The cost of money (2026)

From the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A musical ensemble undergoing a restructuring has formed a small committee to consider the details. An important factor was the membership fee. Although the musicians were all amateurs, in the best sense of that word, there were regular costs to be met. This meant that while the fees were not exorbitant, none the less they were significant. This raised an issue: an aim of the ensemble was to encourage players of various abilities to participate, including those whose financial circumstances would make the fees prohibitively expensive.

The simple solution was to accept that individual circumstances could be taken into consideration, with fees reduced or waived. One committee member, in particular, was enthusiastic in his support of this arrangement, declaring, ‘As a socialist I’m all in favour.’ He was an active member of the Labour Party, obviously mistaking a commendable act of social altruism as an expression of socialism. Indeed, it could appear to conform with the socialist maxim, from each according to ability, to each according to need.

However, while individual needs in this specific context were to be met, the ability referred to in this instance was the ability to pay, not play. A skilled musician’s opportunity to play would depend on a financial arrangement. If at some future time expenses were such that an accommodation of non-fee payers was no longer sustainable by the ensemble then the concession could be withdrawn. The player’s desire and ability to play would still exist, but would be denied.

The determining factor, money, remains decisive in straightened circumstances. The ensemble’s proposed inclusive action is an example of solidarity, again giving the lie to the oft-voiced opinion that human nature is greedy and selfish. There is no requirement for the ensemble to be so considerate as there are a goodly number of members already. It has grown over the decade of its existence and continues to grow. It is now looking to develop a youth section if that can be funded. Back to money again as the crucial factor before the needs and abilities of young people can be identified and met.

The ensemble meets weekly to develop its skills and programme of public performances. The individual musicians devote a significant portion of their time to daily practice at home. In other words they work hard, but entirely unremunerated. Another refutation of the seemingly ‘common sense’ argument that people will not work unless paid. Rather, they pay to work.

This is but one example of what is happening across society, people working voluntarily in a wide range of circumstances, already freely giving of their abilities to fulfil needs both personal and communal.

A moment’s consideration should enable most people to think of those they know and circumstances where they come across volunteers. If all volunteers withdrew their efforts tomorrow, society would severely suffer as a consequence. There are many volunteers who devote more time and enthusiasm to their volunteer activities than ever they do, or did, to the drudgery of their paid employment. This seems particularly the case for those who are officially retired.

The claim that socialism won’t succeed, because it relies on the great majority working cooperatively and voluntarily without financial incentives, is contradicted by the evidence. It is happening now, even though the dominant ethos is all about money. If the social, economic and political context was socialism, having been actively achieved by the vast majority, then what might now be termed altruism would actually be the norm. Very different to how things are presently arranged.

Council services

The borough in which the ensemble operates has recently issued its council tax requirements for the coming financial year. The rate has risen again, to a chorus of much grumbling. There is also a breakdown of the council’s spending. Two major items of expenditure are social care and children’s services. In the jargon these are ‘big ticket’ items. The problem is they become ever more expensive year on year. Social care has become a huge fiscal responsibility because many more people are failing to die in their seventies as was the case until fairly recently. Medical science and technology has advanced markedly, while working in the unhealthy atmospheres of heavy industry has declined, along with smoking,

What should be a cause of widespread celebration is marred by the cost. That science and technology comes at a price, as does the residential and home care for those requiring it. Families opening their council tax bills see the increase as putting further strain on stretched household budgets.

While the council is working under legal obligations to provide these services, a sense of responsibility also motivates councillors to do their best for those with needs. As Labour councillors they may well consider themselves socialists in this context. Theirs is a ‘socialism’ trying to mitigate the worst consequences of capitalism. Social care, for example, to look after elderly workers past the stage of being exploitable labour. In previous times it would have been the workhouse. The workhouse system was developed, at least in part, as a response to perceived rising costs on the parish rates of poor relief, such as the Speenhamland system. Council tax is the modern equivalent of the parish rates and is equally a matter of contention amongst those who must pay.

The bottom line, as it is often called these days, determines how needs are met. Whether it’s being involved in an ensemble, or some similar group, or looking after the elderly or children, the fundamental factor is money. No matter the political perspective, left, right or centre, debates and discussions revolve around the sums of money involved. For some such as the ensemble the decisions are collective ones, made by the whole group.

With public finance, local or national, the arbiter is the law. The price, paid by those who are dependent on what is described as the public purse, is rationing. If a need cannot be met due to there being insufficient funds to pay for it, then it will remain unmet. Even if provision is made it may not be sufficient or of suitable quality. Even in a social, and sociable, organisation such as the ensemble, a change in financial circumstances amongst those who pay may result in the withdrawal of concessions for those who can’t, albeit with heartfelt regret.

Socialism requires the maxim – from each according to ability, to each according to need – to be fully realised for everyone. This can only occur in a society in which the profit motive no longer operates and there are no prices for anything, money having become redundant. Until then, the Labour – and all too common – misunderstanding of socialism will continue to equate it with forms of charity, whether voluntary or legally enforced.

D. A.

Do it Yourself": something worth thinking about (1958)

From the September 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Post-War cult of “Do-It-Yourself” gained most of its newspaper publicity through the effect it had upon home decorating and repairs. The process of making up for colossal war-time destruction and continuing to arm for the next war produced a period of unprecedented full employment. This was the immediate economic situation that kept the repair and redecoration of working class houses at their maximum market price—a price too high for working class families to afford—even with full employment..

And so we have seen the growth of scores of journals and newspaper features devoted to papering ceilings, pointing brickwork and unstopping drains. Firms have made fortunes manufacturing and marketing power tool kits for enthusiastic handymen; and the rate of borrowing from public libraries of books on “useful arts” has doubled..

But “Do-It-Yourself” has more interesting origins than even this novel economic situation. Some of its causes are deeper, more obscure, and may not on the surface appear to be economic at all. If you ask the man who tells you he has just tiled his bathroom with the latest plastic tiles and easy-to-fix adhesive why he did the job himself instead of paying a tradesman to do it, his second reason (after the cost) will be the quality of workmanship. He cannot trust the workers in the decorating firms to “make a good job of it.” Now, the standards of professional decorating for working class houses has never been high, as Robert Tressell’s book, “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists,” makes quite clear. Materials and work are pared to a minimum to keep costs as low as possible and produce a job that will pass muster on a casual inspection. It has little to do with conscientious workmanship because, where the contractor’s price can be paid, as in the office suites of growing industrial companies, picture houses, and the most expensive private houses, the “ professional job ” cannot be bettered. But in the cheap trade there does seem to be justification for saying that standards are falling even below the old penny-pinching level.

The High Cost of Repairs

The reasons are not hard to find. Full employment and the growth of mass production have made repairs of all kinds relatively dearer because of the higher proportion of hand labour they consume. The exploitation of the repair man cannot be stepped up to any great degree by mechanisation as it can in manufacture. It is small wonder, then, that firms whose sole business is repairing and refurbishing shoddily built houses should be forced to lower their standards in order to avoid pricing themselves out of business entirely. Nevertheless, the combination of higher prices and lower quality has forced thousands of working men to arrive home after a full day's work in the factory or office and then put in a full evening's work with a bucket of distemper in the kitchen.

Mass production has done something else. Although it can never produce the finest quality of workmanship, it has raised the standards of design and finish of a number of commodities produced for the working class market. And so the ordinary working man and his wife have begun to apply these standards that they have obtained from mass-produced television sets and crockery and clothes to the homes in which they live. In the majority of these homes the mass-production standard of even the cheapest “ telly ” makes the rest of their furniture and decorations look ludicrously squalid. In addition, the furniture and fittings used in the plays and shows on the telly makes them even more aware of what material comfort can be. The workers have had a slight taste of quality and they find that they like it. The struggle to keep up with the Joneses has begun in earnest and “ Do-It-Yourself ” offers about the only chance for the pay packet to stretch to a set of built-in cupboards, even though they must be made mostly of hardboard and rather thickly painted. The working class family has to put up finally with their own rather poor imitation of quality.

The Tedium of Mass Production

But it is economic conditions also that have made many of these home handymen actually enjoy bringing their total working hours up to twelve or fifteen a day. Wage-working has always been drudgery but it has taken modern mass-production and office organisation to reduce factory work and clerical duties to a deadening tedium. The last vestiges of pleasure in making something or performing a personal service—the real pleasures of work—are gone .A man who attends half a dozen autos all day and every day while they churn out screws gets nothing but boredom and weariness from his work. It is therefore small wonder that in his “leisure” time he should get a certain amount of pleasure out of putting in a new kitchen sink, since the job has got to be done anyway. It really means, however, that working hours have not been shortened very much in the last hundred years.

“Do-It-Yourself” has thus helped to prop up a number of the minor weak points in the capitalist social system: but. like many another social trend, this movement has to some extent overshot the mark already. It has more than filled up the immediate economic vacuum which brought it into being and, far from keeping working class attention fixed safely on private household problems, has begun to spread into wider fields. Acute business men have recognised in this craze a deep underlying need in working men to do something constructive in a social system which, when it is not destroying things and people, is forcing such a high degree of organisation and atomisation upon production and living that the ordinary man feels he is no longer in contact with real things or real life. As with every other potential market, capital has striven to exploit this one to the full. Apart from “ Do-It-Yourself ” kits for making furniture and boats and—in America—rockets, it is possible to take up part time study in all sorts of skills and fields of learning. There are correspondence courses for almost everything except a medical degree: and on a less strenuous level there has been a sharp increase in radio and television programmes with a bias on learning and active participation. “Network Three” is the plainest example of the trend, but it is now also possible to be your own archeologist with Sir Mortimer Wheeler, your own big game hunter with Armand Denis and his wife, or even a marine biologist with Hans Haas.

Much of this is of course spurious or at least superficial participation in such affairs for the ordinary working man; but his appetite has been whetted and occasionally he is given a broadcast programme or a newspaper article that is even daring enough to suggest that he should think for himself.

Do your own thinking

This is really the end of the ride, however. This is where the powers that be want to call a halt to the craze for “ Do-It-Yourself.” It may help the worker to put up with the monotony of factory life if he can do a bit of house-painting in his spare time. That is safe. What he does at home does not seriously offer competition to the mass production he does for the major part of his day. When it comes to thinking, however, the mass media of propaganda—television, films, radio, advertising, newspapers, pulpits, classrooms—could be seriously upset if ordinary working men started doing their own thinking. They might pause from accepting the opinions of professionals on the state of the world and start trying to make their own. They might start asking their own questions instead of leaving it to the Questionmaster. They might begin to ask why, in a world with such vast productive resources and capabilities, with mass production in fact, they have to work eight to ten hours a day, five or six days a week, fifty weeks a year, fifty years in a lifetime, just to maintain a barely sufferable standard of living (when there is no slump), and then be pensioned off with a pittance when they are too old to work.

They might start asking why, in a world where nobody wants war. they should be called upon, every generation or so, to leave home and family to go and hurl death and destruction at other working men and women who also don't want any part of it.

They might even ask how on earth it came about and —what is equally fascinating—how it is kept up that a very small group of people in the civilized world own the land and the vast accumulation of property and wealth upon it, while the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of these countries own nothing but a few meagre, personal trifles.

When working men and women start asking their own questions, they will start putting two and two together for themselves and that, to the propagandists and to the class and system they strive to keep in power, would be intolerable. That would be political thinking; and if there is one thing that the working man is expected not to do for himself, it is to trouble his head about politics. All the agencies of propaganda agree upon this that there are plenty of expert politicians and historians and economists who are far better equipped than the ordinary worker at political thinking. All that he needs to do is to put one or other of the reputable types of representative into the Commons every five years and leave it in their capable hands.

The only trouble is that these professionals have an unbroken record of failure. “Do-It-Yourself "—both the practical and theoretical kinds—has begun to show people that many experts are not so different or so infallible as they used to appear. Some of these jobs and some of these ideas are quite easy when you know how, particularly this business of politics, for which no special training or degree is given, and in which a man doesn’t have to be particularly bright, as is plain when some politicians appear on television.

When the ordinary working man has begun to do his own political thinking and has realised that all the business of present day politics, all the mad mass production and competition for profit, the insane wars for economic and strategic advantages, are only important issues for those who really own the world and only arise because of the social system in which he and his fellows own nothing—when he has thought this himself—then he and all those like him in the world will decide that such a social system must be done away with as soon as possible. And, having acquired a healthy distrust of experts and professionals, he will decline all the offers of those who contend to do the job for him. We will have become aware of what this party has been telling him for fifty- four years: if you want a job well done—if you want Socialism—you must “ Do-It-Yourself.”

S. Stafford

Time to be Free (1967)

From the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

An observer from outer space could be forgiven for thinking that human beings enjoyed work more than any other activity, since the vast majority of them spend the best part of their waking lives at it. However, if he hovered in his space ship long enough to hear the bells and whistles and sirens wail round the world as knocking-off time swept round with the evening shadows, he would be able to infer from our behaviour that we regarded work as unpleasant, if not positively hateful. He would see people streaming out of factory gates and office doors with the terrible urgency of creatures suddenly set free.

From that height, however, he would find it utterly impossible to understand why they should return next morning and allow the gates to be shut behind them again. Even if he could land and talk to some of them he would be likely to find that they did not understand either. If there were a Socialist in the group he would find great difficulty in explaining to the visitor that the civilised world was owned—not by these hundreds of millions who laboured all day to produce and distribute everything that came out of the factories and fields and mines and seas—but by a small elite who hardly ever came near them. It would take some time to explain what ‘owned’ meant. It would take far longer to explain why people allowed it to go on for even a minute longer. In fact, when the visitor had been told that people actually supported the system that kept them enslaved, that destroyed much of the wealth they laboured to produce, and that sent them out to kill one another in millions from time to time, he would probably let in the clutch and streak off home to Alpha Centaurus or wherever he came from.

The trouble is that people hardly ever get this space traveller’s view of things. On the whole, they tend not to question the state of society into which they were born. And they tend to accept their place in it. They have either forgotten or have never been told that it is only in the last four or five thousand of their million years on the planet that they have been steadily dispossessed of the world they live in by a few of their own kind. They have come to accept the idea that work is not something that they do because it is a satisfying activity, or even because they see the need to do it, but simply because of the wage without which they could not live. And so they shrug their shoulders or grit their teeth and sell the best part of their days for the best part of their lives to their employers. During all this time they apply themselves to tasks which are exhausting, boring, frustrating, humiliating, exasperating, degrading, dirty or dangerous, and sometimes a mixture of them all. Very often the jobs that they do are as near pointless as makes no difference. Sometimes they are actively harmful or destructive. And always the satisfaction that there might have been in a job is soured because it is done under the threat of the sack, because neither the tools with which they work nor the product when they have made it belongs to them, and because the demands of profit insist that the job must always be done at a speed or for a price that makes quality and satisfaction impossible.

If you ask people why they do it, what keeps them at it, year in and year out, they will tell you—after they have made the accepted declarations of love and duty towards their family—that it is all for the sake of the few hours a day that are free from work. This is their ‘leisure’, meaning the time that they are allowed, or that is lawfully theirs. The word has no meaning except in a society based on compulsory labour. Leisure is the time in which people are allowed to live for themselves. They often say that they only really begin to live when they leave work. This is why they watch the clock. This is why everybody calls the late afternoon ‘the rush hour’. They rush for the bus stop or the car park or the station in order to start a jostled journey home that is almost as wearying as the day’s work itself.

It is now about nine hours since they left the house with sleep in their eyes and an undigested mixture of tea and cornflakes in their insides. They get home again feeling grubby and hungry and irritable. Leisure starts now! They are free to embark upon the riotous pursuit of pleasure. It is the moment they have been waiting for all day. And it is the moment when the dreary daily truth reasserts itself. They flop into a chair. Really, they need a wash and a change of clothes and light nourishing meal, but for the time being all they can manage is to sip yet another cup of refreshing tea and gaze vacantly at the tail-end of the children’s programme on the television.

It is at this point, usually, that the commercials intervene. A lean and bronzed young man races laughing down a sunbaked beach, empty except for the slim vivacious girl who flees before him, also laughing. ‘Cut’ to the foam-flecked water’s edge as he gains upon her. She reaches the sanctuary of the boat only to have him climb triumphantly in above her and take lovingly in his thumb and forefinger a piece of her creamy chocolate bar. Quite apart from its obvious (and perverted) intention, this advertisement, like many others, demonstrates the fact that energy and zest are essential for the active enjoyment of leisure. But these are just what the worker has sold in order to get his daily bread. There is little or nothing left over for leisure. The first call upon his free time is the re-creation of this energy for tomorrow’s work.

The second is the business of running a home and bringing up children who will form the next generation of workers. If he has a quick wash and a meal there will just be time to play with the kids for half an hour before they have to be got to bed. And then there will be jobs waiting: in the winter a couple of hours decorating; in the summer the garden or the car. Always there will be things that need mending or fitting, forms that need filling and bills that need sorting. By now it will be nearly ten o’clock, and many of the jobs will have been put off until the weekend, but by pushing these to the back of his mind and neglecting to tidy his tools away there is just time to put on his coat and slip down to the local for a couple of pints of wild libidinous pleasure before closing time.

What is generally not realised is that workers are almost perpetually tired. Many of them, particularly the younger ones, cut down on their sleeping time so that they can spend a couple more hours at a dance or a night club, and this has a cumulative effect upon both physical and mental health. What makes it possible is that the pattern of tiredness is undergoing a radical change. Year by year, with the introduction of more machinery, fewer and fewer jobs require a large output of physical energy, but more and more produce mental and emotional exhaustion because of the tension and pressure and pace involved. The result is that most workers arrive home feeling tired but edgy, played out but unsatisfied by their work. They have the vague impulse to go somewhere or do something, but fewer and fewer of them are able to do anything positive about it. This is why many of the young ones must have a motor bike or scooter just to ride round upon—to ‘go’—nowhere in particular. This is why all sorts of useless activities have been invented so that workers can actually do something in their spare time which does not remotely resemble work. What they need most of all is mental recreation if they are to achieve a state of mind which will enable them to face the prospect of going to work again the next day.

With leisure time severely restricted, and the frustrations of capitalism always on the increase, excess has become the order of the day with a large section of people. The intensity of work tends to be matched by the intensity of ‘pleasure’, and often frenzied effort to impart some quality and value to life to make up for the dehumanisation of the daily round. The last thing that most workers want to do is think—about what is going on in the modern world—and the leisure industry is geared up specifically to prevent thinking. Leisure is organised on such a scale and in such detail that workers have no need to plan their holiday activities or their evenings out. It is all done for them. All they have to do is accept it. They are prevented from being alone or quiet for a moment. It is all ‘go’, desperate activity, preferably useless and expensive, often destructive or cruel.

Over and over again, the relaxation of moral strictures and the provision of greater and greater leisure facilities are welcomed as increased freedom. And yet they do not give the contentment that freedom gives. Indeed, the feelings of boredom and frustration get worse. Because freedom has not been increased. It has been curtailed. Many of the activities, such as sports, in which workers used to engage for recreation have been taken over by professionals. One by one, their pastimes, such as skittles or cards, are dwarfed and superseded by glossy commercial versions. Television has entered their homes and stifled their conversation, showing them characters and personalities more charming and interesting than their families or friends. Regardless of programme quality, they need to have the set switched on ‘for company’. The more that capital invades their leisure time, the less they have left to live for themselves, and the more control is extended over what was once their private life. The fact that most workers welcome the change does not invalidate what is happening, it simply makes the process more degrading. Through television, the standard leisure diet for most people most of the time, they can indulge in vicarious action and luxury and travel and violence and love and success, without really having any of these things. They can escape from the real world of work and worries and chores—without really escaping. And all the time the programmes relentlessly advertise capitalism’s most important modern product—the idea that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

If the space traveller watched us for long enough he would see that it is not in our work that we give most convincing proof of our status as wage-slaves, but in our ‘free’ time. We run out from work like animals released from a treadmill, only to perform unquestioningly upon the toys in the cage. We are slaves because we have the slave mentality. The bondage is in our minds.

S. Stafford

Blogger's Note:

'S. Stafford' was the sometime pen-name of the late Ron Cook.

Employers know people aren't lazy (1970)

From the July 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

In which socialist journal did the following appear?

  Most people have a simple theory about work. They think they do not like it. The view is not just confined to employees. Throughout history, employers have assumed that unless they could hold some kind of economic or even physical threat over their workforce, idleness and indiscipline would take over.
  Those rather simplistic beliefs have never entirely squared up with some observable trends in human behaviour. Left to themselves, the majority of people do not spend their time lazing around. They indulge in pursuits like gardening and home decorating which, to the traditional observer from Mars would look exactly like work, except maybe, that a higher level of energy and dedication is exhibited.

In fact this is from an article by Frank Broadway in Industry Week (15 May), the journal of the Confederation of British Industry — the employers' equivalent of the TUC.

This should provide much food for thought for those who imagine Socialism could not work because people are lazy by nature. The fact is that the social sciences have shown Socialism to be possible. There is nothing in the nature or behaviour of human beings that would prevent them organising a society based on common ownership where work would be voluntary and where goods would be free.

The employers know well that people want and need to work. They have long cynically tried to pervert the findings of social science on this point so as to make more profits. As Broadway frankly put it:

  For nearly a hundred years industrialists have been watching, and sometimes subsidising, the infant sciences of industrial psychology and sociology in the hope that something would emerge to enable them to exercise a more dramatic influence over the motivations of their employees (our emphasis).

When employers argue that Socialism, with its democratically-controlled and voluntary work, is impractical because it is against so-called human nature, they know they are lying. It is time that the facts about work disclosed by social science found their way out of the boardrooms and the anti-human personnel departments and into the factories and offices where ordinary people work. After all it is not the employers who keep capitalism going but rather their employees who don’t yet realise that Socialism is possible.

A Goal for the Future (1962)

From the December 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

The reserves had just won their first home match of the season by four goals to one. Discussing the merits of the game, the spectators gradually drifted from the stands and terraces towards the gates. In the roadway outside the ground small knots of men conversed animatedly, moving aside only to avoid the cars wending their way gingerly between them. In the reflected glare of the half-dimmed floodlights a crowd of men and a few women stood expectantly around the office doors of the club, their faces displaying anxiety reminiscent in a very mild way of the poignant pictures of those who wait at the pit head after a mine disaster.

It had been announced by loud speaker during the interval that the first team, playing away that evening against the erstwhile leaders of the First Division, were losing 2—0 at half-time. This was East London’s least fashionable football team, “a rummage sale bargain outfit,” but, nevertheless, recent proud entrants into the Senior division after fifty years or more of wooden spooning in the lower divisions.

The full-time score would shortly be known and the fans were reluctant to depart, hoping against hope to hear that their heroes had at least forced a draw. The look of mingled concern and hope on their faces was almost pathetic and demonstrated a touching loyalty to the club which most of them had probably supported for many years.

Interest in sport, like that in hobbies and study, is not, in itself, an unhealthy thing. Man does not live by bread alone and it is understandable that, after a week of monotonous toil, many a worker finds refreshment and stimulation at the weekly football match, where he can give vent to his feelings and for a short time release himself from the inhibitions and frustrations of workaday life. Healthier still would be the active participation of all people, young and old, in some form of recreative sport which, no doubt, would result in producing a human race less subject to the physical and mental infirmities so rife today. But that happy state of affairs is reserved for the time when the present money-making system, in which playing fields and other sports facilities give way to the demands of more profitable undertakings, will be replaced by a sane system of society in which workers will not toil to the point of exhaustion and will have the energy to enjoy the ample leisure time that such a system would ensure.

Today most of us enjoy sport only as a spectacle and as a means of entertainment. Capitalism, always ready to oblige where profit may be made, has commercialised many forms of sport and hundreds of thousands of people now pay to be delighted and excited by the performance of highly skilled and well trained professional sportsmen, particularly in boxing, tennis, cricket and football, both Association and Rugby. Association football, formerly the preserve of public school and university men, has in the twentieth century been taken to the hearts of the working class. Professionalism has grown rapidly. In the early years of the century footballers’ pay was comparatively poor, but some workers were able to augment their incomes from their regular jobs by playing for the local club at weekends. Many a famous player has begun his career while working in some Scottish or South Wales mine or Lancashire mill.

Today full-time professionalism is the rule and despite the fall in gates at football matches during the past few years professional footballers, by resolute trade union action, have succeeded in obtaining much better rates of pay and conditions. In addition the star system has emerged by which outstanding players who attract large gates are able, by taking advantage of the competition between clubs for their services, to command much higher wages than average while club managers acquire ulcers and disburse tens of thousands of pounds in striving to capture them for their clubs. Naturally, it is the richest clubs which can pay most money, so that the tendency is for the stars to gravitate towards them. Football club profit depend upon large gates, so—woe to the manager whose team fails to draw in the paying spectators. His days are numbered.

Football pools are another example of profit-making applied to sport. Weekly, the proceeds of millions of small stakes are distributed among a lucky few, after the pools promoters have taken their slice. Every Saturday evening during the season millions of workers, with fingers crossed and bated breath, scan the football results in the classified editions, hoping that, at long last, the winning line has turned up to lift them out of the “affluence” of the working class into the real ease and independence of the capitalist class.

The knowledge of sports lore exhibited by some fans is nothing short of amazing. To listen to a discussion by such people can be very enlightening. Workers, whose memories are notoriously short about politicians’ electoral promises, are found to be highly efficient in remembering the results of matches (the names of goal-scorers thrown in for good value) and the names of winners of horse-races that took place in the far distant past. To understand and explain the complicated rules of various games seems child’s play to people who, we are told, will never be logical enough to grasp the principles of Socialism. The way many a worker effortlessly overcomes the intricacies of the back pages of the 12 o'clock editions reminds one of the graceful ease of a Grand National winner taking a hurdle and disproves any contention that working class brains are inferior. And as for loyalty and enthusiasm—well, one has only to witness an argument, between two opposing fans to see that these qualities are not lacking.

There is nothing to deplore in the interest that workers show in sport or in any other pleasant or useful leisure occupation. However, we cannot help thinking, when we observe the crowds of workers at football matches and other sports events, that if only a fraction of the thought and energy, loyalty and enthusiasm which are devoted to sport interests were diverted to the study and propagation of Socialist principles and ideas and the building up of a strong Socialist movement, how much nearer would be brought the day when the world would be freed from the evils of capitalism.

In a moneyless Socialist world in which the means of production and distribution would be owned by all in common, each would contribute to the work of Society according to ability and receive according to need. Profit-making and buying and selling would have been ended and hence money would be unnecessary. Commercialism, therefore, would cease to exist in sport just as it would disappear in every other sphere of social life. In the same way as the means of life would be produced only for use and would be free to all, so would sports be indulged in only for the fun of the game and facilities to take part in them would be available in abundance to everybody.

No longer would there be the need for extra monetary inducement to win games, nor the buying and selling of footballers like bullocks at a cattle market. Freed from their price-tags the better players would be valued for what they really are, not supermen, but skilful players very dependent for their success on the competence of their team mates. In a world of human co-operation and harmony the only competition would be in such activities as sport and the most highly-prized reward for the prowess of the player would be the applause and admiration of his fellowmen. How different from the petty viciousness of the commercial competition which pervades most of social life in the present profit-making system with its industrial strife, class and racial hatreds and destructive wars!

Fellow football fans:

Socialism is a goal worth working for!
  “So now to the task of ending Capitalism.
UP, UP, UP -to World Socialism." 

(With apologies to the writer of Leyton Orient’s programme notes.)

Socrates.