From Recession to Slump (1992)

From the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

When is a recession not a recession? Answer: when it's a slump. Up to now pro-capitalist economists, journalists and politicians have avoided this word because of its associations with 1930-like conditions which, they have proclaimed for years, could never come back. But now the taboo on using it being broken and the talk is about "the danger of sliding into slump" and how this can be avoided.

“Recession” was a word invented in America after the war by the followers of the pre-war British economist Keynes. Big slumps, they preached, could be avoided by the application of Keynesian “demand-management” techniques, but relatively minor downturns could still occur. These were “recessions" but there was no need to worry since Keynesian policies would always prevent them turning into slumps. Thus the Penguin Dictionary of Economics defines a recession as “a sharp down-turn in the rate of economic growth or a modest decline in economic activity, as distinct from a slump or depression which is a more severe and prolonged downturn".

There is even an official internationally-agreed definition of a recession: two successive quarterly falls in the total production of goods and services (“seasonably adjusted real Gross Domestic Product", to be precise). On this definition, Britain has been in a recession since the end of July 1990, GDP having fallen or been stagnant every quarter since then. It is this that has got the pro-capitalist economists worried. According to their theory no recession should have lasted this long. No “recession" has in fact ever lasted this long. Hence their doubts about whether this time it is not a slump rather than a mere recession that they are faced with.

Worried
Gavyn Davies, a City economist who is also an economic adviser to the Labour Party, is worried:

  So do we now face a "slump"? As far as 1 am aware, this word has no precise economic definition, but it is generally used to denote a state of enduring decline in activity, in which a total collapse in confidence—often associated with an overhang of excessive private sector debt— leads to permanent weakness in asset prices and capital spending. It is further associated with a decline in the general price level (negative inflation), and describes a situation in which monetary policy alone is powerless to stimulate demand. It is a word most often applied to describe the calamity of the 1930s, from which a combination of Lord Keynes and international rearmament (mainly the latter) eventually rescued the world. (Independent, 19 October).

He concludes by saying he doesn't know whether we are yet in a slump. William Rees-Mogg, former editor of the Times who now writes a regular column in the Independent, is bolder. He has frankly compared the present situation to the depression of the 1930s:

The belief that has previously restrained the Government from acting decisively is that this is an ordinary 10-year recession, like those of 1973 or 1981. The evidence is that it is a major debt deflation crisis, more like the 1930s, the 1870s or the 1820s. (26 October).

As a Monetarist Rees-Mogg has his pet theory as to what causes a depression. As he wrote in his column the week before, “each great depression is worldwide. It is set up by inflationary expansion of debt. It is produced by the painful process of liquidating that debt, which forces down asset values and destroys businesses and jobs". So, for him, a depression is a “debt deflation crisis" and the way-out lies in reducing the burden of debt by reducing interest rates. This, purely monetary, explanation is inadequate and superficial.

It ignores why at times businesses go into debt and why banks are prepared to lend them money. Businesses go into debt when they think they can invest the borrowed money in production and make sufficient profits both to pay the interest and still have plenty left for themselves. And when the prospects of profit-making by businesses are good, banks are prepared to lend them money because they can be sure that they will be paid their interest. So the key factor is the rate of profit not the rate of interest. In fact interest is a totally dependent factor: it can only be paid out of profits. As profits arise out of production it is here, in the field of production not that of money, that we must look for the explanation as to why slumps occur.

In a period of boom all the various competing businesses imagine that they will be the one to benefit from the expanding market and all plan to expand their productive capacity, generally borrowing to do so. There eventually comes a point, however, after all the planned for extra productive capacity comes on stream, when the amount produced in some key sector exceeds the amount required by the market. A crisis of overproduction then occurs. Factories cut back on production; workers are laid off; orders for supplies are reduced; all this has a knock-on effect, leading to a contraction of the total market. Then what they call a recession and we call a slump sets in.

Gavyn Davies explained the onset of the present slump well enough in an article he wrote in the Sunday Telegraph soon after it started:

  Around July [1990], companies began to complain in private that demand had suddenly fallen away without much warning . . . What we are now observing is the flip side of the boom in confidence which led to so much borrowing and investment from 1985 to 1989. In those years, output growth was persistently stronger than anyone expected . . .  As consumers threw caution to the wind, companies decided it was time to invest, and the level of capital formation rose to heights which had never been seen before, relative to GDP . . . It was not until the middle of 1990 that companies suddenly realised their expansion plans were not supported by the prospects for demand . . . [T]he main casualty over several years is likely to be capital spending, since productive capacity has run ahead of demand. (27 January 1991).

In a slump businesses are left with the problem of paying from their reduced profits the interest on the loans they contracted to expand productive capacity during the boom period. Rees-Mogg wants to help them by reducing interest rates. This would certainly reduce the money they have to pay the banks and to that extent increase their retained profits, but there is no reason to suppose that in itself this would be enough to lead them to invest in expanding production again, as the example of the US shows were interest rates are as low as 3 percent yet the slump there persists.

Recovery after a slump only begins when the prospects for profit-making revive. This is sometimes called "confidence” and in a sense it is: businesses have to be "confident" that if they invest in increasing production they will be able to sell what they produce and make a profit. This is not a question, as Major and Lamont evidently believe, of just talking about things getting better and giving the impression you really believe this (even if you don't). Something concrete is required and that can only be a real change in the opportunities for profit-making.

Falling asset values

Ironically perhaps—since what is involved is a capital loss for businesses—the main factor bringing this about is the decline in “asset values” that both Rees-Mogg and Davies highlight. In a slump the value of the capital invested in buildings, factories, plant, machinery, raw materials and stocks falls in real terms. Marx called this “the devaluation of the elements of constant capital” and it comes about either through firms writing off the previous value of their assets or through them going bankrupt and their assets being bought up by other firms at a lower price. Either way the rate of profit is increased, as this is calculated as the ratio of the amount of profits to the total capital invested. If the latter falls in value the rate of profit increases even if the amount of profit remains unchanged.

This fall in asset values is a key element in the Marxian explanation of the function of slumps under capitalism: to clear away deadwood and allow capitalist production to resume on a fitter, leaner basis. It works by raising the rate of profit, so eventually making the businesses that survive ready to invest in production again in response to the only incentive they know—profit.

Contradiction

The present slump has led to a revival of Keynes' discredited ideas. The Independent, in a ten-point plan it has launched to “save Britain from slump”, declares “as Keynes pointed out, if the private sector will not spend, the public sector must” (22 October). The Guardian is even more enthusiastic. The front page of its magazine section (3 November) featured a full page photo of Keynes with the caption “Is this the only man who can save us now?”. The opening words of the main article, by Robert Skidelsky, author of a new book on Keynes entitled The Economist as Saviour set the tone: “the search for a saviour to lift us out of the slump has led us back, not unnaturally, to John Maynard Keynes”.

However, it is not the “spending your way out of a depression" aspect of Keynes' policies that Skidelsky emphasises, but rather his clever little scheme to decrease real wages in a slump. Keynes argued that workers would offer less resistance to their real wages being reduced by rising prices than by a direct cut in their money wages and so advocated a policy of (mild) inflation as the best way to bring about the necessary reduction in working class living standards. He was, in other words, just as much an enemy of the working class as any callous Free Marketeer. The “us" he wanted to save was not us but the ruling class of which he was himself a well-heeled member.

“Spending your way out of a slump” seems to be the common-sense solution. The only problem is where is the government to get the extra money to spend from. There are three possibilities. One is to raise it through taxes. Another is to borrow it. And the third is to print it. All have their drawbacks. Printing the money will simply lead to double-figure inflation which will eventually adversely affect the balance of payments. Borrowing it will tend to push up interest rates, increasing the debt burden on productive industry. Taxes, like interest, can only come in the end from the profit-making sector of the economy, and increasing taxes on businesses which are already suffering from a fall in profits is clearly no way to encourage them to increase production again.

The last Labour government tried to apply Keynes' policy of “if the private sector won't spend, the public sector must” during the 1973/4 slump. In the end Callaghan had to confess to the 1976 Labour Party Conference:

  We used to think that you could just spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you, in all candour, that that option no longer exists and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting bigger doses of inflation into the economy, followed by higher levels of unemployment. (Times, 29 September 1976).

There is a fundamental contradiction here which no government can overcome. Capitalist businesses have cut back on production because the market for their goods has shrunk and they can't make the same amount of profits as before; the government can't spend what the businesses aren't investing, because all the possible ways of financing this will further undermine the profitability of industry. The plain fact is that in a slump there is virtually nothing any government can do to speed recovery. All they can do is to wait for the slump to run its course—to wait for asset values or real wages to fall sufficiently to restore the prospects for profit-making— while refraining from doing anything to make matters worse.

Adam Buick

From Columbus to Clinton (1992)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

All awful things come to an end. This one ended on 3 November with the election of Bill Clinton as leader of what he called in one of his speeches "the greatest country in human history". After a year of endlessly repeated “Gahd Bless America" and pseudo-debates on network TV between toothpaste models posing as politicians, a minority of the US population decided to vote for Big Mac instead of Wimpy. Faced with the choice between capitalism or capitalism they opted for. . . . Capitalism.

The most remarkable thing about the Presidential contest was that neither side addressed the most pressing question of all: How is it that in the richest country in the world nearly a quarter of the workers are living below the government’s own poverty line? In cities like Detroit and New York and Houston vast numbers are homeless, long-term unemployed, without any health insurance and empty of hope. A quarter of all US families (and 70 percent of black US families) have only one parent, and one in three of them are existing beneath the poverty line. 40 percent of Hispanics and 45 percent of blacks in the US face official poverty.

In 1970 7.5 million American families lived below the government-defined "near-poverty level" (of $13,700 per year for a family of four or more, in 1992 values); twenty-two years later the number of families living below that level has doubled to 15 million, constituting 44 million workers. Again, in 1970 less than half of US families were bringing in two wages, whereas in 1992 there has been an 11 percent increase in the number of two-wage families (to 56 percent), but still the number facing officially-defined poverty has doubled. Furthermore, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, real wages (i.e. the buying power of workers’ incomes) are falling, so that in real terms the average US wage in 1992 can buy 19 percent less than what it could in 1972. In short, the workers are getting poorer.

Rhetoric
Neither Bush nor Clinton were prepared to go beyond rhetoric in relation to the problem of poverty. Bush has a lousy record of neglect for those in need. Following Reagan, his Administration operated on the callous basis that the market would sort out those whose needs should be satisfied. Of course, the market responds to profit and not needs not backed up by purchasing power. Bush has presided over a nation where the public provision of health care has been slashed (in Detroit every single non-private hospital has been closed down and they have been transferring the psychiatric patients to prisons after the state of Michigan decided to cut all welfare expenditure); free education has been discredited (the 1980s saw such cuts in Californian public schooling that now only the most impoverished children are sent to what were once regarded as the best schools in the USA); whole inner city areas have become crime-dominated, drug-infested wastelands (for the first time in twentieth century US history a majority of Americans no longer live in cities) and the level of street violence and murder is rising unstoppably.

In the light of such a dire state of affairs the Republican rhetoric of sickening Christian moralising must have offended a lot of American workers. Clinton was afraid to make anything more than indifferent noises about "change" in relation to the poverty issue because he feared that any talk of helping the most disadvantaged workers would lose him the support of the less disadvantaged wage and salary slaves. Clinton’s campaign exhibited all the lack of commitment or willingness to offend the rich which would make him a prime candidate for leadership in the British Labour Party.

Clinton did not win; Bush fell asleep at the wheel and lost. Clinton’s reputation is based upon the ability to indulge in empty phrasemongering of the "gahd bless you all" variety and a semi-eloquent knack of saying nothing. For example, in an interview in the September issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Clinton spoke of the need for greater American prosperity, then stating "we are going to have to reconcile ourselves . . .  to having a higher percentage of people at lower wage levels". In short, American prosperity under Clinton will mean more workers earning less than they do now. The American workers can look forward to more of the same: falling wages, unnecessary poverty, accompanied by plenty of flag-waving and toothy smiles.

The real Columbus
Of course, 1992 was not only the year of “the greatest country in human history” deciding which hollow grin to be stuck with for the next four years; it is also the year of national celebration of the arrival of Columbus to America five hundred years ago.

Most Americans know less about the real Columbus than they know about Clinton’s shady love life. In Britain the 1492 industry hit rock bottom with the production of the relentlessly unhilarious Carry On Columbus. There has been an ongoing row in the London borough of Lambeth where the local council refused to allow the erection of a Columbus statue outside the Archbishop's Palace because it would be offensive to local black people.

The memory of Columbus should cause offence. The European “discovery" of America as a land fit to exploit was accompanied by one of the most vicious exercises in human annihilation in the history of property society. When Columbus was governor of Espanoia, the first Spanish colony in America, 50,000 natives were killed within the first six months. They were not killed by accident or even neglect, but as a result of a calculated policy of destroying or enslaving the native Indian population whose lives prior to “discovery” had been characterised by communistic sharing and mutual aid.

Central Mexico, with a population of 25 million, ten times that of England at the time of its “discovery”, was reduced to a population of little over a million by the end of the sixteenth century. In western Nicaragua 99 percent of the native population was exterminated: from a population of 1 million to 10,000 in just sixty years. Peru and Chile had a population diminution from over 9 million to less than half a million due to the genocide.

According to Professor David E. Stannard's highly informative book American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1992):

  All told, it is likely that between 60 and 80 million people from the Indies to the Amazon had perished as a result of the European invasion even before the dawning of the seventeenth century.

That workers are being asked to celebrate this vast global plunder is evidence of the sickness of capitalist national ideology. While Bush piously tells Serbians to refrain from barbarous nationalist deeds, he and his friends, including Clinton, urge us to commemorate the barbarity of Columbus and the murderous robbers who appropriated America as their own.

The truth is that we have more to learn from and to respect about the native Americans who were killed off (only half a million survive in the modern USA, many still confined to squalid reservations) than from their persecutors. The truth is that a clear line runs from Columbus through to Clinton: the line of ultimate deference to the rights of property, and Gahd bless all those who own it. Socialists want neither their imaginary gods, their lousy flags, their oppressive governments nor their arrogant nationalism. We want a world without nations, states, classes or the curse of poverty. In the struggle to achieve that Clinton is our enemy; he is the enemy of anyone unwilling to succumb to the history tyranny of property.

Steve Coleman

New Realism (1992)

From the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

They drove us from the land on which
we fed
into town and city
They starved us lest their bidding we did
to labour without pity 

They drove us from the streets on which
we met
into pub and hovel
They beat us lest our voices we quelled
to listen and to grovel 

They drove us from halls in which we
gathered
into suburb and flat
They sent us papers and screens
commending us
to apathy and tat 

They drove the sight out of the world
from our eyes
with censorship and soap
But our eyes still wandered towards the
land
and lingered yet in hope 

They drove our heads into wired iron
hats
of myth and fantasy
We found ourselves back on the land
in virtual reality.
                                                      Peter Nielsen

The Futility of Reformism (1992)

From the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists contend that it is capitalism and capitalism alone which creates all of the major problems in the world today. Poverty, unemployment. crime, war. homelessness and, to a large extent, disease, not forgetting pollution and destruction of natural resources, are all fundamental to capitalism and cannot be solved on any long-term basis whilst this system continues.

Those who support the continuation of present-day society would disagree and claim that capitalism can be changed to solve all, or most social problems, by means of reforms. In fact they would claim that these problems are not problems of capitalism at all but problems that exist, as it were, alongside of capitalism. Each problem has a separate cause (seldom stated) and that therefore it is worthwhile making attempts to improve matters by tackling them one by one whilst retaining capitalism.

Never succeeded
No reform has ever solved a single problem of the capitalist system and none ever will because the pressures of the system are always too much. A reform is not a fundamental change; it is an attempt to alter the way in which capitalism is run. The fundamentals of capitalism are minority ownership of the means of production, the production of wealth for sale on the market, a money economy, a wages system, and the realization of profit from the difference between the wages the producers are paid and the sale of what they have produced. The forms of government and the methods employed to actually run the system are not fundamental but come about through particular historical and other circumstances. Thus Soviet Russia was, and is under another name, a capitalist country. So are China, USA and any other developed country you care to name.

While the fundamentals of capitalism are in existence its nature must remain the same. There must always be a drive for profit and a drive to expand markets which come before any other consideration. Capitalism cannot escape the iron laws of its own economics. Even given the desire to do so from those in power they must follow the laws of the market—or go under, to be succeeded by those capitalists who have a more realistic appreciation of the necessities. The system hangs together as a whole; no one part of it can be taken away.

In the history of capitalism, in every country, hundreds of reforms have been put on the statute books, reams of legislation written, and scheme after scheme have been implemented by all manner of well-meaning people looking to find the solution to the ills facing humanity. Whole industries have been nationalized, then "privatized" to no avail. Government money has been poured into priority areas, only for “black spots” to spring up elsewhere. Housing estates which were erected to ease the housing situation for the working class are now being demolished because they ended in intolerable conditions. An entire scheme of sickness care was set up in this country to cater for working-class ill-health called the National Health Service (they forgot to add ‘‘for workers"—when has a capitalist ever needed a "health scheme”?) The NHS is now in disarray. Endless training schemes have been set up to help young workers find (non-existent) jobs. Way back in 1911 the same problem was confidently going to be solved by the first Labour Exchange set up by Lloyd George.

Why is it that the charity business is booming? There are literally hundreds of charities operating to ameliorate just as many hundreds of ills, yet as fast as they collect money the problems grow. Many, many more examples could be given of reforms which came to grief or ended up creating worse problems which then have to be dealt with. Meanwhile capitalism is growing more and more dangerous and desolating more and more of the world.

Unplannable
For reforms to "succeed” capitalism would need to work smoothly and rationally. But capitalism is a totally anarchic, unco-ordinated system which cannot function in such a way because it only follows one law—the drive for profit. This blows the best-laid schemes of government, planners or reformers apart in its path.

It is quite impossible to achieve a long-term plan for any objective because capitalism is always in some crisis and demands immediate responses to pressures. World events occur with such rapidity that for any country just to try to maintain stability is about as much as they can do. They are so busy swimming against the tide of change that they are using all their strength just to keep their heads above water. They are so busy reacting there is no time to act. So, even if a long-term plan could ever work—and there is no evidence to show that it would and overwhelming evidence to show—that it could not—capitalism is such a dynamic system that it will not stand still long enough to allow such a plan to happen.

Internationally, capitalism has fared no better. All countries face desperate dilemmas in their relationships with other countries. Many stratagems have been put into operation to balance world trade and all have failed. Even if it were possible to devise a financial system which could iron out the tensions in world trade the co-operation of all the major countries would have to be secured. This is impossible because every capitalist country is always following a policy to suit its own interests. Since a major objective is to export more than is imported at any given time, it is obvious that not all can succeed. Add to this the conflicting interests of the multi-nationals and the difficulties encountered in handling lesser developed capitalist countries and it can be seen why reforms of international capitalist relations cannot succeed in harmonizing capitalism on a world basis.

Profits first
Given the nature of capitalism the puzzle is why do political parties advocate reforms and put them forward with every evidence that they themselves believe their absurd schemes will work? It is a mistake to believe that the capitalists understand their own system. They have never studied it in the way that socialists have. Capitalist economists make their reputations, and get their bread, from supplying "solutions" to capitalist problems. What kind of future would a budding Keynes have if he, or she, pointed out that there is really no way of ensuring a stable economy, that the system always staggers on from crisis to crisis?

Capitalists are struggling to survive in business and maintain their competitive edge. To do this they must make sufficient profit to re-invest in capital equipment and keep it up-to-date. This has to be their priority. Anything else comes afterwards. It is not the “wicked” capitalist who brings this about; it is not a moral decision, it is an economic necessity.

Given this as the norm—the everyday face of capitalism— where do reforms fit in? Reforms are basically of two kinds; those that are meant to make the capitalist system run a little more smoothly for the capitalist class and those that are meant to ease the lot of the worker. Neither kind can work because only a fundamental change of social system can make any difference. Reforms are not meant to change the fundamental set-up of capitalism; they are expressly the opposite of that. The most that can be achieved is to ease the conditions of a section of the working class for a time. But as fast as a reform is applied fresh problems are thrown up on account of the changing pressures of capitalism.

So the question remains, is it worth the effort? Why bother? Chasing after reforms is a futile effort, a waste of working-class energy when that energy could be put into something that is worthwhile—working for socialism.

Cyril Evans

Between the Lines: House of Frauds (1992)

Healey and Howe in ermine.

The Between the Lines column from the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

House of Frauds
I have long been of ihc view that there is something particularly silly about the British ruling class. All that left-wing talk about how the rulers will prevent a socialist majority from having our way has never carried any credibility. Watching tire Channel Four Cutting Edge documentary on the inside life - life? - of the House of Lords (16 November, 9 pm) was watertight evidence that sanity is no qualification for being in the ruling elite of capitalism.

The rituals of the so-called Upper House, where twelve hundred unelected members can claim five hundred pounds a week for doing a totally worthless job which involves a lot of sleeping, are part of that public school tradition which makes Britain an ex-Empire. The documentary showed the induction into the peerage of two new life frauds. Geoffrey Howe — Thatcher's hatchet man at the Treasury who finally turned the axe on the mad priestess herself — and Denis Healey — who started out in the Communist Party and ended up as the Labour Chancellor who introduced monetarist policies before the Thatcherites ever entered Number Ten.

These social vandals were receiving their pay-off for a lifetime's dirty work of screwing the working class on behalf of the bosses. That is why life peerages are given to politicians and trade union leaders who have served the system well. Most members of the House get there simply because their old man died and they inherited a peerage. Remarkably, the documentary stated that one third of all members of the House of Lords went to just one school: Eton, the place which has huge annual fees and where names of pupils must be signed up soon after they are born. So much for the myth of equal opportunities under capitalism.

But back to the silliness. Watching the absurd rehearsal of their inauguration, where Howe and Healey had to practise putting on and taking off their ridiculous medieval hats and bowing to the Lord Chancellor as they proceed towards him, it became clear that this sort of behaviour would not be out of place in the confines of a psychiatric hospital where disturbed people repeat certain actions with no particular purpose. The parliamentary games are to a great extent about doing barmy things simply because other people have done them before. Those caught up in such a ritual, and benefiting from the payments involved, no doubt think that they are indispensable.

In fact, this documentary was ample proof of the good sense of dispensing with these useless people. Unlike other critics, however, socialists are not simply out to abolish the House of Lords. We want to abolish the entire function of government. This will only happen when lire majority refuses to be governed, to live as inferiors in a class society, and to demean themselves by accepting for one moment that there are superior people who must sit in a special House or Chamber and make decisions for us.

Terry Fields

More Frauds — No Longer In The House
Socialism will be a stateless society without leaders or led. The Cutting Edge documentary the week before the Lords' expose was about the Militant Tendency — in particular, their campaign in Broadgreen in Liverpool to retain their MP, Terry Fields, in the 1992 General Election. As it happens, the Militant members shown on this documentary were exposed as sincere and enthusiastic people whose convictions were worthier, at least on the surface, than the tired old official Labourites who were out to defeat them.

The problem with Militant is that they are a fraudulent body, they pretend to be socialists, but they stand for state capitalism — a repeat of Lenin's failed vanguardist strategy. They claim to be the real Labour Party, even though Labour has expelled them and is embarrassed by them. Terry Fields appealed for support on the grounds that he was the real Labour candidate. His supporters sought votes on the basis of sterile old promises to make capitalism better. Fields lost the election. Of course, he lost in part because he was the victim of a campaign to discredit his leftist stance. But it would be nice to think that he lost also because workers in Broadgreen were unwilling to get excited about left-wing Labourism, were not prepared to give yet another pseudo-radical five years to govern them from the House of Common Thieves in Westminster, that they regarded Fields and other politicians as playing a game that they wanted no part in.

The Socialist Party is hostile to both ermine-clad rulers who like capitalism as it is and reformist MPs who want capitalism with bandages over its worse sores. Neither Etonians nor Leninists, but THE WORLD FOR THE WORKERS!

Steve Coleman

50 Years Ago: Some Socialist Points on the Beveridge Report (1992)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Times reads into the Report the "confident assurance that the poor need not always be with us”, but this is merely a misuse of terms, and one incidentally for which Beveridge appears not to be responsible. He talks all the time of abolishing “want" by which he avowedly means something quite different from abolishing poverty. By want he means the condition into which the workers fall when their wages stop, not the condition in which they always are because they are carrying the capitalist class on their backs. Beveridge is quite clear about the distinction and says so. Did he not make a statement on December 1 (reported in the BBC news broadcasts but apparently not in the Press) that it had always been his view that want could be abolished within the ranks of the wage-earners without any inroads into the wealth of the rich? He is saying in effect in his Report want could be abolished without interfering with capitalism, but neither he nor the Times want to abolish poverty. But for the poverty of the poor there could be no riches for the rich—a state which he and they find quite acceptable.

[from Socialist Standard, December 1942.]

The Starvation in Somalia (1992)

Editorial from the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nobody can fail to be moved by the pictures and accounts of people starving in Somalia. It really is an obscene crime against humanity that people should be dying of starvation in a world which is not only capable of producing enough to feed everybody but even has enough food stockpiled to stop it straightaway. As the Observer reported on 30 August:

Britain has enough wheat and barley lying unused in its grain stores to feed the entire Somalian nation for more than a year.
 At one single centre—on a disused RAF base near Kidderminster in Worcestershire—there are four huge warehouses stuffed with enough grain to supply the stricken war-torn nation for a month.
   One of these warehouses is said to be so full that it is virtually impossible to open its large steel doors. Yet in Somalia, hundreds of people—mostly children—are dying daily.
  The Kidderminster grain mountain is part of a total of 568,000 tonnes housed in Britain—in turn part of 19.6 million tonnes of wheat and barley kept in EC warehouses.
  This massive surplus could feed Somalia—which needs 40,000 tonnes of food aid per month for its starving people—for more than 40 years.

In a sane world, one geared to meeting human needs and serving human welfare, stopping people in Somalia dying of starvation would be a question purely of logistics. Organising to transport the food from where it is stockpiled to Somalia.

But of course we are not living in a sane world. We are living in a world dominated by market forces. And it is their inability to operate in the human interest that has caused the problem in the first place and is now preventing it being solved in the simplest, most direct way.

People are starving in Somalia not because there is not enough food in the world to feed them. They are starving because they lack the means to make their demand—or rather, their absolute need—for food effective. They lack either money to buy food or access to land to grow their own. Those in Somalia who do have these things are not starving.

Those with money in Somalia can, and do, have access to food—the television has shown pictures of well-stocked markets, sometimes with starving people lying on the other side of the street. We mention this not to belittle the extent of the obscene situation in Somalia but to underline the point that famines only affect those whose access to money or land has collapsed for some reason. Famines are a social not a natural phenomenon.

Protecting the market for food in Somalia is in fact a key factor shaping the so-called “food aid” policies of governments and the UN. They know that to make available for free distribution anything but minimal amounts of food per starving person would be to undermine local markets and local market-oriented production, leading to more people coming to lose their access rights to food. And of course they are right. Given the market system this is exactly what would happen. So, quite apart from financial cost considerations, they deliberately limit the amount of free food they supply.

This is what we mean when we say that it is market forces that are preventing the immediate starvation in Somalia being solved in the way that it would be, almost literally overnight, in a sane society, one that would have to be based on the common ownership of resources: transporting the food from the warehouses of Europe to the towns and villages of Somalia.

But what of the long term? Could starvation be averted after the warehouses of Europe and North America had been emptied to feed the starving in Somalia and other parts of the world? In other words, could the planet produce enough to adequately feed the whole world’s population on a permanent, continuing basis?

Professor Vulimiri Ramalingaswami, who is chairman of the World Health Organisation’s medical research committee, is in no doubt that it can. “We have the ability as a world to produce enough food for everyone”, he told a meeting in Geneva in August. “We need to devise mechanisms so these fruits can reach those in greatest need” (Guardian, 18 August).

Professor Ramalingaswami is to chair a conference in Rome this month that the WHO is organising jointly with the Food and Agriculture Organisation. The FAO and the WHO are apparently thinking in terms of a “world crusade to end famine deaths”. Something like this is indeed what is required: a crash programme to increase world food production and distribute it on a free, non-market basis to where it is needed. But it is not going to happen. For the same reason that the warehouses of Europe are not going to be emptied to immediately stop the starvation in Somalia. It would undermine the market.

Not this time the local markets in some famine-stricken part of the world, but the world markets for wheat, maize, rice and other world commodities. As long as all things are produced for sale on a market with a view to making a profit, food is never going to be produced to feed people who can’t pay for it. As long, in other words, as food remains a commodity people will starve and Somalias will continue to happen.

Gold-Seeking Guru (1992)

From the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 1992 Schumacher Lectures held in Bristol in October set out to explore the link between "good work, good business, good economics and a spiritually informed world view". One of the advertised speakers was Sir James Goldsmith (in fact, he only sent a video message) who was presented by the Schumacher Society as one of "four great thinkers and activists who look towards a sustainable future based on spiritual and ecological values”. The image that is created of him is that of a businessman and industrialist who has given up his business interests to devote himself to changing human values and creating a better world and who has a particular interest in environmentally-sustainable land use.

Certainly, James Goldsmith gives millions of pounds to the Green movement including organizations like Friends of the Earth. In the 1970s he financed an anti-nuclear campaign against the nuclear plant at Windscale. Nuclear power was, he declared in a recent interview reprinted in Resurgence magazine (no 152), "hopelessly uneconomic, terrifyingly dangerous and insecure”. In the early 1980s he helped his brother Edward Goldsmith launch and finance The Ecologist magazine. Then in 1990 in a flamboyant gesture, he sold his timber interests, the profits from which had largely enabled him to build up his spectacular fortune in the preceding decade, to Lord Hanson. In return he acquired Newmont Mining which owns mostly goldmines. He declared on giving up his timber assets that he would devote the rest of his life to protecting the environment and in particular to persuading businesses and governments to end the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest.

But environmentalists beware! Despite what the Schumacher Society has to say about James Goldsmith—and it is after all one of the leading ecological associations in Britain—his credentials as a great environmental thinker and activist do not bear close scrutiny. The large amounts of money which he dishes out to the Green movement along with the glib, superficial pronouncements he makes on a variety of subjects from communism to Buddhism, farming and sustainable land use amounts to little more than sophisticated greenwash. He is one of those members of the capitalist class who recognize that if they are to hold on to their power and wealth, they must appear to take into account the well-informed and vociferous demands of the growing environmental movement. They must discredit the views of those people in the movement who point to the profit system as one of the main perpetrators of ecological destruction and unsustainable resource use. He attempts to buy off the more naive participants in the ecological movement by appealing to their recognition of the need for global solidarity which is unfortunately coupled with a refusal to grapple with the political reality of the class-divided system under which we live. In the interview reprinted in Resurgence magazine he stated:

I believe business is vital—and a free market extremely important—because you need prosperity to clean up the scars of the past and because people who are reasonably prosperous can think six months, a year, ten years ahead.

But it is the activities of Newmont Mining in which he holds a 42 percent stake that reveals the full hypocrisy of his position as a promoter of ecologically sustainable land use and his commitment to creating a better world.

Profits from pollution

In September this year, two environmental and human rights groups, Minewatch and Survival International named Newmont and one of its subsidiary companies. Dawn Mining, as being among the top ten violators of Native American land. Both companies are at present in dispute with at least two Native American communities whose survival has for centuries depended on the ecologically- sustainable land use which Goldsmith claims to be such an expert on. In Nevada. Newmont Mining has polluted ground water with cyanide and heavy metals from five goldmines on its Carlin Trend concession. The Western Shoshone tribe who are in dispute with the US government over the ownership of this particular area have commented with dismay at this desecration of land which they have looked after so well for so long according to their spiritual values:

It is the Western Shoshone belief that Mother Earth is a living being, she is alive in her own way. not as we humans are but in a different way.The blood that flows in our veins keeps us alive. The water that flows in our Mother Earth are her veins and keep her alive. This water must be kept clean and pure so that all life upon Mother Earth is to continue for the future. (Statement issued by Western Shoshone . National Council, August 1992).

In Washington State, Dawn Mining Company which is Newmont's 51 percent-owned subsidiary plans to use low-level radioactive waste to fill a huge pit on its uranium mine and mill complex, part of which is on a Spokane Indian Reservation. Both members of the tribe and the Washington State Health Department have demanded that the company use clean soil instead. The company is bankrupt and claims it cannot afford to make the site safe unless it is paid by other US states to take their unwanted radioactive waste. If the site is not cleared up soon there is a danger that 400 million gallons of contaminated water may begin to leak from disused mine pits into nearby rivers.

While Goldsmith pontificates about the environment and spiritual values, Newmont mining continues on its profit-seeking rampage around the world. In Peru, Newmont owns a 10.7 percent share in the South Peru Copper Corporation (SPCC). At two mine sites in the south of Peru, SPCC' is responsible for seriously depleting water resources, poisoning rivers and coastal waters and causing serious respiratory illnesses among the local people.

In Australia, the company suffered a slight setback when another of its associate companies, Newcrest, along with several other mining companies came into direct conflict with the Jawoyn Aborigines over a proposed goldmine at Coronation Hill in the Northern Territory. The Jawoyn are strongly opposed to mining in this region because they believe a dreamtime creation figure called Bula lives there. If Bula is disturbed, apocalyptic events will follow. According to the New Scientist (27 April 1991) the Aborigines also refer to the area as “sickness country". It has high levels of radioactivity caused by uranium deposits close to the surface. Mining in the area could indeed unleash the destructive powers of the sleeping spirit. . . Certainly, mining the area would drastically deplete and contaminate the waters of the South Alligator River system which runs through the Kakadu National Park made famous in the film Crocodile Dundee. In June 1991, the Aborigines won their battle to get mining companies banned from the area by an opportunistic Australian Labor government anxious to capture the green vote over this most publicized issue in election year. But how long will it be before the ban is reversed or the companies find a loophole which will enable them to slip into the area?

Greed for gold

In the meantime, Newmont continues to prospect for gold—in Uzbekistan, in South and Central America, in south-east Asia and in Europe, with little care for people and environment. The company's activities make Goldsmith's words sound very hollow indeed. When in 1990 he swapped his timber assets for a mining company, he was simply exchanging interests that were decreasing in profitability and becoming too sensitive for a man concerned to maintain his green image for a more lucrative source of wealth and one about which there is considerably less public awareness. He has admitted that his sole reason for acquiring Newmont was the pursuit of profit when he said in 1991:

Gold and gold-mining shares will have their day and when they do everyone will want to buy gold shares, (quoted in The Guru and the Gold, Minewatch dossier, 218 Liverpool Rd. London Nl)

Goldsmith is no different in spirit from that group of Europeans who first set foot on American shores—the conquistadores—who were also motivated by a greed for gold.

Any discussion about spiritual values and ecological sustainability should surely begin by referring to the experts in the subject—those people whose survival has for centuries depended on a profound respect for the earth and the finite nature of her resources, and whose customs and traditions reveal an intimate and scientific understanding of their environment.

Certainly, there is nothing ecologically sustainable about multinational mining as those who are first to be on the receiving end of its destructive processes point out. Many Native American communities, and indeed other indigenous groups such as the Jawoyn Aborigines mentioned above, have spiritual taboos relating to human activity which tampers with the land in the way that mining for profit does. Some such as the Navahos in Arizona are opposed to digging up coal as they regard any mining as a sacrilegious and destructive act, but other communites in other parts of the world have engaged in small-scale mining activity, taking from the earth what is of use to them and with minimal damage.

Unless Goldsmith genuinely becomes part of the struggle to wrest control of the Earth’s resources from the minority who own and control them, in order to create a society of common ownership based once more on a sustainable use of resources, he will go down in history merely as one member of that class of ruthless profit-seekers who for so long have been responsible for the wholesale destruction of people and planet.

Kerima Mohideen

Slump—France hit too (1992)

From the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The depression, or slump, is worldwide. That’s official. Capitalism is in deep trouble. Some countries have, as yet, been less affected than others. But it is only a matter of degree. In France the politicians are despised (there have been many scandals particularly among the so-called socialists), and there is an air of gloom among retailers, despite an apparent affluence among some sectors of the working class. Nevertheless, France has not suffered the appalling political crises that have hit Britain over the last few weeks.

But let no-one be fooled.

Inflation is at just under 2.7 percent, but unemployment, with all its miseries, is officially at 10 percent. That is three million; but it is certainly at least four million. For about a year, unemployment pay is around 70 percent of the person's previous salary (which, to some extent, makes unemployment almost tolerable in economic terms); after that, it is reduced drastically. And more than one million workers have been officially unemployed for more that two years. Many have had only two or three jobs, often lasting less than one month, during the last 18 months.

For those in a job—the "lucky” wage-slaves—the "good life” is fast receding into the distant past; if it ever really existed anyway. As in the United States and the United Kingdom, most workers are heavily in debt. Less have their houses or apartments mortgaged—unlike the British, many French consider buying a house or flat over a 25-ycar period, a mug’s game. Let the landlord do the decorating or repairs, they say.

France is increasingly becoming divided, not into three classes, but two—the working class majority and the capitalist minority. The peasants are a dying class. Farmers are doomed. For years now, their sons and daughters have flocked into the towns and cities looking for and, until fairly recently, getting jobs. At the end of the last war. there were probably almost three million farms and smallholdings in France; now, there are less than 920,000. Like the majority of workers, the farmers too are heavily in debt. No wonder they get involved in often violent demonstrations—not that that will make any difference in the long run.

Of course, French capitalists are not doing all that well either. But that’s their problem. Few have been seen begging in the Metro, or along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, or outside the posh shops in the Rue du Faubourg. Exports, not unnaturally, are down: about 2 percent this year. And tourism, particularly from crisis-ridden Britain, is certain to decline in the months (and years?) to come. Sales of perfumes, cars, expensive clothes and even scotch whisky (always popular with the bourgeoisie) are all declining.

Capitalism in France, as elsewhere, will not collapse. But it will probably get worse, and deeper, before it gets better. Unemployment in France—as in Britain—is likely to remain high for a long time, particularly as old industries like coal and steel continue to contract and ultimately die. Despite French dirigisme, and a far larger state sector than in post-Thatcher Britain, France is still very much an integral part of world capitalism; and is as much subject to the unplannedness of a production-for- profit economy.

As elsewhere, French workers instead of putting their trust in politicians (the French, it should be said, are less inclined to than the British) will have to organize for the abolition, rather than the reform, of an increasingly insecure capitalism, with its inevitable booms, recessions and slumps. 

Peter E. Newell

Sting in the Tail: Pecking Order (1992)

The Sting in the Tail Column from the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pecking Order

The scene is the African veldt: hungry vultures circle over a carcass but they are robbed of their meal by some other predators.

Nature in the raw? No, this is capitalism in the raw because those predators were not wild animals; they were humans. The Guardian (29 October) explains:

. . . the eco-sensitive in Johannesburg have been leaving carcasses on the veldt in a bid to save the vultures from famine. They have put an electric fence round one of these "vulture restaurants" in Bophuthatswana to stop the starving people in the homeland getting at the food.

There is a way to end such human degradation and it doesn't involve Bob Geldof, Telethons, or sending a fiver to Oxfam.

Silly Billy

Comedian Billy Connolly has consigned "socialism to the scrapheap. He told Melvyn Bragg on The South Bank Show (ITV 4 October) that "Socialism is wrong. It must be if all those people in Eastern Europe have rejected it".

Obviously Connolly has been under the impression that what existed in the state-capitalist dictatorships was socialism! No doubt he got this idea from the "communists" he knew in his days as a folk-singer.

One of Connolly's past concert tours was entitled "Rebel Without A Clue": we couldn't have put it better ourselves.

Sensible Sinead

It is not often that you get pop singers talking much sense about politics so it is a real pleasure to record what Sinead O'Connor had to say about money.

My biggest aim is to persuade the world to get rid of money, the root of all evil. If everyone agreed to do it at the same time, it could happen. Won't most people be better off pursuing happiness rather than material assets.

The Sun (23 October)

The more current that idea becomes the easier it is for socialists to spread the ideas of socialism. The only logical alternative to capitalism's money madness is socialism where all production will be solely for need.

Told Ya So!

How John Major must sigh for the heady days when he replaced that nasty old Mrs. Thatcher at number 10.

Remember how his popularity had the stricken Tories soaring in the opinion polls? Everyone, we were told, liked this smiling, unassuming, decent chap.

Alas two years on and his name is mud. From singing his praises the press cannot rubbish him enough (the Sun even calls him a turnip) and he is rated the most unpopular Prime Minister ever.

But this column saw it coming! In January 1991 at the height of Major's love-in with the voters Scorpion pointed out that all leaders of governments must make decisions about the running of capitalism, decisions which will inevitably alienate many voters and

This is why every Prime Minister (Tory and Labour) and the voters have, for a while, a honeymoon followed by a cooling off and eventual divorce. This is what happened to Mrs Thatcher and sooner or later John Major's turn will come.

Marks & Spencer

Work hard - your firm will prosper and you will prosper. That is the accepted wisdom that we are constantly being fed by the media. Well, what do you make of this item?

Marks & Spencer, the Rolls-Royce of Britain's high street stores, is purring through the recession with profits up almost 20 per cent. The St Michael label returned profits of £257 million on higher sales of £2.24 billion with the winning combination of selling expensive food and not quite so expensive clothes.
The losers in the battle against recession were 300 staff made redundant at M & S headquarters last year.

The Times (29 October)

Left Wing Stunts

"Major and Lamont must go" is the Socialist Workers Party's latest stunt. Their declared aim is to "kick the Tories out" but the sacking of Major and Lamont will not achieve this as they would merely be replaced by other Tory luminaries. In any case, mid-term leadership changes ALWAYS restore Tory fortunes - witness the last one.

The SWP's real aim is to get a Labour government in. Their argument is that of course Labour will fail; many workers will see this and turn to the SWP.

Both of these aims are hopelessly doomed. A change of leader would, as history shows, leave the Tories more firmly in the saddle while Labour's inevitable failure would, as history also shows, simply pave the way for yet another Tory government.

Our recent readers survey revealed that some readers think we devote too much space to leftwing parties: sorry, but the above surely demonstrates the genuine need to expose their hare-brained and misleading antics.

Hypocrisy

As Robin Cook, and other Labour Party frontbenchers, try to expose the government's sale of arms to Iraq during a so-called ban. It is worthwhile recalling Labour's position when they formed the government.

While the government attaches the highest importance to making progress in the field of arms control and disarmament, we must also take what practical steps we can to ensure that this country does not fail to secure its rightful share of this valuable commercial market.

Denis Healey in the House of Commons (25 January 1966)

Why Beveridge reorganized poverty (1992)

From the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty years ago this month the Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services by Sir William Beveridge was published to widespread acclaim. Supporters of all the pro-capitalist political parties hailed the Report as the basis for a restructured and improved social provision for the working class after the war against Germany had been won. According to the veteran Communist campaigner Willie Gallagher there was no mistaking the attitude of the British population to the plan. He told the House of Commons:

The trade union movement wants the Beveridge Plan, the Co-operative movement wants it, the Labour Party wants it, the Communist Party wants it, and the Liberals and a section of the Tory Party want it. It is clear that the great masses of the people, as represented by these forces, want the plan.

In retrospect it may seem ironic that those on capitalism's extreme left-wing, as well as its more mainstream defenders, should have been so enamoured with the Beveridge Report. Their reformist enthusiasm certainly overlooked the fact that one of its express aims was to increase productivity and encourage the working class to concentrate on the war effort while holding out the vague hope of better conditions to come, echoing Lloyd George's 1918 "land fit for heroes to live in" homily.

While the Labour and Communist Parties jostled for a reformist advantage over the Beveridge Report, the Socialist Party analyzed the purpose and nature of the Beveridge proposals in a pamphlet called Beveridge Re-Organises Poverty. This pamphlet quoted the Tory MP Quentin Hogg (now Lord Hailsham) and his advice on the necessity of social reform within capitalism—"if you do not give the people social reform, they are going to give you social revolution"—and suggested that the Beveridge recommendations were best judged in the light of the wave of working class discontent which followed the 1914-18 war, which the capitalist class and their political representatives feared might be repeated.

Poor relief

The actual content of the Report and the proposals it put forward for social reform were, as the Times put it, "moderate enough to disarm any charge of indulgence" (2 December 1942). In large part the reforms aimed at providing an efficient working framework for the replacement of the unbalanced and disparate system of poor relief previously in existence in Britain. In fact a familiar claim of Beveridge at the time was that his proposals would be cheaper to administer than the previous arrangements. As he put it in his Report:  

Social insurance and the allied services, as they exist today, are conducted by a complex of disconnected administrative organs, proceeding on different principles, doing invaluable service but at a cost in money and trouble and anomalous treatment of identical problems for which there is no justification. (p. 6, emphasis added).

Many of Beveridge's proposals were already effectively in force for a significant number of workers, but the Report recommended the introduction of a unified, comprehensive and contributory scheme to cover the loss of employment, disablement, sickness and old age. An enlargement of medical benefits and treatments was proposed, as was a plan for non-contributory allowances to be paid by the state to parents with dependent children.

This latter scheme was criticized in another Socialist Party pamphlet called Family Allowances: A Socialist Analysis, which demonstrated how Beveridge's proposed Family Allowances would be of principle benefit to the employing class, not the wage and salary earners, allowing employers to make-across-the-board wage reductions as wages had previously had to take account of the entire cost of the maintenance and reproduction of workers and their families, even though the majority of workers at the time had no dependent children to provide for. The Family Allowances plan was a scheme based on targetting provision on those workers actually with children. Family Allowances: A Socialist Analysis explained: 

wages must provide not only an existence for the workers himself, but also enable him to rear future generations of wage workers to take his place. It is quite logical therefore from a capitalist point of view to raise objection to a condition which in a large number of cases provides wages "adequate" to maintain children for those who in fact possess no children.

Poor get poorer

In outlining the case for universal state benefits and health care, the Beveridge Report was undoubtedly of some benefit to sections of the working class who, for one reason or another, had found themselves outside the existing schemes of provision. But as the case of Family Allowances demonstrated some of the gains for the working class were more apparent than real.

As the Socialist Party was able to predict, the recommendations of Beveridge and, for that matter, the modifications that have been made to the various branches of the welfare state in the last 50 years, have not succeeded in solving the poverty problem. Particularly since the end of the post-war boom in Britain in the late 1960s, the problems of poverty and income inequality have accelerated. To confound the prediction of some supporters of capitalism (and some so-called Marxists too) that the tendency of state-assisted capitalist development is to make the rich relatively poorer and the poor progressively richer, the numbers of those in relative and absolute poverty have increased in Britain, America and a number of other leading industrialized countries. Moreover, this phenomenon currently shows no sign of being reversed, despite the attentions of the reformers.

Part of the explanation for this lies in the way in which state benefits have periodically failed to keep pace with rises in the general price level, and the systematic way in which entitlements like unemployment benefit and income support have been allowed to fall as a proportion of the average wage. In 1979 a married claimant in Britain qualified for 35 percent of average earnings, but by 1990 this was down to 27 percent. In the same period of time the number of unemployed men means-tested rose from just under half to three-quarters. The break between pensions and earnings meant that a single pensioner received only £46.90 a week instead of £58.65 and a married couple £75.10 instead of £94.05. Meanwhile in the US, an unemployed New York woman with two children receives one third less in real terms than in 1972 (Sunday Times, 6 September).

In the year 1990-1 the government spent £77 billion on health and social security, 42 percent of general government expenditure. For the current financial year 1992-3 the total is likely to be about £100 billion, necessitating the present large increases in the government's Public Sector Borrowing Requirement. With the increasing demands placed on the health service and the additional burdens placed on social security expenditure during the slump, pressure to cut back in government spending is intensifying.

Sticking plaster

As the 1942 proposals of Beveridge indicated, and experience has subsequently proved, expenditure on the welfare state can never really serve as anything more than a sticking plaster on capitalism's poverty problems. The capitalist system leaves little room for sentiment and its driving concerns of profitability and capital accumulation impinge on the effectiveness of the welfare state, as they impinge on everything else. The health services and social security have to be paid for ultimately out of the profits of the capitalist class, generally via taxation (the burden of which in the last analysis falls on the bosses) or borrowing.

The need to keep health and social security expenditure in check does not therefore come about because of the blind malice or hatred of politicians but because of the need to keep the amount of profit taken off the capitalists as low as possible. The spectre of a declining rate of profit after tax—restricting future investment in the profit-making sectors of the economy—is not something the capitalist class are simply going to sit back and accept. This was demonstrated by the rise of so-called "Thatcherism" in Britain and other industrialized countries in the 1980s. whose overt mission (not altogether successfully carried out) was to reduce borrowing and the proportion of the capitalists' accumulated wealth taken through tax. This, indeed, was the same mission undertaken by the last Labour government after its initial attempts to expand the economy through Keynesian economic policies ended in chaos.

Today, with the world in the midst of another economic crisis, and with future attacks on the welfare state developed since Beveridge, we can confidently re-assert our initial analysis of 50 years ago, to the effect that Beveridge represented not the "new world of hope" set out by the reformers, but a "re-distribution of misery". That misery remains and will do so as long as capitalism and its insane priorities continue to carry all before it.

Dave Perrin

Obituary: Freddie James (1992)

Obituary from the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Freddie James, who was a Party member for many years, died on 29 August 1992, at the age of 67.

He joined the Party in 1948 and for many years was an active member of Hackney Branch, Although he did not continuously maintain his membership, drifting out and into the Party again at various times, he maintained his links with the Party and supported the party case until his death. He had a somewhat anarchic attitude towards payment of dues and replying to letters, and could rarely bring himself to ask for his dues to be waived, and thus became lapsed from the Party from time to time. However, he never left because of disagreement.

In the 1950s and after, he was a prominent and active member, frequently speaking at open-air venues in Hackney and elsewhere. He was also frequently to be seen at Head Office and Party meetings generally and was often active at Conference and Delegate Meetings. Fred had an aggressive and rumbustious style, which did not endear him to everyone, but he always displayed an underlying good humour, which softened many of his barbed comments.

Fred was also active for the Party in the Provinces, and for some time in the 50s stayed in Nottingham where he spoke at outdoor meetings and was active in the local branch. He also took an active interest in left-wing and anarchist meetings and was frequently to be found at meetings organized by other parties and groups, where he determinedly put forward the party case. He stood as a Socialist Party candidate in Bethnal Green in elections to the old London County Council in 1958.

Freddie James (as he was usually called) was a lifetime student of politics, history, psychology and social sciences generally. In his Hackney branch days he gave lectures and conducted classes on such topics as ancient society and anthropology. His former home in Weymouth Terrace, Hackney, was for many years a centre for party members and others to have discussions and arguments, drink tea and play chess. His last home, a flat near Euston Station, had every room and passageway crowded with the thousands of books that reflected his lifetime interests.

Apart from politics, Fred had consuming interests in psychology and music. He studied the guitar with Len Williams at the Guitar Centre, and himself became a teacher of the guitar, at GLC classes and at the City Literary Institute. He also maintained his enthusiasm for chess, and in recent years frequently had friends dropping in on him for a game. He also helped to found a community arts group in Kentish Town, and was treasurer of this group when he died.

About two years ago he was diagnosed as having cancer of the oesophagus, and underwent drastic surgery. During his periods of hospitalization he maintained a cheerful and lively demeanour and his hospital bed was often surrounded by relatives, friends and acquaintances, enjoying his company. He faced his frequently painful disabilities with remarkable courage and fortitude, and when there was a recurrence of his illness shortly before his death, he continued to display a calm but cheerful presence.

Fred will be much missed in the many fields in which he became well-known. A memorial meeting, to celebrate his life, was held on 25 October at Lauderdale House, Highgate, which was attended by party members who knew him, former members and many others.

Albert Ivimey