Party News Briefs (1951)

Party News from the December 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reference was made in the November issue regarding the work being done by Party members during the recent General Election. Wherever possible branches made a special effort to get the literature distributed and to hold additional propaganda meetings during the three weeks of the campaign. S.W. London Branch report that on receiving the information from Head Office that 10,000 Socialist Standards and 50,000 Election Manifestos were to be disposed of, a call was sent to the Branch members asking them to take as many additional Standards as possible, also to assist in a door-to-door sales campaign and to attend other, political parties' propaganda meetings to sell our literature.

These ideas were put into effect with the result that a number of meetings were attended where our members put the Socialist point of view, our Election Manifestos were distributed and Socialist Standards sold.

Local trade union branches were canvassed by circular in order that a speaker could put the Socialist Case. Four of these were successful.

The greatest measure of success, however, was obtained in what the Branch believed to be the most effective means of Party propaganda, selling the Socialist Standard from door to door and this was the method used to dispose of the bulk of 37 dozen copies sold during the month.

A lot of new ground, as well as old, was covered during the literature drive and it should be emphasised to Branch members the need for as much of their time, effort and enthusiasm in the future in order to keep up this good work.

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A number of interesting lectures and discussions are bang held by branches, and details of all of the December meetings are advertised on other pages of this issue.

In particular a public meeting is being held at Kensington Town Hall on Monday, December 17th. The local Conservative and Labour Party have been invited to oppose us from our platform.

Please make a special note of the time, date and place of this meeting and come along with friends, sympathisers and opponents.

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Ealing and Paddington Branches are holding socials and dances during December, full details on other pages.

The first of a weekly series of Saturday night socials was held at Head Office (52, Clapham High Street) on November 10th. Nearly 100 members were present, music was provided by four members of Fulham Branch. Apart from being a happy evening the social provided the General Fund with £7 6s. 0d. by means of collection, raffle and canteen. These socials are being held every Saturday evening—please make a note and come along and enjoy yourselves.

The Socialist Standard subscription form is specially included in this issue in order that members and sympathisers do not forget to ensure a regular copy of the Socialist Standard during 1952. If you have already sent in your subscription form, why not treat a friend to a year’s subscription as a gift? It is an excellent way to introduce new readers to the Standard. If you know of sympathisers or friends who occasionally read a copy, why not ask them to be regular readers and get them to send in a subscription form.

At the same time please have a look at the list of pamphlets available and make sure that you have all of them in your possession, if not, all the pamphlets advertised can be obtained from the Literature Committee at Head Office.

Phyllis Howard

Capitalist Poverty Problems (1951)

From the December 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

In our August issue we referred to the financial plight of Mr. Ronald Tree, M.P., who was trying to struggle along on £140 a week before obtaining a further £214,000 from his grandfather's trust fund. The Evening News of 8th August contained an article on a slightly different financial problem, namely, how a young married couple can set up home on £80. Since the solution is “worked out” rather neatly, it is possible that many members of the owning class are worrying needlessly over money problems that can be easily overcome by members of the owning class. In any case, we recommend Mr. Tree and others to study the joys of working class existence in order to appreciate how poverty really should be borne—or should it?

  “Well, can a couple set up home these days on only £80? . . .  It certainly cannot be done if you think in terms of elegant new suites and modern furniture, but it is amazing how comfortable and bright a home can be with second-hand pieces (polished up or painted), home-made curtains and covers, ingenuity and good taste.”

Quite so. Elegant new suites and modern furniture are only made in order to satisfy the bad taste of those who can afford them, and everybody knows that second-hand pieces (particularly very cheap and very used) are really the most desirable.

   “Let us pretend (they) have been lucky enough to find a small, unfurnished flat. It is not a palace. In fact there are only one fair-sized room and a little kitchen.”

Yes, it is important to realise that a two-room flat is not a palace, not even a 3-room palace. Once you have it well into your head that anything more is just vulgar ostentation you are well on the road to being ideally contented there. There is much further good advice on how the young couple can get bargains at junk-shops, and find substitutes for what is really needed, such as liquid lino in the kitchen instead of expensive inlaid linoleum. After the £80 has been frugally allocated the writer remarks that as time goes by they will go on saving for the things they hope to have. The whole adds up to a very fair commentary on working class standards.

Why should such an article be needed showing just how little money need be spent on workers’ homes to make them quality to be called homes? The answer is that it is part of the propaganda, carried on by all the private and state owned media of mass influence, designed to make poverty acceptable to the workers. The wages of the latter are the price of their mental and physical energies, bought by the capitalist as cheaply as possible and used to create a profit. The less it costs the workers to live the more funds there are to go into the capitalists’ "trust.” The fact that all wealth is created by workers, the shoddy for themselves and the luxurious for their masters, is coolly ignored by the apologists of the system.

Fellow workers, when will you realize that you need not go short of anything that you, collectively, are capable of producing? Between the present extremes of wage-slaves, who can afford little more than the bare necessities of a working life, and capitalists, whose wealth finds expression in idle and extravagant luxury, lies the possibility of all people having their reasonable needs satisfied.

This entails the abolition of Capitalism and the establishment of a system of production solely for use, needing no money and therefore producing no money problems of any sort. It is within your power to bring such a society into being, if you will only think and act in your own class interest, instead of in that of a class of parasites. Your wages will not buy the things you need, and you ask for more in vain because your masters also want more at your expense. It will remain so while they have the whip hand of ownership of the means of living and until you decide to relieve them of it by establishing Socialism.

Stan Parker

You, Too, Can Be Class Conscious (1951)

From the December 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are three things that you must know before you can become class-conscious. First, you must know what constitutes a class; secondly, you must know to which class you belong, and thirdly, you must know what are your class interests. Having acquired that amount of knowledge you can claim to be a fully fledged class-conscious member of society.

There are a deuce of a lot of confused notions about social classes. People talk about lower classes, upper classes and middle classes. They even talk about upper middle and lower middle classes and of the working classes. These social divisions are income groups, not classes. A person’s class is not determined by the amount of money that he can get hold of, but by the manner in which he gets it.

There is no limit to the number of groups that can be included in these income classifications. Every income variation of a few coppers could qualify for a new group, which, of course, accounts for such foolish phrases as. “ the working classes,” as though there are a number of them.

We must not confuse this classification or we shall arrive at a false conclusion. Human beings walk on two legs, but that does not make them human beings. Capitalists are wealthy and workers are poor, but wealth, or lack of it, does not make capitalist and worker. It is the source of their wealth or the cause of their poverty that places men in one or other of these social classes.

The majority of people on this earth, when they arrive at their early teens, are sent out to find a job in order to augment the family income. They set out with nothing much more than their travelling fare and they go to a prospective employer and offer themselves for work. The employer may want a typist or a turner. In either case he is interested to buy some energy. If he needs a typist he will provide the office and the typewriter; be will dictate and expect the typist to translate his words on to paper via the typewriter. If be needs a turner he will provide the lathe, the workplace and the material to be worked on. The worker will bring only his energy and that he will apply to operating the machine.

For all typists and turners, as well as for millions of others, that is the only way they can get the wherewithal to live. They have nothing else but their ability to work and they sell that in order to get the necessities of life. They constitute a class—the working class.

Against this there are others who have no need to work. Their parents can ensure them an education of qualify and absorb them into the family business or maintain them out of the family income. They are born into their class, as are nearly all its members; only a very few nowadays manage to creep into the privileged class over the backs of their fellows. These are the people who own the offices with the typewriters and the workplaces with the lathes. These are the people who will employ the typists and the turners and all the others. The workers will produce an income for these privileged ones and absolve them from the necessity to work. They can take themselves off to Monte Carlo, Monaco or Monte Video, and rest assured that their incomes will be safe. Because they own land, or factories, or machines, or ships or something else, they constitute another class—the capitalist class.

There are a few people who do not appear to fall within either of these two classes. They are the people who own the means of getting a living without having to seek employment, but their means of livelihood are such that it is a mighty meagre living that they get. There is the fellow who owns a hammer, a last, a few pieces of leather and a small shop and who ekes out a livelihood repairing other people’s footwear. There is the fellow with a taxi-cab who plies for hire and the chap who raises a few cucumbers under some glass that he owns, and struggles along on the proceeds of the sales. These and some others, mostly small shopkeepers, do not fit directly into the classification of either working-class or capitalist class. In the main they are distributing agents for capitalist wholesale firms which do not want the bother of running their own retail business. As a social class their interests are so bound up with those of the working class that there is no purpose in considering them separately. Look along the High Street in any fair sized town and note the changes in recent years. Little John Smith, the grocer, has gone and J. Sainsbury or the Home and Colonial Stores have taken his place. Freeman, Hardy and Willis or Bata have ousted the small shoe vendor. Montogue Burton has built a palatial shop where Snippet, the small tailor, used to cut and stitch. W. H. Smith has taken over from the little “paper man.” No shopping centre is complete these days without its Woolworths, its Scotch Wool and Hosiery Stores, its J. Lyons or A.B.C. caterers, Dunn’s the Hatters, Dorothy Perkins, Timothy White and Taylors or Boots the Chemist, United Dairies, Granada or Odeon Cinema, Halfords, Mac Fisheries and all the other big names in retail business. The big capitalist firm is in the High Street and the little “middle class” man is in the side streets or the less busy part of the town, that is, if he has managed to hang on in the face of the overwhelming competition. These so-called “middle class” people are being squeezed out and are becoming managers for the big capitalist stores.

With these “in-between” people drawn irresistibly to the working class, there is a line-up of society into two classes, the workers and the capitalists. So, to the second point. To which class do you belong? That is something that you can decide for yourself. The fact that you are reading the Socialist Standard makes it a hundred-to-one bet that, like us, you are a member of the very-hard-working-class. So, all that remains is for you to grasp what are your class interests.

You have probably experienced the blind urge of class antagonism without recognising it. You have probably felt a sympathy for “poor" people being suppressed by “rich” ones. You have probably observed what you consider to be a lot of injustice in this society and you have more than likely, at times, got all het up about it. That is an admirable emotion, but it does nothing to indicate where lie your interests. If you find that you fit into the capitalist classification and you enjoy the privileges and luxuries that go with membership of that class, then your interest is apparently to keep things going in the same old way so that your privilege and luxury can continue.

But if the more probable is the case and you are one of our fellow workers, what then? You will find that your interests run in two channels. In the first you will find that, as a member of the working class, you will have to wage a continual struggle to maintain your living standards, to say nothing of the struggle to try to improve them. You will be living on wages and your employer will resist your efforts to increase them. He will always want more for his money and you will be carrying on a ceaseless struggle against him. You do not have to be class-conscious for that. All workers, even those who delude themselves that they are little capitalists, have no alternative but to struggle to get what they can out of the present social set-up. But if you are class-conscious you will wage that struggle with your eyes peeled and you will not expect from it more than it is possible to achieve—which is mighty little.

Of course, you will not be satisfied with mighty little, so you will seek a way to achieve a life free from struggle and free from all the ills that beset members of the working class. You will realise that, no matter what you gain by your struggle to improve your wages and conditions, the members of the opposing class still live in comfort and leisure and the political machinery is frequently used to nullify some small gain that you may have made. Then you turn your attention to politics.

It is to be expected that, if you have discovered that there are very narrow limits set on what you can achieve by struggling within the present social system, you will turn your activities towards putting an end to that system. If it does not serve your interests, why retain it? It is in the interests of the capitalist class to retain it, but you should strive to abolish it.

On the political field you will find many parties which aim to make all sorts of alterations to the present social system, but which will show their venom when anyone suggests abolishing it. Yet that is where your interests lie, not in struggling to crawl out of your class into the capitalist class, which is well nigh impossible, but in striving to end a class system of society altogether. Even if you manage to get yourself into that money-grabbing clique termed “middle class” you still need to end the system that makes you sweat for hours each day in order to get a living. And there is always some more “ successful ” fellow who is ready to give you a back kick and send you back to the ranks of the working class again.

There you are. Make up your mind to which class you belong. If you are of die working class, then get off your knees, stand up and be a man and fight to achieve a society that can offer you a life worth living. You have been a tame and docile wage worker long enough, voting for political quacks who have led you up every garden path they can find. Take a look round, find a political party composed of people like yourself who are also class-conscious and who know what they are after. Roll up your sleeves. Until you do you are holding up those who do want to get on with it So, get weaving and let us hear from you.

W. Waters

Human Nature (1951)

From the December 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

Of all the bugs that have ever bitten the working class, the Human Nature one is perhaps the most persistent as well as the most illogical. There is certainly no socialist who has not heard repeatedly the statement that Human Nature is against Socialism, or that the people of this country would not stand for socialism.

Of course the words they choose to clothe their arguments are just as incorrect as the objection itself. It is Human Nature to eat when you are hungry, to drink when you are thirsty, and to sleep when you are tired. These things are part of the inherent nature of human beings as indeed of all biological organisms. Nothing can alter this and nobody wants to change it— least of all socialists. What is meant by Human Nature, as used by those who trot it out as an objection, is not human nature at all, but human behaviour. Now human behaviour is quite another thing and its roots are to be found principally in one’s environment and the economic conditions which influences one’s physiological make-up.

Man behaves in the way he does, very largely, although not completely, because of the conditioning he receives from his environment, since he is a social animal and lives in a community.

Normally a Bishop would not steal food, but if he were placed in an environment in which he had no choice but to steal food or die of starvation, his behaviour would be dictated by his environment. He would thus break the 8th Commandment, and be forced to excuse or justify himself by the unfortunate conditions in which he found himself (or which surrounded him).

Now what does the objector find in socialism which warrants his statement that human nature (behaviour) would not stand for it? His only answer appears to be that the workers would not tolerate the regimentation, the filling up of forms, and being told to do this, that, or the other. Indeed not only has the objector a false conception of human nature, but also (as usual), a completely false conception of Socialism. Who knows what the workers will or will not stand for? At least we can be sure that they have stood for two world wars almost without a murmur; and at present they appear to be standing for the preparation for a third.

In England they have stood for rationing for about 12 years, and with the end not yet in sight. They have stood for conservative and labour governments. "The labour party promised them everything and gave them nothing; while the conservatives promised them nothing and saw that they got it.” They have been through crises of unemployment and privations galore, and have received untold promises of better times to come if only they tighten in their belts and work for the common good. But in the end there still remains the struggle for their livelihood and the division of society into two classes, one of which owns the means of production and exploits the other.

Where therefore do the human nature objectors stand? Surely they are condoning the existence of a system which means the continuance of their own exploitation, whether they know it or not? Human nature (behaviour) can be made to tolerate some strange things. What socialism in effect means is the emancipation from exploitation by a ruling class, and if the workers won’t stand for their own emancipation, then things are certainly in a bad way.

Horace Jarvis

From Whence Came Capital? (1951)

From the December 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once we were often told at our propaganda meetings that the capitalists obtained their wealth by hard work and saving. We are pleased to say that this is not told us so often now, which is an indication of the increase in the knowledge of politics and economics on the part of the working-class. It is the workers and not the capitalists who work hard and the only thing it will bring them is to an early grave. The workers are also the savers. They save for a holiday, or against sickness, or unemployment and some other unexpected expenditure. But however much they save it can never be enough to enable them to start out as capitalists. Capitalists don't work hard. They needn't. They have others to work hard for them. They may, and probably do save, but many of them have such large incomes that spend as they will they cannot use them all, and there is a balance left over for reinvestment.

And now let us talk about capital. What is it? It is wealth used for the production of more wealth by the exploitation of human labour power, or in a short way, money invested for the purpose of profit. This is the one thing that all capitalists must possess, and the thing that workers must possess if they aim at becoming capitalists. Need more be said? Is it not obvious that born members of the working-class, we shall remain members of the working-class until we die. We are sometimes asked how a worker can become a capitalist. The answer is ridiculously simple. Choose the right parents! With parents members of the capitalist class, you can be a capitalist before you can gurgle "Da-Da." But we committed the cardinal error of choosing working-class parents, and so we shall live and die members of the working-class.

We think it might be of interest now to examine the foundations of the wealth of the capitalist class of this country. It is a story of horror, blood and slaughter. For example, large amounts of wealth were obtained by piracy. Raleigh, Drake and other noted sea-captains of their day were nothing but pirates who preyed on Spanish ships coming from South America laden with gold and treasure. It is true that this treasure had been stolen by the Spaniards from the Incas of Peru and the aristocracy of Mexico, and that the mass of the population of Peru and Mexico have lived in direst poverty while their masters were in luxury. But where is the legal genius who can justify theft on the grounds that the things stolen had already been the subject of theft?

Another source of early capital was the Lombards. These were Italians who settled in London from the 12th to the 17th centuries. Hence Lombard Street in the heart of the financial centre of the world. These Lombards were, of course, strict Roman Catholics, and lending money at interest was anathema to Catholicism. But the Lombards did not allow religious scruples to interfere with business, so they lent large sums of money to English merchants and traders. The Dutch, too, when their commercial supremacy was ended, lent large sums to the English.

India, too, played its part in providing capital for early English capitalism. The main channel for this was the East India company, and its higher employees. The Indian peasants suffered severely from the activities of these people. They cornered essential foodstuffs and sent the price sky-rocketing. They cornered rice, an essential part of the Indian peasants' diet and those peasants who could not pay the very high prices were permitted to starve.

Bu the blackest page in English mercantile history is undoubtedly the slave trade. For three hundred years English merchants carried on this foul trade. It is computed that in all 5,000,000 Africans who went into slavery in America and millions more either died on the voyage or in the slave raids. But it was a source of considerable wealth to those operating it. It is said that large numbers of churches and chapels in Bristol, Southampton and Liverpool were built with money made in the slave trade.

And then after 300 years it was abolished. But those loudest in their denunciation of it were stalwart defenders of child slavery in England, when children of eight years of age were working in mill and mine.

And so we have given you a short history of where capital came from in the first instance. It is a story of blood and horror.

True these sort of things don't happen now. But now in order to defend their system the capitalists are prepared to sacrifice the lives of millions of workers in their wars. Do you not think it is time you ended it?

Clifford Groves