How the miners can win (1984)

From the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The present conflict in the mines has been as prolonged and bitter as any since the miners were first organised nationally in 1841. Most of the written words and the many speeches and statements which have argued out the day-to-day details of the conflict treat it as though it had never happened before. Yet the history of miners' strikes shows that this is a re-enactment of past struggles and a part of continuing class conflict.

These arguments which evade seeing the dispute as part of continuing class struggle, play into the hands of the government. the National Coal Board and. through them, the capitalist class. From their point of view it is important that the basic issue of class struggle should remain concealed. These arguments focus attention on the particular personalities involved but the Thatchers. Scargills and McGregors who at present occupy the centre stage have only taken over from others who have all acted out the long-running drama which was written by capitalism when it was first established.

Moreover, the government and the Coal Board would wish the issues to be argued out solely in terms of the economic logic of the market system. In this scheme of things the profit motive is the dominant economic factor which must lay down the boundaries for what can happen. In this way. the possibilities of action are confined within a narrow economic framework in which the interests of capital override all others.

What is the capitalist view of the function of the miners? It does not and cannot see them as useful workers producing a vital source of energy. Capitalism sees miners through the distorted lens of its economics. It sees miners as exploitable human commodities, economic units of labour power with wages as their price. The economic factors which regulate the use of miners' labour are those which regulate capitalist production as a whole. In this view, the function of miners is to maintain the overall profitability of British capitalism. Therefore the production of coal as a saleable commodity for profit must be in some proportion with the general level of commodity production and sales existing throughout the whole economy.

The position at the beginning of the strike was an accumulation of 50 million tons of coal which was in excess of British capitalism’s requirements. Regardless of the human need for energy supplies, the further stockpiling of coal would have incurred costs which would have subtracted from the overall profit. Therefore, according to the logic of the market system, coal production had to be reduced. The least profitable mines which incurred the highest running costs in relation to output had to be closed and. regardless of the social consequences, miners had to be sacked.

The miners have not submitted passively to this logic. They are not economic automatons but real people with real needs and definite material interests as workers in their struggle with capital. But the miners were caught in a trap. Had they not gone on strike the mines would have closed and by striking they closed them themselves. This trap illustrates the ultimate impossibility of the position of workers under capitalism. By striking, the miners have themselves reduced coal production and reduced coal stocks. But this would have happened anyway with pit closures. In this way the forces of the market have dictated events.

In the conflict, the present economic depression and the accumulated stocks of coal have determined the relative strength of the combatants. But more than this, the conflict has brought out into the open the conflicting interests over which the combatants are engaged in continuous class war. The miners have pressed their interests as members of working communities with the need for material security, the need to be socially useful and the need for responsibility and power of decision-making in running the life of their communities. The deadlock which has existed in the strike is the irreconcilable pressure of these needs on an economic system which cannot provide for them. The miners' struggle has been against the dictates of an economic tyranny which hires and fires workers according to whether they can be profitably employed. It has been a struggle against an economic tyranny which determines the lives of communities without giving these communities any democratic voice.

Moreover, during the strike the miners have demonstrated how socialism could be run on the practical basis of their own voluntary co-operation. The mutual aid which has been carried on has been a magnificent example of this. The organisation of food supplies, the practical activities of providing meals and transport have been carried on by voluntary co-operation. Nobody has been paying the mining families money for doing all this. This is what the apologists for capitalism say can never happen, yet at the same time they use the brutal forces of the state to attempt to smash it.

The miners and their communities can look back through generations of struggle, back to the early seventies, the general strike, the great strikes of the nineteenth century and countless others in between. They can recognise now that the many strikes of the past resolved nothing; each was a dress rehearsal for the next. Nor is there anything new in their long experience of having to confront the brutal forces of the state.

With this experience they can treat the hypocritical claim that the law is neutral with the contempt it deserves. They know that the law is an instrument of class oppression. framed politically by governments in the interests of the capitalist class. The truncheons which have been wielded against the heads of strikers are the same state truncheons which have smashed workers in the past. There is nothing new about the imprisonment of workers and the use of handcuffs in the course of arbitrary arrest. Neither is there anything new in the use of the law in smashing working class organisation. The present state appropriation of funds repeats the anti working class actions of previous governments.

The Miner in October announced the headline "It's War". This is right — it's  class war. But in this war. and in all the conditions of continued class struggle the question must be asked — is the strategy right? Without a clearly defined objective there can be no final victory. It is more than obvious now that by confining working class struggle solely to trade union action over wages and conditions of employment workers have fought on a battle ground where they are boxed in by the economics of capitalism, where they remain totally vulnerable and only capable of defence.

Whereas capitalists, acting through the state, can present an organised and united front with the clear objective of maintaining the present system of exploitation, the Trade Union movement has no counter strategy for pursuing the interests of workers. In these circumstances, organised capital has no great difficulty in keeping the Trade Union movement weak and fragmented. It can play one set of workers off against another, exploiting their insecurities. The isolation felt by the miners has been an example of this. It is not that the steel workers, the road haulage workers, the dockers and railwaymen are insensitive to the needs and struggles of the miners. They too are boxed in by the economic insecurities of capitalism.

On the other side of the class war the capitalists have kept control of two overwhelmingly superior positions. Firstly they have kept ownership and control of the means of production and all the material resources of life. Secondly they have maintained control of the forces of the state, including the police and the armed forces.

The vital question now is this. Is it possible that workers can continue to concede these overwhelming advantages to the capitalist class and at the same time hope to win victory in the class war? Such a victory requires that the tactic of trade union defence stays. At the same time workers must go on the offensive with the clear political object of taking over the means of production and the forces of the state.

At the very most, trade union action should be regarded as a short-term expedient aimed at curbing the inroads of capital on the lives of workers. This would involve negotiation with employers or their state agents, and if necessary strike action. But the main thrust of working class organisation must be political and aimed uncompromisingly at stripping the capitalist class of their ownership and control of the means of life and therefore the abolition of capitalism. In this work there is no need in any' circumstances to negotiate with capitalists or their governments. The responsibility rests entirely with the working class itself and this work must develop entirely through its own political organisation. It is only by ensuring the rapid growth of the Socialist Party and the World Socialist Movement that workers can shift the field of battle to their own advantage in the class war. This is how the miners, and all other workers, can win.

In their strike, the miners have acted under the greatest difficulties and disadvantages. The great danger now is that faced by the immense forces of organised capital, including the National Coal Board, the government, the law, the state machinery and the hostile media, and not least having to struggle as working class families with all the conditions of material shortages, the miners might become demoralised and lapse into a mood of despair. Thoughts must be focussed on all the elements involved in the strike which show the direction which must be taken in the immediate future. The example of co-operation, of organisation, and the links which have been renewed nationally and internationally. must be built upon. By combining this co-operation and this organisation with the political work of organising for socialism, workers can convert their struggles into the most powerful force for social change. This is the positive and constructive thing that can emerge from the coal strike. With the World Socialist Movement. trade unions could contribute massively to bringing the issue of socialism before all workers throughout the world.

This need to link day-to-day resistance to capital with the political work of organising for a change in society was recognised by the Trade Union movement in its earliest days. The tragedy has been that in this country it has linked itself with the Labour Party. It did this in the mistaken idea that a Labour government could reform capitalism to the advantage of the working class. In particular it focussed its political aims on nationalisation. Socialists warned against these mistaken ideas at the beginning of the century when the Labour Party was formed. Inevitably the trade union link with the Labour Party and hopes invested in nationalisation have proved a completely useless diversion. The prolonged and bitter struggle of the miners against a nationalised capitalist industry is its own condemnation of nationalisation. Under the last Labour government unemployment doubled and unions had to fight as strenuously against its effects as ever they have had to do against a Tory government. But all that has been proved correct is the socialist stand that workers cannot solve their problems under capitalism. Political organisation must be directed at the abolition of capitalism.

For this purpose, the Socialist Party has never compromised socialist principles, nor supported any programme or cause which might damage working class interests or unity. We have kept our object clear. Workers can only solve their problems by organising to establish a society based on the common ownership of the means of life in which the people of the world co-operate to produce goods and provide services directly for need. This is the only way in which the miners, in co-operation with all other workers, can win.

Pieter Lawrence

Blogger's Note:

In this same issue of the Socialist Standard, there was an advert for an audio recording of a recent SPGB public meeting on the subject of the ongoing Miners' Strike. That audio recording is available on the SPGB website. It is worth listening to, as the speaker, Steve Coleman, was an excellent speaker. Click on the link:

The Miners Strike  – A Marxist Analysis

Speaker – Steve Coleman

Venue: Duke of York, Kings Cross, London

Date: 12th October 1984

Famine in Africa (1984)

From the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Toyin Falola, writing about the impact of colonialism in Africa, has this to say:

The situation then turned from one of mere trading partners to one of unmitigated exploitation. Colonial rule was so successful that although nearly all African countries have now achieved political independence they remain economically dependent on Europe. This unequal partnership is a major obstacle to the socio-economic development of Africa. [1]

The problem with the theory of “neo-colonialism" is that, like all theories developed within the narrow perspective of nationalism, it tends to overlook the boundaries of class. Where it acknowledges the dynamics of class struggle, more often than not it absorbs it into the conflict between countries — between the rich industrialised North and the impoverished providers of raw materials in the South. Thus Susan George:

The present world political and economic order might be compared to that which reigned over social-class relations in individual countries in nineteenth century Europe with the Third World now playing the role of the working class. [2]

To be fair to George, she does draw attention to the existence of “local elites" in the Third World. Yet all too often with those who subscribe to this neo-colonial model of the world, it is not that such an elite exists that matters but that it should so unashamedly ally itself with its erstwhile colonial masters.

Who is this elite in Africa? According to Greg Lanning:

At independence the new rulers in Africa lacked an economic base in society and used the patronage and power of government to consolidate their own position. Partly because of this and partly because of the nature of an underdeveloped economy, “the state plays a major role in economic activity and development". The importance of the state in post-colonial Africa means that those who staff and run the state apparatus form the basis of the emergent ruling class in Africa. [3]

The dominant ideas in society being those that best serve the interests of its ruling class, it is perhaps not surprising that contemporary politics in Africa should be so receptive to Leninist ideology with its statist prescription for the management of an emergent capitalism. On the other hand, as Lanning suggests, in trying to consolidate their economic position Africa's rulers depend heavily on the revenue accruing to their national treasuries from foreign companies operating within their territories. Such a situation demands a degree of pragmatism. For a ruthless pragmatist like President Mobutu of Zaire this has proved most rewarding. With a personal fortune of about £100 million, Mobutu is one of the richest men in the world, while the average wage of a Zairean worker amounts to just over ten dollars a month. Clearly, if Africa’s ruling class chafes against the constraints of “neo-colonialism", it is also very much a beneficiary of it. While it has neither the inclination nor the option to withdraw from the interlocking relationships characteristic of an integrated world economy. Dinham and Hines point out to what extent it has been able to modify these relationships to its own advantage:

Could a politically independent state wrest economic power from the foreign companies which continued to control their export crops? The strategies open to governments were limited and experience soon showed that measures to acquire immediate control by nationalisation led to retaliation from the companies involved. Most countries opted for more modest legal and financial controls. These measures did not drive the companies out — nor were they particularly intended to do so, for the companies were by now crucial to many African economies. [4]

More recently, however, the trend has been for these multinational firms to opt out of plantation agriculture in which many of them have their roots and to move towards an arrangement known as “contract farming”. What this means is that local producers are contracted by a firm to produce a certain output which the firm then purchases at a fixed price. This has the advantage for the firm concerned in that it eliminates the risks attached to growing crops.

But while multinational firms invest less in direct landownership than they did in the past, in other respects their dominance has become more entrenched and pervasive. These latter activities include the marketing, processing and transport of agricultural products as well as the provision of agricultural inputs such as fertilisers, machinery and management or technical services. Such "vertical integration" is the hallmark of modern agribusiness corporations. In other words they are able to exercise wide ranging control over the many links that make up the food chain, from the supply of seeds to the packaging of the final product.

For the proponents of economic nationalism, this is a highly regrettable state of affairs. Not only are African countries denied greater "vertical" control over their products but are economically restricted in a “horizontal” sense as well. This is to say their structure of production is relatively undiversified. being closely aligned in most cases to a fairly narrow spectrum of external markets which absorb the bulk of Africa’s trade. According to Dinham and Hines

Twelve countries are dependent on just one main crop for over 70 per cent of their income. and a further eleven countries depend on only two crops for well over half their income. [4]

Such a highly concentrated pattern of production has a number of disadvantages built into it. In the first place, it greatly increases the risk of loss due to environmental factors. It also makes these countries extremely vulnerable to fluctuations in the price of their export crops. Just as a mining community in Britain, for example, could be devastated by the closure of a mine on which it heavily depends, so a drastic fall in the price of a single agricultural product can wreak havoc with whole regions given over to the production of this crop. In Africa’s case, probably the most extreme example of “over-concentration” is that of Gambia, where groundnuts are grown on 73 per cent of the arable land and account for 90 per cent of its export revenue.

The market economy is, of course, an inherently unstable system and within it the price of agricultural products tends to be more volatile than most. It is this very instability which adds yet another dimension to Africa’s plight in that a high proportion of its export crops happen to be slow maturing and so not readily adaptable to the vagaries of the market.

Take, for example, coffee. In at least eight African countries coffee is an important export crop grown largely by smallholders. High current prices will induce farmers to plant or expand their acreage of coffee trees. Once planted they have to wait for roughly five years for the coffee trees to mature but as Moore-Lappe and Collins point out:

By the time your first harvest of such crops is ready you might find the bottom has dropped out of the market. And it probably will have since producers in your country and others will have planted to meet the demand at the same time you did The likely result is overproduction once the new trees begin to bear more than the consumers are willing to buy even with a drop in price. [5]

In the economically advanced areas of world capitalism, governments have usually sought to cushion agriculture from the erratic workings of market forces. But this in turn has created yet another problem: periodic crises of “over-production” and chronic food surpluses. In fact so huge are these surpluses that in America alone it costs £700 million a year just to stockpile them. [6] But such stocks are by no means surplus to human requirements; they are surplus to the capacity of the market system which restricts workers’ consumption to the size of their wallet. Once again, Susan George:

As long as food is regarded as a commodity . . . you will have this scandalous situation of surpluses on the one hand and famine on the other. Because people who can’t pay. who cannot become consumers with a Capital C are not interesting to this world system. [7]

In the Third World, however, there is far less scope for governments to intervene and protect their agricultural sector in the way that the EEC or the American government can. The reason is that the subsidies paid to farmers in the richer countries represent a tax burden on other sectors of industry. But in the developing countries this is hardly a practicable course of action:

Developing countries are so called because their other industries are not developed: generally speaking, agriculture is their one main industry. Agriculture has, in their case, to support the government. Only in developed countries with prosperous industries able to give revenue to the government can the government, in its turn, support agriculture. [8]

In addition to the problems affecting African countries arising from fluctuations in the prices of their agricultural exports, there has been in the post war era a longterm tendency for these prices to drift downwards against those of imported manufactures and oil. For example, "in 1969 a coffee producing country had to sell 66 bags of coffee to buy one 16 tonne truck but by 1979 it had to sell 123 bags of coffee to buy the same truck" [4] Don Casey, in a paper prepared for the UN Development Programme, estimated that the total loss of foreign exchange earnings to Africa due to this relative fall in the price of agricultural exports in the two decades after World War Two, "exceeded all foreign funds invested, loaned or granted during that period". [5]

This "deterioration in the terms of trade" has prompted African and other Third World governments to try to secure commodity agreements through bodies like the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in order to stabilise prices or else to form producer cartels along the lines of OPEC. To date such attempts have been largely unsuccessful. Partly this is because "producer countries" are themselves no more a monolithic bloc than their customers but are deeply divided by competition over markets. When, for example, a conference was held some years ago to try to reach an International Tea Agreement, several African countries objected to the idea of fixing prices or quotas. The reason was that Africa’s share of world output was projected to grow substantially in the near future.

Faced with these increasingly stringent economic pressures, African governments have little choice but to move even further down the road that has led to the predicament in which they find themselves. To boost their revenue they must encourage commercial agriculture. In so doing they have had to turn more and more to multinational agribusiness for the necessary imports and to private banks or aid agencies for loans to finance this expansion. This of course only further reinforces the need to promote commercial agriculture. It is after all mainly from this source (apart from the mining sector in some cases) that governments can hope to raise the necessary amounts of foreign exchange that can go towards repaying the debts incurred.

For peasant farmers throughout Africa such developments translate into a mounting burden of misery. As peasant farmers they are of course mainly “self provisioning" — they produce food primarily for their own consumption — production for the market being a secondary consideration. But today this social arrangement is coming under increasing attack.

After “independence”

Julius Nyerere in his famous 1967 Arusha Declaration, remarked that

The basic difference between Tanzanian rural life now and in the past stems from the widespread introduction of cash crop farming. Over large areas of the country peasants spend at least part of their time — and sometimes the larger part of it — on the cultivation of crops for sale — crops like cotton, coffee, sisal, pyrethum and so on. But in the process the old traditions of living together, working together and sharing the proceeds have often been abandoned.

The Arusha Declaration itself was an attempt to transform peasant agriculture by reducing the influence of market forces. It sought to build a self reliant economy by raising agricultural productivity through the mass mobilisation of peasants within a framework known as the Ujamaa (meaning “familyhood”) programme. Among other things this entailed the enforced resettlement of scattered peasants into some 8000 planned villages, ostensibly to extend essential services to the rural population as a means to greater productivity.

The Ujamaa experiment is interesting because of its ideological commitment to the idea of peasant self-reliance. Its failure to live up to this commitment — for it came increasingly under the control of a burgeoning state bureaucracy — highlights all the more starkly the inherent conflict of interests between African governments generally and the peasant populations in the countries which they govern. The fact of the matter is that these governments need to further extend the influence of market forces, not to reduce it; to transform, as Marx put it. “a society in which one definite mode of production dominates even though not all productive relations have been subordinated to it" into one based more and more on purely capitalistic relations of production. In short, what the Ujamaa programme foundered on was not an ideological betrayal but the economic exigencies of Tanzanian capitalism and its heavy dependence on foreign imports and aid resulting in the need to generate foreign exchange.

How is the capitalist imperative to extract marketable surpluses from cash crop production transmitted to, and impressed on, the African peasant? In colonial times a favoured method to induce peasants to grow cash crops was by levying taxes. This remained the case after political independence. Indeed, in some cases the burden of taxation has substantially risen:

In Mali in 1929 the French levied a tax that required each adult over fifteen to grow between five and ten kilos of cotton to pay for it. By 1960, the last year of French rule, the tax had risen to the equivalent of forty kilos. By 1970. during the drought, the successor government forced each adult peasant to grow at least forty eight kilos of cotton just to pay for taxes. [5]

Generally speaking, crops that peasants produce for export are purchased by marketing boards — usually government-run and almost all monopolies — and then sold to foreign buyers for processing. The price that peasants are paid is often far less than that charged by the marketing board which in turn reflects the state of the world market. It may be deduced that the lot of the peasant might improve with an improvement in the world market. But this is not necessarily so:

A slight increase in income that peasant farmers in underdeveloped countries might acquire from a rising world price for their commodity has to be weighted against the increased threat of displacement by land-grabbing commercial farmers or corporations that see higher prices as new grounds for profit. [5]

In the post war era most countries in Africa experienced a surge in cash crop production though more recently in the 1970s output has tended to level off (partly due to the world recession). Significantly, this growth was achieved primarily not by raising yields but by expanding the area under cash crop production. Inevitably, this was at the expense of subsistence agriculture which was progressively pushed onto less productive marginal land. Since subsistence agriculture is a major local source of food, this development goes a long way towards explaining the steady fall in per capita food production in Africa over the last twenty years or so.

In the past the availability of relatively abundant land, coupled with communal forms of land tenure, tended to cushion subsistence agriculture and ensure a modicum of food security. Indeed, it was this that mainly inhibited the development of a strong indigenous landowning class. But today this picture is rapidly changing as a recent survey from the Cornell University Centre for International Studies suggests:

The study found a trend across Africa towards increasing privatisation of communal lands, growing concentration of landownership and the fragmentation of holdings, all factors further aggravating rural poverty. In some countries lands traditionally available to all tribal members are being appropriated by government officials or foreign firms, usually with the acquiescence of chiefs.[4]

It has been estimated that three quarters of Africa's population now have access to less than 4 per cent of the land [2] while in many parts of Africa “small farmers do not own enough land to occupy themselves for at least 6 months of the year”. [9] And most importantly, with the question of famine in mind, “8-10 per cent of the rural labour force in Africa is now landless and these numbers and proportions are growing rapidly". [4]

The consequences have been catastrophic for millions of peasants caught between the hammer blows of the market economy and the anvil of diminishing returns from subsistence agriculture. And as rural deprivation worsens, so the tide of migration to the cities has gathered pace. Africa may be the least urbanised continent. with less than a quarter of its people living in cities, but its rate of urbanisation is roughly twice that of its population growth. This means on current trends that the population of African cities can be expected to double every 14 years. But how can this growing population be fed when domestic food production mainly in the form of peasant farming is in the throes of decline?

The answer as far as governments are concerned is to import food, particularly cereals, from abroad. This first began on a significant scale in the 1960s when the price of cereals was low as a result of the accumulation of huge surpluses in North America and Europe. But. as Sir Fred Catherwood explained, this was by no means an unmixed blessing:

These surpluses from Europe and from America depress Third World prices; they put Third World farmers out of business, they drive them off the land and into the shanty towns and they reduce rather than increase production in the Third World. [7]

Without doubt. African governments are fully aware of this, but whether they are in a position to do anything about it is quite another matter. They have to take into account for example the likely response of town dwellers to any increase in the price of basic foodstuffs that might benefit local producers. Furthermore, as new tastes become entrenched in the urban areas it is even more difficult to break away from dependence on a particular cereal (like wheat) which for climatic or other reasons cannot be grown in much of Africa. The population of Africa may be mainly rural but political power is overwhelmingly urban-based, with consequences graphically spelt out by Basil Davidson:

So it was increasingly the towns, after independence, that dictated the priorities of economic policy; and the new demands of the towns, pushing aside the needs of the countryside, increasingly called the tune. More and more exports had to go in paying for the imports demanded by the towns . . . the towns and cities, in short, became the tail that wagged the economic dog. and the rural populations, still in most cases the great majority of all the people, had to suffer for it. [10]

When in fact big increases in food prices have been pushed through against the wishes of the urban population, this has in many countries been the prelude to serious riots and, in some cases, a successful coup d'etat. Little wonder, as Rene Dumont put it. "governments fear urban unrest far more than the dispersed and unorganised peasant farmers”. [11] Prompted by this threat—not to mention the military aspirations of rival African states — they have sought to massively arm themselves with the paraphernalia of repression: “At present governments spend an average of between 4 and 7 per cent of their budgets on agriculture — while spending 20 per cent on defence". [12]

More recently in the 1970s the cost of food imports rose substantially. For African countries this was an ominous development. particularly when seen against the background of a relative fall in the value of agriculture exports. Many governments in response to this crisis have initiated large scale (often state run) agricultural schemes in a bid to boost domestic food production by attracting foreign investment and expertise.

At first sight this might seem an unlikely area for foreign firms to invest in, for the reason so candidly explained by the Chairman of General Foods: "It is virtually impossible for a private business establishment to develop, distribute and sell enough of the kinds of food poor people need and still break even, much less look for any profit". But the role of aid has been a crucial factor in enticing agribusiness. Firms find it sufficiently lucrative to participate in large scale agricultural projects as these "attract funding on concessional terms by aid agencies" and with payments effectively guaranteed by the aid agencies concerned this eliminates financial risks to the firms themselves. In short, with the prospect of large scale schemes coming to dominate domestic food production in the 1980s this will "ensure agribusiness an increased role in Africa’s food production, thus complementing its historic control of Africa's cash crop production". [4]

Should this happen it will further erode subsistence farming, displacing peasants or driving them more and more into the market place of hunger where the economic risks are as great as the physical margins of survival are small. For increasing numbers of them throughout Africa a way of life is dying by degrees; slowly strangled, as though by a python whose length spans the circumference of the globe.

Robin Cox

References

(1) African History and Culture, edited by R Olaniyan, 1982

(2) How the Other Half Dies. S.George, 1979

(3) Africa Undermined. G.Fanning with M. Mueller. 1979

(4) Agribusiness in Africa. B.Dinham & C. Mines. 1983

(5) Food First, F.Moore Lappe & J.Collins. 1982

(6) The Observer, 1 April 1984

(7) Utopia Limited, programme notes, 1984

(8) Agriculture The Triumph and the Shame. R Body. 1982

(9) The growth of Hunger. R.Dumont & N Cohen. 1980

(10)  The Story of Africa, B.Davidson. 1984

(11)  The Guardian. 25 June 1982

(12) Newsweek. 6 August 1984

Inconvenient commemoration (1984)

From the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not every liar, cheat and hypocrite is qualified to be a politician, for which a high standard of expertise is required. Even so equipped, however, politicians can frequently become victims of what has come to be known as the banana-skin syndrome. A pesky civil servant is sometimes the agent of this dreaded problem which can bring about political death, or even reveal the fact that a female generalissimo was lying through her teeth when she disclaimed responsibility for the slaughter of 350 of her fellow human beings.

Whether the suggestion by that well-known Christian. Enoch Powell, that the murder of 350 Argentinian sailors should have been an occasion for “justification and rejoicing" (as reported in the Belfast Telegraph, 3 October. 1984) is genuine hypocrisy, is open to doubt. It is true that according to the Christian ethic “thou shall not kill", but Christian practice has never been averse to a bout of murder, providing it is committed under the guise of war. At any rate, it is conceivable that the eminent Enoch is quite genuine in his well-publicised hatred of all but the best of white-anglo-saxon protestants.

Timing is critical in the use of hypocrisy. It is fine, for example, for the British Labour Party to show righteous indignation about the Tories presiding over rising unemployment; attacking the health service; breaking strikes and using the full rigour of the capitalist law to punish pickets and strikers and, indeed, all the other dirty things that Tories do. But the Labour Party can protest only when it is Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition — and its parliamentary representatives should leave the House before the Tories remind them that all Labour governments — all seven of them — have done all of these things in the past and will be obliged to do so again if they ever become the government again.

Yes, timing is always vital; but then, how fickle is the public memory? Who is likely to remind the pensioned media that butchering the people of Afghanistan was a practice taken up by British governments long before the Russian ruling class ever thought of it? Churchill, arguably one of the greatest exponents of political hypocrisy. just got his timing right in 1939 when he told the British working class to pledge their lives in the fight against Hitler — just two years after he had told readers of The Times that if Britain ever got into difficulties he hoped a man with the will and determination of Hitler would emerge. Mind you, this feat of monumental hypocrisy was almost eclipsed by the Russian Foreign Minister. Molotov, when he told his German counterpart that the Russian rulers had always held that a strong Germany was indispensable to world peace — about a year before their respective leaders sent their wage-slaves out to slaughter each other.

Then there was Kenyatta of Kenya, the leader of the Mau-Mau. If we believed the British press, this unsavoury bunch not only killed our brave boys who were upholding the flag in foreign parts, they actually ritualised the savaging of their corpses. Finally a deal was done with old Jomo that helped to keep trade and commerce intact and Kenyatta was canonised into the ranks of secular saints who help to keep the world safe for hypocrisy and capitalist exploitation.

Given half the space used by the press for bingo and trivia, we could lengthen indefinitely the list of current and past examples of hypocrisy. Where these examples proved successful, you can be sure that the timing was right. Bad timing and . . . there’s a banana skin!

It was such a banana skin that caused no less a person than the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland, the redoubtable hypocrite, Dick Spring, to fall on his political backside on 1 October last. In looking at the background to Spring’s misadventure. it is important to note that the Irish government is busily re-writing history in order to distance its more prominent personnel from the activities of the Provisional IRA and events in Northern Ireland. Again, the element of time comes into this mammoth exercise; according to the comfortable Garrett Fitzgerald and his cohorts, murder and mayhem was alright in 1916 and in 1919-21 but it is quite . . . well, barbaric, today.

Of course there were differences between 1916 and 1984. In 1916. when Pearse and Connolly led a bunch of politically ignorant workers onto the streets of Dublin to kill and be killed by their fellow members of the working class, Ireland was undergoing a period of British rule less rigorous and repressive than the country had ever experienced. In the present Northern Ireland troubles, on the other hand, those who mislead workers into an anti-working-class conflict against each other have very real military repression as well as social deprivation to play the role of recruiting sergeants. But this is not the difference that concerns southern Irish politicians; the difference is that they now have power and influence as the lickspittles of Irish capitalism; power, influence, Mercedes cars and all the trappings of rich living that their ex-imperial masters used to flaunt and all derived directly from the earlier bout of killing. Can it be wondered why they want to conceal the history of their bloody inheritance?

The old songs about yesterday’s heroes that once rocked the timbers where drunken patriotism found solace no longer have official favour — what respectable politician would want to share a ballad with the Provos? The sick commemoration services that previously allowed government ministers to unveil plaques to the immortal memory of some poor, unfortunate Paddy Murphy — whose dog might have barked at the Black-and-Tans — are, similarly, now frowned upon. But sometimes it can’t be helped; members of the commemoration committee might be the same people who marshall the voting fodder for the Party and. on the principle of votes before principles, what can a Minister, even a Deputy Prime Minister, do but attend?

Doubtless, for such good reason. Deputy Prime Minister Dick Spring was the chief hypocrite at a commemoration in honour of Sir Roger Casement, a would-be Republican gun-runner who was apprehended by the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1916. Actually, there are several layers of hypocrisy in the Casement affair. After his arrest, the British authorities — who had knighted him for his civil service in the Congo — found his diaries which, they claimed, revealed that he was a homosexual. The truth or otherwise of that claim should have been irrelevant but — mindful of the sick perversity of Catholic thinking on matters sexual — both sides tried to make propaganda out of the alleged revelations. the leaders of Catholic nationalism claiming that the “Black Diaries" were forgeries and, as such, demonstrated the depravity of the British.

The truth of the matter has never been cleared up nor have Irish politicians — the political heirs of yesterday’s gunmen — or the present IRA ever been brave enough to express their admiration for Casement irrespective of the nature of his sexual proclivities. The hypocrites can only revere the memory of a heterosexual Casement. But that is the lower layer of hypocrisy; the more immediately glaring aspect of the matter — the commemoration of a gunrunner by an Irish Minister — was the part that came unstuck — through bad timing for all concerned.

Poor Dick was not to know that the latter-day gunmen were attempting an almost carbon-copy re-run of the Casement adventure — at least, not when he agreed to give the oration. As it was a seven-ton trawler, loaded with weapons and surrounded by the entire Irish navy, was sailing into port within a short distance of the spot where Dick was commemorating an equally-failed venture. Whether it disturbed the Deputy Prime Minister to the point where he left the festivities without partaking in the sumptuous repast usually allotted to a hypocrite of such high standing. is not reported. Certainly, the affair did not appear to rock his boss, Garrett Fitzgerald, who with contemptible effrontery took credit for saving the lives of “fellow-irishmen” who might have died if the weapons had got into the hands of the Provos. Presumably, had Casement's mission been accomplished, the resultant deaths might have provided another opportunity for some other hypocrite to commemorate a "successful" engagement in the “Glorious Struggle" where the "other side" were “British" members of the working class.

Paisley, one of the chief political architects of the present troubles in Northern Ireland, and the Unionist Party leader. Molyneaux, while complimenting the southern politicians on the capture of the arms, were quick to point to the hypocrisy of the Irish government. Molyneaux equated the Casement adventure with the more recent attempt to bring weapons into Ireland and he upbraided the southerners for not condemning all gun-running. A fair point, you might think, until you remember that he and his Party of Superbrits owe their existence in no small way to the fact that they conspired successfully with Germany, in 1912 — in the shadow of the First World War — to bring in guns to use against British troops if the British government intended to impose a solution of the Irish Problem that was not compatible with the political and economic requirements of the capitalist class in Northern Ireland.

Harrington might well have been referring particularly to Irish politicians when he penned the couplet:

Treason doth never prosper; what’s the

reason?

If it prosper, none dare call it treason!

We are not implying that capitalism is bad because its politicians are demonstrably cheats, liars and hypocrites. Capitalism should be abolished because it kills people by starvation, war and lack of medical attention; because it imposes poverty of varying intensity on the overwhelming majority of the world's people; because it divides. alienates and embitters the human family and denies us all the material means of a full and happy life — and finally because. even if the politicians who legalise its thieving processes were anxious to promote political honesty, they could not do so.

Richard Montague

Belfast Branch, WSP

Blogger's Note:

Embedded within this article in the original copy of the December 1984 Socialist Standard was an ad for the recently published pamphlet, Ireland — Past, Present and Future. This pamphlet was produced jointly by the SPGB and the World Socialist Party of Ireland. It can be accessed at the following link.

50 Years Ago: Who are the working class? (1984)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Within the ranks of the working class itself there are many who suffer from the illusion that they are in a class apart from and above the common worker; in fact that their interests are identical with those of the masters as against the rest of the workers. Amongst these are scientists, managers and salaried workers of various kinds.

These types of workers would be under no delusion if they would apply to their condition the test of a slave. On what do they depend for their living? Are they dependent wholly or mainly on selling their energies for wages or salaries in order to live? If this fits their economic condition then they are members of the working class, slaves, always in fear of losing their jobs and suffering accordingly.

The point always to be borne in mind is the frailty of the hold upon that on which the living depends, and the ease and swiftness of operation of the power of the job-controllers. Many in exalted positions have had this very cruelly impressed upon them, and although they scorn the suggestion that they are enslaved, yet they take good care to placate and dance to the tune of those responsible for the salaries.

There is no escape, therefore, from the conclusion that the fundamental interest of all who depend upon wages or salaries is identical, and is opposed to the interest of those who own the means of production and pay their slaves wages or salaries. It is a slave interest opposed to an ownership interest.

[From an article, "Are You a Slave?" by G. McClatchie, published in Socialist Standard, December 1934.]

Letter: Social Insanity (1984)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Social Insanity

Dear Editors,

I should like to bring to the attention of your readers a double question, about the so-called “balance of terror". I am hoping to encourage some debate on this, having already tried without great success to obtain some response from the so-called “intellectual elite" on this matter. What difference is there between the "totalitarian" political regimes where the voice of reason is automatically stifled, and the so-called liberal regimes, where the free voice of irrationality overwhelmingly stifles, in practice, the voice of reason? Don't these two types of regime suffer from the same malady, which we might call a kind of politico-military paranoia? With regard to the future of humanity, these rival oligarchies show themselves to be accomplices caught up in one demented course, based on a barbaric strategy: "If you want peace, prepare for a universal holocaust”.

Maximilien Rubel

Paris

Reply:

We endorse fully the suggestion that the governments of both West and East are engaged in a kind of madness, or irrationality which threatens to end in a nuclear war which would probably wipe out a large percentage of the human race. We would add two important points. Firstly, the "madness" of leaders and governments to which our correspondent refers cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of the population. Their power is ultimately a reflection of the failure of the working class to assert its interests; their ability to inflict “paranoia" and the hatreds of nationalism and warfare on the rest of us arises directly out of our acquiescence. Secondly, weapons proliferate not for their own sake, but in order to fight wars, and wars in their turn do not take place in isolation from social forces. The cause of war in the modern world is the competition between rival capitalist power blocs, including Russia and China as well as the more openly capitalist countries. They compete over markets, trade routes and raw materials: all sources of profit for the propertied minority within each state. These issues need not concern the working class majority, who are merely used as cannon fodder.

The only way to end the madness of preparing for a universal holocaust is to prepare for a universal revolution. This revolution must democratically replace the profit system with the common ownership of the world's resources. For this, we need a majority of socialists, and the present growth of the socialist movement must be actively encouraged by all who seek to remove the threat of war from the face of the earth.

Editors.

Letter: Silent professor (1984)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Silent professor

Dear Editors,

I have just been reading the introduction to The Communist Manifesto by A.J.P. Taylor. Some of the criticisms he uses against Marx and marxism 1 have come across before and I disagree with him. However, he claims that the Labour Theory of Value has been discredited (p.37 in the Introduction). Having read Volume I of Capital. I find it hard to believe that the value of a commodity is not created by the labour power of the workers.

Could you please let me know what theory/argument Mr Taylor has in mind when he says the Labour Theory of Value is no longer credible and whether or not it has any validity (which I doubt).

S H Lodwick 

Plymouth

Reply:

S.H. Lodwick has a point; where do famously learned people like A.J.P. Taylor find the evidence to support their sweeping condemnations of marxism and its explanation of the workings of capitalist society?

To try to answer this question we wrote to A.J.P. Taylor, some two months ago. telling him that we can't answer our correspondent's enquiry and asking for his help in finding the sources his opinions are based on. But on this point Professor Taylor, who is not famous for any reticence in publicising his views, remains mysteriously silent. We have not had a word from him. by way of reply or even acknowledgement. Readers can draw their own conclusions.

Editors.

SPGB Meetings (1984)

Party News from the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

The November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard carried details of the audio recording of one of the meetings which was part of the advertised Working For Socialism educational weekend. [See above.]

As an aside, the listing above also gives details of the SPGB's Bristol Group's meeting in December 1984 on the subject of Anarchism, where the speaker listed was Guildford Branch's Brian Rubin. On the SPGB's website, there is an audio recording of another meeting from the same year which was organised by Islington Branch, where the speaker was again Brian Rubin, and the topic under discussion was Anarchism. This meeting dates from earlier in the year. There is a strong chance there is an overlap in content in both meetings. Anyway, it's a cheap excuse to provide a link to the audio recording of the Islington Branch meeting from June of that year.

New World Socialist Journal (1984)

Party News from the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

All of the second issue of the World Socialist is on the blog. Click on the link.

Unions & Saving Jobs (1984)

From the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

In addition to their concern with wages and hours of work, all of the five hundred unions in this country have an interest in the number of jobs available to their members, as highlighted by the strike of coal miners.

In this they are confronted with three facts of capitalism. In the first place the total output of each industry is not the maximum that is physically possible but the amount that companies and nationalised industries are able to sell at a profit: production is governed by the market. In capitalism's periodic depressions most industries suffer a decline in sales; hence the present unemployment of over 3 million.

Secondly, companies and nationalised industries, having to meet competition from home and abroad, try to hold their share of the market by producing more cheaply. This they achieve by labour-saving machinery and other methods designed to secure the same output with fewer workers; that is by increasing the output per worker. Official estimates show that, since 1980. average output per worker has increased by the exceptionally high figure of ten per cent, which means that the number of workers in work could have been kept at the 1980 level only if the market had expanded by ten per cent — instead of which it has been shrinking in the depression.

The third factor is that there is no permanence about the size of the different industries. Old ones decline or disappear often with devastating effect on the workers. In recent years manufacturing industry has lost a million workers, because from being a big exporter of manufactures this country is now on balance an importer. The railways, which displaced horse transport and the canals, have themselves been hit by motor transport and air transport. Coal has been largely displaced by oil, gas and nuclear power so that the number of miners has fallen from over a million in 1926 to about 200,000. Postal traffic declined with the expansion of telephones, and farms employ far fewer workers. One industry that has grown remarkably is banking, finance and insurance. In 1965 they employed 645,000 workers; the figure is now 1,366,000 and has continued to expand during the depression.

There is one notable exception to the dependence of output on profitable sales. It is the willingness of all governments, either for political reasons or having wartime needs in mind, to keep some loss-making industries and companies alive with subsidies. For a century governments did this with the loss-making inland telegraph services and have in recent years given big subsidies to agriculture and shipbuilding. Subsidies to the coal industry have been based on the expected long-term position when North Sea oil runs out and coal may expand again.

Unions with members in declining industries have long been to the fore with campaigns to induce governments to grant subsidies to their industries. (It was a big issue in coal mining and agriculture in the years after World War One.) But it is not only the unions. Employers’ organisations in the various industries have been equally active with their claims — companies supplying equipment to the coal industry and agriculture; companies making equipment for railway electrification and many more. Often the unions and the employers make joint representations to the government.

In the nature of the situation conflicts arise within the ranks of the employers and between the unions, as for example in the competition between the railways and road transport. That the railways would lose traffic to the often cheaper and more adaptable road transport was inevitable, but the Labour Party, whose government had protected the railways to some extent, complained that Tory governments “had deliberately encouraged road transport” at the expense of the railways and had "made sure that the railways would be fatally crippled in the contest". (Twelve Wasted Years, Labour Party 1963)

It goes without saying that capitalists in industries not benefiting directly or indirectly from the subsidies protest vigorously about their profits having to contribute through taxation to finance the subsidies.

In recent years there have been similar conflicts in the energy field, as between coal, oil, gas and nuclear power. The claim of the National Union of Mineworkers that coal should be given absolute priority, coal imports restricted, power stations converted to coal-firing and nuclear power reduced or phased out got the backing of the Labour Party but unions with members in the industries that would be adversely affected take a different view. At the Labour Party Annual Conference in October an Executive Committee resolution reaffirming the Party’s policy and condemning “the gross inefficiency of nuclear power stations and the dangerous risk to health they create for us and future generations", was defeated—3,483,000 to 2,967,000. (Financial Times 2 October 1984)

Such claims and conflicts relate to attempts by individual unions to induce governments to promote the expansion of one industry at the expense of others but there have been other policies framed to get joint action by all unions with the aim of increasing the number of jobs for all workers. One such policy is combined action by the unions to raise wages so as to expand total demand and create more jobs. This is arithmetical nonsense; higher wages do not expand total demand.

Marx dealt with this issue effectively over a hundred years ago, pointing to the obvious fact that raising wages reduces profits. Workers’ expenditure goes up but the expenditure of capitalists is correspondingly reduced, changing the kind of expenditure but not its total amount. Marx ridiculed the idea that pushing up wages would avert or cure a depression and so reduce unemployment. Unions affiliated to the TUC and Labour Party have also relied on policies aimed to increase the total number of jobs by government action. This was recently stated by Arthur Scargill when he called for a Labour government which would, he said, “get rid of unemployment and create meaningful jobs". In an early, crude, form this is a belief that any increase of government expenditure would create more jobs. But in 1974 government expenditure was £26,000 million and unemployment was 630,000; in every year since then government expenditure has increased and in 1983 was £115,000 million. Yet unemployment more than doubled under the Labour government of 1974-1979 and has more than doubled again under the Tories.

In a less crude form this theory was set out in the 1983 Labour Party election programme. which admitted that an increase of government expenditure financed by taxation would have no effect at all on employment. The increase of government expenditure would be offset by a corresponding fall in taxpayer's expenditure: “For the increased spending in one part of the economy would be cancelled out by the decreased expenditure elsewhere”. The programme then went on to say that the effect would be different if the increase of government expenditure was financed by borrowing. But how would it be different? Just as a taxpayer cannot both pay increased taxes and spend the same as before, so anyone who lends £1.000 to the government cannot also spend the £1,000. (Incidentally, the Labour government of 1974-9 and the Tory government since 1979 both increased the amount of government expenditure covered by borrowing.)

The theory is wholly fallacious as also is the opposite theory, advanced by the Tories, that the number of jobs would be increased if government expenditure were decreased. There is no way whatever in which government can increase its expenditure without a corresponding fall in the spending power of the population generally. The idea of the number of jobs being increased by some policy of the government is fallacious for another reason in capitalism itself. As has already been pointed out, the volume of production and therefore the total number of jobs rests on market conditions, on sales and profitability. It does not depend on some supposed overall deficiency of spending power which has to be made good by increased government expenditure or any other government policy.

The failure of the capitalists to continue to expand investment and production in a depression is not because they could not continue but because many of them choose not to do so. And they choose not to do so because they see no prospect of profit in it. Specifically it is not because they are all short of cash. As it was put by the City Editor of the Daily Mail (30 October 1984): “Companies have never had so much cash.” He could have mentioned GEC with its cash mountain of £1,500 million. much of it lent to banks. Now, or at any time in the depression, GEC could have spent its cash buying materials and plant and hiring more workers to produce more electrical goods. They have not done so because there was, and still is, no profit in it. If GEC had expanded production, the goods would have been unsaleable, except at a loss, and if they were sold the effect in existing conditions would have been to destroy the market for other electrical companies and put some of their workers out of work. GEC and other companies wait until market conditions make further investment and expansion of production profitable again.

Given the continuance of capitalism with its production for the market and the making of profit, there is nothing unions or governments can do to create more jobs for the workers as a whole. The idea of capitalism without periodic unemployment and depressions is a delusion.

Edgar Hardcastle

Party News (1984)

Party News from the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Debates.

Late October. Doncaster. The Socialist Party was in debate against the local Young Tories. An audience of 40, including 30 non-members, listened to the case for capitalism, as defended by a young lawyer who argued that without the laws of property society would descend into chaos. The socialist speaker had to explain that capitalism is in chaos and that only socialist production for use will enable people to bring social affairs under control. Several striking miners were present and they were left in no doubt that the solution to the problems of capitalism involved much more than defeating "Thatcherism" and electing a Labour government of capitalism. The case for revolution received an enthusiastic reception from quite a few of those present and our comrades in Doncaster are looking forward to the speedy growth of the Party in the South Yorkshire area. The local Labourites agreed at the end of the meeting to hold a debate with us in the near future. Will they be true to their word?

In the same week. Islington branch ran a debate against a bunch of Leninist jokers who take themselves more seriously than any workers are ever likely to: the Communist Workers’ Organisation. They were arguing that a majority of workers can never achieve socialist understanding under capitalism but, instead of drawing from this unhistorical assumption the logical conclusion that socialism is therefore impossible. the CWO plans to set up socialism (as a leadership) without the workers being conscious.

The debate, which attracted an audience of 60, most of them non-members, proved to be an interesting education class in the follies of Leninism, part of the education being provided by the socialist speaker and the other part being demonstrated by the idiocies uttered by the bogus communists of the CWO. The latter organisation — about twenty of them throughout the country — regard themselves as the revolutionary vanguard of what they call "the class". According to them, office workers, foremen, policemen and trade union officials are not members of the working class.

In their published statement on the post-revolutionary transition period we are informed that the vanguard will set up a "proletarian state" — for, according to these Leninists, it is an anarchist fallacy to imagine that the state will disappear immediately in a socialist society. Their speaker stated (into the microphone, and obtainable from the Tapes Committee) that “there will need to be a socialist police force". Their second speaker, a Leninist caricature who ought to audition for Citizen Smith, thought that workers can't understand socialist ideas and they won’t understand them until the socialist revolution takes place.

A couple of silly romanticists salivated over the fact that the CWO's revolution would involve "a scries of bloody battles" (but not just yet) and that the CWO was all in favour of the miners using class violence (which the Leninist vanguard was prepared to endorse on a theoretical level, but would leave the miners themselves to the practical activity of serving the prison sentences).

The CWO, like a few other obscure Leninist sects with whom the Socialist Party has debated, has an infuriating habit of speaking in language that few workers can understand: when they attend a meeting they arc "making an intervention"; anyone with whom they agree is part of "the revolutionary milieu"; and democracy is only a "bourgeois fetish". The Socialist Party was accused of paying too much attention to "democratism”.

These would-be state-capitalist dictators are a laugh a cliché; the young Tories of Doncaster, confused and anti-working class as they were clearly shown to be,d could give the CWO lessons in political integrity. But we have more than a strong suspicion that public debating will not be engaged in by the CWO again in a hurry; after all. if you think that workers are too thick to understand the case for socialism — which is what the CWO position amounts to — why bother talking to the dummies?

Steve Coleman

Activity in Paris

It seems that several years of hard work by very few members has finally begun to pay off, with the possible formation of a regular discussion group in Paris. Our French language journal, Socialisme Mondial, now has about eighty subscribers. A series of press advertisements has produced a modest but steady response and a list of over one hundred current contacts throughout France. Recently, a couple of members visited about ten contacts in the Paris area, some of whom are now fully in agreement with the socialist case and could form the nucleus of a group there. We have also been exchanging literature with several other groups in Paris calling themselves "communist". Some of these contacts have proved quite fruitful. We can, then, report that a small but determined group of French workers is in the course of emerging from the political wilderness to challenge the stale myths of capitalism in all of its forms.

Clifford Slapper

Running Commentary: Grimethorpe again (1984)

The Running Commentary column from the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Grimethorpe again

The Yorkshire village of Grimethorpe, scene of one of the fiercest clashes between police and striking miners, is no stranger to class war. It was here, in 1947, that the miners were forced to use the strike weapon in defence of their living standards in an incident which revealed the true nature of the recently nationalised coal mines.

At that time the industry generally was still congratulating itself on having got rid of the greedy, complacent and inefficient private coal owners; there was a Labour government presiding over "socialist” Britain. with their propaganda that workers should work harder and restrain their wage demands so as to help rebuild the export trade of the British capitalist class.

It was in that cause that the National Coal Board tried to tighten the exploitative screw on the miners of Grimethorpe by requiring them to produce more coal during each shift — by increasing their "stint". But unfortunately for the NCB and the Labour government the miners would not agree to this lowering of their standards and they came out on strike, in which they were soon the victors.

Unfortunately too for the NUM, whose general secretary was prominent in his denunciation of the strike. This remarkable fact is made even more so — in view of recent events in the coalfields — because the secretary was a member of the Communist Party, Arthur Horner. The Communist Party were then following the tactic of supporting the Attlee government’s attempts to get British capitalism back on its feet. It was consistent with this that the CP opposed strikes, even those like Grimethorpe where the workers were up against an antagonistic government, as they are today. This attitude was soon to be reversed when, as the Labour government’s foreign policy became more settled in opposition to that of the Russian ruling class, the CP turned to opposing them and so to supporting strikes.

Workers have every reason to remember Grimethorpe 1947. They should remember it for the lesson it carried about the nature of capitalist society and about the futility and motivation of reforms like nationalisation. They should remember it when "communists” like Scargill and McGahey vow that they will never betray working class interests.

The lesson is clear: as long as capitalism lasts the working class must always struggle to protect their interests, without compromise, and they must make this their own, conscious struggle instead of trusting leaders.


Plus ça change . . .

At least Margaret Thatcher has never made any secret of the fact that she and her government stand without hesitation for the interest of the British capitalist class. When they support a programme like cutting back the coal industry and sacking thousands of miners they do not pretend that this has anything to do with socialism.

What then of France, where there is of course a “socialist” President whose election was greeted with such enthusiasm as the dawn of a new age of equality and freedom for the workers? In 1981 Mitterrand was promising, in an election speech, that his government would "end years of neglect” of the coal mines there and increase production from 19 million tons to 30 million. No wonder the French workers were so enthusiastic; it is usually attractive, to someone dependent on employment for a living, to assure them that their exploitation is secure for the foreseeable future.

But as it has turned out that has been yet another of Mitterrand's pledges to have been dishonoured. The future for the French miners is, if anything, blacker than that for the British. For example in the case of the coal field of the Nord-Pas dc Calais region, the French equivalent of the National Coal Board would like to shut down production completely by 1990 — and this in what was once the heart of French coal mining. The famous target of 30 million tons has been gently dropped, and even the present target of 18.5 million tons is being reduced to 12 million by 1988, which means that about 28,000 miners will be lopped off the industry’s workforce.

The reason for this drive, which must be the envy of Ian McGregor, is that the French industry operates at a deficit of over £730 million a year. Like the British mines, this is a burden which the capitalist class as a whole are not prepared to carry indefinitely.

One difference between the two countries, however, is that the French miners are not struggling against these demands.

What protest there is is desultory and disjointed. Perhaps their reaction to this latest exposure of left wing political heroes makes them cynical and apathetic. In fact it should persuade them of the futility of all leaders and of all promises to make capitalism work against its nature. The failure of Mitterrand was inevitable; a careless response to it by the workers is not.


Blow-up at Dunlop

Michael Edwardes got his knighthood because of the sterling work he has done in rescuing several large industrial concerns which, before he took over, were apparently due to go out of business. The list of these firms is impressive in its length and in the prestige involved; it includes names like British Leyland and ICL. When Edwardes had finished his work with them, they were usually a lot more profitable than when he began (which is what he means by “rescue") and quite a few productive units had been shut down with a lot of workers thrown out of work.

There was simple justification for this. If something didn’t pay Edwardes did his best to make sure it didn't operate any more. He also took on the unions, most famously at British Leyland, so that they ceased to present so large an obstacle in his drive for the maximum of exploitation, the maximum of profitability.

So it was not surprising that when the great Dunlop tyre company also dropped into danger the 46 banks who are owed something like £385 million by the firm cast wistful eyes in Edwardes’ direction. Any money they had sunk in keeping this ailing giant on its feet, the banks reasoned, would be that much more secure under the control of the diminutive, ruthless, profit-preoccupied supremo. So one of those commercial assassinations was arranged, in which Edwardes took over at Dunlop, bringing some of his henchmen from ICL and firmly removing eight of the existing directors.

The outgoing chairman left with a barely coded warning of Edwardes’ “. . .methodology, his way of dealing with people, which in this way removes the continuity of the business". But of course Edwardes “deals with" people in exactly the correct way for this social system. Capitalism’s basis of private ownership of the means of life puts people on the same level as everything else which goes into the productive process. If they make money they will be employed; if not they will be discarded.

Of course people are a bit different from machines; for one thing they have feelings, which can sometimes be inconvenient to 24 hours a day, seven days a week exploitation. Such considerations may convince Edwardes that this is a less than perfect world. What it tells the workers, to judge from their reactions, is anyone’s guess.

World Without Money (1984)

From the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The idea of socialism as a world without money can be found in sources covering a wide historical span and a great diversity of authors. Below we publish for the first time our own translation of part of the "Communist Catechism" written in German by Moses Hess in 1846.

1. What is money?

It is the value of human activity expressed in figures, the buying price or exchange value of our life.

2. Can human activity be expressed in figures?

Human activity has no price, any more than has man himself, since human activity is human life, for which no sum of money can compensate; it is priceless.

3. What is the man who can be sold for money, and the man who sells himself for money?

He who can be sold is a slave and he who sells himself has the soul of a slave.

4. What must we deduce from the existence of money?

We must deduce the existence of slavery, for money is the very mark of the slavery of man since it is the value of man expressed in figures.

5. For how long will men remain slaves and sell themselves, with all their abilities, for money?

 

They will remain slaves until society provides and guarantees to each the means he needs to live and act in a human way, so that the individual is no longer forced to acquire these means by his own initiative and, with this in view, to sell his activity in order to buy in return the activity of other men. This trade in men, this reciprocal exploitation, this enterprise which is called private, cannot be abolished by any decree; these can only be abolished by the establishment of a communist society, in which the means will be available for each to develop and use his human abilities.

6. In a society constituted on this basis, is the existence of money possible or imaginable?

No more than is the existence of human slavery. When men are no longer obliged to sell to each other their energies and abilities, they will no longer need to estimate their value in figures, to count, or to pay. In place of human value expressed in figures will then appear real, priceless human value: in place of usury, the flourishing of human abilities and the pleasures of life; in place of competition by unfair means, a harmonious cooperation and a noble emulation; in place of the compound interest table, the head, the heart and the hands of free and active men.

Moses Hess

God returns to the White House (1984)

From the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 1984 US Presidential Election campaign, which seemed to have been going on for ever, is at last over. For some of the hopefuls who fell by the wayside, such as Gary Hart, the run up to 1988 has already begun. (The BBC 9 o'clock News on October 29 called this Life after Mondale — where was the life with Mondale you may ask!) The overwhelming victory of Ronald Reagan had appeared inevitable all through and there is little evidence that the alternative strategics suggested for the Democrats (Jesse Jackson’s “rainbow coalition" being the front runner) would have produced a better result.

Reagan’s victory clearly owed nothing to the brainpower of the candidate; he was clearly reluctant to engage in even the two so-called debates with his opponent. Indeed his performance, stripped of its multi-million dollar showbiz trappings, was more akin to "The President’s Brain Is Missing", that brilliant lampoon from Central TV’s Spitting Image, than the wise pontifications we are taught to expect from those "born to rule”.

Equally it could not be put down to the promises made in the Republican election platform, at least not the sort that appear to offer immediate benefits to workers, such as increased welfare spending or "fair fares" on public transport. Such apparent concern for the workers' plight was noticeably lacking, and any promises made were to increase rather than make good the cuts already made in this area. The charity soup-kitchen and in a few places even the parish workhouse have reappeared as features of American working class life. How can a party with such a record and campaigning on such a platform win such an overwhelming victory? A glance at the areas of the country which voted Republican tells us that very few of those workers who are dependent on the "welfare" programme did vote for Reagan, either in 1980 or this year. A strategy which writes these votes off is certainly brutally cynical, but a winner none the less.

A radio commentator at the Republican convention in Dallas in August put this particular brand of cynicism down to what he termed “compassion fatigue". His viewpoint was that capitalists (not only American ones, of course) have been getting so fed up with the welfare handouts they have been forced to give that they are now flatly refusing to finance any more. Despite all these apparent handouts, however, the queue of the needy is longer than ever. It is very difficult for any party trying to run capitalism, even on a "radical" reformist basis, to counteract this without being wide open to counter-attacks alleging "profligacy”.

Having seen on TV excerpts from the Democrats’ convention in San Francisco in July, it was natural to speculate on how much worse the Republicans could be when their turn came. In the event they comfortably exceeded the grimmest expectations with a degrading display of sycophancy and puerile hero-worship that beggared belief. An especially disturbing thought was that if Reagan’s campaign managers had thought that votes would have been lost by all the ballyhoo they could easily have toned it down. They didn't and their judgement has been proved right. The Times (29 October 1984) referred to his luck with the present trends in the American economy (and luck it is, as capitalism cannot be "managed”) and said: "The other thing most Americans clearly like about Reagan is his unashamed patriotism". Sad as we are that so many workers think this way, this figures. Indeed it parallels the Falklands campaign of two years ago and the way Thatcher used it to improve her poll ratings. That it is Reagan rather than the party he leads that projects this image is shown by the election results viewed as a whole. The other Republican candidates for office had at best only moderate success in clinging to Reagan's coat tails.

Another feature of Ronald Reagan is his tendency to treat really serious issues in a light-hearted vein. This was highlighted by his "joke", cracked during a radio microphone test, about ordering the bombing of Russia. The following extract from The Times says: In a letter due to appear in the September 24 issue of Forbes magazine, Mr Reagan writes: "Granted. I shouldn’t have said it, even though I was sure I was saying it only to the several people who know me well and with whom 1 work. The damage, if any, was due to the worldwide press dissemination."

We should not forget either the union bashing tactics of his administration, typified by the smashing of the air traffic controllers strike. Union membership is now only 18 per cent of the total labour force. Even this does not appear to have lost him votes in the present political climate.

Cartoon by George Meddemmen.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the Dallas convention was the light it shed on the activities and influence of the movement known as Moral Majority. This body is one of a number of overlapping forces consisting of politically-minded fundamentalists (Protestants who claim to believe in the literal truth of the Bible). Part of their aims is revealed by a new one of the brood, the American Coalition for Traditional Values. The Times comments: “The title says it all: ‘The coalition parades a strong ‘pro-family' line, is vehemently anti-abortion. wants prayer in school, an emphasis on strong defence and stricter welfare policies. It is opposed to homosexual rights and is against the Equal Rights Amendment that would cement equal rights for women into the constitution.’” (21 August 1984)

Moral Majority, the best financed and most visible of the interlocking groups, is led by Jerry Falwell, a Baptist minister from Lynchbury, Virginia. After a short period of gathering momentum they surfaced in 1980 at two pre-election rallies. In April a “Washington for Jesus" event had overt political overtones. In the late summer a rally in Texas was attended by Ronald Reagan in person, to endorse the aims of the movement. The day after the 1980 election Moral Majority claimed credit for supporting Reagan and backing some extreme right wing candidates who won election to Congress. They argued that in the two previous presidencies there had been a moral decline which had seen "liberals, humanists and leftists conspire to take God out of public life”. (“The New Christian Right"—article in Encyclopaedia Britannica Book of the Year 1981 by Martin E. Marty.) Although a religious man himself, Marty easily disposes of Majority’s claim to speak for any silent majority which they may say exists, and mentions highly personalised scandals in which some of its prominent members have been associated.

Between elections the efforts of Majority and their allies carried on at a more local level. The Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year 1982 reported "an alarming increase in demands for the removal of books and material from schools and libraries. Many of the books being questioned dealt with American history, feminism and racial attitudes." The Majority also claimed to be monitoring television programmes allegedly for “sexual, profane and violent content”.

The election campaign of 1984 found Moral Majority in the Republican party’s machinery and working hard to register "Christian" voters. Jerry Falwell delivered the benediction at Reagan's formal nomination, his “coronation” as some dubbed it. Support for Majority’s views has been expressed during the campaign by the Roman Catholic hierarchy, through the Archbishop of New York’s intervention against Geraldine Ferraro on the abortion issue, and the Mormon Church. At Dallas, The Times (21 August 1984) reported, “some observers are concerned at what they regard as a mix of politics and religion that is growing uglier”. Four days later the same newspaper was clearly disturbed at the surfacing of “a style of anti-communism that the Republicans have not worn since 1964". The Republican Party may not have been responsible for dubbing Russia as "socialist”, but they have certainly taken advantage of the seeds of confusion sowed by the Bolsheviks to commit some monstrous crimes of their own. We need only recall the activities of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Un- American Activities Committee. It appears all too likely that another attack of this deadly disease is imminent.

All this suggests that there is a considerable danger of something akin to the Fascism of the 1930s emerging in the USA. It is to be hoped that American workers will not make the mistake of thinking that things could have been much different had Mondale been elected president. The same forces would have exerted the same pressures at local and national levels as at present. The hope lies in a greater participation by the American working class in the democratic process, to establish socialism.

E.C. Edge