They said it . . . (1992)

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

We had women on every platform daring the election, hat the party used them like decorative potted plants—Labour MP Ann Clwyd on women and the Labour Party.

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I did it because they were going to repossess my Sky dish—David Kernaghan, explaining the armed robbery which brought him a seven-year gaol sentence.

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You should not believe everything you read in the newspapers—Robert Clark, chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers. 

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It is quite a work to dredge out of the English language pejoratives strong enough to describe their vulgarity, brutishness and maladroitness—Former Tory Minister Alan Clark on the royal family.

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Nobody was going to throw the first brick because there were too many people living in glass houses—Norman Tebbit on the Mellor scandal.

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With low coffee prices a symptom of stocks rather than supply, a stock destruction plan by producers would have a greater effect on the world market price than anything else— Lawrence Eagles, commodity analyst.

50 Years Ago: War, Crime and Punishment (2003)

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

Recently two young soldiers were convicted at Berkshire Assizes of robbery with violence. Instead of sentencing them straight away the judge gave them a choice – volunteer “unconditionally” for Korea or go to gaol. After they had a night to think it over their counsel told the judge: “They are eager to take advantage of your lordship’s leniency, and volunteer for overseas service.”

An editorial in the Daily Mirror (9th May) strongly criticised the judge’s action. The Mirror asks how the choice of the convicted men could be unconditional in such circumstances,. But there are other aspects of the matter that should be brought out, and the main theme of the editorial (An Insult to the Army) is of little consequence compared to the deeper questions concerning the cause of crime and war in our present society.

The comments of the judge Mr. Justice Hilbery are indicative of the conventional attitude to crime. “You have been convicted of a very grave crime. When you robbed and attacked as you did each was not showing his true nature. Each of you is a better fellow than that. See active service and turn yourselves into men of courage.”

From this it would appear that when people rob and attack others without the sanction of the law they are not showing their “true nature.” If, on the other hand, they take part in organised attack and robbery against other nations (for what else is war?) then they are turned into “men of courage.”

The Daily Mirror believes that the men risking life in Korea are undertaking a high and honourable duty, and that it is not for courts to confuse military service with crime and punishment. In extenuation of the courts it should be pointed out that in the circumstances the confusion is pardonable. “War crime” is a name given, by the nation in a position to inflict punishment, to certain of the “military services” performed by the forces of other nations.

[From an article by “Stan”, Socialist Standard, June 1953.]

Hunger and plenty (1949)

From the November 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

"If the nations of the world were really to attack the problem of food, it would prevent them attacking each other. A plan now before the sixty Governments of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation opens the way to a beginning by dealing with one aspect—the fear of slumps, which has always kept the world production far below world needs.

Half of the people of the world have never had enough to eat. That figure is given in a United Nations calculation of how the world fared in 1939.

A couple of years ago it was estimated that 462,000 children were seriously short of food and in Europe itself 60,000,000 were on the danger list.

Yet everyone old enough will remember how in various countries during the 1930s vast stocks of food were destroyed and farmers were brought to bankruptcy because they had produced more than people could buy.

Bonfires were made of many millions of pounds worth of grain and coffee, to keep the prices up. Milk was poured down drains. The U.S. Government once ordered the slaughter of 3,000,000 young pigs because there was ‘ too much bacon.’ Denmark and Holland did similar things.

In a world where millions were starving, all sorts of arrangements were made to keep down the production of food.”

(Daily Mirror (26/9/49) Editorial column).

The correspondent then goes on to say that what we need is a United Nations plan to set up a clearing house for surpluses, which would enable countries to buy in their own currencies if they were short of dollars for instance. First of all there is a contradiction in that statement. In the opening remarks he states that because people were unable to buy back what they had produced, there arose a surplus.

He goes on to say, however, that these clearing houses would get over the difficulty of countries needing the food because if they were short, say, of dollars they could pay in their own currencies.

If you notice, their first remarks were referring to 1939 and the years before that. Was there a dollar shortage then? No. It is therefore obvious that whether there is a dollar shortage or not the position remains the same. Like many others, they make the mistake of thinking that in some way or other Capitalism can be made to work in the interest of humanity. What they fail to see is that so long as goods are produced for a market with a view to profit, this insane situation where vast stocks of food are destroyed because workers have produced more than they can buy back, will once again loom on the not so far distant horizon.

Slumps, booms, war and unemployment are.part and parcel of the capitalist system, and so long as workers support various reforms. United Nations plans and the like, which only tinker around with Capitalism and do not solve these problems, so long will they have to put up with the evils which go with that system.

Workers—don’t bury your heads in the sand. Get to grips with the capitalist system and understand how it works, and then, only then, can you overthrow that system and establish Socialism in which goods will be produced solely in order to satisfy human needs.

J.P.

The Passing Show: Is He Really So Greene? (1966)

The Passing Show Column from the March 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is He Really So Greene?

At the time of writing rail union secretary S. F. Greene has a lot on his mind. Even though the rail strike was called off at the last moment, there is still plenty for Mr. Greene and his lads to do round the negotiating table.

Which perhaps explains the very terse letter one of our members received from him at the beginning of February. You may know that it is the practice for the Socialist Party to send speakers to put our case to other organisations where possible, particularly trade unions. No strings attached, incidentally, except perhaps payment of the speaker’s fares. So one of our branch organisers wrote to the N.U.R. headquarters asking for a list of their branch addresses, intending to write to some of them direct.

Nothing very difficult about that, you might think? Well, you’d be wrong. “Dear Sir,” came back Mr. Greene’s reply of February 3rd. “1 have received your letter ... but regret 1 am unable to supply you with the information you require.” That was all, leaving us to draw whatever conclusions we liked. For example, was it that he just did not have the information? Is it possible that the N.U.R. is a union whose general secretary doesn’t know where its branches are? How on earth did he let them know whether or not to strike?

Maybe Mr. Greene is just not allowed by his executive to tell us what we asked, which seems pretty daft when you think that any railway porter could probably tell you the address of his union branch without a second thought. No, we can only think that perhaps he doesn't want us to speak to his branches, and that maybe the word has got around that the Labour Party doesn't like us very much (it’s mutual, by the way). After all, the N.U.R. is affiliated to that body. Let us then suggest a rewrite of Mr. Greene’s reply for hint: -

I have received your letter, and have the information you require, hut if you thing l'm sending it to you you're jolly well mistaken. I'm not having any incitement to disaffection—we've supported the Labour Party for more years than I care to remember (and a lot of them I don't care to remember), and we’re going on doing it, never mind their anti-working class actions and the stand-up fight we’re having with them over pay and conditions.

Which, when you think of it, seems to typify the sort of logic behind the thinking of most Labour supporters.

The ''Mirror" Again

And while we're talking about railwaymen, I suppose it was inevitable that they would get precious little support from the rubbish mongers of the capitalist press in general, and that the Daily Mirror would wade into them with two-inch headlines. ‘‘Chaos — Or Commonsense?” yelled the front page on February 10th, while the centre pages of the same issue carried on the attack with an article by that very rich friend of the workers, Labour M.P. Woodrow Wyatt.

The Mirror has always prided itself on its plain speaking and down-to-earth attitude, but this does not make it really a very original newspaper. It says mainly what the others are saying but in a brasher and coarser manner, and, of course, it specialises in large headlines and meagre reading content. In the past it has made a practice of picking out certain strikes and condemning them because they were small and petty. Now the N.U.R. gets it in the neck for precisely the opposite reason.

Because of the Mirror’s deliberately cultivated COR-BLIMBYness, many people think it has working class interests at heart, but nothing could be further from the truth. It is, as ever, firmly on the side of British capitalism, even though it may niggle some capitalist politicians and at times land itself with a libel action. It deals always with superficialities, never scratching under the surface of any social problem. This is not surprising—all newspapers distort facts and pander to ignorance and prejudice to a greater or lesser extent. But the Mirror must truly be the envy of Fleet Street in having developed the technique to the nth degree and built a circulation of many millions on a veritable mountain of bewilderment and bigotry. Therein perhaps lies its only claim to originality. It ran true to form over the railmen's strike.

How Much Are You Worth?

"What sort of—um—salary were you thinking of, Mister—um—?" I was asked by the lean, sharp featured, fussy little personnel man. I was a fresh-faced school leaver, determined to start to start as I meant to go on, and really get somewhere in the world. I swallowed hard.

‘Two pounds a week?” I suggested in a squeaky voice which belied my attempts to sound bold and confident. He wrote it on his pad, ringing the figure round slowly and heavily with his pencil, simultaneously shaking his head and drawing in a long slow breath through rounded lips. “Frankly, you’ve gone down in my estimation,” he confided. “I was hoping that you would be different from the usual run of money-grabbing youngsters we have coming to us for jobs. We can offer you (pause for effect) twenty-five shillings a week (this slowly and deliberately, savouring every word). You must be prepared to work hard, plenty of opportunities here for advancement . . . show what you’re worth . . . etc., etc.”

Obviously his idea of “getting on” was a bit different from mine. I bid him a polite goodday and got a job elsewhere —at two pounds a week. When I look back on that first encounter (there have been a few since then) I’m inclined to wonder if  the mincing little man is still with his firm, so diligently guarding his boss’s interests. Certainly he was only putting a line which is as old as the hills and which is trotted out just as much today as ever it was. Many workers do believe it, however, and spend their lives trying to show their boss what they are worth; only the boss’s assessment invariably falls short of theirs. Which is a big snag and shows that the strength of your bargaining position is what matters, not the strength of your moral arguments.

But now look at the other side of the coin. William Davis, Guardian financial editor and a man prone to moralising lectures in his column, on how much harder we must all work, has been asking “How much is a company chairman worth?” On February 5th he gave a table showing the average payment to directors of various big firms, the figures ranging from £9,800 to £38,500 a year. But the thing to notice was the absence of any moralising sentiment in answering his own question, thus:

Business men should he made to feel proud of high salaries. The ambition of lower-paid people should be to equal them, not to show jealousy. 

I never really understood why there was so much fuss about the £24,000 a year paid to Dr. Beeching ... on simple business grounds alone, it was a good price.

To which every capitalist politician will say Amen. I don't think they will be saying quite the same thing, though, in the next few weeks when some of those "lower-paid people." like bus and railway workers, push for higher wages. That's not quite the sort of equalising ambition Mr. Davis has in mind.

Up, Up, Up It Goes

I have before me some cuttings taken at random from newspapers over about one week in January. They are all about the same problem—crime in its various forms, crime major or petty, but crime nevertheless Over two thousand London telephone boxes wrecked by vandals, gang attacks on transport lorries, drug peddling, robbery with violence. The list is as long as your arm. and very depressing.

“We are determined to stamp this out,” says a magistrate to a phone box wrecker. “You may expect long prison sentences," says the Lord Chief Justice Lord Parker, in a blanket warning to dope peddlers. How many times have we heard this sort of remark? And still the crime situation worsens. Home Secretaries have come and gone, but crime, it seems, goes on for ever. Mr. Roy Jenkins is the latest to try his hand. “I intend to mount a sustained and effective attack on crime," he is reported as saying at Hull on January 17th.

He proposes to "give the police every support, best equipment." etc, which may make them more efficient at crime detection, but will never solve the problem itself. And what of the criminals themselves? They will be modernising their methods, just like the police, using the means which current science puts at their disposal, so that in a few years time yet another Home Secretary will be saying he is going to wipe out crime.

Why is it so persistent, and defiant of efforts to end or even check it? Basically it is a fight over property of some kind. Even the apparent senseless hooliganism of ripped train seats has behind it a blind resentment towards property owned by someone else. And since no Home Secretary ever aims to remove private property society, crime stays stubbornly with us.

Gaspers

“Before independence we ensured that our army, civil service and judiciary were insulated from politics." (President Azikiwe of Nigeria. 16.1.66—just after seizure of power by Major-General Ironsi.)

Eddie Critchfield

News in Review: China's Bomb (1964)

The News in Review column from the November 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abroad

China's Bomb

Sir Alec Douglas-Home always stood up for an independent British nuclear armoury on the grounds that it gave the British capitalist class a place at the top negotiating table.

There may be something in this. The disputes of capitalism are finally settled by force, or by the threat of force—even when the amiable, wise-cracking Lord Home was Foreign Secretary. It is reasonable to suppose that the power with the biggest bomb will be the power with the biggest say in international affairs.

That is why the three first nuclear powers once hoped to keep the Bomb's secret to themselves, so that world capitalism was an orderly affair of just two big power blocs with Britain as a buffer between them.

This was a forlorn hope. Many other nations have been trying to develop their own bomb. The French were the first to succeed and now, in spite of a certain amount of hindrance from Russia, it seems that China has also arrived as a nuclear power.

The top table is getting rather crowded. 

The prospects are that it will get more crowded still. The Indian government, which always reserved the right to reconsider its original decision not to manufacture nuclear weapons, greeted the news that China had the Bomb with the announcement that India could also develop one if it wanted to.

All of this should please those who hold the theory of the deterrent, because the more nations that get the Bomb the more they can all frighten each other into peaceful intentions. Or is the opposite true?

In fact, wars are not caused by armaments, or by the lack of them. Capitalism is like a jungle, with any number of competing nations clawing and savaging each other in the ruthless struggle for advantage.

No humane considerations, no moral concepts, come into this. A government will coldly take the decision to manufacture a weapon which it knows is capable of literally atomising tens of millions of people in the blink of an eye. And having so decided, the members of the government will go home placidly, play with the dog, bath the baby and themselves sleep innocent sleep.

There is no sanity in this. To the requirements of property society, the human race is deliberately making the means of perhaps wiping itself out.

Capitalism marches on. It expands into places where it has not been before. It develops its productive abilities in fantastic leaps and bounds. At the same time it deprives, exploits, degrades and terrorises its people to an undreamt of intensity.

Politics

Immigration

Today the Communist Party is posing as the friend and champion of the interests of the immigrant worker. But, as with most other matters, it has not always taken up this position. Seventeen years ago, for instance, the Communist Party was engaged in an anti-Polish campaign. In 1947 the two Communist members of the House of Commons were continually asking questions about the Poles in Britain. Some of the comments then made by Willie Gallacher indicate the level to which the Communist Party was prepared to stoop. On February 4, 1947, the following exchange took place during question time:

Mr. Lennox Boyd: Is it not a fact that the vast majority of Poles are desperately seeking employment in this country?

Mr. Gallacher: Let them get employment in their own country. (Hansard, Vol. 432, Col. 1555.)

On July 29 again:

Vice-Admiral Taylor: Can the right hon. gentleman give us an assurance that none of them will be forcibly sent back, and can he tell us how many have refused to accept work?

Mr. Bellenger: I cannot give an assurance of that kind, but these Poles cannot remain on British benevolence indefinitely.

Mr. Gallacher: We do not want them. (Hansard, Vol. 441, Col. 251.)

In the same year the Communist Party published a book by their leader, Harry Pollit, under the title Looking Ahead. In here we read:

I ask you, does it make sense that we allow 500,000 of our best young people to put their names down for emigration abroad, when at the same time we employ Poles who ought to be back in their own country, and bring to work to Britain displaced persons who ought also to be sent back to their own countries? We want our own workers to have confidence in their own land, to take a pride in building it up. (p. 72.)

Who was it said, “the working men have no country? ”

Business

Dahlia affair

Could there be anything less offensive than a dedicated dahlia grower?

Just listen to his endless talk of ray and disk florets. Look at those sensitive, earthy hands caressing the prize blooms. A very perfect gentle chap, it seems.

Yet behind that placid exterior lurks a desire to undermine the basis of society. What happened when dahlia growers in the Midlands organised a cheap air trip to the United States?

Why, they invited other dahlia fans to go as well and if that is not subversive, antisocial and plain criminal, what is?

Fortunately, virtue triumphed. The Midland Dahlia Society booked their flight with B.O.A.C. but they broke the rules of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) when they advertised it as open to non-members. Virtue was a spy employed by rival airline Alitalia, who reported the matter to the IATA and so got the trip called off.

But virtue was not unreservedly rewarded. The Alitalia man—their Manchester manager—came back from holiday to a doormat load of poison pen letters, which shows how much people hate a wrecker of dahlia growers' outings.

Nobody seems to have got upset with the real culprit. The IATA does not only lay down rules about economy fares. It also governs all other aspects of flying freight and passengers all over the world, and the charges which are made for this.

In other words, it is an international organisation which tries to regulate the markets in air traffic. Quite often this means that the IATA restricts traffic, as it has in the Dahlia Society affair.

Such carve-ups are quite common under capitalism; they exist in all manner of enterprises and their object is to safeguard the profitability of those enterprises. This—the profit motive which underlies all capitalism's operations—is where the disappointed dahlia growers should vent their frustration.

And so should all those poison pen writers, who perhaps see something particularly mean and degrading in useful men wasting their time spying upon other useful men wasting their time thinking up ways of avoiding commercial restrictions.

At Home

The Sun

The International Publishing Corporation—the Daily Mirror group to most people—are noted for their mastery of the technique of ballyhoo. At one time, no newspaper had its finger so sensitively upon the pulse of public ignorance as did the Mirror—and none exploited that ignorance so cynically nor so remuneratively.

But recently there have been new scents in the wind. Is the Mirror losing its grip, as the IPC gets larger? The group's latest paper—the Sun—is trying, among other things, to prove that the finger is still unerringly there, still knows how fast or how slow beats the reader’s pulse.

“The only newspaper,” claimed the Sun, “born of the age we live in.” Self consciously, the paper detailed the type of person it is confident of attracting. The New Young Men with the Hardy Ames suit, with the open plan bungalow on the new estate, the foot on the second or even the third rung of the ladder. The people with a conscience—and, naturally, with the big buying power.

All of this splurge was really aimed at potential advertisers, to persuade them that space booked in the Sun would pay off. It is the advertising revenue, and not the circulation figures, which now decide whether a paper lives or dies.

The Daily Herald, when International put it to sleep, had a daily sale of well over a million copies, but couldn’t attract enough advertising to pay its way. In contrast, the colour supplement of the Sunday Times, which is virtually given away, is a money-spinner—and is therefore being widely imitated—because it attracts some rich advertising.

What this adds up to is that in the newspaper world it is only the really Big’uns who now stand a chance. This may mean that the Sun, backed by IPC’s massive resources and under the practised and ruthless control of Hugh Cudlipp, may eventually survive.

Which would merely add another mouthpiece of capitalist propaganda to the rest. And if the Sun lives up to its promise to be a “radical” paper, a paper with a “conscience,” a particularly unctuous and nauseating mouthpiece it will be. “The only newspaper born of the age we live in.” Ugh.

The Freedom of Slavery. (1905)

From the April 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following is from the “Daily Mirror.” It snows how even the capitalist Press will speak the truth sometimes :—

“Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs receive our air, that moment they are free

So wrote the poet Cowper, and his lines summed up the feeling which Englishmen had about slavery in the days when the agitation for its abolition was going on.

"Even now the very talk of slavery arouses indignation. Yet what humbug it is! How many of us have thought out for ourselves the question whether it would not be better for thousands of people in Britain to-day to be slaves rather than free men ?

"What is the ‘freedom’ of the man who depends upon his labour and cannot find employment ? He is ‘free’ to tramp about all day looking for work; ‘free’ to see others warm and well-fed while he shivers and gnaws a crust; ‘free’ to grow weaker and weaker as cold and hunger tell upon his frame; ‘free’ to sink down beaten, ‘free’ to starve slowly, ‘free’ to die.

"Slaves, at any rate, are looked after; fed and clothed sufficiently ; given a roof over their heads. In the old slavery days it was as rare to find a man who neglected or ill-treated his human possessions as it is nowadays to come across cruel or careless owners of horses and cattle.

"Britons regard slavery with horror, but at the same time many of them treat their free workpeople far worse than they would treat slaves. If a slave dies it is a loss to his owner. If a ‘free’ worker dies there are dozens of others eager for his job. His death makes no difference to an employer at all.

"A man in the depths of despair, starving, shoeless, shattered by the misery he had gone through, wrote to us for help. At the end of his letter was a sentence which arrested our attention. Even slavery, he said, would be infinitely preferable to such a life as his.

"We have bought this man in order to show to what depths it is possible to sink in this ‘free’ country of ours, where the name of slavery is abhorred, but where enormous numbers of ‘free’ men and women fall into a state compared to which slavery would be a pleasant and easy condition of life.”

The man (whose name and address was published) was told by the “Daily Mirror” to show himself.

“A short man came, a man with a face that had once been full of intelligence and keenness, but which was now pulled out of its proper shape by misery. A man who walked with a heart-broken walk—with a walk that walks hopeless creatures to self-destruction. A hopeless man.

" ‘I am the man who wants to be a slave,’ he said.

"The bitterness of his tone was that terrible bitterness that is an amalgam of despair and nonchalance.

" ‘But are you worth buying ? What is your price ?’ he was asked.

"His square chin thrust itself out and for a moment looked like the sturdy, independent chin nature had meant it to be.

" ‘I will sell myself for £10,’ he said, ‘and victuals and shelter.’

" ‘But you are not worth £10 ; at least, why should you be worth £10 ? What can you do ?’

" ‘I don’t know anything,’ was the miserable answer.

" ‘Will you sell yourself for £2 ? ‘

" ‘Yes.’

" ‘That was how we got our slave.

"WE HAD TO BUY HIM FROM SHEER PITY.”

Two pounds ! Less than the price of a horse. Less than the price of an ass. Is the Socialist so very wrong when he asserts that hundreds of thousands of the working-class of free England would be better off, materially, in a state of chattel slavery ? Under such a condition they would at least have food and clothing and shelter, where to-day they have little of either, and can be bought as an act of charity for two pounds!

And yet the transaction of the “Daily Mirror” is not exceptional. Quite the contrary. Every member of the working-class sells himself or, which is the same thing, his power to labour, every time he can find an employer to buy him. He sells himself, generally speaking for just the amount that will keep him in working condition and enable him to reproduce his kind. He sells himself for his keep without even receiving, as in the case of the man purchased by the “Daily Mirror,” a bonus of £2. Indeed, he can sometimes be found offering a bonus of £2 to anyone who will give him information that will enable him to sell himself !

That he receives wages wherewith to buy the things necessary to the maintenance of life does not alter the fact of the sale ; does not alter the fact that he is the property, the slave, of the man who buys him.

And yet because, when he is fortunate enough to find a buyer for his labour power (himself), he receives a sum that enables him to buy what he likes within the limits of that sum, he thinks himself free— a delusion most sedulously fostered by the parsons and politicians and apologists for the present system.

He is free because he can choose how he shall spend his pitiable earnings — whether in scrag-of-mutton or corned beef ! Free because he can leave one master when he likes, although to get another—for a master he must have under present conditions if he is to live— is a task he may find it no easy matter to compass as the “Daily Mirror” slave seems to have discovered to his sorrow. Freedom ! Was ever such a travesty on words ?

Little as it was expected the “Daily Mirror” has spoken sober truth as to the advantages of chattel slavery over present-day “freedom,” for the worker’s freedom has brought him nothing but a more precarious dependency. But when this Harmsworth journal says it has bought a man and implies thereby that such a transaction is unusual, it is simply blurring the indisputable fact that every worker sells himself ; that every employer buys a slave.

When the working-class have accepted that truth, and have accepted the further truth which The Socialist Party of Great Britain exists to propagate, viz., that their condition with all its concomitant misery is directly due to the fact that the workers are separated from the means by which they live —have no control over the land and the machinery by which wealth is produced from the land and distributed, because these means are held and controlled by the employing or capitalist-class, they will be ready to appreciate the force of the contention of the Socialist Party that in the substitution of common ownership and control of the means of life for the present individual ownership, and in that alteration alone lies the remedy, a remedy that can be applied when the workers have appreciated, but not until then

G. J. Hodson

Cashless - but not moneyless (1995)

From the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Welcome to a World without Money” ran the headline of a full-page feature article in the Daily Mirror on 30 January. But it wasn’t an article on Socialism or anything like it. Written by Tanith Carey, it was about an experiment that starts in Swindon this month when people will pay for things by using a special smart card instead of notes and coins or cheques or even ordinary bank and credit cards.

Tanith Carey describes what the experiment will involve:

“Imagine going on a shopping spree and never having to shell out a penny for your purchases. Groceries at the supermarket. a new outfit, even a burger on the way home all yours without ever opening your wallet. There are no bills to sign, no rooting around in your back pocket and no reaching for change in the bottom of your purse. In fact not a note changes hands. Instead, everything is taken care of with a simple swipe of a card. ”

If ever this was to be adopted universally the result would be a cashless society, not a moneyless society which would be something quite different.

A cashless society would be one in which we no longer used paper notes and metal coins to pay for things; in other respects things would stay the same. A moneyless society, on the other hand, would be a society in which the whole concept of money—as a unit in which prices are expressed and as a means of payment—would have become redundant because the things we need to live would not have prices and would no longer be bought and sold. It would be a radically different society from today.

Most people tend to see money as giving access to wealth. Indeed it does, on condition that you have some. But from another angle it can be seen as a means of excluding people from wealth—from the wealth we need but can’t pay for because we haven’t got the money. Money, in other words, only gives conditional and restricted access to wealth. It is a means of rationing—it only gives people access to what they can pay for—and the workings of the capitalist system distribute these rations to people in very' unequal amounts.

Cashless society

The idea of a “cashless society” was first promoted by the banks in the 1960s as a way of encouraging people to use cheques and so open bank accounts. In those days most people still received, each week or fortnight, a pay packet in the literal sense—an envelope containing cash. This you put in your wallet or purse and spent to meet your needs over the next week or fortnight; if you wanted to save something you had to take it as cash to a bank or building society or to the Post Office.

The banks’ scheme to increase their business worked and today most people have a bank or building society account and are paid either by cheque or by a direct transfer to their account. People now pay for many more things than they used to by cheque, with the result that the need for cash—circulating notes and coins—has declined and an approach towards a cashless society made.

A cheque is basically an IOU, a promise to pay the payee (the person or business it is made out to) a sum of money at a later date, when it is presented to their bank in fact. This, too, takes place without the need for any physical transfer of cash. It does, however, involve the physical transfer of the cheque and the feeding of the details into a computer by a bank employee. This is time-consuming and so relatively expensive for small amounts, and now the banks are dissatisfied with cheques too. They prefer bank cards.

Originally these were guarantee cards presented with the cheque to guarantee the payee that the bank would honour the cheque up to a certain amount even if the payer didn't happen to have that amount in their account at the time the cheque was presented for payment. Then, with the incorporation into them of a microchip, they became "smart cards” which enabled their holders to withdraw notes from the hole-in-the-wall cash machines that sprang up in high streets throughout the country. Now they can also be used instead of a cheque to pay for things, provided, that is, the seller (a supermarket, shop, restaurant, etc) is equipped with a machine that can read the information on the card's microchip and transmit details of the transaction to a central computer. The banks envisage these cards eventually replacing cheques altogether.

So, after the cashless society the chequeless society, the society of electronic money or, as the computer bull's call it, “digital dosh”.

Digital dosh

The experiment in Swindon, financed by the Nat West and Midland banks, takes a different approach towards the same end. It aims to see if it is practicable—and of course profitable—to replace not just cheques but cash itself in everyday transactions.

Cash differs from a cheque in two important respects. First, it circulates: the same note or coin is used many times, by the different people whose hands it passes through, to pay for things. Second, payment in cash is a transaction between two persons only; no third party is involved, only the payer and the payee, the buyer and the seller To recreate electronically these conditions, while at the same time safeguarding against fraud, is technically more difficult than the bank-card-type system which uses a third party—the central system—to carry out and confirm any transaction. But it can be done, and has been done for the Swindon experiment.

Those taking part in the experiment will be issued with a plastic card but this will be different from an ordinary bank card in that holders can transfer to it from their bank account a sum of money of their choice. This can be done either from a machine at the bank or from one attached to their phone or from an “electronic wallet” This wallet is similar in shape and size to a pocket calculator and it too contains a keyboard and a display panel; money can be transferred to it in the same way as to a card but it can also be used to transfer money directly to someone else’s card.

The card works on the same principle as a BT phonecard except that it can be used to pay for anything from a supermarket, comer shop, pub, restaurant, etc participating in the scheme, even for small items like newspapers, stamps or sweets not normally purchased by cheque. When the amount transferred to the card has been spent it can no longer be used without more money being transferred to it.

When the card is used to pay for something it is inserted into a machine that transfers the money but no information about the buyer to the retail outlet's electronic till. A perfect substitute for cash and one that avoids the dangers of robberies and muggings (but not of counterfeiting).

What a waste

It’s all hi-tech stuff, but what a waste! What a waste of the ingenuity and technical skills of the computer analysts, programmers and software and hardware engineers, since electronic money is still money, i.e. still a means of rationing people's access to things.

All these smart cards, electronic wallets and scanners with their digital signatures, guardians, cryptographic algorithms and PINs are designed for one purpose: to allow those with money access to things and then only up to the limit of the amount they have, and so to deny this conditional access to wealth to those who don't meet the conditions, i.e. to those who don’t have money or who don't have enough money. They only make “sense” in a society based on private property and buying and selling and are yet another example of how' today under capitalism scientific knowledge and technology is prostituted and used to serve anti-social ends.

In a rationally-organised society, where we produced goods to satisfy the various needs of people and where people had free access according to their individually-defined needs to what had been produced, the same technology could be used to set up and operate the efficient system of stock control that would be needed to ensure that the stores were always stocked up with the products people had indicated they wanted. But this presupposes a society of common ownership and democratic control, not the banks' advertising agency’s slogan of a cashless society. Then we would truly be able to say “Welcome to a World without Money”.

Adam Buick

Press Exposure: Winners and Losers (1995)

The Press Exposure column from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

What do you want from your newspaper? Do you want a comprehensive, insightful report on what is happening in the world to help you form your opinion on whether we need to run things differently and if so how? Or masses of analysis and policy to help you come to the same conclusions as the writer? Or would you prefer, along with page-after-page of sport (which usually means page-after-page about the off-field foibles of the sportspeople) and dedicated probing of the sexual meanderings of pop stars. politicians and aristocrats, the chance to take part in some sort of competition which promises a chance of making you rich beyond your maddest dreams?

Competitions have been a consistent feature in the press. There is, for example, the humble (although that can depend on which newspaper it is in) crossword which occasionally offers the sort of prize—like a dictionary—which will not make you rich for the rest of your life. In the past there was a peculiar competition called Bullets, giving prizes for constructing apparently meaningful responses to obviously meaningless phrases. It seemed densely indecipherable but was very popular. Some newspapers have run competitions with a car as the prize, or enough petrol to run a car far into the future. Others have offered to pay the mortgage on a house. The so-called quality press has not been immune from this: the Sunday Times has run competitions—one was about post-war test cricketers—which were little more than lotteries and the Times has run one involving the phantom buying of shares. And of course there is good old bingo, which in the newspapers came in different styles. Sometimes the player had to get a card from a newsagent, sometimes the card came through the letterbox with all the other junk mail. All that you had to do then was buy the newspaper which published the numbers to be crossed off the card. It promised big prizes—perhaps a million pounds but there was a loophole. As both cards and numbers were produced by the newspaper and the "game" was not played openly as it is somewhere like a working men’s club, there was nothing to prevent the cards and numbers being designed so that nobody even won the jackpot.

If you think this is farfetched consider the case of Spot-The-Ball. This was another popular, long-running, competition in which the newspaper published an action photograph of a football game, with players leaping and thrashing about—without a ball. Competitors had to mark a cross where they thought the ball was. Addicts of Spot-The-Ball could spend a lot of time with a magnifying glass and a ruler, trying to work out where the players’ eyes were focused and where their boots were aimed at (assuming they were looking at the ball and trying to kick it; which is not always the case) and drawing lines in the hope that the point of intersection would be the winning spot.

In 1990 the Sun ran a Spot-The-Ball competition, in which the photograph was draw up into a grid. The unlikely to prize was £5 million. This desperate venture was quickly copied by the Daily Mirror, then stumbling under the even more desperate ownership of Robert Maxwell. In the Mirror contest readers had to Spot-The-Ball on five consecutive days: the promised top prize was £1 million.

The snag

It all seemed very exciting and enticing but there was a snag. The competition would be judged—that is to say the position of the ball would be decided—after the Mirror had all the entries. This would be done by a panel of judges (on the first occasion chaired by none other than Maxwell himself) who could put the ball in a square which nobody had marked. And that is what happened. Maxwell had instructed his editor "Make sure it doesn’t cost me any money" and, apart from a few "second’’ prizes of £10,000 that is what happened. The whole thing was a fraud on readers of the Mirror who were gullible enough to believe that a newspaper would help them solve their money problems in that way.

When this sort of trickery is exposed—as Maxwell’s Spot-The-Ball was exposed in a subsequent Panorama—we are subjected to a lot of indignation from people who seem to expect the press always to be honest, always to tell the truth. Which brings us back to the original question of what we want from the papers. Imagine for a moment what would happen, if the press suddenly dropped its unwavering support for capitalism and began to publish material which could be sustained by serious argument. What if they stopped treating every pronouncement by political leaders with such grovelling respect? It is difficult to believe that journalists listening to some revered figure churning out yet another discredited placebo for society’s problems do not reflect that that have heard it all before. Difficult to believe that they don't realise that capitalism’s spokespeople have nothing fresh or effective to say and that they should admit to their impotence and advise us to swamp them out in a social revolution.

Fraud

Because capitalism itself is a massive fraud, in which millions of useful people allow themselves to be exploited to sustain a parasite minority and a social system which cannot be organised in the interests of its people. Beside that, a newspaper's bogus bingo, Win-A-Car, or Spot-The-Ball are so trivial that in the history of fraud they won’t rate so much as a column inch.

Ivan

" . . . live like Lords." (1957)

From the January 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “I am told that if I get a rise the goods I make will not sell, because Germany will make them more cheaply, and I shall be worse off.

   So if I want to keep my standards of living up, I have got to keep it down. If I work for less than my German counterpart, I shall be better off. Then he will want to work for even less, so that he can be better off than I am. Finally, we shall all work for nothing and live like Lords.” 

This letter from a reader was published in the Daily Mirror some three years ago.

The Newspaper Industry (1967)

From the June 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Fleet Street is a jungle”. That is not the most original and penetrating comment ever made by Cecil Harmsworth King, chairman of the International Publishing Corporation, from the safety of whose mighty ramparts he could boast “I shall survive”. Which is more than can be said of the one national daily paper, one London evening, four national Sundays and over one hundred local papers which have perished in the jungle since the war.

Perhaps the most famous of these were the News Chronicle and The Star, which collapsed overnight in October 1960. There was a great deal of fuss over this, but the fate of the two papers was inescapable. Although they both had a circulation of over a million, during the last nine months of their lives they showed a combined loss of £300,000. In typical style, the Daily Mirror composed the most pointed of their many epitaphs: “A commercial failure is a commercial failure. However sad. However regretful.”

There have been no comparable deaths in Fleet Street since then but this is not to say that all the papers are bursting with health. A recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) fore, cast that four national newspapers will close by 1970; five dailies and two Sundays are making losses amounting to several million pounds a year. What the Manchester Guardian said ten years ago is still true:

Between the upper and the nether millstones of limited revenue and rising costs some units of the industry are being ground into oblivion.

Today, one of these units is The Guardian itself, which is losing around £1 million a year and which last December warned the printing unions that production costs had to be cut by a quarter by the end of the year.

Just as in other industries, production costs are a persistent worry to the newspaper managements. In evidence to the 1961 Royal Commission on the Press, the Daily Mirror said that its total variable costs had increased 4.2 times between 1937 and 1960, and fixed costs 2.2 times.

In this situation, wages are bound to be under the microscope; in Fleet Street they have always tended to be above average, although none of the printing workers is yet able to employ quite as many servants as some of the shareholders:

When the EIU reported last January, it pointed a disapproving finger at Fleet Street’s wages and commented that the industry “. . . is almost unique in the degree to which control of labour is in the hands of the unions.” The printing unions might well take this as a back-handed compliment to the efficiency with which they have done their job—which was, after all, what the EIU was supposed to be looking for.

Apart from their efforts to hold down production costs and wages, the newspapers are locked in a battle with each other, for circulation and advertisements. The losers of the battle find themselves in a descending spiral; a low circulation, or a high circulation in the wrong places, does not attract revenue from advertisements. This usually means cuts in quality (one of the troubles of the News Chronicle was that it could not afford to run as many pages as its rivals), which mean lower circulation and therefore less advertisements . . .

For the winners the spiral works in the opposite direction; with the exception of The Times, the cost of advertising in a national newspaper is tied to its circulation:

Advertising revenue is, and has been for some time, vital to a newspaper’s survival; without it it simply could not make ends meet. The Daily Express told a PEP enquiry in 1955 (Balance Sheet of the Press) that 39 per cent of its revenue came from advertisements; the EIU found some "quality" daillies getting 70 or 80 per cent of their incomes from the  same source and the “populars” about 40 per cent.

To attract the advertisements, the papers must themselves advertise, in campaigns aimed at industry’s sales directors. The Daily Telegraph says that on Fridays, when its colour supplement comes out, circulation goes up to 1,450,858—“. . . at just the right time for the peak weekend spending period.” (The whole idea, in fact, behind the colour supplements was to attract advertisers—as is obvious from the most casual glance through them.) Then there is “. . . the advertising medium that sells best” (News of the World, circulation 6,184,000) and “The Religious Weekly With National Appeal” (Methodist Recorder, circulation 69,568.)

The accepted formula for survival in Fleet Street’s jungle is size and diversification. Two giants out-top the rest—the International Publishing Corporation (IPC) and the Thomson Organisation. Both have big investments in newspapers and publishing overseas and in commercial television. Both received EIU's admiration for being “operated as a commercial business” (Daily Mirror) and “profit orientated” (Sunday Times).

Thomsons own the Sunday Times, the Scotsman, the Western Mail and now, after the Monopolies Commission had given the necessary approval under the Monopolies and Mergers Act, The Times—a takeover which in itself showed up the plight of the newspaper industry. Thomsons also own exhibition companies, a package tour firm and an airline.

IPC, in the words of the Press Council (Report 1966), is the ". . . largest and most comprehensive publishing and communications empire in the world.” It owns the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, The People, The Sun, and something like ninety weekly magazines and 123 which come out less frequently, among them Autocar, Country Life, Everywoman. The weekly total was recently reduced by one when IPC put The Statist, after a long and painfully unprofitable iillness, to sleep.

A long way behind these two groups are Associated Newspapers (Daily Mail, Daily Sketch, Evening News, National Opinion Polls, a stake in Southern Television and in the North Sea explorations) and Beaverbrook Newspapers (Daily Express, Sunday Express, Evening Standard, a share in ATV.) Then there are the smaller, sometimes private, companies like the Daily Telegraph Ltd. and the Manchester Guardian and Evening News Ltd. This was how the three biggest groups made out in 1965:

Correction: It should read 'Profits Before Tax'

For the future, Fleet Street’s barometer is not set fair. The competition from television will not grow any weaker; the decline in advertising revenue will probably continue; production costs will not fall. The big groups have the resources to ride the storm and to put in labour saving equipment; in 1965 Thomsons invested £2.7 million in equipment and a new paper of their’s — the Evening Post in Reading—is composed with a computer. The small groups will be hard pressed to compete with this; their papers are especially vulnerable.

The suggested remedies are not original. The EIU advised an all-out war on costs, saying that in London alone the industry could sack enough workers to save nearly £5 million a year. Lord Thomson wants the unions to cooperate: “We have to learn to use these new tools of our trade, and I hope the efforts to do so will not be hamstrung by restrictive practices . . .” (Fleet Street, the Inside Story of Journalism — Macdonald 1966.)

And of course someone had to suggest the State stepping in like a fairy godmother to save it all. Richard Brightshaw, joint general secretary of SOGAT (one of the printing unions) has “. . . called for a National Printing Corporation, backed with large Government resources, which would . . . take over ’commercial projects and ailing publications’. . .” Lena Jeger, Labour M.P., “. . . is a strong supporter of outright nationalisation.” (Sunday Times, 8/1/67).

Like most of the lamentations about the state of Fleet Street, these are based on the assumption that newspapers are sacred. In fact, they are commodities, like the rest of capitalism’s wealth. When it is applied to other industries, the newspapers always support the principle that if something is unprofitable it should not be produced. If Fleet Street is a jungle, it is capitalism’s profit motive which has made it so. 

Ivan

Workers Beware—or the Withered Labour Party (1952)

From the May 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

As was to be expected the Labour Party in opposition is looking around for means and ways to regain power. Having put their programme into practise and been thrown out of office after six years they must find something new, or at least something that looks new. When in opposition there is no time to lose, preparations must begin at once for further wool pulling and political scheming in order to get back, and who should be first to see the necessity of this than that worthy journal with “Forward with the People ” as its slogan—the Daily Mirror. A month or so ago this paper drew attention to the fact that the Labour Party’s aims had been put into operation and they now needed a new plan to meet the challenge of the times. On Monday, 25th of February, a series of articles entitled “Whither Labour" began in the Daily Mirror. These were written by ex-ministers of the late Labour Government and Mr. Sam Watson, a member of the National Executive of the Labour Party. We will review these articles here to show how empty they really are and how unworthy of working class support First let us stress that the very need for a new programme shows the futility of the first one. But if nationalisation and all the other past reforms, designed to bring better times and upheld as the cure for all ills by the Labour Party, have proven fruitless, what indication is there that they can dream up something new to solve workers problems?

Mr. Morrison and “Social Justice.”

The first contributor was Mr. Herbert Morrison who made a great deal of play with “social justice” but skilfully avoided telling us what it is. He said social justice is as much part of our defence as "planes, warships and guns” so perhaps he had in mind the prosecution of the dockers last year by Sir Hartley Shawcross under order 1305 or the banishment of Seretse Kahma or may be he thinks the record-breaking profits under Labour rule alongside the wage freeze policy was socially justified. Mr. Morrison goes on to gloat about “publicly owned industries, the great health and social services,” but fails to mention that despite these things the mass of the workers still live in poverty. Unemployment is creeping back and wars are still going on in which Britain is involved. He then says something quite funny which he should know is not true:—“What we were doing was new” as if Britain was the first capitalist country to go in for nationalisation, in fact all of these things had been done years before in Germany or Denmark, Australia or New Zealand, Russia or Italy and in many other countries sometimes by avowedly capitalist governments but in not one instance did they alter the lot of the masses. Just like the Tories he stresses the need to export and “rearm to protect the freedom we have won over the centuries.” One might almost think Mr. Churchill had written this. The freedom such as it is has not been won by re-arming or going to war but by bitter battles between workers and capitalists here at home. The right to strike or even form trade unions, the right of free assembly, even the vote, were not obtained by bloody wars in other countries but in the class war in this one. The big “if” on which Mr. Morrison pins the Labour Party future is whether they can kid the workers to sink their differences with the capitalists and think of the nation “as a whole” a “socially inspired community,” the workers working as usual and the capitalists, state and private, playing their important rolls by hogging 90 per cent. of the accumulated wealth.

Then Mr. Gaitskell

Mr. Gaitskell wrote the second article which appeared the next day. He right away declared himself to be in favour of increased efficiency. Workers must scrap “all restrictive methods and practices” if we are to achieve “a peaceful world, a steady job, a decent house and rising living standards:” these are “the things that really count.” Weird indeed is the fact that six years of Labour government have not removed the need for these things. Who says the Labour Party was once really anti-war? Mr. Gaitskell declares he “supported rearmament in the 30’s” and he maintains that arms are the way to lasting peace.

This Labour leader also urges us “to work together for the common good.” At the end of his article he shows that he knows the Labour Party is sunk “unless we first win over a million doubtful voters:” he might well explain what made them doubtful in the first place.

Bevan the “Rebel"

The third writer was that bloodcurdling rebel Mr. Aneurin Bevan. From him, the “leftest of left,” many workers may have looked for something different, but no it was the same old song being sung, only off-key. Political parties must be ready with the right “kind of action required in the national interests at any time.”

He engages in the usual mock battles with the Tories and private enterprise, though Mr. Gaitskell had said the day before “smaller businesses will need help in finding capital,” so perhaps they should have got together to see which it is to be.

Mr. Bevan makes an observation made by the S.P.G.B. years ago that we are “faced with the prospects of semi-starvation, if not actual hunger, at a time when the physical sciences dazzle us with their achievements.”

He stated that “the pursuit of profit failed to ensure the provision of essentials first and secondary things afterwards,” but how empty all this vote-catching becomes when we read on—“ If the community is to survive, then investment must be compelled to follow the discipline of long-term planning.”

Capital must be controlled, for capitalists when on the loose compete and in time of crisis this does harm to "national interests,” so they must be collectively looked after.

The Labour Party only left office in October last after six years of power, yet Mr. Bevan tells us “Private enterprise has failed to make sure that our manufacturing capacity is matched by a flow of the necessary raw materials. Thus unemployment and short time working are once more showing themselves in our midst, and this has been aggravated by a rearmament programme of impracticable proportions and unrealisable speed.”

He forgot that he was a member of the Government which brought in the arms programme, but then he only objects to its “proportions” and “speed,” not to its existence. The rest of the article shows his deep concern for the welfare of British capitalism. He challenges the Americans’ right to world leadership on the ground that Britain is looked to to provide those counsels “for which she is fitted by her experiences and her sacrifices.”

Labour Supporters are not Socialists.

The miners’ secretary in Durham, Mr. Sam Watson, came next and although this gentleman is also a member of the Labour Party National Executive, we must bear in mind when reading what he says the fact that trade unions came into existence to fight the capitalist class in the economic field. Like those who wrote the previous articles, Mr. Watson starts with the Nation and ignores class divisions, but what he says further on must come as a shock for all who expected or expect great things of the Labour Party. It drives home full-swing the accuracy of the Socialist Party’s claim that there can be no Socialism without mass-understanding. After forty-five years of the Labour Party in and out of office he says, “It is wishful thinking to believe that there are millions of people in the country, especially in the trade union movement, who are 'raring’ to go forward for the kind of society Labour wants, and are held back like dogs on a leash only by right-wing leaders in the union or in the Labour Party.” And again: “We deceive ourselves if we refuse to face up to the fact that hundreds of thousands of people in the Labour movement have either no knowledge, or only limited knowledge, of the causes of the present grave situation.” Surely Mr. Watson can understand their ignorance, for when has the Labour Party ever made any effort to teach them?

He is typical of the people who sneer at the S.P.G.B. because it is small and insists on understanding. Perhaps this is a good lesson in where mass membership without understanding leads to. Socialists have always said that votes cast for something other than Socialism cannot bring it about. Mr. Watson, just coming to, says, “We had the largest vote in the history of the party in 1951, but it was not secured on a basis of fundamentally changing our economy, but in the belief that if the Tories won they would immediately proceed in principle to cut down the standard of living and might even increase the danger of war.” Votes cast out of fear and ignorance will never solve anything, yet throughout the election this is exactly the kind of vote the Labour Party sought. It is now an established fact also that the late Labour Government made preparations for atom bombs here in this country. How they must blush when they call the Tories “warmongers”! Like those who wrote earlier Mr. Watson hopes for the sinking of class differences, greater efficiency and cheaper production to keep or capture “the markets of the world.” “Fair shares for all” is still to be Labour’s call and those words echo down the corridors of time as Labour Governments come and go without effecting any change in the distribution of wealth.

The “Daily Mirror’s” Contribution.

Having heard from the brains of the Labour Party on Friday, 29.2.52, the Daily Mirror made its own contribution for our enlightenment. Their writers notice that the number of skilled workers is “going down,” which they say is a “disastrous trend.” They first claim credit for having “supported the Labour Party in its struggle to achieve certain declared aims— fair play and fair shares for everybody,” and then they have the nerve to ask “why at the last election the people of Britain rejected a Labour Government”! The answer is simple: they didn’t bring home the bacon. The Daily Mirror can talk about a greater say in industry for the workers and advocate a greater sharing of the wealth produced, but while Capitalism remains, profit making is the motive for production, and the more workers get the less there is for the capitalists, and this would never do. If all the old men in responsible positions in the Labour Party were replaced by younger men the capitalist class would still own the means of living and workers would still be subjected to this as wage slaves, for, high wages or low, the people who pay wages still live on profits sweated for by those who receive wages.

By facing storms the Daily Mirror thinks that “Labour can become a really great NATIONAL party.”

We already have one National Party, but if what this newspaper is getting at is the fact that there is nothing to choose from, we agree. The history of Capitalism has been one of crises, yet the Labour Party have not learnt to do otherwise than to try and patch it up.

A little later on (March 11th) an article entitled “Short Time” appeared in the same paper. Remembering all the social reforms and the “benefits” of six years’ Labour rule this article tells us of the 8,000 workers on short time in Oldham where a family of six exists on £5 13s. a week and have only 18s. 9d. to spend on “milk, meat, fish, gas, electricity, fares and clothing.” They are on short time, says the writer, Claud Morris. After being used to working overtime they work for three days a week at £3 10s., and make it up with unemployment money and family allowances if they have children.

The mill went on short time “because of lack of orders.” All the “industrial efficiency” and “economic planning ” in the world cannot abolish the problems of Capitalism. While politicians here are cooking up schemes to extend trade and capture markets, the politicians of Japan, China, Russia, America and the rest of the world are doing the same. In the final throw, trade routes like the Suez Canal, raw materials such as Malayan rubber, and Persian oil, and the markets of the world have to be retained or obtained by force. The wars of Capitalism, past, present and future, are not in the interest of the working class because they own neither the raw materials, the trade routes, nor the markets.

During the same week that saw publication of the articles, Mr. Attlee, Prime Minister of the late Labour Government, was writing a series of articles in Labour’s own, the Daily Herald. These were on the same lines as the others mentioned, and equally empty.

“The positive remedy is to increase our exports.” We have already seen where this leads. “We must cut down our imports, especially from dollar countries. This means going without some things, but we shall have to put up with this.” We don’t have to re-elect Labour to be told this; the Tories are already doing it. To draw any loose ends together it might be as well to bring to our reader’s attention that the whole lot of articles in both newspapers never once mentioned the phrases “working class,” “capitalist class,” “Socialism,” “fellow workers,” or “workers of the world, unite.” They are concerned with running Capitalism and all their ideas, old and “new,” are in line with that basic fact. One final stunning blow to Labour leaders who brag of their achievements while in office and who are trying hard to trick their way back, is their contribution to the housing problem, the building of the Festival of Britain. As a party which alleges concern over workers' problems and affects to blame shortages of materials for their failings, they stand indicted.

Nobody can say we are being wise after the event, for we state that their future programmes will fail and we know why. There is no way of running Capitalism beneficially to the masses and without war, slumps and crises. To abolish Capitalism is the only way to peace, plenty, happiness and security. Socialism is the solution, common ownership of the means of life and production for use the world over. Socialism is the solution and the urgency for its establishment is now. So don’t be fooled, fellow workers. It's your votes they are after. Socialism requires your understanding. It may be a long road, that depends on you, but until you bring about Socialism you have nothing to look forward to save a fate worse than death and lots and lots of promises.

Harry Baldwin

Homeworkers — reserve army of the half-employed (1979)

From the April 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

With fingers weary and worn.
  With eyelids heavy and red,
A Woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
   Plying her needle and thread —
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
   In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
   She sang the 'Song of the Shirt!’ 

'Work — work — work
   Till the brain begins to swim.
Work — work — work
   Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam, and gusset, and band,
   Band, and gusset, and seam,
Till over the buttons I fall asleep

   And sew them on in a dream! 

'O, Men with Sisters dear!
   O Men! with Mothers and Wives!
It is not linen you’re wearing out.
   But human creatures’ lives!
Stitch — stitch — stitch,
  In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
Sewing at once, with a double thread
  A Shroud as well as a Shirt

The Song of the Shirt

  Thomas Hood (1799-1845)

Whatever the outcome of this winter’s campaign by many union-organised low-paid workers, it will do little or nothing to improve the situation of homeworkers. These freelance, “self-employed” workers, mainly women, work in or from their own homes, some as envelope addressers, others putting toys, balloons or mottoes in Xmas crackers, while a great many are in the rag-trade. The Daily Mirror (Jan. 30, 1979) exposed some typically atrocious conditions:

  Mary Fabri gets paid 80p a dozen for making fashionable Broderic Anglaise petticoats which sell at £4.75 each. Her earnings are £20-£22 per week, out of which she has to pay about £1.30 for electricity to power her sewing machine. Rachel Tomlinson used to “slave away till two or three in the morning”. She machines trouser suits at 75p each, using a twentypart pattern: these suits are sold by mail order at £26. Pat Frolich and her friends, getting 4p for putting tassels on football supporters’ scarves, tried to get 1p increase, and on being refused they joined the General and Municipal Workers’ Union. “I didn’t get any more work which amounts to the sack, and the Union couldn’t do a thing.”

In the nineteenth century, before the factories superseded the domestic system, the lace-makers, milliners and spinners working at home, were all employed in much the same way. There was also then the notorious “rag trade”:

  One of the most shameful, the most dirty, and the worst paid kinds of labour, and one on which women and young girls are by preference employed, is the sorting of rags. It is well known that Great Britain, apart from its own immense store of rags, is the emporium for the rag trade of the whole world. They flow in from Japan, from the most remote States of South America, and from the Canary Islands. But the chief sources of their supply are Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, Belgium and Holland. They are used for manure, for making bed-flocks, for shoddy, and they serve as the raw material of paper. The rag sorters are the medium for the spread of small-pox and other infectious diseases and they themselves are the first victims. (Capital vol. I.)

The homeworkers of today, as of Marx’s time, are part of a fluctuating pool of labour on the fringes of unemployment.

From the capitalist’s point of view the advantages of employing homeworkers are many. The main and most obvious is that their labour-power is cheap. As Marx observed of the “so-called domestic industries", “unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete” (Capital vol. I). Since there is not enough work to go round, each homeworker is competing against thousands of others, all equally desperate. Also, as unemployment has increased many housewives are driven to supplement the breadwinner’s inadequate paypacket by turning their homes into factory annexes. According to the Low Pay Unit, the number of full-time workers earning less than they would be able to get on Supplementary Benefit (the government-decreed poverty norm, on which families can survive) increased from 130,000 in 1974 to 290,000 in 1976 (Observer, 17 Sept. 1978). If we add to this figure the one-parent families where a mother struggles to bring up her young children on Supplementary Benefit, we can see how large a number of homeworkers there are on the fringes of the employment market.

Another advantage for the capitalist is that the homeworkers’ working hours and conditions are totally unregulated and unprotected: no Factory Acts, no National Insurance stamps, no income tax. The hours worked, and pay obtained, are entirely a private matter between the individual homeworker and his or her “employer". Homeworkers do not normally have any contract of employment so it is rare for them to get the sack: but if the “employer” just stops sending them any work they have no legal protection. Because they are isolated from one another, they seldom get the chance to organise and protect themselves from the imposition of harsh work norms. (Some Market Research firms go to quite extraordinary lengths to prevent their interviewers meeting up with one another: in such firms the only personal contact the interviewer has is with her supervisor, never with other interviewers.)

Because most of them are on piece-rates (inevitably extremely low) home workers have to work exceptionally long hours to obtain something like a wage. For instance, a hand-knitter made a complicated Fair Isle sweater which required 30 hours work. For that job she was paid £5.20. Employers take the cynical view that “very often women are grateful to us because we are paying them for their hobby” (Daily Mirror, 30 Jan,.1979). The same woman whose hobby is toiling at her knitting machine or typewriter for long hours at a miserable pittance is worth, as a housewife, £87.90 a week (Daily Mirror). At least, that is what she could get if she was paid for doing some one else’s household chores and caring for someone else’s children. Then consider some of the less agreeable jobs, such as delivering sales leaflets door-to-door in all weathers. In one typical area, women and schoolchildren who deliver a free local newspaper and sales material get paid £3 basic, a rate which has not changed in ten years. No one would describe this as a “hobby”.

Another advantage to the firms that exploit homeworkers is that, should their work-load fluctuate, as is the ease with Xmas crackers, market research and the rag-trade, the employees can be left high and dry without work (without pay) during slack periods, yet can be required to work almost round the clock in a busy season. There is absolutely no limit to the number of hours homeworkers may work in a week, other than their own physical limits. (Pit-ponies however are limited to 48 hours a week).

Homeworkers are a mere footnote in the economic history of our times. Yet their low rates of pay serve to depress those offered to factory workers in the same area. How else would Grunwicks be able to offer such low rates to women working part-time.

The reformers of British capitalism have introduced legislation to control the length of a working day, the conditions of work within factories, the protection of workers from “unfair” dismissal or discrimination, to provide paid holidays and sick pay, to insure workers from actual destitution when injured or unemployed, and to provide pensions and maternity leave. All these regulations are easily evaded by those firms which exploit the reserve army of the unemployed in their own homes. In addition this practice reduces the firm’s own overheads (power, light and heating, and in many cases depreciation of machinery).

In one of his novels, the Russian writer Dostoyevsky described a widow who stitched away all night. In his Autobiography, Charles Chaplin described how his mother slaved at shirt-making, starving herself to feed her children when there was not enough money coming in. Her reward was premature senility, caused by malnutrition.

Marx described the domestic industries as “the last resort of the ‘redundant population’ ”—capitalism’s safety-valve. So long as people can be made “redundant”, so long will this cynical exploitation of the very needy continue. Fashion firms will flourish while factory rates of pay will be depressed and women will be degraded to the point where to many prostitution seems preferable.

The wages system with production for profit is the root cause of all these social evils. Reforms of the law can do next to nothing. To end exploitation in the home, as in the factory, we must abolish the wages system. There is no other way.

Charmian Skelton

Capitalist "Solutions" to Hypothermia (1976)

From the March 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The popular lie, often put forward by champions of Britain’s welfare state, that “no one starves to death here any more” has currently been exposed as such by the recent high-lighting in the media of the condition known as hypothermia.

But hypothermia (or “low heat”) is nothing new. Old people have died by the thousand from lack of food, fuel and clothing for years under the welfare state. But only lately has there been significant publicity about it. From the Sunday Express 1st February 1976 we learn, “Soaring fuel costs which lead to thousands of old people economising on home heating were blamed yesterday for a massive rise in the number of elderly patients being taken to hospital suffering from effects of cold . . . One theory being put forward for the higher than ever toll is that pensioners, many living alone on small incomes, are frightened of using heating and lighting appliances because of the cost. So they sit at home without heating . . . Pensions, with the present price of electricity and food, don’t go very far”

From the Daily Mirror 2nd February 1976: “The tragedy spotlights the problem of hypothermia which claims an average of 45,000 lives in Britain each year . . . Ninety thousand old people have been given a twin death sentence—by the coldest weather for four years and rocketing fuel prices . . . The Department of Health and Social Security recommends a minimum temperature of 70 for homes. Yet a survey shows that 89 per cent of pensioners’ living-room temperatures were below the Government standard. And that was before the increased fuel prices.”

To the Socialist the answer to the problem would seem obvious. Food, fuel and clothing, like all other needs should be freely available (not only to the elderly) to all human beings.

But what are the capitalist solutions to the problem? Call in on elderly neighbours to find out if anyone is actually dying. (Milkmen are regarded as being useful here.)

Doctors can obtain special wide range thermometers so that if they find a cold, collapsed old patient in a cold house, lacking food, fuel and clothing they’ll be able to pinpoint the diagnosis.

And, so public-spirited is the Daily Mirror that on 7th February 1976 they devoted a front page to the problem. Indeed, the way they launched their “campaign” one almost got the impression they were offering to finance food, fuel and clothing themselves. But, in fact, what they came up with was a free “cut-out” sos sign for those dying of hypothermia to put in their windows for the milkman etc. to see. And listen to the further contributions of these philanthropic crusaders:- “If you know old people who live on their own, make sure they have a copy of the warning poster” (and the Daily Mirror supplied it free remember.) "If you see the Daily Mirror's SOS sign in a window, see what help you can give. Knock on the door and give all the help you can”.

But the altruistic Mirror also gives a good capitalistic reason for donating SOS signs to the dying. It quotes Mr. Hugh Faulkner, director of Help the Aged who “welcomes the Mirror's campaign.” “The plight of the old is frightening this winter. The winter weather has really hit us now. Food and fuel bills are higher than ever before and pensions have just not kept pace with inflation. Someone, sometime will eventually realise it is cheaper for the nation to keep old people warm and well fed in their own home than have them go to hospital.” (our italics). So please help “the nation” to do it cheaper, chaps!

Still the Mirror:- “Everyone can help to alleviate the suffering and misery which is piled on old people year by year”, (they don’t say by whom). Then, in thick type:- “Today, the Daily Mirror appeals to everyone to help the old to survive winter. Be a busybody and you could save a life.” Then a broad hint that the neighbours should come up with the necessary funds: - “Check that the old man or woman living down the road is all right. Make sure they are warm and have enough food. If not, get in touch with the local welfare services and run a few errands to stock up their food larder.” Other advice the beneficent Mirror gives free is:- “make sure there is an efficient heater. . . . and they need at least one hot meal a day and frequent snacks and hot drinks.”

Actually, another newspaper takes the prize. The Stoke-on-Trent Evening Sentinel comes up with this:- “A cheap thermometer to alert old people to the dangers of cold and hypothermia went on sale at Stafford today. The thermometer at 20p, is being marketed by an Essex firm as a non-profit making venture.”

Four chemists in the Stafford area have agreed to sell the thermometers which are blue and white. When the temperature falls to the blue zone—below 60 Fahrenheit—it indicates danger to the old people from cold. “This may not save lives but could alert people who may not realise they are in danger”, said Mrs. Jane York, the firm’s social representative. “The see-at-glance thermometer could also warn social workers and visitors of old people at risk,” explains Mrs. York.

What useful gifts—stick one of these on their wall and the pensioner dying of cold will be able to see exactly why.

It makes one marvel at the bitter irony and cynicism which can unconsciously be spewed out by people not wanting to face the obvious. Were it not so tragic it would be hilarious.

R. B. Gill