Yes in My Back Yard (2025)

Book Review from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abundance: How We Build A Better World. By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. ISBN 9781805226055

This book has caused quite a stir. It has even made Chancellor Reeves’ summer reading list, and been cited – in passing – by Robert Peston. It is part of the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) trend. Its central theme is that government regulation is choking the capacity for effective action to generate wealth, and that instead the liberal left has been concentrating on the parcelling out of scarcity, rather than trying to improve the overall material wealth of society.

The authors mention the expensive failure to build a high-speed railway in California, citing environmental laws and litigation as the reason: alongside the excessive bureaucracy to plan the route. They also note California has higher rates of homelessness than comparable cities in Texas, and attribute the blame to zoning and to authorities loading environmental, building and labour standards into permissions, making building uneconomic for developers.

In their narrative, they do discuss the nature of landholding and the fact that residents’ houses are also financial assets, only to skip blithely over them to discuss bureaucratic complexity again. In so doing, and returning to their theme that it was the failure of efforts to restrict the power of public authorities that is to blame, they ignore the role of private property.

The state is restricted in order to secure the power of private property. The litigation is there to protect property rights. It’s there to protect economic interests (and some firms do benefit from regulation). The complex funding arrangements and financial regulations are there precisely to keep the interests of wealth superior to state power. This is a political choice, and one that those who fund the political parties will continue to demand.

At points, the authors seem to indicate that it would be better to allow constructors to build slum housing than to continue allowing homelessness. They also suggest reducing quality controls and demands on construction: in essence, they are allowing that the working class cannot afford decent housing. Although their ‘lens’, as they say, is increasing supply, they ignore the lack of effective demand for the majority.

They find time in their conclusion to reference Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto talking about unfettering productive forces to produce abundance. But they ignore what those fetters of capitalist society are: the law of no profit – no production, and the law of no profit – no employment. The growth of income streams alongside the capacity to produce so much that profit margins would be reduced to zero.

Absent an understanding of the role of private property and the class struggle from their narrative, they are reduced to a simple call for de-regulation coupled with bold state action. They do not see that the litigiousness they decry is meant to exclude a thorough-going democratic control that includes all voices. The abundance they seek can only come from the common ownership and democratic control of productive wealth.

Pik Smeet

Warning: capitalism can harm your health (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part of the socialist case against capitalism is that in a society based on ruthless competition the control of economic costs will always take priority over the needs of human beings. Therefore plans to cut government and business costs by weakening health and safety regulations are of little surprise to socialists.

The government gave notice of its intentions last November when in the Queen’s Speech it announced a Deregulation Bill which many feared was directly aimed at diluting some of the Health and Safety laws. This Deregulation Bill would give government departments and ministers the power to abolish laws by parliamentary order (Labour Research, January 1994).

At the beginning of this year it was announced that the Health and Safety Executive, the body responsible for enforcing health and safety standards, was to make 230 cuts in jobs over the next two years because the government has reduced its grant. Its budget has been cut by £5 million for the period 1994-95. In 1995-96 it will get only £192 million which is £10 million less than it asked for. In the coal-mining industry the pit deputies union NACODS failed in an attempt in the High Court to prevent the introduction of new mine safety regulations which will weaken safety standards in the pits. The Management and Administration of Safety and Health in Mines Regulations Act of 1993 takes away the role of pit supervisors to monitor safety at pits. This role will now be given to safety inspectors who will have no legal powers and can be overruled by management (Labour Research, February 1994).

Lower standards

Despite improvement in conditions for most workers since the early stages of capitalist industrial production, many workers still suffer illness, injury and even loss of life due to avoidable accidents at work or through diseases directly related to their working environment. Statistics for 1993 show that 430 workers were killed through their employment and there were 88,536 injuries reported to the enforcing authorities (Labour Research, January 1994).

An example of the type of dangers still facing workers in their employment concerns people working with or coming into contact with asbestos.

The effects of inhaling asbestos dust have been known for decades. Asbestos causes asbestosis, a disabling and ultimately fatal scarring of the lungs, lung cancer which is almost always fatal, and mesothelioma, a painful and fatal cancer of the lining of the lung or stomach. Amongst the workers most affected are miners, dockers, those involved in the manufacturing of asbestos products, building workers using products containing asbestos and those who work in or maintain buildings which contain decorating asbestos products. It has been estimated by the Department of Employment that some six million tonnes of the three main types of the product crocidolite blue asbestos, amosite brown asbestos and chrysotile white asbestos had been imported into the UK by 1986.

The widespread use of asbestos left a legacy of almost 3,000 people dying of asbestos-related cancer last year. Asbestos is responsible for more cancers than any other industrial substance. According to recent research by Professor Peto of the Institute of Cancer Research and the Health and Safety Executive, death rates due to mesothelioma alone will increase from around 1,000 in 1991 to between 2,500 and 3,000 a year. As usual under a system designed to meet profit rather than human need, the victims of these avoidable diseases are very often not properly compensated particularly where they have been exposed to asbestos contained in the buildings they work in.

Obstacles to compensation

Various obstacles are put in the way of claiming so-called benefits. To be able to claim compensation workers have to have worked in certain prescribed industries. This generally means they would have to have had some direct contact with the substance via actual asbestos materials or the machinery or appliances used in the manufacture of asbestos products. Under these limitations for claiming compensation it is estimated that 43 percent of mesothelioma victims actually die before they receive their benefit (Labour Research, March 1994).

Despite all the evidence about the health hazards from working with asbestos there are few signs of a complete ban on all types of the substance. In fact William Bernard, president of the American asbestos workers’ union, at a recent conference on construction safety in the USA, gave the following warning:

"Asbestos manufacturers are once again on the assault. They are arguing that a particular type of asbestos chrysotile is not hazardous to health. They are asking the European Community and World Health Organisation to allow it to be used again, especially for use in third world countries" (Labour Research, March 1994).

The fact that workers still suffer illness, injury and death through their employment is yet another indictment of a system of production for profit. It is also an indictment of the failure of reformism. Not only have years of reformist political parties and trade unions campaigning on such issues failed to resolve the problems, at present we are seeing moves designed to weaken already inadequate health and safety legislation.

Profits first

As with other issues reformism cannot succeed as it fails to get to the root cause of the problem — a social system where human well-being must take secondary place to controlling economic cost for the sake of profit. The failure of reformism can also be seen by the fact that in arguing for, in this case, better health and safety provisions reformists accept a capitalist agenda. The TUC, for example argue for better health and safety on the basis that in the long run it will prove "cost effective". The TUC points out that an analysis of the costs and benefits of legislation such as those prepared by the Health and Safety Executive have shown the legislation involved to be "cost positive".

The economic cost benefit argument may or may not be correct but this is not the point. From the point of the majority of us who have to sell our ability to work to an employer in order to live, and so the potential victims of the profit system, our health and lives must come first and to hell with profit. In the short-term the best way to protect our health and ultimately our lives is to organise collectively and effectively at the point of production in order to assert our own interests as against those of our employer. This factor is more important than arguing for improved health and safety legislation.

Ultimately this issue proves once again that the real choice facing us is a society' based on profit which dominates our lives at present as against that of one based on human need for which we need to organise to bring about. As with so many other issues capitalism has proved that it cannot safeguard our health and life in the production process. If capitalism cannot afford the economic cost of health and safety our answer must be that we cannot afford capitalism.

Ray Carr

Not any answers (1996)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Knob-twiddling, the perennial pastime of the compulsive radio listener, has been greatly stimulated by the growth of deregulated airwaves, allowing for new stations of aural passion to be visited by the rover in search of a casual broadcasting relationship. Like trainspotters, the lowest of the lonely in the world of atomised leisure pursuits, the wireless addict delights in finding new programme timetables to collect and tune in to. While the rest of humanity lives its life (or pretends to), the radio junkie listens in to the one-way conversations of radio which serve as cultural life-support machines to the alienated, uncertain aural consumers who want reality sorted out for them on the hour every hour.

I grew up in a world which had just stopped listening to wireless, but in which some of us still listened to radio: the poor cousin of the telly. We laughed at The Clitheroe Kid, worried along with Mrs Dale, squirmed at the pompous smugness of Any Questions (still there; still smug) and went to sleep with the pips from The Shipping Forecast. As infancy' turned to adulthood the Home Service became Radio Four (arguably one of the greatest quality services still relatively undamaged in Britain), the Light Programme became Radio Two (the home of the terminally middle-aged) and the pirates, having been destroyed by the authoritarianism of the then Postmaster General, Tony Benn, gave way to the vacuous ramblings of Tory Tony Blackburn and Radio One.

Deregulation of the airwaves has been a gradual business (and business it is), starting in the early Seventies and culminating in the effective auction of the airwaves which has flogged off licences to whoever thinks they can make a fast buck out of grabbing listeners’ attention. Most people who still listen to radio are fairly fixed in their dial location (with occasional moves within one format, such from Radio One to Virgin or from Radio Three to Classic FM), but for some (the hard-core addicts) the urge has been to roam into hitherto unknown territories.

All of which is to explain how and why it was that a terrible thing happened to me on the way to the phone-in. There I was twiddling merrily in search of the latest from Harry of Hatfield or some other undiscovered philosopher (for, had he been alive today, Socrates would surely have been a regular caller to any phone-in going) and suddenly this lunatic is screaming at me in a fashion reminiscent of an out-of-work evangelist. Now, many a time I have sat transfixed and mortified before my TV set when travelling in the USA, where Coming To Jesus is a big industry. Listening to this previously undiscovered radio station was no different, just more amateurish and more embarrassing for being on the same dial as Radio Four.

Premier Radio is London’s Christian station and, at least at the time of writing, its awfulness has become compulsive. Its presenters, who mainly recite passages from the bible and play songs about clapping your hands for god, do their best to appeal both to the blue-rinsed ladies of Surrey who believe that wireless went downhill the day they allowed an unmarried mother on the The Archers and the fully-certifiable God Squad whose permanent stupor of gullible belief is know by them as being saved. So, the station balances precariously between phone-ins peppered with dull hymns on which old ladies call into to pray that Jesus will come to shoplifters and bad sorts and occasional touches of raving barminess.

An example of the latter was a twenty-minute talk by a born-again vicar whose justification for the laying on of hands so that “Jesus will come all over the sick and cure them” was in no need of Freud to decipher it.

Quite why Premier Radio should exist when socialists are not even allowed to buy advertising space on the airwaves is one question; another is why anyone can still be satisfied by this unadulterated crap. And then yesterday evening, in self-torturing pursuit of the clues, a mock-sincere voice came on and explained how this station was different, for it was there to appeal to those with nobody in the world to care about them: the lonely, the poor, the distressed and lost. God, they were informed, cares about them—as he will carefully explain once they snuff it. And then, instead of turning to Luke or John, as the presenter urged us to, I took another look at that brilliantly descriptive passage by Marx: “the heart of a heartless world . . . the sigh of the oppressed”. Be it from pulpit or high-tech studio, where there is religion there is misery and where religion meets misery its job is to tell the miserable to wait for hope in the next life. The experiment is over; I have heard the voice of salvation and twiddled the knob on my radio until it went away. Of pseudo-saviours the world has had more than its share; and at least everyone knows that The Archers made it up.

Steve Coleman

Labouring in Vain (1995)

David Lange in 1984.

From the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the benefit of those who might not have experienced a Labour
 government, last month we published an article on the record of the 
various Labour governments that have been in office in Australia 
since 1984. This month we look at what the Labour government 
that ruled New Zealand between 1984 and 1990 put the workers
 there through.

The New Zealand Labour Party came to power in 1984 and stayed there until 1990. Labour shocked its supporters, party members and most of its voters by following a path of financial market deregulation, cutbacks in public services, sales tax, users pay, corporatization and privatisation of a large portion of the state, removing industrial and agricultural subsidies, removing trade barriers, import restrictions, import tax and duties. None of which was outlined in its pre-election campaigns. By the end of Labour's 6-year rule, unemployment was at catastrophic levels, record numbers of businesses had failed, the state had been turned upside down, and many of Labour’s traditional supporters and party members had left the party in droves. The only people happy were NZ Treasury, richer capitalists and the National Party (NZ Tories).

Prior to the Labour Party victory in the snap general election of 1984, Robert Muldoon had been both Prime Minister and Finance Minister for all of the nearly nine years of National Party government in New Zealand. Due to the screwed up concepts of socialism many people have, Muldoon has gone down in “history'” as having instituted or continued so-called “socialist” policies in his time as Prime Minister and the Labour Government of 1984—1990 has been labelled “right-wing free marketeers”.

The “socialist” label attached to Muldoon is of course nonsense but used by some to describe Muldoon’s policy of reenforcing the state’s role as provider of support through social welfare, subsidies to exporters, tariff walls to protect inefficient local industries, and the investment of huge amounts of state capital in ambitious energy projects named “Think Big”. “Think Big” was aimed at making NZ at least 60 percent self-sufficient in energy and was largely motivated by the oil shocks of the 70s. It is worth noting that NZ enjoyed a prosperous period post second world war with England guaranteeing a market for NZ produce (meat, butter, wool) and high wool prices generated by the likes of the Korean war. It was the entry of England into the EEC, and an international decline in agricultural produce prices that resulted in successive NZ governments giving subsidies to farmers and borrowing overseas in the hope of riding out the unfavourable market conditions.

When it came to the snap election in 1984, NZ was under a wage freeze (a price freeze had just been lifted), inflation ranged from 6.1 to 15 percent during the year, the economy was described as “one of the most regulated, protected and subsidised in the developed world” (Europa World Year Book), unemployment stood at 66,500, public debt stood at $21.88 billion. The fixed exchange rate was clearly overvalued while politically government unity was disintegrating as Muldoon’s autocratic style drew fire from within and without, and the economic position of the country worsened.

The 1984 election was more than anything focused on Muldoon, and the cry from the as usually confused “left” was “out with Muldoon”, never giving a thought to what was to replace Muldoon. Not only the “left” wanted rid of Muldoon, feminists, homosexuals, liberals, civil right activists to name a few wanted him out. None gave a moment’s thought as to what actually made capitalism tick—or were the least interested in how the system operated. A significant portion of the capitalist class wanted Muldoon out as well, having their eye on the international investment capital that would flow in once financial deregulation occurred.

Power for power’s sake

Labour came to power in July 1984 with a 17-seat majority and total share of the votes of 43 percent (NZ operated a First Past the Post electoral system until recently). Its election policies centred on health, housing, employment, education, the economy, overseas debt and an anti-nuclear stance (though Labour leader David I.ange had opposed the anti-nuclear position when it came up for formal endorsement at the Labour Party conference, he later championed it as Prime Minister as if it were his own brain-child). The Labour Party had a great deal of assistance in the 1984 election victory from the newly formed New Zealand Party who had one of New Zealand’s wealthiest capitalist’s as its leader: Robert Jones, property tycoon. By drawing the protest vote with its so-called “traditional National Party policies”—votes that would otherwise have remained with National— Robert Jones helped achieve his objective—a Labour government and promptly wrapped the New Zealand Party up to the immense chagrin of its officials, This if anything should have given an unsuspecting public a clue as to what the new Labour government would be all about.

Even before the fourth Labour government resumed office it was confronted with a major balance of payments crisis and had to agree to a 20 percent devaluation of the NZ dollar. This decision was made on the advice of the NZ Treasury and Reserve Bank economic advisers where the Chicago School of Economic thought already dominated. (The Chicago School advocated removing state intervention and instituting laissez faire type economics). This set the tone for the rest of the Labour government term and was quickly followed up with abolition of exchange controls, deregulation of finance, abolition of subsidies and incentives and the floating of the NZ dollar. Within days, Lange was announcing the "cupboard was bare” and everybody should look to "tightening their belts ”. It soon became clear who was to be doing the belt-tightening and who would be letting the belts out. As the international capital flowed in, the local pigs were gorging themselves at the trough in a speculative frenzy that was to end up with the largest share-market and property crash in the history of the country in October 1987. Inflation was to peak at close to 20 percent in 1987.

Before and during the run up to the election in 1984, there was no indication from Labour that it would adopt such policies and its official economic policy was not much different from the conventional Keynesian style economics that both National and Labour had been following for decades. The Labour government therefore deliberately deceived the electorate and its own party supporters. Mike Moore—a cabinet minister and later Prime Minister told the Auckland Press Club that “had we talked about some of the things we did in 1984, we would never have got there (elected )”. A post-election remit of the Labour Party opposed free market policies; this made no difference to the course pursued by the Labour cabinet. So much for Labour Party democracy. There is little doubt that the Labour Party wanted power for power’s sake, and the conservative nature of the election campaign they waged reflected that.

Rogernomics

The Labour government finance minister Roger Douglas along with associate finance ministers Caygill and Prebble took on board the advice of Treasury. The economic policy enacted by the Labour government quickly became known as “Rogernomics” in the same vein as “Reaganomics”. The cabinet argued as a justification for their actions that their economic reforms would allow the fulfilment of the Labour Party’s social goals, even though no one ever defined the nature of these social goals. A similar argument is contained in the Treasury document Economic Management. “Users Pay” was a term that suddenly started slipping from Labour Ministers’ mouths and was meant to signify a new approach to providing services by the state, where the user of the service would be charged for at least part of the cost of the service.

In 1986, the State-Owned Enterprises Bill was passed through parliament. Lange and Palmer (deputy prime minister) denied when challenged that corporatization of many government departments would involve job losses and was a prelude to privatisation—they already had an eye to the approaching 1987 general election. Corporatizing government departments had never been a Labour Party policy. At the head of the new SOEs, the government placed leading business figures, many of whom were friends of the finance ministers. The SOEs’ boards of directors were supposedly accountable to Ministers (in a directors-shareholders style of relationship) and although the SOE Bill contained a section which enabled the Crown to pay the SOEs for non-commercial services this rarely occurred. The result of the implementation of the SOE Act was the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. With Alan Gibbs (businessman well known for his cabinet connections and backer of the New Right think-tank—the Centre for Independent Studies ) as chairman, ForestCorp (formerly the Forest Service) sacked the forestry work force and took some back as independent contractors.

The previously state owned Bank of New Zealand which has the largest share of retail banking in New Zealand had been partly sold (33 percent) by the Labour government in June 1989 amid pathetic cries of “they’re selling the family silver” from the likes of Pat Kelly—a long time trade unionist and Labour Party member.

By October 1990, $NZ13.7 million had been paid out by the government to private sector advisers employed in connection with sales of crown businesses.

The Lange Labour government introduced a supertax on the elderly. Extra income earned from savings or investments meant the old age pension was severely eroded by a surcharge tax. Of course while ordinary workers were being sacked in their thousands, mortgage interest rates at more than 20 percent, and workers were being asked to tighten their belts, parliamentary Labour in collusion with their fellow gutters in the opposition voted themselves a nice fat golden retirement package.

Government debt grew from $NZ21 billion in 1984 to nearly SNZ44 billion in 1991 despite state asset sales. Debt servicing grew from 10.6 percent of Government spending in 1980 to 15 percent in 1991. So much for the miracles of Rogernomics.

Unemployment over Labour’s term of office grew from about 60,000 to over 160,000 registered as officially unemployed. This had a particularly marked affect on female workers, despite the election of the Labour government being supported by feminists and the setting up of a Women’s Ministry. Unemployment figures are misleading, particularly in periods of high unemployment, as many married women or women living in partnerships are forced out of the workforce to be dependent on their partner, and so don’t show up in the official figures.

Labour disintegrates

Despite a show of unity during the first term of office from 1984 to 1987, and subsequent re-election on the back of a very slick TV campaign funded by taxpayer money and their nuclear ship ban (National was still opposed to the ban), Labour began to slowly fall apart.

The prime minister’s office in New Zealand has quite extraordinary powers and past Prime Ministers have used these powers to manipulate cabinet, sack hostile ministers and appoint friendly ministers without any endorsement needed from either cabinet or caucus. Lange was pretty much driven by cabinet and Treasury during the first term, in the second term, he opposed aspects of Roger Douglas’s budget that led to a falling out and eventual sacking of Douglas by Lange using the dictatorial powers of his office. Lange replaced Douglas with Caygill. Prebble was to follow soon after when he publicly criticised Lange’s ability as a Prime Minister.

A concerted campaign by Lange’s opponents led by Douglas and Prebble and ill health eventually resulted in Lange’s resignation. The deputy prime minister, Palmer replaced Lange as Prime minister but only for a few months before resigning in favour of Mike Moore. Moore and Labour lost the 1990 general election to the National Party (National had by then decided being anti-nuclear was a good idea) in what was a landslide victory, ending 6 years of Labour reign, a reign that devastated the very workers that Labour purportedly represented. National turned around and followed exactly the same economic policies only with more vigour, breaking virtually every single promise made during the election run-up. What Labour started, National finished.

Why did all this happen? And under a Labour government? Very logically. Property institutions under capitalism ensure that democracy can only be a veil, while underneath the vested interests that arise inevitably from a system of society based on production for profit, minority ownership and control of the means of production and distribution ensure that the interests of the majority—the workers— come last. The undemocratic nature of political parties such as Labour, government, companies and corporations are a reflection of this system and its need to subjugate workers in order to carry on fleecing them. Labour when faced with running capitalism became the manipulated.

The incredible thing is that rather than having learnt their lesson, many former Labour supporters have deserted the Labour Party to a party called New Labour— part of the Alliance (a political alliance of New Labour, Manu Motuhake, Green, and other minor parties)—with the same old failed formula, the impossible task of trying to run capitalism in favour of the workers.

Having become totally disillusioned with politics and politicians in general after being lied to and deceived, voters when faced with the choice of continuing with the First Past the Post electoral system and a Mixed Member Proportional system similar to the electoral system in Germany, turned to MMP. MMP means larger and fewer electorates, and a party list vote and is said to favour coalition style of government. Many workers are hopeful that this will result in fairer government. There is no evidence to support this, and the capitalist class and overseas investors seem far from concerned. Capitalism will merely adjust to the situation and workers will continue to suffer insecurity, pollution, poverty, violence and a life of drudgery and uncertainty. 

Dave Tildesley

Between the Lines: A Simpler Truth (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Simpler Truth

In the month that has seen the parasitical pigs fighting round the ITV trough to see who can win the fattest franchises, the state-funded BBC announced that it will lay off 104 workers in its News and Current Affairs section so that it can slash its budget by £2 million. The BBC's new Funding The Future policy statement states that there will be a £75 million cut in BBC expenditure by 1993. This will be paid for by laying off workers, making cheaper programmes and selling off the big-audience productions to commercial companies who can pump them for profit. (For example, BBC's Question Time is to be sold off — just as all the leftists who appear on it have sold out.) The future of British TV, dominated by big-money outfits who are to buy up the deregulated commercial channels and a cut-price, game-show dominated BBC, will consist of more televised Ratners for the proles while the bosses entertain themselves in the casinos and opera houses on money they have acquired by robbing us.

Speaking of robbery, The Simple Truth concert (BBC2, 12 May, 8pm - 1 am) is worthy of comment. The concert, to raise money for the Kurds and other victims of "disasters" (for which read "every day occurrences of the profit system), was the brainchild (to refer to the parentage loosely) of top Tory, Jeffrey Archer. Young Jeff, it will be recalled, is a pretty generous sort of guy: prostitutes who have never met him before have only to drop him a line requesting £200 and it's in the next post. Archer hoped that the concert would raise £10 million. Viewers were urged to phone in with £5 donations. £10 million — a lot of money, eh? Until you start to think that

• The daily cost of the bombs dropped on the Kurds in Iraq during the recent Gulf war, which Archer proudly supported, was far greater than the amount collected by the concert.
• The daily rate of interest required from African states, where millions are dying, is greater than the money collected by the concert.
• The proportion of weekly income of an average British worker which £5 constitutes is a thousand times greater than £5 out of the weekly profits obtained on the basis of working-class robbery by Archer, the multi-millionaire creep.

Their Music

Another thing about The Simple Truth timewasting was the chronic irrelevance of nearly all of the music to any kind of real social change. The five hours of the concerts were filled with melodies to make us moronic. From the talentless drivel of super-hyped New Kids on the Block to the sub-Sinatra tripe of Whitney Houston, the whole show had nothing to say about what is actually going on in the world. The following Sunday your reviewer was at the Levellers' Day commemoration in Burford and heard the superb Peggy Seeger singing songs of real class awareness. She is not the only one writing and singing such material; there is a huge growth of singers, writers and bands coming out of and reflecting the experiences of the working class. What they have to sing about relates to the profit-caused problems of the Kurds, the starving Africans and Bangladeshis. But you don’t find the likes of Archer or the state-run BBC giving exposure to them. They might make the wage slaves think too much.

The Worst Show on Earth

Neighbours (BBC1, whenever you switch on) is in no danger of making the wage slaves think too much. A prerequisite for following the events of this implausible load of old tosh is that you do not think at all. Last month junior Education Minister, Michael Fallon, called for the programme to be banned, saying that it dulls peoples's senses. His Labour opposite number. Jack Straw, said that it was "a pretty trashy programme". Quite why a Tory Minister should object to workers’ minds being dulled (how else could they win an election?) or a Labour leader should object to trash (who but a collector of such would read the lie-a-minute Labour manifesto?) we do not know. We do know that the BBC, representing the true voice of the ruling class, put out a statement saying that Neighbours was a good programme because it offers moral education to its audience. Funny that: when this column exposed the predecessor of Neighbours, Crossroads for being a vehicle for just such moralistic propaganda we were atttacked by an article in The People newspaper suggesting that our claim was the loony delusion of deranged Marxists

Steve Coleman

Losers’ World (2000)

Book Review from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy’, by Edward Luttwak, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998)

Most American textbooks on capitalism either present it as the best possible system that will last well into the future if not for ever, or admit that it has a few faults which are a small price to pay for its benefits. Luttwak is closer to the second position than the first. In his opening sentence he expresses his belief “both in the virtues of capitalism and in the need to impose some measure of control over its workings”. In a matter-of-fact tone the author discusses the many and dreadful consequences of capitalism for the losers, of which there are many more than winners. By turbo-capitalism he means a form of capitalism that is much different from the controlled form that mostly prevailed from 1945 to the 1980s. He admits that “turbo” is his term—others simply call it the free market. It means very much more than the freedom to buy and sell:

  “What they celebrate, preach and demand is private enterprise liberated from government regulation, unchecked by effective trade unions, unfettered by sentimental concerns over the future of employees or communities, unrestrained by customs barriers or investment restrictions, and molested as little as possible by taxation.”

Luttwak likes the increase in economic growth that turbo-capitalism brings but is aware of the consequences which he deplores:

  a breakdown of familial capitalism (especially in Asia): “Cold-blooded, truly arm’s length and therefore purely contractual relations” 

  increasing job insecurity: “employees at all but the highest levels must go to work each day not knowing if they sill still have their job on the morrow” 

   the global increase in unemployment: “it is a protracted tragedy at the personal level, and destabilising at the social level” 

the insecure majority are persuaded to accept the sovereignty of the market: “losers blame themselves rather than the system”

In mitigation of the harsh discipline and sharp inequalities which Luttwak admits turbo-capitalism has brought, he believes that there are “two great forces that serve to balance its over-powering strength”: the American legal system (poor people can get “damage awards”) and the pervasive influence of Calvinist values (earned wealth is no impediment to virtue).

In Luttwak’s favour is his assessment of Blair and the left wing in politics: ” . . . both Clinton in the United States and Blair in the United Kingdom have continued to use some liberal prose to wrap their conservative remedies . . . even a left-wing electoral victory can yield only right-wing polices”.

Compared to what he calls “defunct communist economies” and “bureaucratic socialism”, the author believes that turbo-capitalism is “materially altogether superior, and morally at least not inferior . . . Yet to accept its empire over every aspect of life, from art to sport in addition to all forms of business, cannot be the culminating achievement of human existence. Turbo-capitalism too, shall pass”.

Yes, Luttwak, but what are you doing to help make it pass?

Stan Parker

City Scandals (1987)

From the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Did you get your British Gas shares ok? What’s that, you didn’t bother? Well, neither did most other workers who had the chance, and no one knows how many of those who did buy the shares will hold on to them. It was estimated that on the day after the sale, around one tenth of the shares had already changed hands as small-time buyers sold out to the big institutions like insurance com­panies and pension funds. This is what hap­pened with British Telecom shares. When they were first sold in 1984 the number of individual shareholders was 2.3 million. By May 1986 the number was down to 1.6 mill­ion, a drop of over 30%, and this figure is cer­tain to fall still further as time passes.

Nevertheless, interest in the stock market is a lot higher than ever it was before. Until recently most people only ever saw the stock market quotations in the newspapers if they accidentally turned over two pages at once, but the saturation coverage by the media of the government’s privatisation programme has changed all that. Also, the fear of unemployment has ensured that many employees of quoted companies follow the share price of those companies as a guide to their job prospects.

However, the workings of the stock mar­ket remain a mystery to the vast majority of people and this helps preserve the silly notion that financiers, stockbrokers and the like who do understand it are brainier than the rest of us. Actually, it’s not nearly as difficult as it seems One of the main reasons why someone not involved in finance finds it baffling is the frequent use of several different words to describe one item. For example, government “stock , which pays a fixed rate of interest, is also called “gilts” (gilt-edged) or “consols” (consolidated) while “securities” is simply the a11-embracing name for stocks and shares of all kinds.

Different types of shares have different rights and rewards. The “ordinary” shares are the ones which actually own the com­pany. Holders of these have full voting rights and receive a variable dividend depending on the company’s profits, if any, and what the directors decide to pay out. These shares are also referred to (more confusion) as “equities”. “Preference” shares usually have no vote but entitle holders to a fixed dividend ahead of the ordinary shareholders assuming there is something to pay out. “Deben­tures” are loans made to companies by investors who receive fixed-interest whether the company makes a profit or not.

Until October 1986 members of the Lon­don Stock Exchange had to be British-born. And although they would angrily denounce “who does what disputes in factories, ship­yards, etc.. they had their own restrictive practice. This meant that only those who were brokers could buy and sell securities for the public and they made their money by charging clients a fixed commission. “Job­bers”, on the other hand, bought and sold on their own account but could only deal with the public through the brokers and made a living from the difference between the prices at which they bought and sold. So brokers couldn’t act as jobbers and vice-versa. Since October membership of the Exchange is open to other nationals and the difference between brokers and jobbers is abolished along with fixed commissions. Now the price on deals is negotiable

All of these changes, known as “de-regu­lation”, are the result of the Big Bang” we have all heard so much about. The idea is to make the London Stock Exchange more competitive with its main rivals in New York (Wall Street) and Tokyo. After all, if custom­ers can have their business carried out more cheaply in New York or Tokyo then that is where they will make their deals and the new computerised communications technology makes that easy to do. This new technology also means that dealers in London will now transact business in their offices and the Stock Exchange floor will be almost deserted from now on

Any stock market must protect its reputa­tion for honest dealing If investors think that they may be ripped-off then they will take their business elsewhere and this is why the New York and London Stock Exchanges are trying to curb “insider dealing”. The most notorious insider is the Wall Street speculator, Ivan Boesky, who for years had apparently anticipated the rise in price of var­ious securities which he bought on a huge scale. Hailed as a genius, Boesky had simply been using confidential information passed to him, for a cut, by people who were profes­sionally engaged in takeover bids which would push up the price of the shares involved.

It is hard to imagine that Wall Street didn’t know what Boesky was up to. No one can consistently tell in advance what the market will do. The anarchy of capitalist production sees to that. When every company in every industry is making its plans independently of all the others, and when all of them are sub­ject to forces beyond their control such as decisions taken by foreign governments or even their own, then how can future market trends be forecast with any certainty? The truth is that large-scale insider dealing has been the norm for a long time and will con­tinue in the future whatever steps are taken to eliminate it. So much for the claim fre­quently made on behalf of the capitalists that their high returns are justified because they are the risk takers”. Not if they can help it, they’re not!

What about the other claim that the capitalists are the wealth creators” because of their activities in the stock market? The real wealth of society consists of human beings using their physical and mental energies plus the resources of nature to produce the goods and services society needs. This wealth is legally owned by the owners of the enter­prises whose workers have produced it. All the workers receive in return for their efforts is a part of the total value produced in the form of their wages and salaries. The remain­der, surplus value in the form of dividends and interest, belongs to the owners of the various stocks and shares. These securities are merely legal title to this surplus and it is this title which is being traded when sec­urities are bought and sold. So capitalists create not a scrap of wealth and stock exchanges are only the places where surplus value is divided between them.

Even so, the enormous power of the capitalists makes them seem invincible and many workers, even against their wishes, cannot see how capitalism can ever be top­pled. But the power of the capitalists does not lie in the amount of pounds, dollars and francs they own. It lies in the fact that the vast majority of workers still see production for profit as the only possible method of produc­ing and distributing society’s wealth. If that idea should weaken due to the growth of socialist consciousness in the world’s work­ing class then the power of the capitalists would not look so invincible at all.

We can see today how easily stock mar­kets can tremble when investors get the jit­ters over, say, the mere rumour of a small increase in interest rates or some other trivial matter. Imagine what those jitters will be like when the socialist movement begins to grow. Who will be willing to invest then? Capitalism depends for its continued exis­tence on working-class support for it. When that support crumbles then so too will the power of the capitalists.

Vic Vanni

Observations: Santa on the spot (1986)

The Observations Column from the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Santa on the spot

Playing Santa Claus can be an extremely disagreeable way of contributing to a Christmas party. It's not just that all those robes and false whiskers make you feel like the pudding in the steamer, nor the physical assaults which must be uncomplainingly absorbed from impatient, disappointed or inquisitive children. There's also the fact that you're being set up to work a deception on people who, by their age, are assumed to be nicely vulnerable to it.

Whatever the hazards faced by the amateur Santa Claus they are as nothing compared to those of the professionals, those derelict actors who seem ready to take almost any risk for the sake of a bit of work in the Christmas spending spree. This year it promises to be even worse; if there are any Santas getting job satisfaction by resisting the idea that Christmas is a vast festival of commerce, 1986 should make them change their minds.

The pressure is on, in all the big stores, for the jolly Santas to turn in higher sales figures and some decidedly unromantic methods are being used in the process. Harrods, where Santa has always wandered freely about the toy department chatting with the kids, are now confining him to his enchanted castle because, the store say, the old method was too random to ensnare all the possible children. Hamleys, where they have never had a Santa before, now have three of them working shifts in a magic forest where the time and motion people roam among the clockwork animals. Each child is allocated 25 seconds to state their dearest Christmas wishes and the Christmas sport of mishearing the child's name, traditional but time-consuming, has been eliminated through a system of name cards.

It is worse outside London. In Glasgow and Manchester Santa had to bid perilously for publicity by shinning up a 100-foot ladder, amid exploding fireworks, onto the roof of the store. In Chester he was winched up to a high window by the fire brigade. For all this, of course, youth and fitness are needed; Santa, like so many other jobs, is no longer for the older man.

None of this is calculated to bring a magic sparkle to a child's eyes, but to enliven the sales figures. Selfridges are planning to process a quarter of a million children through Santa's grotto this year — a quarter of a million spenders, that is. Maximising customers, to use the stores' jargon, means maximising profits, which is a nice seasonal present for the shareholders.

It gives a new meaning to the old saying about Christmas being for the children.


Bus de-regulation

The recent de-regulation of buses is absurd even by the warped standards of capitalism It is the latest outcome of the Tory Party's central economic tenet: "If it's profitable then privatise it”. The result: total chaos in many towns and cities outside London as hundreds of private bus operators compete for a limited number of profitable routes; inner city streets in towns like Glasgow congested with hundreds of almost empty buses looking for passengers, while on the outskirts of the city and in rural areas people stand at bus stops waiting for buses that no longer run. paying the price for living on "uneconomic" routes.

For such people some form of public transport will still have to be provided: employers will still expect their work force to get to work on time. So the local council will be obliged to lay on public transport on these "uneconomic" routes. In other words the state will still be involved in public transport provision, albeit on a more limited scale.

The reason why utilities and services like transport, gas. electricity and water were nationalised in the first place was because it was recognised that it was more efficient and cost-effective for the state to run certain essential services than private capitalists. But it looks as if the Tory obsession with privatisation now means that that lesson must be learned all over again. In the meantime it's workers who will suffer as a result of the chaos — capitalists may run bus companies, but they certainly don't have to travel by bus.


Undeserving poor

In the nineteenth century the Poor Law made a distinction between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor. The "deserving" poor, people like widows and the long term sick or disabled, were granted Poor Law relief: the "undeserving", especially the able-bodied unemployed, were subjected to the workhouse test to see if they were really desperate or just shiftless scroungers. The idea was that only the really desperate who had no other alternative would put up with the brutally punitive regime of the workhouse.

That same mentality has always been present in the modern system of welfare benefits (hence the different benefit rates for unemployed and other claimants). So the government's latest "available for work" test is just the last in a long line of methods for sorting the "deserving" from the "scroungers" (with the added bonus of bringing down the embarrassingly high unemployment figures before the next election).

The unemployed are to be required to fill in a new questionnaire when they claim benefit to enable (according to Lord Young) "a proper assessment to be made of a person's entitlement to benefit". The claimant will be asked a series of trick questions: if they give the wrong answer then they are likely to have their benefit suspended. Questions like:

• Are you immediately available for work? (Correct answer: "Yes")
• What wages will you accept? (Correct answer: "I'll take anything, no matter how low, that is offered me").
• Do you have children or a disabled relative to care for? If so can alternative arrangements for their care be made immediately? (Correct answer: "A neighbour or relative has promised, that in the event of my being offered a job. then they would be prepared to step in to look after baby/granny/disabled relative").
• Are you prepared to accept work in another town? (Correct answer: "I'll get on my bike and go anywhere just so long as you 'll give me a job").

Although the government has dismissed claims that they are merely trying to fiddle the unemployment figures Kenneth Clarke. Paymaster General, said that if the new scheme reduced the number of claims allowed by less than two per cent then it would pay for itself, including the £14 million cost of employing 1,400 extra benefit staff. A senior civil servant wrote a letter to all regional benefit managers saying: "We may be able to deter two to four per cent of fresh claimants who are not serious about looking for work and disallow another two to three per cent who are not available".

Between the Lines: Whose Choice? (1988)

The Between the Lines column from the December 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whose Choice?
Were it not for a few armed men taking some accurate shots at British troops in North America in 1776, there would have been no USA and no election for the American media to drone on about for the past year. It is interesting to speculate whether George Washington, were he alive today, would be banned from the media because he was a terrorist. However, Washington won and the battle between the two mega-mediocrities for access to the White House tennis courts has been in full swing. If you ask most workers who it is that chooses the President, they will tell you the electors do. Apart from the fact that about half of the American workers did not vote at all, it is a mistake to imagine that those who did made their own choice. Managing TV election campaigns, including millions of dollars of advertising time, is now one of the principle ingredients of any American Presidential election. Most political advertising conveys images of rivals rather than a candidate's policies, and the election is won on the basis of which millionaire most successfully destroys the credibility of the other. Thus it was that Dukakis lost, a victim of his own inability to show that Bush was a less competent and nastier individual than himself. Bush proved himself to be "the evil of two lessers" and so won the key to the door. Technically the key was handed to him by the workers of America. To be sure, if they wanted to they could use their votes to lock the door of the state to all future Bushes and Dukakises and other front men for the profit system. In reality, ABC, NBC and CBS had far more to do with the outcome of the 1988 Presidential election than the workers ever did. The TV screen did not reflect what the workers were thinking; it told them what to think We had good reason to make the same observation about the British general election last year. And as long as this is the case — as long as a small, unelected clique of politically conservative media controllers are allowed to set the electoral agenda — it is a matter of serious doubt whether the democratic claims of the electoral system can be treated as much more than a sham.


Whose Freedom?
The government has issued a new White Paper (7 November) on the future of broadcasting. They claim to be concerned to make the media freer. More channels, less regulation. greater local service — and of course, that favourite characteristic of capitalist freedom: if you want the extra goodies on offer you'll have to "pay as you watch". The claim of Mr Hurd and his fellow advocates of greater TV freedom is that more TV, with more market priorities governing it, will offer more opportunities for us to see what we want. This is not so. Firstly, the new channels will not open up new opportunities for independent TV production, but will be bought by current media monopolists, such as Rupert Murdoch, who is already making millions out of deregulated TV in Australia. These millionaires will not make exciting new programmes but provide the cheap, shoddy, and vulgar in order to please advertisers. Secondly, new TV stations will continue to cover the capitalist agenda. This is because the only people with a real incentive to produce TV which challenges the capitalists' interests are the working class and. as socialists never cease pointing out. the workers do not own or control the means of production. including means of mass communication. Greater media freedom will come about, not by flogging airwaves to multi-millionaires or by "relaxing" standards so that workers are able to watch dirty movies, but when the media is freed from the necessity of being a business.

Steve Coleman

The Big Bang (1986)

From the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

So that was the Big Bang was it? What revolutionised the Stock Exchange and shook the City actually made no difference to most. Workers woke up one morning to a deregulated Stock Exchange, but would not have had much time to ponder the significance of such a revolution on their lifestyle before they had to get to their work or their place in the DHSS queue.

But of course, such matters must be important mustn't they? After all, it's on the news every evening, after the royal item and before the Granny-parachuting-for-charity, we get the summary of the share price fluctuations, and hear how the Pound struggled, rallied, finished weakly. As one who after a usual day's work (struggled, rallied, finished weakly) cannot see the significance of it all. I sent off for the Stock Exchange's glossy pamphlet An Introduction to the Stock Market. Thinking that "bull" was what economists talked about (rather than a type of market). I needed to see what all the fuss was about.

The cover had lots of photographs of the type of people who, presumably, own shares: all ages from smiling babies to smiling OAPs; all occupations from cooks to builders. welders to fishermen. They even managed to get half-a-dozen different ethnic groups represented on the pamphlet cover, which is about five more than are effectively allowed on the trading floor of the Stock Exchange, to go by recent reports.

Of course it's the same sort of rubbish that we get on TV with every advert for the TSB flotation, the idea that becoming a capitalist is as easy as wearing a bowler hat, everyone can do it. It's a popular notion — borne out by the oversubscription for TSB — that we can drag ourselves free from the varying degrees of poverty and pressures of working-class life. There is nothing wrong with wanting to escape that, but there is everything wrong in believing that a handful of shares in the TSB will free you of anything but a few hundred quid.

It is a popular notion because people want it to be true but it has no basis in fact. Research by London Weekend Television shows that the City is not full of self-made men (or women). Those who reach the top in the City still come, predominantly, from a privileged background. Indeed the class division between rich and poor, owners and non-owners did not end years ago with the nineteenth century, nor the nationalisation of the 1945 Labour government, nor the privatisation of the present government and certainly it will not end with the next stock market flotation (there should be one soon), nor with the next boom period (there should be one sometime), nor with a next Labour government.
The situation today has changed little:

• the top one per cent own some twenty per cent of the total wealth in Britain, which is as much as the bottom seventy-five per cent;
• the 20.000 millionaires in Britain own more wealth than half the population put together;
• the top six per cent enjoy forty-four per cent of unearned income, while two-thirds have none.

(They didn't tell me that in the glossy brochure. I had to look elsewhere.)

The fact that some of those who work in the factories now have a couple of shares in British Gas tucked under their pillows, and a fifty pence reduction in their gas bill, will not upset the factory owners.

But isn't the Big Bang going to change all that? Isn't it going to sweep away the inherited privilege of a lucky few, in favour of real rewards for those with courage, enterprise and a will to work hard? You know the sort of person, a cliche that only exists in the head of a Tory Party speech writer he (not she) is pulling himself up by the bootstraps and pulling in his belt, he's got his nose to the grindstone, one foot on the ladder and is on his bike . . . Well, "yes" is the answer if you have eyes to read the brochure with; no is the answer if you also have a brain to think with. Far from opening up the City to the individual and the entrepreneur, the Big Bang means the deregulation of exchanges and emphasis on high technology, allowing very complex and very fast transactions of commodities all over the world. In the USA, this "programme trading" has produced much larger and more frequent swings in the markets. Judgements are decided by short-term market fluctuations. not on longer term evaluations like the state of the economy in general. Consequently, small investors cannot weather the large swings in the market without large financial backing. It's the big fish that remain.

But regardless of the fluctuations of share prices, the legal business of exploitation is not just a matter of gambling on the Stock Exchange — buying and selling at the right times and the right prices —where you are rewarded for your "courage". All you need to do is sit on your shares and spend the money as it comes in. You don't need talent or guts, just a lot of money. Indeed, a BBC Nationwide news programme a few years ago had an item about a dog (presumably they could not find a parachuting grandmother that day), who placed his paw on the Financial Times and chose the shares for his master. The dog was a millionaire. And his owner looked about as happy as a dog with two million pounds. You can do it too. Try it at home - all you need is a dog and somewhere in the region of £100,000. A trained monkey could do it. Even Gerald Grosvenor (the Duke of Westminster — two billion pounds and two O' levels to his name) can do it.

Most capitalists are the same, they get someone else to do the little bit of work of buying and selling shares. Most hardly even see the Stock Exchange, let alone the factories. land or offices they profit from.

Quite simply, the City cannot be opened up to everyone. As my brochure says (stuck away in the last paragraph on the bottom of page nine), your broker will "tell you honestly if your personal circumstances are such that you would be ill-advised to become an investor". Capitalists need workers but we don't need them. They couldn't tolerate a builder or a manager or a secretary retiring at the age of thirty to live off the proceeds of their work. They need to squeeze as much as possible out of you, from when you are strong enough to work until you are old enough to drop. The rest of your life is your own.

Unfortunately for this scheme of things, capitalism never runs smoothly for very long. The deregulation which has already started has produced some blatant examples of inflated salaries in the City. At a time when wage councils are being abolished and while one quarter of full-time workers in London are below the poverty line, the news that a few miles away in the City salaries can touch £lm cannot help the government's pleas to workers for wage restraint. At least the Queen has set the right example to Britain's greedy workers by accepting a pay rise below the rate of inflation, in the process boosting her earnings last year from £3,850.000 to over £4million.

Then we have the interesting sight of Thatcher criticising the excessive salaries. The champion of the market-place, outflanked by the uncontrollable nature of the system she supports. For capitalism, which periodically bares its "unacceptable face" that no cosmetic can hide, is the best ever advert for socialism.

We could have a society where personal consumption of wealth will not be restricted by your personal circumstances and where production of wealth will not be restricted by the requirement of a surplus called profit.

Socialism will take the information and communications technology that today enables vast amounts of useless information — like market fluctuations and share prices — to circulate the world in seconds, every second, and will liberate its potential for a society based on production for use, as we liberate ourselves in a movement for World Socialism which makes the Big Bang look a damp squib.

Brian Gardner