Editorial: Poland - crisis of state capitalism (1982)

Editorial from the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The crisis in Poland is not a crisis of socialism. They are not socialist military dictators who have formed a junta to coerce the Polish workers into what the Western press sickeningly calls ‘moderation’. They are not socialist banks that are banging on the door of the Polish Politburo, demanding the repayment of financial loans. They are not socialist journalists who compose the propaganda which the Polish media pours out in order to blind workers to their real interests. They are not socialist bureaucrats who sit in luxurious offices in the Kremlin and applaud every measure by the Polish rulers to subdue and humiliate the workers they exploit. It is not socialism which has been tried and found wanting; the social system which has led to misery for millions of Polish workers is STATE CAPITALISM.

The crisis of Polish state capitalism has its immediate origin in the investment boom of the early 1970s. In 1973 Poland had the third fastest national growth rate in the world. To pay for this investment it was necessary for the Polish government to borrow from the Western banks: in 1971, Poland’s foreign debt stood at 700 million dollars; by 1975, when the boom was in full swing, the debt had reached 6,000 million dollars. The interest on the loans was so great that the Polish government had to borrow more from the Western banks in order to pay its previous debts: by 1980 Poland owed approximately 27,000 million dollars to Western capitalists. With the shortage of consumer goods on the market, Poland’s private farmers — who own 80 per cent of all agricultural land — refused to sell their produce in return for money which could not buy them what they need. The scarcity of agricultural produce — meat in particular — led to price rises. The Polish workers, having been pushed to breaking point in a productive drive to produce enough profits to pay off their masters’ debts, regarded the increase in the cost of already scarce food as the final straw.

All of these problems were direct consequences of world capitalism: the farmers could produce enough food to feed everyone; the industrial workers could produce consumer goods and have plenty to eat; but under capitalism, financial debts come before food (profits before needs) and that is why the military has attempted to crush the working class organisation, Solidarity, while the wealth producers of Poland arc suffering, many on the verge of malnutrition.

The distortion of the idea of socialism has been one of the greatest political crimes of our age. So-called socialists who were once praising Stalin from the distance of Western Europe are now claiming to support Solidarity, even though many of them have not repudiated their Leninist sympathies. Yet as early as January 1918 the Leninist attitude to trade unions was clearly expressed by Zinoviev: “trade union independence is a bourgeois idea . . . an anomaly in a workers’ state”. In November 1920 it was Trotsky who proposed the sacking of the elected leaders of the Russian railway union so as ‘‘to replace irresponsible agitators . . . by production-minded trade unionists”. Even in the midst of the great strikes of August 1980, the New Communist Party’s newspaper referred to Solidarity as “the Gdansk wreckers” and stated that “irresponsible individuals, anarchic and anti-socialist groups are attempting to exploit work stoppages . . . for their own ends”. In the 1930s the Socialist Party of Great Britain had its meetings smashed up by members of the British Communist Party because we dared to expose the anti-socialist activities of their hero, Stalin. Today in 1982 we are still as hostile as ever to the pseudo-socialists of the Left who advocate state capitalism.

The only alternative to the system which oppresses the workers of Poland and all other lands is WORLD SOCIALISM: a society without frontiers, classes, property or rulers. Only democratic political action by the working class, without leaders or dogmas, will lead to the of a socialist society. By their actions, the workers in Solidarity have won the admiration of socialists, even though we strongly oppose their nationalist and religious illusions and even though we recognise the limitations of trade union action. Having defied their masters and combined together, the next step which the Polish workers must take is to organise a class conscious democratic political party to aim for the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution. To this end, the Socialist Party of Great Britain offers support to our fellow workers in Poland.

Letter: Shelley (1982)

Letter to the Editors from the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

With regard to your review of Paul Foot’s Red Shelley in the October Socialist Standard, you omitted to point out that Queen Mab does contain some magnificent attacks on buying and selling (which Foot ignores, logically enough for a supporter of the SWP which does not realise that these are incompatible with socialism).

Hence commerce springs, the venal interchange
Of all that human art or nature yield;
Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand
And natural kindness hasten to supply
From the full fountain of its boundless love,
For ever stifled, drained and tainted now
(V. II, 38-43). 

All things are sold: the very light of Heaven
Is venal; earth’s unsparing gifts of love,
The smallest and most despicable things
That lurk in the abysses of the deep,
All objects of our life, even life itself,
And the poor pittance which the laws allow
Of liberty, the fellowship of man.
Those duties which his heart of human love
Should urge him to perform instinctively,
Are bought and sold as in a public mart
Of undisguising selfishness, that sets
On each its price, the stamp mark of her reign
(V. II, 177-188) 

A brighter, morn awaits the human day
When every transfer of earth’s natural gifts
Shall be a commerce of good words and works;
When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame,
The fear of infamy, disease and woe.
War with its million horrors, and fierce hell
Shall live but in the memory of Time,
Who, like a penitent libertine, shall start.
Look back, and shudder at his younger years
(V. II, 177-188). 

Adam Buick, 

Luxemburg

Wage Cuts (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

When capitalism is going through a period of expansion most industries are able to sell all their output at a profit. With unemployment at a low level it is a favourable time for unions to press wage claims. Employers, rather than have the flow of profits interrupted, will make concessions, often without strikes actually taking place. In this phase the workers’ standard of living rises. In a serious depression the position is reversed. The threat by the unions to close the factories loses most of its force because, with sales falling and profits harder to make and often disappearing altogether, employers are cutting production, standing workers off, closing factories down, and in extreme cases going out of business. The big increase of unemployment helps the employers to resist claims for wage increases. In this phase it is normal for the standard of living of workers to fall, quite apart from what happens to the unemployed.


As far as workers in work are concerned, what is going on in a depression is obscured because, at least for a time, wages and salaries continue to rise more than the rise of prices. In the year for May 1980 to May 1981 the average earnings of all workers rose by 13 per cent while prices rose by only 11% per cent. But employers are interested not only in rates of wages but equally in the amount of work they can get out of each worker. There has been a general intensification so that the same output can be got with fewer workers. A survey early in the year showed that this has happened to a marked extent in offices, and the same has gone on in industry generally, often with the introduction of pay related to productivity, as in the coal mines. It is shown too in the reduction of staff by 9,000 in British Airways and in the cuts of Civil Service and local government staffs. And with the deepening of the depression the wage trend is now changing. In the period January to July 1981, while prices rose by 10.8 percent average earnings of all workers rose by only 7.3 per cent.

Of course the unions try to resist this and declare that they will not accept it; just as they have gone on declaring in the past ten years that the level of unemployment, which has doubled and doubled again, was “unacceptable” to them. They are wise to do their best but they cannot escape the consequences of capitalism, any more than can the capitalists.

Different groups of workers come up against the impact of depression in different ways; ranging from private industry where falling profits hit them at once and directly, to nationalised industries in which government subsidies may lessen the impact for a time, to the Civil Service and local government, where government pay policy is the decisive factor.

In manufacturing industry, with many bankruptcies and other companies on the verge, average earnings of all workers and the average earnings of engineering workers have both been falling behind the rise of prices since 1978. Seventeen cases have been reported of companies in which unions have had to agree to pay freezes for varying periods of up to a year (Daily Mail, 21 September 1981). Among these are the British Steel Corporation, British Airways and British Caledonian. In the engineering industry, against a claim by the union for an increase of at least fourteen per cent on the national rate, the employers at first proposed no increase at all, but later offered three per cent which the unions rejected. The unions faced the difficulty that 400.000 jobs have been lost in the year to June 1981 and there are 300,000 workers on short time. In this industry wages are negotiated locally, apart from the national rate, and the employers’ offer leaves the field open for bigger increases in companies still trading profitably.

For the nationalised industries as a whole the government has announced that its 4 per cent guide line is expected to be applied. British Leyland accordingly made an offer of 3.8 per cent and the unions were told it was not negotiable. The company’s reaction was: “We are obviously not in a robust enough situation to withstand any widespread or protracted industrial action. We would not survive. There would be a widespread loss of jobs if they were successful in getting a lot of people out on strike” (The Times, 3/10/81).

Unlike BL, the nationalised coal mines are not losing money, and in the changed energy situation, there is a government approved plan for expanding output in the long term. New mines are due to come into operation. Not wanting a coal strike, the Board offered nine per cent, and then increased it but a strike is still possible.

It is in the Civil Service and local government that the 4 per cent is chiefly intended to operate. In this field the government, directly or indirectly, controls the amount of money it is prepared to spend on wages and government strategy has already been made clear in the determined fight to defeat the 21 weeks of strikes by civil servants. Like Reagan’s ruthless handling of the strike of government-employed Air Traffic Controllers, it aims to set a pattern for wage increases generally. Since 1956 Civil Service pay has, by agreement, been related to movements of pay for comparable work in outside industry. But long before 1956, in a less formal way, governments sought to prevent the pay of its employees getting out of line. A situation similar to the present one arose in 1931. Then, too, in a depression, the government drastically cut expenditure on its departments. Civil Service pay, which from 1920 to 1931 had been reduced periodically in line with the fall of prices, was subjected to a further 10 per cent cut. Unemployment pay was also cut.

Governments enter into agreements with Civil Service unions, but, like employers generally, when it suits them they will suspend, modify, or break agreements, including those permitting claims to be taken to arbitration.

The present government has already prepared the way for this in Civil Service pay this year. The unions are to be allowed to go to arbitration, but the agreement on which the unions recently settled their dispute, contains a significant reservation: The Government will accept recourse to the Civil Service Arbitration Tribunal but on the understanding that the Government reserves the right, if necessary, to ask the Mouse of Commons to approve setting aside the Tribunal’s award on grounds of over-riding national policy.

Although the government pays a large part of the expenditure of local government it has not in the past been able to prevent local authorities increasing these expenditures and meeting the cost by levying higher rates. The Thatcher government has tried in various ways to get local authorities to hold down wages and reduce the size of their staffs. Finding these measures inadequate new legislation is pending to give the government more direct control.

The declared attitude of the unions concerned threatened a “winter of discontent” comparable with what happened in the winter of 1978-9 when the Labour Government tried to impose a 5 per cent ceiling on wage increases and provoked widespread strike action. On past form we may expect the Thatcher government to be more determined in its resistance.

Edgar Hardcastle

Scarman—judicial oversight (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since, the riot in the St Pauls area of Bristol in April 1980, there have been disorders on a comparable scale in a number of British cities. The most violent took place over three days in April in the Brixton area of London, but there were also large- scale incidents in Southall, Toxteth (Liverpool) and Moss Side (Manchester), as well as smaller disturbance in other towns. The impact of such events is intensified by live television coverage, which reveals their similarity to civil war and apparently shows a near-total breakdown of law and order. The government were worried, both about what was already happening and about what might happen in the future if the causes of such upheavals went unidentified and unremedied. Two days after the Brixton disorders had ended, Home Secretary William Whitelaw appointed Lord Scarman to conduct an inquiry into the riots. His report was published at the end of November (Cmnd. 8427).

Scarman has a reputation, in staid circles, for being something of a “radical” judge, a supporter of a Bill of Rights, and he is well practised at holding inquiries into social disorders of one kind or another. He has clearly learned (though perhaps it came naturally) how to draw conclusions and make recommendations that will offend no one in authority and yet serve as evidence that not quite all is well and that “something” is being done. For example:

  I find that the direction and policies of the Metroplitan Police are not racist. But racial prejudice does manifest itself occasionally in the behaviour of a few officers on the streets (p. 127).
  There is scope for a more coherent and better directed response by the police to the challenge of policing modern, multi-racial society (p. 128).

His strongest criticism is describing as “a serious mistake” the operation known as Swamp 81, which involved flooding selected areas of Brixton with policemen who were expected to make widespread use of their powers to stop and search people in an attempt to detect and arrest robbers. This operation heightened the impression that it was difficult, especially for the young and black, to walk the streets of Brixton without being harassed by the police.

The report begins by considering the social conditions in which the riots took place. A picture of deprivation and discrimination, the fruits of capitalism, is visible even through Scarman’s studied understatement. In the Borough of Lambeth, which includes Brixton, some twelve thousand households live in overcrowded conditions, and one-fifth of all the housing stock is officially substandard. The unemployment rate in Brixton is thirteen per cent, but among young black males it is estimated to be a staggering fifty-five per cent. The other riot areas have similar environments. In Scarman’s words:

  The common strands in many of the major disorders . . .  are to be found in shared social conditions, in economic insecurity and perceived deprivation, in enforced idleness because of unemployment, and in the hostility of at least a section of young people to the police (p.14).

But these are merely “common strands”: 

  None of these features can perhaps usefully be described as a cause of the disorders, either in Brixton or elsewhere. Indeed, there are, undoubtedly, parts of the country which are equally deprived where disorder did not occur. But taken together, they provide a set of social conditions which create a predisposition towards violent protest (p. 16).

This is a comforting (for the ruling class and their government) piece of illogic.

Reaction to the report has been mixed. The Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality described it as “brilliant”, which is a sad reflection on his aspirations. Ted Knight, lefty leader of Lambeth Council, observed that anyone on the local streets could have said what the report does, and complained that Scarman had not pointed out the new restraints on council spending — as if the past history of Brixton had not included periods of more public spending. The strength of Lambeth Borough Council’s proposals can be seen from their suggestion that the Metropolitan Police would be more answerable for their actions if they were accountable not to the Home Secretary but to a local Police Authority — just as the police in Merseyside are!

Of course, it doesn't matter how the police are controlled. Whatever system is used, they will continue to be the defenders of capitalist order and capitalist property. Imagine that everything the reformers want of the police has been achieved: no racial prejudice among them, black policemen at all levels of the force, local accountability, true consultation, riot equipment surrendered. The essential role of the police will not have been altered. Many of those who see police harassment as the major cause of the disorders are quite content to see the police carry out their duties, so long as they do so in a less objectionable manner. In the words of the leader of one of Brixton’s black organisations: “We do not object to what they the police do so much as to the way they do it.”

What is this essential role of the police? Scarman provides an answer which is eloquent largely for what it leaves unsaid:

   the primary duty of the police is to maintain “the Queen’s Peace”, which has been described as the “normal state of society”, for in a civilised society, normality is a state of public tranquillity. Crime and public disorders are aberrations from “normality” which it is the duty of the police to endeavour first to prevent and then, if need be, to correct (p. 62).

In writing this, Scarman seems to have forgotten that part of his report which describes the “normal state of society" in Brixton, not an area noted for its public tranquillity. Slums, unemployment, insecurity, hopelessness form the Queen’s Peace in nineteen-eighties Britain, which we are supposed to believe is a civilised society! It is a topsy-turvy world in which penury and slums are accepted as normality, but that is the world and the logic of capitalism, and that is the world the police play a part in defending.

And that is the world at whose disposal Scarman has placed his services. The task of his inquiry was to alert the government so that it might tinker with a few things (such as longer training for police) in the hope that these will suffice to prevent such confrontations in the future. Socialists, having held our own inquiry into the nature of capitalist society, recommend that it be not tinkered with but replaced.

Paul Bennett

Drug profits (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The perverse priorities of capitalism are most clearly reflected in the market place; if harmful products can be sold easily, capital will be switched in the hope of realising this potential of larger profits. This often forces the capitalist class to pass legislation in which the interests of the minority of capitalists directly benefitting are sacrificed to the broader well-being of the class as a whole. Certain minimum standards of health and safety are laid down so that the usefulness of the working class to capitalist production is not too greatly impaired by such things as adulterated food, industrial pollution, or the side effects of so-called “wonder” drugs.

Naturally those capitalists profiting by the sale of a harmful product will play down the dangers and try to find a loophole in protective legislation. For when Chemie Gruenenthal, the original German inventor of thalidomide, discovered that they had produced a killer drug they at first tried to continue marketing the drug, while spreading confusion about it. Johann Goden, Gruenenthal’s representative in Cologne took the lead by suggesting that the drug be mixed with other sedatives so that “if it proves impossible to keep things dark . . .  any side effect could then be attributed to the other preparations. But heaven help us if this expedient turns into a boomerang”. Later he visited a clinic and reported back “I took the opportunity to explain our standpoint over the peripheral neuritis problem” [one of the side effects] “and did my best to foster confusion over the subjects [1] Goden was as clear as anyone could be that considerable further harm would result from further sales of thalidomide, yet he continued to work actively to that end. This drug, like so many others, was originally considered to be safe, and the harmful side effects were only discovered later. There is however an industry, operating within the capitalist system but in most countries outside its legal framework, the harmful longterm effects of whose products have been known for a very long time. Yet it is flourishing now as never before, despite the current recession. This is the narcotics industry, which lures the wrecks of capitalism with a transient escape from all its woes, but leaves them evermore desperate for the next dose, and for the money to buy it.

The cultivation of opium from the oriental poppy, concentrated mainly in the so-called Golden Triangle in South Fast Asia, predates capitalism by many centuries. It was discovered that smoking the petals in long pipes, or hookahs, helped to relieve the drudge of the continual struggle for existence. The sensations of dreamlike euphoria, relaxation and the absence of pain are however bought at a price. The development of tolerance by the body means that ever increasing doses are required to excite the same response, and this can lead to dire consequences. This is more particularly the case with the opium derivatives which can be more easily absorbed and therefore work faster. Laudanum and morphine have genuine medical uses in emergency cases but addiction to them, and more particularly to heroin, supplied in a form which can be injected into the veins, does nothing but harm to the victim. The symptoms include lassitude, depression, sallow complexion, jitters, loss of appetite and insomnia. There is also damage to the circulatory system, as veins become useless following repeated injections.

Also of ancient origin is the cultivation of cannabis (Indian hemp) and marijuana. The latter (similar to hashish, long associated with Arabia and the Levant), is a plant which flourishes in North America. Unlike the opium derivatives, this family of drugs are much less habit forming. In consequence there is a strong lobby in many countries in favour of legalising their use. However well meaning the protagonists on either side, this is really no more than an argument about the cheapest way, from the capitalist viewpoint, of controlling the problem. Marijuana and cannabis are usually smoked in tobacco laced with the drug, which can produce a growing intoxication and sense of well being. In the long term there can be vivid colour hallucinations and relaxation of inhibitions, accompanied by a lethargy that acts to prevent the sufferer from becoming violent. Cocaine, in contrast to the opiates, is a stimulant sometimes used by doctors to relieve fatigue. Its use can lead to over-confidence, garrulousness and unnatural euphoria, overdosing to weakness, emaciation and depression.

Drug addiction is a serious problem to the capitalist employers because the addict cannot operate as an efficient cog in the production machine, indeed is often incapable of any work effort at all. Because of this inability to find employment, the confirmed addict will turn to crime in order to pay for “shots”. It was however not until 1909 that the capitalist class were sufficiently concerned to undertake any collaborative international action in this sphere. In that year an Opium Commission met in Shanghai, involving 14 countries led by the USA, the country which had then, and still has now, the most serious addiction problem. The object was to control movement from one country to another. The first Interhational Narcotics Convention met at the Hague in 1912, and five other Conventions up to 1936 were attempts progressively to check the traffic at its source and to control opium production, importation and exportation. This Convention eventually totted up 85 signatories, but all these efforts have been almost totally ineffective. The producing countries did not take the drastic action demanded to license production and collect all the opium produced. They were unwilling for the simple reason that the trade was too profitable and the effect on their own national economics would have been too severe. Consequently cultivation has continued and efforts to illegally smuggle the drug into other countries have been intensified. Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok are the main ports involved, but there is now a growing traffic by air. In the 1950s and 1960s “Communist” China became a major source of smuggled heroin, most of the supply to Hong Kong now arriving by the overland route.

In America, the illegal cultivation of marijuana is flourishing. Both there and in the Golden Triangle record crops have been harvested in 1981. The potential profits in these bonanzas cannot of course be reaped without sales, and efforts to achieve these are now in full swing. The equivalent in the narcotics trade of the orthodox sales representative is the “pusher”. Compared to his respectable counterpart, the pusher has two big problems. The illegality of the business means that most transactions must be conducted in secret, away from the eye of the law, and that there is no legal redress against any payment defaulters. This leads to on-the-spot sanctions. A case was recently reported [2] where a lad unable to pay had his knuckles broken so that he could no longer inject himself. If an addict is unable to get drugs, he or she suffers agonising withdrawal symptom, so that this victim was put in a ghastly dilemma. In a recent court case [3] concerning the smuggling of Columbian cannabis into Britain, the smuggler had bought a £2000 computer to keep account of sales. This compelled even prosecuting counsel to remark that “the way in which the accounting was done leaves one with a degree of admiration.”

Rehabilitation of individual addicts is a long and costly process, and the success rate is low. Thus the process has been depersonalised with the main effort being spent on trying to prevent supplies reaching the country in the first place, or reaching customers if this fails. Consequently, although there are some centres attached to hospitals for the treatment of addicts, there is an inadequate number of these. Another recent court case [4] illustrates this. A Blackpool cannabis pusher who was fined £1,500, had found demand so great that he had to take his phone off the hook. “It was like feeding the 5000”, he commented. The court were told that thousands of young workers in the Fylde area were begging him to supply them with drugs. Yet the nearest treatment centre is at Prestwich Hospital in Manchester, 40 miles away and difficult to reach except by car.

Those commentators who say that the addiction problem “is no respecter of class” [2] are incorrect. They fail to see the common class position of all workers in opposition to the ruling capitalists, being confused by the subdivisions into seeing “upper” and “lower” classes, managerial classes, and so on. What they really mean is that addiction is found among all sections of the working class. If a young capitalist becomes “hooked” that presents only the relatively trivial problem of a bad example being set. The capitalist nowadays takes no part in the productive process, so it matters little whether or not he is capable of doing so. On the other hand, workers who experiment with narcotics can damage only themselves, in more senses than one. For when they come down they find that there are still no diamonds in the sky.

E. C. Edge

References

[1] “Suffer the Children”, The Story of Thalidomide. Sunday Times Insight Team, published 1979. Andre Deutsch.

[2] Nationwide. BBC1 TV, 15.10.81

[3] Daily Telegraph, 1.10.81

[4] Daily Telegraph, 25.9.81

My Life With Nye (1982)

Book Review from the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

My Life With Nye by Jennie Lee. Penguin, £1.75.

This is an account of the lives of Aneurin Bevan and Jennie Lee. Bevan came from a Welsh coal mining family and, at an early age, joined the Labour Party. Jennie Lee came from a Scottish mining family and was, like her father, a member of the ILP.

They were both idealists who threw a great deal of energy into their political lives under the mistaken impression that capitalism could be adjusted to work in the interests of the working class.

The author makes several references to socialism but does not define it and one is left with the impression that, like so many people who regard themselves as revolutionaries, she means “nationalisation”.

Later, we find them helping to win World War II and when Attlee had ousted Churchill, Bevan threw himself into the task of building up the Health Service when he was not charging about the world rubbing shoulders with Tito and various other enemies of the working class.

From the socialist point of view there is very little of value in this book, although it is an interesting document in that it records the strong belief among many young people of the nineteen-thirties that Russia was being formed into a workers’ paradise. They can now see how wrong they were. The so-called Communist Party was strong in numbers and even managed to get two members into Parliament. Now, world events have reduced CP membership and those who are left are disenchanted with recent events in Poland and Afghanistan.

Bevan may have been sincerely anti-capitalist in his early days but it seems that he came to the conclusion it was not so bad after he had ceased to be a wage-slave.

As a personality, Bevan was probably everything that Jennie Lee has said that he was, but he was definitely not a socialist.

Luigi

SDP — moderate magic? (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the SDP was launched last March it was fashionable to say that it couldn’t grow because it had no roots. Its opponents wrote it off as short-term opportunism that was bound to fail. Few people considered it a serious threat to the Labour-Tory see-saw. But it has grown. Now, less than a year later, it’s got almost thirty MPs, about 70.000 members and is way ahead in the opinion polls. No one is writing it off any more - not even Labour left-wingers who, while continuing to revile the Social Democrats as opportunists, have now got to admit that at least they look like being successful ones.

Will the SDP ‘break the mould’ and, as Shirley Williams predicted after her by-election victory at Crosby, ‘sweep on to victory at the next election’ (The Times, 28/11/81)? The old adage of a week being a long time in politics may apply here just as much as it was seen to apply recently to the apparent fervour for nationalism in Scotland. But supposing the SDP did come to power at the next election is it possible to know what would happen to Britain?

Policies
Although the SDP has been widely attacked for having no policies, the criticism isn’t altogether fair. It hasn’t got a manifesto as such but it is possible to piece together the broad lines of what it says it will do as a party of government.

First of all the statement Twelve Tasks for Social Democrats issued at the party’s launch shows a clear commitment to continued British membership of the Common Market and support for active participation in NATO with the aim of multilateral disarmament. And these two platforms have been confirmed on many occasions since. It’s true that many of the other points contained in the launch statement (“consistent economic strategy”, “schemes to conserve energy”, “mixed economy”, “fair distribution of wealth”, “better environment”, “equal rights”, “imaginative generosity”) are, as Ian Bradley, SDP sympathiser and author of the first book to be published on the party, [1] says, “so vague that they border on the platitudinous”.

But they are no more so than many of the proposals that the other parties commonly advance when they are out of office, and the SDP can point out that some of the suggestions in their twelve-point programme (proportional representation, incomes policy, apprenticeship schemes, decentralisation) have been amplified since they were first made and in some cases even ‘costed'. They can point for evidence of this to the discussion papers issued for the SDP's first conference last October, to various pronouncements made by their leading figures, and to the idea advocated by Roy Jenkins, the party’s probable leader, of an ‘inflation tax’ which would fine employers for giving workers pay rises beyond a limit laid down by the government.

What is there to be said about the more concrete of these SDP policies? The Ecology Party has described them as a ‘recycling of politics’, and it is indeed difficult, despite the SDP’s claim that they will ‘change the face of Britain’, to find anything in them that hasn’t appeared in one of the other three parties’ manifestoes before and that could possibly make any fundamental difference to the lives of the majority of people in this country in the future.

If we take as an example membership of the EEC, it would be hard, even for the most ardent ‘Europeanist’, to show that it had been of any particular benefit to British wage and salary earners, and even harder to show that future membership will make much difference either. Then, being in NATO, far from helping to bring about world disarmament as the SDP suggests it would, has so far meant increasing amounts of resources spent on bigger and more lethal weapons and the nightmare of nuclear war as near as ever. Incomes policies which aim to punish employers for paying their workers too much have been tried before too (for example by the last Labour government). As they have the effect of depressing living standards and increasing industrial unrest, they founder on opposition both from workers through their trade unions and from employers.

As for the ‘mixed economy’ (part-private, part-state ownership), it’s precisely what the Labour and Tory parties, despite their lip service to other ‘philosophies’, have always practised when in government and it has done nothing to solve problems such as the financial worries, insecurity, unemployment, boredom and dissatisfaction experienced by the vast majority of workers in both sectors. Finally other proposed SDP measures like decentralisation (or regional assemblies) and proportional representation can only be described as new inasmuch as they’ve never actually been tried in Britain. They’re certainly not new as far as Europe goes. Both have been in operation for many years in, for example, Italy, yet Italians (as this writer can vouch for from personal experience) would not think of claiming that this gives them any superior say in the way decisions arc made about their lives.

Wish Fulfilment
So why are so many people thrilling to the SDP if all it has to offer are these more-of-the-same policies? Well, first of all, the evidence of two MORI polls was that at least 50 per cent of SDP supporters were ignorant or mistaken as to its probable policies. And it’s hard to imagine that even informed supporters are excited about the specific policies on offer. What’s more likely is that the SDP’s support is based not on policies at all; but on the attraction of the individuals offering them.

The so-called Gang of Four have been carefully portrayed, both by their own expensively acquired publicity machine and by a highly sympathetic media, as sane, purposeful, trustworthy personalities who, if only given the chance, will produce a brand new political broom and use it to sweep spotlessly clean. They’ve been expertly projected as the team capable of doing a job that others, through lack of honesty, integrity or ability, have failed to do in the past. The party that these nice, reliable, sincere, intelligent people are trying to get off the ground is one based on honesty, virtue and common sense. How can such a venture be anything but ‘a good thing’?

It all smacks of an exercise in wish fulfilment and is ironically reminiscent of the hopes so many people had in 1964 when they elected the first Labour government for thirteen years with a leader referred to at the time as a ‘political magician’. That leader's name was Harold Wilson.

Realities of Government

Will what happened to Harold Wilson also happen to the magicians of the SDP? Well, to an extent it already has, because all four of them are past failures. They’ve all served as ministers in governments which no impartial observer could describe as successful. Will tilings change for them in the future? Is it ‘all different now’ as Crosby SDP voters kept telling reporters who tried to remind them of Shirley Williams’ record as a Labour minister?

In the past governments have failed to deliver the expected goods because the conditions they found once in office didn’t allow them to. And it couldn’t be any different for the SDP. Put in charge of a system which operates through the market, buying and selling and production for profit, the SDP would find, as the other parties have found, that conditions change continuously and unpredictably. Its plan, for example, to reduce unemployment by apprenticeship and job creation schemes would depend on whether its revenue from taxation allowed such schemes to be funded. And this in turn would depend on whether the world market, over which governments have no control, decreed high or low profits for the employing class which funds the government with taxes from those profits. These schemes in any case would be nothing more than a short-term expedient, would conceal a certain amount of unemployment for a time. They couldn’t possibly cope with the rise in the jobless that, if the present recession goes on, will occur whichever government is in power. Employers will not employ people, not even under an SDP government, unless they can find profitable markets for their goods.

So niceness, sincerity, reliability — these things would have nothing to do with the practical conduct of an SDP government. The professional economic forecasters are always divided among themselves on the future conditions the market is going to create and the politicians of the SDP would be unable to read into the future with any greater clarity. Whoever it is that finally formulates the Social Democrats’ election manifesto the leadership, the MPs or their local ‘policy groups’ — the administration called to put that manifesto into effect will find that many of its best laid plans will have to be delayed, altered or simply abandoned.

Duplicity and Deception

For all their need to play it by ear, however, an SDP government would, we can be quite certain, pursue one policy to the bitter end — the policy, unspoken but fundamental and shared with all the other parties, of perpetuating a system in which the vast majority of a country’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small minority of its citizens while the majority of the people — the wage and salary earners — are hoodwinked into believing that this system is run in their interest. The Gang of Four did this when they were members of Labour governments and they will do it as members of an SDP government.

Already they have begun to tarnish their new laundered image, to show the kind of duplicity and deception necessary for running the British profit system. Firstly David Owen, at a public meeting in Swansea attended by this writer (9 July 1981), declared that the two main planks of his party’s foundation were EEC membership and multilateral disarmament but then told a unilateralist questioner that the SDP still welcomed into its ranks those who favoured unilateral disarmament. Then Shirley Williams, in her campaign at Crosby, referred to Graham Page, whose 19,000 Tory majority she needed to overturn, as ‘a healer not a divider of one person from another’ (Sunday Times, 25/10/81). Yet she must have known that this was the man who, three years ago, called for a total three-year ban on all immigration to Britain.

Finally the SDP’s application form for founder membership of the party asked for a £9 subscription and proclaimed: ‘If you really want a party that’s in nobody’s pocket it will mean digging into your own’. It also said that, unlike the Labour and Tory parties, the SDP had ‘no pipeline from big business or trade unions pumping money into its funds. It will belong to its members and no one else.’ Now, articles in the Observer (15 November 1981) and the Sunday Times (6 December 1981) have named a large number of leading industrialists as supporting and making financial contributions to the SDP. The chairman of the SDP’s finance committee is David Sainsbury, finance director of the grocery chain. A trustee is Clive Lindley, millionaire owner of the LCI group and a former longstanding Labour Party supporter. Other supporters include Lord Sainsbury, Sir Claus Moser of Rothschilds, Edmund Dell of Guinness Peat, Cob Stenham, financial director of Unilever, the Rowntree company, John Lambourn of Commercial Union, and John Harvey-Jones, new chairman of ICI. The Sunday Times article also revealed that the party organises lunches for potential donors at its headquarters in Cowley Street, where, according to SDP recruiter Anthony Sampson, ‘the business side is critical’. And this is the party that was to be ‘in nobody’s pocket’.

Quantum Jump

‘Social Democracy’ is a bright new label but the stuff inside the bottle is as unpalatable as ever. Far from taking the ‘quantum jump’ Shirley Williams talks about in her recent book [2], her party can only limp along the same well trodden path as the parties that preceded it. Yet social democracy does have another meaning. For the socialist pioneers of the last century it meant a moneyless, leaderless society of free access, voluntary cooperation and complete democratic control — socialism. And this kind of society not the SDP’s — will be the real ‘quantum jump’, ‘humanity’s leap’, as Frederick Engels put it, ‘from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom’.

Howard Moss

[1] Breaking the Mould? The Birth and Prospects of the Social Democratic Party, Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1981.

[2] Politics is for People, London, Penguin, 1981.

The Birth of Compromise (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

That creaky old monster, the British Labour Party, is in danger of drowning. Even with a Tory government presiding over mass unemployment and endless cuts, Labour’s “alternative” is seen by many workers to be equally unappealing. There are some who may be shocked at the Socialist Party of Great Britain failing to mourn the demise of a political institution which for seventy-five years has claimed to stand for workers’ interests. But the record of Labour governments of strike breaking and cutting workers' living standards in the way the profit system demands, proves their claims to be untrue. To find the root cause of the problem, we must move from the Labour Party’s death throes to its birth pangs.

In the 1870s, after a long history of persecution, British trade unions were legalised, and in 1874 two miners elected to parliament. But by the mid-eighties still only eleven MPs were workers, although the working class formed about three-quarters of the population. After 1867, only a minority had the vote and the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party took it in turns to run capitalism, much as the Conservative and Labour Parties have done since the First World War. There was sometimes little to choose between them, but many workers preferred the Liberals, who made particular efforts to appear more radical than their rivals. The working class lacked unity, but mechanisation and concentration of capital reduced the divisions between skilled and unskilled labour. Large-scale production encouraged workers to recognise their shared class position as one of poverty and dependence, squalor and insecurity.

In the 1880s, small political groups were formed, such as the Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation and its break-away group, the Socialist League. Some of their members, particularly those in the Socialist League, had a very clear view of socialism as a system to replace the world order of capitalism, and of the need for democratic action to set up a system of production for use rather than profit. The majority of workers did not support the socialist proposal of freeing themselves from their wage-slavery, and the eleven MPs referred to above voted in the House of Commons as Liberals. A debate arose as to whether workers should try to get representation in Parliament on the basis of supporting capitalism, or whether the movement for socialism should first work towards majority support and then use Parliament to end the system rather than run it. The former idea, which was to win the day at the turn of the century, was expressed by Hubert Bland in Today, June 1887:

A popular organisation must be created for the express purpose of working existing political machinery (our emphasis).

At the same time, the Liberal Gladstone announced that he was prepared to “back the masses against the classes” (The Times, 29/6/1886), that is, the workers against the capitalist class, although he was so “radical” that he regretted the “leaning of both parties to Socialism, which I radically disapprove” (J. Morley, Life of Gladstone, ii. p.346). In fact, both parties were simply making concessions to workers to win their votes, and Lord Randolph Churchill more cautiously wrote that “we have so to conduct our legislation that we shall give some satisfaction to both classes and masses”.

The boom conditions of the late 1880s helped the formation of the “New Unions”, such as the Gasworkers’ and General Labourers’ Union and the General Railway Workers Union. John Burns and Tom Mann of the Social Democratic Federation organised the famous London Dock Strike of 1889. The new trade unions of this time were less exclusive than their predecessors, with lower subscription dues and more emphasis on industrial action to improve wages and conditions. But the early 1890s saw a return to trade depression, higher unemployment and consequently greater pressure to lower wages. The employers organised something of a counter-offensive on the industrial field, and the high increase in union membership of the previous decade again fell.

In 1890, the Shipping Federation was formed by shipowners to allow jobs only to those prepared to work with non-union men. In 1893. William Collison formed the National Free Labour Association as a supply of blackleg workers. In 1896, the Employers Federation of Engineering Associations was founded, to oppose the Amalgamated Engineers, and the following year the Federation responded to strikes with a six-month lock-out, which slack trade enabled them to afford. In 1898, the Employers Parliamentary Council was established to ensure direct influence at Westminster. The law courts began to reverse the terms of the 1870s statutes and overturned precedents in cases such as Lyons v. Wilkins and Quinn v. Leathern, outlawing picketing. In 1901 the House of Lords confirmed the Taff Vale Railway Company’s demand for damages resulting from industrial action by the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, amounting to £23,000, which the union had to pay.

These repressive measures of about ninety years ago renewed the debate about what action workers could take. Many trade unionists supported parliamentary representation to secure legal rights for trade unions. Some argued that the Liberal Party, which many had traditionally supported, would be unable to do this, and this view was justified by the Liberal Party’s difficulties at the time. Many of their capitalist backers were going over to the Tories, partly because they wanted import duties to protect their industries from German and American competition. Liberal support for capitalism had to be blended with “the new aspirations of the labouring masses out of which the party of the future must spring” (Manchester Guardian, 11/5/1894). But there was no reason in principle why Liberal or Tory capitalists in Parliament could not support limited aims like trade union immunities and various social reforms. In any case, the idea of working-class members of Parliament carrying out these measures themselves was hard to implement. Before 1911, MPs were not paid and had to be financed, so workers approached the Liberal Party asking to be nominated as candidates. Again and again, the local Liberal caucuses refused such requests. Among those they refused were Keir Hardie and Ramsay Macdonald, who were later to sit as Labour MPs.

In 1893, the Independent Labour Party was formed. Its aims included tax reform, an eight-hour day, and “collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. Exchange implies private property, though, and this contradiction is repeated in the Labour Party’s famous Clause Four. What it means is state ownership, or nationalisation, which is not socialism. The Fabian Society had been trying to “permeate” the Liberal caucuses in order to exert a secret influence. Unlike the Militant Tendency, they eventually admitted that this was a futile waste of time. The attempts of the TUC Parliamentary Committee to get Liberal backing met with little success, and so the idea developed of forming a separate party with the financial backing of the trade unions. Three points in particular are worth noting about what happened. It was not a movement for socialism, it only involved a very small minority of the working class, and it was not democratically organised.

Aside from the question of trade union rights, the reform issues adopted were similar to those of the Liberal Party: opposition to the Boer war, improved workers’ compensation, and that classical capitalist policy, Free Trade. (Later on, the Labour Party sometimes came to support instead that other reputable capitalist policy, Import Controls.) At the turn of the century (as now), very few workers actively stood for socialism. In the 1895 election, not one of the thirty-two ILP candidates was elected, and they merely stood for nationalisation, rather than common ownership. If there were a majority of socialists, millions of them, they could easily have financed some of their number to go to Parliament with a mandate immediately to abolish the profit system. But what there were instead, were trade unionists, many of whom were bitterly opposed to socialism.

In 1899 the TUC voted 546,000 to 434,000 to try to increase the number of workers in Parliament. Hardie secured an ILP majority on the executive of the resulting Labour Representation Committee, with his friend Macdonald as secretary. The same year, Hardie was elected at Merthyr Tydfil with the help of £150 from George Cadbury, the chocolate baron. In 1903, Gladstone made a secret pact with MacDonald that the LRC could have a clear run in thirty constituencies, provided that they demonstrate friendliness to the Liberals where possible. At the same time, the “rank and file” at the LRC Conference were actually voting that its candidates must “strictly abstain from identifying themselves with, or promoting the interests of, any section of the Liberal or Conservative Parties”. In one constituency the LRC wanted to put up a candidate where a Liberal planned to stand. Macdonald wrote to the local secretary threatening: “my executive will even go to the length of publishing a condemnatory resolution in the newspaper”.

From 1900 to 1906, the membership of the trade unions which were affiliated to the LRC increased from about a third of a million to about a million, while the membership of the constituent “socialist” groups remained at about twenty thousand, falling to fourteen thousand from 1901 to 1904. The greatest number of votes polled by the Labour Party before the First World War was about 500,000 in 1910, about one tenth of the electorate. Those workers elected as “Lib-Labs” in the first years of this century were prepared to co-operate in parliament with LRC independents, for the sake of expediency. By the 1906 election, the leaders Hardie, Macdonald and Henderson had organised the skeleton of a national political machine, modelled on the established parties. They devised a programme which only contained reform measures compatible with capitalism. Their glorified trade-union pressure group was preparing to replace the Liberal Party in its role of alternative government of capitalism. The Labour Party was born by the “back door” method of collaboration with the Liberal Party itself. In the Liberal landslide of 1906, twenty-nine out of fifty LRC candidates were elected. The ILP and Fabian Society by then accounted for less than a fiftieth of the affiliated membership.

As the Liberal Party floundered, the Labour Party rose, based on active participation by workers in the system which exploits us. In 1904, the Socialist Party of Great Britain was formed. In the first issue of the Socialist Standard, in September 1904, there was an editorial opposing the LRC with good reason: the LRC members had no common principles, but only the name “Labour”:

Unity is only possible among those who possess common principles. Unity cannot, therefore, be secured for any length of time by the members of the Labour Representation Committee, but even if it could, the body is not based upon Socialist principles 

which is the reason for the lack of unity in the Labour Party today. That first issue also said of the Independent Labour Party:

Having neither the courage to proclaim themselves Socialists nor to disavow Socialism, they are today coquetting with that working-class wing of the Liberal Party - the Labour Representation Committee. When the question of Socialism was raised on the committee, their chief representative declared that was neither the time nor the place for such discussion.

The victory for compromise marked by the rise of the Labour Party may have seemed complete, but it was not permanent. The Labour governments which have been formed since, have proved the impossibility of trying to legislate against the ugly effects of the profit system. The Labour Party was formed on the basis of popular support for capitalism, and it has become one of the major institutions of that system. Workers need not sorrow for it in its old age, or run to carry the SDP baby which is really its uncle. Now, more than ever, there is a chance, and an urgent need, to build a party to end capitalism, not to run it.

Clifford Slapper

Party News (1982)

Party News from the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

“We sedulously cultivate free speech in this country, even in its most repressive form.” These were the words of that one-time friend of Stalin and revered politician, the late Winston Churchill. The notion behind these pious words is that free speech is worth promoting because it enables people with conflicting ideas to present their arguments so that action can be based on policies which have been thoroughly argued out on a public forum. Indeed we were told that between 1939 and 1945 the deaths of 300,000 members of the British working class, and the destruction in air raids were all suffered in the cause of protecting the Great Freedoms which exist in Britain.

Strangely, the not-so-famous namesake of the man who was in favour of “showering them with mustard gas” during the last world war does not seem to share his late grandpa's piety. The Manchester Group of the Socialist Party of Great Britain recently invited the present Winston Churchill, who is MP for Stretford, to participate in a public debate on the question “Would socialism be a change for the worse?” In a reply we were informed that Churchill had “no wish to share a public platform with a member of the Socialist Party”. What's the point, you might wonder, of advocating democracy if you are against the idea of entering into political debate against your opponents? As Churchill’s idea of democracy includes support for a minority of wealth owners to live comfortably and securely off the backs of the majority of wealth producers, his political beliefs were already not unblemished with contradictions.

Paying ourselves . . . (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last December 10 saw a grimacing Margaret Thatcher posturing for photographers in a mechanically reclining wheelchair which was one of the winning entries in a competition run by the Design Council. Thatcher had lots of praise for this device and others like it in the competition, for the alleviation of suffering it would bring to the disabled.

In the insultingly patronising “Year of the Disabled” (hard luck presumably, on their terms now 1981 has gone) Thatcher’s mock concern is doubly hypocritical as she is at the front of a campaign to cut money to the second-rate Health Service leaving more to spend on machines of destruction. For instance, on the very day she was pictured in the national press gallivanting with glee around the equipment for the disabled at the Design Council Awards, it was reported that a NHS hospital for the mentally handicapped in South London had been ordered to cut back its expenditure by so much that some children would be left in their wards all day—because of the number of staff to be made redundant—and all sorts of facilities for the children including a hydrotherapy pool would have to go.

Even with cash donations from parents to help the local Area Health Authority pay for the required staff, no new patients from the community, however needy, will be admitted to the hospital because of the lack of resources. When Thatcher said last year in solemn tones, ‘‘We are paying ourselves too much”, most of us who are living in poverty of one degree or another were angered or confused. It now perhaps becomes clearer exactly what was troubling her conscience. Between June 1980 and June 1981 the largest percentage wage increase received by a sector of the British public was not received by the miners, transport workers nor by the shipbuilders for example who received increases of about 10 per cent, 40 per cent and 9 per cent respectively. It was received by none other than dear old Margaret herself and was over 40 per cent! (CIS Anti-Report, 1981, sources: Dept, of Employment Gazette, Hansard, Labour Research Dept.)

White House bugged (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Could President Reagan, the greatest supporter Big Business has ever had in the White House, be responsible for a cardinal sin against capitalism?

In the highly competitive world of exterminators, the answer is a gloomy yes. In short the President helped in the promotion of a perfect product that supermarkets won’t touch: a powder that rids homes of cockroaches permanently so needs to be bought only once.

‘Stores don’t want a once-and-for-ever sale,’ explained Alan Brite, president of the company that makes Roach-Prufe. ‘They like repeat business.'

‘Who would want to produce a tyre that never wears out, an everlasting battery or a car that lasts a lifetime?’

Mr Brite traces his problem back to the day Ronald and Nancy Reagan found cockroaches in the White House. They called in chemists and experts from the University of California and consulted the permanent staff who, like millions of Americans, had accepted that periodic infestations were as inevitable as the seasons.

The final solution the experts revealed was Roach-Prufe. The Reagans tried it and the dreaded cockroaches never returned. The word leaked out and, in a blaze of publicity that would have cost millions, the public clamoured for Mr Brite’s product. But it was rejected by a marketing system geared to a fast turnover of the imperfect.

So instead of despatching the powder in truck loads to thousands of outlets across the nation, Mr Brite has to use more expensive door-to-door salesmen.

Daily Mail, 18 November 1981

Labour: who will mourn? (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who will mourn the Labour Party if, as seems likely, it is in its death throes? Prudent political commentators must even now be composing its obituary. Who will there be to shed tears if the end comes?

No doubt there will be thousands of workers, people who have tramped the streets in election campaigns, stood out in harsh weather to listen to some Labour leader, who will mourn. They were convinced that the reformism of the Labour Party offered some hope of a better world. They clung to this conviction in the face of years of evidence to the contrary; often, in the end, they were reduced to claiming that the Labour Party was the best of a bad bunch better, at least, than the Tories. Some of them might even have thought that Labour stood, at some time and some place, for socialism, although their conception of it was extremely vague.

There will be many trade unionists to mourn; workers who linger stubbornly in the Labour Party tradition that, having sprung from the trade union movement, the party must always represent the interests of union members. For some, as Labour governments fought the unions over wages and working conditions, as Labour ministers urged workers to break picket lines, it must have needed a special effort of obduracy to keep the faith. Those who did will mourn.

Some members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament will mourn. They may be convinced that Labour’s conference decision to support unilateral nuclear disarmament would have meant something to a future Labour government. They will have been notably insensitive to political history and to the manner in which the governments of capitalism are liable to treat the idealism of a minority of their followers. Insensitive and ignorant, CNDers will be there to mourn.

Muddle-heads on the left wing will mourn. The Socialist Workers Party, for example, has devoted a lot of time to telling the workers that the Labour Party is their enemy but that they should vote for a Labour government. The SWP must be very grateful to the Labour Party, for providing so fertile a soil in which to sow such confusion. If Labour dies, where will the crazy militants of the left find an adequate substitute? So, without a doubt, they will mourn.

Racists among the working class will regret the passing of the Labour Party who, after all, gave racist laws the stamp of respectability; if a “socialist” government wanted to restrict the entry of coloured workers then it must be all right, mustn’t it? Crude patriots whose support for the Labour Party was rooted in a defence of their standards of poverty, who would fight to the death for their jerry-built home, the drudgery which is “their” job, the sub-standard care they get in hospitals; they who found much comfort in Labour’s racism will mourn the party’s end.

Among the British capitalist class there will also be many mourners. They saw the reality of Labour rule, with eyes unstarred by distorted history or by current deceptions. They knew that the Labour Party has always done its best for the interests of the British ruling class, that it has always done what it saw to be necessary for those interests to be protected and advanced. They had no cause to complain at their treatment at the hands of any Labour government. And it was all done while the working class were being told they were experiencing a socialist society. If only in gratitude, members of the British ruling class will mourn.

Abroad, also, there will be capitalists who will grieve that Labour is no more. The American ruling class, for example, who found in the governments of Attlee and Wilson such sterling allies, will no doubt pay tribute to a fond memory. The Attlee government gave its full support to the Americans dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the Americans declared war on North Korea, that same Labour government was eager in its support, sending British workers to die in the war there to protect the interests of their masters. Similarly, the Wilson government was a steadfast ally of the American war effort in Vietnam, supporting it through all the horrors which that war produced. The American capitalist class, in the person of President Johnson, expressed their gratitude at the time and it was well deserved. No doubt, the master class of America will mourn.

Socialists will not mourn the end of the Labour Party. We know it to be a party of capitalism, which stands for the interests of the minority owning, exploiting class in society. The effect of Labour rule has never been to leave that master class in any weaker position; in fact, if anything. Labour has gone out of office leaving the rich richer and the poor poorer. Every Labour government has attacked the living standards of the working class and because it has called this socialism, has thrown up a mountain of confusion.

What of those Labour Party members who, anxious to throw off the burdens of their position as workers and to alleviate the sufferings which are the everyday experience of workers everywhere, will mourn the passing of their party as the only vehicle they know to the society of freedom, peace and plenty? They are fatigued with disappointment and doubt. They will find the case for socialism refreshing.

Socialism requires that there is a majority of workers who understand and want it. That consciousness immunises a socialist against the deceits and the assurances which bolster the politics of capitalism. Socialists are alert to the fact that only a society based on common ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution will abolish the problems of capitalism. We are aware that no reforms can do this and that parties which have a programme of reformism are seeking only to postpone socialism in other words to maintain capitalism.

The socialist alternative to the Labour Party, dead or alive, is a society in which all human beings stand equally in their access to the common wealth, a society in which all people co-operate freely to produce the things society needs. This will be a world without frontiers, without nationalities or senseless patriotisms or racism. It will be a world with only one people, all working together for the common good. It will be a world without war, poverty, starvation and much of the disease which now shortens our lives. It will be a society of freedom and abundance.

Workers who mourn the Labour Party must consider the alternative of socialism. For them, after the agonies of confusion and doubt, it will be like a life after death.

Races without winners (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 8 December last, a judge at Manchester Crown Court sentenced to gaol a sociology lecturer and eight students who had formed a left-wing hit squad armed with a “fearful array of weapons" and to crusade against their fascist rivals from the National Front. So. the right wing thugs won that battle 9-0 without having to cross their front doors. “Daddy, where are you going with that sledgehammer?” the child of the sociology lecturer might have enquired. “I’m going out to persuade those fascists of the need to establish a society of peace and harmony”, comes the reply.

As people become increasingly frustrated with the inability of the “respectable” political parties to solve major problems like unemployment and poverty, fascist ideas gain popularity. Today, both main political parties are riven with internal disputes. Neither can present to the electorate a united and confident parade of leaders in order to capture trust and votes, and both have records of miserable failures in government. As the recession aggravates social problems, so the appeal of fascist ideas grow stronger. “What we need is a clean break . . . stronger leaders . . . firmer discipline . . .  a firm movement to bring order where there is chaos . . .  to re-establish some of the old virtues like obedience and fear of God . . .  a clean Britain, a pure Britain ... a White Britain . . .  ”, runs the rhetoric of the dons of ignorance.

Organisations like the National Front and the British Movement have been churning out propaganda, aimed particularly at young people, to foster racial antagonism between between black and white. In recent years, minority ethnic groups have suffered an increasing number of racially inspired attacks. Temples, mosques, synagogues and burial grounds have been vandalised and daubed with fascist slogans and emblems; left-wing bookshops have been raided and bombed and people have been attacked in the streets and abused with racialist insults. This alarming trend is only the tip of an iceberg of popular and institutionalised racialism and romantic para-military left-wing expeditions to root it out will not only fail but could have the opposite effect.

The frequency and seriousness of racial attacks reached such a pitch last February that the first official Home Office study of racially inspired crime was commissioned by the Home Secretary. William “short, sharp shock” Whitelaw. The committee issued its report (Racial Attacks, Report of the Home Office Study 1981) last November.

The problem of racial tensions is usually approached from the assumption that we should be devising plans to enable ‘different races’ to exist co-operatively. Although on the face of it this is an anti-racialist attitude, it is in fact quite the reverse. There is, of course, only one race, the human race, and no one has a “pure racial make up”of one stock. Peoples of the world do enjoy many diverse cultures but there is no necessary link between ‘race’ and ‘culture’. A white Caucasian born and bred in an Indian village will acquire an Indian language and culture and, conversely, an Asian born and bred in England will acquire an English language and culture. The culture of a country is not a fixed, static entity, but rather something which constantly changes with the arrival of new ideas and people from different cultures. Today’s so called “British stock” in fact trace their ancestry to a great variety of groups who settled on this island including the Celts, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Romans and Normans. Each of these groups was, similarly, the result of a mixture of people of different geographical and cultural origins. So, many of the philanthropic reformers who today advocate measures like “positive discrimination” as ways of improving the relations between the “different races”, are in fact proceeding from the same fallacious racial assumptions as their fascist opponents.

The problem of police brutality, harassment and infringement of personal liberties is usually approached from the point of view of wanting to organise the police force to do their job kindly and unobtrusively. Like trying to design the gallows in the best interests of those sentenced to hang. It is the job of the police to act against the interests of most of us. Their main function is to protect property which means making sure that the great majority of us who actually create wealth don’t take back more of it than we can buy with our wages.

Since its organised beginnings in the eighteenth century, the police force has been their police force, not ours. Like banks or national armies, police forces are an integral part of modern capitalism. They can only be swept aside once their reason for existing – the protection of private and state property –has been removed. That is once a majority have established common ownership of social wealth. With the enormous oppression of the working class that the police force as such represents, it would be silly for us to campaign for trivial changes to police organisation. At the end of last year that party-of-a-thousand-demands,the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), launched a nationwide campaign to have the Chief Constable of Merseyside. Kenneth Oxford, sacked after the police behaviour leading up to and during the Toxteth riots. At a recent public meeting in Manchester, the SWP were asked in what possible way the removal of one Chief Constable (and, of course, his immediate replacement by another Boy in Blue) would help to establish socialism, or even benefit the working class. “Well, you've got to start somewhere” was the reply — not by some drunken joker, but by Tony Cliff, one of the leading theoreticians of the SWP.

The Home Office Report on Racial Attacks, recognising the upsurge of such incidents in recent years, and the way in which certain parties like the National Front are fostering a climate of antagonism between ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’, makes a number of recommendations. One is that in investigating and dealing with alleged racial attacks the police should be more “sensitive” to the issues involved. This is not very helpful. An organisation of uniformed men and women, armed with truncheons, handcuffs, private interrogation rooms and with the full force of the law behind them, even with the best will in the world (forget Blair Peach, Liddel Towers, David Moore) could not operate sensitively. With the huge job of methodical tyranny that they have to carry out, the police have to act on wide, clumsy and insensitive rules of thumb. For instance, in his book The Signs of Crime: A Field Manual for Police (1977) David Powis, then Deputy Assistant Commissioner to the Metropolitan Police, included in his list of indicators of suspicious people: “People of an untidy or dirty appearance –especially with dirty shoes” (even manual workers, if honest, he says, are clean and tidy!) Also included were “political radicals” particularly if they “spout extremist babble” and “groups of young people in cars”.

That Great Crusader for racial harmony, William Whitelaw after he had finished singing the praises of the overtly racialist Nationality Act and showing such concern to re-unite Anwar Ditta with her family, chipped in his little bit of piety to the Report by writing its introduction. He said he would be exploring ways of combating racialist propaganda. Perhaps he will be consulting the expert wisdom of members of the British judiciary like Justice McKinnon who, presiding at the trial last year of John Kingsley Read (Chairman of the British National Party) for inciting racial hatred, commented that he (McKinnon) saw nothing inflammatory in calling somebody a “wog” as he had often been called that himself at school. Justice McKinnon is a ‘white’ man who was educated in Australia. Exploring how best the law can deal with racial attacks, Whitelaw may also wish to tap the discretion of Lord Justice Lawton who was a parliamentary candidate for the British Union of Fascists in 1936 in Hammersmith.

The profit system does not operate on any moral code, and we cannot say that as capitalism continues it will progress to smoother and more harmonious ways of working. Governments will tend to discourage or promote racialism to suit the requirements of the profitability of industry. During the last World War much of industry and many services were destroyed. After the war there was much work to be done, and with about 30,000,000 workers killed in Europe, there was an acute shortage of labour. The capitalists needed an enlarged workforce quickly, and they weren’t fussy about where the ‘hands’ came from. In the Economic Review of 1947 the [govern]ment set out its policy.

Foreign labour can make a useful contribution to our needs . . . foreign labour is the only substantial additional source of manpower which is open to us–especially for the undermanned industries.

Apart from using refugees and displaced persons after the war as European Volunteer Workers (Britain took about 200,000 of these) the colonies were also used as a new source of immigrant labour, particularly the West Indies, India and Pakistan. Now that Britain along with other industralised countries is in the throes of another crisis and there is high unemployment, the government is less keen on immigration. Hence Thatcher’s “they’re swamping our culture” scaremongery, and measures like the Nationality Act.

From the Zionists, who proclaim they are the ‘Chosen People’, to the neo-Nazis who believe that honour is theirs, all racialism feeds and flourishes upon ignorance. Today, the most significant historical division of people is that by which a small minority (from all cultural origins) own and control the means of life, while the overwhelming majority of us (from all cultural origins) create wealth and run society primarily to produce profits to further enrich the rich.

Today, the great majority of workers are struggling under the weight of holding a privileged minority above their heads. When they look down and observe that we are blaming our poverty on each other, because some are “black” and some “white”, they must enjoy a contemptuous laugh and feel comfortably secure above us. The real tyranny today is not that of the police, the army, judges and politicians. They are a small minority. It is a Tyranny of Ideas which makes the minority mighty and the majority meek.

Gary Jay

The abolition of money (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

At first it is hard to envisage a world without money. It requires a considerable jump of the political imagination to think of life without banks, wallets, coins, bills, cheque books or financial worries. From birth to the grave, workers’ lives are conditioned by money. Without it we starve; because of it we are poor; to get it we are forced into wage slavery; if we steal it we can be locked away; people grow old before their time because of it.

In Robert Tressell's classic socialist novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the socialist, Owen, explained to his workmates the nature of money:

“Let us begin at the beginning”, continued Owen . . .“First of all, what do you mean by Poverty?”
“Why, if you’ve got no money, of course,” said Crass impatiently.
The others laughed disdainfully. It seemed to them such a foolish question.
“Well, that’s true enough as far as it goes,” returned Owen, “that is, as things are arranged in the world at the present. But money itself is not wealth: it’s of no use whatever.”
At this there was another outburst of jeering laughter.
“Supposing for example that you and Harlow were shipwrecked on a desolate island, and you saved nothing from the wreck but a bag containing a thousand sovereigns, and he had a tin of biscuits and a bottle of water.” “Make it beer,” cried Harlow appealingly.
"Who would be the richer man, you or Harlow?” (p. 29)

In short, it is not money as such which can satisfy needs, but money as a medium of exchange. According to Owen, "Money is the cause of poverty because it is the device by which those who are too lazy to work are enabled to rob the workers of the fruits of their labour” (p. 209). The significant point is that Tressell (or Robert Noonan, as he was really called) was not considered strange for making his socialist character advocate the abolition of the monetary system. At the turn of the century, when the Socialist Party of Great Britain was formed, socialists were frequently heard advocating a moneyless society. After all, how could one logically speak about a system of common ownership without referring to its logical consequences?

These days, those who pose as socialists, but in fact have no other purpose than to reform the capitalist system, are never heard to refer to the abolition of money. Benn, the SWP, the Communist Party and Co. are all united in their dismissal of the possibility of a moneyless society. The celebrated Clause Four of the Labour Party constitution states its aim as “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. The illogicality of such an objective betrays the Labour Party’s profound confusion about the nature of socialism: if resources are commonly owned, who is going to need money to buy anything and who will be selling it? The abolition of all property and the introduction of common ownership necessarily does away with the anachronistic social relationships of buying and selling. The confusion of the Communist Party of Great Britain is clearly demonstrated in its pamphlet. Time to Change Course; in the section headed “Where Will The Money Come From?” (p. 81), we are told about financing socialism:

Under socialism, with all the main industries, land, resources and financial houses publicly owned, it is from these sources that the main forms of revenue will be derived. Personal taxation will be simple and not too arduous for the majority of people. Indirect taxation would be kept to a minimum. The present rating system would go. Local authorities would rely on other steps to raise local revenue.

Clearly, the Communist Party has failed to liberate itself from the ideological assumptions of the money system. Its members would do well to read Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in which he states that Communists (or socialists) stand for “the abolition of buying and selling”. This revolutionary objective is a hallmark of any principled socialist. Anyone claiming to stand for socialism who rejects the need for a society without money (or the possibility of attaining it) is not a socialist and should be treated as an opponent.

Great ideas are of social origin and never the product of just one brain. In the months before Marx’s Communist Manifesto was published in English (in November 1850), a number of workers in Britain were discussing the idea of abolishing money. The correspondence on the subject, which appeared in the Chartist journal, The Red Republican, has never before been seriously examined by historians. Presumably, most of them have dismissed the correspondence as an insignificant exchange of views between harmless economic eccentrics; in fact, it is a highly significant discussion, showing that there were workers discussing the case for a moneyless society before the Socialist Party of Great Britain began to advocate it.

The first letter, from George Smith of Salford, was published in The Red Republican on 27 July 1850, under the heading “ABOLITION OF MONEY”. He argues that

. . . in order . . . to prepare the way for the absolute supremacy of the working classes, preparatory to the abolition of the system of classes, what should be done? Evidently something more than getting possession of political rights, or even destroying those twin monsters, rent and usury; for had we possession of the one and had successfully destroyed the other, there would yet remain in existence a monster which would reproduce its kind to torment humanity; and that monster is money! Sir, in my opinion, so long as mankind will agree to have a circulating medium — will allow everything in life to be measured by money — so long will they suffer the evil consequences springing therefrom . . .

By 10 August, Smith’s letter had provoked a response. The writer, who signed himself “A Wage Slave”, opposes the need to abolish money, stating that “What society wants is just social institutions”. He argued that capitalism survives because workers are not paid the full value of their labour power and that the real need is for an equitable distribution of money. (The modern Left, one hundred and thirty years later, has not advanced beyond such theoretical fallacies.)

The Red Republican of 24 August contains two letters on the money question, taking up three columns. The first is from RPP, who states that the abolition of money “is the most important subject for discussion at the present time”. He goes on to agree that money should be abolished:

I would root out and abolish a system that compels man to give the sweat of his heart’s blood to the great money-mongers, wasting his own time, strength and happiness, as wealth may command. It is the slavery of the many for the sake of the few. Such a state of things must no longer exist, for man was made to enjoy all things equally with his fellow-man.

But — just as the reader is thinking that the correspondent has hit the nail very close to its head — RPP proceeds to argue that “the working classes must return to barter”. The second letter is from George Smith, who initiated the correspondence, and contains some excellent answers to the arguments of “Wage Slave”:

Strange, that in the 19th century, any wage slave should be found to advocate the continuance, in any shape, of that which, whilst it shall last, must perpetuate his vassalage, to its “fortunate possessors”. Does not my friend see both the craft and the hellishness of money? Who produces everything which sustains life, and feeds our desires for luxuries? The workers! Through the instrumentality of their labour, and by no other means can these things be produced. Then by what chicanery do those who “work not, neither do they spin” obtain all they want to superfluity, whilst those who produce are kept almost without? Why, by the crafty invention and use of money, with which they, like true “philanthropists”, come to the producer, and assure him that the food he is taking home is not “the stuff of life” but that which they will give him in return for his food is the real sustainer of existence, and thus he is cheated out of his produce for a shadow.

Smith rather confuses cause and effect — it is not money which produces class division, but the other way round — but nevertheless he is clearly moving in the direction of the ideas later to be elaborated by Marx. Responding to “Wage Slave’s” advocacy of a “just commercial system”, Smith rightly states that:

For a man to dispose (or sell) of his labour at the “public mart” presupposes a buyer of that labour, and, according to our friend’s just commercial system, I am afraid that no buyers would purchase unless they could live out of such purchases. To live by buying and selling is to live nefariously.

“Wage Slave” replies on 7 September, stating that he can now see the importance of Smith’s idea, but doubts whether everyone else will be intelligent enough to live in a moneyless society. (A familiar argument from modern Leftists.) “Why propose to do that which is impossible at the present time?” asks “Wage Slave”. This question was asked of the SPGB when it was formed in 1904 and it was for this reason that our members were labelled “the impossibilists”. If those who took this view in 1850 and 1904 had spent less time running away from the need to convince people of a good idea, and telling its advocates that they were wasting their time, we would have achieved the seemingly impossible long ago.

On 14 September Alexander Bill contributed a letter to the correspondence, in which he argued (rather confusedly) that he was opposed to “the total and unconditional abolition of money”, although he did agree with Smith “when he says that our present monetary system is the basis of all those social evils under which we labour”. His answer was to introduce a “prohibition of private trading” and “the establishment of public marts”. Effectively, this was an argument for state capitalism.

The final letter on the subject was published on 28 September and came from George Smith. To “Wage Slave’s” claim that workers could not arrive at the point of intelligence which would make a moneyless society possible, Smith responds:

Intelligence! What is it? Walker says intelligence is “perception, understanding”. Now, will my friend say that it is impossible for the intelligent to excite the perception of the, at present, ignorant, and give them understanding?

No further letter appeared on the subject. Smith’s question remained unanswered. But since 1850, the post-Chartist Left has responded to the question in the negative. While claiming to be fully committed Marxists, they refuse to advocate the case for the abolition of money because they consider the working class too stupified by capitalist conservatism ever to accept or understand it. Instead, they argue in favour of state capitalism. It is because of this that socialists are fundamentally hostile to the left-wing parties and groups.

Genuine socialists stand for a society in which all factories, farms, offices, docks, mines — indeed, the entire means of producing and distributing wealth — will be owned by the entire world community. The resources of the earth will belong to everyone. No laws will exist to preserve the right of one section of society to use things and another section to be denied the use of them. World socialism will be a social order based on free access for all people to all the goods of the earth. In such a society money would by an out-dated relic. Nobody will buy anything or sell anything or pay for anything. Those who cannot easily imagine such an arrangement should remember that people in pre-capitalist societies would have found our present social order equally difficult to comprehend. Those who have made the mental leap from the prison of the money system to the freedom of world socialism are urged to join us now in our struggle to create the society of tomorrow. The objective is urgent; we have waited for too long.

Steve Coleman