuming such a Bill would pass unamended. The SSP only have six members of the Scottish parliament, and their current strategy is to apply moral pressure to Labour and Liberal MSPs to vote for their bill; in the course of which, small amendments here and there from the more openly capitalist parties, on whose support it will depend, could well rob it even of its nominal stringency. Such amendments would be simple capitulations to the reality that the ultimate determinant of policy is the ongoing profitability of capital.

If the free school meals were deemed to be too expensive relative to the benefits and profits accruing to the capitalist class, then heavy political pressure would be added to the situation to reform the scheme. Were a Scottish Parliament to make a fight of it, then capitalists would use their capacity to disinvest in Scotland, as they would anywhere else, to go in search of better profits. That is, the limit of any reforms we could win for ourselves on the basis of the capitalist system will always be circumscribed by the need to keep the capitalist system functioning.

Of course, the SSP could fight to form an executive outright and use control of the political machinery to resist the encroachment of capital trying to claw back any costs of running the school dinners scheme. The net result of that, though, is that after going to all that time and effort, they would simply have succeeded in resuming the class struggle as before, only in the domain of the state, rather than in the workplace. Further, they would have gone to all that effort to fight for the crumbs, when by the very same means they could have put an end to the capitalist system itself.

Our objection to reformism is, then, that by ignoring the essence of class, it throws blood, sweat and tears into battles that will be undermined by the workings of the wages system. All that effort, skill, energy, all those tools could be turned against class society, to create a society of common interest where we can make changes for our common mutual benefit. So long as class exists, any gains will be partial and fleeting, subject to the ongoing struggle.

Socialists understand well the urge to do something now, to make a change. That makes us all the more determined, however, to get the message across, to gather our fellows to clear away the barrier of the wages system, so that we can begin to build a truly human society, in which children aren't given a share in a wage-slave's ration – whether at home or at school – but instead receive all the food they need without having to pay. In the face of such potential, why waste time fighting for half measures?

Pik Smeet