At Home and Abroad . . . (1971)

The Home and Abroad Column from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Review December 1971

At Home

It is impossible to sympathise with the howls of frustrated rage over the cynical semantics of the Compton report on the interrogation methods of the British in Northern Ireland. The military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph pointed out that the methods employed were also used on some British shock troops, with the idea of training them to resist pressure if they were ever captured. This was of course a poor attempt at justifying the methods used by the British but it did underline the fact that brutal interrogation is widely used, on all sides, in war. And anyone who really expected the inquiry to come up with anything other than a whitewash themselves need some sort of interrogation but on a psychiatrist’s couch.

Cynical semantics have also been used by government spokesmen about two of their most pressing problems. When he addressed the well-fed Institute of Directors at their annual conference, Chancellor of the Exchequer Barber forgot all about the mounting unemployment and claimed that we are about to experience the biggest boom for years, that the economy is expanding and that price restraint is working. Perhaps he was drunk—the directors always enjoy a good lunch, with a small bottle of wine. Shortly afterwards Barber’s colleague Peter Walker, not to be outdone, was burbling out the same stale old promises about housing which we have been hearing for so long. His new Housing Bill, he said, is the most important reform in the field this century and then, like housing ministers before him, he made the ritual promise about slums. Walker, who lives in a posh house himself, reckons that he will have cleared the slums up in ten years. There is no mitigating evidence, that he was drunk.

Abroad

Never before have the protests about Bomb tests been taken as high as those about America’s latest one underneath the island of Amchitka. If this indicates a heightening of the energy of the protesters, it also hints that their unrealistic hysteria is becoming acute. Surely they didn’t expect the Supreme Court to rule that human interests should come before those of the American ruling class? To overturn every priority, every assumption, upon which capitalism everywhere works? Perhaps in future they will realise the order of things under capitalism and then begin working against the system instead of against one of its effects.

Meanwhile, another of the world’s nuclear powers—and one where there is no opportunity to protest against its Bomb tests—was finally allowed to join the club. China’s entry into the United Nations, although a big diplomatic defeat for Nixon, showed the contempt with which the UN (which, we may remember, was once going to be the means to a securely peaceful world) is treated by the world powers. In the old days America would never have allowed such a defeat. For after all the fine words and the lies about it, the United Nations is little more than an international gangsters’ club. It is fitting that the latest recruit to the top league of international capitalism should at last be welcomed into it—bombs and all.

Politics

Despite the recent upheaval in the Labour Party over the Common Market, it was a fairly safe bet that Jenkins would beat Foot for the Deputy Leadership. Most of the press applauded the vote, as a sign that Labour is still interested in men of principle and honesty. In its present depression, Labour could do with a new hope; even the problems which the Tories are finding in trying to run British capitalism have not yet erased the memories of those six gloomy years of Labour rule. So once again we have a rising star, who is going to lead us to yet another promised land. In this one incident we have all the history of capitalist politics; promise and disillusionment, confidence and panic, hope and despair. This wearying process goes on year in and year out, with each successive leader being hailed as the answer to our problems then quickly exposed for a futile trickster. And none of them, yet, has been honest enough to admit it.

Honesty is a word very foreign to the Communist Party, whose recent national congress came well up to the expectations of those who always look to the Communists to provide some hilarious political double acts. This year, of course, they had to talk about Northern Ireland, and to hammer out a typical reformist line. They showed a touching concern for the catholic minority, then took the line that the best thing to happen was for the British troops, whose methods have been under such fire, to stay there. This was typical of the confusion and the trickery of the Communist Party, who as usual are dabbling their hands in the blood of the workers in the hope of fishing up a few miserable scraps of ignorant support.

Blogger's Note:

See the article, 'Northern Ireland: The Gentle Art of Interrogation ', from the same issue of the Socialist Standard.

Doing the Splits (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

How seriously should we take the splits in the Labour and Conservative parties over the Common Market ? Is there likely to be some massive realignment of capitalist politics, with Roy Jenkins leading a coalition of Liberals and pro-Market Labourites in a new party ? Will the great machine of capitalist politics suffer irreparable damage, or can we still sleep of nights secure in the knowledge that it will continue to deceive, coerce and exploit us ?

To begin with, nobody should allow themselves to think that the splits have anything to do with principles. Of course all members of the capitalist parties say their political allegiance is based on principle, but issues like the Common Market, which they say are also matters of fundamental principle, cross the party lines so that George Brown agrees with Heath, Wilson with Enoch Powell and so on. This shows how flexible are the “principles” of our parties and it tells us something about their splits.

One notable, but not unusual, feature of the splits over the Common Market is that both the big parties are suffering at the same time. This makes it difficult for either of them to adopt the attitude of pious shock which they affect when only the other side is split. Then they can say that such disputes are evidence of their opponents’ irresponsibility. When they themselves are divided on some issue they claim that this goes to show what a lively lot they are, vibrant with debate yet tolerant and united enough to contain the argument and apply it for the benefit of all those voters outside. This is all part of the jolly game of politics.

In this country, it is the Labour Party who have become famous for their splits, very often splashing them into the public eye. This has tended to promote the idea that the Tories are more stable and united but there is some evidence that this is not true. Since the 1929 Labour government, the Labour Party have had only four leaders—Lansbury, Attlee, Gaitskell and now Wilson—and of these Lansbury was never more than a caretaker after the defection of MacDonald. During the same period the Tories have had seven leaders —Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Home and Heath—and in almost every case they have changed to the accompaniment of a public dispute.

At the same time, behind those gentlemanly Tory facades, there have been fierce splits over matters of policy. For example, Macmillan was much occupied with persuading his party to move out of the Edwardian era (which he was said to personify) and to accept the decline of the British Commonwealth. This seemed to be no more than accepting the obvious and the inevitable, but Macmillan was bitterly fought by a strong section of the Tories headed by Lord Salisbury, who always looked and spoke and thought like an archetypal Tory backwoodsman. For Salisbury, the final blow was the surrender of independence to Cyprus and he resigned to snipe at the Tories for their policies on the old Empire and to mumble about the shocking treatment being handed out to our kith and kin in Rhodesia.

Life was no more placid for the Tories before the war. They were split on the best method of dealing with the rebirth of German capitalism; when that matter was settled in the forties they found scapegoats for their own doubts and disunity in Baldwin and Chamberlain. Of these two, Chamberlain always kept a pretty firm grip on his party, at least until the end, but Baldwin’s career at the top was almost continual turmoil, as he was under constant attack.

The Labour Party do not have the Tories’ reputation of the party of gentlemen and usually conduct their rows like public house brawls. Perhaps that is why they are so famous for their splits, which have very often blinded the voters to the fact that Labour is always solidly united on the basic issue of trying for power to run British capitalism. Their most damaging split, in 1931, was not on any fundamental issue; they were united in the opinion that the working class had to suffer in some way during that time of crisis for British capitalism. None of them ever suggested Socialism as a way out of the whole sorry mess.

Having survived the debacle in 1931, Labour had a comparatively tranquil time until they came to power after the war, when the group which eventually became known as the Bevanites were constantly rocking the boat, which was in any case leaky and unstable. Here again the splits were never on fundamentals but were always over the best—often, quite openly, the most vote catching — methods of running British capitalism. In the end, at the Brighton conference of 1957, Bevan shocked many of the followers to whom he was a new Messiah by publicly making his peace with Gaitskell. The conference was debating nuclear armaments and Bevan, who was supposed to be the man who would guide us all to Socialism, argued that British capitalism needed these arms to protect its position against the other capitalist powers and that failure to recognise this would be electorally disastrous.

At that time the Labour Party, in the aftermath of Suez, were smelling the approach of power. In the event the Tories hung on and when the election came in 1959 Labour’s defeat threw them into another uproar of dispute, with the Gaitskellites arguing that the party’s traditional policies (or rather their traditional propaganda, because the policies were so easily ignored by governments) should be abandoned. This was to be, not because the policies were not socialist, not even that they went against working class interests under capitalism. It was simply that they lost the party votes. The next couple of years saw another row, this time over nuclear weapons, until Wilson came along and settled the whole matter by running British capitalism with a single-minded concern for the interests of the ruling class, while assuring everybody that he was doing something entirely different.

It very often happens, that a split reveals a future leader—sometimes in the role of peacemaker, like Wilson, sometimes as a man of honesty. In this Common Market split in the Labour Party, Roy Jenkins has come into prominence; he has been a consistent supporter of British capitalism joining Europe and perhaps one explanation of all the coverage he has had recently is the publicity boys’ surprise at finding a politician who says the same thing on more than one occasion.

It is distinctly pathetic, to see the Labour Party putting so much faith in Jenkins, perhaps as an overreaction to the exposure of Wilson as a tawdry trickster. They were once similarly hopeful about Wilson, as they were about all the many leaders who disappointed them before. Once again they are ignoring facts; the records show that Jenkins is no less cynical, no less a vote-grabbing politician, than the rest. For example, in a book he wrote in 1959 — The Labour Case — he avowed that Labour’s policies could be carried out “. . . without any question of an increase in the tax burden. On the contrary, they should leave room for substantial reductions.”

Apart from the fact that Jenkins was here descending in his anxiety to grab votes for his party, to pandering to the ignorance of workers who think the level of taxation affects their material interests, it is clear now that he was making another of those empty politicians’ promises. The Wilson government based a lot of their policies on steeply increased taxation—and Jenkins, as Chancellor of the Exchequer for about two years, was directly responsible for a lot of it. He was the inspiration for a lot of the Wilson government’s attacks on workers’ living standards, frequently lecturing us from the television screen on our spendthrift ways which were causing such terrible poverty among the grouse moors and the slums of Park Lane and Eaton Square. In a recent debate in the Commons (see The Guardian, 10 November 1971) he denounced unemployment just as if his government was not in power when it first became a serious problem and attacked the Tories for their ". . . silly little argument . . . that unemployment was an inevitable result of wage claims, and that those responsible must just take the consequences.” Yet this is what he said when he was Chancellor, at a union conference which was debating a motion condemning an incomes policy backed by legal sanctions:

An uncontrolled wages situation could undermine the Government’s central purpose, by putting back into people’s hands the purchasing power that the Budget had siphoned off . . . (The Times 25/4/69).

Jenkins is said to be a “liberal”, yet he did not resign over the racist laws passed by the Wilson government, which outdid the Tories in pandering to working class colour prejudice. He supported the reintroduction of prescription charges — much higher than the Tory charges which Labour had stopped; the raising of the school leaving age, the end of free school milk, the cuts in the housing programme. He was prominent in a government which kept the British nuclear weaponry. And that is only part of the list of anti-working class acts for which honest Roy, martyr to his conscience, must take his full share of responsibility.

So if the Labour Party decide to put their faith in Jenkins as yet another new saviour, they will be as bitterly disappointed as they were with Wilson, MacDonald and the rest. Jenkins may look and speak like a stern, unbending schoolmaster but what he actually is, is an ambitious capitalist politician. His function is to get power to run the affairs of the British capitalist class and to carry this out he is quite ready to join in the deception and the trickery which make an essential part of capitalist politics.

When the uproar over the Common Market has died down and workers who have been so fascinated by it, and who have been deceived into taking sides, have settled back into their proper, lowly place in capitalist society another incident will have been written into the history of politics. Then the whole futile business can start all over again.

Ivan

Tories Again Steal Labour’s Clothes (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1957 the Labour Party Conference adopted a new pensions policy to which they gave the grandiose title of “National Superannuation”. Under their proposals, said their policy statement.

“there would be two elements in the State pension, a flat-rate element and a graded element. Every insured worker, including those in approved private schemes, would be entitled to receive the flat-rate element, as they do now, whereas only those covered by National Superannuation would receive the new graded element. Thus everyone in the country, when they reach the approved age, would draw (1) a flat-rate pension and (2) a graded pension, due to him either from an occupational scheme or from National Superannuation.”

Employers were to contribute more towards the cost of National Superannuation than the workers and some of the money was to be invested in stocks and shares.

At that time, neither pensions nor contributions were related to earnings (or “graded”): everybody paid the same National Insurance stamp and got the same pension, while those who had no income apart from this pittance had to resort to National Assistance.

Labour had hoped that this vague but superficially attractive promise of “Half Pay on Retirement” (as Richard Crossman once unwisely put it) would win them the next election. Imagine their dismay when the Tories announced in the election year of 1959 that they were to introduce earnings-related pensions themselves. This State Graduated Pension Scheme was denounced by the Labour Party, with some justice, as the “Tory swindle”. It is still going and pays a man the princely pension of 2½p a week for every £7.50 he pays in! Even the Tories recognise that it has been an utter failure and now propose to abolish it (and swindle its victims even more by not protecting them against inflation).

Elected to power in 1964, Labour set to work on their National Superannuation Scheme. They didn’t exactly give this matter any priority as it was not until 1969 that the details—to apply from April 1972—were announced. Even then, what emerged was somewhat different from the original 1957 policy. Instead of two State pensions, one flat-rate and one earnings-related, there was to be only one earnings-related State pension; employers and workers were to pay the same; the money was not to be invested in stocks and shares; and only the lowest paid were to get half-pay on retirement (a big deal that would have been, seeing they could hardly live on full pay).

Grossman’s National Superannuation and Social Insurance Bill was still going through Parliament in June last year when the Labour government was kicked out. The Tories had criticised the Bill as too complicated, but had promised their own reform of pensions. Their alternative plan was published in September in the White Paper Strategy for Pensions. What is interesting about these proposals is their amazing similarity to Labour’s 1957 plan. The passage quoted earlier could well have been Sir Keith Joseph explaining the new Tory proposals.

The Tories propose a basic flat-rate pension from the State (like the present below-the-poverty-line £6 a week) which everybody will get and an earnings-related pension either from a private scheme or from the “State Reserve Scheme”. It is this Reserve Scheme that bears the resemblance to Labour’s original National Superannuation. For not only will employers pay more towards it than workers but its funds will be invested in stocks and shares. When Labour had proposed this in 1957 it was greeted by howls of “back-door nationalisation” by the Tories. Now, apparently, they have changed their minds and done what not even Crossman dared to do.

The Tory plan also involves another measure which might have been expected to come from a Labour government: there will be earnings-related contributions for the basic flat-rate pension. In other words, the higher paid will pay more than the lower paid but will only get the same pension.

Labour would have claimed that this was part of some plan to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. It is nothing of the sort since the fortunes of the wealthy are to be left untouched. It is really only redistributing income from the not-so-poor to the poor, a redistribution of poverty amongst the working class. Labour’s bill would have had a similar effect and this in fact is all most social reforms can amount to under capitalism.

That the Tories can introduce reforms originally proposed by Labour is a further proof that the two parties are basically the same. They are both committed to capitalism and are both trying to solve its problems without upsetting the profit motive. So it is hardly surprising that they both come up with similar reforms.

The present need to reform State pensions is the result of the failure of the previous Labour/Tory pensions policy. Nearly thirty years ago now, they were both agreed on another plan to “abolish want in old age” —the Beveridge Report. The recommendations of this Report were embodied in the National Insurance Scheme set up in 1948 and still extant. Today this Scheme provides on retirement a miserable pittance which, even the government’s own White Paper admits, is about £2 below the poverty line so that one in three pensioners are forced to apply for means-tested National Assistance or “supplementary benefit” as it is now cynically called.

Anyway, earnings-related pensions are only supposed to abolish—some time next century, according to the government’s own figures — destitution in old age. Poverty, in the sense of being deprived of control over the means of production and its products, is the normal condition of the class of wage and salary earners, during their working lives just as much as during retirement. It is only because they are poor that workers need doles to protect them from destitution in old age.

We doubt, however, if the new reforms will ensure that no old worker falls below the poverty line, especially since the Tory proposals, like Labour’s Bill, envisage the continuation of the modern Poor Law known as the Supplementary Benefits Commission. Poverty, and in some cases destitution, in old age will be the lot of the working class as long as capitalism lasts no matter how many social reforms are made.

Adam Buick

Warning — this system is dangerous (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Peter Simple, the columnist who plugs a consistently comfortable, almost invulnerable, reactionary line in the Daily Telegraph, has often turned his acid pen against the people who sought to prove with their statistics and experiments and surveys that cigarette smoking is a factor in causing death by lung cancer. It was not simply a matter of an individual’s right to puff his way into an early grave if he wanted; to Simple, smoking was part of the slow, feudalistic way of life which he imagines (and it is only imagination) was once lived by the people of this country.

So any fan of the column must have turned to it with trembling hands, after the most recent anti-smoking report from the Royal College of Physicians. Sure enough, there was a passage on the report. But at the end of an unusually mild attack, Peter Simple had to confess himself baffled by it all; why did they attack smoking? Why? Why? It was all rather disappointing, especially as it showed that the columnist had not read even the press reports of the document, some of which quoted the vital reason for it all: 

Government and Parliament must decide between an easy source of revenue and the preservation of the lives, health and productive capacity of the people they serve. 

Now what this quotation from the report indicates is that we have here a case just like many which have gone before. “Productive capacity” is vital to industry, to employers; since it depends upon the lives and health of the producers then any employer who keeps the most casual eye on his profits must start to worry if he has reason to think that the lives and health of his employees are being threatened.

The only chance of a large, official campaign against smoking was that there would be enough evidence that it was damaging the profits of the employers. The evidence about the possible effects of it on health has been there for a long time; the crucial point is when it is likely that there are also effects on productive capacity, or profits, or some other aspect of the worker/employee relationship. It was the same with the Clean Air Acts and with the measures aimed against noise, pollution and the like. It is the same, still, with the countless combined eyesores and threats to safety such as the coal tips in South Wales, where the “economic” case for removal is not officially considered to have been made out four years after Aberfan.

We can approach this point from another direction, by looking at one of the report’s ideas to persuade people to stop smoking. This was to print on all packets a warning of the possible effect of smoking. This has already been put into practice and nobody can now draw out a cigarette without being confronted with the awful words "Warning — smoking can damage your health”. This may or may not be an effective idea; there is a case that the words of warning might only go to make the smoke more enjoyable, spicing it with thrills of guilt and danger.

But the main point is that it is surprising that this technique should be confined to cigarettes. An average of something like twenty people are killed on the roads every day, but nobody has yet suggested daubing the doors of all road vehicles with the words “Caution — this machine is potentially lethal.” And while we are on the subject of death, what are they doing, allowing all those advertisements for the armed forces and none of them with a warning that the forces’ job is to train killers to protect the interests of their master class?

And what about the other, innumerable, ways in which capitalism, in the name of profit and the rights of a privileged society, simply murders people? We are thinking here not so much of the quick, easily identifiable death like the road accident and the battle but the slow erosion of life — the coal miner with his lungs gradually filling up with dust; the asbestos worker with a horrible death in prospect; and all of us, whoever we are and wherever we live or work, who are subject to the atmosphere which is foully polluted because at present capitalism thinks it is cheaper to pump its muck into the air than to find other ways of dealing with it.

Every factory, then, every mine, every aircraft, almost everything which capitalism uses in the march of its profit-based activity, should have some sort of warning on it, shouting out the damage which it does to us — and the reason it happens. Food which is devitalised and adulterated to make it more easily marketable should carry a label telling us what has happened to it and what is likely to happen to us if we consume it. The homes we live in should have a notice on their door, telling us that they are inferior buildings which are uncomfortable and cramped and are full of dangers to health and life (the home is at present the biggest killer of all — it is all done, they say, by “accident”.)

Then there are the health hazards which are even less identifiable, which are insidious but none the less deadly. These are often matters of pressure upon us, matters of the sheer struggle to live, to survive, to get to and from work, to keep out of debt, to raise children, to hold a job. Sometimes it is even a matter of finding somewhere to live. Not so long ago, there was a case in the Appeal Court in which nine homeless families who were squatting in some houses owned by the Southwark Borough Council were ordered to move out. There was no doubt about the desperate plight of these people; the council’s man in court said their conditions were “heart rending”. But the judges did their job; one of them summed it up with the words:

It must be in the interests of law and order to protect the title of property such as these.

Yet at the same time the judges were also saying how sorry they were for the squatters. They were using words like “deepest sympathy” and “deep depression and oppression”. Unusual perhaps for words like that to come down from the bench; but if that was how the judges felt, how did the situation affect the squatters? How much of their health, their life, was simply worn away by a desperate plight which had to stay like that to protect the title of property?

But of course such situations can only be known to a certain social type. The inferior standards of living, the life without privilege, without security, without comfort, is the life of the worker. He is the person who has to struggle and who is never far from the razor edge, if not actually balanced on it or indeed toppled off it. He is the person whose health and life suffer because he is simply not permitted, by his social station, to live free. He must be suppressed and degraded; he must accept second, third, fourth best. And it makes no difference, that he is in the majority and that he makes up all the socially useful people in society.

What it amounts to is that capitalism should wear one great big label, warning everyone of what it is doing to them. It should tell them that it is a system in which only a few have the opportunity to live like human beings and they do this on the backs of the many. It should tell them that it is a society where everything we need is made so that a minority can profit by it, which means that all our welfares and lives are under continual assault and in constant danger. It should tell us that all the health hazards and all the tensions can be ascribed to the basic inhumanity and craziness of capitalism.

All members of the working class should have these labels, and they should have them from the day they are born because it is from then that the assault of capitalism upon them begins in earnest. And it carries on until they are in their graves.

Ivan

50 Years Ago: Russia’s New Economic Policy (1971)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why this new change of policy? Larin’s explanation is worth noting. A decree had been issued in November 1918 under which —

Trading in the products of domestic craft and small private industry remained free both for individuals and for the co-operative societies . . . But here we met with political reasons which paralysed our policy in practice — and these reasons must be sought for, not amongst the peasantry, and not amongst the workers. The town bourgeoisie itself simply refused to trade and refused to carry on its small undertakings. The laws remained, but the stores and workshops became empty, as the owners would not any longer risk their capital under the Bolsheviks. (Labour Monthly, November 1921.)

Larin’s explanation, however, is to some extent contradicted by Lenin. In the weekly edition of the Manchester Guardian, for 11 November, is a report of a speech by Lenin, taken from two communist papers—the Berlin Novy Pont and the Riga Novy Mir. According to this report Lenin stated that

their economic policy during the first period assumed the possibility of passing directly from the old economic system to the State control of production and to distribution on a communist basis.

It will be seen that this statement contradicts Larin’s claims, while further on Lenin, after referring to their being compelled to wage civil war, continues :- 

Under the influence of this state of things and of the desperate situation in which the Republic then was, under the influence of other circumstances of which this is not the time to speak, we made a blunder; we decided to pass immediately to communist production and distribution.

Despite the contradictions between Larin and Lenin, they are both agreed upon the fundamental fact—namely, that it was impossible to establish Socialism in Russia to-day, and that, therefore they must allow capitalism to operate, beginning with small industry and trading. Surely a striking tribute to Marx. 

[From an article The Force of Conditions, by Jack Fitzgerald, Socialist Standard, December 1921].

SPGB Lectures and Special Meetings (1971)

Party News from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Slump Deepens (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nobody knows how deep the present depression will go, how far it will spread and how long it will last, but there are plenty of ominous signs. At first, some two years ago, the British Press had its eyes on growing trade and unemployment difficulties in America, then it became apparent that conditions were rapidly worsening in Britain. Now we read reports of troubles in Japan and the countries in the Common Market. The Observer (7 November) under the heading “Fear and Depression hits Europe” reported:

Western Europe has been seized by recession jitters. The economics of the main industrial returns are still far from a crisis situation, but bankers and industrialists in France, West Germany and Italy are intensely alarmed by the outlook for 1972.

The government here tries to stimulate optimism by declaring that we are on the verge of big expansion, but, as the Times recalls in its issue of 5 November, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was making the same kind of hopeful forecast exactly a year earlier. This is the common pattern of all the recessions capitalism has ever had. Nixon’s government was also a case in point. First the promise that there would be no recession, then the denial that it had begun, then the late admission that it was a little one and would soon be over and finally the complete reversal of policy by his government in August last—a clear confession that the policy that was to have solved the problem had in fact not worked.

The First National City Bank of New York, in their monthly Economic Letter, were caught napping by this. They were so impressed by an article written by Paul W. McCracken, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, in which he explained “clearly and persuasively” why the Nixon government would not adopt the Galbraith policy of imposing controls on prices and wages that they re-published the article in their August issue; only to find that by the time it was in print the Nixon government had imposed a 90 day freeze on prices and wages, to be followed by a policy of “guide lines”.

This policy of controls was reported to have been well received, apart from a certain amount of trade union mistrust, just as the Heath promise to curb price rises helped him to win the Election in June 1970.

Most people believe that things would be better and life would be easier if only prices were stabilised or reduced. This is a complete illusion, a failure to understand how capitalism works. To start with nobody actually wants all prices to be reduced: what they all want is that the prices of the things they buy should be reduced and the prices of the things they sell kept as they are or increased. This includes the workers, none of whom want to see a reduction of their wages —which also are prices, the prices at which they sell their mental and physical energies (their labour power) to the employers. The workers also want “full employment”.

Here they come up against the cruel truth about capitalism. The employers have paid off hundreds of thousands of workers because at present selling prices and costs of production (including wages) they cannot make a profit. If they saw the prospect of a profit they would re-engage them to-morrow. From the employers’ point of view the solution lies in raising their selling prices, or reducing costs, including wages, or cutting their total costs by getting the same amount of work out of fewer workers. All of this is subject to the overriding condition that the goods produced can be sold, and at the present time world markets are shrinking and competitors abroad are also trying to cut their costs.

Though it had not attracted much general attention some prices have been falling, notably the metals copper, aluminium, antimony, silver. The price of copper has fallen from about £700 a ton early in 1970 to about £400—due to overproduction. It is being met by agreement to curtail production, with a consequent increase in unemployment. If the depression deepens and extends generally to other countries all prices could be stabilised or actually fall. Capitalism is behaving normally, going through its phases of expansion, boom, crisis and stagnation just as Marx depicted it a century ago. What has obscured the effect of these phases is that governments have superimposed on the normal workings of capitalism a steady depreciation of money itself.

This has led monetary economists such as Milton Friedman to offer as a remedy a curtailment of the increase of the money supply and a consequent restriction on the general rise of prices. It would not solve the problem of capitalism’s alternating expansion and contraction. Capitalism works like this at any price level, high or low. In the years 1920-1924 prices fell by a third and wages by rather more, with unemployment reaching peaks of over 2½ million in 1921 and 1933 and never falling below a million.

Would any of the various forms of controls of prices and wages avoid depressions? The answer is that every possible variety has been tried and failed. What is happening now is that the governments are shopping around, as is Nixon’s trying the cast-off methods which have been used elsewhere. All the short lived “miracle” countries are in the same situation. No longer do we hear about the Japanese miracle, the French miracle, the German miracle and so on.

The latest to start moving into depression is Sweden, just when John Davies, Secretary for Trade and Industry gave an interview in the Director (November) saying that he rather liked the Swedish version of incomes policy even though it wouldn’t be practicable in this country at present.

In this country some form of incomes policy has been tried half a dozen times by Labour and Tory governments since the war and all have failed and been abandoned.

The last was the Labour government’s imposition of a “standstill” for six months in 1966, followed by six months “severe restraint”. (This policy was imposed only four months after the General Election of March 1966 without any mention in the Labour Election Manifesto that it was intended). It completely failed to prevent prices and unemployment rising, and the Heath government have been even less successful.

It may be hard to accept but is nevertheless true that there are no ways, with or without an ‘incomes’ policy, to prevent capitalism from behaving in accordance with its own economic laws.

Edgar Hardcastle

Non-Revolutionary Unionism (1971)

Book Review from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Revolutionary Syndicalism in France, by F. F. Ridley. Cambridge University Press. £4.20.

This is a study of the theory and practice of the French equivalent of the TUC, the Confédération Génerale du Travail, in its syndicalist period from 1900 to 1914.

The basic unit of worker organisation in France at this time was the syndicat, or local union of workers in the same trade. Hence “syndicalism”, which on its own is really just the French word for trade unionism. The CGT leaders described their policy as “revolutionary” syndicalism. They were anarchists and wanted the unions to stage a general strike to overthrow capitalism and set up a moneyless, wageless, Stateless society where the unions would control production.

The bulk OF the CGT members, however, were just militant trade unionists, interested mainly in fighting the day-to-day struggle to improve wages and conditions within capitalism. Most of the CGT’S policies for this struggle—political neutrality so as not to divide workers who need unity to defend their economic interests; recognition of the class struggle between the workers and the capitalists and their government; strike action; the only real gains are those the workers get by their own action—were just good trade unionism. Others such as sabotage and intimidation were, as we shall see, a sign of the movement’s weakness.

The anarcho-syndicalist leaders of the CGT were in the same sort of position on the industrial front as the Social Democrats were on the political front: workers supported them not because they wanted to overthrow capitalism, but because they felt that their policies would bring some improvements within capitalism. Like Socialism for the Social Democratic parties, the General Strike became for the CGT a more and more ultimate aim which had little reference to its day-to-day activity, except perhaps as an inspiration. Ridley brings out this point well.

The CGT was no more an anarchist organisation than the Social Democratic parties were socialist. Its pretensions too were exposed at the outbreak of the first World War, though it seems to have been a reasonably good trade union body for its time.

Ridley brings out a number of other valid points. Wage and salary earners were a minority both of the population and of the electorate in the France of this period. Of the 12 million wage and salary earners, only about 836,000, or less than 7 per cent, were organised and less than half of these were in the CGT. The CGT, in other words, only represented about 2 to 3 per cent of the working class. As Ridley says,

  in a sense, violence is the only path open to the weak. There is a close relationship between weak, unorganised labour movements and the outbreak of revolutionary or anarchist activity in Russia, Spain and Italy, as well as in France.

French industry too was backward. The syndicalist slogan “The Workshops to the Workers” was taken literally to mean that the small-scale workshops where many French workers were employed would be run by the syndicats, or local unions. It is significant that the nation-wide unions representing workers employed in large-scale industry—mines, textiles, railways, post office—though in the CGT were opponents of its anarchist leaders.

The General Strike was originally put forward as an alternative to the ballot box as a peaceful way to end capitalism. But, as the Socialist Party of Great Britain pointed out at the time, experience of much lesser strikes showed that any such move would be met by the violence of the State. And. why if a majority can be persuaded to strike for Socialism don’t they at least try the easier way—the ballot box—first?

The cult of action, or action-for-action’s sake, some syndicalist theoreticians espoused was shared also by extreme nationalists and monarchists which, as Ridley suggests, is why after the first World War so many of them found it easy to go over to fascism. Mussolini himself, though never an anarcho-syndicalist as such, was a leading figure on the direct-actionist wing of the Italian Socialist Party before the war. Ridley also says that it is wrong to see Sorel’s Reflections on Violence as a statement of syndicalist principles since Sorel was not a syndicalist leader or militant; he was only someone who happened to sympathise with some aspects of syndicalism at the time he wrote his book.

Unthinking activism and contempt for democratic discussion and peaceful persuasion—break-up of meetings, lectures and sports matches, confrontations with the police, physical attacks and threats against people with different views—is again being indulged in by the assorted followers of Mao, Guevara and Trotsky without their realising its dangers. This is vehemently opposed by the Socialist Party.

Professor Ridley’s book is a good analysis of syndicalism, though some may find the philosophical discussion in the third part a little abstruse.

Adam Buick

Northern Ireland: The Gentle Art of Interrogation (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anybody living in Northern Ireland today who doubts the assertion that the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary are waging a vicious war against that section of the working class who are Catholics or who question the allegation that part of the weaponry of that war are brutality and torture can carry out his own inquiry.

There are a number of approaches.

For example, one could go into a Catholic district almost any night and linger in the vicinity of a street corner until the inevitable military patrol comes along. When one has been called a “fucking Irish pig”, or a “fenian bastard” or when one has been put against a wall and had one’s ankles or knees kicked or, even, a baton deflected off one’s testicles, one can quote “the Law”—which, along with “Order", the military are defending for one’s protection—and the consequences will complete a definite stage of one’s inquiry! It is a simple test which we would urge on marble-mouthed gentry who speak down to us from Westminster or Stormont—though, if they were to get the full benefits of such a test, it would have to be carried out incognito!

If one has escaped the needs for hospitalisation at this stage of the test, it can be carried further by indulging in some simple and minimal act of self-defence. Irrespective of one’s age or sex this is guaranteed to provoke the “security forces” into a flurry of security excitement which will ensure that in future one will have no difficulty in appreciating why so many people who, a short time ago, laughed at the military posturings of the I.R.A. are now, tragically, finding their way into its ranks.

There are, of course, no gas chambers in Ulster. Unlike the ghetto Jews in Nazi Germany, Ulster’s ghetto Catholics are not herded into gas chambers and murdered. They may be gassed in their bedrooms or living rooms but then they have the satisfaction of knowing that a group of humane medical people, acting for the British government, have said that the gas used has no long-term effects—unless, that is, the concentration is heavy, in which case permanent brain damage may result. Again, maybe, they could be disturbed by other medical opinion that asserts that inhalation of the gas does produce permanent and damaging side-effects or they could be apprehensive about the fact that the power determining the concentration of the gas is the same power that shot an unarmed man outside his own door, further up the street, last night.

One can understand the brutal reaction to taunt and provocation. One can appreciate the anger of a member of a military machine, embracing the most awesome devices for killing, to the death of comrades at the hands of amateurs who must compensate for lack of numbers and weaponry with stealth. What continues to surprise is the fact that politically ignorant members of the working class, with normal emotional appetites, can be induced into the trade of killing at all; but worse, that there can be a process whereby such men can be brutalised into a condition that allows them to engage in acts of savagery against homes that look like their own homes, women who look like their own wives and mothers, and children who look like their own kids.

When we go up the scale to the professional torturers, the mind simply boggles. Here’s one person’s reaction:

. . .  I knew I was in a torture chamber. Yet my mind could not conceive that I was living in the twentieth century . . . Surely these men could never bring themselves to torture me in cold blood. Looking around at their faces I saw neither passion nor compassion in any one of them.

The writer in question details the ensuing physical and psychological torture to which he and his fellow-prisoners were subjected:

. . . Corporal Walters had been compelled to stand to attention for over forty hours before he collapsed. Fusilier Kinne had been kicked so savagely during a beating-up in jail that he sustained a double-rupture . . . Denis’s hands were secured so far up behind his back that he had to stand on tip-toe.

The quotations are from The Edge of the Sword a book written by Lieut-General Farrar-Hockley, who recently commanded British Land Forces in Northern Ireland. The writer is describing the experiences of himself and his comrades at the hands of the Chinese and Koreans when, as Captain Farrar-Hockley, he was taken prisoner in Korea in 1951 and he digresses at length on the mere beatings and kickings meted out by his captors as well as the foul system of psychological tortures devised to break them.

It was after Korea that the British Army began to develop its own techniques for the interrogation of prisoners and the specialisation in brutality and torture devolved on men whose personality and behaviour showed aptitude for the trade. Such men were seconded from their regiments and “elevated” to the Special Air Services (SAS) where the entire curricula of known brutality was imparted to them in “schools” such as that at Bradbury Line, near Hereford. The activities of these heroes is the subject of a permanent “D” notice imposed on the British press. Apart from their employment as torturers, killers, and specialists in counter-espionage activities these worthies are sometimes employed in the business of toughening-up and brutalising ordinary troops.

Despite denials by Lord Balniel, the British Minister of State for Defence, and the protests of Lord Carrington—sometimes known in Ireland as Himmler Carrington—of SAS presence in Ulster, some Irish newspapers have given quite detailed information about the activities of SAS Unit 22 in the province. It is possible, however, that Balniel’s honesty may be vindicated in the suggestion that the SAS unit concerned got around the dilemma of plying their foulness in the UK by seconding their Ulster contingent back to their old regiments. Certainly, if they are not in Northern Ireland, there is a lot of evidence to indicate that the brutality of the army and police dealing with political detainees makes the work of the SAS superfluous!

After being given the overall I was taken outside the room and along the corridor into another room and made to stand against the wall as one is made for frisking only I was made to stretch my legs and arms as far apart as I could get them. My feet also had to be as far from the wall as possible. I was to remain in this position for at least two, and at most four, days with the hood on. I lost all track of time, but there is no doubt that 1 remained in this position for days. If I did not keep my head straight I was hit with a fist in the small of the back, the genitals, the arms. As the duration of my stance against this wall grew longer, the collapsing and falling became more frequent, until I began falling every twenty or thirty minutes.

No, we are not back to Lieut-General Farrar-Hockley and his Edge of the Sword; this time we are with a Mr. Michael Donnelly who was arrested in Ulster by Crown Forces on 9 August 1971, “on suspicion”. The extract above is from his sworn statement made eleven days later.

There are many other statements that speak of beatings and kickings, the “disorientation treatment” which involves putting a hood over a prisoner’s head and putting him in a confined space where he is subjected to a constant high-pitched or throbbing noise for days on end, the discharging of firearms, using blank cartridges, at the prisoner’s head, sexual assault, electric shocks, and the use of injections. Many of these statements are attested to by medical evidence of the victim’s condition after “treatment”, by the corroboration of other prisoners (and it is noteworthy that prisoners who did not know one another and had no chance to devise corroboration after their experiences, relate the same details), by the “disappearance” of prisoners for periods up to eleven days after arrest (during which the police, the military, and the local Home Affairs Ministry pass the buck about the prisoner’s whereabouts until he subsequently turns up in a prison hospital).

Following on the adverse publicity which the Authorities have been subjected to as a result of the well-documented revelations of torture and brutality, the Westminster government yielded to pressure and set up the inevitable inquiry. That such serious allegations should be answered by an inquiry confining examination, by its terms of reference, to a mere fraction of the total complaints, that it should be presided over by a paid British government official, that it should have no powers to compel witnesses to attend or to order the production of any records relating to the complaints, gives rise to the suggestion that it is a mere whitewashing exercise.

By the time these lines are in print the official inquiry will be complete (the complainants, predictably, boycotted it) and will have published its report. It is safe to say that while it may make scapegoats out of some minor thugs for some slight overstepping of the mark—doubtless “as a result of the regrettable circumstances of the occasion”—it will not, and could not, find the political flunkeys of capitalism guilty of the charges levelled against them. If you reflect on the effects of such a decision on the British government and its Stormont rubber-stamp you will understand what we mean!

The “Security” Chiefs themselves are revealing. As part of the general propaganda drive against the IRA which includes finding “large caches” of arms conveniently deposited on vacant lots and empty houses and killing gunmen who are carted off by their comrades and, presumably, buried secretly—despite the fact that anyone conversant with IRA tradition knows that the denial of a patriot funeral to an IRA man killed in action would be an affront that his family and comrades would regard as blasphemous — the “Security” people are now justifying the internment of men without trial by claiming that it is bringing them the necessary intelligence to take the initiative against the IRA. The proposition is worth pondering; surely if a suspect’s arrest is justified in the first place the authorities must be well satisfied that he is an IRA activist and, indeed, the claim that they are getting information from those arrested would appear to bear this out. But if there is no brutality, no torture, why do these vicious enemies of the State who must be arbitrarily incarcerated in the public interest, suddenly decide to give helpful information to the Authorities?

There are those, of course, who will claim that whatever methods are being used are justified. It is a convenient stance when one is not included among the innocent—and the Authorities have released considerable numbers of people who claim they were victims of torture and brutality after relatively short periods, showing that even in their own recognition they had “made a mistake” and have even admitted that some of those detained were victims of mistaken identity.

One can be sickened by it all; can say impotently “I must do something”. But what to do? That is the question . . . the question that chokes on emotion. On pity, on sadness, on hatred, on a blind desire to strike wildly at the perpetrators of the foulness. By all means, we must strike back at the evil but not wildly, not emotionally, not stupidly. There is no solution in wanting to strike back at the leering face of the soldier or widow the wife of the cop. Certainly violence, riots, killings, bombings etc., could decide the issue against those who use the weapons of torture and brutality. Enough deaths and destruction of property and the British government may decide that the job is not worth the candle and, if one is a Republican, one may have the joys of victory and the pleasure of imposing one’s notions of freedom on those in Northern Ireland who don’t want a Republic.

It could happen then that those who presently support the British connection in Northern Ireland could become the rebels and one could become a member of the new Irish Republican “Security” Forces—it’s even possible, and it has happened before, that one could be seconded to a British SAS “school” to learn the techniques of brutality and torture in order to put one’s talents “in the service of Ireland”.

It could happen because the material conditions that now allow it to happen here would continue to exist in the Irish Republic of one’s ambition despite the vapourings of the IRA and similarly-confused pundits regarding the establishment of “a Workers’ Socialist Republic”. It did happen when the British withdrew from the south of Ireland in 1922 and left the Irish Free State Army to deal with the unfortunate idealists who thought that among other things, freedom meant more than changing flags. It continues to happen now in the various state-capitalist “Socialist Republics” throughout the world where freedom is mortgaged for the State organisation of poverty—“Socialist Republics” established by the efforts of IRA-like idealists who were strong on the poetry of freedom and weak on the economic and political conditions required to establish it. How often does theirs become the face that leers behind the riot vizor? Theirs the finger on the executioner’s gun? Theirs the macabre brain of the torturer: Cuba . . . Russia . . . China . . . Israel . . . Egypt . . Kenya . . .

Just think of a country, any country, where a minority—a group who identify their economic privation with some common ethnic or religious distinguishing feature —resist their condition by real or alleged extra-constitutional means and there you have the Northern Ireland situation. What is happening in Northern Ireland today is happening, somewhere in the world of capitalism, every day. It is yesterday’s news from Czechoslovakia, or Aden, or Vietnam; it is today’s news from East Pakistan and Ulster; it will be tomorrow’s news from somewhere else in the crazy world where trade and profit take precedence over human beings. The news deals only with the death, the shootings, the bombings and organised barbarities. The poverty, frustration, bad housing and utter social despair that causes the eruptions rarely breaks through the veneer of religious bigotry, racial prejudice or political hatreds they have created. For poverty and human privation is not news . . . they are too general ... too mundane ... too constant a feature of capitalism.

It is only in capitalism, with its market economy and its need to deceive the overwhelming majority of those who produce wealth that the wages and money systems are essentials of production and distribution, that the material conditions for friction and violence can continue to exist. It does not matter what political party presides over the system of wages exploitation, whether it calls itself “Socialist”, “Communist”, “Republican”, “Democratic” or any other name; the capitalist system, identified by its broad masses of wage workers, its production of wealth for sale and profit and the continuing existence of poverty and want on the one hand and privilege and power on the other hand is an anachronistic foulness that cannot exist without war, violence and brutality. It is a foulness that not only deprives the great majority of the material means of a full and happy life, but degrades and brutalises people to play the role of soldiers, “freedom fighters”, gaolers, torturers and murderers.

How can we then strike back at such a system? Not surely of degrading ourselves with the same foul weapons of murder and torture simply to drive out the present administrators of the system and the flag that identifies them in order to submit to the same system under a different gang of political administrators?

It is essential that we should understand that capitalism is a world system, a world problem to which a world solution is required. Wealth today is produced by social labour from the resources of the world and the abundant evidence of those countries that have attempted to counter the effects of world capitalism by tampering with the economy at national level has demonstrated the truth of the Socialist contention that only the total abolition of capitalism as a world system can end the problems of society in general and the working class in particular. Even more, perhaps, experiments in State-capitalism, as proposed by the IRA and other political groups in Ireland, and as practiced in many countries of the world today, have shown that not only do the old miseries of poverty, etc., remain but that, faced with the disillusion and frustration of a working class that believed State ownership could solve its problems, the new regime resorts to the worst excesses of capitalism and denies its subject class access to the very political avenues essential to its emancipation.

Richard Montague

Who Benefits from Aid? (1971)

Book Review from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rich Against Poor, by C. R. Hensman. (Allen Lane. The Penguin Press. £2.95.)

The Postwar world has seen a shift in policies to the Third World. As imperialism left the scene, "aid" came into fashion.

This book emphasises how the aid process conceals a process of exploitation as great as the earlier imperialism. While Western governments pride themselves on their charity to the starving millions, the truth is that their role is no more one of benevolent altruism than was that of the old-style pawnbroker.

Like the pawnbroker, they take a fair whack in interest charges: Ghana is still paying off Nkruman's debts at a crippling rate (medium-term loans alone take 20 per cent of her entire budget). Aid-giving governments would prefer to see their customers come again than to set them properly on their feet financially.

So the developing countries will never become "developed" while seven-eights of the aid they receive is directed at supporting the military and political rulers of these countries. Only one-eight of aid given by America is actually of a purely economic nature, and even then, it is not directed at alleviating poverty, but has what Hensman calls an "anti-development" role.

As a former Brazilian Minister of Economic Planning wrote:

This development of which we are so proud has brought about no change at all in the living conditions of three-fourths of the country's population. Its main feature has been a growing concentration of income, both socially and geographically . . . The majority of the Brazilian population has reaped no benefit  . . . Because of the anachronistic structure of Brazilian agriculture, it has led in many regions to a relative increase in the rent from land, thus rewarding parasite groups. Similarly . . . a variety of subsidies—in the name of development—have very often put a premium on investments which . . . favoured a still greater concentration of income in the hands of privileged groups.

Aid, then, plays its part in helping the rich get richer and forcing the poor into ever deeper poverty. 

This is on the whole a useful book, covering a lot of the ground. Hensman is especially thorough in discussing the Indian sub-continent, Latin America and America's history and contemporary scene. But there are many notable gaps: Africa and the Middle East are barely mentioned, and the Green Revolution not at all.

While unsympathetic to Russia, he is typical of the unscientific leftist in viewing China through ludicrously rose-coloured glasses. Lyrically, but without supporting evidence, he tells us that in China the poor are free.

Again typical of a woolly sheep of the left is his style. He uses many undefined terms loosely—terms such as rich and poor, development and anti-development, proletarian democracy and the war on poverty—and when he starts to argue the case for the "abolition of anti-development", it is far from clear what he is proposing.

His conclusions, after assembling a mass of interesting information on sordid international capitalism, are astonishingly naive and jejune. He exhorts his readers to boycott products made by "exploited" or "sweated" labour; to make contact with their fellow-poor (possibly by infiltrating aid agencies?) and finally to overthrow the bosses and establish "proletarian democracy". Only then can the developed nations "stand beside the poor in sympathy and solidarity".

In no way does Hensman examine what is meant by exploited labour or the nature of an exploiting class. He does not explain how a closer acquaintance with the bourgeois classes of Karachi and Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay—a cannibal breed who exploit their own kith and kin as viciously as any colonial power—could improve international working class solidarity. As for his revolution—presumably along Maoist lines—Socialists see no merit in a society still dependent on the labours of a wage slave class, with mankind still divided by barriers of nationality and a continuance of today's divisions between the haves and have-nots.

The book has other faults: Hensman has provided a grotesquely inadequate Index (e.g. no mention of Russia/Soviet Union, and although he refers to Swift's "modest proposal"—about Irish depopulation—one finds no reference in the Index, either to Swift or to Ireland). A book of this sort should also have a bibliography—especially at this price. 

Charmian Skelton

Report on Clydeside (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the time of writing the UCS situation is still unresolved. It would appear that the government's plans for Govan and Linthouse may be extended to include Scotstoun with the remaining division, Clydebank, possibly being sold to a private buyer encouraged by favourable government terms. This would give the workers concerned a respite, however temporary, and leave them still hoping—and we shall return to this—that a future Labour government will nationalise the whole Upper Clyde shipbuilding complex. Whatever happens it seems unlikely that the original proposals which meant a reduction of another 6,000 jobs and the closure of the Scotstoun and Clydebank yards will go through. It looks, then, as if the resistance put up by the men has been at least partially successful. Of course their actions have nothing to do with Socialism and fall within the confines of trade union activity, an activity which is and only can be defensive in nature.

Much ink has been spilled over these events and many opinions have been expressed on the "work-in" tactics employed in the struggle. Several alternative courses of action have been suggested, the most popular one being that a "sit-in" would be more productive. This would entail occupation of the yards with no work being done on the ships already under construction in the hope that the delay would force the government to capitulate. However, this would mean finding money to pay the entire workforce instead of, as at present, only the several hundred made redundant. As the weekly wage-bill for UCS amounts to £¼ million then it can be seen that the task of providing even half this sum each week would be a monumental one. Also, it is unlikely that such a tactic would have secured as much popular support as the work-in and doubtless the shop stewards' committee took these and other considerations into account. Then there is the possibility that a non-working sit-in would present the government with an excuse to clear the yards on the grounds that the men had no legitimate reason for being there.

It is heartening to see a group of workers refusing to passively accept the sack, but we deplore the repeated promises to work harder and give the fullest cooperation to their employers in future. Of course these promises may only be so many words and were, after all, the product of having had the unemployment gun held to their heads. At least they didn't meekly accept their fate or rely solely on appeals to Labourite and trade union leaders to save them. They took positive action on their own account.

It could be argued that since shipbuilding is, at least at present, unprofitable and is bound to be run-down anyway, then the redundant workers should bow to the inevitable, take their redundancy payments, if any, and get out. This view could be supported by pointing out that even if the UCS workforce could be maintained at its present level then this would probably be at the expense of shipyard workers elsewhere: more orders coming to the Clyde means less orders for Tyneside or Belfast. This, of course, is true but because the industry is declining there is already a high level of unemployment in shipbuilding on Clydeside, so the chances of finding work locally are poor.

For many it would mean uprooting their families to seek work in England or overseas. And it is unreasonable to expect workers who generally think production for sale at a profit (capitalism) is the only way to run society, to put first the interests of the whole working class—that will come when they are socialist minded and not before. They joined a trade union for the limited purpose of combining with their fellow members on a craft basis to protect their own interests. We recognise this and accordingly don't expect revolutionary policies from non-socialist trade unionists.

We also recognise that before men can have any views at all, political or otherwise, they must have access to the necessities of life. They must have sufficient food, clothing, shelter, and all the other things which have come to be regarded as making life tolerable. For most workers nowadays "necessities", or their current standard of living, aren't acquired by dole money. Living standards should rightly be measured in relation to the wealth of society. Despite all the talk about how well-off to-day's workers are, their wages only enable them to live in a state of relative poverty. Nevertheless, these wages at least prevent them sliding into destitution which for many is what dole money means. Besides, there is either the personal experience or the handed-down knowledge of what large scale unemployment can do to men, so they feel that their backs are to the wall and that they must unite to save their jobs.

In their fight to change the government's mind the men have an unrecognised ally—the fact that governments cannot simply ignore political, economic and social pressures. For example, the Tories must have been dismayed at the general response to the proposed sackings and closures; they cannot afford to lose too many votes between now and the next general election. Also, the consequences of such severe unemployment might well result in increased social problems like the break-up of families or a steep increase in the crime rate, and there have been local warnings to this effect. So factors like these could account in part for the softening of the government's attitude.

The whole UCS episode has once more thrown into relief the utter hopelessness of the "left-wing". They have offered every solution under the sun but the real one; they will talk about absolutely anything except production for use and the abolition of exchange relationships. Some of their utterances have been simply ridiculous. The Communist Party actually called for an "end to redundancies and the nationalisation of shipbuilding". As if nationalisation ever meant anything less than the rationalisation of the labour force involving, as with British Rail and the Coal Board, large scale redundancies. Hugh Scanlon of the Engineers claimed that success for the UCS could mean the abolition of unemployment in Britain. Small wonder if workers remain convinced that their problems can be solved within capitalism. Scanlon should know that while production for profit remains, then so must unemployment in one degree or another. The "Militant" Trotskyists were outraged that the government should grant Yarrow's, which is outside the UCS, £4½ million of "taxpayer's money". Apparently the taxes which are a burden on the capitalist class alone should be spent in a way Trotskyists approve of. We also bad the usual "appeals" for "soviets" plus howls that the imagined revolutionary situation was being betrayed by traitors, etc., etc.

Whatever the outcome on Clydeside the unpleasant fact remains that the production for profit system will still be with us. Even if the UCS workers realised their dearest wish to see the four yards remain as an integrated whole, production there as elsewhere must be subject to capitalism's economic laws—it must be profitable or, if under nationalisation, at least make the minimum of loss. This means that the process of removing as much unnecessary labour as possible must continue. Indeed, J. Reid, the men's spokesman, recognises this when he argues that by remaining together the yards would be "more viable" through a "lack of duplication in terms of marketing, design, research and many other factors" (Glasgow News 11 October). The avoidance of duplication is only achieved by sacking some of the workers concerned. So in order to be "more viable" the realities of capitalism—the need to produce cheaper ships to meet competition—must result in future sackings whether by the hand of the government or even by a shop steward's committee.

There is no way out of this. The fact is that in shipbuilding, just as in every other industry, the productive forces have outstripped the demand. True, there will be a continuing growth in the amount of tonnage required to meet the increasing volume of world trade, but even a considerable increase in the demand for ships could not satisfy the present world capacity to produce them, so the contenders will still have to fight for a share in the market.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain will continue to urge workers everywhere to resist attacks made on their living standards by their employers. This is a basic necessity so long as capitalism lasts. At the same time we recognise such action to be purely defensive, besides never-ending, and which still leaves the factories, mines, shipyards, land, transportation systems, and the other places where wealth is produced, in the hands of the owning class. We therefore have organised politically to work to bring nearer the day when capitalism's inhumanity, waste and chaos will be swept away by the democratic action of the majority of the world's working class—the useful people.

Vic Vanni