No change (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was hardly noticed at the time, but last May the British penal system, which does not have a reputation for moving swiftly with the times, underwent an historic change. As a result, the prospects are that a lot more youngsters will be going to prison than before, which probably gave some excited relief to those who nurture a punitive lust towards young criminality. Like much superficial and irrelevant adjustments, this was called a revolution. In fact it was nothing more than the abolition of the Borstal system and its replacement by something called Youth Custody.

The first Borstal was set up in 1902, in the village of that name in Kent, as an experimental training camp for young offenders. This was greeted as a great humanitarian advance, for the young had traditionally been harshly treated when they broke the law. In the 18th century 90 per cent of offenders who were hanged were under the age of 21; in 1838 Parkhurst was converted from a military hospital to a young offenders' prison, where the shackles and the whip were in regular use. The experiment at Borstal was regarded as a success and the Prevention of Crime Act 1908 (which did not, of course, prevent crime nor even offer any perceptive notion of what it was) gave birth to an entire system of the places.

The draftsmen of the 1908 Act set out the new institutions' objects in ringing terms, dear to the hearts of the legislators of the day:

  . . . places in which young offenders may be given such industrial training and other instruction and be subjected to such disciplinary and moral influences as will conduce to their reformation and the prevention of crime. (Quoted in Justice of the Peace, 19 November 1983).

Nearly sixty years after the Act, the Home Office were sure that these objects were being achieved for the Borstals, they said, were providing ". . . all-round development of character and capacities — moral, mental, physical and vocational . . ." (The Sentence of the Court, 1969: HMSO).

Well, that was not quite how many of the Borstal boys remembered them. One will never forget the immediate assault he was subjected to on his arrival, before he had had time to break any of the rules, to show him what would happen if he did. Another has bitter memories of his first, character-forming, day when he saw a friend beaten because he couldn't wash the floor to an officer’s satisfaction. He was, in fact, in the last throes of leukaemia: when he died, a couple of days later, the governor had the boys assembled to suggest that they might like to contribute to a wreath.

The intention was to model the Borstals on public schools, which were supposed to breed into youths the insular prejudices which had helped subdue so much of the world into the British Empire. They were divided into houses, supervised by people who anywhere else would have been known as prison officers but who in Borstals were called housemasters. There was an emphasis, at least in theory, on house spirit, physical exercise and career training. A lot of money was spent on some of them; one had a library, a sports field and a shed full of racing boats such as might have been the envy of a public school. Others were huge purpose-built complexes with classrooms, workshops and a farm. It was of course useful to display such Borstals to visiting parties of judges and magistrates who were looking for reassurance that they were doing the boys a favour by sending them there. Other Borstals were rather less favoured; they might be converted military camps, some from the Napoleonic Wars; one of these could expect, on a typical day, to have over half its inmates — boys aged between 15 and 21 — to be homeless when they were released to face the rigours of life at what was called liberty. The prospects of such boys were poor; a Home Office Research Bulletin in 1978 found a 60 per cent reconviction rate among homeless ex-prisoners. (Making Good, Martin Wright. Burnet Books, 1982). The main problem facing these boys would have been eradicated if they could somehow have moved upwards into the other class in society, where a housing problem is not known, but no Act of Parliament was ever drafted with that in mind.

There was in fact one way in which the Borstal did provide the best schooling in the country. They were the Oxbridge of criminal education, where boys who had previously bungled their offences could learn how best to steal a car or break into a house. One graduate, now middle-aged, put it something like this:

  When I left Borstal I was 18 and I had to make a choice. I’d learned how to make crime pay; should I go straight or go back at it, only properly this time? When I looked at the profits I could see there was really no choice so I went back at it. Got my own little business together then I packed it in. Till I got tempted with this little lot.

But it was not their futility, nor any violence or corruption about them, which brought about the end of the Borstals; it was simply that, in the eyes of the legislators and of the people who vote for them, they were not doing their job. For the past twenty years or so, a flood of statistics has borne into public awareness the impression that crime is predominantly the act of poor young men from an urban environment. Throughout the period 1972-82 the highest rate of known crime per 100,000 of the population has been in the male age group 14-17 and the next highest in the male age group 17-21. In 1982. the most recent year for which figures are available, the rates were 76 and 73 respectively while for all age groups it was about 22. Even allowing for statistical quirks — for example many of the offences committed by teenagers are by their nature more likely to come to the notice of the police than are some of the more premeditated and sophisticated crimes by adults — the figures give a clear enough picture and it is one of widespread disaffection among the youth of Britain.

Certainly, that was the message reaching the courts, with their daily stream into the dock of youngsters who had taken cars, broken into houses, or picked a pocket. But when the courts came to exact their revenge. they often found their powers restricted by the Criminal Justice Act of 1961. This Act forbade the courts to send anyone to prison, if by their age they were qualified for a sentence of Borstal, for any period between six months and three years, with the intention that a sentence of any intermediate length must entail Borstal training. This was Parliament’s response to the developing problem of juvenile crime, which it hoped to deal with by something officially defined as training rather than with something condemned as punishment. (Those were high days for the theories of social work as a palliative to capitalism's ailments; the inevitable failure of social work has opened the way for a return to a harder policy of restraint and punishment.)

More than one judge, impatient to imprison some miserable, quaking youth, fretted at the restrictions of the 1961 Act; for one thing, Borstal training meant that the Home Office decided when the offender was released, instead of the judge fixing it by the length of sentence. Flower-hatted Tory ladies and puce-faced gentlemen gave vent to their outrage at the apparent indulgence of teenage louts and ne’er-do-wells. Stimulated by a typical media panic, there was a White Paper and a “debate" and then another Act of Parliament. The original noble aims of the Borstal were forgotten and they were quietly put to death; the signs at the gates were replaced with others which proclaimed that what had been a Borstal is now a Youth Custody Centre; new forms were printed; the housemasters went back into uniform and to being called prison officers. In one way or another, judges and magistrates can send youngsters to some sort of prison for whatever time, short or long, they decide — and the signs are that they are happily taking their chance. According to the Guardian of 14 September 1983, in the first two months of the Act's operation the number of inmates aged 15-20 in the Youth Custody Centres increased by about 1,000; a crisis of overcrowding is now looming, to rival that in the adult prisons.

The treatment (for that is what it is called) of offenders is officially judged in terms of its effect on re-offending. No “treatment" method has such a “success" rate that it outdistances the rest and presents a clear economic choice for a government to invest in. No method offers any comfort to the law-makers and this is especially the case with juveniles who are given custodial sentences, for up to 80 per cent of them re-offend within two years of their release (Martin Wright). This says a great deal, not so much about the offenders but about the penal system and the society in which it all happens and which the penal system is supposed to defend.

The legislators and the sentencers — and reformers — turn their attention to the character of the offender, which at least allows them to ignore the character of this society. Crime happens mainly in urban areas because they are the concentrations of population which capitalism set down so that workers could live near the places where they were exploited. The history of this, of the expulsions from the land and the pitiful trek for survival to the towns, is one of extreme cruelty. Urban pressures are different now but in their way they are as fierce and destructive as ever. The towns and cities are places where economic and social alienation is made explicit, where people can lie dead in their homes without anyone knowing, where the homeless skulk through the parks and the streets, dirty and ignored.

Capitalism's social engineers encourage us to escape this fate through an attachment to the family and they have an ideal of this — an inturned. private, passionless unit where appetites and emotions are kept in check to promote our docility in exploitation. Capitalism’s family breeds neurosis as it socialises its children into a passive acceptance of their place as wage slaves. But at the same time this family has little resilience; it breaks under only a slight pressure and when that happens its members are left bewildered and damaged, sometimes to the point of seeing themselves as freakish. Children of one-parent families, for example, can often go through agonies of embarrassment in their relationship with other children who have both a mother and a father at home. An impressive number of such children take the role of social deviants and end up in the dock and with the cell door clanging into place at their backs.

For this is not a social system based on majority human interests. It cannot encourage. nor even manage, any challenge to its basic character; it must respond with discipline and repression. It cannot condone human freedom because to do so would undermine its structure of privilege feeding off poverty.

Almost unnoticed — and so far unmourned — the Borstals have gone now, and there are other places which operate on the same blind and brutal deceptions. Meanwhile capitalism goes on, with its poverty, its repression and its human alienation. “Is there not,” observed Marx, “a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals to make room for the supply of new ones?”

Ivan

Leave them kids alone (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Between the ages of five and sixteen children are compelled to attend institutions where they are indoctrinated, humiliated, regimented and brutalised. Schools are places which strip children of their dignity and creativeness and make them learned in the idiocy of capitalist thinking and obedient to the authorities which govern the system of oppression.

The position of the school child is pathetic by comparison to that of older workers. In employment, wage slaves can combine in trade unions to affect the conditions of their exploitation; the child at school has no such chance. School governors and head teachers do not negotiate with children — and where bodies like “school councils" do exist, they are mockeries of democracy which lead to nothing but frustration for the student who wants to alter conditions. Capitalists are not able to assault the wage slave whose labour power they have purchased — indeed, it is a legal offence if a boss hits a worker. Not so in schools: although beating is now officially illegal in some areas of Britain, there are still many schools where adults beat children too weak and powerless to hit back. Even where children are not the victims of physical attack by adults, it is often the case that verbal abuse, sarcasm and intimidation by shouting are used as methods of control. Under British law schools must carry out religious indoctrination and physical training. These too are fates which wage slaves are spared: you can, at least, get through a day in the office or down the mine without some moralising trickster testing you on the contents of St. Luke’s Gospel or some brainless lump of muscle screaming orders at you to jump over a wooden horse. At school these events occur weekly, and unless you are enterprising enough to consistently find excuses for avoiding them you are unlikely to go through at least five years of secondary education without being affected. Fortunately for many young people, compulsory religious indoctrination persuades them to keep away from the tedious and absurd fairy-stories for the rest of their lives.

What else is taught in schools? Without doubt some of it is useful, but the critical child must watch out for the bias of the system. Geography, for example, is taught in a way which often fails to make the distinction between the natural and the social: it is one thing to study a river or a continent, but too often “countries" and “borders" are spoken of as if they are part of the “map of the world" rather than the social arrangements of capitalism. Although not as bad as it once was, geography teaching is still remarkably nationalistic and racist. There are still text books which depict little black children as “happy-go-lucky” inferiors destined to lifestyles of fitting deprivation. (This is ironic because, as a serious study of world geography will show, many areas of mass destitution are among the most abundant in natural resources.)

What goes for geography applies even more to the teaching of history. There are two basic fallacies conveyed by the indoctrinators of history in schools: firstly, the belief that history is no more than the story of the past; and secondly, the narrow outlook which identifies only those events concerning the British — or, at most, European — ruling class as being of historical significance. If studying history is to be of any use it must present the student with the question: What next? Schools fall in with the conservative assumption of capitalist ideology that history stopped at the present and now we can expect the revolutions and fundamental changes of lifestyle which have been the story of society so far to cease. The emphasis on nationalism not only affects British schooling: the children of every capitalist country are encouraged to see the past from the angle of their own particular ruling class. Not only are the blinkers of nationalism fitted on those at school; it is still the case today that a student can enter Oxford University to do a history degree and leave three years later having studied only British history.

The indoctrination process does not escape the study of English. Some of it is creative and stimulating, but many children are put off reading literature after leaving school as a result of the boring experience of learning by heart large chunks of Keats or Shakespeare to pass exams. The snobbery attached to “appreciating" literature is enough to put anyone off. Why should children who appreciate the genuine dramatic qualities of Coronation Street or Fawlty Towers believe that it is “proper" to think more highly about the dramatic excellence of Hamlet or Much Ado About Nothing?

So, schools do not teach children to understand society, but to understand what the ruling class want us to know about society as presently organised. The socialist message to school students is a simple one: just as you probably will not believe everything you read in the Sun and you certainly should not believe everything you read in The Socialist Standard, so you should not accept everything told to you by your educators. Before accepting, think critically and check the truth by reference to your own experience and that of other people; don't believe, understand.

It is not only "knowledge” which schools distort. One of the principal purposes of schooling is to mould the child’s character. What sort of character does the capitalist class require? Workers who are obedient, naive, repressed, malleable, submissive . . . the list is endless, but can be summed up in one word: exploitable. The educated wage slave is a willing victim of the legalised robbery of the wages system. Of course, capitalists need different types of wage slaves: some to wear suits and operate the calculating machines, others to wear overalls and operate the factory machines, some to wear white coats and operate the get-you-back-to-work service. But the one requirement is that they must be willing to be used by a minority to produce rent, interest and profit.

Capitalist schooling teaches children to play roles. Because capitalism can make good use of sexual inequality, schools encourage virility in boys and femininity in girls. After years of this conditioning the educators claim these character differences to be natural. Sexual stereotyping is still one of the most powerful forces for the preservation of capitalist ideology.

In addition to teaching boys to behave like Action Man and girls to be birds, schools teach young workers to fit into the obedience role. For a large part of school life children are learning nothing but to stand up when a bell rings, to start eating when a siren sounds, and to jump through hoops when instructed and to feel guilty when they have disrupted the status quo. The obedient wage slave is a bore of historically unprecedented proportions; many readers will remember the school prefects who spent their later school lives exhibiting the after-effects of a short back and sides to the brain.

What about the people who run the schools — the teachers? They are merely salaried workers who are paid to do the ideological dirty work for their employers. Some of them may be attracted to the “profession" because they like pushing defenceless children around but, on the whole, like other workers who have to run capitalism for the capitalists, teachers are sincere men and women who would rather not have to work within the kind of institutions which schools currently have to be. Like the policeman who thinks he is a social worker, there are teachers who hope to use their position to enlighten their students along liberal lines. But. as has been stated in another context, the educators need to be educated, and many of these trendy teachers have nothing to offer children except indoctrination with a touch of guilt.

Unfortunately for the capitalists, despite the millions of pounds which they spend annually on schooling (more than on military defence because they recognise the value of ideological conformity), the young working class is not acting as required. With what horror do the self-righteous guardians of social conformity regard punks who treat with disdain many of the moral norms of the system. A few years ago Pink Floyd’s record, Another Brick In The Wall shot to number one in the charts, serving as an anthem of youth disillusionment with the schooling process. Although it would be far from true to say that school students who show signs of rebellion in their dress, hairstyles and language are necessarily any more opposed to capitalism than anyone else, there is no doubt that a growing consciousness is emerging among young workers that schools are mucking them about and that society is offering them less than it could. Out of this consciousness will come the growth of socialist thinking. He or she who resents wearing a dull school uniform today could be the socialist who rejects the uniform ideology of capitalism tomorrow. While socialists should not exaggerate the significance of youth dissent, which is a hallmark of our age, we should not ignore the fact that it is part of the process of transition — a transition which will end, sooner or later, in social revolution.

What about children in a socialist society? To begin with, they will be economically dependent on no one, for the wealth of the world will belong to them no less than to their elders. There will be no laws forcing children to study, for in a society of co-operation we will be able to rely on children's innate desire to learn. To begin with, respect for teachers will not be based on fear. Learning will not be the means to passing an examination so as to increase the price of labour power, but to enable one to contribute more usefully to society. The process of learning will not be confined to certain ages, so that by twenty-one formal education is over: in socialist society centres for formal learning, and informal learning through practical experience, will be open to people throughout their lives. Freed from the objective of creating workers, socialist teaching will be able to show people how to stretch their humanity as broadly as possible. Socialism will mark the victory of human consciousness over the domination of capitalist necessity; now, we are forced to confine our thinking within the stultifying barriers of the profit system. In a socialist society, instead of killing off that wonderfully creative ingenuity and imaginativeness of childhood, we will be able to learn from it, to let it express itself fully and to allow our own conception of adulthood to include some of the insights of childhood which the present system has such a need to repress. For too long society has seen children as semi-humans, to be moulded into the pathetic parodies of humanity which men and women under capitalism are today. In a socialist society the great task will be to liberate children from their inexperience and to incorporate the joys of childhood into the lifelong experiences of adults.

Steve Coleman

Poverty and the minimum wage (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is, and always has been, a feature of capitalism that there are big differences in wealth and income between rich property-owners and propertyless workers, but also big differences in wages within the working class. The solution is to get rid of capitalism and establish socialism, in which there will be no incomes from property ownership and no wages system: all the members of society will have free access to the products of industry. At one time leading members of the Labour Party, including Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw, endorsed that idea. The first chairman and leader of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie, declared that the Labour Party existed to achieve it. The Labour Party then abandoned the aim its leaders had once proclaimed (or, as they said, “postponed” it). They did so on the ground that it was essential to be “practical" and to deal at once with the pressing evils of capitalism.

One of the immediate problems that they were going to deal with at once was the existence of large numbers of workers on very low pay. All sorts of remedies have been tried but have been a total failure. Not only is the problem still with us but, according to an independent body — the Low Pay Unit — the lowest paid workers were relatively worse off in 1980 than they had been 95 years earlier when figures were first collected. The Labour Party's programme at the last General Election brought the failure story up to date:

 The next Labour Government will launch an offensive against low pay as part of our strategy for equality. The problem of low pay remains acute both in relative and absolute terms. If low pay at present is defined as less than two-thirds of average male manual workers’ earnings, there were 3 million full-time low-paid workers in 1982, of whom 2 million were women workers. Adding to these figures young workers, part-time workers and home workers, produces a total in the region of about 6 million — a great majority of whom are women.

One supposed remedy was more nationalisation and the expansion of local government services; but many of the “low-paid” are to be found in central and local government and the nationalised industries.

Another alleged cure for poverty was the Beveridge social security scheme after World War II and its accompanying pledge of “full employment” and no more depressions. It has failed in both respects. Along with 3½ million unemployed the depression has increased the number of “low-paid" workers. And this is the SDP-Liberal Alliance's verdict on the social security aspect:

  William Beveridge has been mutilated over the years. Instead of a basic benefit, which was to secure for the old, the sick and the unemployed a tolerable minimum standard of living as of right, we have a complex network of benefits dependent on 44 different means tests. Many people are dependent on benefits which are woefully inadequate.

So the Alliance sees the need for a new Beveridge scheme to remove the accumulated deficiencies of the old one, and to include a new feature, the payment of benefit to low-paid workers in addition to their wages.

Another remedy was to be the election of a Labour government. Their 1918 programme, Labour and the new Social Order, committed a future Labour government to introduce a “national minimum” wage to be applied by law in all fields — employment, unemployment, the sick and the pensioners. In 1935 the leader of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, in his book The Will and the Way to Socialism, said that the next Labour government would create “an equalitarian society" — the rich and the poor would both disappear. "It would", he wrote, "work to reduce the purchasing power of the wealthier classes, while by wage increases and by the provision of social services it will expand the purchasing power of the masses". When he became Prime Minister in 1945 it was his government which introduced the first of the "incomes policies" designed, among other things, to prevent wages from rising.

At one time it was thought that the remedy for low pay was trade union organisation, but it came up against the problem of industries in which unions did not exist or were quite ineffective. In 1909 the Liberal government created “trade boards" (later renamed Wages Councils) for the industries with "sweated" wages. The councils, made up of representatives of employers and workers, along with “independent" members, were empowered to fix minimum rates which were enforced by law. Wages Councils still exist and it is among the workers in these industries that many of the Labour Party’s "low paid” are to be found. An extension of the Wages Council minimum rates for separate industries, is the proposal for a national minimum to apply generally. The 1983 Labour Party election programme included the statement "we will also discuss with the TUC the possibility of introducing a statutory minimum wage", and this has been taken up by Neil Kinnock.

The minimum wage schemes come up against the facts of life of capitalism. The capitalists are in business to make profit; from the capitalist standpoint the only productive worker is one who brings profit to his employer. If the capitalists cannot make profit by employing workers, they do not employ them. While many companies can adjust themselves to paying wages negotiated with the unions and still make a profit, there are others who can stay in business only if they can get workers at very low pay. If compelled to pay more, they fold up..

This situation was dealt with in 1973 in a report by the Prices and Incomes Board, who said that the enforcement of higher rates in certain low pay fields "results in unemployment among low paid workers whom employers no longer consider worth employing at the higher rates". Some advocates of minimum rates show a remarkable blindness to the realities of capitalism. Where it is a question of the criminal law they know, from the millions of crimes every year, that the enactment of laws against bank robberies, burglaries and so on, does not mean that those crimes do not happen. Where it concerns statutory minimum wages they think it is different, but it is not. The Low Pay Unit reported in 1976 about the Wages Council industries: "In 1974, the last year for which figures are available, 13.4 per cent of employers checked as a matter of routine, were paying below the legal minimum compared with 7.9 per cent four years before". In 1983 the Unit reported: "Last year 35.1 per cent of employers inspected were paying below the minimum compared with 31.5 per cent the year before".

What happens, particularly at times of heavy unemployment, is that workers receiving less than the legal minimum prefer to keep their jobs rather than report the underpayment. In the depression years of the Thirties the National Congress of the Agricultural Workers Union said that more than half the farm workers were being paid less than the legal minimum wage and cases were known of agricultural workers who, having received illegally withheld pay after an inspector had intervened, gave the money back to the farmer in order to keep their jobs.

Realising that the levels of minimum wages they wanted to enforce would result in workers losing their jobs, some advocates of statutory minimum wages have proposed to get over the difficulty by the government subsidising the industries concerned. This was in fact done under the Corn Production Act 1917. The Act guaranteed prices to farmers for their produce and introduced minimum rates for farm workers in order to meet the shortage of food caused by the German submarine attacks on shipping. The farmers did very well out of it, but farm workers' wages failed even to keep up with the increased cost of living. When the war-time emergency was over the Act was scrapped. Farming is heavily subsidised now and farm workers have statutory minimum wages, but it has not prevented farm workers being among the Labour Party's 6 million low paid.

All the schemes in three quarters of a century to solve the problem of “low pay” have failed, and further schemes promise no greater success. The Socialist Party of Great Britain was right in the first place in holding that this and the other problems of capitalism will not be solved while capitalism continues.

Edgar Hardcastle

Letters: Marx and crime (1984)

Letters to the Editors from the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx and crime

Dear Sir,

I read with great interest the two parts of the article "Marx’s Conception of Socialism” published in the July and August editions of the Socialist Standard.

Firstly, a point of information: the phrase "the judgement of the criminal upon himself" comes from Chapter VIII of the Holy Family by Marx and Engels. The Foreign Languages Publishing House (Moscow 1956) renders it slightly differently, but the sense is clearly the same.

  . . . under human conditions punishment will really be nothing but the sentence passed by the culprit on himself. There will be no attempt to persuade him that violence from without, exerted on him by others, is violence exerted on himself by himself. On the contrary, he will see in other men his natural saviours from the sentence which he has pronounced on himself, in other words the relation will be reversed, (op cit p.239).

Presumably Marx and Engels meant by this that certain categories of human action, which are now classified as crimes, would be considered reprehensible in a socialist society ("human conditions"). However. while individuals might punish themselves in remorse for such actions, their neighbours, moved by feelings of humanity would try to persuade them not to. Which of these tendencies would win out, the individual's remorse or his neighbour's humanity, one cannot predict. The precise category of actions Marx and Engels had in mind is not clear — they do not mean crimes of violence, for these by definition do not exist, since "coercion is contrary to “(truly)' human nature" (op cit p.238).

Secondly I am worried by the statement that "In a socialist society you will only be able to have free access to the things which society decides it will make available for free access". This sounds dangerously like “‘you will only be available to have free access to the things the majority decide they will make available for free access" and it clearly breaches the principle “'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". The article was on much safer ground when it stated that in the early days of socialism, the attitude of relatively opulent workers to "free access" should be: "Don’t take advantage of it". While it may be true that in a socialist society, a majority would be unlikely to abuse its power, nevertheless, the principle of "To each according to his needs" seems to provide a safeguard for minorities, which although only based on “moral" force is better than no safeguard at all.

Clive Hill,

Graduate Common Room,

London School of Economics.

Reply

We thank Clive Hill for the source of the quotation from Marx, in the Holy Family.

Other interesting statements by Marx and Engels will be found in two Pelican books: Karl Marx — Selected Writings (1976) pp. 167/8 and 234/5, and Engels — Selected Writings (1967). pp. 175/6.

Marx and Engels were both examining crime and punishment in capitalist society from the socialist standpoint. Two quotations will indicate the line of their approach: Marx wrote:

 Punishment is nothing but a means of society to defend itself against the infraction of its vital conditions, whatever may be their character. Now, what a state of society is that which knows of no better instrument for its own defence than the hangman, and which proclaims . . . its own brutality as eternal law?

Engels argued that "society creates a demand for crime which is met by a corresponding supply" and added:

 I leave my readers to decide whether it is just to punish criminals under these circumstances.

On his second point, about "free access", Clive Hill's fears are groundless. The passage in the article was an attempt to deal with a misunderstanding about '“free access" voiced by a questioner at a meeting. Reasoning from what goes on under capitalism, with trade unions and other groups making claims and calling on the employers, or the government, or "society", to meet them, the questioner said he interpreted "free access" to mean that whatever any individual though they would like to have society would provide for them. This misses the point that, with the establishment of socialism, all individuals will be members of the community. co-operating together democratically to meet the needs of all on the basis of “free access" and making the necessary production and other arrangements to make it possible.

Editors

Asbestos deaths

Dear Editors

Although the article ‘“Fireproof Death” (Socialist Standard, October 1983, by Gary Jay) is no doubt written with the best of intentions, nonetheless it contains some inaccuracies which this campaign feels should be set right. Perhaps the most important misinformation is the statement. "There are safer substitutes for nearly all uses of asbestos".

It was actually established beyond doubt (see the Anti-Asbestos Campaign Fact-sheet) that satisfactory substitutes for every Asbestos application will be available in Britain by November 1982. I must stress that this is an independent single issue, non-partisan campaign. I say this because you do not necessarily need to be a socialist to realise that when it comes to Asbestos society can no longer afford free enterprise, if you fully understand the nature of Asbestos and its threat — which Gary Jay obviously does not — viz. "Asbestos and similar hazards”. I assure you that Asbestos is entirely in a class of its own as there are no similar hazards. The others that Gary Jay mentions are hazards of chemical poisons or hazards of human mismanagement — minor hazards. Asbestos however is the single most serious threat to life on this planet that I, or anyone else who understands its chemistry, can recognise. In our fact-sheet we ask whether there will be 40,000 deaths per annum in Britain caused by Asbestos in 2022. Even this is a moderate estimate.

Please in the interests of public health and safety do print a summary of these criticisms.

Harry Moss 

The Anti-Asbestos Campaign

Reply

The fact that there is evidence for all asbestos uses being replaced with safer substitutes strengthens the case against a social system which continues to use this murderous material because of its cheapness, and therefore profitability, to the ruling class. This is one of the numerous social problems which are constantly produced by the profit system. The solution is not to campaign against these symptoms individually.

The uses of various unsafe, dangerous and anti-social materials and products have the same social cause — the system of production for profit. By the time that one well-intentioned reform group thinks it has solved a problem, capitalism has produced many more.

Many thousands of people are dying and being injured in ways which could be avoided. They are victims of wars, starvation, insanitary water consumption, industrial accidents and so on, ad nauseam. These are problems produced by a competitive social system. The majority of people, the wealth-producers, produce wealth as wage slaves. Production, production techniques and distribution are geared to profit and not human need.

It was not, as Harry Moss says, simply “human mismanagement" which precipitated the misery outlined in the Socialist Standard article, including Rowan Point, Ford Pintos, thalidomide and poisonous cooking oils. These problems are endemic to our social system. Asbestos is beyond doubt a highly dangerous substance, as information in the AAC fact-sheet illustrates. But asbestos is one of many urgent problems which have the same solution. In a world capable of producing enough food for everybody, more people starved to death each day in 1982 than died from asbestos in the whole year. On the brink of a nuclear war the world now holds the equivalent of over four tons of TNT for every single human being on the planet.

Only in a society of common ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth can these grotesque problems be made unnecessary. Socialism will mean production for use not profit. The community will control what is produced with all the care, meticulous research and pride which will flow from the awareness that we are producing for our own good, and not as now to provide profits for an owning minority.

Editors

Cross of gold

Dear Editors,

Re: issue of September 1983

On the bottom line, centre column, you attribute the remark “Shall mankind be crucified upon a cross of gold" to Eugene Debs. I believe that you are actually referring to "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold" made by William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was a US representative and presidential candidate upon the Democratic Party ticket.

As usual, enjoyed this issue. Keep up the good work.

Merwin Orner 

New Jersey, USA

To "M.K., Scotland"
The Editors would like to publish your letter, with our reply to the important points you raise. However, it is not our practice to publish letters without knowing the name and address of the sender — not necessarily for publication. Please get in touch with us.

Editors

50 years ago: We Still Live (1984)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another year has gone by and a fresh one is commencing. How are things with us, and what are the prospects?

To begin with, there are two things that are worth a comment. The suspension of the Social Democrat (organ of the Social Democratic Federation) a few weeks ago brings to light the fact that the Socialist Standard is the only one left of the group of journals that claimed to appeal particularly to workers in 1904. The others have either ceased publication, changed their names, or only appear fitfully. A similar process has also been at work with the organisations the journals represented. So true is this, that were we to reprint our first Manifesto, which contains references to these groups and journals, it would be like a voice from another planet to the workers of the present generation.

It is useful to record these two points, because those of our readers who were alive and interested in the working-class movement 30 years ago will remember that the formation of the Socialist Party was greeted with contempt and anger as a splitting movement by a group of youthful upstarts. We were promised a speedy death. But we still live, and we flourish without the aid of trickery, trumpery or trumpets.

The fact that we flourish, however, is not really a matter for great congratulation. We ought and might have expected to be progressing far better than we are doing. The case we put forward is simple and it appeals directly to the interests of all who depend for their existence upon the sale of their mental and physical energies — members of the working class.

[From an editorial "Our New Year Message". Socialist Standard, January 1934.]

Socialism will work (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists stand for the establishment of a system of society fundamentally different from that which exists now. In a socialist society the means of producing and distributing wealth — factories, farms, mines, docks, offices, transport — will belong to the whole community. Common ownership will do away with the need for exchange, so that money will have no use.

Production in socialism will be determined by people on the basis of social need, not profit. At the moment people may need wealth but, unless they can afford to buy it, they must go without. Production is geared to sale with a view to profit. Socialism means production solely for use: bread to eat, houses to live in, clothes to wear.

What will be the incentive to work in a socialist society? There will be no wages, for in a classless society no person will have the right to buy another person's ability to work for a price. Work in socialist society will depend on co-operation and the voluntary decisions of men and women to contribute to society in order to keep it going. Just as an individual could not survive if he or she did not eat, drink or take basic health care, so a socialist society would not survive unless the people in it acted cooperatively in a spirit of mutuality.

Socialism will not be a Utopia where all the problems of existence have vanished. Unpleasant work will still have to be done. Of course, much of the dirty work of the profit system, such as killing and conning and counting bank notes, will be dispensed with immediately in a socialist society. Other unappealing work can probably be taken care of by labour-saving machines. Where dirty work will have to be done in socialist society we can be quite sure of two things: firstly, it will not be done by the same people all the time — members of society will take turns; secondly, such work will be carried out by socially conscious men and women who will appreciate that society belongs to them and therefore its less pleasant tasks must be performed by them. In the knowledge that we own and control the earth, and all that is in and on it, it is unlikely that human beings will refuse to attend to the dirty work within socialism.

What about the lazy people in a socialist society? Critics of the socialist proposition often tell us that socialism would be confronted with millions of men and women who would refuse to do their bit to make society run efficiently. Indeed, socialist society will contain millions of babies and infants who will not be able to work down mines or milk the cows; but, in the sensible knowledge that these dependants will be the providers of tomorrow, we do not think that the inhabitants of socialism will let babies starve to death. Fifteen million children under Five die of starvation every year at the moment — a society based on production for use would not tolerate such obscenity. There will be those in socialist society who are too old or too ill or too incompetent to offer much to society; but they are not lazy and there is no reason why society should not allow them to give according to their varying abilities and take according to their differing needs. And if one who contributes less takes more, why should this be a problem in a society which is based on the satisfaction of needs? Those people living in a socialist society who are too lethargic to work will not be a drain on society's resources for very long, for if they lie in bed for long enough they will die — of boredom, if not of inertia.

But is it not the case that, given a society of unrestricted access to social wealth, human greed will lead people to consume all the wealth of society within one month? Such is the “problem" foreseen by the critics of socialism. To begin with, their prediction is based on the false assumption that socialism would be a society of consumption only, whereas it would obviously be a society where what is consumed would have to be matched by what is produced. So, if people in socialist society decide to eat ten dinners a day — as our critics seem to fear — there will have to be provision made to produce enough food to satisfy such unhealthy gluttony. Of course, in cases where people want what society is unable to produce, or has democratically decided it will not produce, their consumption will have to be limited. This may be bad news for the Utopian but. for the worker who is currently deprived of what he or she needs (not because society cannot satisfy the need or has decided democratically not to but because it is unprofitable to do so) the idea of democratically organised production for use is infinitely preferable to the present social arrangement. For example, the thousands of pensioners who have died of hypothermia are not likely to reject the socialist proposition because it will not allow them to eat ten dinners a day; at least a society based on producing for needs will ensure that no one is unable to have access to warmth.

But what about this greed ? The critic of the socialist idea is truly worried that in a society of free access, people will take more than they need. Now it is quite true that if the stores were opened tomorrow and workers were invited to go in and take as much as they want without having to pay there would be a mad rush and the stores would be empty within a day. But why should this be the case if the stores are always open for free access? It would be odd indeed for the inhabitants of socialism to store dozens of loaves of bread, which would go stale before they could be eaten, when the option would exist to go to the store and collect a new loaf of bread each day or few days. It would be no less odd for us to read today of workers filling their lungs up with water because they fear that when they next turn the tap the free liquid will no longer be there to consume. Perhaps, in innocence, the earliest inhabitants of socialism will indulge in a few feasts of conspicuous over-consumption (who would be surprised at such action after years of poverty and social inferiority?), but such antics will soon end when the physical consequences of such irrationality are felt.

But is it not the case that, even if classes were abolished and all people were equal, a hierarchy would soon arise again and society would be back to square one? The opponent of socialism feels convinced that inequality is a phenomenon from which society can never escape. Perhaps — and only perhaps — socialist society will not eliminate inequalities of talent: one person might be a greater pianist than another will ever be, while another will run faster than another could ever train to run. But this does not mean that socialism will establish a hierarchy of pianists or athletes or poets or brain surgeons. In a co-operative society it will be recognised that poets cannot write their literary masterpieces unless the miner is willing to bring the coal from under the ground. Humanity lives interdependently. And who is to say that miners will not be poets when they are not down the mine and the greatest chess player in socialism will not sweep the streets so that the greatest brain surgeon can walk to the hospital without rats biting at the ankles? The rigid division of labour which is a feature of the present system will not exist in socialist society.

In general, critics of the socialist proposition are not saying that they are opposed to the establishment of a socialist world, as defined by socialists. Most of them are raising objections to socialism which reflect their own conditioning by the present social order. The “problems" which they fear are based on the wrong assumption that socialism is going to be imposed on the conditions of capitalism, including the consciousness which props up the system. Of course, a majority of people whose minds are still filled with the ideas and prejudices of the profit system could never run socialism. That is why the Socialist Party of Great Britain states emphatically that there can be no socialist society until a majority of workers understand and want it. Only then will the baseless fears of socialism’s critics become as absurd as the quaint old fears of the Victorians that electricity in all homes would lead to dangers which society would be unable to handle. Yes, the future always looks strange when people’s minds are imprisoned within the past, but the nearer we get to the next stage in social development the less strange the idea of production for need becomes.

There are thousands of workers walking around with ideas in their minds which are close or identical to those advocated by socialists; as that number grows, and as they gather into the conscious political movement for socialism, the doubts of the critics grow fainter and more absurd and what once seemed unthinkable rises to the top of the agenda of history.

Steve Coleman

Produce for use (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

As soon as labour, in its direct form, has ceased to be the main source of wealth, then labour time ceases, and must cease, to be its standard of measurement, and thus exchange value must cease to be the measurement of use value. The surplus labour of the masses has ceased to be a condition for the development of wealth in general; in the same way that the non-labour of the few has ceased to be a condition for the development of the general powers of the human mind. Production based on exchange value therefore falls apart, and the immediate process of material production finds itself stripped of its impoverished, antagonistic form. Individuals are then in a position to develop freely.
(Grundrisse, Karl Marx, translated by David McLellan. p.142)

Marx’s meaning here is clear enough. If the tendency which exists under capitalism to produce goods more and more cheaply thanks to advances in science and technology were continued indefinitely, a stage would eventually be reached where goods could be produced so cheaply — would require so little labour power to produce — that it would no longer make sense to sell them; the only thing to do would be to give them away or make them available for people to take freely, according to their needs, without having to pay for them. In conditions of abundance it makes no sense to put a price on goods. As Marx points out, the price of a product reflects the amount of labour time needed to produce it; in the early days of capitalism when direct labour was still the main production force, pricing goods according to the time it took an average individual using average techniques of production to produce them had a certain logic. However, when the main productive force has become science and technology, in which labour intervenes not as an individual contribution by a skilled worker but as the co-operative effort of a collective workforce, then it no longer makes sense to measure output in terms of its labour time content; it no longer makes sense to put a price on goods and sell them. The abundance made possible by modern technology points to a different system in which goods will be freely available.

Of course capitalism will never reach this stage of its own accord. It will not automatically collapse and be replaced by a society of free access to goods and services. It merely tends to make the price system — in fact, the whole money-wages-prices system — redundant. It is in this sense that it paves the way for a society of free access. But the end of “production based on exchange value” has to be a conscious political act.

Adam Buick

Know your place (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

    "I can't cope with it. Sometimes I have to go hungry in order to feed the child. For two or three days at a time, I go without food. I just drink a cup of tea” (a single parent, Breadline Britain. LWT, 1983).   

  "Roland Waller (Tiny) Chairman and Managing Director of Lonrho, according to the company's latest set of accounts, picked up £266,034 in salary (1982). plus £3,990,513 in dividends. His income of £4,250,000 is the equivalent of £82,000 per week" (Labour Research, 1983).

What is wealth? It is the result of human effort being applied to the material environment. In order for human society to continue it needs to produce wealth. As our technology to operate on the environment has been changed in character, so the system of social relations in which we combine to produce wealth has changed. Very early forms of human beings arranged their production and distribution of wealth on a communistic basis. They suffered under no governments. They had no notion of individual property by which one person could exclude others from access to the wealth which many of them had taken part in helping to produce.

When, for reasons of scarcity of raw materials, competition between communities arose, the phenomenon of property took root. Since the emergence of property society the ways in which we have related to each other in the process of producing wealth have been changing. One epoch in human history was characterised by most of the wealth producers being physically owned and possessed by the ruling class. These were the ancient slave societies: what the doublespeak history books describe as the “ancient democracies of Greece and Rome".

Another era in our history worked on the basis of a pyramidal hierarchy with the monarch at the pinnacle and beneath him aristocrats, knights, serfs and peasants. The modern set of social relationships in which we work to produce wealth are those of the profit system — capitalism. We have reached a stage where we have developed a very efficient means of producing and distributing wealth, but the system (the set of social relations) that we use to produce and distribute wealth is one which conflicts with the needs of the majority of people. Today the factories, farms, offices, transport and communications networks are owned by a small minority of people and state bureaucracies. In return for wages and salaries the majority work for the minority. Each worker is paid less than the value of what he or she produces and the capital-owning minority live off the surplus value thus donated by the workers.

So the rich get increasingly rich by not working, while the workers remain in a constant state of poverty as wages and salaries are used up before the end of each week or month. Production in this system is aimed at the goal of profit. From the point of view of the capitalist there is no reason to allow commodities to be produced if there is no prospect of being able to sell them for a profit. This explains why millions of human beings die each year from starvation although society has the capacity to produce more than enough for everyone.

The nineteenth century social investigators Booth and Rowntree exposed and commented on the wretched poverty of Victorian society. Many subsequent improvements in society were, and still are, measured against this sort of backdrop. But the argument that “at least we are better off than we used to be" is not very helpful. You could say that compared with the workers of a century ago. the workers of today are not poor. But poverty is not measured by reference to the past. It needs to be measured by reference to the present. Bearing in mind the sort of prosperity that most people could enjoy today because of what we could produce, the majority are poor. There are, of course, degrees of poverty ranging from the millions who are destitute and starving to the millions who exhaust themselves each week in order to varnish the mediocrity of their lives with artificial fun.

Since the implementation of Beveridge's plan for social security by the Attlee government of 1945-50 some people have opposed the urgent need for socialism — that is classless society — on the grounds that you could, after all, make capitalism run well for the working class. Because capitalism works on the principle of continuous impoverishment of the working class it can never work in our interest, any more than a prison can be designed to work in the interest of the prisoners. The welfare state provides a careful system of indoctrination to produce literate, numerate. punctual, obedient and docile wage- slaves: state education; and a cheap medical service to keep workers just healthy enough. In a House of Commons debate on the Beveridge Report. Quintin Hogg MP (now Lord Hailsham) remarked that.

Some of my honorable Friends seem to overlook one or two ultimate facts about social reform. The first is that if you do not give the people social reform they arc going to give you social revolution . . .

(Parliamentary Debates. 17 February. 1943, Col. 1818)

In fact, Beveridge himself saw his plan as a means of making the existing social services “more economical". He observed that.

It is to the interest of employers as such that the employees should have security, should be properly maintained during the inevitable intervals of unemployment or of sickness, should have the content which helps to make them efficient producers.

(Beveridge Report. Social Insurance and Allied Services, p. 109)

In the same vein Samuel Courtauld, millionaire chairman of the great rayon company. said that he was.

   . . . strongly in favour of the principles and almost all of the proposals of the Beveridge Report . . .  I have not the faintest doubt that if we can survive the first severe business contraction which arises after the war, social security of this nature will be about the most profitable long-term investment the country could make. It will not undermine the morale of the nation’s workers: it will ultimately lead to higher efficiency among them and a lowering of production costs.

(Manchester Guardian, 19 February 1943).

The relative poverty of the majority is endemic to capitalism. The majority under this system will have to live second-rate lives. And being in this condition of poverty cannot be easily escaped from. Generally, you do not get rich by working hard. You just get tired.

Poverty is a social problem today not because there are insufficient resources. We can project laboratories into space. We can construct thriving cities where once there was desert. The current state of agricultural and industrial technique enable us to adequately feed and clothe all of the world’s 4.2 billion inhabitants. The political parties which stand to operate this present social system do not have a solution to the problem of poverty. According to the “virtuous" Victorian values advocated by vocal members of the Conservative Party it is individual frailty or idleness which is the cause of poverty although not perhaps in the case of the House of Lords and the top exclusive gentlemen's clubs.

Throughout its history, including prior to the seven occasions when it has formed the government, the Labour Party has made promises about reducing poverty. Perhaps more so than the other parties, it is seen as the party to do away with poverty. But because it has only ever stood to run capitalism the Labour Party has always, as a government, acted against the interest of the working class. During their last period of office, according to the Department of Health and Social Security, the number of poor families increased by 37 per cent between 1974 and 1977. Over the same period the number of individuals living in poverty increased by 43 per cent. The social service cuts introduced by the last Labour government meant the loss of 25,000 hospital beds. In its first two years, the share of the nation's wealth held by the top five per cent of people increased from 43.1 per cent to 46.2 per cent, while that of the bottom 50 per cent of the population fell from 7.1 per cent to 5.6 per cent.

Although the SDP/Liberal policy is difficult to discover, it appears that the Alliance is moderately in favour of moderately reducing poverty to an acceptable level. Before it eliminates poverty from society, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) seeks to sack Thatcher, reform the Labour Party and create more jobs. As jobs, or employment, or exploitation, were the cause of poverty in the first place, voting Labour to abolish poverty is about as logical as jumping into the bath in order to get dry.

The only solution to poverty is for the majority of people to act democratically and to put the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth into the hands of the whole community. With production carried out on the basis of "from each according to ability, to each according to need” there will be no poverty, just one prosperous world community. There will be no antagonism of economic interest between those who produce but do not possess and those who possess but do not produce. With one worldwide community democratically using the earth's resources to provide for our needs, we will finally have stepped from the contradictions of property society. The most painful and stark contradiction we suffer now is that the profit system itself has created a single, world-integrated society of production. Labour and resources come together from all over the planet to constitute many goods. Commerce has accelerated the development of highly efficient communications networks (including telephones, television communication, computer link-ups and holographs) and transport systems. But standing in the way, preventing this technology from being used to satisfy our needs, is the tyrannous idea that we need to have a social system with property owners, money, profits, wages, policemen, prisons, passports and nations. In his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde observed:

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor.

Gary Jay

PLO in retreat (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even capitalism’s grotesqueries do not usually run to civil war in the absence of a nation-state, but that is precisely what has been happening in the Lebanon. The Palestinians, uprooted and dispersed at the lime of the formation of Israel in 1948, are engaging in fierce inter-factional fighting. Even before the latest events, it was the case that more Palestinian guerrillas had been killed by the armies of their supposed allies, the other Arab states, than by Israel; but now. Palestinian is killing Palestinian.

In June 1982. Israel launched a full scale invasion of Lebanon, supposedly in retaliation for the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to Britain. Soon there were over 100,000 Israeli troops in Lebanon and the capital, Beirut, was bombed and besieged. About half a million Palestinians live in the Lebanon, many of them since 1948 in the more-or-less permanent settlements known as refugee camps. In August that year, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) began to evacuate its headquarters in Beirut. The following month, the Israeli army acquiesced as Phalangist Lebanese militia massacred upwards of two thousand men, women and children in the Sabra and Shatila camps.

Dissent within the PLO ranks has greatly increased since the withdrawal from Beirut. Syrian-backed opponents of PLO chief Yasser Arafat have been attacking troops loyal to him. The Beirut defeat weakened Arafat's position, as did his willingness to talk to King Hussein of Jordan over an American peace initiative in September last year. The manoeuvring of Hafez Assad, the Syrian President, led to Arafat being expelled from Damascus (where he had gone after abandoning Beirut) last summer and going to the Northern Lebanon coastal city of Tripoli. There he and his supporters have been bombarded by dissident PLO men and the Syrians, who have forty thousand troops in the Lebanon. The rebels — led by men such as Ahmad Jibril and Abu Mousa — accuse Arafat and his clique of being corrupt. building large houses and even harbours and helicopter pads for their own use from PLO funds (Guardian 23 November 1983). At the time of writing, the PLO seem likely to be forced to evacuate Tripoli, perhaps under a United Nations flag, though it is not clear where they will be able to go.

Lebanon is a former French, earlier Turkish, colony. It became "independent" in 1943, but has remained embroiled in the murderous power politics of the Middle East. Its internal politics are dominated by two coalition groups: the Lebanese National Movement (L.NM) is a reformist grouping which supports the PLO and its main rival is the Lebanese Front, dominated by the Phalangist party (founded in 1936 and named after the Phalange of Franco’s Spain). The Phalange opposes the PLO, has collaborated with Israel and supports the expulsion of all Palestinians from Lebanon. Bashir Gemayel, leader of the Phalangist militia and president-elect of Lebanon when assassinated in September 1982. had gone on record as saying that in the Middle East there was one people too many, the Palestinians. No apologist for Zionism could have been blunter. These were the ideas that motivated the Sabra and Shatila massacres.

The Machiavellian tactics of Syria and President Assad lie behind much of the present turmoil and the possible escalation into war with the American part of the ludicrously-misnamed multinational "peace-keeping” force. Despite brave words about retaliation for encroachment of its airspace, Syria has done nothing in response to Israeli and French air-raids on parts of Lebanon it controls. Syria's Russian-supplied armed forces are operating only against the PLO. Ironically, it is the Palestinian cause that Assad claims to be espousing, and whose chief spokesman he intends to be. A country with scant supplies of oil, Syria can only become powerful by conquest and/or influence. The plan for a Greater Syria encompasses Jordan and Palestine as part of Syria: control over that part of Lebanon not in Israeli hands is a first step on this road. Assad has retained dictatorial power in Syria for thirteen years; in 1982 he killed over twenty thousand Muslim fundamentalist opponents of his regime. In 1976, during an earlier civil war there, Syria invaded Lebanon in order to contain the Palestinians and the Lebanese National Movement, and supported the Phalange — all in the name of Arab nationalism and the Palestinian "revolution".

The expansionist role of Israel in all this must also be remembered. Some Israeli military leaders have made no secret of their strategic aims: the Lebanon to be cleared of foreign forces and re-established as a christian-dominated state, the West Bank and Gaza annexed to Israel, the PLO destroyed and Jordan converted into the Palestinian state. The even less rational wings of Zionism claim that, as large parts of Lebanon belonged in Biblical times to Asher, one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, so they should belong to Israel today! This kind of nonsense — hankering after past glories that only benefitted the ruling class anyway — seems as prevalent in the Middle East as in most parts of the world.

Meanwhile Israeli oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories continues. Palestinians on the West Bank have been dispossessed of their homes in favour of Israeli settlers. They must carry identity cards and are subject to military orders which, for instance, prohibit such subversive acts as the planting of fruit trees. One Palestinian is quoted as saying:

 For the moment, the Israelis have divided us into two categories, the educated, who cause trouble by talking about social and political rights, and the labourers, whom they need. They would like to expel the first and keep the second. (Time 21 November 1983).

The Palestinians are seen by Israel as at best, a source of cheap labour.

There are those who see the PLO and the Lebanese National Movement as representing something more than just a nationalist organisation. For instance, one member of the Palestine National Council writes:

Israel's war against Lebanon was . . .  intended to destroy the first successful alliance between the Palestinians and a nationally committed Arab movement as well as the first liberated national zone where the alliance could have developed a prototype of a liberated Arab national polity.
(Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. in Race & Class, Spring 1983)

The claim, then, is that a PLO/LNM alliance would pave the way for "national liberation" throughout the Arab world, which would involve the removal of such despots as Assad and Hussein. This would explain why both Israel and Syria are opposed to such a development. But such claims are nonsense. A "democratic secular" Palestine would be a capitalist Palestine. forced to exploit its workers just as Palestinian oppresses Palestinian in intra-PLO feuds today. All leadership must be overthrown, Arafat and Jibril as well as Assad and Shamir.

Like the Zionists, the Palestinians have embraced a dangerous myth about the past; in their case, the myth that pre-1948 Palestine was some kind of paradise. It was no such thing: most Palestinians struggled along on tiny plots of land, under the weight of massive debts, exploited by a class of landlords. Palestine did not belong to the Palestinians, any more than modern Israel belongs to working class Israelis. They have yet to realise it, but the workers of the entire Middle East — within whatever irrelevant national boundaries they now live — have an identity of interest, that 

Paul Bennett

Running Commentary: Like no tomorrow (1984)

The Running Commentary column from the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like no tomorrow

For some reason it was offered as a criticism of The Day After that it told us something we already knew — that a nuclear war would bring unprecedented destruction and suffering. In fact, as many commentators pointed out, the reality will be far worse. One estimate is that in a 220 megaton attack on Britain 80 per cent of the population will die. Everywhere it will become frighteningly cold and dark, as the nuclear dust blots out the sun and brings a new Ice Age in which people in the mass will starve or freeze to death.

Perhaps the most chilling part of the Film was in the build up to the holocaust — the palpably heightening tension, the strained faces listening to the news, the first announcement of the use of “tactical" nuclear weapons, the missiles blasting out of the silos, trailing smoke across the sky behind a washing line, released when servicemen opened a red box marked “Gently”. It was too close to experience for our comfort — too close to Berlin 'in 1948, Korea in 1951, Cuba in 1962 and to the numerous other international crises when the world might have been under threat of having no tomorrow.

Was The Day After an argument for unilateral nuclear disarmament or for the Heseltine policy of eventual disarmament through eventual agreement while the powers meanwhile build up their nuclear arsenals? Of course, CND claimed that the film made their case for them, forgetting that it portrayed the culmination of the international rivalry which is endemic to the capitalist system. CND have no concept of what is needed to end that system, although to end it is the only way in which the world will be rid of war and all weapons of war.

Heseltine is a different case. He and his party make no bones about their support for the social system of division and conflict, the system which makes a priority of killing and destruction. No nonsense from the Defence Minister about the urgency to avoid the ultimate, overwhelming catastrophe; he stands unashamedly for capitalism and for the interests of the British ruling class, at whatever the cost to the rest of us.

But beneath their superficial differences, at their core CND and Heseltine stand for the same thing. They all support capitalism although in varying degrees they may seek to evade some of the effects of the system. By confusing the issue, by pretending that capitalism can be controlled and reformed into benignity, they each in their own way aggravate problems such as war.

If The Day After told us anything it was of the desperate urgency of the work to overthrow capitalism and to replace it with a society which will not know war. That is not one of the facts which can be devalued as something everyone knows already. If it were more widely accepted, the future of the world would be more secure and tomorrow would be a matter of happy anticipation instead of fear.


One for the rich . . . 

In court seven teenagers admitted that over fifteen months they made 28 raids on local restaurants, breaking in to steal drinks, food and cigarettes; they also asked for 30 other offences to be taken into consideration. The value of their hauls totalled £1,435; they were ordered to pay £1,527 in fines, compensation and costs (Guardian, 30 November 1983).

The culprits were pupils at the exclusive Darlington School in Devon, where parents pay £8.000 a year each for their keep and “education”. The payments ordered by the court must have made quite a dent in the pocket money of the accused. No doubt this will be made up by doting parents who, not long ago, howled for the dismissal of the then headmaster of the school who had warned them of under-age sex, burglary, vandalism and drug taking among the pupils, and they had objectcd to some “unsuitable” pictures of his wife which had appeared some years ago in a magazine.

No prize is offered to the first reader sending in the most likely punishment which the court would have doled out if, rather than being the pampered offspring of the rich, the offenders had come from the streets of Brixton.


Glasses and classes

How is a member of the working class to be recognised? Lord Curzon, the archetypal High Tory of his day, thought that it was by the colour of our bodies; he had no idea, he remarked as he watched some soldiers bathing in an Indian river, that the lower orders had such white skins.

Ridiculous Labour MP Frank Dobson has recently suggested another method. He fears that it might be possible to spy out a worker — or at least one of the more impoverished among us — by the style of their glasses. In the House of Commons debate last November on the government proposals to end the opticians' monopoly on the sale of glasses (which Labour MPs might have been expected to welcome) Dobson expressed the reservation that making glasses available outside the National Health Service might mark out anyone who is unable to afford other than the NHS article.

This is gradualism gone made. Will Labour MPs now fight to eliminate variety in spectacle styles, arguing that this new equality would be a step on the road to the revolution? More to the point, are there not other ways in which a worker can be distinguished?

There are. first, the places where we live. None of them is ever likely to be featured in those advertisements by the posher estate agents in Country Life. Then there are the clothes we wear; mass produced articles such as would chill the blood of the discreet tailors patronised by our masters. What about the food we eat? Whatever Robert Carrier is paid to say on TV, there are more than subtle differences between the fare on sale in Tesco and what can be ordered, by those who can afford to. from Harrods.

But above all there is the way we get our living. The fundamental, ineradicable distinguishing mark of the workers is the fact that they live through selling their abilities to an employer for a wage. The size of that wage does not vary significantly from the point of being enough to reproduce the worker in terms of renewing mental and physical energies and in the sense of bearing future wage slaves. This is the root of our poverty, the hall-mark which identifies a member of the working class and which is expressed in sub-standards in what we can afford to consume.

This hall-mark cannot effectively be obscured or concealed, no matter how some workers may try by pretending to a life style which is not actually available to them. Indeed it is futile and reactionary to make such efforts, for if workers faced the reality of their poverty they would thereby be taking one of the first steps to its abolition.

And then there would be another way in which a worker could be recognised — by their class-consciousness and their activity in the struggle to establish a classless, povertyless society.


Keep off the beach

When the bombs went off over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and tens of thousands of people died, we were consoled that there was a positive side to this unprecedented event. Nuclear power is a source of energy which could be used to produce electricity, endless and safe and cheap. It could be an age of new prosperity. Nuclear power, said the authorities, was good for us.

There were some doubters who muttered inconveniently about the dangers, that there was such a thing as radioactivity which could leak and that an accident at a nuclear power station could lead to frightful consequences. The authorities were reassuring. There would be no accidents; the designers would see to that. Radioactivity was easily controllable. Nuclear power was good for us.

Well, since those innocent days there have been incidents like the Three Mile Island melt-down and the leaks at Windscale, which have blighted the surrounding land. Now the sea too is under threat, as the nuclear waste discharged from Windscale comes ashore as a menacing oily slick, polluting the fish and the seaweed and the beach itself. Nuclear power, the authorities still tell us. is good for us. Meanwhile we must stay off the beaches while they try to expunge the memory of the incidents by renaming the power station which will henceforth be known as Sellafield.

The history of nuclear power is one of the search for a source of cheap energy. This search did not happen in the interests of human beings but for the sole reason that the owning class are concerned that commodities should be produced as cheaply and reliably as possible. Cheap, reliable production means more competitive goods; it means a better chance of capturing markets, of more assured profits for the owners of the means of life.

In this process the welfare of human beings is of lesser consequence. The search for profit and capital accumulation has a sordid history of pollution, to the point of killing people and destroying elements of the environment. Nuclear power stations are a typical phase in that history. In a sane society, based on human interests, nuclear power would be of vast benefit to the world; free of the restraints of production for profit, it would be safe in its method and its design. It is capitalism which makes of it a polluter and destroyer, so that at places it is unsafe to walk on the beach, to pick up a pebble, to touch the seaweed.

Nuclear power may well be good for us. It is capitalism which is bad for us.

How you are exploited (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Production for profit is clearly a key concept in defining capitalism. In fact, it could be said to be the essential feature of capitalism since the latter may be defined adequately enough as a form of social organisation in which wealth is produced for sale on a market with a view to profit.

But how is profit made from producing wealth? The usurer obtained his profit out of the revenue of the person to whom he has lent money and the merchant adventurer his by cheating or plundering of other traders or direct producers; but profit arises in a completely different way when invested in the production of wealth. It is created within the process of production itself.

The person with money to invest in production (whom we will call a capitalist) must first convert a part of it into means and instruments of production (raw materials. machinery, a factory); the other part will be needed for hiring workers to come and work in the factory on the raw materials that have been supplied.

When the employees have worked up the raw materials into a finished product, new wealth will have been created. This will belong to the capitalist but. because we are in an exchange economy, not only new wealth but new value has been created. However, the capitalists are not interested in new value in the abstract, nor even in new value in the form of a portion of the newly produced goods; they are only interested in it in the form of money. To realise this they must therefore sell the products. Once they have done this they have a larger sum of money than they started with; their capital has increased and value has expanded itself.

However, not all the money realised from the sale of the product is their profit, as part will represent the value of the raw materials and wear and tear of their machines as well as the upkeep of the factory. It is therefore merely a part of the original capital in a different form. A second part will replace the amount of capital used in hiring the workers to enable a repeat of the operation. It is the third part which is now profit.

The source of this profit is clear: it is the labour of the workers who transformed the raw materials into finished products. In an exchange economy labour, as well as creating wealth, also creates value: where the producer does not own the means of production and where the product of labour belongs to the employer, the new value created also belongs to the employer. A part of this is repaid to the producer in the form of wages, but the rest — what Marx called surplus value — is profit for the capitalist.

The exploitation (for there is no other word for it) of the wage workers takes place fully in accordance with the normal rules of exchange: an equal value is exchanged for an equal value. For what the workers sell to the capitalist is not their labour (the product of labour, or what has been produced) but their ability to work, their mental and physical energy — what Marx called Labour Power.

Under capitalism labour power, like everything else, is a commodity and has an exchange value. The exchange value of labour power is roughly the cost of training. maintaining and replacing the particular kind of labour power (skilled or unskilled; bricklayer or engineer, clerk or schoolteacher) involved. Wages are the price of labour power, or the monetary expression of its value.

Historically, wage labour has been at the very basis of capitalism. The landless labourers who were available in the early days of capitalism provided the early capitalists with a labour force to exploit, so allowing capitalism to come into being. The wages system also provided capitalism with a vast and growing market for consumer goods, so helping it to spread. Wage labour can thus be regarded as another key, defining feature of capitalism.

Adam Buick