Editorial: In Place of Wishes (1988)

Editorial from the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Each year at this time an arbitrary line is drawn across our lives. It has as much mysticism about it as any religion. On one side of the line lies the Old Year with its mistakes, its problems, its inadequacies. On the other the New Year beckons us, with its pristine sanity, enlightenment, happiness. It is a time to make resolutions that the next twelve months will be innocent of the disfigurements of the past twelve. Some people mark the occasion by getting drunk, to lubricate the process of acting towards others with warmth and respect. Others may rely on the collective hysteria of the occasion to intoxicate them. Happy New Year, they wish each other. It’s probably not all insincere, either.

But powerful as alcoholic poisoning and popular delusions can be there is an amnesiac scale about the event which is positively staggering. For does life really get better from year to year for the millions of people who wish to each other that it should? The millions who snatch the short holiday to pretend that they are something other than the social class which, although productive and useful, is exploited, repressed and deceived?

That question was what actually dominated the election last June. Thatcher and her crew energetically told us that things were not only getting better but would carry on like that, as if the Tories will never rest until they have drenched us all in prosperity. Enough workers were impressed by this campaign, shrewdly aimed as it was, to send the Iron Lady back to Number Ten.

It is likely that the Tories won a lot of votes through their schemes to enable workers to buy shares in the privatised industries. This whole idea, with its elaborately buoyant publicity, rested on the assumption that the Stock Market is a casino where share prices always go up, so that workers who borrowed a little money to buy a few shares could then sell them quickly and so make a small profit. This illusion — that the class structure of capitalism had been radically changed by Norman Tebbit was badly damaged by the stock market crash, which catapulted distraught yuppies into a position of media-dominance. In fact, a falling stock market also offers the possibility of making money — but in a way not usually open to penurious workers.

It is worth mentioning this if only because a popular response to any criticism of Thatcherite Britain is that the critics are motivated by a septic envy. There is, apparently, an opulent gravy train on the move for those who are economically nimble enough to climb aboard. The economically disabled have only themselves to blame. But is this society, which we labour under, really so carefree an arrangement? Are its critics really so devoid of material to support their arguments?

Well what, apart from the events on the Stock Exchange, happened last year? What effect did all those salutations, last January, have for us?

It was, in fact, a year of disasters in a very material sense. The crazy massacre of Hungerford cannot be explained away as an isolated mental breakdown. Michael Ryan was a man who could not answer, to his own satisfaction, the sexual, social and familial expectations of capitalism. So instead he loved his guns, his cars and his terrible fantasies. The capsize of the Herald of Free Enterprise was not an accident for the ship was being sailed just as the company's balance sheet thought appropriate. At the time of writing the immediate cause of the King's Cross fire has not been made public, but emerging facts have shown up the reductions in vital staff and the tardiness in replacing dangerously outdated equipment, in the cause of reducing costs and so maximising profit.

Although as a disaster it is rather less dramatic, the problem of the homeless grew worse, with the numbers of families with nowhere to live increasing as their chances of finding anywhere within a reasonable time decreased. Young workers have been coerced into accepting government approved work or courses under pain of being cut off from state benefit. The government's discovery that state benefits can be cut by changing their name and the conditions under which they can be claimed brings memories of the special indignities heaped on the unemployed during the 1930s. Finally, in face of the official statistics which tell us that it is not happening, the waiting lists of workers who need treatment in hospital grew longer so that some die while they are waiting and babies are prevented from having desperately needed operations through a lack of specialised nurses who have been driven out of the work through their paltry wages. Even the consultants, contemplating the beds kept empty by the priority of conforming to a budget, have been moved to make their unequivocal protests.

There was no happier prospect abroad. At the end of the year Bob Geldof was flying back to Ethiopia to ask why, after all that effort and expenditure, millions have to suffer an agonising, degrading death by starvation. Those sickening pictures of dying babies, too sick even to take their mother's milk, are condemnation enough of capitalism in themselves. The Gulf War continued to consume its fearsome human diet, there is slaughter in Africa, Haiti, Afghanistan and the brutality of South Africa's racist regime does not lessen. The cold cynicism of capitalist politics has been exposed by the Irangate affair, which cannot be hushed over by even Reagan's consummate acting skills. He may yet be saved by the diversion of a treaty to abolish medium-range nuclear missiles which, even if it should ever be fully implemented, would still leave us living in a world with more than enough destructive power to kill us all several times over.

No, it was not a Happy New Year. Neither was 1986, 1985, 1984 . . . We shall need to do more than wish that things will get better. We have the power to change the world and the ability to run it in the interests of the human race. And the reasons for that are all too obvious.

Economics Exposed: Fair shares? (1987)

The Economics Exposed column from the December 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The plummeting of share values on October 19 of this year produced a lot of hot air, as pundits on all sides attempted to draw their political conclusions. Brian Walden, in a feature article defending the free market, warts and all, glibly referred to "capitalism's manifest superiority to socialism as a method of improving society" (Sunday Times, 1 November 1987). The Labour Party shadow cabinet produced a document stating that what was needed to avoid further trouble was "massive government intervention". And the CBI, at their Conference in Glasgow, made it a shocking crime to utter the dreaded word "crash", referring instead to a range of terms such as "adjustment". "nosedive", "the problem", "the events of the past few days" and "the latest squalls '.

There were two types of people who were immediately affected by the wiping of about 25 per cent off of the share prices at the London Stock Exchange in the course of a week. On the one hand, there were those for whom losing a quarter of the value of their shares meant losing millions, or very many thousands of pounds. Of course, they still had three quarters of the value of their shares, which would have been worth even more millions! Moreover, at the time of writing, share prices appear to be regaining a large part of their former value. For the people in this first category, socialists would not have shed any tears. They are a small minority who live comfortably on the backs of the rest of us. Most big capitalists would not have been affected by such a hiccup. Their privileged lifestyle smugly continued regardless of the panic by workers on their bosses" behalf.

We can sympathise rather more with the second group of people who were affected during that week. Many workers have been persuaded in recent years to buy shares in industries which had previously been nationalised. The government claimed it was taking these industries out of the hands of the state bureaucracy (which Labour had indeed falsely equated with "the people") and handing them over to ordinary people themselves. Of course, there was one snag. Most people are workers and therefore lack the cash to buy more than a handful of shares at the most. All the rhetoric about ordinary people becoming "capitalists" overlooks this simple fact.

To be a real capitalist you would require the cash to buy such shares in hundreds of thousands. Dividends paid on shares tend nowadays to be in the region of, say, 20p a share annually. While this provides the owner of a million shares with a nice unearned income of some £4,000 a week (making it a matter of choice whether to bother to go to work or not), the worker who has proudly bought 400 shares, for example, would receive £1.60 a week; hardly enough to retire on. It is an obvious but rarely stated fact that somebody can have a small "stake" in an enterprise, even with some minimal voting rights or control, but it is the size of the stake they can afford which dictates their position in society, their class and therefore their condition of life. And no reforms proposed by any of the political parties can even attempt to deal with this ultimate inequality at the roots of capitalism.

Beyond this aspect, several other problems have emerged from the great privatisation "sell-off" bonanza of recent years.

★ Largely as a result of these policies, the number of adults in Britain who own any shares has increased from 7 per cent in the late 1970s to 15-20 per cent today. But that still leaves four out of five adults with no shares whatsoever. There is every possibility that the number of shareowners will once again fall below 10 per cent, particularly after recent events.

★ Within the small minority who own shares, there is a much smaller minority who monopolise the bulk of all shares. About four fifths of all privately held shares are owned by less than one per cent of the population.

★ Of all the shares bought in recent "privatisation" issues such as the Trustee Savings Bank. British Gas and even British Telecom, a substantial proportion have already been cashed in again, with more shares gradually falling, predictably, into fewer hands. In many cases workers had saved a few hundred pounds and found that they needed that money back again after a year or two to help with household expenses, for which they had no other resources to fall back on. In other cases the intention was to make a quick (and very small) profit, then withdraw. The proceeds will hardly finance a life of leisure. Real capitalists do not have to sell their entire investment portfolio some months after acquiring it.

It is the people in this second category whose recent position was tragic. In some cases, workers had put their life savings into projects promoted by the government's smooth-talking advertisers only to watch their modest nest-egg eaten into during one week by the fluctuations of the business casino known as the Stock Exchange. During the television coverage of the October "crash", some investment analysts actually came on (rather too late) and said that it really was "not right" for the "very small investor" (the worker) to get too involved in the risks of share investment in the way that the big investors are able to and that the dramatic fall in share prices might serve as a warning and lesson to such people.

The real lesson, however, is that such wild commercial fluctuations show us the true nature of the capitalist economic system. Based on competition for profits throughout the world market, capitalism is unpredictable, uncontrollable and unable to meet human needs securely. The mass media had a field day, getting excited about their tedious obsession with share price indexes minutely fluctuating in a way that was of little immediate interest to most viewers. It was nearly as bad as the boring hysteria of the election coverage during the summer. What they failed to point out, though, was that such "strange" developments have happened before and will happen again, because of the very nature of world capitalism itself. They will happen under Brian Walden’s "free market" and under the "massive government intervention" which the shadow cabinet waffled on about. Nobody can predict when such problems might happen again, or find any way to avoid them.

The price of shares in a company can respond to subtle changes in business "confidence”. In a sane, socialist society the only pointers will be human needs on the one hand, and the real resources available for meeting those needs, on the other. The only “confidence" to be concerned about would be our vital confidence in our own ability to work together co-operatively to meet our needs. That ability certainly exists.

The temporary failure of "confidence" which found expression on October 19, on the other hand, was a failure of confidence in the secure, continued flow of profit into the bank accounts of the parasite class in society. They seem to have picked up since then, and persuaded themselves that there is nothing to worry about. Shall we prove them wrong?

Clifford Slapper