Cops protect robbers (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism will be a world society without a police force. In fact, it will be a society without a legal system. And because there will be no laws there will be no courts to argue about them in, no prisons in which to lock up offenders, and no people who will be called criminals because they have broken the law.

The idea of socialism as a lawless, crimeless society is likely to evoke the strangest of responses from those who stand for what is euphemistically referred to as ‘law and order’. Judges will tell us that prisons and punishment must always be, for we are all sinners. The person in the street will say that without the law there would be anarchy and under anarchy nothing would be safe. Criminologists will tell us that anti-social behaviour is a necessary feature of modern urban industrial living (which is only a trendy way of saying what the judge has already said). Indeed, even most criminals will insist that a certain degree of law and order is necessary and that the best place for those who have committed worse crimes than them is in a prison cell.

As for the politicians, Leftie Frank Field (Labour, Birkenhead, no convictions) writes that ‘Like most people, I cannot conceive of a society without a police force’. (Guardian, 5/8/81). Tory Home Secretary Whitelaw warned on television recently that ‘without the police, that which we treasure as a nation would be jeopardised’. (Could he have been referring to the Stock Exchange?) Even the very silly Workers’ Revolutionary Party, in their recent GLC election manifesto, called for the replacement of the Metropolitan police force by an armed workers’ militia.

The public’s view of the police is currently undergoing a profound change. The image of the Dixon of Dock Green—type copper with a patronising concern to protect ‘villains’ from themselves and a claim to serve ‘the community’ is fast dying. The role of the police as the brutal defenders of property and privilege is increasingly being recognised. The use of the police as strikebreakers, as contributors to the harassment of racial minorities, as corrupt bullies who will often turn a blind eye to law-breaking if the price is high enough, and, in the cases of Liddle Towers, Blair Peach and unrecorded others, as the unprosecuted murderers of members of the working class.

This writer’s first experience of police methods came during the Grunwick strike in 1977 when he saw uniformed officers kicking pickets when they lay on the ground and beating people up in the back of open police vans. Many trade unionists will testify as to how the police have been used in strikes in order to make life hard for the strikers. Accounts of police persecution of legally innocent workers are increasingly common, especially in areas where there are many black immigrants. Many people convicted of crimes—and many not convicted, but charged-have told how police have illegally beaten them, forced confessions from them and even intimidated their friends and relatives.

The words of police chiefs do not help to comfort those who live in fear of ‘the boys in blue’: Metropolitan Police Chief Commissioner, David McNee, recently stated that ‘if people stay off the streets at night they will have nothing to fear from the police’, while Merseyside’s Chief Constable. Kenneth Oxford, wrote in his report to the Liverpool police committee, six weeks before the Toxteth riot, that

My policy on relationships with the community has been endorsed and strengthened throughout the year, with all members of the force being mindful in this direction. I am confident that these relationships with all sections of the community are in a very healthy position and I do not foresee any serious difficulties developing in the future. (Quoted in the Guardian, 6/8/81. Our emphasis.)

Oxford, whose force has been seen as a major contributory factor in the outburst on Toxteth streets, is clearly not a man of prescience.

Much as some people would like to turn a blind eye to it, it is a fact that the police force often exceeds its legal powers, frequently serves to increase social tensions and ignore criminality when it is committed by the rich. But this is not the root of the problem; socialists are not simply opposed to the police-or to “bad” police—but to a system of social relationships which necessitates coercive forces.

The purpose of the police is to defend property. Yes, it is true that they help old ladies cross the road (whether they want to or not) and they run youth clubs for skinheads who want to be the next Henry Cooper. This, however, is not their main job and the idea of the police as uniformed social workers is a myth. Indeed, police officers can often be disciplined by their superiors for spending too much time helping people when there is real police work to be done elsewhere. One such case is quoted by E. Bittner:

An officer was walking a beat in a quiet residential area when he encountered a middle-aged matron who had been locked out of her home. She had a load of groceries and obviously could not climb into the window she designated as open . . . He set aside hat and truncheon, climbed in through the window, and came downstairs to let her in. As she was grateful and was going to write a letter informing his superior of his meritorious service, he had to carefully explain to her that what he did was against police regulations and quite possibly against the law (since he had no evidence that she actually lived in the house). Any mentions of his actions would probably become a black mark in his personnel file. (“A Theory of the Police” in Potential for Reform of Criminal Justice, ed. H. Jacob, Sage Publications.)

Before the establishment of an official police force in 1829, policing was the direct responsibility of property-owners. Private security gangs were employed to defend the wealth of the rich against the illegal requirements of the poor. Before the rise of industrial capitalism, the administration of the law was primarily in the hands of local land magnates. They would appoint their own magistrates, pay for their own guards and be looked upon as the final arbiters in local disputes. With the increasing role of the state as a means of social control in the mid-Nineteenth century, the unity between the right of ownership and the right of coercion became blurred, but not eradicated.

The role of the early police force, as now, was to ensure the maintenance of the order of property. In an age when slums and mansions, expensive restaurants and hungry children, night clubs and homeless vagrants exist in such close proximity to one another it is vital for the owning class to have a permanent force to protect them and their property from the intrusion of the impoverished. With capitalism, the concept of criminality became synonymous with the disruption of property relationships. In earlier centuries laws tended to be justified in moral terms, but modern jurisprudence has increasingly discarded anachronistic moral and religious formulae and has described its role in explicitly material terms. The police, as a body which is directly governed by laws passed in parliament, now have a clearly political role. What the state says, the police must do.

Dirty work

The state is not an institution which has always existed. In ancient societies, when the means of producing wealth were commonly held, there was no need for an institution to defend private property. The state was a direct consequence of the earliest appropriation of wealth in the form of tools, land and slaves—by private owners. The evolution of the state, as an institution to protect and expand private property, has developed as humankind has increased its domination over the natural environment. With the emergence of nation states with their own particular economic interests, in Western Europe in the late fifteenth century, it became necessary for states to recruit standing armies to fight the battles of the various national ruling classes. At this stage of the evolution of the state machine emerged a division of its functions between military responsibilities to the ruling class—the protection and expansion of markets—and domestic responsibilities- the retention of internal order on the part of the nation’s rulers. That is the role of the police: they are the uniformed guards of the property-owning class. For every worker’s car which they retrieve and for every mugger they catch (and the police are notoriously bad at solving crimes which affect the working class), there are a hundred cases in which the police are quite directly defending property against poverty.

Of course, the capitalists do not do their own dirty work. They are the last people to be found treading the beat or risking their lives in fights against criminals. Why should they bother when they can pay suckers from the working class to act as human guard-dogs on their behalf? Just like other members of the working class, members of the police force have problems. They are dependent upon wages and, like most workers, these are never enough to satisfy their complete needs. They are frequently pushed around by authoritarian superiors who expect them to obey senseless orders. Many of them would like to be liked, but because of the real nature of their job (which is disguised during their training) they are forced to come into frequent conflict with their fellow workers. Of course, many workers join the police force because they are authoritarian, sadistic or politically motivated, but for the vast majority it is just a job, just a wage and just employment. Often the police respond to their problems by demanding more weapons or tougher laws, but in the end these will not eradicate their problems. So long as there is a system which needs repression, intolerance and thuggery in order to defend its norms, and as long as there are wage slaves who are willing to get their hands dirty defending their exploiters’ position, the police’s problem will continue.

Reformists are occasionally heard to demand the reform of the police. Indeed, the new Labour GLC leader, Ken Livingstone, has recently pledged himself in favour of a people’s police force, accountable to a ‘socialist GLC’! We have all experienced what is meant by a people’s police force. In state capitalist Poland, the armed bullies who smashed the skulls of striking workers in Bydgoszcz were called a ‘people’s’ militia. Did that stop them from viciously defending the right of capital against the needs of wage labour? To conceive of a legal system which will operate in terms of friendship and consensus within a system where ownership and control are firmly in the hands of a minority who own the productive and distributive machinery is naive in the extreme.

In a socialist society the means of wealth production and distribution will be commonly owned and democratically controlled by the whole community without distinction of race or sex. In such a society, where no factory, farm, mine, newspaper, aeroplane or house will have an owner, be it an individual or the state, there will be no need for property laws. There will be no function for police or courts or prisons. The vast libraries containing thick statutes on who is entitled to possess what (and, by implication, who isn’t) will be placed in museums. The truncheons and uniforms and judge’s wigs will be regarded as items of perverse historical curiosity. For once the wealth of the world belongs to all humanity and there for our free access, what will there be to steal and what reason would there be to steal it?

Of course, the Human Nature Brigade will not be slow to answer our question. They will correct us for indulging in such utopian dreams. They will remind us that it is not the viciously competitive, warlike system of capitalism which leads people to commit acts of violence, but Human Nature. They will inform us that it is not the system which turns sex into a commodity and makes films glorifying the conquest of women which leads men to rape women, but Human Nature. They, who are the selected élite who have special knowledge of mankind’s inherent characteristics, will be able to tell us that it is not the overcrowded, boring, stressful conditions of most workers’ lives which leads some to act anti-socially, but Human Nature. And our Nature being what it is, we shall always need police to push us around and prison warders to lock us up and judges to judge us. Socialists argue that the social environment makes men and women what they are and that a competitive, jungle society will create anti-social beasts. Change the way in which the society is organised and human behaviour will change also.

But just as capitalism creates wage slaves who want to be pushed around and want to be slaves and fear freedom, at the same time, paradoxically, it creates its own gravediggers. By subjecting the working class more and more to the reality of its exploited and oppressed condition, capitalism creates dissent. If such dissent currently takes the form of engaging in futile street battles with the police and looting the third-rate commodities from the windows of the cheapest shops, experience will eventually transform such dissent into conscious political action. After all, however many policeman’s hats are knocked from their head, the police and the class which they exist to protect will still be there. However many reforms are passed to soften policemen’s truncheons, the arm of the law will always be stronger than the power of a politically atomised working class.

Steve Coleman

From work to welfare and back (1998)

From the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

At one time the Labour Party wanted to reform capitalism into something different and better. Now it isn’t even a genuine reformist party but, in its thinking as well as its practice, is continuing the Thatcherite counter-reformation of whittling away state benefits.

“A new contract that will lift people out of dependence and into dignity” was how Frank Field, the Minister for Welfare Reform, described the proposals in the Labour government’s Green Paper New Ambitions for Our Country–A New Welfare Contract, published at the end of March.

The best form of welfare, declared Field, was work. Everybody able to do so had a duty to work and the Labour government would take steps to ensure that three groups in particular—young people, single parents and the long-term unemployed—fulfilled this duty. Of course it wasn’t presented quite as bluntly as this but in the form of offering these groups the “opportunity” to work and of “helping” them to overcome their “dependence” on state benefits. It was clear all the same that Article I of the new “contract” the Labour government was proposing them reads: Either you take a job or we cut your benefit.

Field was in effect saying that it is better for the poor to be dependent on an employer rather than on the state. But why? To Socialists both forms of dependency are equally undignified, an expression of the fact that in capitalist society the propertyless majority only have a choice of who to depend on for the source of the money they must have to buy what they need to live. What we want is a society in which nobody will be in this position, but where everybody co-operates to produce what is needed and then everybody has access as of right to the common store of wealth to satisfy their needs, a society of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.

Field, on the other hand, as a manager of the political side of capitalism, has a different point of view. From his perspective, it is better that the poor should be dependent on some employer for an income rather than on the state, for the simple reason that this is cheaper for the state and saving money on welfare benefits is the name of the game.

What Field was announcing was a policy aimed at shifting as much as possible of the burden of maintaining the poor from the state to employers. This has two aspects. First, forcing the able-bodied poor to take any job, however shitty and however low-paid, by threatening to cut their benefits. Second, if the wages are too low, making them up to the poverty line by payments either to the employer or to the person. Subsidising low-pay employers in this way will still cost the state some money but far less than the present system, so Field and his team of accountants at the Department of Social Security have calculated.

This does represent a change of policy, but is one forced on all capitalist governments, irrespective of their political colour, by the workings of the capitalist economic system. Capitalism runs on the profits made in the profit-seeking sector of the economy and most of the state’s income comes from these profits, either through taxation or through borrowing. The state is in this sense parasitic on the profit-seeking sector and when this latter is in difficulty, as it has been since the long post-war boom came to an end in 1973, the state has had to trim its spending.

This is why all capitalist states have experienced a more or less permanent budgetary crisis since the middle of the 1970s. The main consequence of this for ordinary people has been a continual whittling away of the reform measures that existed up until then. This was the policy of the Thatcher administration who carried it out under the ideology of “anti-socialism” by which was meant undoing everything the post-war Labour government had done. This policy is being continued by the present Labour government because, given the economic circumstances, as Thatcher put it, “there is no alternative”.

Christian doctrine

The only difference is one of tone and style. Thatcher and her ministers arrogantly expressed the contempt the ruling class has always had for the lower orders by denouncing the poor as work-shy scroungers. Blair and his ministers preach to the poor that they have a duty to work in accordance with the Christian doctrine that, because Adam and Eve dared to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, all humans have been sentenced by God to hard labour for life. The Tories just cut benefits to the poor but Labour tells them that if they don’t work they won’t get to heaven either.

There was a time when the Labour Party’s ideal was to shift the source of people’s income away from work and more and more towards as-of-right payments from the state. The more daring of their thinkers looked forward to a time when, in return for some socially useful work, everybody would be guaranteed a decent income by the state sufficient to meet their needs. They saw this as coming about as a result of the extension of the system of transfer payments to parents, pensioners, the unemployed, the sick and disabled which already existed. It was an argument that the way forward lay through more, not less, of people’s income being provided by the state.

It was a reformist proposal in the classic sense of the term—a suggested way of gradually transforming existing capitalist society into something different. It was never going to work (since taxing profits to pay people a decent income goes against the whole logic of the capitalist system) and it hasn’t, but at least it represented a view that things don’t have to be as they are. The present Labour government not only disagrees with this classic reformist strategy but wants to move—and is bringing in measures to move—in the opposite direction: away from income-through-the state back to income-from-jobs.

The harsh reality of governing capitalism long ago led to Labour accepting the logic of the profit system. In practice all Labour governments have done this but it has now led to Labour embracing its ideology as well. The Labour Party was set up to try to reform capitalism into something better for workers but it now merely aspires to make capitalism work more efficiently by its own criteria of profitability and competitiveness. Instead of the Labour Party changing capitalism, it is capitalism that has changed the Labour Party.

Adam Buick

The Greasy Pole: Trust Me, I'm A Labour Politician (1998)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

New Labour. New government. New ruses. New lies. It takes us back to those times—not so long ago—when John Major put on his King Canute act, as the tides of sleaze washed all around him, denying that he was drowning in corruption or, if he was drowning, there was nothing wrong in that.

When Tony Blair was confronted with the evidence which suggested that, in response to a £1 million donation from the Formula One millionaire Bernie Ecclestone, the government had changed its mind over banning tobacco advertising on the racing cars, his response was to say that it was just crazy to even think that Labour ministers could be guilty of such a thing. When it was put to him that there was a little—how do we put this— inconsistency between government taxation policies and the way the Paymaster General manages his considerable wealth, Blair’s response was again to describe such an allegation as scandalous, incredible. So that’s all right then—except that in neither case did Blair’s apparent indignation allow him to answer the question.

During Prime Minister’s Questions on 10 December Blair’s comment to an intervention from William Hague about Tory and Labour MPs voting together to cut single parents’ benefit was “I’m sorry (which is not to be taken as meaning that he actually was sorry) but he is simply wrong. “ And when Hague gave examples of the assurances given by some ministers, before they got into office, that they would not implement the cuts designed by the Tory government, Blair snarled that, again, he was “sorry but that is simply not correct".

Women MPs

In fact, both Blair and his Social Security Secretary Harriet Harman went on record against the cuts in lone parent benefit when the Major government decided to implement them in November 1996. Labour’s election manifesto New Labour Because Britain Deserves Better had one brief paragraph on lone parents which set out plans to help them get jobs, which sounded very caring and supportive but forgot to mention about making them even poorer in the process. Of course there are other Labour MPs whose behaviour has been equally cynical. Chris Pond, for example, made his name as Director of the Low Pay Unit and in those days he was never backward in making scathing, well documented comments on Tory proposals to make the lot of poorer workers even worse. Pond was quite clear about the proposal to cut single parent benefit: — “particularly spiteful “ he called it and, just in case we had missed the point, “[the cut] will make it much harder for families to make ends meet “.Well since then Pond has become a Labour MP and he has voted for the cut in benefit which he labelled as “spiteful “.

Another Labour MP—a woman, and we all know how enthusiastic the Labour Party was about getting women into Parliament so that they could run capitalism more humanely and sensitively than men—was anonymously quoted in the Observer of 23 November, spouting the kind of unfounded bigotry about poverty which is supposed to be confined to the shriller kind of saloon bar Tory:

“These [single mothers] aren’t desperate people. Most of them have got men somewhere in the background. “

Without pausing to supply evidence of the existence of the high-living benefit scroungers, this architect of Labour’s New Britain showed what value she puts on election promises and how she regards the people who elected her party to power:

“There were some people who voted for me who thought we could make a difference.They didn’t understand.”

Perhaps this is the kind of attitude Tony Blair had in mind when he wrote, in his preface to Labour’s manifesto, that it was “hardly surprising” that “People are cynical about politics and distrustful of political promises.”

Scroungers

In fact the cut in lone parent benefit is not likely to be the end of the matter.The signs are that this government has more plans to eradicate these scroungers who threaten to undermine the very foundations of this country so that people like Bernie Ecclestone will not be able to invest so much in Formula One races and others like Paymaster-General Geoffrey Robinson will have to think twice about involving themselves in offshore trusts. Perhaps we may soon have special fraud squads to question anyone found by themselves pushing a pram.

Meanwhile there is Frank Field, who also came up through the poverty lobby and who is now Minister for the ominously titled Welfare Reform, refusing to rule out plans to impose further benefit cuts on single parents who don’t knuckle under to the government’s pressure to find a job—any job, no matter how bad the conditions or pay. Then there are all those other bloodsuckers like old-age pensioners who at present can backdate a benefit claim for a year but who, under Tory plans which Labour will implement, will now have to do it within one month—a measure described by Age Concern as “mean and certainly not in the spirit of Labour’s pre-election pledges’’

Of course it could be that the benefit rates are so generous that the people who live on them are emerging as a newly enriched privileged class, living in luxury while the likes of Ecclestone, Robinson and Blair scavenge in dustbins for their next meal to give them the strength to plan further benefit cuts. The organisation Justice, a human rights group, recently compiled some figures about conditions in this country. Justice says that the benefit for lone parents are £23 a week less than is needed; that one-in three children and 65 percent of disabled people live on or below the poverty line; that nearly 1.5 million homes are unfit to live in. And so on. Take your pick of the evidence, both statistical and anecdotal. It tells the same story and it is different from the one told by that Labour MP, who said the voters didn’t understand when they elected a Labour government.

Perhaps the voters did not understand; they didn’t understand that the real issue was not whether British capitalism should be run by the Conservative or the Labour Party but the urgency of replacing capitalism by socialism. One thing is certain: a proper understanding of what is at stake and how we can authentically change society can only be helped by the exposure of the contemptible creeps who tell us that under Tony Blair things can only get better.

Ivan

Political Notebook: An old man does not forget (1979)

The Political Notebook Column from the March 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

An old man does not forget

Harold Macmillan, the Edwardian fop whose languid manner concealed a very sharp political brain, was eighty five years old last month—an occasion marked not just by the usual flood of obsequious congratulations (what’s so clever about a member of the ruling class reaching old age—the real heroes are workers who make it into retirement) but also by a long television interview with none other than Robert McKenzie.

McKenzie, it will be remembered, was playing with his psephological toys when Macmillan was creating history by leading the Tories back to a third victory at the polls. That victory was even more remarkable for the fact that it came a few years after the Conservatives were in disarray after the collapse of Eden’s Suez adventure, which succeeded in pleasing no one in his party.

Macmillan’s technique was essentially simple. First imply—or even, if you are forced to. promise—to do one thing and then, as the realities of capitalism require it, do something else. For example, while he personified all the patriotic nonsense of the heyday of the British Empire, he worked steadily and stealthily to dismantle it.

Like most politicians, he was cursed with an albatross—an unwise statement which probably cost him more support than it won for him. Ever since he said it. Macmillan has been trying to prove that he did not mean that we had never had it so good; on television he pretended to forget who had coined the phrase.

Macmillan succeeded, for a time, by means of openly treating the working class with contempt. And they never resented it. Now, in a winter of deep discontent, Macmillan still does not bother to hide his feelings, holding forth from his sumptuous Sussex home about problems which do not disturb the even tenor of these final days.

As long as it's black

One of the most famous sayings of the original Henry Ford was that of course his customers could choose any colour car they liked as long as it was black. Everyone laughed and bought a black Ford car.

And in a sense that is what is going to happen at the next election. It is a fair bet, that much of the argument between Tory and Labour parties will be about which of them has the more effective method of dealing with the present crisis in British capitalism.

In fact, there is nothing exceptional about this crisis. Every government tries in some way or other to hold down workers’ wages. Since the war, some governments (usually Labour) have succeeded in this for a time, subduing the unions with a mixture of promises and arm twisting.

But this can’t last for ever; workers whose living standards are going down sooner or later begin to notice it—and try to do something about it. And the something must, in the last analysis, be to strike.

Confronted with a situation like this, in the early days of 1974, Edward Heath’s Conservative government accepted a suggestion from the Pay Board (as it then was) to set up something called a Relativities Board. The idea behind this was to pretend that a pay rise conceded to the miners was not really a rise at all—only an ironing out of ‘‘relativities".

This useful and adaptable, piece of jargon is now being used by the Labour government, again to disguise the fact that their attempts to hold down wages are being beaten! Callaghan, apart from offering rises up to ten per cent, is also muttering about a Relativities Board to design ultimate justice for us all.

Nobody should be deceived by this transparent attempt to convince us that there is some enduring solution to our problems under capitalism. Nor by the politicians' mouthings that the parties of capitalism are at odds over the matter.

Thorn or Rose

For some years now one of the sharpest and most uncomfortably barbed thorns in the side of the Labour government has been Frank Field, director of the Child Poverty Action Group.

The CPAG was formed in 1965 to draw attention to the plight of the hundreds of thousands of families living below the poverty line and to demand government action to help them.

So a lot of their work consisted of a detailed, searching analysis of the so-called Welfare State. Their examination of reforms like social security benefits, Family Income Supplements and so on could have done nothing to encourage anyone to believe that such measures hold out hope of any lasting improvement in working class living standards.

Indeed, during the last few months of the previous Labour government — in March 1970 — CPAG presented their findings on Labour’s reforms:

The charge therefore stands: the poor are relatively worse off under a Labour Government.

Field has not allowed any respite to this government: he was at the centre of the row over the leaking of Cabinet minutes which revealed Labour’s intention to postpone the child benefit scheme (a footling reform, hardly worth minuting let alone leaking the things).

Simple souls might assume from all this that Field was an unrelenting opponent of the Labour Party, whose schemes leave the poor relatively worse off than ever. But the politics of reform are not so simple. Field, who in 1966 stood as Labour candidate for the rock like Tory seat in Buckingham South, has had better luck this time—he is Labour candidate for Birkenhead. where the majority in October 1974 was over nine thousand.

No doubt Field has already worked out how he will reconcile his former attacks on the Labour government with his support for them. He must also be hoping that the voters in Birkenhead will not find any problems in swallowing this particularly audacious piece of hypocrisy.

Cold Comfort (1976)

From the February 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

A doctor has sent the following two items to us. First, a cutting from the Daily Mirror of 22nd December 1975.

  A thousand babies are doomed to die this winter — because their parents can’t afford the cost of heating their homes. This “slaughter of the innocents” has already begun with the deaths of 212 babies aged less than a year. This is on top of the normal infant mortality rate. The babies are dying of infections caused by the cold — mainly bronchitis and pneumonia, says the charity Child Poverty Action Group, in a report out today. The charity’s director, Mr. Frank Field, said yesterday: “Infant deaths are swinging wildly up . . . Recent huge increases in fuel prices are to blame. Thousands of people can’t afford to heat their homes. Mass disconnections are taking place.”

Second, a letter to the doctor from Beecham Research Laboratories, headed “Hypothermia: A complimentary aid to diagnosis.”

   This potentially fatal condition needs to be identified promptly . . . Many authorities are now calling for the routine use of special wide-range thermometers that operate throughout the hyporthermis and pyrexic range (75°F-105°F). We are very pleased to be able to offer you one of these wide-range thermometers with our compliments, and we are sure it will prove to be of value to you in your practice.

   The elderly also number amongst the patients who are ‘at risk’ from infection. Many doctors have found Magnapen to be particularly well-suited to the treatment of the more worrying infections such as seen in patients with acute-on-chronic bronchitis, cellulitis and otitis media . . . Please sign and return the enclosed reply-paid card and we shall ensure that you receive a wide-range thermometer with additional data on both hypothermia and Magnapen.

The doctor’s note to us says: “It’s an ill wind, isn’t it?”

How much longer is the Working Class going to accept this? (1976)

From the April 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most people are aware that something called “Inequality” exists in society, but have only vague ideas about how great it is and about how it has been caused. Socialists know that enormous inequalities are unavoidable symptoms of capitalism which can only be eradicated in one way: that is by the abolition of capitalism and by replacing it with Socialism, under which the wealth produced by industry and agriculture, as well as the means for producing that wealth, will belong to all the people.

Why is the need for the establishment of Socialism urgent? As an answer, let us look briefly at some of the recognized social problems: the uneven distribution of wealth, housing and homelessness, unemployment, industrial injuries and diseases, old age and retirement. The Welfare State and its reforms have been with us for thirty years and yet these social problems remain as serious as before its introduction. Just read a few items in the book Unequal Britain by Frank Field (1974). It is worth while to look at the following figures and think about what they mean.

In this country more than 25 per cent. of the wealth is in the hands of the top 1 per cent. of the population (Unequal Shares by Tony Atkinson, 1960). The top 10 per cent. own approximately 75 per cent of the wealth while, at the other extreme, more than 90 per cent, of the population have total wealth holdings of below £5,000 (each).

In terms of absolute wealth, some of the richest industrialists are Lord Thomson of the Thomson Organization, with a personal shareholding of £59.5 million, Sir Jules Thorn and Sir Charles Forte with £29.6 million and £28.9 million respectively. As a worker, whatever your employment is, how about comparing your annual income (or, perhaps, your life’s income) with the incomes of these privileged individuals:

F. S. MacFadzean (Shell)                       £75,900
Val Duncan (Rio-Tinto Zinc)                 £63,000
Sir John Davis (Rank Organization) £55,000

It is a fact that today two million families (not individuals, but families) live in homes which possess no hot water, no bath and no inside toilet.

Meanwhile, in the Daily Mirror series on injustices and privilege (1st October 1974), John Pilger reveals that Hugh Denis Charles Fitzroy, the Duke of Grafton, lives in a house with twenty bedrooms. Of course, he owns additional property and houses.

7.7 per cent. of households have no fixed bath, 7.4 per cent. have no inside toilet, while 6.1 per cent. have no hot water supply. 5 per cent. are living in officially classified “overcrowded conditions” (Labour Research Department, 1973).

On the other hand, Harry Hyams, the property speculator, owns a six-hundred-acre Wiltshire estate. In April 1973, Ravi Tikkoo, the shipping magnate, paid £500,000 for a house on Hampstead Heath (Daily Mirror, 19th April 1973).

The social problem of unemployment is striking hard at the working class, with 1,430,000 (white- collar workers and professionals, as well as blue- collar workers) out of work in December 1975.

Two-fifths of all pensioners are living on means which arc below the official Supplementary Benefit levels. From October 1973, the standard old-age pension was worth just 20 per cent. of the average male take-home pay. On the question of redundancy payments, workers who devote sizeable parts of their lives to industry receive an average redundancy payment of £328 (1972). Meanwhile, Aubrey Jones received a golden handshake of £63,000 from Laporte Ltd. and Duncan Sandys MP was given £130,000 from the Lonhro company (source: Labour Research Department).

It is these inequalities which are the symptoms of capitalism. Socialists recognize these inequalities as inevitable reflections of class ownership. This is the situation after thirty years of the Welfare State and more than a hundred years of social reform. The same inequality and the same social problems remain. We can reject completely that reformers’ red-herring of trying to redistribute wealth. Therefore, the working class (all working and employed people) must, for its own sake, reject tinkerings and tamperings with capitalism.

No, capitalism cannot be reformed in the interests of the working class. It can never be made to benefit the working class. Just looking at the history of capitalism and at capitalism today proves this point over and over again. Given that capitalism cannot be reformed to suit the interests of the workers, who are the overwhelming majority of the population, and, remembering all the misery, poverty, destruction, wastage and violence which are an inevitable consequence of capitalism, there remains the urgent task for the workers to say that they have had enough and to abolish capitalism.

Capitalism must be ended by the conscious, democratic action not merely of workers in Britain, but of workers throughout the world. When this happens, it can be guaranteed that the full potential of mankind will be released for the first time in history. The forces of nature have endowed each individual human being with a brain capable of immense creativity in innumerable different forms. For the very first time, Socialism will enable Man to use these faculties and energies to the full.

Vincent Otter

Make A Difference (2001)

From the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Does anybody really still believe that either Labour or the Conservatives can make any difference? Is there any point in choosing between them?

Well he would say that—or something like that—wouldn’t he. His audience were not to know that what Blair meant was that his government would be so hostile to outdated dogma and ideology that they would simply carry on where the Tories had left off. For example soon after the election John Major buttonholed Jack Straw to ask why New Labour were sticking to the Tory spending plans which Kenneth Clarke, Major’s Chancellor, had described as “eye-wateringly tight”. Had the Tories been re-elected, said Major, they would never have stuck by them.

In fact Labour won that election on a minority vote—44 percent to the Conservatives 31 percent, the Liberal Democrats 17 percent and the others 7 percent. As the next election draws near, the Labour election experts are resisting any tendency to over-confidence. “This time,” said one of them recently, “we cannot afford a quiet campaign or for Hague to be ignored. The size of our majority will depend on a high turn out”. It is almost traditional among party agents and activists to assume that the lower the total vote the worse it is for Labour. So if the weather on polling day is bad, or if there has been a particularly stressful episode of Coronation Street, or if it’s football on the box—the Tories can be expected to do relatively better; they might even win some seats which they would otherwise have lost. It seems as if the very people who are supposed to benefit the most from Labour selflessly building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land can be put off from voting for it by a shower of rain or Deirdre Rashid’s latest emotional spasm or the spectacle of some millionaires kicking a football at a net.

It does not need a degree in psychology to work out that voters stay away from the poll through apathy but it does seem to need some political awareness to appreciate that a prime cause of apathy is the similarity between contesting parties which suggests that there is no point in choosing between them. This sometimes worries the parties themselves to such an extent that they feel obliged to try to highlight what they hope we will agree are fundamental differences between them. Before the last election Portillo tried to convince us that there is such a thing as a genuine Labour/Tory debate by talking about the “clear blue water” separating them. More recently Blair’s speechwriters thought he should speak out against the “forces of conservatism” (by which he did not mean just the Tory Party).

Thatcher

The Labour Party—or at least the few members who have bothered to find out about their party’s disreputable history—should be haunted by memories of 1931, when their leaders finally conceded that as their policies were so similar to those of Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives they might as well go the whole hog and form a government together. Apart from anything else this deprived Labour of some charismatic and well-known leaders like Macdonald and Thomas and replaced them with the lachrymose George Lansbury and later the reserved, colourless Clement Attlee—who, when he became Prime Minister in 1945, showed that he was anything but mousy and compliant. One effect of the events of 1931 was to sustain the idea that Labour was actually engaged in a fight with the Tories, who were basically different. That illusion kept a lot of party members going, through the worst defeat of their history. What is the situation now?

Blair came to power at a time when Thatcher had gained a reputation for being a kind of mad woman in the tower. Thatcherism was a new swearword for a supposed policy of deliberately creating unemployment through destroying swathes of a once powerful manufacturing industry, with the effect of grinding down the poorest in society while cracking down on anyone who tried to keep their head above water through offending against the system’s property laws. If all this got too much for the voters to stomach, their doubts could be diverted by a jingoist stimulant like the war in the Falklands. Capitalism is always ugly but that was a a time when it was grotesquely so.

So how did Blair signal that all that was at an end? Well as soon as he could spare time from organising a few necessities like Bernie Ecclestone’s £1 million donation to the party he forgot all he had ever said about Thatcher laying waste to British jobs and industry and popped round to get some advice from her on the best way to run British capitalism. In her turn Thatcher made it clear that she preferred Blair to her successor John Major, who had disappointed a lot of Tories as a flaccid nonentity. This opinion was not just a passing aberration by someone driven out of her mind by all those years of being the most powerful person in Britain, hobnobbing with—and bullying when she could get away with it—other heads of state. Before the election Blair had so impressed Viscount Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail, with his intention to “reform” the welfare state that the Tory press baron swung his newspaper into support for New Labour on the grounds that they were the “new Conservatives”. And Alistair McAlpine, who was Thatcher’s Party Treasurer and remains one of her keenest admirers, praised Blair as “…a damn sight more Conservative than John Major…a Thatcherite… a man of principle…quite princely.” (McAlpine was accustomed to speak his mind. He once described Major as “hanging about like a pair of curtains”).

Single Parents

Blair’s government did not come to deserve such praise from such exalted quarters by planning to revolutionise society so that social relationships were adjusted through a re-distribution of wealth. In October 1997 Peter Mandelson, then in charge at the Department of Industry, assured a meeting of executives from computer firms that New Labour was “. . . intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. What he did not say was that they were equally relaxed about other people getting stinking poor. One of their earliest ventures was to cut the benefit of single parents—a particularly depressed and pressurised group. As most of these are females some of the more odious Labour MPs felt justified in attacking the essential immorality of unmarried women who got pregnant to jump the council housing queue while they claimed benefit to pay for their cigarettes and Bacardis. One of these MPs—Frank Field, who had risen through the poverty lobby to become Member for Birkenhead and Minister for Welfare Reform—said that “There are no single mums in Birkenhead. They all have a boy friend somewhere”. The legislation for reducing the benefits of single parents was first introduced by the Tories, when it was denounced as a typical example of the cruelties of Thatcherism. Peter Lilley was the minister concerned; he was exultant at New Labour’s open support for the cause of punishing the poor and stood in the Commons directing Labour MPs into the correct lobby to vote for the cuts.

McAlpine does not admire all of Labour’s luminaries and one who escapes his embrace is Jack Straw, an exception to the tradition of Labour Home Secretaries such as Roy Jenkins, who liked to see themselves as “radical” and “liberal”. In the intensity of hatred he has aroused in the lobbies of penal reform and civil liberties Straw has exceded his immediate Tory predecessor, Michael Howard. “I couldn’t stand Michael Howard,” said McAlpine, “so imagine what I feel about Straw”. He was referring to the Home Secretary’s intention to abolish the law of double jeopardy, to allow people to be tried again for an offence for which they have already been tried and acquitted. As we go to press Straw has not revealed how many more times he wants a person to be tried or if it will go on and on until they are convicted but when he does decide it will no doubt be with an eye to the fact that while he has been at the Home Office the prison population has reached over 65,000. This trend will probably be accentuated by another of Straw’s plans, to erode the right to opt for trial by a jury at a Crown Court, where there is a better chance of acquittal than before magistrates.

Education

Straw is a former President of the National Union of Students, who may have learned at university that he should get his hair cut and smooth his image if he was to climb the greasy pole into Parliament and a top government job. On the way up he said a few things which might now embarrass a less sensitive and ambitious man. For example his denunciation of private prisons as immoral. In fact there was always more than an element of the bogus about the opposition to private prisons, which ignored the dreadful conditions existing in state prisons. The Chief Inspector of Prisons recently condemned Brixton and Wandsworth as appalling and inhumane, he said that Winson Green in Birmingham is even worse than Brixton and that Young Offender Institutions like Feltham in Middlesex and Brinsford in Wolverhampton are “corrosive”. Could private institutions, it is fair to ask, be any worse? But in those heady days in opposition Straw’s ambition was urgent enough to override facts.

Another New Labour front bencher stubbornly trying to put his past behind him is Minister of Education David Blunkett, who was once thought to be the teachers’ friend but turned out to be their scourge. There was a time when Blunkett could denounce Tory education plans for callously undermining the future of the children. Now he spends his days thinking up new ways of weeding out and punishing any teacher who fails to come up to standard in defiance of the kind of deprivation and alienation to be found in the slums of the inner city or rural deserts. His demands that teaching conforms to centrally conceived and imposed standards of achievement has damaging effects on teachers and sometimes disastrous results for the pupils. This kind of pressure was supposed to have been wiped out by the advent of the comprehensive school—once a cherished principle of the Labour Party but now due to be abolished, sneered at as “bog standard” by self-appointed education expert Alistair Campbell, who also happens to be Blair’s public relations man. Campbell is extremely adept at handling a few stroppy hacks but he might be a bit bog standard himself if he were faced with teaching a classroom of young toughies from the local estate. Blunkett plans to introduce an openly selective system—the same system that was eventually rejected as responsible for blighting so many young lives.

Ethics

Another Minister whose performance in opposition persuaded a lot of people that he would make a difference is Robin Cook, who reluctantly accepted the job of Foreign Secretary and quickly began to rave about an “ethical” foreign policy without telling us that the ethics would involve him cheerily shaking hands with the murderous dictator of Indonesia, President Suharto, or Blair hailing as a “fellow moderniser” a butcher like the Chinese premier Zhu Rongji and the ex-KGB operative who is now Russian President Vladimir Putin, carrying on the blood bath in Chechnya. These were examples of how capitalism fashions the “ethics” of foreign policy. The arms industry in Britain sells about £5 billion worth of its products each year to Indonesia. China and Russia are important trading partners. Beside that, of what concern are thousands of people imprisoned or murdered for their opinions or slaughtered in a war? In any case it took Cook only a few months to modify his ambitions over an “ethical” foreign policy. “Compromise, “ he announced on a BBC radio programme in January 1998, “is inevitable to foreign policy. That is real life”. That declaration can be understood properly only by someone who is alive to what “compromise” and “real life” mean in the context of capitalist society and the lowly place it gives to human lives and welfare compared to the profit-demanding priorities of the ruling class.

It is little wonder if the voting working class have difficulty in separating Labour from the Tories. The solution is to understand that the parties are united in their principles to maintain capitalism and all that that entails. In March 1972 Roy Jenkins, who had been Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer so should have known what he was talking about, observed life in this country:

   In spite of half a century of effort, our society—and still more our world—is still disfigured by gross unfairness . . . The poor are still poor. Property speculators—and others—are as relatively rich as were those with an accepted position at the top of the social structure.

Almost thirty years later, Jenkins’s successors in the Labour Party tell us that about a third of the children in this country live in what Blair has called “frightening” deprivation. And New Labour, with their big majority and their clutch of government ministers trying to forget the indiscretions of their left wing youth while they grow daily more and more like the Tories they once professed to despise, promise that in twenty years’ time they will have got around to abolishing child poverty. Does anyone really believe them? Does anyone really believe that it is worth choosing between Labour and the Tories? Does anyone really believe that to cast a vote for either of these parties will make a difference?

Ivan

It's the Poor What Gets the Blame — Official (1974)

From the December 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

One way of assessing Sir Keith Joseph’s comments on “whole groups and classes of people” is to imagine a speech he would have made if Britain were at war. Would he then have said a large section of the working class was moronic, lecherous and irresponsible, and should be stopped from breeding the criminals and lowlifes who are its heirs? Ah, no. “Social classes 4 and 5” would be the bulwark of civilization, and their babies — however many — deserve orange-juice and vitamin pills. These kinds of bombast are exchangeable as an organ-grinder’s tunes, though the underlying contempt remains the same.

Joseph’s speech was made to Conservatives on 19th October. He suggested they put aside economic affairs —“never really the main thing”—and instead aim to “remoralize our national life”. His case was that present- day society is a decadent morass. It has been made so by “socialist intellectuals” and “permissiveness” and, in particular, letting the working class into universities. As an example of the ruin these tendencies have led to, “our human stock is threatened” by the persistent breeding now from parents unsuitable to have children:

   Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most are of low educational attainment . . . They are producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, subnormal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters. Yet these mothers, the under-twenties in many cases, single parents, from classes 4 and 5, are now producing a third of all births.

It may be useful, before going further, to say what is meant by “classes 4 and 5”. The groupings are made by the Government on the basis of the job of the family breadwinner, and these two divisions comprise semi-skilled and unskilled workers If they are assumed to be about two-fifths of the population, Joseph’s protest because they have one-third of the births is absurd. Summaries from the 1971 Census, given in the Sunday Times on 27th October, show that family size is practically the same in all five groups—about three-and-a- quarter persons.

Capitalist Hacks Unanimous
The central point of Joseph’s attack might have been, had it come from a more thinking person, a demonstration of the uselessness of social — including “moral” — reform as tried equally by the Tory, Labour and Liberal parties.

  Real incomes per head have risen beyond what anyone dreamed of a generation back; so have education budgets and welfare budgets; so also have delinquency, truancy, vandalism, hooliganism, illiteracy, decline in educational standards.

But he was only reviving his political forefathers’ dictum that if you give the undeserving poor money they only get into trouble, and if you teach them to read they write rude words on walls. The working class is used to this sort of thing, and being told it is to blame when capitalism has problems. Indeed, Joseph was being unfair to his Labour opponents: they share that standpoint. Following the Budget on 12th November the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, announced on TV that if he failed to stop a slump or inflation it would be the fault of “the British people”:

  The choice is yours. If you really prefer mass unemployment and rising prices you can always have it.

To add more, practically no-one in the chorus of critics of Joseph denied his thesis. Other Conservatives thought it “a sad mistake . . . which would inevitably cause serious doubts about his political judgement”. Frank Field of the Child Poverty Action Group acknowledged Joseph’s “problem” of breeding by sub-standard people, and “blamed this on the failure of the family planning system and suggested that the solution was to give women more incentive to limit their family size”. (Both quotations from The Guardian, 21st October.) The Bishop of Southwark put it down to “Conservative policies of 50 years ago” (Observer, 20th October) and “human nature” (News of the World, 27th October).

Official Labour replies were on the same lines. Ian Mikardo, the party chairman

  appeared to accept the gist of what Sir Keith Joseph said in his controversial weekend speech on the nation’s morals, but he neatly turned it to Labour’s advantage . . . he blamed individualist, self-centred Conservative doctrine.

(Guardian, 25th October)

Mrs. Castle, the Secretary for Social Services, accused Joseph of wrong statistics and expressed herself as equally anxious over the problems named. And Renee Short, another Labour MP, spoke of the need for a minister to deal with population problems and said:

  It is absolutely right for Sir Keith to say we need considerable extensions of education about family planning, but it is not only needed in the fourth and fifth social groups.

All agreed that the working class must be kept decent, and sneered at one another for legislation having failed to do so.

Class and Intelligence

None of the critics appears to have noticed one extraordinary implication of Joseph’s speech. Like the Victorian moralists, over human behaviour he wants to have things both ways—people are born bad but also influenced to be bad: the teaching of Eric, or Little by Little. But, in addition, Joseph was propounding what looks like Lysenko’s theory that acquired characteristics can be transmitted. Given mothers of “low educational attainment” who have learned immoral attitudes, there will be babies destined to be illiterates and criminals. Since reform cannot change heredity, the prevention of birth is the only answer — “the lesser evil”, he said.

This kind of rubbish was exploded long ago. However, there is a more cogent answer to Joseph’s contentions. Being in classes 4 and 5 — or any of the others — has nothing to do with intelligence or probity. People are in these “classes” because of their relationship to the means of production: specifically, because they own nothing and have to work as capitalism allows them. In fact the groupings are not social classes at all, but lists made for administrative purposes. The only two classes are of owners and non-owners of the means of living. People are born not into “free choice” but into one or the other class and all the implications of its position.

If intelligence were a factor, we should like to be told the intelligence quotients of, say, shareholders in big companies; the royal family; or politicians who have their speeches written for them. Would Joseph say that breeding by any number of these who were of “low intelligence” was a threat to human stock? Of course not. There are, in any case, different answers for them. The slow-learning or recalcitrant offspring of the well-to-do are put out to private tutors in country vicarages to get them in shape for Oxbridge. The idea of intelligence is irrelevant to that sort of life. It is a yardstick-concept by which the ruling class picks over the working class for its own purposes; the working class insults itself by accepting it.

Different Meanings

Joseph spoke about “responsibility”. The fact is that the capitalist system which he represents and upholds depends on irresponsibility. To hand over control of one’s life, have its activity appropriated and accept the say-so of leaders and rulers, is irresponsible. Yet that is precisely what Joseph requires, the “choice” he wants exercised. It is not a question of Doublethink, but of class terminology. For his class, following its interests, the working class acts “responsibly” by not following its own!

If you look at the occupations which make up groups 3, 4 and 5, the matter becomes clearer still. They are nearly all useful occupations — manufacture, building, mining, transport, the essentials for social existence. Not so most of the occupations in groups 1 and 2. A few are; the majority are about as useful as a tapeworm. What do “intelligence” and “educational attainment” mean when they are put to the non-uses generated by capitalist society? A former drama student has remarked to the writer that when he sees acquaintances on TV it is always in commercials: singing the praises of canned soup, zooming through space with packets of Tasty Morsels. For this, they studied Shakespeare and toiled at voice and movement—now, humans behaving like idiots.

Let us tell Sir Keith Joseph and the co-diagnosers of his “problem” the truth. The working class is the intelligent, educated class which makes the wonders, and competently carries out the humdrum tasks, of the world we live in. Without that being so, there would be no electronic marvels or university buildings. Nor would there be the sumptuous dinners from which capitalist politicians rise to make their self-important speeches. Or dividends for the shareholders of Bovis Ltd., of which Joseph is vice-chairman.

Moral Humbug

The so-called moral questions can be put in perspective by referring to the 1949 Report of the Royal Commission on Population. This was concerned with finding ways to induce people of all groups and grades to have more children: to maintain the work force, for "military strength and security”, and for “the maintenance and extension of Western values and culture”. There was no talk then of threatening the human stock, or the immorality of girls under twenty having babies.

Of course the family as a socio-economic unit has largely broken down, but Joseph’s conception of why this happens is extremely naive. Apparently he believes a currency of “immoral” ideas is the cause of such a breakdown, whereas the opposite is true. The family’s life and functions were disrupted by the extension and intensification of the division of labour; following that, fresh ideas of morality were generated — without, however, affecting the existence of capitalism.

But what kind of society are we living in? Sex and reproduction are the strongest of human instincts and pleasures. The tragedy for the poor is being swindled out of enjoyment and fulfilment by poverty, inadequate housing, worry, and living on the edge of a high-priced culture. Many girls in that situation, said Joseph, are unmarried or deserted or divorced: how nice of him to point it out, from the comfort of Class 1. How nice of Mrs. Castle too, to deny that “socialism is synonymous with permissiveness”. Indeed, she is right. “Permission” means condescending to allow, and that has nothing to do with the free, responsible world Socialists envisage: Mrs. Castle’s “socialism” is not synonymous with Socialism.

It will not be too long before the working class demonstrates its intelligence, and its contempt for the Josephs and Castles, by getting rid of the system they stand for.

Robert Barltrop

Running Commentary: Capitalism Condemned (1979)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism Condemned 

The objections to capitalist politicians is not that they are dishonest (though they usually are) nor that they are incompetent (though this is the norm) nor that they are a particularly nasty sub-species (though on the whole they are). The objection is simply that they claim to be able to run capitalism in the interests, of the majority, but they can’t, haven’t, don't and won’t.

Evidence floods in of the palpable fact that this society works in the interests of a small minority and that problems of the majority are, by and large, left intact.


Poverty

The Supplementary Benefits Commission defines poverty as a standard of living so low that it cuts people off from normal community life; people are not warm enough, not fed enough and do not have sufficient clothing to appear in the street without embarrassment. It must be remembered that poverty is not an absolute concept but a level relative to what can be expected at any particular time. But even by capitalism's standards (which are low enough) poverty still stalks the working class in the form of depressed living conditions.

The Supplementary Benefits Commission’s report for 1978 issued in October stated that the amount paid in supplementary benefits was insufficient to keep the people who depend on it out of the Commission’s definitions of poverty. As to how many people in this country are in this position one can turn to the report of the Low Pay Unit, also issued in October. This claimed that one family in eight were living below the bare official minimum. These people will not have gained anything from the so called tax cuts introduced by the soak-the-poor Tory budget. The Low Pay Unit expects that one effect of the budget will be to plunge a further 10,000 families below the official poverty line.

The former director of the Low Pay Unit, Frank Field, (now a Labour MP) estimated that if a realistic level for the poverty line is taken, 14 million people in this country are living in poverty (Guardian 1/10/79). What Field does not explain is what he is doing as a Labour MP if he condemns the system the Labour Party has run and is so keen to perpetuate. But Frank’s unfrankness here is only the norm for an MP.

But perhaps the most interesting survey of poverty to emerge in October (for some reason a good month for reports) was Peter Townsend’s massive book Poverty in the United Kingdom. This provides a wealth of statistical evidence about poverty under British capitalism. In effect, it refutes the claims of politicians that they have solved the poverty problem. The Observer commented that this book, together with the Supplementary Benefit Commission’s report, ". . .  remind us that Britain, 35 years after the end of the war, retains a shameful sub-culture of poverty, striking almost arbitrarily at the old . . .  large families, widows, the disabled, one-parent families and others.” (28/10/79.) Such facile comment is remarkable. When the Observer refers to the old, the large families and widows, it should have made it clear that it was referring to one class only. Old, widowed, disabled, large familied capitalists do not come within the scope of the poverty problem. Perhaps the word “others” is supposed to mean about ninety per cent of the population?


The Joys of Work

Meanwhile most workers still have to work. The conditions in which they do so vary from the despair of the mind-bending repetitive manual and clerical jobs to the outright appalling — those that are likely directly to cause an early death. Take some of the recent grisly revelations on asbestosis. A government advisory committee on asbestos also reported in October. It appears that as early as 1906 the government knew that asbestos was a killer. The link between asbestos and lung cancer was discovered in 1930. The link with other forms of cancer was made clear in 1964. No government cared much about it. Now after three years the government committee has recommended new standards which will be an improvement; if they are adopted, instead of one worker in ten in the industry contracting (and painfully dying from) asbestosis, only one worker in twenty will do so. What progress. And there is a good old-fashioned conspiracy by the rich and powerful asbestos industry to keep back the truth about the dangers of asbestosis. Meantime asbestos continues to be used and people who work with it (in particular the laggers-people who lag pipes) die young, in agony.

The Guardian (24/10/79) reports on one man who, never having been warned of the dangers, worked as a lagger from 1946 to 1958. At the age of 41 he was told he had the disease. At the age of 44 he was almost paralysed. Now he lives as a cripple: in constant pain, he is unable even to climb the stairs to his bed.

There is no cure, only the inevitable agonising death. And just to add insult to the injury, the invalidity pension for that man, his wife and four children is £54.70 a week. Not only does capitalism maim you, it then lets you continue what’s left of your existence in wretchedness.


Year of the Child

As the Year of the Child comes to an end, we may well ask is there a better future for children? On the whole things look worse than ever. Amnesty International’s Prisoner of Conscience Report, also issued in October, reminds us that children throughout the world are being tortured and murdered. Ethiopia—5000 young people slaughtered in 1977/78; Central African Empire—100 children battered to death under the megalomaniac Bokassa; Chile—children tortured in front of parents to extract confessions and information from them; Russia—children wrenched from their parents who have committed “crimes” such as distributing private essays. The International Labour Office published a report (Observer 4/10/79) showing that more than 52 million children in the world under the age of 15 worked for a living—although child labour is prohibited by law. Most of these figures are made up from children in countries where poverty is rife and either children work to the detriment of their physical and mental well being or face starvation. The report, which contains horrifying case-studies from Mexico, Peru, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Thailand, Italy, Argentina and Greece, draws the hard conclusion that “child labour cannot be prohibited by law”.

The Amnesty and ILO reports only skim the surface. And as these lines are written children are dying like flies of starvation in Kampuchea. Reports on numbers vary, but even the most conservative estimate is chilling. In the meantime, British, American, Russian, Kampuchean and other politicians argue about the “best” way to send in the food—an argument which is heavily concerned with their respective standing as powers in world capitalism.

Ronnie Warrington

Running Commentary: Refugees (1982)

The Running Commentary column from the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Refugees

The aim of the United Nations at the time of its establishment was to “cut the causes of war at their roots”. But because the causes of war are related to the struggle among sections of the ruling class, organised in separate nation states, for markets, trade routes and natural resources, and because the United Nations was not established to end class-divided society, it is hardly surprising that the organisation has failed completely in its objective.

Since its foundation the destruction and slaughter of war has continued unabated all over the world. Even in recent times, over Vietnam, Korea, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan and now in the Falklands, we have seen its manifest impotence to control military disputes with sanctimonious resolutions of the “502” variety.

Another aim of the UN was to deal with the problems of refugees. What are refugees? They are walking, sandwich-board-like indictments of the lunatic way society is presently organised. They are millions of people, both en masse and dissipated, escaping from one part of the globe to another. People from Afghanistan escaping to Pakistan while people from Pakistan escape to the West. People fleeing from El Salvador and Guatemala. People on the run from one part of Africa to another. Recently, the UN Commissioner for Refugees, Mr Poul Hartling, told a press conference that:

  In global terms, we can say that the UN is responsible for some 10,000,000 refugees throughout the world at present. Of these, between four and five million are to be found in Africa, between two and 2½ million in South East Asia and the rest in South America and elsewhere. (Guardian 2014/82)

Unrecognised as “refugees” (although that is what they really amount to) are the thousands of people who depart from places like Britain, particularly in times of economic recession, for Australia and Canada to seek a way out of the grimness of life in their country of origin. But for members of the working class there is no escape from poverty by travelling from one continent to another.

Cashing In

Down in deepest Surrey is a firm called Pubjoy Mint, which is in the business of producing medallions to commemorate all sorts of forgettable events like royal weddings and anniversaries. These are then sold to people who are impressed by Pubjoy’s enthusiastic utterances that the medallions are of lasting beauty, intrinsic value and historic significance.

Nothing is safe from this firm. Any day now, they could announce a medallion—which everyone will cherish and show to their children in its unique plastic clearview cover and handsome display case—marking the achievement of three million unemployed.

Meanwhile they are cashing in on other events. Their latest creation commemorates the Falkland Islands Task Force. On one side are the aircraft carriers Invincible and Hermes; on the other the indomitable Britannia stands, trident across the Falklands.

“It is not an approval of war in any way,” said The firm’s marketing manager. “It is to commemorate Britain’s response to what has happened in our territory.” The medallions cost £600 for the 22 carat gold version and £7.50 for one in silver plated base metal.

The Task Force was sent to protect the property and the investments of a section of the British ruling class (the sort of people who can afford that 22 carat medallion) against the ambitions of a part of the Argentinian ruling class. Workers on both sides (who can afford only the silver plated medallion) have no interests at stake in the struggle, although they take their masters’ part in it and will suffer and die in it.

Such episodes are black tragedy in world history. That they can be further exploited by the sale of ghoulish mementoes is evidence of the urgency to end the social system which causes it all. The only fitting commemoration in these cases would be the workers’ strengthened resolve for a basic change in society.

Sick Pay

Most people who have to spend time in hospital leave the place profoundly impressed by the work of the nurses. Often unpleasant, physically and emotionally stressful, unrelenting, usually under extra difficulties caused by shortages and “economies”. And very badly paid, although it would be difficult to imagine a wage high enough to be “fair” for such work.

The Confederation of Health Service Employees states that nearly half of all full-time nurses, most of them in training or auxiliaries, are getting wages which are below the poverty line the level at which they qualify for Family Income Supplement.

The employers may argue that the union has produced these figures in support of its current pay campaign, in which it hopes to raise the government’s 6.4 per cent offer. This is the latest episode in a long battle over nurses’ pay (remember Selwyn Lloyd in 1961?) in which successive governments have cynically exploited the fact that, when it comes to the point, nurses shy away from the ultimate and in their case the frighteningly powerful weapon of a strike.

Because of this we can expect the nurses always to be among the lower reaches of the wages league. Workers’ pay is not a matter of morality, a reward for the job which they do, a reflection of how stressful or how necessary their work may be. If those guidelines did apply in society at large there would be a lot of members of the Stock Exchange and aristocrats starving to death.

Wages are the price of a worker’s labour power and, like any other price, they move up or down in response to pressures like booms and slumps, a shortage or a surplus of the labour power. This is a hard, unromantic reality of capitalism—a system which must first concern itself with its profitability and leave human welfare a long way behind.

Nurses are not angels. They are just another bunch of motivated, essential—and harshly exploited—workers without whom life under capitalism would be even more unpleasant than it is.

Cartoon by George Meddemmen.

Increasing Poverty

According to a report published earlier this year by the Low Pay Unit and the Civil and Public Services Association the poor are getting steadily poorer. The same day the report was issued (April 3) it was confirmed that the salary of Michael Edwardes, the chairman of British Leyland, had been increased last year from £65,400 to £95,500.

The job which Edwardes performs for this modest reward is to keep down pay rises for the workers and to ensure that the company pays out as little as possible on improving the conditions of the workforce—as little, that is, as is compatible with the best efficiency which can be squeezed from the wealth producers.

The week after the poverty report of the Low Pay Unit, the Department of Health and Social Insecurity released figures which showed that the number of people in Britain living below the official poverty line—supplementary benefit level—has risen to over two million for the first time. New statistics sent to a Labour MP in reply to a series of parliamentary questions disclosed a rise from 1.9 million to 2.1 million between 1977 and 1979.

The Labour MP who requested the information was that self-righteous friend and patron of the poor, Frank Field. On learning the facts, Field became very indignant and described the revelation as “alarming”. One fact that must have slipped his mind, what with all that ringing in his ears, is that there was a Labour government in office between these years.

Gary Jay

Undercurrents (1984)

Book Review from the March 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist Arguments, (eds) D. Coates & G. Johnstone, Martin Robertson, 1983, £5.95

A book all socialists would like to write is one in which the nature of capitalist society is clearly and simply exposed, along with its supporting ideology and mythology. After reading such a book it would be impossible for anyone to listen to a speech by Margaret Thatcher without laughing: it would give everyone effective counter-arguments to racialist rantings: it would stop everyone talking about monetarism and make them consider the abolition of money as a practical alternative: in the face of its relentless logic and wicked humour all of the smarmy apologists for capitalism will be reduced to stuttering incoherence: and so on. Finally it would tear to shreds all of the common arguments against socialism and it would be printed in all languages; becoming the major work that convinced the workers of the need for a peaceful democratic revolution, co-ordinated to bring about a classless, moneyless, world socialist community.

This is not such a book. It is intended to be the first part in a series of "socialist primers" aimed at building "the protective wall of a sophisticated and widely-understood socialist counter-culture" around "the left", prior to winning the battle of ideas among the workers. So the final verdict on this project must await the completion of the series of books; meanwhile some observations can be made.

It is amazing that the editors managed to hold together a group of contributors with such widely differing views. All are united under the slogan of "a socialist alternative to . . .", but for Labour MP Frank Field a socialist alternative to the present fiscal system means a return to tax exemption in place of the personal tax allowance system; while David Coates, after Marx, criticises trade unions for not:

 . . . using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system. (p. 78).

All shades on the political left get a showing in this book, from a concern with the most meagre reform of capitalism, to a partial apology for street violence:

In claiming self-defence as a justification for employing force/violence, socialists and black organisation are challenging . . . the general claim by the state to represent the interests of the people as a whole  . . . (p. 220).

Statements like that make you feel the authors are walking an intellectual tightrope in their attempts to include as many views as possible in their chapters, for shortly after the last quotation the same author writes:

In and by itself violence can neither achieve nor sustain anything of which socialists can be proud. (p. 225).

But the statements on violence during the revolutionary transformation to socialism, if they are to mean anything at all, must make clear the conditions under which socially sanctioned force may be used against hypothetical obstructive minorities. Gordon Johnstone is finally unable to do this and has to hope that the socialist revolution will be less violent than other social transformations in history.

The reason for this and many other failings in the book is that nowhere do the authors state how socialism could be brought about, except that an overall impression is given of an accumulation of reforms leading to a more "egalitarian" society, alongside inspired work by labour leaders, plus a good deal of state confrontation, with massive expansion of workers' councils, much argument and a little use of democratic procedures.

Some light is shed on this political eclecticism by the editorial introduction:

We have asked our contributors to ensure that they make plain the nature of the disagreements on the left in their particular field, so that no section of the socialist camp need feel alienated by any gratuitous sectarianism . . . (p. 4).

I wonder what parts of this book the left will find most attractive; the penny-pinching reformism, the labour politics or the revolutionary asides? Bob Jessop argues, absurdly, that they should espouse all parts and advocates that a:

three-fold strategy requires socialists to work at a distance from the state, within the state, and against the state. (p. 105).

Crudely put it means we should smash, ignore and reinforce the state — which about sums up my response to this book. The good bits make it worth reading. They may increase as the series goes on and the authors realise that the triple advocacy of reform, bolshevism and revolution just makes a mess of socialist consciousness.

B. K. McNeeney