50 Years Ago: Socialism or 'Something Now' (1980)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard 

For years we have been told by Labour Party supporters (who had never tried to teach or even to understand socialism) that the working class did not want socialism, they wanted ‘something now’. We return the jibe and ask when the Labour government is going to give it to them. We were told that ‘half a loaf is better than no bread’ and that the way to get socialism is to build it up piecemeal, adding one gain to another until some day we shall wake up and find that capitalism has imperceptibly changed into the cooperative commonwealth.

One ‘half loaf’ has already been delivered to the cotton workers by the Labour government — a 6¼  per cent reduction in pay instead of the 12½ per cent asked for by the employers. May we ask how many such half-loaves will be required to produce socialism?

From an article ‘Labour party’s main plank gone’, Socialist Standard, January 1930.

Running Commentary: Waste Not (1980)

The Running Commentary Column from the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

WASTE NOT

There was much that was puzzling in the Tory election promises, not least their declared determination to hunt down and exterminate all waste and inefficiency.

To begin with, there was the puzzling implication that under the Labour government workers had had a marvellous time, being paid to be inefficient in jobs which were wasteful. Those thousands who were thrown out of work as a result of Labour government cuts and their other policies may be expected to give vent to an especially hollow laugh.

And then there was the appointment of a Waste and Inefficiency Watchdog. In some ways this was a shrewd move; Margaret Thatcher chose Derek Rayner, joint managing director of Marks and Spencer — a firm with a reputation among workers who buy their sweaters there for being highly efficient and non-wasteful.

Now Rayner is busily at work, and one of the areas he is hunting over is, of course, the Civil Service. Already some 20,000 jobs have been lost in a recruitment ban; now ministries like Industry, Trade, Employment — even the Foreign Office — are to be further cut. There may even be redundancies — something civil servants are accustomed to organising for other workers, on the comfortable assumption that it would not happen to them.

But the puzzle is — why does Rayner stop there? Why is his view so blinkered? Why does he try to get rid of waste and inefficiency by making capable workers idle in dole queues? Why, in other words, does he not realise that the only way to rid us of waste and inefficiency is to abolish the social system which operates on the profit motive?

In the name of commodity production and profit capitalism wastes an enormous amount of the world’s resources and its people’s abilities. Why doesn’t Rayner extend his hunt to include that? There are, as usual, no prizes for the correct answer to this puzzle. 

SCREAM, BABY, SCREAM

Does Rentamob live? In Tehran a forest of clenched fists pump up and down in the air, and from tens of thousands of throats comes the rhythmic, beating screech — “Aya-toll-ah Kho-mei-ni; Aya- toll-ah Kho-mei-ni”.

In America too there are clenched fists on high, and faces similarly contorted with passion. Only the screams are different, for those people are protesting against the Ayatollah’s followers capturing the American Embassy in Tehran, and they lust for the blood of the Iranian ruler.

Demonstrators have developed a style which is international. Whatever the matter of their protest, across the world the clenched fist denotes a proclaimed unity and strength. Political argument degenerates into shouting the same few words again and again, with the object not of making a point but of intimidating the audience.

The subject matter of demonstrations also has an international flavour. Workers swarm onto the street regularly to demonstrate their anger or to give voice to demands on issues which actually have nothing to do with their interests. Iranian people demonstrating for the Ayatollah and Americans doing the same thing in opposition to him are at one in their ignorance of their own class interests and of the solution to their problems.

The violent gestures and the empty slogans are a device which disguises this ignorance; a ranting mob is motivated by emotions inflamed to a point beyond rational argument. They can hardly see or think; their satisfaction is in the excitement of the marching, the piston fists, the syncopated, screaming slogans.

It might be more hopeful if they were Rentamob. At least then they would be doing it for money; at present they give their allegiance to their respective ruling classes gladly, for free, getting nothing in return except exploitation and contempt. 

COLD STEEL

Unrelieved gloom from the nationalised British Steel Corporation. Its chairman, Sir Charles Villiers, recently claimed that he could so manage things that the industry would break even by next March. Now he has had to give a different story; losses during the first half of 1979 were £145.6 million and are forecast to reach about £310 million for the whole year.

So will Sir Charles resign after this blinding mistake which suggests that he is not as in touch with the steel industry as he might be?

Well, actually no; instead he will continue with his plans to sack a lot more workers. The works at Corby and Shotton (12,000 workers ‘redundant’) are to be closed, and Villiers’ axe will swing at other plants, where thousands will lose their jobs. Since 1974 the total labour force in the industry has been cut from 228,000 to 182,000 — which has not reversed the industry’s decline.

The future for steel is also bleak. BSC have a capacity to produce some 34 million tonnes a year, but during 1980 they expect to turn out only about 16 million.

Another ‘economy’ measure will be to increase the importing of coking coal from Australia, America and Poland. This does not please that other nationalised concern, the Coal Board, who obviously would like British Steel to behave as if it did not operate under the capitalist social system, with all that that implies in terms of priorities. Those priorities are based on a simple proposition — no profit, no production. That law of capitalism, under which all wealth is produced to be sold at a profit, applies as remorselessly to a state-managed industry as to a private one.

Workers who voted — and who still vote — for nationalisation because they thought a state industry would put humane considerations before capitalism’s economic laws have had a series of nasty shocks. The current condition of the steel industry is the latest — and one of the nastiest. 

Labour and Monopoly Capital (1980)

From the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The sad, horrible, heart-breaking way the vast majority of my fellow countrymen and women, as well as their counterparts in most of the rest of the world, are obliged to spend their working lives is seared into my consciousness in an excruciating and unforgettable way. And when I think of all the talent and energy which daily go into devising ways and means of making their torment worse, all in the name of efficiency and productivity but really for the greater glory of the god ‘Capital’, my wonder at humanity’s ability to create such a monstrous system is surpassed only by amazement at its willingness to tolerate the continuance of an arrangement so obviously destructive of the well-being and happiness of human beings.
    If the same effort, or only half of it, were directed to making work the joyous and creative activity it can be, what a wonderful world it would be.

From Paul Sweezy’s foreword to Labour and Monopoly Capital by Harry Braverman (Monthly Review Press)

Letters to the Editors: Violent Means (1980)

Letters to the Editors from the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

VIOLENT MEANS

I would like to know your party’s view of those who resort to violence to achieve socialist and communist aims, since does not the Communist Manifesto (talking about communists) end: “They openly declare that their ends can be obtained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”. Also, what do you propose doing with all the present capitalists, the monarchy and the bourgeoisie, once the transition to a socialist state has been achieved.

G. J. Pinkney,

Al Ain 

Abu Dhabi

REPLY

Since socialism (or communism — they are synonymous terms) will be the first society to run in the interests of the majority of people, it must be established democratically by the world’s working class. At present the workers consent to capitalism by allowing representatives of the ruling class to control the governmental machine. Socialism’s establishment depends upon the conscious withdrawal of that consent and political organisation for control of the state machine for the purpose transferring the means of wealth production and distribution into common ownership.

Is this democratic conception of revolution at variance with Marx? In the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, Marx describes the role communists must play in a relatively undeveloped capitalist system. We cannot expect Marx to have foreseen the growth of limited political democracy over most of the world after his death. As Engels, who lived ten years longer than Marx, later stated, with the rise of parliamentary capitalism the age of the barricades disappeared. That is why the SPGB does not urge fellow workers to take up arms and fight the state; such a conception of revolution is manifestly unrealisable.

Once socialism is established — without the need for a transition period, since we live in an age of potential abundance — there will be no state or SPGB, just democratically organised society. What will the members of that society do with parasites like capitalists and the royal family? We will invite them to democratically co-operate or independently stagnate, for no longer will there be an inferior class to jump to their commands.

DIRTY WORK

I have been receiving your magazine for almost one year now and am in full agreement with the arguments you put forward against the capitalist system. The only weakness I can find is that you have not published any articles which explicitly describe the kind of utopian society which socialism would render possible.

For instance, in certain articles you say that “everything will be made to satisfy human needs”, “wealth will be turned out in abundance” and that “men and women will be free to discover their full potential, to develop their talents, acquire new skills and fulfil their pleasures to the full”.

Certain questions must arise from these statements:

1. How is society to be organised, as surely it will not be possible to ensure that everyone will achieve his or her potential and develop their talents? Who is going to fill the roles of miner, refuse collector, labourer, indeed any job in which the individual will not find fulfilment?

2. How are material goods to be distributed when demand is greater than supply so that, once again, some may not be able to fulfil their potential?

3. What is to be done with people who do not wish to cooperate?

J. Treweeke 

Hickley 

Leicestershire

REPLY

It is always pleasing to receive a letter from someone who is fed up with capitalism and has genuine questions about socialism. We are not advocating a utopia, but a practical, immediate solution to the insanity of the present social order.

You ask, who will do the dirty work in a socialist society? Co-operative socially conscious adults will perform these tasks, as they will do everything else. Of course, some presently unpleasant jobs can be made pleasurable or unnecessary, but given that men and women will still have to do some things they dislike we can only suggest that it is better to live freely and engage in occasional chores than to be compelled to do so because of our poverty. Remember, in socialism individuals will have the opportunity to experience a variety of occupations; to do different things at different times.

If there are shortages in socialism (and this could be so in times of natural disaster), society will democratically have to distribute available goods according to need. ‘From each according to ability, to each according to need’ will be the economic law of socialism.

Those who do not wish to co-operate in socialist society will be free to stand aside. But why should anyone refuse to co-operate when it is in his or her material interest to do so? Socialism can only be achieved when men and women are conscious of the need for collective co-operation.

Please send us any other questions about socialism that you have, for they are bound to be shared by many others. Once you have given our replies your consideration, we invite you to join us in the struggle for a new society.

EDUCATING ANDY

You say that socialism cannot come about until the majority understand and desire it and democratically take the steps necessary to achieve it. I would object to this in a number of ways. Firstly, it implies that the main role of a truly socialist party is to educate. Fine, but how can you, from your position of putrid insignificance, ever hope to educate the masses, when everything else they hear tells them the opposite with far greater force. I would strongly argue that your present position is suspiciously utopian.

Socialism can be brought about simply by following the example of the USSR. Firstly, a small group of dedicated socialists takes power by means of a coup and then takes the necessary steps to strengthen and modernise the state. (This must come first, because if it doesn’t the revolutionary state will be gobbled up by the forces of reaction). When the state is strong enough to hold its own against hostile and greedy capitalists it must, as the Soviet Union has done, serve its people and work for world revolution. Gradually, slowly, countries will lose their chains and be liberated. Then, and only then, can come about the stateless state, the truly international world.

The process of education takes place when the revolution has taken place; then it can be carried out far more comprehensively and adequately than the SPGB, in its virgin white dogmatism, could ever do. If ever a revolution came along — say, in time of war — would the SPGB take power and seek to carry out this process? I fear not.

Andrew Thorpe 

Dronfield 

Sheffield

REPLY

Mr. Thorpe does not tell us whether he is one of those dedicated “socialists” planning to take state power in a coup, or is simply waiting for the revolution to come along so that he can lend a hand in the “education of the masses”. Whichever, he’s obviously been reading Lenin and Alice in Wonderland and has got the two mixed up.

Historically, minority action has been a feature of revolutions which swept away barriers to the development of capitalism; this was the case in England, France, America and Russia. By the end of the nineteenth century, under the influence of Marx and Engels, insurrection was rejected as a socialist tactic and the need for the working class to gain control of the machinery of government recognised. A minority uprising against the forces of the state would, in 1980, be suicidal folly, as well as a negation of the Marxist view of wage workers as a revolutionary class. Repeating parrot- fashion what Lenin said may conjure up romantic visions in the simple minded, but in unfortunately does nothing to lessen the terrifying power of modern state machines.

Mr. Thorpe considers himself enlightened but rejects the idea that a majority of his fellow workers could ever become class conscious. Lenin may have come to him in a dream, but it is not to individuals or groups of individuals that we must look for a solution to working class problems. The movement for socialism must be a working class movement, dependent upon working class strength and intelligence. It is elitist arrogance to suggest that most workers are not able to accept socialist ideas, and that therefore what is in their interest must be fed to them on spoons.

It is true, as our correspondent states, that capitalist ideology has a firm grip around most workers' throats, but it is not the SPGB alone that will be responsible for the spreading of socialist ideas. The development of the capitalist system itself engenders the idea of its opposite; it is the inherent contradictions of the system, of human need alongside unused resources and waste, that will continue to give rise to the demand for a system based on human cooperation and need. And because socialism is a society of co-operation, the need for individuals to understand and voluntary agree to its operation is obvious.

Needless to say, there is not socialism but capitalism in the Soviet Union. There, as in the West, all the features of an exploitative society are present: class monopoly of the means of production; the dependence of workers on the sale of their mental and physical energies to an employer for a wage or salary; inequalities of wealth and income; and production of commodities for sale and profit. Socialism, on the other hand, will be a world-wide system, without national frontiers or state machines. It is a society that does not "come along" like a 52 bus, and the SPGB certainly rejects the idea that the socialist revolution could ever coincide with working class support for war.

Socialism in debate (1980)

Party News from the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

This speech was contributed by a student who is not a member of the SPGB, to a recent debate at University College, London, on the motion “This House Believes That Socialism is the Incestuous Child of Naive Idealism and Political Tyranny. ”

(The motion was proposed by a prominent member of the National Association for Freedom.)

MR PRESIDENT, IT HAS ALREADY BEEN DEMONSTRATED TO THIS HOUSE, BY MY COLLEAGUE, THAT ALL EXISTING SOCIETIES, INCLUDING RUSSIA AND CHINA ARE ABOUT AS “SOCIALIST” AS THE RED SEA IS RED, SO THE PROPOSERS HAVE PROCEEDED UPON MISCONCEIVED ASSUMPTIONS.

Socialism will be a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.

Today, under capitalism, 10 per cent of the world population own a staggering 90 per cent of the world’s accumulated wealth; and nine of every ten adult humans are selling their time in exchange for what is overtly called a “living wage”. In socialism, everyone will own everything; private property will not exist. Just to take one example of how common ownership will work, the land on this planet will be as available to everyone as the sunlight is today. If we visualise the size of the earth and then remember that the world population could still be stood on the Isle of Wight we’ll realise that the common ownership of land is scarcely going to present any problems.

It follows from a proposition of common ownership that in socialism there will be democratic control of all production and distribution by society as a whole, which would be no problem, even today, with current methods of world communication.

With common ownership and economic democracy a socialist society would produce things to satisfy human needs and not to make a profit. In 1978 the EEC alone destroyed 30,000 tons of cauliflowers, 23,000 tons of tomatoes, 60,000 tons of peaches, 41,000 tons of apples and 16,000 tons of oranges, and this destruction at a time when one third of the people on earth are seriously malnourished because they can’t afford enough food to eat. The watchword of capitalism is “no profit, no production”, in other words food will not even be produced if it cannot be sold at a profit, even if this means that people have to starve as a result. Anyone who believes that capitalism can ever be made to work more humanely is being both naive and idealistic. In socialism there will be no waste or want as production will be solely to satisfy human needs and desires.

In socialism, the maxim “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” will transform the character and quality of human existence. People will be able to choose the sort of work they most enjoy and be creative to the best of their ability. People will be glad to give their best and take the best of everyone else as William Morris describes in his vision of socialism—News From Nowhere— in socialism work will become the ultimate form of art. In socialism we will be building houses, for instance, with a mind to safety, comfort and elegance rather than as now when houses are knocked together with maximum scamping and hideous designs to lower costs and thereby increase profit. Price and profit dictate in capitalism what pleasure and purpose will dictate in socialism.

In return for his or her work, everyone in socialism will have free access to all that is produced, to all services and all entertainments. People will take according to their needs, or more accurately their self-determined needs. As socialism will be a propertyless, moneyless society people will no longer have cause to be greedy or acquisitive. Greed, like envy and theft, is an axiom of capitalism. Who, for example, is going to take home 25 watches just because there is free access when you only need one watch to tell the time? Again, socialist production, unfettered by the need for a market, will be able to produce as much as it wants of anything at any time, so as there will be such continuous supplies and free access, hoarding in socialism will be about as sensible as keeping your own supply of air in polythene bags.

In socialism there will be an abundance of everything pleasant. Lately there has been much journalistic parroting about the earth’s so-called limited resources. One thing the media hacks mysteriously neglected to mention was the modest estimation in a 1978 report of the UNO that the world’s resources are sufficient in potential to feed, clothe and shelter three times the present world population. On the same theme the so-called “energy crisis” is, with all due respect to the Daily Express, simply a crisis about which governments are to take what dividends in the profits of certain markets. Still on the subject of why there will be such an abundance, it should be pointed out that to operate on this plentitude of resources, in socialism, people will be able to exploit the fantastic capacity of industrial technology. We will not have to restrain the use of something like the silicon chip, for fear of causing redundancies, on the contrary a redundancy of human toil in socialism will mean more efficient production and more time for leisure, it will not, as now, be a reason for misery. Even when industrial technology was 100 years less advanced than now, Oscar Wilde had this to say in his essay on The Soul of Man Under Socialism, he said “In socialism, all unintellectual labour, all monotonous dull labour, all labour that deals with unpleasant things and involves dreadful conditions will be done by machinery, and just as trees grow while the countryman is asleep, so while humanity is enjoying itself in cultivated leisure, machinery will be doing the necessary and unpleasant work.”

Apart from the unshackled use of industrial technology on the earth’s resources, people in socialism will also be able to benefit from the work of millions of men and women who had previously been employed in socially useless work under capitalism. The multitudes for instance, who were being trained by their governments in the savagery of war, or who were building death-machines, or who were stockbrokers, insurancemen or bank employees—the list is extensive. Plus those who, under capitalism, were involved in absolutely no work whatsoever, like the unemployed, tramps and, of course, the aristocracy.

For the same reasons that people will be producing such an abundance, production will enjoy paramount efficiency, and, for the greater part of their time, people will be able to do exactly as they please. In socialism, education will be voluntarily undertaken by children and adults because it will be a fascinating and useful pursuit. People will attend schools and colleges to cultivate their interests and refine their thoughts. They will, not, as now, attend to be inculcated from childhood with an orthodox framework of thought, nor will they attend to apprentice themselves as a better caste of wage-slave. Again, on a similar issue, in socialism, science will be used to assist humanity in its pleasure, safety and welfare. It will not be used to invent something like the neutron bomb.

In Socialism the natural beauty of the earth will be uncontaminated by industrial toxic waste. The earth is polluted in this way now as it is a cheaper and therefore more profitable - means of disposal than others. The interests of the whole community will be catered for under socialism and not the interests of a profit-hungry minority.

Socialist society will be void of instability and insecurity. People involved in administration will have the same standing as everyone else, and no reason to try and usurp power. Even if one or two maniacs wanted to, there would be no unemployment or poverty on the back of which anyone could ride to power. People in socialism will have no use for leaders. The terrifying threat of war will be unknown in socialism because there will be no artificial national boundaries, and no governments to squabble over international markets.

Utopia is the ancient Greek word meaning “no place” or “nowhere”, and so, as socialism presently does not exist, it is a Utopia on the world atlas, but it is readily available as soon as the preponderance of people on earth understand what it is, and choose to establish it. Socialism is not the incestuous child of anything. It is as yet unborn. We will not see the birth of this cherished child until development and enlightenment choose to consummate their compatibility.

I urge you to defeat this motion. 

(The motion was lost)

North American grand tour (1980)

Party News from the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

What better to do at the turn of the year than look back at one of the more enjoyable times in 1979. I was fortunate to take a five-week break in the USA and Canada last September and was able to combine a holiday with Party activity. The size of the American continent amazes me; it is a pity that capitalism denies access to its many beautiful places to the majority of people.

First stop on the trip was America’s Hyde Park — Boston Common, a place with a history of political meetings and regularly used by the World Socialist Party of the USA in the past. For a couple of hours I had a good crowd of 150, with plenty of questions. An awkward customer from Texas was soon quietened by those who wanted to hear what we had to say. It was predominantly a young crowd, and the questions were so similar to those we get in this country. The members used the meeting to give away introductory leaflets and handbills advertising the meeting the following day in Faneuil Hall. It is a small world; after the meeting a young girl came up and said she had heard me speaking in Hyde Park during August while on holiday in London. The Pope spoke on Boston Common a week later, but he didn’t take questions.

The members were far too optimistic in hiring Faneuil Hall, which holds about 700. It is a lovely building, a landmark in American history always open to visitors. We did not fill it by any means. There was only a small constant audience although many people came in, took photos of the interior (and occasionally of the speaker) and listened for a short while. My only claim to ‘fame’ in this hall is that here Edward Kennedy recently announced he would be standing for President; he used the same lectern for his notes as I had used.

South to Sullivan County Community College, attached to the State University of New York, for a lecture entitled ‘New Directions in English Politics: Views of a British Marxist’. A small but attentive audience had many questions and points in discussion.

Canada next stop - first Victoria on Vancouver Island. A half-hour TV programme with live questions, including one on the state of the British cotton industry! A two-hour interview with a reporter from the Victoria Times resulted in a reasonable write-up for the Socialist Party of Canada. The indoor meeting arranged by the Victoria Local was very satisfying, some of the audience meeting us for the first time.

A lively two-hour lunchtime session at Victoria University provided questions covering a wide range of subjects. One student, hearing our attitude to Russia, immediately walked out, saying it was the duty of socialists everywhere to support the Soviet Union. A pity he didn’t stay to argue his case.

In Vancouver, Comrade Roddy had arranged a radio and TV show. The radio phone-in programme brought a number of varied questions and many nationalist views from white Canadians concerned about the Vietnamese boat people coming to the American continent. The TV interview lasted only about eight minutes but was in prime time, a programme similar to BBC Nationwide. The interviewer fed some delightful questions which enabled me to cover a lot of ground.

From one side of Canada to the other — next stop Toronto. A young member was keen to have a go outdoors, so we held a meeting. It had been raining all day, but we gathered a few people and it gave him a chance to air his lungs. I feel sure he will be speaking there regularly this summer. Another radio interview with a sympathetic questioner brought my Canadian trip to a close.

Back down to New York for two radio shows within a couple of hours. I had 30 minutes with the Arlene Francis Show, one of the most popular in New York. She had intended to devote a lot of the programme to the British National Health Service and the current agitation in the USA for something similar. When I told the programme producer the socialist attitude to such schemes, the plan was dropped and the time was allocated to questions on our case.

The second radio show lasted for 45 minutes on a station that devotes all its programmes to minority groups. The interviewer covered a tremendous amount of ground, from the Common Market to rising nationalist groups; he was more than surprised at some of my answers. His only regret was that the programme had not gone out live; had this been so, he was sure the lines would have been ringing with questions. Transmission was due the following Sunday, but I had to give way to Fidel Castro who was in New York and took my slot. This is a station where it is hoped to get the WSP another hearing, dealing more with the Western Socialist.

My thanks to all members in the USA and Canada who did so much in arranging meetings and broadcasts. Any other SPGB speakers who can make the trip will find it a refreshing contrast to the constipated attitude in this country to socialist participation on radio and TV.

Cyril May

Grandest larceny (1980)

From the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

In nineteenth century Italy lived one Cesare Lombroso, a Jewish doctor who served for a time with the Italian army. Lombroso spent a lifetime trying to prove that such considerations as the shape of one’s head, the nature and extent of tattooed designs, even an analysis of one’s urine and faeces, were critical factors in the determination of actual or potential criminality. (One of his more enterprising followers — Salsotto — saw significance in his own observation that a surprising number of criminal women were particularly well endowed with hair between the pubes and the umbilicus, and that down on the face was common among women found guilty of infanticide.)

Lombroso was seeking what Christopher Hibbert in his scholarly review of crime and punishment, The Roots of Evil (Penguin Books) described as the “atavistic type — the born or instinctive criminal”. (He — Lombroso — concluded his life’s work with a study of spiritualism.)

As Hibbert has noted, however, Lombroso’s contemporary, the French magistrate Gabriel Tarde, was not impressed. He wrote:

If one examined hundreds of thousands of judges, lawyers, labourers, musicians, taken at random and in various countries, noticing their different characteristics, craniometric, algometric, sphygmographic, graphologic, photographic, etc. as Lombroso has examined hundreds and thousands of criminals, it is extremely probable that we should ascertain facts not less surprising; thus, for instance, we might succeed in finding instinctive lawyers.

(Tarde, Criminalité comparée)

Tarde, who was clearly ahead of his time, believed that the origins of crime were mainly social. But even today, when the more thoughtful might be expected to opt for the reason of a Tarde rather than the shaky premises of a Lombroso, a great many remain reluctant to accept that crime (other than that of a purely pathological nature) is a consequence of our social and economic condition — a result of physical and mental deprivation manifesting itself as poverty, oppression, hunger and insecurity.

This being so, it is unsurprising that the responsibility for crime is so rarely placed where it properly belongs: with the system which spawns its causes — capitalism. So it is also unremarkable that the penal systems of the world, even where they are most ‘enlightened’, should place more emphasis upon punishment and retribution, if not downright indifference and neglect, than upon any recognition that the criminal or young offender is a victim of circumstance.

Institutionalised Theft

It is in the interests of the capitalists that their benefactors, the working class, should remain disabused of any such heresy as the suggestion that capitalism is to blame for criminality. Or, indeed, any other of the social evils for which it is responsible. It follows that they — the capitalists — must do everything in their power to cover up their own culpability. They must disguise as best they can an expropriation of socially produced wealth on a scale so vast as to constitute the grandest of all grand larceny. For the capitalists — sole owners of the means of production and distribution — rob us daily of the fruits of our labour.

Socialists, having as their authority not only the Labour Theory of Value as developed by Karl Marx but their own experience as workers to draw on, know that this is true. Enormous wealth in the form of surplus value is taken from the workers as a class. Acting more or less in concert, and to the virtual exclusion of the seven to ten per cent who constitute the capitalist class, we are responsible for digging the mines, cultivating the land, crewing the merchant fleets, operating the machines of industry, staffing the hospitals, prisons, schools, offices, and all the various agencies of government, local and national. Workers do everything from performing the most dangerous and soul-destroying manual tasks to engineering some capitalist’s tax evasion; from the production of capitalism’s military hardware to the design and construction of its yachts. They are its news gatherers, editors, censors, and its street corner newspaper vendors. They manipulate the businessman’s stocks and shares and they sweep the Stock Exchange floor. They provide capitalism with its armies; they die like flies in its wars. You name it, they do it. And how? By selling their physical and brain power to the highest bidder — if they’re lucky! And for what? Enough to live and reproduce on commensurate with what it costs to ‘educate’ and train them. (So, under the capitalist system we can expect to see the farm labourer working long hours in filthy conditions and in all weathers, receiving perhaps half the wages of, say, the skilled mechanic — who in turn is ruthlessly exploited at the point of production.)

Spirited but Misguided

Many spirited but misguided workers, seeing ahead of them only a miserable life of toil, boredom and relative, if not absolute poverty, take to the more attractive and, as they hope, rewarding path of crime.

What they do not always appreciate is that capitalism has some trumps to play against them from the start; cards with the words ‘police’, ‘judges’, ‘prison’, ‘army’ and so on indelibly stamped upon them. For under the rales of capitalism, theft, coercion and retribution are the exclusive prerogatives of the capitalist ruling class. (Mass killing, for example, is OK provided it is authorised by the State — the executive arm of the ruling class — and sanctified with a drum-head service.)

Workers, then, must be kept in their place. Should they, by their actions, threaten the ‘right’ of the capitalists to own everything, then that place is prison or some other ‘corrective training’ establishment. Once inside (and this can be true even of your friendly neighbourhood police cell these days), almost anything goes, from the warder’s boot to the administration of Largactil. (This extremely powerful sedative, otherwise known as chlorpromazine, if taken in large doses can cause “liver and kidney failure, mental and physical infirmity” [New Statesman, 2.11.79], Prisoners commonly refer to it as the ‘liquid cosh’.) Such retributive indignities as three to a cell and slopping- out are the small change of a system which, as the recent May Committee’s report has indicated, is close to breakdown.

Cant and Hypocrisy

As if this state of affairs was not already vicious enough, we have recently been regaled with the sight on television of the Tory faithful, in a condition approaching orgasm, adoring a smirking William Whitelaw as he outlines his plans for his spanking new Special Detention Centres, in which certain categories of young offender will receive ‘short, sharp shock treatment’. There can be few things in British politics quite as repulsive as your Tory redneck and his mate when they scent blood. (In this respect they have nothing to teach the dogs with which they torment defenceless wild animals.) All in all, then, just one more demonstration — if any were needed — of the indifference of capitalism’s lackeys to the true plight of the disadvantaged.

Hypocrisy is another unlovely characteristic of our masters’ customary behaviour, especially as it relates to ‘law and order’ — the rallying cry of the politician the world over. Those who welcome the bludgeons of the police Special Patrol Group when deployed against demonstrators or picketing workers can be relied upon to bare their fangs and snarl for revenge when confronted with the ‘bower boots’ of the football ‘hooligan’. As the poet A.E. Houseman put it: “Some can gaze and not be sick,/But I could never learn the trick.”

It is plain, then, that workers are confronted with an exacting but essential task - one which calls for an all-out effort; first, to understand what Marx and his contemporaries meant by the ‘class nature of society’, and then, in the light of this understanding, correctly to interpret the behaviour of those who stand to profit most from capitalism, as set against the response of those for whom it can offer nothing but suffering. Then, and then only, will workers find themselves asking the right questions.

And the most penetrating, if by this time the most rhetorical, must be: ‘Who under capitalism are the real crooks; and who the true victims?’

Richard Cooper

Political Notebook: Nationalised Democracy (1980)

The Political Notebook Column from the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

NATIONALISED DEMOCRACY 

British Leyland, as a state-run industry, is said to be owned by the public. Members of ‘the public’ who neither own state bonds nor gain from BL’s profits would be right to conclude that nationalisation is just another way of running capitalism in the interest of the capitalists. According to the Labour Party, however, nationalisation benefits us all, partly because, unlike in private industry where a few bosses make decisions, in state-run enterprises ‘the public’ appoints administrators like Sir Michael Edwardes, chairman of British Leyland. This public appointment, so the myth goes, makes nationalised industries more democratic.

Two men who probably voted Labour at the last election are Terry Duffy, president of the AEWU and Derek Robinson, a sacked shop steward who was chairman of the Leyland Combine Trade Union Committee which issued a pamphlet entitled The Edwardes Plan and Your Job, seeking to persuade the BL workers not to accept the management’s plans for the contraction of the company.

If ‘industrial democracy’ means anything it must include the freedom of people like Derek Robinson to express their views as forcefully as they wish. But Robinson was sacked on the grounds that the distribution of his pamphlet was disruptive. Terry Duffy, Robinson’s union leader, refused to call an official strike to protect Robinson against this clear victimisation by a management which is supposedly representative of ‘the public’ and supposedly a part of Labour’s more democratic industrial framework. Terry Duffy, his fellow leaders of the engineering union and Derek Robinson — the left wing militant — should begin to question the validity of ideals which equate state ownership with socialism.

Robinson’s Reforms

Alas, when we come to read Robinson’s pamphlet we find a collection of sterile proposals for the continuation of capitalist production, but in a benevolent guise. He argues for increased investment in BL, an extensive sales campaign to boost BL’s profits, the introduction of new technical developments, better wages and conditions and — a typical dose of left-wing nationalism — the imposition of import controls:

The UK’s imports are running way above those of any other country with a motor industry of its own. And they are increasing.

In the section in which he advises the workers at BL about what must be done, Robinson states that:

Around the demands for ‘the right to work’ and ‘BL must be saved’ we must develop a campaign that involves every BL worker, every component worker and the whole labour movement . . .  In the interests of our members, workers generally, and in the national interest, Britain’s manufacturing base must be defended. (His emphasis)

It would do Derek Robinson no harm to contemplate a few economic realities during his period of enforced retirement. There is no right to work, just the employer’s right to exploit your labour, should it be profitable to do so. This is so whether capital is privately or state owned. ‘BL must be saved’ is the slogan of the slave who is dedicated to the retention of his master’s property, as is the patriotic claptrap about the ‘national interest’. Instead of devising elaborate schemes to put the capitalists’ house in order, Robinson would do better to campaign for a society in which cars are produced, if they are produced at all, because they are needed and not because they are profitable.

CONSTITUTIONAL CONTORTIONS

Article 13 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China states that:

Speaking out freely, airing views fully, holding great debates and writing big-character posters are new forms of carrying on socialist revolution created by the masses of the people. The state shall ensure to the masses the right to use these forms to create a political situation in which there are both centralism and democracy, both discipline and freedom, both unity of will and personal ease of mind and liveliness . . .

According to the Peking Daily, on 2 December guards were stationed on the so-called Democracy Wall in Peking because the wall has been a forum for the sale of magazines criticising the government and the Communist Party. Such criticism, it seems, takes the words of Article 13 too literally and risks imprisonment for doing what is constitutionally legal. Are there any Maoists who would care to write in and tell us that the Chinese dissidents are simply CIA hirelings plotting to subvert the Thatcher-loving communist dictatorship.

MORE VODKACOLONISATION

A very interesting report has been issued by Charles Levinson, general secretary of the International Federation of the Chemical, Energy and General Workers’ Union. In it he points out that between 1971 and 1975 400,000 jobs were lost in Europe’s synthetic fibres industry because of cheap imports from Eastern Europe, where workers are not able to organise in free trade unions to improve the price of their labour-power. The benefit of importing from the Soviet Union and its satellites, says Levinson, is that there are

. . . adequate supplies of cheap, non-militant labour . . . workers belong to the state-run organisations whose officials are appointed and whose policies are set by the same control committee which are concluding agreements with the capitalist firms.

PIN-STRIPES AT THE TUC

A minor event at the TUC Headquarters has received hardly any media attention. For some years the British Foreign Office has had close relations with the International Department of the TUC. As from this month, the FO will have a permanent member of staff at the TUC to ensure close collaboration between the unions and the government. So those of you who mistakenly believed that the unions were being manipulated by Russian spies can rest safely in your beds in the knowledge that it is being manipulated by patriotic chappies from Lord Carrington’s Foreign Office.

Steve Coleman

The decade ahead — socialism or chaos (1980)

From the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagine a history book written one hundred years from now: “The 1970s was the last decade in which the majority of the world’s population acquiesced to what was known as the capitalist system. In the early eighties the world socialist movement began to grow, inspired by the insoluble contradictions of the profit system. By 1986 socialists were in a majority in most of the advanced capitalist countries. In no time at all they developed into a majority of the world’s population, and society was ready for the great revolution which marked the beginning of social civilisation.” We are free to dream of success in the coming decade, but reality presents us with the prospect of further frustration for our cause. Capitalism has a considerable capacity to reform itself and so to deceive workers that symptoms and not cause are the source of social problems. The means of communication are owned and controlled by our class enemy; to break their monopoly over the minds of the working class is a formidable task.

If this is not to be the decade in which social freedom is demanded by humanity, then it is inevitable that the majority of the earth’s population will continue to consent to capitalism. It will mean that, as in the 1970s, the years before us will be years of misery, degradation and exploitation for the working class. This is inevitable in a class-divided society in which one class possesses but does not produce and another class produces and does not possess. Without claiming the power of clairvoyancy, let us attempt to look forward into the 1980s and predict how capitalism may develop.

In the 1970s there was much talk of the unhealthy ecological consequences of industrial waste and pollution of the environment. The air in the big cities is filthy, houses are overcrowded and designed to be dull and cheap, and our lives are endangered by the unsafe development of nuclear energy. Reform groups like Friends of the Earth and the Ecology Party have made much noise about the need to make society clean, healthy and pleasant to live in. Some efforts, both technological and legislative, will no doubt be made to deal with the effects of pollution and waste. However, it can be said with certainty that any environmental improvements will come second to the accumulation of profits by the capitalist class. It is possible that by 1990 there will be a reduction in the pollution of the atmosphere, but this will be because ‘clean air’ is more efficient for capitalism, not because it is more pleasant for workers. With the present dangers involved in the production of nuclear power, the 1980s could witness minor — or even major — nuclear disasters. But why should capitalists invest money in alternative energy research, such as solar energy, when it is cheaper to carry on with nuclear power and risk human lives? Within the next ten years, urban poverty and deprivation will not vanish. Overcrowding, homelessness, alienated lifestyles, social insecurity and powerlessness over our local environment will still face workers everywhere.

The insane slaughter of people by people, called war (it is in fact legalised murder), will occur again and again in the next decade. It is not only nuclear war that socialists oppose, as if ‘conventional’ wars like 1939-45 and Vietnam are somehow acceptable. Every drop of working class blood which is shed in defence of the capitalists’ raw materials and markets is a profound condemnation of the profit system. Will Russia and China intensify their diplomatic skirmishes? Will America and Russia fight it out over the oil in the Middle East? How many of us will die in the process? Cambodia, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Iran, the Spanish Sahara . . .  these today, where tomorrow? In Ireland we can be sure that the English capitalists who have investments to protect will not give up without a bloody fight. We can expect not only the ‘legalised’, ‘respectable’ violence of the capitalist states but the senseless terrorism of would-be powers like the IRA and the PLO. The 1980s could be the decade in which all of us, socialists and defenders of capitalism, workers and capitalists, are destroyed by the ultimate madness of the nuclear bomb. Only a society without the need of war can prevent the possibility of mass destruction, the alternative to it is to live in fear in the years ahead.

One-third of the world’s population is currently malnourished. Despite the existence of charities, which are always one step behind the growth of poverty, one can be sure that this problem will not be eradicated in the decade ahead. Think about what this means: there is a potential for the production of an abundance of food, enough to feed us all three times over on Western standards, but a third of humanity will starve because it is more profitable to destroy food than to give it to the hungry. Think of the hideous pictures of children dying of malnutrition and it will be impossible not to conclude that to allow capitalism to continue is to be responsible for such terrible suffering.

Poverty is not confined to distant lands which can only be observed on TV screens. In Britain workers are still faced with the problem of making ends meet. Of course the standard of comfort has improved, but compared with the life which is possible, can we honestly say that workers are better off? The social services which Labour politicians are constantly telling workers to be thankful for are presently being cut because the government cannot afford to pay for them. ‘Free’ health treatment, cheap school dinners and leisure centres are some of the social facilities which have been thrown as crumbs to the working class and are now being taken away. By 1990, how much of the so-called Welfare State will have been dismantled? When capitalism faces a crisis, workers’ conditions suffer. Capitalism itself will not collapse, for booms always follow slumps, but even if the 1980s is a decade of almost permanent boom (which is unlikely) this will not enable the politicians to solve a single problem mentioned in this article. If you or your relatives are sixty years old, employed and reasonably satisfied with your life at the moment, you might be seventy, living on a pittance of a pension and hardly able to survive in ten years time. Now is the time to do something about it.

Inflation has been one of the significant problems of the 1970s. As the Socialist Standard has consistently demonstrated, inflation is a government-produced problem, not an inevitable feature of capitalism. The present Tory government has so far been totally incapable of getting rid of inflation, and it is probable that governments will continue to inflate the currency as a means of temporarily side-tracking some of their economic problems. It is possible that the 1980s will see the final abandonment of the bogus theories of J.M. Keynes, but what will the economists put in their place? They will be forced to find another set of economic nonsense to enable them to produce incorrect predictions, theories which do not correspond with economic reality, and ‘solutions’ which invariably fail. Is it too optimistic to hope that more economists will turn to the writings of Marx and discover that the best remedy for economic problems is to abolish capitalism?

The 1980s will be the decade of the so-called New Technology. An article in the November 1979 Socialist Standard demonstrated the falsity of certain hysterical forecasts about the effects of the silicon chip. Ultimately, machinery designed to increase productivity will be introduced despite attempts by the unions to prevent it. What an absurd system of society this is, in which people suffer hardships because more can be produced more quickly. By 1990 there will still be unemployment (in Britain it it predicted to reach the two million mark in the first half of the decade) and there will still be politicians promising to bring about ‘full employment’. But in a society in which men and women are employed only when their labour results in profit for an employer there can be no avoiding fluctuating levels of unemployment. Some Tory MPs have suggested that unemployed workers should be ‘forced’ to accept any job offered rather than be given social security payments. So consider that if today you are employed in an average-wage, moderately satisfying job, by 1990 the system may make you unemployed and forced either to accept a marked fall in living standards or to accept an unpleasant occupation. The alternative to this is to consider not the eradication of unemployment but the abolition of employment as such.

Thirty-two years ago George Orwell wrote his classic political novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Many of the aspects of that frightening totalitarian state are present today: the power blocs, the invasion of privacy, the doublespeak, the creeping increase in police powers. In the state capitalist countries the similarity is even more striking — there, dissidents are tortured and the state machine is all embracing. The concentration of real power into fewer and fewer hands shows every sign of increasing up to and beyond 1984. The relatively innocent rise of punk rock and its lyrics of despair was the 1970s’ indication of the alienation and cynicism of youth; it could be a sign of more sinister movements to come. The two main political parties continue to defend the same system while pretending to be different. Whether the two-party one-voice system carries on throughout the 1980s or whether new pro-capitalist parties come into being, we can confidently predict that there will only be political dead ends so long as the majority class places faith in leaders.

The 1980s, like all other decades, will have no shortage of radicals, pseudo-socialists and working class heroes to suggest half-baked programmes based upon reformist demands and trendy ideas. The left, posing as political progressives, will continue to advocate their incoherent and anti-socialist policies, squandering the energies of those workers who join them in search of an alternative to the status quo.

It is for ordinary men and women like ourselves to determine the course of the 1980s. The choice is between pollution, housing problems, starvation, social service cuts, poverty, inflation, unemployment and war —all socially created problems - and the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution.

A happy (and socialist) New Year.

Steve Coleman

The seventies (1980)

From the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

As The Seventies close, do you remember the prosings of journalists and politicians ten years ago? A new era was dawning. The white heat of the technological revolution was going to make everything different. The common people were about to enter a new age of prosperity and happiness — or so we were told. It seems a little far-fetched now, doesn’t it?

In fact, of course, the economic and social relations of capitalism are totally unchanged. The small owning class still faces the large working class in irreconcilable antagonism at home, while across the world each state, governed by its ruling class, prowls the economic and military jungle seeking its prey.

Common Market

These fundamental realities express themselves in terms of the various issues which rise to prominence from time to time, but although different episodes pass across the screen, the projector is unchanged. The European Economic Community is one such episode, about which we have been exhorted to concern ourselves. The British ruling class found itself in a quandary for two reasons. The British Empire, with its secure overseas markets for British products, finally disintegrated in the fifties and sixties. Where could substitute markets be found? The only obvious answer was for Britain to join the six Western European countries who had combined to form a ‘common market’.

The other quandary of British capitalism urged the ruling class in the same direction. British foreign policy for at least half a millenium has been devoted to protecting the trading position of London and the Thames from the competition of ports opposite to them across the North Sea in the Belgian/Dutch Low Countries. For centuries Britain repeatedly sent forces to help those countries obtain or safeguard their independence from the great powers which were currently ruling or threatening them — whether France, Spain, Austria or Germany. Expeditions in pursuit of this commercial and strategic imperative were sent to the Low Countries in the time of Philip of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler. But then, after the Second World War, Britain was no longer powerful enough to prevent the formation of the EEC and the consequent linking of the Low Countries ports with the industrial power of France, West Germany and Italy.

Rotterdam’s port flourished as London’s declined. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em; and British capitalism abandoned its long-held distaste for ‘European entanglements’ and joined the Common Market. The referendum held years later in Great Britain on the subject was a mere formality. The British ruling class had decided to go in (more enthusiasm for joining was found among the bigger firms and less among the smaller, but the bigger firms naturally carried the day): so the media told the voters what to think, the campaign for going in spent vastly more money that the campaign for staying out, and (in strict impartiality) three leaflets were distributed to every voter in the country, one putting the reasons for staying out and two putting the case for going in.

The electorate is overwhelmingly working class, but it is a working class not understanding capitalism and therefore not accepting socialism — and, lacking such understanding, it can be pressurised into voting how the capitalist class currently wants it to. So a large majority voted for joining the EEC. Socialists took no part in the debate; our advice would in any case be ignored by the ruling class, and we are dedicated to the abolition of capitalism, not the solution of its successive problems.

Inflation

The other main domestic issues in the seventies were of slightly longer lineage. Keynes advised a moderate continuous inflation as a means of stimulating production and profit (as he hoped) by accentuating the booms and moderating the slumps. This has been put into operation as deliberate policy by every government since 1935, though it has been subjected to routine attacks by every opposition in the same period. So every party promises to end inflation as a general election approaches, and every government cold-bloodedly continues it after the election. This leads to such farces as Margaret Thatcher’s current claims that the government is putting prices up in order to fight inflation, as if you might fight dishonesty by telling more lies or save whales by stepping up their slaughter.

Inflation not only reduces wages every week — one might almost say every day it is also a weapon in the hands of the big capitalist as against the citizen who cherishes hopes of becoming a small rentier or coupon-clipper. For despite the efforts of employers to pay employees only as much as they have to spend on maintaining themselves, thereby enforcing continued attendance at the factory or office; and despite the efforts of governments to equalise the purchasing power of wages by penalising the unmarried and the childless in favour of those married and bringing up children (by income tax adjustments, heavy taxes on items such as beer, tobacco, cars, cameras and so on, balanced by handouts such as children’s allowances, family income supplements) -- despite all these efforts, some workers by fortunate chance or by exceptional habits were able to put by sums of money in the old Post Office Savings Bank or building societies.

Inflation destroys this money, thus reducing workers again to the absolute necessity of selling their labour-power. Money put into National Savings by loyal (or misguided) workers in, say, 1930, would come out now, including all the interest which has accrued, at not much more than a tenth of its value in real terms. So inflation, which both reduces wages and destroys workers’ savings, has been an abiding feature of capitalist policy, both Labour and Conservative, for forty-five years now.

Trade Unions

If you are standing on a ‘down’ escalator, you have to walk continually upwards in order to stay in the same place. So combinations of workers in times of inflation have to fight continually, not to obtain any better pay but merely to avoid a declining standard of living. In capitalism as it has developed over the centuries in Britain, struggles to force prices (including wages) up or down are endemic, even in times when the currency is stable. When the currency is being rapidly devalued, as at present, it cannot be expected that such struggles will be any fewer. Prisoners kept in the hold of a ship will make strenuous efforts to reach the hatchway when the ship is sinking. These attempts by workers to increase the price of their labour-power (or avoid its decline) are seized on by the media as evidence of innate wickedness and depravity; but attempts by companies to increase the prices of their products are depicted as part of the law of nature.

The Grocer magazine, for example, records each week the latest increases in the price of food, each the result of a successful strike by the suppliers the withholding of supplies at the lower price and their availability only at the higher price — with never a word as to the ‘depraved’ or ‘evil’ nature revealed by such increased demands. Having filled the media with attacks on workers who are trying to restore their standard of living to what they thought they had agreed to work for a year ago, capitalist propagandists can then make our flesh creep with tales of the overweening powers of the trade unions. The less bright trade union leaders and militants, flattered by this picture of their own importance, sometimes accept it as true; but it remains as completely fictitious as Hitler’s diatribes about the overweening powers of the Jews in Germany in the 1930s. Both fictions had the same origin: to denounce the over-great powers of your adversaries both prepares the ground for, and justifies, your subsequent attacks on them.

Abroad

Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, after fourteen years of settler rule and nearly total ostracism, is about to follow the great majority of African states and become a developing capitalist nation in which the Zimbabwean capitalist class will decide whether its profits are better served by a Western-style system with several capitalist parties contending for power, or by one-party rule. Neither variety of political superstructure on the capitalist basis will have the support of socialists.

The seventies saw the United States finally disengage itself from Vietnam, and the triumph in Vietnam of capitalism operating through a police state. The passions aroused by several decades of war in that unhappy country led to perhaps hundreds of thousands of those who backed the wrong side being driven out by the new ruling class. Thousands of these boat people must have drowned. So another country joined what fanciful British newspaper articles are still calling the ‘monolithic’ and ‘communist’ section of the world: though a moment’s consideration reveals that it is neither communist nor monolithic. The majority of the boat people, for example, were Chinese; since China is now Vietnam’s deadly enemy, a potential fifth column had to be, and was, extirpated. Cambodia has now become Vietnam’s Vietnam, with 100,000 or more Viet troops (with Russian supplies) supporting one puppet, Heng Samrin, while China upholds another, Pol Pot — amid the corpses, it is thought, of three million Cambodians who were unfortunate enough to be caught up in the capitalist rivalries of the ‘monolithic Eastern bloc’, tainted by the destabilising influence of America.

Where now are the progressive thinkers who were assuring us during the seventies that all would be well in that part of the world if street demonstrations and agitation forced the US forces to leave Vietnam? They are quiet at present, until the next recurring problem of the capitalist world demands a similar facile ‘solution’ which will in fact merely lead on to the next problem while capitalism lasts.

Energy

Another issue which has spawned millions of words in the decade is the ‘energy crisis’. Oil in its easily available form will, some experts tell us, run out in the foreseeable future, further supplies will have to come from oil-bearing shales and extraction will cost more. The forecast has been followed by a higher price of oil (in real terms), and other forms of energy such as coal have also become more expensive in pursuit of oil, which has a commanding share of the market. (Hence coal miners are somewhat higher in the league table of wage-earners, which has led to cries of ‘the revolution is round the corner’ from some and ‘disaster is upon us’ from others — both equally wide of the mark.)

Energy will not run out. Capitalism is endlessly inventive in its pursuit of profit. A planet consisting of a red-hot mass of molten rocks just below the surface — actually breaking through the crust regularly in some areas and more sporadically in others — surrounded by continuous tides, rivers, and winds of enormous power, and bathed by a rotating but continuous deluge of sunshine, is not going to expire from lack of energy, though new ways of making it available will be employed. Socialism would dispel any worries about energy even more quickly, the oil, coal, gas and so on consumed by the world’s enormous military forces and preparations for the next war, by the police, prison and psychiatric services, by the financial and profit-taking mechanisms of capitalism is simply wasted, and under socialism would be used to feed, clothe and house humanity.

So farewell to the seventies. At least the empty and futile hyperbole employed to welcome the decade ten years ago should make us chary of accepting similar verbosity about the eighties,

Alwyn Edgar

That 17 per cent bank rate (1980)

From the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Companies borrowing from banks and householders with building society mortgages naturally like interest rates to be low. So the government’s announcement that the Bank of England minimum lending rate had gone up to 17 per cent, an all-time record, was greeted with an outcry from the borrowers and jeers from the Labour opposition.

But this is only the latest incident in the story of high interest rates. When the rate went up to 7 per cent under the Tories between 1951 and 1964 (then a post-war record), Harold Wilson promised that the next Labour government would “end the present government’s doctrinaire policy of high interest rates”. But under the Labour government between 1964 and 1970 it reached 8 per cent (Tory jeers), making nonsense of George Brown’s hope to see mortgage rates down to 3 per cent. The next post-war high bank rate was 13 per cent under the Tories between 1970 and 1974 (Labour jeers).

Again the Labour Party, in its February 1974 election programme, attacked Tory failure to keep interest rates down; but while the Labour Party was in office between 1974 and 1979 the bank rate went up to 15 per cent (Tory jeers).

It was at the October 1974 general election that Margaret Thatcher promised to keep mortgage interest below 9½ per cent — now it is 15 per cent. So do governments control interest rates and fix them at whatever level they choose? Margaret Thatcher now says no. Replying to Jim Callaghan in the House of Commons on 15 November, she said:

He must not run away with the idea that interest rates are just determined by the government.

She explained that the rates rise when too many people, companies and the government itself are borrowing. She added:

They are determined by the activities of ordinary men and women demanding wages in excess of output and then striking, and also borrowing to keep going.

As the Tory election programme had promised that the government would help to keep interest rates down by borrowing less, Sir Geoffrey Howe had to explain why the government finds itself compelled to borrow more. He said it was due to strikes which had “delayed the collection of VAT and telephone bills. At the peak the arrears on telephone bills are expected to reach £1,000 million.” (House of Commons, 15 November).

The Labour Party has always believed that it could keep interest rates down. A report adopted by its party conference in 1944 promised ‘cheap money’ permanently. “The Chancellor should have statutory powers to require any bank to lend him any sum he likes, for as long as he likes, and on what terms he chooses.”

They appear not to have noticed that the ability of banks to lend to the government depends on offering interest high enough to attract deposits to the banks, which would be impossible if the banks had to lend to the government at artificially low rates.

When Margaret Thatcher says that governments do not determine interest rates she is stating a half-truth. It is true in the sense that Bank of England lending rates merely reflect what is going on in the money market, but it ignores the effect on interest rates of inflation, for which the government itself is responsible.

In the nineteenth century when there was no inflation, bank rate was generally less than a third of what it is now, rising to peaks at times of crisis when companies were forced to borrow at high rates to save themselves from bankruptcy. Inflation has changed the conditions for borrowers and lenders. If prices rise by, say, 25 per cent a year, the purchasing power of money at the end of a year is reduced by 20 per cent.

If someone with £100 lends it at 25 per cent, at the end of a year they have £125, but its original purchasing power is reduced to £100. They will have lent at no real interest at all. To get any real interest they have to lend at something above the rate of inflation. This is why in the past twenty years interest rates have reached record peaks. The responsibility lies with the Labour and Tory governments who have pursued a policy of continuous inflation.

In Germany and Switzerland, where inflation rates are much lower than in Britain, ‘bank rates’ are 6 per cent and 4½ per cent. But in Germany during the hyperinflation of the 1920s people were borrowing at rates of hundreds per cent a month. Inflation, as Marx showed, is caused by an excess issue of paper money. His view is supported by abundant evidence; whenever and wherever excess issue has been stopped, the price rise has been halted.

While Denis Healey was Chancellor, the Bank of England, under his control, printed and put into circulation an additional £4,550 million of notes, and the cost of living doubled. This additional money goes into government revenue and is spent. In 1978 Denis Healey, declaring his determination to curb inflation, made speeches in which he said, “We are not printing money now”. Margaret Thatcher has repeated it in exactly the same words. If inflation results from an excess issue of ‘money’, and if the Labour government in 1978 and the Tory government in 1979 are ‘not now printing money’, why have prices continued to rise?

Here we come to a piece of confusion created by economists and politicians. When governments say they are ‘not printing money’, they are not talking about the excess issue of notes but what they call ‘money supply’, which consists predominantly of bank deposits. In the week in which Margaret Thatcher said “we are not printing money”, the Bank of England printed and issued an additional £150 million of notes. In the first seven months of Tory government the Bank’s note issue went up by £625 million.

In face of all the evidence, they deny that the excess issue of notes has any effect on the price level. So during all the time that governments have been claiming to curb inflation they have gone on promoting it — incidentally causing interest rates to be high.

Workers who think how happy they would be if prices went down instead of up and if mortgage rates were very low are mistaken. They should look at the inter-war years. Prices, including house prices, were only a fraction of what they are now, but so were wages. There were at least as many people homeless, and workers unable to afford to buy a house or take out a mortgage or rent decent accommodation. For the workers, capitalism is just as intolerable without inflation as with it, with high interest rates or low.

Edgar Hardcastle

The World on Our Backs (1980)

Book Review from the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The World on Our Backs by Malcolm Pitt, Lawrence & Wishart, £2.95

The 1972 Miners' strike was classic confirmation of the socialist case on industrial action: by combining in unions, and by appropriate use of the strike weapon, workers can force their capitalist employers to disgorge a little more of the wealth taken from them in the process of exploitation.

This book, written by one of the Kent miners, is a somewhat anecdotal account of their picketing of power stations and coal depots in the South East, and particularly the London area, in the course of the strike. It was of course this picketing which, by closing down the power stations, eventually forced the Conservative government of the time to back down through the face-saving formula of a Court of Enquiry. In record time—the strike was still in progress—the miners were awarded a substantial wage increase, way outside the limits the government was trying to impose.

Normally, the longer a strike goes on the less chance there is of a successful outcome, but in this case the miners enjoyed considerable public sympathy, which deterred the government from taking tough action (such as using the troops to move coal). Above all the strikers benefitted from the solidarity of transport workers, without whose refusal to cross picket lines the power stations would not have been closed.

A point which is often overlooked regarding the strike is that it was essentially defensive: most miners had suffered a cut in their living standards and were merely demanding that a previous standard be restored. As Pitt makes clear, many faceworkers, especially in Yorkshire, Nottingham and Kent were actually earning less money than they had been five years previously—thanks to a new wage structure introduced with the agreement of the National Union of Miners which essentially only benefitted face workers in low productivity areas. It was this that made the miners so determined to fight.

According to Pitt (who joined the so-called Communist Party in 1974) "the miners' determined offensive on the picket line sparked off a whole process of united trade union action that opened up a completely new stage in the progress of the working class to Socialism". This is nonsense. The miners' strike of 1972 (and of 1974) was purely defensive action on the issue of wages. Necessary, heroic even, but still nothing to do with socialism—the abolition of the wages system by political action. Until socialism is achieved trade union activity, including strikes, will be necessary, just to maintain living standards. However, such running fast to stand still will not remain forever the objective which the working class sets itself.

Adam Buick

Fuzzing the Issues (1980)

From the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is probably fair to say that public lack of confidence in the police is more widespread now than it has been for some years. The reasons for this are a crop of cases which go well beyond the sporadic exposures of police corruption and reveal violent handling by the police of prisoners and others. During an anti-National Front demonstration in Southall, Blair Peach died after being beaten around the head, and witnesses have stated that it was policemen who did the beating. The Kirkby division of Merseyside police has figured in several allegations of brutality: in one case a man died who had been arrested for drunkenness, while in another, the victim 'only' had his spleen and one kidney removed after being 'interviewed' by the arresting officers. In Glasgow a policeman resigned in disgust at the way other officers had treated a man who died in police custody. 

Part of the disquiet is due to the way such accusations are dealt with, for it is the police who police the police. In the Glasgow case, a sergeant was charged with culpable homicide and acquitted, but usually an internal inquiry is all that takes place. After the Blair Peach incident, a member of the Special Patrol Group, an 'elite' anti-demo squad, was suspended from duty, but nobody has been charged with murder or even assault. 

'Accountability' is a word beloved by liberal supporters of capitalism when discussing the police force. If public rather than internal inquiries were held, they argue, the police would be seen to be answerable and subject to the laws of the land just like ordinary citizens. Even politicians who as a rule staunchly support police actions will sometimes join in the call for a public inquiry, since it will simply 'clear the police's name'. 

Such demands can be placed in their proper perspective if we ask ourselves exactly what capitalism wants from its police force. The police exist to enforce the laws promulgated by the state with the aim of conserving the capitalists' rnonopoly of the means of production. The police must therefore be as efficient as possible in protecting property (which means predominantly capitalist property) and in apprehending those who take what legally belongs to someone else. Whether such efficiency expresses itself in bending the law and framing innocent people is of no concern unless it becomes sa blatant that public respect for the police is called into question. 

For the capitalists also want the workers — those excluded from owning more than insignificant amounts of property — to regard the police as the protectors of all, high or low. The police arrest not only the perpetrators of bank frauds but also those who mug old age pensioners in the street. They protect individual workers from the wrath and potential violence of picket lines, and also control crowds and keep the peace at football matches. We are, the conventional wisdom runs, all equal before the law, and the police — who are subject to it themselves — do not discriminate in the way they enforce it. 

The capitalists and their apologists scoff at any suggestion that such a description is a myth, and staunchly uphold the honesty and reliability of the police. When this honesty is called into question, it is defended even more strenuously. But just occasionally it becomes impossible to keep up the pretence any longer, and the bent or brutal copper is made an example of and made to resign — or even sent to prison for a stretch. Members of the police force who are found out in this way are characterised as 'rotten apples', the assumption being that such behaviour is quite alien to the vast majority of the police. 

However, the view that the rotten apples are few and far between simply isn't supported by the evidence. An American commission investigating police corruption in 1970 discovered that in one section of Brooklyn, 73 out of 75 policemen were regularly taking small bribes from gamblers and supermarkets for turning a blind eye to lawbreaking. The way bent policemen are exposed is so often the result of chance that many must go undetected, since they never make a crucial slip. For example, Soho's notorious Sergeant Challenor was only exposed in 1963 because one of the people he tried to fit up was an active member of the National Council for Civil Liberties. (Challenor was charged with perverting the course of justice but found unfit to plead through 'insanity'.) 

Such framing of the innocent may happen because of the pressures on the police. Financial reward, promotion and improved status are usually achieved in the force by results — which means a large number of arrests and convictions. Policemen are workers who are forced to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage, and they suffer all the poverty and oppression entailed by such a status. If the prospects for a wage increase will be assisted by a higher rate of solved cases, then the temptation may be hard to resist to bend the rules a little, and gradually to do so more and more. 

The main pressures on the police, however, are due to the kind of society in which they and we live. A society based, as capitalism is, on oppression, violence and inequality will yield crime and policing in its own image. A century and a quarter ago, Karl Marx wondered "what a state of society is that which knows of no better instrument for its own defence than the hangrnan?" And what a state of society is that which relies for its defence on violence and corruption on the part of those who are supposed to ensure the safety of all its citizens? The bent copper — whether one who frames the innocent or takes bribes from lawbreakers — is merely responding to the cut-throat, dog eat dog ethics of capitalism. 

But a police force without corruption — were such a thing possible — would still be an instrument of class warfare, designed to protect the capitalist class's monopoly of property and power. This is seen most starkly in the way the police harass pickets and give protection to blacklegs, thus helping to blunt the efficacy of strike action. Grunwick was just one of a long line of such cases. To expect capitalist laws and capitalist police to act in any other way is utopian. The way the law defends property was revealed in a judgement against squatters handed down by Lord Denning in 1971: 

If homelessness were once admitted as a defence to trespass, no one's house could be safe . . .  the courts must, for the sake of law and order, take a firm stand. They must refuse to admit the plea of necessity to the hungry and the homeless, and trust that their distress will be relieved by the charitable and the good."

(Quoted in J.A.G. Griffith, The Politics of the Judiciary)

Rarely has ruling class interest be en expressed so transparently. 

Besides the possibility of being framed or beaten up, anyone who comes into contact with the police runs the risk of being held in prison while awaiting trial. Judges usually accept police opposition to bail, even where, should the verdict be guilty, the sentence will not be a custodial one. One such case is summarised by Barry Cox in Civil Liberties in Britain: 

A man was charged with conspiring to rob and possession of a firearm. He had no previous convictions, yet the police successfully opposed bail four times before they withdrew their objections — after the defendant had spent a month in prison. At his trial the judge stopped the hearing and directed the jury to acquit him. But by then he had lost his job and council house, his wife had had a mental breakdown and his son was having to have psychiatric treatment.

It is also worth pointing out the extent to which the police actually create the law as well as enforce it. Picketing is a case in point — the law allows much latitude to the police to decide on the spot what does and does not constitute reasonable picketing. The conspiracy laws are so all-embracing that they allow the police to charge people on suspicion that they planned to commit an offence — even if they don't actually commit it. The centuries-old vagrancy laws come close to giving the police carte blanche to arrest anyone on 'suspicion' that they may be intending to commit an offence, and they have in recent years been interpreted in a racist manner as a device to keep young black people off the streets.

There are also things which the police do without legal justification. Nobody is obliged to go to a police station unless they have been arrested , not even to 'help police with their inquiries'. There is in law no such thing as a general warrant — but the police are in practice allowed to search houses for anything incriminating, not just for items connected with a specific crime. It is not illegal to hold meetings in the street — but that didn't stop two Socialist Party of Great Britain members in Bolton in September from being charged with obstructing the highway. Such is the capitalist concept of freedom of speech, and such is the grubby work of enforcing capitalism 's laws. 

Workers should reject the liberal view that a publicly accountable police force could be turned from a tool of oppression into a bastion of liberty. The police are a class creation and will always remain so. It will be a testimony to the human and comradely nature of socialist society that it will require no policing and no police. 

Paul Bennett