Editorial: The alternative to Thatcher (1983)

Editorial from the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard 

With each passing day the dominance of Margaret Thatcher over the British political scene grows wider and more powerful. To the surprise of many observers, she is proving vastly skilful at the disreputable trade of creating and using opportunities to monopolise the attentions of the news-seeking media. Her recent visit to the Falklands was an example; while she was there firing cannon, flirting with exultant soldiery and encouraging the Islanders, the other parties, for all the publicity they got, might not have existed.

On her return home, apart from one or two embarrassing facts such as the dole queues and the ever more stringent poverty of the increasing numbers of workers who rely on state handouts, she professed to be able to see nothing but sunny days ahead. She trumpeted the news that the official index says that prices now are not rising as fast as they were. Over many years of propaganda, from Labour and Tory governments, workers have been persuaded that the level of prices is a matter for their concern. A Prime Minister who can claim to have controlled prices is regarded as the leader of a successful government.

Thatcher's popularity rests on a reputation for putting things, and people, in their place. She overshadows the rest of her government, who are banished to boring conferences on the EEC regulations for potted geraniums or are left to squirm through potential scandals like the Franks Report and the police trying to execute the wrong man in a London street. She has put General Galtieri firmly in his place; he is now an ex-President with little honour to his name. She has brought the unions to heel, with even the coal miners shrinking from a fight at the cost of leaving their posturing President Scargill looking more ludicrous than before.

All of this, and much more, Thatcher achieves by a simple, well tried technique. She ignores any inconvenient reality and substitutes for it a fantasy cunningly fashioned to appeal to the distorted perceptions of the working class. This fantasy she then propagates, come what may, as the one rocklike, eternal truth which will save us all. In this way Thatcher assumes the image of a resolute leader who knows what is good for us and who cannot be swayed from what she knows is right. Thus she is able comfortably to revive the crasser sentiments of patriotism which many people thought had finally died, after a long decline, in the trenches of 1914/18. She is able to mislead workers whose acquaintance with history goes no further than skin deep that this is the new Elizabethan Age which was supposed to start in 1953 but is in train now that she is queen.

With the Labour Party in disarray and the SDP recovered from the excesses of their first flush of optimism, do we face the prospect of the Tories being in power for ever more? Thatcher haters can take heart; there have been many examples — Baldwin, Churchill, Macmillan. Wilson — of leaders who were once judged to be invincible but who were abruptly brought down. (It is an interesting side-fact that such leaders have a propensity for living a long time afterwards, to write their memoirs and act the Elder Statesman. Such physical toughness is demanded of top politicians; Thatcher all too apparently has it in good measure.)

The likelihood, then, is that if the Tories have their way the next election will be fought on the personalities of the respective leaders. Thatcher will be presented to us as the best Prime Minister in British history; the SDP are already puffing up the florid Roy Jenkins as the most successful Chancellor of the Exchequer since the war, which is probably as startling for Jenkins as for those who remember his spell at the Treasury; and the Labour Party will have to say that Foot is, well, perhaps the finest thinker in the history of Hampstead.

An election in that style — and we have not so much as caricatured what may well happen — would further obscure the fact that what is happening now in the world has historical and social roots and that beside that reality leaders count for very little. The problems of capitalism 1983, as ever, can be dealt with only by reference to, and an understanding of, those roots. In this, which in other words is a development of consciousness among the working class, leaders are unwanted and irrelevant. The superficial, day-to-day patch-up job on capitalism’s ailments which are the policies of these leaders and their parties is equally beside the point.

To look at the roots of the capitalism’s problems is to consider the case for something more fundamental and permanent than a party programme hashed up to win votes, or the plastic personality of some leader. It means to weigh up the case for the abolition of capitalism, for the dispossession of the ruling class and the substitution of socialism — the society of common ownership and democratic control of the means of life.

Socialism will be a democratic society in which everyone will have free — and therefore equal — access to the world’s wealth. The basis of common ownership of the means of production and distribution will nurture the roots of social relationships which are radically different from those we suffer under today. Socialism will be privilege free, its material and moral processes fashioned by human co-operation for the production of abundance.

That is the real alternative to the Iron Lady and to her surroundings — the sordid parliamentary sham fights, the insidious political campaigns, the slick media promotion of leaders as super-human or sub-human, according to taste. Socialism needs, and will have, an informed, conscious commitment on the part of the world’s working class before it can be established. And that will characterise its morality — one not of blind submission but conscious participation.

Running Commentary: Austerity for Spain (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Austerity for Spain

After France and Greece, Spain is the third Mediterranean country to elect a "socialist" government. Actually, of course, the new Spanish government under Felipe Gonzales is no more socialist than its predecessors. The PSOE, despite its name of Spanish Socialist Workers Party, is a reformist party which has been elected to run the affairs of Spanish capitalism; and it has already announced that it will do so in accordance with the economic logic of capitalism: profits for the capitalists, austerity for the workers.

A few days before he was appointed "super-Minister" for the Economy, Miguel Boyer revealed to the Madrid correspondent of Le Monde (27 November) precisely what the new government's approach was going to be. We reproduce his words without comment:

  There is no other solution for this country but to pursue a policy of austerity. To want an immediate reflation without first curing the economy and while the international situation is against us would only delay the reckoning and in a year oblige us to in the end take even more severe austerity measures. There will be no reactivation of the economy in Spain without wage moderation, without refloating enterprises and without giving priority to controlling inflation.

  Our priority is not to increase internal demand since we would only succeed in upsetting our balance of payments as the example of France has shown. We must first of all relaunch investment. then exports, and there is only one way to achieve this: the profits resulting from the increase in productivity must remain in the hands of the heads of enterprises so that they decide to invest. The workers, to begin with, will have to be satisfied with the maintaining of their purchasing power at its present level.

Unfair cops

Home Secretary Whitelaw and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Newman are supposed to be organising a police force to prevent public disorder so it is very embarrassing for them when a group of policemen irresponsibly shoot a man in the street. It is of course even more embarrassing for the policemen who fired the shots who may have been expecting the usual commendation for bravery for approaching a highly dangerous criminal if they had shot the “right" man.

The event has strengthened a number of dark suspicions, that the police in London are issued with guns too easily, which conditions them to use them too freely. The uproar which followed the shooting promises to rumble on for a long time. A number of prominent public figures are striving, in the name of our safety, to wring some advantage from it all. When it is over there may be some minor changes in some obscure regulations, which will be presented to us in triumph, as an insurance against it ever happening again.

So far, then, the debate has been off target. There have been demands for the police to be more efficient in catching criminals so that they gain more public confidence and therefore do their job even better. There have been, again, calls for the police to be more “accountable”. One Tory MP made himself unpopular by saying that the people attacked by the police were associated with crime, implying that perhaps it was all right to try to kill them after all.

The basic facts of the true function and role of the police have been passed over. They are there to protect the rights of private property; the man they set out to catch that day was wanted by them because, they said, he has committed some determined robberies and is, therefore, a personified threat to property rights.

In this job the police, as well as the other arms of the coercive state machine, will be as ruthless and as efficient as they need to be and are able to be. If this means that they must roam the streets with guns, then that is what they will do.

It is nonsense to demand that an organisation like that should be accountable to the very people they are in business to repress. Property rights need not be protected against the ruling class, since they possess them already; it is the dispossessed working class who must be resisted.

It is members of the working class who commit the vast majority of offences against property; it is members of the working class too who arrest the offenders and, when they are punished, it is workers who carry out the court's orders.

That situation exists by virtue of workers' acquiescence; they are accountable to themselves for their degraded position in society and the repression and violence which they wreak on themselves.

OPEC not OK

For almost ten years the oil states in OPEC have been cast as the world's villains, responsible for starting the present recession. It was in 1973 that the international price of oil surged upwards, as the cartel clamped on restrictive production quotas.

This gave the Heath government a convenient explanation for the economic crisis — one which fitted in with an established tradition that such difficulties are the fault of avaricious, untrustworthy foreigners. It was in that tradition that the Labour Party blamed the crash of the 30s, which swept them from power, on to a foreign bankers' ramp. After the war, the Attlee government grumbled that most of their worries were due to the dominance of the American economy. Harold Wilson’s dramatic plans for prosperity through technological progress were, we were darkly told, laid waste by the gnomes of Zurich.

An essential part of the tradition is that the villains, like plump vultures, are themselves invulnerably prosperous and secure. No gnomes arc expected to be seen, begging in the streets of Switzerland. No oil sheik is reported to be down to his last desperate million.

Well, whether OPEC triggered off the slump or not (the real explanation of the cause is a lot more fundamental) they are now themselves suffering in it. One result of the recession is that the oil market is glutted. This has severely damaged the unity on which OPEC relies to make itself felt, as member states cut their prices below the agreed levels or produce above their set quota.

This disorderly behaviour is threatening the very existence of the cartel. The process is being aggravated by the oil producing states outside OPEC — notably Britain and Mexico — who are carefully keeping their export prices “competitive”.

Combines like OPEC are attempts to introduce a permanently profitable order into the chaos of capitalist production and commerce. OPEC could operate for as long as conditions allowed but it cannot escape the fact that oil is a commodity and that it will not be produced unless it is profitable to do so. It cannot avoid the reality that capitalism passes from boom to slump and back again in an uncontrollable cycle which takes no account of any assumptions that it can be brought to order.

Saviour for civilisation

Workers who worry their way along the dole queue about whether the pound is worth what it used to be will be comforted that the new governor of the Bank of England, Robin Leigh-Pemberton (which is the sort of name not usually to be found in a dole queue) regards ". . . sound money as fundamental to civilisation”.

Of course Leigh-Pcmberton is bound to have some ideas about money because he has a fair bit of it himself. He had an expensive schooling at Eton and then, like a lot of pubescent members of the ruling class, he became an officer in a fashionable Guards regiment.

He is sometimes known as a farmer, which doesn't actually mean that he gets up in the small hours to milk the cows or comes home tired and smelly after a day with the muck-spreader but that he owns a couple of thousand acres in the lush county of Kent.

Leigh-Pemberton has been getting £78,000 a year for being chairman of Westminster Bank and it seems that his new job might mean a wage cut of about £3,000 a year but, if he is typical of most members of his class, he will regard that as a worthy sacrifice in the cause of sound money and civilisation.

So we should all be grateful, even if we are trying to survive on the dole, to have such a man at the top in Threadneedle Street. From the heights of his privileged origins, his inherited wealth, his effortlessly accumulated positions of power. Leigh-Pemberton will be able to lecture the lower orders about the profligate living habits they acquire through their lifetime of being exploited.

Workers who are scraping by on their wages, watching their livelihood run through their fingers like sand, or those who are barely existing on what are called state “benefits" may be willing to heed his words in the cause of sound money.

Others who are more sensitive, more aware, will know that such issues are of no account to them and will feel themselves insulted as well as exploited.

Which way euphoria? (1983)

From the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twenty years after it was first discerned as a threat to what are still known as civilised standards, the black image of drugs persists. There are still nightmares about heroin-crazed addicts terrorising the land in a frantic search for their next fix. Anxious parents watch their composed, ambitious children for the first signs of descent into the pit of addiction from which the only escape is premature death.

What substance is there to these fears? Some drug addicts do lead excessively unhappy and disordered lives, inflicting on themselves awful illnesses like hepatitis, septicaemia or gangrene and losing parts of their limbs. Very often they resort to crime to raise the money for their drugs and their very recklessness leads to a high death rate. Heroin addicts are 30 times more likely to die than anyone else in a comparable age group.

But it must also be said that too often the debate on the issue is heavily misinformed. For example there is the myth of the instant and progressive addiction, the dread process by which the first whiff of cannabis fumes leads inexorably to the syringe surging with heroin. It is truer to say that those who pass from soft drugs to hard do so because the soft ones are unable to answer their demands. In fact, for most people the first experience of a drug like heroin is very unpleasant, like being sick after the first few cigarettes. Immediate addiction happens very rarely, if at all; as one addict put it, “You have to work at it".

Of course the addicts’ self-image is anything but black; to them drugs offer an ecstatic release. One describes using heroin as like “golden fire running through your veins”, another exults "This is what men go to prison for and it’s worth it”. The opiates, especially heroin, act on the central nervous system to blot out stress and anxiety and replace it with euphoria. A doctor’s description is: "The addict feels he has eaten to his heart’s content, experienced full sexual satisfaction and eliminated all anxieties . . " It is reasonable to ask why relief and pleasure should be regarded as a threat to society and be subject to heavy legal penalties.

The answer of the everyday, law-abiding, hard-working traveller on the Clapham omnibus is, of course, that drug addiction is unhealthy and there is plenty of evidence which apparently supports that opinion. But it is arguable that the more degraded aspects of the addict's life are caused by the social reaction against drugs rather than by the substances themselves. Up to a point heroin in itself need do little organic harm to the body; much of the damage commonly associated with it is due to the context in which it is used — the dirty, sometimes communally used needles, the dilution with water from the bowls of public lavatories, the adulteration which illicit supplies are vulnerable to, the malnutrition caused by the high prices for drugs on the streets. None of these factors would operate, were the drug not legally controlled and restricted. Not all heroin users descend into filthy, shambling addicts; in the House of Lords on 13 December 1955 Lord Amulree confessed: “I like my little drop of heroin: it works very well for me. I have taken it for 25 or 30 years but have not yet become an addict".

Addictive drugs have existed for a very long time but it is only comparatively recently that they have been defined as the cause of social problems. Morphine was first isolated from opium in 1804 and was widely used as a painkiller and in patent medicines. Heroin, a derivative of morphine, was discovered in 1874, when it was hailed as a new wonder medicine, non-habit forming and free of morphine’s undesirable side-effects. Amphetamine was first produced at the end of the 19th century. During the war the stimulant benzedrine was supplied to both German and British troops; 72 million tablets of it were issued to the British forces to be taken, according to the official instructions, when the men were “. . . markedly fatigued physically or mentally, in circumstances calling for a special effort”. In Japan the widespread use of stimulants during the war led to a serious post-war problem of dependence. Cannabis — not addictive and a very different substance to the opiates and amphetamines — has been known medicinally for thousands of years although its uses were not opened to the western world until 1839. It was a popular medicine for the wounded during the Crimean War. In 1933 the effects of marijuana on American troops in the Panama Canal Zone were assessed, with the official conclusion that “. . . no recommendations to prevent the sale or use of marijuana are deemed advisable”.

The Pharmacy Act of 1868 laid it down that opium and its derivatives, on which Victorian medicine heavily depended, were poisons and must be controlled. The Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 took this a step further, defining heroin as illegal unless prescribed by a qualified doctor. In 1925 the Geneva Convention internationally outlawed the non-medical use of cannabis, morphine, heroin and cocaine. Heroin came under further threat in 1955, when Health Minister Ian Macleod announced his intention of prohibiting its manufacture. This provoked stormy opposition from the doctors, who were commonly prescribing the drug to case the discomfort of terminally ill people. The government backed down, as governments usually do when they are in conflict with the medical profession, and there the matter rested for a while. There were then few known addicts — about 300 or 400 — and most of them were either elderly people who had formed the habit through medical treatment or nurses and doctors whose addiction originated in their working association with drugs. The situation was controlled with regular prescriptions; the Brain Committee on Drug Addiction produced in 1961 a reassuring report.

It soon became clear, however, that the Brain Committee had misread the situation. At the very time they were sitting an unprecedented boom in drugs was in existence. Its origins are obscure; one investigator traced it to a burglary of opiates from a pharmacy in 1951, others thought the immigration of the 1950s brought a lot of regular users into the country, or that the stringent anti-drug laws introduced by the Canadian government in 1958 caused a flight of addicts to England's easier legal climate. Whatever the truth, it was clear that a new element had come on the scene — the non-medical use of drugs, by young people, for pleasure. Officially the demand for drugs was still catered for through GPs but such was the demand that a black market flourished as addicts discovered that prescriptions were more readily obtainable from a few pliant doctors who were prepared to sell them to their clamouring patients. These doctors became publicised as the heartless, avaricious villains of the drugs boom; some of them flavoured the media hacks' outpourings of righteous indignation by having foreign-sounding names like Petro and Frankau. They were hounded, prosecuted. struck off, imprisoned. One of them is now in Broadmoor.

The Brain Committee, having got its breath back, reported again in 1965, by which time the number of known opiate addicts had risen to 927. A new Dangerous Drugs Act came into operation in 1968 which drastically changed the scene. Drugs such as heroin could now no longer be prescribed by GPs but only by specially licensed doctors mainly operating in drugs clinics attached to hospitals. These doctors were often qualified psychiatrists, which implied a secondary function that they would treat the addict out of dependence. In most cases the clinics attempted to supplant heroin with methadone, a synthetic opiate which has an active span of 24-36 hours (in contrast to heroin’s 8 hours) which in theory allows the user to function in a more stable way — in other words go to work, pay the bills and so on. Some doctors became very enthusiastic about methadone and there was a boom in it during the 70s. as the patients wheedled for an over-prescription which they could sell so that they could buy illegal heroin.

Another requirement of the 1968 Act was that doctors had to notify the Home Office of all addicts of drugs like cocaine and heroin who came to their notice — an enforced breach of medical confidentiality which had hitherto been applied only in the case of contagious diseases. For the first five years of the Act’s operation the numbers of known addicts hovered around 3000. From 1973 it began to climb steadily until 1978, when it really took off:

1973 1974 1975 1970 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981

3023 3252 3425 3474 3605 4116 4787 5107 6157

For a number of reasons, these figures do not give a true picture. Many addicts are not known as such to their GP and they avoid contact with the clinics, preferring to hustle for illegal supplies or to wheedle prescriptions for drugs like diconal from doctors who are prepared to “treat" them as private patients in need of a sedative. The physical consequences of injecting diconal can be horrible — limbs swollen like purple balloons, massive fiery ulcers and sometimes death. This is the reality behind such estimates as that of the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence, that the official figure of known addicts in 1981 of 6157 masks a true figure of about 30,000.

In such ways are the pronounced intentions of Acts of Parliament frustrated. Such laws are formed on the assumption that a problem can be easily defined by legal draftsmen and a gaggle of MPs in a debate. It can then be controlled, equally simply, by prescribing punishments for anyone who steps outside the law. But the definitions, the prescriptions — and the problem which starts it all — are not immutable. Fashions in drug abuse change in response to influences like availability. The end of Prohibition in America led to the outlawing of the social use of marijuana, as the liquor interests feared the effects of the drug on what they hoped would be a post-Prohibition boom in sales of drink. The people who were prosecuted in the famous Operation Julie had been occupied in making a lot of very pure LSD. The Customs and Excise recently said (Guardian, 6 January 1983) that a lot of high grade heroin is now on sale in this country, which cuts down the risk of illness and death because it is pure enough to be sniffed or smoked rather than injected.

Cohorts of psychiatrists and social workers probe and worry about the cause of drug addiction. Most of them agree that the addict has a personality inadequate to cope with everyday crises. As the first experiments happen typically in adolescence, the observers are able comfortably to ascribe it all to the rebelliousness of puberty, to an immature desire to shock parents, teachers, bosses. Well, the function of psychiatry and social work is to patch up casualties, not to prevent war; they leave untouched the vital questions of why personalities are deemed inadequate and why the adequate (which of course includes the psychiatrists and social workers) are expected to cope. Commando-like, with persistent crises. They pay no heed to the structure and the role of the family, school and the employing class.

A more useful approach recognises that the casualties in the drugs world come from the casualty class in society. The recent Pullitzer divorce case in America showed that the other class can easily support a drugs habit without spiralling into ragged destitution. The same applies to this country. Standing outside a picturesque village in Southern England, in acres of lush meadows and barbered gardens, is a large medieval manor house where anyone who can afford the mountainous fees can take their addiction to be expensively hidden, soothed and nursed. Any worker who is mistakenly accepted there is rapidly diagnosed as untreatably psychopathic and discharged to the nearest NIIS hospital.

What hope is there, in this sorry situation, from the addicts? Some of them pretend to some insight into their difficulties, offering “social pressures" or some other easily available cliche. But what is this “insight" worth? The great amphetamine boom of the 60s and 70s was a pathetic attempt by youngsters who hated their job or were bored at school to prolong their leisure time by staying awake — which obscured the fact that the real, accessible problem was in the fact that they needed to be employed and to be trained for employment. The disarray of capitalism is not to be seduced into order through any pill or syringe. Capitalism devotes an enormously disproportionate effort to stamp out the illicit, uncontrolled use of drugs and it does so because it is determined that workers shall experience euphoria only on capitalism’s terms, as the reward for constructing a secure job, a modest mortgaged home, a regulated, aseptic nuclear family.

As a social system it rests on a leucotomiscd acceptance of the disciplines of wage-slavery. It can be ended, and social euphoria achieved, only as the work of brains which are free of any kind of junk.

Ivan

50 Years Ago: Lloyd-George on Capitalism (1983)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sometimes in old buildings which have stood firm for centuries a little insect enters the woodwork and gradually eats away its strength. To all outward appearances for a long time it seems as solid as ever but the mischief is gradually reducing the core of the timber into dust.

Our economic system is crumbling, not from external pressure but from inside. Can Mr. Baldwin persuade the deathwatch beetle to stop nibbling at the rafters for three whole years? Time is pressing. Governments are too dilatory and easygoing in dealing with this tremendous emergency. Whatever happens there must be fundamental changes. No one doubts this. They are in process now of being effected; everywhere the old order is passing away; nay, it has passed away already. What will take its place? Are statesmen thinking out that problem?

The existing industrial, financial, and economic order with its bland and cruel greed, with its extravagance and its poverty, its luxuries and its miseries, its waste and its chaos, with its tens of millions of honest workers reduced to eating the bread of charity whilst the riches of Providence are rotting in the fields because they are not permitted to reach the needy; with its slums where no humane man would house his cattle, with its nations organising to starve and slaughter each other — this system has been tried and found wanting.

(From a speech at Carnarvon on Thursday, January 19th. Manchester Guardian, January 20th. Reproduced in the Socialist Standard, February 1933.)

Can’t Pay — Will Pay (1983)

From the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tebbit’s Green Paper on “union democracy” has been greeted with howls of indignation from the bureaucratic stooges who dominate the trade unions in Britain. Indeed, the trade unions are quite right to tell the Tories to keep their capitalist paws off independent working class organisations. Workers do not need lessons on democracy from a party which openly exists to preserve minority class privilege.

It cannot be denied, however, that the Green Paper's recommendation that the system of paying the political levy to the Labour Party be changed from contracting out if a worker does not want to pay to contracting in if one does, is in the interest of trade union democracy. It is a fact that very many workers — possibly hundreds of thousands — currently pay the levy because it is too much bother to contract out. In short, the Labour Party is receiving regular payments from many workers who do not vote for it or support it in any way. Attempts to contract out of the levy, which involve no more than signing a form, can be made difficult by those union officials who resent their members’ unwillingness to pay for the Labour Party. Many workers are simply paying the levy for the sake of a quiet life. If this were not so the Labour Party would not be so worried about the prospect of workers having to volunteer to pay. What kind of a party is it that can only survive by conning workers — many of whom oppose it — to supply its funds? Any attempt by the unions to abolish the levy and let workers volunteer dues to whichever political party they wish to support would be democratic.

Seventy-five per cent of Labour Party money is acquired by means of union political funds. In 1927 the Conservative government introduced legislation forcing the contracting in system on the unions. The result of this legislation made clear the real degree of willingness within the unions to support the Labour Party: the number paying the levy fell from 3.3 million in 1926 to 2 million in 1928. By 1934 only 1.85 million union members volunteered to pay the political levy. In 1946 the Labour Party passed a law permitting a return to the undemocratic procedure of contracting out. This led to a sharp increase in those paying the levy from 2.6 million in 1946 to 4.3 million in 1947. Was this because nearly two million trade unionists had been converted into Labour Party supporters and wanted to give it their money? No: it was due to a change in the law initiated by an anti-working class party in order to increase its own funds.

The function of trade unions is to defend and increase the wages or salaries of their members and to attempt to improve conditions of employment. Trade union action is strictly limited by the social laws of the profit system and can never lead to working class emancipation. For unions to support pro-capitalist parties, financially or in any other way, is manifestly against their interests. In supporting Labour’s policies for capitalism, trade unions become involved in disadvantageous deals to make the system work more efficiently. The business of running capitalism is not the political concern of workers: the working class can only advance by abolishing the wages system.

Prior to the 1979-General Election several unions increased their political donations to the Labour Party: the GMWU gave £100,000: the TGWU £150,000; the NUM £100,000; the AUEW £102.400; and the ASTMS £50,000. This was on top of their regular political payments. Were the members of these unions balloted before this money was given away? No, they were not — and they will not be when union funds are wasted once again on helping the Labour Party to deceive the workers in the next General Election. Socialists refuse to pay the political levy and many of us make efforts in our unions to end affiliation to the Labour Party.

The Labour Party’s financial crisis is not unique. Long bankrupt in the field of political ideas, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CP) is apparently on the approach road to financial insolvency; its daily newspaper, the Morning Star, has launched an appeal fund to keep it going. The Star's precursor, the Daily Worker, was the first newspaper in Britain to greet the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as an admirable event. Posing as a friend of the working class, the CP’s newspaper has a long and disgusting record of supporting the dictatorship in Russia, from the days of Stalin to the present. Of the 30,000 Morning Stars printed daily, approximately 15,000 arc sold in Eastern Europe (where workers must be very interested to read about a Communist Party which actually encourages strikes rather than locking up workers who participate in them). This means that the CP is selling only 15,000 Morning Stars in Britain — less than the claimed membership of the CP: 20,000. The CP is appealing to trade unions, such as AEUW-TASS and the TGWU, to buy shares of up to £10,000 in the paper. If these unions provide such aid will they first ballot their members?

The CP has faced grave political problems in recent years, with rival factions (Stalinists v. Eurocommunists) pulling in different directions. It seems that the Stalinist wing (known within the CP as the “tankies”) arc opposed to the occasional criticisms of Kremlin policies which expediency has compelled the CP to make. Mick Costello has recently resigned as the CP’s Industrial Organiser because of his opposition to certain official CP policies, including its involvement in CND which is thought by the “tankies” to be “too anti- Soviet". There are strong rumours around the CP that their next Congress in November will remove the present General Secretary, Gordon McLennan, and appoint a new. more pro-Russian leadership. The effect of all these “vanguard manoeuvres” on the working class will not be very great. Indeed, if the CP goes out of existence it can only be to the benefit of the movement for socialism. Meanwhile, the CP's Gerry Cohen has been given the job of taking the begging bowl around the unions to canvass funds from bureaucrats with a liking for the Kremlin autocracy.

The Tory Party, of course, is never short of a few bob when there is capitalist propaganda to be put out. Its funds are not the result of dues and collections taken by its members; only just over £500,000 a year is paid into Tory funds by its constituency branches (Financial Times, 7 October. 1978). A substantial proportion of Tory funds comes from companies which make political donations either to the Conservative Party itself or to allied bodies which exist either largely as front organisations for Tory political aims. For example, in the financial year before the last General Election. Rank Organisation gave £30,000 to the Tory Party plus £1,000 each to the Centre for Policy Studies and Aims; United Biscuits gave £20,000 to British United Industrialists (BUI); Tate and Lyle gave £10,675 to the Tories, £5,000 to the Centre for Policy Studies and £3,000 to BUI; Taylor Woodrow gave £15,000 to the Tories and another £15,000 to BUI; Allied Breweries gave only £2,310 to the Tories, but then gave £26,500 to BUI. So what are these front organisations? BUI raises approximately £500,000 a year for political purposes: at election time most of this goes into the Conservative Party campaign. Aims was previously known as Aims of Industry and existed as a “pro-free enterprise" pressure group made up of several Tory MPs. The Centre for Policy Studies, of which Margaret Thatcher is President and Keith Joseph Chairman, is a Tory think tank which contributes more than thoughts when election fund donations are required. It causes far less public embarrassment for big companies if they are able to channel their support for Toryism through these front organisations.

Some big businesses are now turning to the latest capitalist party, the SDP. There is some hope that investment in the latest political con-trick will yield returns. At present the SDP is keeping quiet about where it gets its funds from; of course, the millions of pounds worth of media publicity given to the new product — even when it only consisted of four members — was absolutely free.

It remains to be stated that the only Socialist Party in Britain has no grants coming in from trade unions or rich companies; it has no front organisations to collect its money surreptitiously; unlike the so-called Workers Revolutionary Party it has no film star leaders (or leaders of any description) who can afford to invest thousands of pounds in it; there are no foreign governments subsidising the SPGB. Of course, millionaires with nothing better to spend their legally stolen money on are most welcome to donate large amounts of it to us; but we shall not hang about waiting for them. The fuel for the coming workers’ revolution must be provided by the working class itself — there is no better cause. 

Steve Coleman

Obituary: Charles Wooster (1983)

Obituary from the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are very sad to have to report the loss of our comrade Charles Wooster, who died of a brain haemmorrhage late last year. He became a socialist as a young man during the 1930s, and remained, as his father had been, committed to exposing the contradictions of capitalism throughout his life. He was actively involved in Party meetings in Wood Green and Haringey, and at the time of the Second World War refused, like many other socialists, to fight in the interests of British capitalism. He became the headmaster of a primary school in order to avoid the more obviously exploitative nature of work in industry. The principles Charles stood for were reflected at his funeral, where simple speeches from those who knew him replaced the pomp and ceremony of religious hypocrisy. We express our condolences to the family of this dedicated man, who will be remembered for his compassionate affability.

"The Thatcher and the Michael Foot . . . " (1983)

From the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

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Women's Estate (1983)

From the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Women's Liberation Movement could be said to be divided into two groups: Socialist Feminists and Revolutionary Feminists. In one editorial of Scarlet Women the Socialist Feminists say " . . . we have to examine Socialist Feminist thought and seek to redevelop it. What we are looking for is nothing less than a total redefinition of Socialist thought and practice. We are looking towards a Socialism that abolishes patriarchy”. The Revolutionary Feminists stress the primacy of the sex struggle for women, in contrast to the Marxist emphasis on the class struggle. Their focus is on issues which directly concern the sexual subordination of women to men — rape, prostitution, control of reproduction and pornography. They claim that Marxist analyses which are based on the primacy of the class struggle are incapable of adequately dealing with these issues or any others which they say cut across class boundaries. They see women as a sex class. So there is a tendency in the women's movement to be critical of Marxist theory as neglecting the sexual division.

Simone de Beauvoir, in her book Second Sex, says men are encouraged to play out their lives in the realm of transcendence, whereas women are confined to immanence. In other words, men work, create, do things, are in positions of authority and make their own histories, whereas women are confined to the home where their function is not to create but to maintain. Women keep house and raise children. Of course, reality is not quite like this, since work in a capitalist society is often stifling and stunting and men engaging in it could hardly be described as creating their own histories by transcending themselves. Within the present social context, however, it is still true that men are trained to go out, work and, within limits, shape their own lives and that, even bearing in mind the alienating nature of work, they have more opportunities to satisfy their need for creativity than women. The myth that woman's natural place is in the home and that naturally she will find the fulfilment of her creativity in bearing and raising children is terribly destructive.

A woman may, and does, work while living with a man, although many a wife maintains a home for her husband and lives for him and through him rather than for and through herself. A mother’s job outside the home may offer the family more than week-to-week subsistence. It is her wage that enables the family to eat better food, have a holiday or new clothes. It does not follow that the job will be satisfying; many jobs open to women are unpleasant — waitresses, clerks, salesgirls, typists and factory hands. Usually the nature of these jobs makes marriage seem more attractive, and often girls hope to find the best available man for financial security or to escape from the crowded and repressive home.

The pattern of wifely subservience is changing, however, and the myth that child bearing and rearing is the fulfilment of a woman’s destiny is being questioned. Having children is no substitute for creating one's own life, but many women are conditioned to devote themselves to nothing else and so end up as intolerable burdens on their children.

Much of the resentment in Women’s Liberation movements against men is sexual — they feel they are being treated as objects (as. in fact, many are). Fashions, advertising, films and magazines all betray the fact that women are culturally conceived of as objects and, worse still, often accept this definition and try to make themselves into a more desirable commodity on the sexual market. We must recognise that this self-definition and conscious acceptance is related to economic and social structures. Men and women are oppressed together and must be liberated together. Women will not achieve anything by venting their hostility on men. They must recognise that capitalist society inculcates destructive beliefs about themselves and must understand the extent to which they have been conditioned since childhood.

If we recognise that the problems facing women are related to the structure of the whole society, then we see that the only solution is to change society fundamentally. We live in a capitalist society where goods are produced for sale with a view to profit. Simple manufacture has evolved into a gigantic electronic technology. The world retains the same basic social relations, in both public and private sectors, of capital and wage labour. All over the world there is poverty, famine, insecurity, inequality and war. The basic reason is the commodity nature of wealth under capitalism — the fact that wealth is socially produced and privately owned. Every social system has its basis through which almost every feature of it can be traced and explained. The morals, attitudes and institutions of capitalism are explained through the class ownership of the means of producing and distributing the world’s wealth.

A section of the population, as direct proprietors or company shareholders, own the land, factories, mines, workshops, ships, banks and any other trading concern, or invest their money in government or municipal securities. This is the basic social condition which forms social relationships like buying and selling, employing and being employed. It is also responsible for social institutions like shops and markets, which are needed for the relationships to operate. On one side is the capitalist class and on the other the working class.

A class is a group of people who, although they may differ in their nationality or background or their so-called race, have economic interests in common. A class, with its common economic interests, exists whether or not its members realise it. A capitalist is someone who has enough ownership to be able to live without going to work for a wage or salary. Because of this ownership the capitalist's interests are opposed to those of the working class — those people who do not own enough to give them a living but who rely for their livelihood on selling their labour power to the employer for wages.

Whenever a commodity is bought or sold there immediately occurs a clash of interests, for it is to the advantage of the seller to sell for the highest possible price and of the buyer to buy at the lowest price possible. Therefore it is in the interest of the working class to get the highest wages and best working conditions they can, and in the interest of the employers to exploit workers as intensely as they can for as little as possible. This dooms the majority of capitalism’s people to poverty. Capitalism produces for profit — when profit is not available production ceases or wealth is destroyed. Because of its basic characteristics, capitalism is unable to satisfy the needs and desires of the world’s people. It must always deprive, undermine and suppress them.

If the Women's Liberation Movement achieves all its immediate demands, such as equal pay, educational opportunities, 24 hour nurseries, free contraception and abortion on demand, there will remain the need for a revolutionary change in society.

Although Women’s Liberation came into existence in the late nineteen-sixties, feminist organisations were in being long before. Juliet Mitchell in Women’s Estate says of the Suffragettes " . . and indeed when in 1918 in England it (the vote) was given to women over thirty who owned property the most powerful wing of the movement was satisfied and the struggle evaporated”. The Women’s Liberation movement is not different from other reformist organisations which choose to put immediate aims before a revolutionary change in society.

Doreen Davies

Marx and trade unions (1983)

From the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx’s assessment that the English trade unionists involved in setting up the International Working Men's Association were “real powers" was to be proved correct by the subsequent careers of some of them. Robert Appelgarth, for instance, played a very prominent role in presenting the evidence of the trade unions to the Royal Commission which had been set up to investigate them in 1867 and whose Report in 1869 paved the way for a further liberalisation of the law governing their activities. Howell, as Secretary of the TUC’s Parliamentary Committee from 1871-5, was the first General Secretary of the Trades Unions Congress, whose first congress had been held in Manchester, in June 1868. Thus Marx was dealing with some of the top British trade unionists of his day. Since in politics they were Liberals it may seem strange that Marx, as a revolutionary communist, should have been prepared to work with them. But, for him, what was important was not their politics but the fact that they were leading trade unionists, solidly implanted in the working class movement.

In other words. Marx’s participation in the IWMA was a resumption of the same strategy derived, through Engels, from the Chartist experience of the early 1840s which had motivated his earlier collaboration with Ernest Jones. Because he believed that out of the economic organisations of the working class would eventually evolve a conscious political movement for socialism, he was not too concerned about the political ideas of the trade union leaders he had agreed to work with. The development of the working class movement itself would, Marx believed somewhat over-optimistically, sooner or later put this right. The important thing at this stage for Marx was to set this movement in motion, to encourage independent working class trade union and political activity. When this did not happen, as became evident within a number of years. Marx severely criticised the union leaders for having sold out to the capitalist class and the Liberal Party.

In fact until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 the activity of the IWMA was mainly of a trade union nature. Not all the members of the IWMA, particularly not the French workers, were convinced of the utility of trade unions and strikes and to Marx fell the task of providing a theoretical justification of trade unionism. Marx proved to be a worthy successor to Hodkingson and other earlier pro-working class writers, in whose tradition he must indeed have been regarded by the English trade unionists whose practice he was showing to be sound from an economic point of view (despite what the economic orthodoxy of the day claimed) and who called him "Dr. Marx" out of respect for his economic and historical knowledge. This is not to suggest that English trade unionists were incapable of themselves providing economic justifications for their activities. The Secretary of the London Consolidated Society of Bookbinders. Thomas Dunning (1799-1873), had written a book, published in 1860, Trades Unions and Strikes: Their Philosophy and Intention, which impressed both Marx and the leading British economist of the time, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Marx referred to it several times in his footnotes in Capital and, more extensively, in some notes which he did not in the end include in Volume 1 of Capital. In these notes he took up Dunning's argument that the economic logic of trade unions was to ensure that the laws of supply and demand were “fairly” applied or, translated into Marx’s economic categories, to ensure that the workers were paid the value of their labour power, defined as the value of

the means of subsistence that is customarily held to be essential in a given state of society to enable the worker to exert his labour-power with the necessary degree of health, strength, vitality, etc and to perpetuate him self by producing replacements for himself.

Without trade unions, workers would tend to be paid less than this value:

. . . the value of labour-power constitutes the conscious and explicit foundation of the trade unions, whose importance for the English working class can scarcely be overestimated. The trade unions aim at nothing less than to prevent the reduction of wages below that level that is traditionally maintained in the various branches of industry. That is to say, they wish to prevent the price of labour-power from falling below its value.

“Abolition of the wages system”

Marx presented a particularly well-argued case for trade unionism in a reply to John Weston, an old Owenite and a member of the General Council of the IWMA. which took up two successive meetings of the Council in June 1865. [1] Weston had argued that trade union action to raise wages was pointless, even harmful, as wage increases only led to price increases or to wage cuts for other workers. Marx showed how Weston’s arguments were unsound: the level of wages did not affect the level of prices; the effect of a general increase in wages would be, after a readjustment of demand, a decrease in the rate of profit. Marx did, however, recognise that trade union action, including strikes, was basically only defensive and that if workers were not going to go on fighting a permanent rearguard action they should begin thinking in terms of abolishing the wages system altogether:

I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way in their every-day conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any large movement. At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these every-day struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in those unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto ‘A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword. ‘Abolition of the wages system!’

Marx ended his talk by proposing a resolution. which the General Council adopted, the third clause of which declared:

Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system.

The trade union question was also discussed at the first Congress of the IWMA in Geneva in September 1866. Marx drafted the “Instructions” for the General Council’s own delegation. The sixth section, headed “Trade Unions: Their Past. Present and Future", gives a very clear idea of Marx's hopes for the future evolution and role of the spontaneous economic organisations of the working class that trade unions were:

. . . unconsciously to themselves, the trade unions were forming centres of organization of the working class, as the medieval municipalities and communes did for the middle class. If the trade unions are required for the guerrilla fights between capital and labour, they are still more important as organized agencies for superseding the very system of wage labour and capital rule.

This characterisation of the trade unions as being the equivalent for the working class of what the medieval towns had been for the bourgeoisie Marx had already made on previous occasions, in the Poverty of Philosophy and in the series of articles in the New York Daily Tribune 1853-4 in which he referred to as his “history of strikes". It is almost a syndicalist vision of the emancipation of the working class, except that Marx envisaged the trade unions playing a political role, converting themselves into, as it were, a mass political party of the working class, rather than remaining industrial organisations relying exclusively on industrial action to try to overthrow capitalism.

Marx’s participation in the British trade union movement was however not just confined to theorising. As we have said, until 1870 the IWMA was mainly concerned with trade union matters and has been accurately described as being during this period “an international trade union liaison committee". [2] When a strike occurred in Britain and the employer imported blackleg labour from the Continent, the IWMA intervened, often successfully, with leaflets and speakers in the appropriate language, to persuade the continental workers not to break the strike. Similarly, when a strike occurred in Britain or on the Continent, the IWMA publicised it and raised funds from workers and trade unions in other countries to help the strikers and their families. Marx, as a member of the General Council, played his part in such activities, drafting for instance a leaflet addressed to German tailors concerning a strike.

Marx put the finishing touches to Capital, which was first published in German in Hamburg in September 1867, at a time when he was actively involved in the mainly trade union-type activities of the IWMA. This no doubt helped to give Capital a very pronounced pro-working class character. Marx only mentioned the trade unions in passing (since he planned to deal with the question in a separate volume, which never appeared, to be devoted to "Wage Labour"), but he did devote considerable space to another working class struggle: that to achieve a legally-enforceable maximum working day. As with trade unions. Marx was not content simply to describe and support this struggle. He also showed how the demand for a legal “normal working day" was justified even from a capitalist economic point of view.

There had been opposition to this demand also within the IWMA, once again from the French workers who, influenced by the ideas of Proudhon, had doubts about appealing to the capitalist state to protect the working class. In the "Instructions" he drafted for the General Council delegation to the 1866 Geneva congress of the IWMA Marx met this criticism head on. with regard to the legal limitation of child labour. The "more enlightened part of the working class", he wrote

know that, before everything else, the children and juvenile workers must be saved from the crushing effects of the present system. This can only be effected by converting social reason into social force, and, under given circumstances, there exists no other method of doing so, than through general laws, enforced by the power of the state. In enforcing such laws, the working class do not fortify governmental power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency. They effect by a general act what they would vainly attempt by a multitude of isolated individual efforts.

Mere Marx appears, not so much as an early-day syndicalist, but as a reformist arguing that the condition of the working class could be improved under capitalism through the action of the existing state.

Class struggle over hours

But he was no more a reformist than he was a syndicalist. He did indeed believe that state intervention to limit the working day could bring about a real improvement in the condition of the working class and in Capital did not hesitate to say so:

  On the whole the working population, subject to the Factory Act, has greatly improved physically. All medical testimony agrees on this point, and personal observation at different times has convinced me of it (Chapter X “The Working Day", Section 6. footnote).
  To guard against false conclusions front the text, I ought here to remark that the English cotton industry, since it was placed under the Factory Act of 1850 with its regulations of labour-time, etc., must be regarded as the model industry of England. The English cotton operative is in every respect better off than his Continental counterpart in misery (Chapter X, Section 5. footnote).

This is a far cry from the absolute impoverishment of the working class under capitalism which some have read into Marx! Marx also had the highest regard for the government officials who enforced the Factory Acts in a strict and conscientious way, saying of one, Leonard Horner (1785- 1864) that "he rendered undying service to the English working-class” (Chapter IX. “The Rate of Surplus-Value”. Section 3, footnote).

It is important to understand why Marx thought that it was possible for factory legislation to improve working class conditions. It was not because state intervention generally — reformist political action, if you like — could bring about an improvement in working class living standards, but because, in this particular case, in the absence of state intervention, wages were being driven down below the value of the workers’ labour power. The parallel with trade union action was clear, and deliberate. Factory legislation was another way of ensuring that workers were paid the full value of the commodity they had to sell, their ability to work. If they had to work too long hours the workers were not being paid, in the words of the slogan Marx denounced as conservative, "a fair day’s wage for a fair day's work”.

Marx, basing himself on a leaflet produced by the building workers strike committee during the strike and lock-out of 1859-60, summarises the workers’ case for a shorter working day as follows:

You pay me for one day’s labour-power, whilst you use that of 3 days. That is against our contract and the law of exchanges. I demand, therefore, a working-day of normal length, and I demand it without any appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place . . . I demand the normal working-day because I, like every other seller, demand the value of my commodity (Chapter X, "The Working Day", Section 1).

Since the capitalist employer is not prepared to accept this argument, insisting on his right to make maximum use of the commodity he has purchased, the struggle for a “normal” working day becomes a class struggle:

. . .  in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class (ibid.).

Marx describes the course of this struggle in detail, from the first attempt at legal limitation initiated by Robert Owen in 1802 through the Acts of 1833 to the 1850 Act. in Section 6 of Chapter X of Capital entitled “The Struggle for the Normal Working-Day. Compulsory Limitation by Law of the Working-Time. The English Factory Acts, 1833 to 1864”. There is therefore no need for us to repeat that history here, but it must be emphasised that this was a purely defensive struggle:

  The history of the regulation of the working-day in certain branches of production, and the struggle still going on in others in regard to this regulation, prove conclusively that the isolated labourer, the labourer as ’free’ vendor of his labour-power, when capitalist production has once attained a certain stage, succumbs without any power of resistance (Chapter X. Section 7).
  For 'protection’ against ‘the serpent of their agonies’, the labourers must put their heads together, and. as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death (ibid.).

This explains why state intervention in this domain was capable of bringing about a once-for-all improvement in conditions, but incapable of bringing about a continual improvement. Like trade union action, once it has improved conditions by raising workers’ wages to the value of their labour power, its role became purely defensive: to ensure that wages were not driven down below their value, in this case by over-work as a result of too long a working day. So factory legislation was subject to the same limitations as trade union action: it could only play a rearguard, defensive role against the encroachments of capital.

In fact, here too the working class had to run fast just to stay still. The capitalist employer sought to compensate for the shorter hours imposed on him by the law by making his workers work more intensively (harder and faster); which meant that the workers would eventually have to demand a further shortening of the working day to avoid being over-worked and so underpaid:

There cannot be the slightest doubt that the tendency that urges capital, so soon as a prolongation of the hours of labour is once for all forbidden, to compensate itself, by a systematic heightening of the intensity of labour, and to convert every improvement in machinery into a more perfect means of exhausting the workman, must soon lead to a state of things in which a reduction of the hours of labour will again be inevitable (Chapter XV, "Machinery and Modern Industry", Section 3c).

Marx added, in a footnote, that "the agitation for a working-day of 8 hours has now [1867] begun in Lancashire among the factory operatives”. The Geneva Congress of the IWMA in 1866 had in fact already adopted the demand for an 8-hour day, following the example of the American trade unions.

Marx also explained, in the Preface to Capital, the space he had devoted to the Factory Acts by referring to the political, as well as economic, lesson they had for the continental ruling classes. The present epoch, he wrote, was that of the rise of the working class:

In England the process of social disintegration is palpable. When it has reached a certain point, it must re-act on the Continent. There it will take a form more brutal or more humane, according to the degree of development of the working-class itself. Apart from higher motives, therefore, their own most important interests dictate to the classes that are for the nonce the ruling ones, the removal of all legally removable hindrances to the free development of the working-class. For this reason, as well as others, I have given so large a space in this volume to the history, the details, and the results of English factory legislation.

In other words, the change-over to socialism would be less violent to the extent that the working class was better treated. In fact, Marx believed that, with the extension of the franchise as well, a peaceful capture of political power by the working class in England had become a distinct possibility.

But there was one argument in favour of a shorter working day and week which Marx did not use, even though it was as widespread in his day as it is now: that it would help reduce unemployment. Marx’s knowledge of the economies of capitalism led him to point out that the effect was more likely to be the opposite. A shorter working day, by increasing labour costs, would encourage the introduction of labour-saving machinery. As he told a meeting of the General Council of the IWMA in August 1868, which was discussing the question, the case for a shorter working day should be based, not so much on economic arguments, but simply on the need for workers as human beings to be healthy and to have more free time; so that they would be fit and educated enough to be able to carry through the advance in civilisation that the change-over from capitalism to communism would represent.

Marx thus provided a theoretical justification for what the working class movement in Britain was actually doing — trade union action to defend wages and demanding a legal maximum working day. This was in accordance with the role he and Engels had assigned to communist theoreticians in the Communist Manifesto:

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists . . . merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from an historical movement going on under our very eyes.

In this sense, a large part of Capital, Marx’s major work, can be said to be a theoretical reflection of the activity of the working class of his day in Britain.

Adam Buick

FOOTNOTES

[1.] First published in 1898 by his daughter, Eleanor, and Aveling under the title Value, Price and Profit, which is the title under which it became a textbook for those calling themselves Marxists in the British working class movement. Its original title was Wages, Price and Profit, by which it is known in other countries and which is also used in some later English editions.

[2.] Collins and Abranisky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement, p.84.

Going private (1983)

From the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a simple belief among electors that the Labour Party is for nationalisation and the Tories are against it. While it is true that there are elements holding such views in the two Parties the reality is much more complicated. There are several different reasons why governments nationalise; because, as conditions change, governments may reverse their policies and because the outlook of the electors has to be taken into account.

The Tories, the Liberals and the Labour Party have all changed their attitude from time to time. In the 19th century Liberal and Tory governments looked on nationalisation as an acceptable way of dealing with private monopolies, and at first the newly formed Labour Party shared that view. It was a Tory government which established the Central Electricity Board in 1926, the BBC in 1927 and BOAC in 1939; a Liberal government which set up the Port of London Authority in 1908. In 1943 Churchill, as Prime Minister, said in a broadcast “There is a broadening field for state ownership and enterprise especially in relation to monopolies".

In the meantime the Labour Party, under its constitution and in line with conference resolutions, became committed to more or less universal nationalisation, and put a large instalment into operation in the sweeping nationalisation Acts of the Labour Government 1945-1951.

Then a reaction set in. The Labour Party leaders, notably Gaitskell, began to resist demands in their own ranks for further nationalisation, and the Tories and Liberals took up a positive opposition to nationalisation except in special circumstances (like the Tory nationalisation of part of Rolls-Royce in 1971 when the firm went bankrupt). The Tories actually denationalised Iron and Steel, which a later Labour government renationalised.

The present Tory policy is identical with that stated by the Liberal Party in their election Programme 1950.

Nationalisation for the sake of nationalisation is nonsense. The Liberals’ attitude is clear. Monopoly where it is not inevitable is objectionable and should be broken up. If it cannot be broken up it should, if possible, be controlled in the public interest without a change of ownership; only when neither the restoration of competition nor control is possible, should nationalisation be considered.

Among the reasons for nationalisation are military considerations, as in the Liberal government Act of 1871 which gave the government power to take over the railways in war-time or other emergencies. It was also military considerations which led a Tory government in 1928 to denationalise some Post Office cables and the Post Office Beam Wireless Telegraph Service and hand them over to a merger of the cable companies. The Post Office wireless service was undercutting the cables and driving them into bankruptcy, which the government wished to prevent, largely for military reasons.

Governments have also introduced nationalisation to secure the integration and modernisation of an industry when it appears to be impractical for private owners to secure the necessary capital for the purpose, as in the case of coal. State control had been unanimously recommended by a Coal Commission in 1919 on the ground that fragmentation into 4,000 separate owners meant waste and inefficiency, which only nationalisation could remedy. It is noticeable that the Tories have so far not seriously considered denationalisation of coal.

But the one continuing issue in relation to nationalisation has been the question of private monopolies and how to deal with them. The first Act giving the government power to buy out the railways was in 1844. Gladstone, who was President of the Board of Trade in a Tory government (it was only later that he joined the Liberals) got the Act through because the railways were exploiting their transport monopoly to fix charges regarded by business men and the government as excessive. During the debate in Parliament an MP who was Chairman of the Great Western Railway opposed the Bill and pleaded that the public should “trust in competition". Gladstone replied that the supposedly competing railways were getting together to kill competition. The Act was never put into operation but it served its purpose as a warning to the companies.

When, eventually, the railways were nationalised by the Labour government in 1947, far from being a monopoly they were being driven towards bankruptcy by road transport competition. In 1844 it was only the railways which were regarded as a dangerous private monopoly; but in the Great Depression at the end of the 19th century there was a growing movement in all industries for companies to seek salvation by amalgamating, so that the Committee on Trade in 1919 could report:

Trade associates and combines arc rapidly increasing in this country and may within no distant period exercise a paramount influence over all important branches of the British trade.

Subsequent Labour and Tory governments have passed Acts to deal with monopolies, but while the Labour Party has continued to seek a remedy in nationalisation, the Tories have now taken a strongly opposite view. At the 1979 General Election the Tory Programme dealt both with anti-monopoly laws and with denationalisation as a means of restoring competition. On the first it said:

In order to secure effective competition and fair pricing policy, we will review the working of the Monopolies Commission, the Office of Fair Trading, the Price Commission, with the legislation which governs their activities.

On the second, the Programme promised to denationalise the aerospace and shipbuilding industries, to sell shares in the National Freight Corporation and to relax the Traffic Commission’s licensing regulations to enable new bus and other services to develop.

In fact they have gone beyond this. Shares have been sold in British Petroleum and Britoil; the British Transport Docks Board is being partly “privatised" as Associated British Ports; British Rail's hotels and ferries have been sold, and there is a proposal to sell British Rail’s thirteen engineering workshops. It is intended to sell shares in British Airways but the airline's £l,000m outstanding debt makes it unattractive to investors unless the government first accepts responsibility for some or all of the debt.

Parliament has been dealing with the Bill to “privatise” British Telecommunications but because it was not mentioned in the Tory Election Programme the actual sale of shares will not take place until after the next election. At the Second Reading of the Bill on 9 November, the Minister of State for Industry, Patrick Jenkin, said that the public will be allowed to buy half the shares and "British Telecom would no longer be a nationalised industry but would become a private sector company”.

His case for the Bill was that it was only by being freed from Treasury control and allowed to raise its own capital in the market that it could "become a major force in the world communications market”. The company will not have a monopoly.

One of the purposes of denationalisation is to raise money for the government to help towards its planned, but so far not operated, reduction of taxation; but the main purpose of the whole policy is to restore competitiveness to British industry which has been the theme of reiterated speeches by Thatcher and other ministers. It will, she says, promote greater efficiency and lower prices, to enable British firms to meet the competition of foreign companies in the British market and exporters to invade world markets more effectively.

Edgar Hardcastle

Will socialism be centralised? (1983)

From the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalist enterprises plan their production as far as possible in line with short- and long-term estimates of "effective” market demand for their products. Within the constraints of market limitations, decisions are taken “centrally” by small minorities appointed by the owners and controllers of capital. Socialist production decisions will differ from this in two major ways. First, in place of “market” demand, the limits of production will be set only by the total, freely expressed needs of people and by the absolute aggregate of available resources. Second, all decisions about production can be freely arrived at and implemented by the people whose lives they affect.

There are a number of reasons for centralisation in capitalism. As a system based on the competitive accumulation between separate units (companies, states), it has a tendency to produce increasingly large conglomerations of capital. With this profitable concentration goes a concentration of housing, employment, and power. Transport costs for getting workers to work and products onto the market are reduced by a dense concentration of population in urban centres such as London, Buenos Aires or Hong Kong. Three-quarters of the North American population inhabits less than two per cent of the land surface area.

The market system is often held up as a free, fluid and balanced arena of enterprise. The truth is the opposite. It is in the nature of the market system that there is an increasing amount of wealth in fewer and fewer companies, fewer and fewer shareholders. Companies or individual investors who fall behind slightly in the rat race go to the wall and fall out of the competition. The bigger, more successful units buy up the smaller units, or what is left of them, and grow larger still. This problem of uneven development operates on an international scale, as well as locally. The parts of the world where capitalism developed first, Europe and America, still contain greater concentrations of capitalist power than many other parts of the world. Several hundred billion dollars are now owed by "underdeveloped" capitalist countries to a handful of more powerful banks and states.

In the market system, the state tries centrally to regulate the competition between enterprises. There is intervention in the market by the state as a centralised expression of the interests of the capitalists as a whole, to try to regulate prices, profit, interest, wages (exchange rates internationally) and so on. The state is also used to exert political control over the working class of the world. Police forces, armies and courts necessarily involve a high degree of centralised power.

The state also often runs power supplies (gas, water, electricity) and transport services, with subsidies where necessary, in order to allow the capitalist class as a whole to control production profitably on a “sound” and safe foundation of reliable services. Again, class interests demand that the capitalist state be a highly centralised power, for the administration of property and accumulation.

There has been a certain amount of debate recently about the conflict between local autonomy and central control. This has included the attempts by some local councils to question the state control exerted by Michael Heseltine, and the London GLC “Fares Fair” policy being ruled illegal. What these developments demonstrate is how much the running of a world-wide profit system depends on the universal submission of social production to the profit-based dictates of the central power in each national state. This link between property and centralised (rather than diffused) control goes right back to the idea of the aristocrat on a landed estate. Sitting in the country manor-house, control emanates from the centre, across the expanse of the territory. The hierarchy of the power structure is reflected geographically. In the same way, ex-colonies which gain political independence such as India, Africa and Latin-America, have tended to remain economically weak in capitalist terms, relative to the old “metropolis” countries in Europe, for many years.

Democratic planning

None of the above factors of market competition, state power and uneven development can exist in socialist society. Democratically planned production in socialism cannot be "centralised". It will be global, conscious, controlled, and it can be described quite unequivocally as “planning” — but this need not imply centralisation. Local, regional and global councils, or other meeting points for the democratic discussion of ideas can be used to formulate and implement dynamic, flexible plans of production to meet needs. These resolutions can be initiated locally, passing through regional and global channels of liaison, and can then return to the local area for local implementation. World projects, such as space travel or the mass production of simple and essential goods such as paper or water, can also be initiated freely, locally, voluntarily, even if their implementation will require global co-ordination. The basis of socialist production is freely available, constantly modified information about what is being produced, where, how much and using what resources.

To avoid dismissing socialism as a distant future prospect, we must be prepared to think in terms of present institutions being immediately taken over for use by a socialist society. This includes present council and government offices and lines of communication, international bodies such as the United Nations, local community organisations such as housing co-operatives or even tenants' associations, and, perhaps most important of all, companies.

The means of wealth production so often referred to in socialist propaganda are organised at the moment into thousands of separate companies, each with its own head offices, distribution facilities, computers and so on. These networks of centralised power could be democratised for socialist use directly. Once the working class has taken over state power, the problem becomes purely an administrative one. At the moment, the forces of the state are used to defend property, in other words to step in and use violence if this process of democratisation were attempted now. Once the state has been taken over, however, it is a matter of using channels which are currently oneway, in two directions. For example, most companies have communications systems, from computers to notice boards, which allow workers to have handed down to them their wages and instructions. For a democratic control of production, all that is required is that each unit, whether it is a factory, a village, or a region, should comprise sophisticated networks which allow those involved in production to express their views. The desires of producers and consumers can be expressed individually, and collectively through votes in each unit, and these desires can be implemented in consultation with other units.

Clearly, we must consider in greater detail how the transition can be made from the present dictatorship of the boardroom, to the democratic control of society. For example, most companies today employ market analysts to estimate “effective” demand, and advise on production levels. In a socialist society, it may be necessary to elect people with the task of co-ordinating between units and regions, and matching “supply" to “demand". This task is less daunting than it may seem, since the modern computer systems allow inputs and outputs to be constantly monitored and displayed on a screen. Also, if too much of something is produced relative to what people decide they need, it can be stored or disposed of without too much trouble. In capitalism, on the other hand, the “surplus" production of commodities relative to market demand can lower prices, wreak havoc through the world market, and lead to crises and depression.

Clifford Slapper