Editorial: Socialism — the efficient society (1978)

Editorial from the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Much of the propaganda work of the Socialist Party of Great Britain is spent, before we are able to talk about the better world of socialism, in debunking the host of fallacies which support capitalism.

One of these is the idea that the profit motive in production makes for efficiency, that profit ensures we make goods which are needed (otherwise no one would buy them) and that those goods are turned out to the highest standards (otherwise they would not sell).

This fallacy sees the profit motive acting as a kind of agent of natural selection, in which anything unable to adapt to the demands of commodity production simply does not survive. And the logical development of this argument is that we are surrounded with the very best of goods, produced in just the quantities we need them and carried to wherever there is a demand for them.

It takes very little thought, or experience, to see that this is not true. To begin at the basis, capitalism produces wealth in the form of commodities — wealth which is turned out with the motive of selling it to realise a profit and to amass further wealth in the form of capital.

The first consequence of this is that, if there is no chance of a profit being realised, there is no production. In this situation it is of absolutely no consequence, that there may be a need for the wealth — people may be starving or homeless, but if the production of food or houses is not profitable they will not be made.

One result of this is unemployment, in which the normal everyday poverty of workers descends into outright destitution. Again, when this happens capitalism takes no account of people’s needs; there may be millions desperate for the little extra income which a job would bring them but if it is not profitable to employ them they will stand — and perhaps starve — on the dole queue.

The drive to produce for profit means that capitalism is always under pressure to turn out goods as cheaply as possible, since the lower a commodity’s cost of production the more scope there is for undercutting a rival’s commodities on the market and, if the market allows, the higher the profit which can be realised.

But producing things cheaply usually means that they are shoddy, sub-standard, jerry-built or even dangerous. It also means that human beings, who may be highly trained and knowledgeable, have used their skills and knowledge in ways which have demanded of them less than they are capable of; they have been forced to prostitute themselves in the cause of commodity production.

There have been many cases of this, which have been spectacular enough in their consequences to make them classic scandals of capitalism — buildings which have collapsed beneath their inhabitants or people needlessly diseased or killed, like the workers in the asbestos industry or the tragic victims of thalidomide.

In a world in which we can solve so many technological problems, and achieve to an extent which would have been regarded as miraculous only a short time ago, there is waste of wealth, restriction of production, unused working capacity and sub-standard production. And this mess is sold to us by what is called an industry — an army of advertising men whose job is to tell lies about things which they need know nothing about. And the whole thing is costed and accounted for by a further army — of accountants, bank clerks, invoice checkers — millions and millions of people simply wasting their lives away doing something which does not produce an ounce of wealth. By no standards of acceptable judgement can capitalism be described, then, as an efficient system of society. But we have not yet mentioned its supreme waste — the poverty to which it condemns its people. Commodity production means the vast majority are deprived of access to the means of producing wealth; left with nothing else, they have to sell their working ability in order to live.

But this labour power is itself a commodity and it is sold, overall, at its value — at what it takes to produce and reproduce the worker in terms of food, clothing, housing, recreation and so on. The effect of this is that the working class always live at the level of subsistence — sometimes, perhaps, rising a little above it while at other times they will fall below. But overall they exist at a level of existence which can only be called poverty.

At the same time, the other class in society — the capitalist class — because of their monopoly ownership of the means of production and distribution are able to live, if they wish, in idle luxury. Beside the poverty — and sometimes destitution — of the workers exists the opulence of the capitalists.

There is, then, a division of interests in society today, a class division which means that every social issue has two sides and that there can be no unity or co-operation. A divided society is not efficient — it is restrictive, hampered, stumbling along at a fraction of its real ability.

Socialists oppose capitalism because it is inefficient. We want a society in which human ability is given full reign, in which people can co-operate to use their abilities and knowledge to the full to produce wealth in abundance and to build a world of freedom and security. That is socialism — the efficient society.

Human energy and capitalist inefficiency (1978)

From the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines efficiency as “the ratio of useful work performed to the total energy expended” meaning the greater the amount of energy input required to produce a given output the less efficient the work. So efficiency is a measure enabling us to compare different ways of achieving something with a view to minimizing energy input (including labour) and maximizing output. Such a comparison can be made between capitalism and socialism which would demonstrate how vastly more efficient would be the latter social system in utilizing the mental and physical energies of people to satisfy social needs.

This however prompts the question: what are social needs? From a human standpoint the answer is obvious: adequate and decent shelter, food, social amenities. What does not appear to be obvious to many outraged and idealistic observers of the appalling toll of human misery is that the worldwide capitalist mode of production is not and cannot be directly geared to the satisfaction of social needs. Under capitalism, wealth is produced as commodities for sale on a market with a view to profit. The fulfilment of human needs is incidental and secondary to this basic motivation. To sell his commodities the capitalist has to find buyers and people can only buy as much as they can afford. Thus the working class are condemned to poverty and to a permanent insufficiency of purchasing power which cannot be redressed by income redistribution (redistribution of poverty) or inflationary policies of printing more money.

Such deprivation is quite unnecessary. For decades the world has technically been capable of producing a superabundance of wealth to satisfy all mankind’s needs. The gap between this accelerating potential and actual output has widened immensely during this time. Experts compute that the world can comfortably support a population many times its present level with existing technology and “known” resource reserves. Patrick Moyniham, ex US Ambassador to the UN, has stated that India alone could feed the world. Historically capitalism has during its brief existence developed the forces of production immensely on the one hand and on the other, has increasingly restrained their application with insurmountable economic barriers.

Since capitalism artificially restricts production we can directly attribute to it the widespread poverty and its effects. One such effect is malnutrition. The magnitude of this problem was illuminated by a UN Food and Agricultural Organisation report in 1974, which revealed that an estimated conservative figure of 460 million people suffered from severe malnutrition prior to 1972 and this number has rapidly increased since then. The consequences are pervasive and profound as Professor Jean Mayer explained:

The child of a malnourished mother is more likely to be born prematurely or small and is at greater risk of death or of permanent neurological and mental dysfunction. Brain development begins in utero and is complete at an early age (under two). Malnutrition during this period when neurons and neural connections are being formed may be the cause of mental retardation that cannot be remedied by later corrective measures. The long term consequences not only for the individual but also for the society and the economy need no elaboration. (Scientific American Sept. 1976).

Moreover, millions are killed or maimed by stress and appalling cost-effective work conditions generated by the commercial rat-race. The resultant wearing and tearing of the fabric of social existence necessitates costly social services. Thus capitalism deliberately vitiates the quality and potential of human labour-power which might otherwise be efficiently expended in the production of wealth. Capitalism is incapable of efficiently applying existing technology to produce even the sort of conditions and requirements favourable to the reproduction and development of efficient labour- power on a satisfactory scale. Instead it creates a vicious circle of poverty and incompetence — as the social scientist, the late Oscar Lewis wrote: “Once the culture of poverty has come into existence it tends to perpetuate itself”.

But not only is capitalism wasteful in stifling its prodigious productive potential: the way in which it organizes manpower within its productive apparatus is itself an inherently inefficient process. This is because it generates priorities which stem directly from the way in which it functions as a mode of production. From the standpoint of actually improving the material wellbeing of society these priorities are socially useless and the rifulfilment engages a considerable and growing proportion of productive effort. Thus capitalism has spawned a gigantic administrative- bureaucratic edifice which has mushroomed in size and complexity in response to the developing economic requirements of the profit machine.

Economists refer to this process as tertiarization. A nation’s occupational structure can be divided into three broad categories: Primary or extractive sector, secondary or manufacturing sector and tertiary or services sector. According to one theory, the Clark-Fisher thesis, tertiary employment increases relative to total employment chiefly at the expense of primary employment in the course of development. The tertiary sector, which is the most advanced economies is the largest, includes a huge proportion of jobs which would be eliminated in socialism such as those in advertising, finance, government and retailing industries. The Clark-Fisher thesis has the qualified support of research findings. The growing proportion of socially useless employment is yet another indictment of capitalism’s obsolescence.

But waste does not end there. In an article in the Economist (30/7/76) it was revealed that office equipment makers predicted that by 1980 annual spending on office machinery will reach $3 billion at 1974 prices or £300 outlay for each of the 10.5 million office workers in Britain . . . who are largely concerned with the mechanics of capitalist finance and commerce. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

World military expenditure at £122,000m in 1976 is equal to the entire income of the poorer half of mankind. Nearly 30 per cent. of worldwide aluminium production is allocated to military usage. Yet war, for which armaments production is a preparation, is merely an inevitable extension of the normal commercial rivalries inherent in capitalism. Such examples represent an enormous drain of human energy and resources in primary and secondary sectors into activities which are socially useless but essential to the maintenance of capitalism—energy and resources which is socialism could be constructively applied to the betterment of society.

Even when workers are available capitalism is incapable, because of its finite markets, of assimilating them into its productive apparatus and yet a considerable amount of energy is expended in their maintenance through the “welfare state” machine (not that this is done out of charitable concern). Millions of even skilled workers with years of costly training invested in them are not permitted to make use of their abilities because they are unemployable or pensioned. This is a grossly inefficient use of available labour power.

Even the wasteful framework of capitalism’s production priorities workers are inefficiently used in relation to the technology at their disposal. Underemployment, as this is called, and unemployment in the so-called third world is flickering between 25 and 30 per cent and still rising according to the New Internationalist May 1974. Another dimension of this problem is the phenomenon of square-pegs-in-round-holes — workers economically compelled to work in particular jobs when their inclinations and skills lie elsewhere. A worker will be industrious and efficient when his interest is in his work. The alienation, drudgery and lack of variety which workers confined within the straitjacket of a “job” experience generally under capitalism must contribute immensly towards inefficient work performance.

What more could be said of capitalism, its planned obsolescence, its status-conscious meretricious trash, its coals-to-Newcastle phenomena, its rotting mountains of unsaleable food? It is a panorama of stupendous waste, of wasted human endeavour. Less obvious examples of waste emerge from a shadowy background of interacting factors congruent with and expressive of property society. Such examples are legion but one will suffice.

In many parts of North West Europe the cultivated land is fragmented into a mass of patches so that one man’s “farm” could consist of a number of plots interspersed among other farmers’ holdings and separated by long distances. As a result the efficiency of movement between plots is seriously impaired. Chisholm in Rural Settlement and Land Use calculated that in Europe “one third or even one half of the agricultural land is fragmented and in need of consolidation” (p. 46). Even without altering land use patterns — although the size and shape of properties can prohibit the use of efficient mechanised techniques for example the subdivision of inherited properties amongst third world peasants into tiny plots — the total transformation of the agrarian landscape on the basis of common ownership is the obvious solution to facilitate the most efficient utilization of the land.

There are many reformist groups who concern themselves with the problem of waste but who in fact employ an extremely narrow definition of waste which they invest with a sense of horror-stricken incredulous alarm as if all this pollution and rape of the land is something new in capitalism. Theirs is a hypothetical world of scarce resources, of exploding populations, of mounting insurmountable pollution levels. Where they circumscribe their notion of waste to what they see as just the excesses of the social system, socialists see waste as something integral to and ineradicable within the framework of commodity production. The destiny of the world has not been pre-programmed. Given the necessary socialist consciousness coupled with the latent productive potentialities imprisoned within the structure of the capitalist economy, the exhilarating vision of an efficient world without waste or want can become a reality.

Robin Cox

This taxation business (1978)

From the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the first issue of this journal The Socialist Party of Great Britain stated that it does not matter to the working class whether taxes are high or low, or whether they are direct, like present day PAYE, or indirect, like the duties on beer and tobacco. Other political parties and the trade unions greeted this with astonishment and unbelief; how, they asked, could anyone be so blind as not to see that workers would be better off with lower taxes? It is the purpose of this article to show that the statement was, and still is, a correct one.

Taxation is always in the news and it got special attention on May 8 last when a collection of opposition parties in Parliament forced the government to reduce Income Tax from 34p to 33p in the pound. The debate was being broadcast on Radio, which accounts for the MPs utterances containing more than the usual amount of humbug. With one exception, all those who spoke, whether for reducing the tax or for not reducing it, said that their sole concern was the wellbeing of “the nation”, but each side had the gravest doubts about the good faith of the others.

Mr. Healey thought the real intention of the Tories was to “grub up a few extra votes”. It seems that in his sheltered life he had never before encountered a political party so depraved as to frame its policy to catch votes. He made much of the Tory and Liberal admission that they favoured reducing direct taxation and increasing indirect taxation, VAT. What shocked him most was the Liberal John Pardoe’s view that there should be an even greater reduction of Income Tax. Did Pardoe not realise that the consequent “enormous ’’increase of taxes on beer and tobacco would raise the cost of living by as much as 3 per cent? (Under Mr. Healey’s guiding hand since February 1974, the cost of living has gone up by nearly 100 per cent).

An argument that did appear in several speeches was that reducing Income Tax would improve the workers’ "incentive to work”.

The one MP who stood aside from the general discussion was Enoch Powell. He made it clear that his group of Ulster Unionist MPs (who usually vote for the Labour Government) were simply using the occasion to bring pressure for the restoration of local government in Northern Ireland. Not one MP mentioned a certain forbidden ten-letter word — the word capitalism; but it is capitalism they were dealing with.

Capitalism is a complicated social arrangement, with many internal conflicts and contradictions. One consequence is that politicians, who need the workers’ support and votes, have perfected the art of presenting capitalist policy as if its real aim was to benefit the workers. It is not safe to accept things at their face value, which is the error made by those who tell the workers that what they need is lower taxes.

At first glance the case they make seems self-evident. If the PAYE deduction from wages goes up or if taxes put prices up surely the workers are worse off? And if PAYE or prices go down surely workers are better off?

The people who use this argument about price increases associated with higher VAT use the same argument about all price increases, whether related to higher taxes or not. (It is not necessary here to go into the question whether taxes on goods actually do simply put up their prices. For the present argument we can accept the belief that they do have this effect).

We can at once concede that at the moment when PAYE goes up or the cost of living goes up the workers are that much worse off: but what we should be concerned with is the longer-term, continuing, situation. And the fact is that, subject to variations due to other, quite different causes, the wages and salaries of the working class as a whole become adjusted to changes of PAYE and changes of the cost of living.

What really matters to workers is their “take-home pay” after deduction of PAYE and Social Security contributions, and what it will buy. It is this purchasing power that continually adjusts itself; not automatically, but through the struggles of workers inside and outside the trade unions, struggles influenced by the varying levels of unemployment. Government “wage restraint” propaganda and policies also play a part.

When purchasing power is reduced by higher tax deductions or price rises, workers react by seeking higher wages. When there are tax deductions or prices fall the workers’ resistance to pressure by the employers weakens. Earlier this year Mr. Healey held out an offer of lower PAYE as an inducement to unions to moderate wage claims.

There is plenty of evidence from past experience to show how take-home pay has adjusted to tax changes, and to changes in the cost of living.

First let us look at Income Tax. In the 19th century hardly any workers came up to the pay level at which tax became payable. During the Crimean War the government considered lowering the tax level so that most workers would pay tax. The idea was dropped for two reasons. First, the high cost of collecting large numbers of small amounts of tax would have been greater than the total amount collected. That is why, with inflation, Chancellors of the Exchequer periodically raise the taxable level to exempt low paid workers from tax. The second reason was that, because unemployment was then very low, it was realised that the workers would be able to get higher wages and thus maintain their purchasing power in spite of tax deductions.

Between 1938 and 1947, Income Tax changes brought far more workers into the pay level at which tax was deducted, and the proportion of pay deducted as tax had greatly increased. (In addition the cost of living had risen sharply). So were the workers worse off? A study of wages in Britain published by the American Department of Labour found that the purchasing power of take home pay had just about kept up with all the changes. A comparison between the purchasing power of present average earnings and that in 1938 shows that this upward adjustment has been more than maintained between 1947 and 1978.

Now for changes directly affecting the cost of living. In 1846 the industrial capitalists secured the abolition of the Corn Laws, thus enabling cheap food to be imported (at the expense of the landowners). It was presented as a boon to workers. Would not their wages now buy more? What the industrial capitalists really aimed at was that cheaper food would enable them to pay lower wages. (Later on when many manufacturers themselves wanted protection to keep out cheap foreign goods they presented it in the guise of “protecting the workers’ jobs”).

Between 1920 and 1926 the cost of living fell by 31 per cent, and PAYE was also reduced. Lucky workers? Not at all. Unemployment was heavy so that, in spite of attempted resistance through strikes, the workers were forced to accept an average reduction of wages of 32 per cent.

A special case of capitalist policy presented as something to help the workers was the introduction of rent restriction in 1915, by a Tory Minister in a coalition government. Because house-building had stopped on the outbreak of war in 1914, rents were rising. Rent restriction was imposed (at the expense of the landlords) in order to dissuade workers from striking for higher wages which would have adversely affected manufacturers as well as interfering with the war effort.

Rent restriction was adopted in many other countries and in the nineteen twenties the International Labour Office conducted enquiries into its effects. A typical finding was that related to Austria. It showed that in Vienna the rent paid by workers had fallen from 20 per cent. of wages in 1914 to barely 1 per cent. in 1923. So were the workers better off?

Most of the workers were in the same position as in Germany; they had practically no liabilities under the heading of rent, but the corresponding amount was not included in their wages. The actual gain was thus nil.

So we are on the solid ground of experience in asserting that taxation is not a working class issue, not forgetting that this presupposes that the workers continue the struggle to maintain and increase wages as far as conditions allow.

For the capitalists the position is quite different. Having exploited the workers to the fullest extent, having got maximum output at the lowest wage they can induce workers to accept they have to pay, out of their profits, the cost of maintaining the State apparatus, the armed forces and so on. The burden of taxation falls on them. It follows that as a class they have very good cause to keep government expenditure as low as possible so that taxation can be correspondingly low. The workers have no such interest.

There is another difference between the two classes. The capitalists have every reason to continue capitalism indefinitely, but workers who give the matter a little thought must conclude, with us, that it is in the interest of the working class to get rid of it.

Edgar Hardcastle

Crime — who loses? (1978)

From the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

I suppose you'd say my politics are Tory, really. I believe in getting as much money for myself as quickly as I can, by any method. I'm a free enterprise man. (Bank Robber—Wormwood Scrubs.)

It is a long, long time since the figures for recorded crime indicated any decline in its popularity as a method of getting rich quick, or at least staying a little less poor. The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester (of whom more later) recently described it as ". . . possibly the biggest and fastest growing enterprise in the world”, which is how the City columns once talked about the oil industry or the activities of Jim Slater. Yet at the same time the belief persists that crime can be reduced or even wiped out.

For example Horace Cutler, the flamboyant Conservative leader of the Greater London Council, said last April:

Never has London been so dirty, so vandalised, so decaying and dangerous. We must take action now to eliminate the mugger, the vandal and the football hooligan. (Daily Telegraph, 21/4/78).

No half measures for Cutler—he wants to eliminate crime and, as he was speaking just before the local elections, we can assume that he was suggesting the best way of doing this was. to vote for his party. This might have been more convincing were it not for the fact that he is already responsible for running this city he describes as dirty, vandalised and dangerous.

Another popular assumption is that if crime can be eliminated and everyone starts living a quiet, law abiding life everything will be alright. (Although the bank robber quoted at the head of this article would probably disagree—he would be likely to die of boredom.) This assumption is based on the idea that law and order is a matter of morality, that the law sets standards which protect and benefit us all and that criminals are people who behave in an immoral way:

. . . what is serious crime but a lack of consideration for others, a failure to recognise their full reality and rights? (Colin Welch—Daily Telegraph 17/4/78).

(Our bank robber has some views on the way banks in their dealings are notable for a lack of consideration for others but never mind.) But many lawful acts are anything but protective and beneficent—for example the acts of organised violence carried out by the armed forces. Similarly, private property rights—on which capitalist society is based—are inconsiderate of the mass of people in the sense that they deny them free access and clearly work against their interests.

How big, in reality, is the problem of crime? There is such an abundance of statistics that anyone can take their pick. Try these:

In 1900 there were less than 80,000 offences recorded in England and Wales. In 1976 there were over 2 million.

Over the past twenty years the number of indictable offences per 100,000 of the population has quadrupled. Violent crime has doubled since 1969.

Last April the British Insurance Association said that between 1976 and 1977 the value of property taken in burglaries from the home went up from £22.4 million to £30.3 million. The BIA had reason to be pained; during 1977 they paid out a record £64.2 million to cover losses by theft.

It is usual to conclude from information like that that crime is rising like some great noxious wave. Parallels are drawn with the increase in divorce, abortions, venereal disease, to compose a picture of a society about to collapse into a new Dark Age. Retired officers in Bournemouth cower behind their Daily Telegraph and take hope from the politicians— usually Tory — who call for harsher penalties and tougher prisons.

In a sense they have reason to be concerned; so steep a rise in recorded crime is a comparatively recent trend. From 1900 to 1920 crime tended to rise in line with the population; it went up more sharply during the Slump, then levelled off before bursting up in the post war “crime wave”. That, too, was seen as a fundamental threat to social order but it was followed, between 1950 and 1954, by a relative stability in the figures. Since then they have been rising and are now doing so at about 15 per cent each year.

But these figures should not be taken neat and regarded as an accurate measure of social behaviour; there are important qualifications which need to be applied. Firstly, “serious” crime—murder, the more grievous assaults; armed robbery—makes up only about 4 per cent of the total. Much of the rest, apart from motoring offences, consists of theft—and about 65 per cent of that involves property under £25 in value. So if the figures for crime tell us anything, it is not that we are about to be murdered in our beds — statistically we are more likely to be involved in a little shoplifting.

Then there is the matter of the very basis of the statistics—the fact that they measure only recorded crime, or crime known to the police. And of course a lot of offences never come to police notice—minor acts of vandalism or the theft of a small amount of money from an unattended handbag or a black eye after a night on the beer. This means, firstly, that there is a lot more crime than we ever hear about and secondly that the statistics might be completely wrong, especially in recording rises or falls in particular crimes, because there may be reasons which persuade people to report a crime at one time and not at another.

For example, the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders thinks (The Guardian, 25/4/78) that the apparent increase in burglaries, which so worries the British Insurance Association, is due in part to people being readier to report the offence and the reason for this is that there has been an increase in the insurance of household contents, along with insuring the mortgage.

In the same way, the police may in some circumstances arrest someone for an offence when at other times they might let him go. Police activity can be influenced by the policy—which might mean the personal quirks—of their Chief Constable. In Greater Manchester the head policeman, James Anderton, has a reputation for a persecutionary zeal against those who are labelled as sexual deviants. According to The Guardian (11/4/78) Anderton’s policemen are especially active against homosexual clubs and were actually considering bringing a prosecution against one, under a bylaw of 1882, for “licentious or indecent dancing”. But the Greater Manchester force does not display the same enthusiasm to hunt down all law breakers; their policy in the case of motorists is to go soft and to try for persuasion before prosecution. Now the figures for crime in Greater Manchester in 1977 went up by over 10 per cent, while those for motoring fell by 35 per cent. But this does not mean that when in Manchester you can cross the road safely but must watch who you dance with.

Much of the response to crime can only be described as a panic in the face of what have been called folk-devils. In recent years we have seen many examples of this, of the mob reaction to Teddy Boys, Mods and Rockers and now muggers and football hooligans. This panic is open to exploitation by vote-hunting politicians but it also infects eminent members of the judiciary, who seem to allow it to affect the sentences they dish out. Last April at the Old Bailey Melford Stevenson, who has made his name in a number of cases not notable for their lenient treatment of the person in the dock, sent a man to prison for three years for the manslaughter of his baby and made the comment that this offence is

. . . now frighteningly too frequent ... It is a curious thing that about 15 years ago the phrase “baby battering” was not in the ordinary Englishman’s vocabulary.

It was not reported, whether Melford Stevenson is aware that the popularity of a phrase is not a measure of the frequency of an offence, nor whether he realises that any increase in prosecutions for baby battering is more likely due to a higher awareness of the problem, and the more efficient machinery for detecting it, than any proven increase in the offence.

Now if the majority of crime consists of offences against property, is it too simple to conclude that the ending of property rights, by the abolition of capitalism, would have the effect of ending crime? There are many who argue that it is too simple, that crime is a response to an emotional maladjustment. Superficially there is something to be said for this as it is common for offenders to come from broken families or to have a history of living in institutions like orphanages. But this can only be a superficial argument since it takes no account of the fact that our type of family is itself a social organism of capitalism, with defects typical of that social system, and cannot be considered in isolation from that system.

And what, in any event, are emotional maladjustments but reactions to or efforts to defend ourselves from, the stresses of capitalism? The ideal of capitalism is the supremely competitive being, a sort of James Bond of industry or commerce whose ruthlessness is shot through with glamour. In reality, capitalism offers a poor bargain to the docile, law abiding worker who carries his degradation with him wherever he goes. John McVicar, who was one of England’s recently most celebrated (and most hunted) big time criminals put his view on this:

Money has never been, or ever will be, my primary object . . . My life was always exciting and dramatic; wherever I was. I was part of the action. Psychologically, I had the satisfaction of personifying the counter-culture with which I identified myself, and I found this was confirmed by my notoriety and prestige. (McVicar By Himself.)

No bank clerk, no assembler on the endless production line, no conforming worker wearing his mortgage and his HP debts like so many albatrosses, can make any such claim. His prestige is limited to a reputation for keeping the paperwork flowing from In tray to Out, or not falling behind with the payments. He personifies the drabbest and most restrictive of cultures, the culture founded on his own exploitation. Perhaps it is arguable whether McVicar (now a “reformed character”) who ended up with a total of twenty three years prison, really got a bad bargain.

Working class emotional problems cannot be separated from the environment in which they are raised. It is no coincidence that crime is high, and violent, in the great urban concentrations—London, Liverpool, Glasgow—where life is fast and pressured and where one generation of slums follows another. Such places did not arise by accident; they originated in capitalism’s need to crowd workers together near their places of employment and to house them in dwellings built as cheaply as possible. This is not something which died with Charles Dickens; such places are still being constructed and need very little to realise their destiny of slumdom and breeding grounds for discontent and crime. One such is the Hyson Green estate in Nottingham, which recently won much notoriety for an especially nasty affair and where one of the unfortunate inhabitants with an aerosol epitomised the agony of living there—“These flats are the slums of tomorrow”.

There is every reason for people who live in conditions which offer no hope to behave in a hopeless fashion. Consciously or not, they grasp that capitalism offers them nothing and they react in what they see as an anti-social fashion, attacking the property precepts on which capitalism is based. One recent case, which was concerned with squatting, allowed Lord Denning to set out those priorities:

. . . the courts must, for the sake of law and order, take a firm stand. They must refuse to admit the plea of necessity to the hungry and the homeless . . . (Quoted in The Politics of the Judiciary—J. A. G. Griffiths.)

If this statement makes it clear that property rights are all-pervasive, it also sets out the near impossibility of not offending against those rights, if only because they are themselves offensive to human interests.

So the “crime busters” must lose and so must the criminals, who at best can hope to claw their way a little above the rest of the working class and who often end up, like our bank robber, rotting away years of their lives in mind-numbing prisons. For it is the working class, who read their newspapers and watch television and worry, because they are told to, about crime, who are massively the losers. At the same time as they worry, they dream of the equivalent of a Great Train Robbery, to lift them away from their life of indignity heaped on degradation. But although it has its losers—and its winners—capitalism is anything but a game.

Ivan.

Colonel Lancaster (1978)

From the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Outdoor speakers of the Socialist Party are frequently requested to name capitalists and are deemed to have failed to prove their case on declining to do so. The validity of our case does not depend on the ability to compile a directory of the parasites of this society however. Capitalists are the products of social conditions where the means of living are privately owned and production is for profit; they are not the makers of these conditions. So it is essential to understand how capitalism works. Socialists only quote names to illustrate this.

A good example is provided for us by the item in the Daily Telegraph of 5 June titled “Tory MP leaves £2.8m fortune”. The point of interest for us, was not in the fact that a Tory MP died rich, there is nothing unusual about that. It was in the first paragraph which stated “Reinvestment of Government compensation from his substantial interest in coal mines in Nottinghamshire, as a result of nationalisation in 1947, has helped to provide the largest probate value so far this year — £3,145,452 gross, £2,807,920 net — for the estate of Col. Claude Lancaster, a Conservative MP for more than 30 years”. To put it crudely, the Colonel, a former mine owner, was the victim of Labour’s nationalisation policies and came out of the ordeal with his wealth intact.

The mining industry between the wars faced shrinking markets. The measures to combat this included wage cuts, deterioration in working conditions, and pit closures and the resulting resistance of the miners to these cuts put the industry at the centre of political controversy in those days. The Labour Party, with the support of the miners, claimed the fault lay with private ownership of the mines and the owners’ greed for profit. Nationalisation was to be the remedy by eliminating the owners. It was understood that the chaos of competition would be replaced by a sane and humane planning of production. The Socialist Party at the time argued that nationalisation was not the answer, as the result would be state capitalism with no important changes in the lot of the workers.

The nationalisation that the Labour Party and many mine workers wanted so badly has been implemented for over thirty years now. Mining has changed much over that period of time, yet the essentials remain the same. The profit motive determines the decisions of executives of the National Coal Board every bit as much as it did that of the managers of the old companies. Closures have continued and the industry has shrunk much since 1947. Mechanisation, which could have been a boon in lightening the toil of the miners, when allied to the profit motive brought stress and danger instead. Nationalisation did for a time bring a change that Colonel Lancaster and the former owners would have appreciated, the miners believed in nationalisation and went along with the streamlining of the industry they had resisted before.

Thirty years after the event that was claimed to be such a momentous change, workers still produce wealth for the benefit of the owning minority and the announcement of Colonel Lancaster’s will is a timely reminder of this.

Joe Carter

Your labour - their profits (1978)

From the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

In spite of the continuing world recession many companies are managing to maintain and even increase their profits. Statistics prepared by the Government Statistical Service show that the gross trading profits for industrial and commercial companies increased by 38 per cent. in 1977 compared with 1976. Over the same period payment of dividends on ordinary shares increased by 17 per cent.

But where do profits come from?

Let us first consider the explanation of profits that is provided by orthodox economics. Orthodox economic theory takes for granted a world of private property where some people mysteriously own capital and earn a revenue from that, and where the rest of the population own only their ability to labour and so are forced to work for a wage or a salary. It assumes private property and the existence of profit to start off with. Its theory, therefore, can in no way provide an explanation of profit, but is merely a description of the way that capital can secure an income for its owners.

The ideological implications of such a theory are clear (although not to the economists, who would deny them). By focussing on a description of the way payments to capital are made, rather than examining WHY such payments are made — which would necessitate an analysis of the foundations of property society — orthodox economics sweeps under the carpet the potentially revolutionary issues and makes profits seem normal, right and inevitable.

Orthodox Theory

Marx was highly critical of this aspect of orthodox theory and regarded it as a complete mystification of the real situation. For example in The 1844 Manuscripts Marx says,

Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us . . . Political economy throws no light on the cause of the division between labour and capital, and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause, i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain.

Marx’s analysis of profit starts off by investigating the underlying property relations of society. As profit is a general characteristic of capitalist society only its explanation is to be found in its specific features. The features that Marx took to be specific to capitalism were the following:-

1. The means of production take the form of capital. This means not only that the means of production are put into operation only if a profit can be expected from the sale of the commodities so produced, but that the function of these means of production is the production of profit for accumulation, and not the production of useful articles as such.
2. These means of production are owned by a minority class who are forced by their position as capitalists to use these means of production as capital, to use them only for making profit.
3. The non-owning class, the working class, are unable to undertake productive activity unless hired by an employer in return for a money wage with which the means of subsistence can be purchased.
4. The economic relations between economic agents (including those between capitalists and workers) have the appearance of freely contracted relations.
5. Money transactions are the norm.

Surplus Product 

Marx argued that it is a feature of all property societies that a surplus product is appropriated by a minority class. In his economic writings on capitalism, he explained how this appropriation takes place in capitalist society; in an economy where economic relations take the form of exchange relations, the appropriation of the surplus product is also effected on the basis of exchange.

Firstly, Marx considered whether the surplus could be appropriated by means of unfair exchanges amongst sellers where commodities are bought cheap and sold dear. If this were so then the surplus would actually be created within the sphere of exchange. This can be discounted as an explanation of the source of the surplus because as capitalists are both buyers and sellers, it would be impossible for them as a class to make profits by cheating themselves all the time, although some individual capitalists may sometimes make profits on this basis by defrauding others. Consequently Marx concluded that an explanation would have to be based on the assumption of ‘fair’ exchanges between buyers and sellers.

As Marx saw exchange itself to be a purely social act, he argued that when commodities are exchanged, what is really happening is that people’s labour is being exchanged. Exchange-value is determined by the value of the commodity, by the amount of socially-necessary labour-time that has been expended on it. By this he meant that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labour needed on average, given the prevailing level of technical development and efficiency, to produce it, including the labour needed to produce the machinery and raw materials. If all commodities exchange according to their values, then what is the source of the surplus product, the surplus value? (We assume here for the sake of simplicity that exchange-values are determined solely and directly by values. In fact, Marx showed in Capital volume 3 that this is not generally the case. The analysis of the source of profit is, however, unaffected by this simplifying assumption).

Marx’s answer to this question is that surplus value is produced by the working class in the ordinary course of their working activity in that the value newly produced by a worker is invariably more than the value that he or she receives in the form of wages. But  how could this happen if all commodities are exchanged at their value? Surely the worker is exchanging labour for less than its value if the worker receives less value than his/her labour produces? Marx’s answer to this was that what the worker actually sells to the capitalist is not labour, but the ability to labour, labour-power. And the value of the labour-power is what it costs the worker on average to maintain himself/herself and dependants. By and large, the wages received by the working class are sufficient to maintain them from one generation to the next, but clearly this is a smaller value than is produced by the working class. The difference between the value newly produced by the working class and the wages received by them is the source of surplus value.

The capitalist class is able to appropriate this unpaid labour by virtue of its monopoly of the means of production which enables it to dictate the terms on which the working class are forced to exchange their labour for wages. This coercion may be softened a little by trade union activity, but essentially is unchanged by it.

Marx then went on to show how this surplus value is distributed among the different sections of the capitalist class in the form of rent, interest, and profit. Thus all unearned income ultimately flows from the unpaid labour of the working class, this being the direct result of the monopoly of the means of production by the capitalist class.

What does all this mean for the worker?

It means that although the world’s wealth is produced by the working class acting on nature-given raw materials, a certain proportion of this wealth is siphoned off for a small parasite class. That enables this class to enjoy a standard of living far in excess of that of the working class. It also provides the capitalist class with the funds for further accumulation on an extended scale which serves to reproduce the existing class relations of society.

It also means that the aim of production is not the satisfaction of people’s needs, but the amassing of surplus value and accumulation on an ever larger scale. Instead of useful articles — food, clothing, shelter, being produced for people, people are subordinated to the production of commodities; instead of people controlling the productive forces of society, people are controlled by them. Consequently, in a world which has a productive potential hitherto unknown, we are faced with mass poverty, mass starvation, mass pollution.

It means that the time is long overdue for the working class to take political action to put an end to a system that works against their interests.

It means therefore that the time is long overdue for the establishment of Socialism where all society’s productive forces are owned and democratically controlled by the entire community. In such a society the means of production will not function as capital but as aids to the production of the useful articles that we need to live. Production will not be for profit but will be directed towards satisfying our needs. Together with other relics of capitalism such as money, insurance policies and price tags, profits will have no rôle in Socialism.

V. W. Brown

The Chinese working class need profits too ! (1978)

From the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

“It is the glorious responsibility of socialist enterprises to work hard to increase accumulation for the State and make greater profits.

“All enterprises, except those which are allowed to run at a loss under the State policy, must have profits and no losses are allowed. We must strive to increase accumulation for socialism, resort to every means energetically to publicize the importance of increasing accumulation for the state, and commend those advanced units and individuals who have consistently increased production and practised economy and who have turned a losing unit into a profitable one. We must make everyone familiar with the slogan, 'It is glorious to accumulate funds for the State and shameful to lose money’, so that the masses will take concrete action to make greater profit greater accumulation and greater contributions for the State.

“Enterprises which fail to make profits for the State and enterprises which run at a loss cannot be selected as Taching-type enterprises. Profitable enterprises must continue to tap their potentials and strive to lower the production costs and make still greater profits”.

Extracts from an editorial in the Chinese newspaper People’s Daily, 27 August 1977 Source: BBC Summary of World Broadcasts (Far East), no. 5602, 31 August 1977

Letters: Progress and Socialism (1978)

Letters to the Editors from the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Progress and Socialism

In reply to my letter, “Technology and Socialism" (March SS), you give some evidence to support your contention of scientific progress making men happier in regards to medical science making the many diseases which were once rife to be things of the past, but you forget that this is a very fleeting sort of happiness in form and content, as it very quickly vanishes due to a host of other serious diseases which arise in society to cancel this ephemeral happiness out of men’s minds, and by doing so add to men’s miseries.

And even though the human lifespan is about twice as long on average as it was in Marx’s day this prolongation of life has not in the main added to man’s happiness on earth, nor has it in any manner or form motivated the workers develop Socialist ideas.

And if man has doubled his life-span since Marx’s day he certainly has not doubled his drive to attain Socialist ideas since Marx’s day. For even in 1848 Marx tells us that a spectre of communism is haunting Europe, but even today with the worker’s life-span being doubled the spectre of communism is virtually non-existent in Europe. It would be interesting to know what the historical materialists have to say about that, for this seems to be regress rather than progress, that is, of course assuming Marx’s Communist Manifesto was correct about the spectre of communism haunting Europe.

My letter never mentioned anything about the expense of technological inventions in regard to the workers, so I do not know where you got that idea from. And you certainly did not try to explain what you meant by progress, in regards to a change from hand mills to steam mills, for it is only too obvious that the steam mills did not motivate the working class to attain Socialist ideas, but rather on the contrary, dehumanised the workers by soul destroying work which turned them into robots, so where is the progress here? You disagree with this view of course, but 130 years of capitalistic technological dehumanisation is against you, plus the fact in our age of 1978 Socialism is a non-existent drive in working class politics. And also historical materialism which is supposed to operate independent of man’s will and consciousness has done virtually nothing from the steam mill in Marx’s day to the present atomic technological age to bring about any great progress towards Socialism, which, of course, you say is the only real progress, although no real evidence exists in society, to make this real progress a reality.

I would like so much to hear your comments on all that.

Ian Campbell

Dundee, Scotland

Reply:

There are two conditions necessary for the establishment of Socialism; the development of the productive forces to the point where they can provide an abundance, and acceptance by the world’s working class of the case for Socialism. Technological and scientific progress has for some decades now ensured the attainment of the first condition. Under capitalism these developments and inventions are not utilised for the good of mankind. However, in a Socialist society the fruits of human ingenuity will be able to benefit everybody. Technological progress will mean social and individual advancement. The 'soul-destroying work’ you mention has not turned the workers into robots— that is, unthinking machines which simply respond to instructions. As we said in our reply to your first letter, “Society is too complex to be operated by robots; instead it is living, feeling and thinking workers who run society.’’ The very existence of the Socialist Party shows that Socialism is by no means “ a non-existent drive in working class politics". It is no good looking to historical materialism to bring about progress towards Socialism; it is people, not history, who will carry out the revolution. The second condition for the establishment of Socialism means a world-wide majority of convinced Socialists, and this is what Socialist propaganda aims at achieving. Rather than worrying about the meaning and nature of progress, you should take a step forward yourself and join the Socialist movement.

Editors.

Facets of Trade Unionism

I recently attended the Civil and Public Services Association annual conference as a delegate for our local Branch. All facets of Trade Unionism were covered; pay, hours and leave. Conditions cf service (including superannuation), welfare, safety, "industrial democracy", racism, relations with other unions, etc., etc.

It became evident to me that what we were doing, basically was trying to get the best possible deal for our union members under capitalism.

I am familiar with the ideas of the SPGB. I read the Socialist Standard each month and I have on rare occasions attended meetings.

The ideology of the SPGB is difficult to oppose and I found myself thinking: there are no solutions under capitalism, Socialism is the answer. It is a pity, I thought, that the energy devoted by delegates in trying to improve the conditions of their members under capitalism is not harnessed to establishing Socialism. And there’s the rub! The majority of the wage-earning class either do not understand Socialism or clearly they do not want it. The SPGB has, I understand, been campaigning for over seventy years! I accept that the SPGB have been hindered by the Labour Party and various left-wing groups, all purporting to be fighting for Socialism, clouding the issues, disillusioning people and making it hard for the SPGB to spread the work and create the majority understanding necessary for the establishment of Socialism.

You may ask why, if I sympathise with your views, I do not apply for membership and help the cause? Well, we all consider our time important and I am no exception. When I occasionally state the Socialist case they think I’m living in a dream world. What about human nature? Greed? or ‘look what’s happened in Russia!’ are the usual responses. It seems that people generally do not believe in the possibility of changing society, or they do not want to.

The SPGB undoubtedly have experienced all this before and, hopefully, have the appropriate answers. Can you give me any heart to become more involved, and suggest ways of dealing with the prevailing attitudes of people?

K. Parkin

London, S.E.1

SPGB Lectures and Meetings (1978)

Party News from the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Questions old, questions new (1978)

From the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Any reader who considers the Socialist Standard to be of interest will find it well worthwhile to read the Socialist Party’s new pamphlet Questions of the Day (price 50p, or 65p by post from Head Office). The previous edition of this pamphlet was published in 1969, and a number of chapters have been added to the new edition.

However, it is a measure of the correctness of the Socialist analysis and of the fact that the problems thrown up by capitalist society remain essentially the same, that we have seen no need to revise the greater part of the pamphlet’s content. But this in no way means that it is out of date, any more than our Declaration of Principles is out of date just because it was formulated over seventy years ago. For the simple fact is that the basic features of capitalism have undergone no fundamental change since 1969 or even since 1904. The socialist case on parliament, reformism, trade unions, overpopulation, human nature and so on remains as valid and as cogent as ever.

This is not to say, though, that Socialists are not confronted by new events and new challenges. In particular, the rise of a Women’s Liberation movement over the last decade has necessitated the inclusion of a chapter on Women and Class. This chronicles the involvement of women in production, and the struggle (not supported by the SPGB) to gain the vote on equal terms with men. The modern women’s movement is analysed in a way that should be thought-provoking for its members and sympathizers. It is not in women’s interests to "achieve” equal exploitation with men under capitalism, but to work for a world of freedom and equality for all. In the words of Clause 4 of our Declaration of Principles, “the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.”

Inflation and unemployment also merit an additional chapter. Inflation is explained as being due not to wage increases but to an excess issue of inconvertible paper money. The inability of Keynesian policies to prevent the recent tremendous rise in unemployment is exposed. The anarchy of capitalism means that politicians’ attempts to produce permanent full employment are doomed to failure.

The chapter on the Chinese revolution, together with our pamphlet Russia 1917-1967, shows quite clearly why the state capitalism which exists in China and Eastern Europe is emphatically not Socialism but just an alternative method of organising the wage-labour-capital-prices-profits system. A chapter on the so-called left-wing parties illustrates their commitment to reformism and to anti-Marxist ideas.

All in all, every worker should find something of interest in this handy and comprehensive pamphlet. It is both a useful work of reference and an ideal introduction to the case for Socialism.

Paul Bennett

50 Years Ago: What is Capital? (1978)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Exploitation gives the key to an understanding of capital. Today the workers as a class are born, and remain, propertyless; they therefore do not own capital which is a form of wealth. Capital is the accumulated wealth of the capitalist class. It is useful for further production, but with only one object — that it may absorb the further unpaid labour of the workers, and thus produce . . . surplus value, the source of rent, interest and profit. Not the means of wealth production in themselves, but the class relations under which they are used to obtain surplus value, realised through sale in the world market — make them capital.

Bodies like the Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party do not stand as we do for common ownership, which would mean the abolition of such class relations. The ILP (Forward May 12 1928) asks:-

When and where any socialist ever pretended or suggested that we could dispense with capital. Socialists propose that capital should be publicly owned.

Socialists do nothing of the kind. By public ownership the ILP means nationalisation or government ownership, a condition under which the capitalists would still collectively own their property as bond-holders, while the workers would still be exploited by receiving wages which presuppose unpaid labour.

From an article “What is Capital”, Socialist Standard July 1928.

Italy's political killers (1978)

From the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Red Brigades carried out their first killing in June 1974. In Padua an armed commando entered the local Party offices of the MSI, the Italian neo-Fascist movement, handcuffed together the two men they found there, one a Party official the other an ex-member, and then shot them both twice in the back of the neck. Two years later, again in June, they shot dead a top magistrate together with his bodyguard and chauffeur, and last year, in April and November, they killed a Turinese lawyer and the assistant editor of the daily newspaper, La Stampa. So far this year their victims have been a magistrate, a police marshal, two prison officers and of course Aldo Moro and his five-man bodyguard. Add to this half a dozen kidnappings (the first in 1972) and scores of bombings and armed attacks on individuals, most of them since the kidnapping of Moro in March, and we have a picture of political violence paralleled in few of the economically advanced countries of the world.

Not of course that the Italian State is in danger of imminent collapse. As we pointed out last month the Red Brigades are a small isolated group with no support to speak of among Italian workers. Far from “striking at the heart of the State”, as they put it, they are impotent to do it any real harm and will ultimately find the massive resources and means of violence at its disposal more than a match for them.

This however is something they themselves do not see. They quite clearly consider themselves a real threat to the State and a potent ideological force among Italian workers. A mixture of jobless intellectuals and individuals from very poor backgrounds, many of them disaffected Communist Party supporters, they issued, in the 55 days that elapsed between the kidnapping of Moro and his killing, 9 communiques in which they tried to justify their activities and explain their position. Their theory as stated in these communiques, all of which were published in the Italian press, can be summarised as follows: — The old liberal nation-state is dead and has been taken over by the “imperialist states of the multinationals”. At the head of the “hierarchical chain” of this multinational imperialism (or the biggest links) are the USA and West Germany with other lesser states such as Italy forming smaller links in the chain and carrying out faithfully the directives coming from above. To pursue its economic interests and at the same time to crush the developing proletarian revolution this multinational imperialism has recruited a “politico-economic-military personnel", “imperialist executioners who massacre the militants of the IRA, the RAF (the German Red Army Faction), the Palestinian people and the Communist guerillas of South America”. Hence the need for revolutionaries to put their strategy in a European, not just a national focus. Italy too has concentration camps in which “there are hundreds of Communist prisoners condemned to the slow death of centuries of prison”. Therefore the Italian slate, “the Italian branch of the greatest multinational of crime the world has ever known”, must be the target of revolutionary violence and the designs of the “imperialist bourgeoisie” must be upset by attacks on this “politico-economic-military personnel” which it has created and which is its expression. In a class-divided society “the Italian proletariat possesses an immense potential of revolutionary intelligence, an infinite amount of technical knowledge and practical capability which, by its own work, it has been able to collectively accumulate, a will and a disposition to struggle which decades of fighting for its own liberation has forged and made indestructible. Upon this stands the whole basis of our organisation: its growing strength is built on the solid foundations of the Italian proletariat and avails itself of the incalculable contribution that its best sons and vanguards make to the building of the Communist Party in struggle”.

This then is the “thinking” behind the Red Brigades’ War against the Italian state. And all the signs are that they see their analysis as original and striking. Yet if we remove some of the more fanatical rhetoric and a few of the contemporary references what we are left with is far from original. It’s a hotchpotch of ideas, slogans and expressions of wishful thinking common to and oft-repeated on the political Left for nigh on a hundred years.

Firstly the theory of “multinational imperialism” when looked at closely boils down to the old notion of capitalism being a carefully planned conspiracy on the part of the ruling class. Certainly capitalism is a fertile breeding ground for conspiracies, political, economic and other kinds, and Italy probably has more than its fair share of them. But to suggest that the whole system is run on a conspiratorial basis is to attribute to the capitalist class and their servants in government powers and controls they do not and can not have. Capitalism depends on the impersonal workings of the world market. It is not run by governments in collusion. What happens is that governments accommodate themselves to conditions created by the market sometimes consulting and acting in concert with other governments sometimes going it alone, but in all cases, and even in the context of an international organisations like the Common Market, acting in what they see as the broad long-term interests of their own national capitalist class. Capitalism may indeed have become more international than ever before but foreign investment is welcomed or otherwise by a government according to its capacity to increase that country’s competitive position in the world market.

The second part of the conspiracy theory propounded by the Red Brigades is that there is afoot an international bourgeois plot aimed at crushing proletarian revolution. As so many leftists before them the Red Brigades refuse to face the harsh reality that the vast majority of workers do not at the present time want revolution in any shape or form. They delude themselves that a mass revolution of which they themselves will be the leaders is just waiting to be touched off and that the ruling class has got together, in this case internationally, to prevent this from happening. The fact is that when the majority of the population of the advanced world want revolution, nothing the ruling class can do will prevent them from having it. At present the authorities have the workers as their willing allies and even if they do possess the complex secret apparatus of repression the Red Brigades talk about, it is for use not against a mass workers’ movement but against small violent minority organisations like the Red Brigades themselves.

Picking off members of this apparatus, the so-called “politico-economic-military personnel”, i.e. rich or prominent individuals, is also an old trick and, as history has shown, quite futile. It is based on the “Great Man” theory of history whereby leaders not conditions are seen to determine the course of history. Since the death of Lenin and Stalin’s rule in Russia leftists have argued that if only Trotsky had triumphed over Stalin things would have been different. Different perhaps they would have been in their details but Trotsky’s own blood-stained record leaves little doubt of his capacity for a ruthlessness to which the conditions and the need to develop state capitalism in Russia would have forced him. The conditions create the men, not vice versa. And if one man disappears another is always on hand to take his place. This, it seems, is a lesson lost on the Red Brigades. Their murder of individuals such as Moro may bring them notoriety and give them a small place in history but its impact on historical development will be infinitesimal.

Lastly the self-confessed “vanguardism” of the Red Brigades. This desire to lead has been a characteristic of all small left-wing groups since the last century. The Red Brigades correctly see society as class-divided but imagine that a small group of determined individuals can lead a revolution against the capitalist class and take the working class with them. They would no doubt argue (they frequently make reference to the theory and practice of Lenin) that this idea is confirmed by the Russian experience of 1917. But what Lenin did in Russia was to set himself up as dictator of those he had led and establish a brutal state capitalist regime as far removed from Socialism as could possibly be imagined. The consequence of violent minority revolution has always in fact been violent minority control. If the Red Brigades—and given the totally different conditions from those existing in Russia in 1917 this would be nothing short of miraculous—were to take over in Italy, the result would be the same. The only kind of revolution truly possible in Italy, as elsewhere in the advanced world, is Socialism in which there will be neither leaders nor led. It will be a majority democratic revolution without the need for violence and will change the basis of society from production for profit to production for use, from world competition to world cooperation.

All sorts of theories have been advanced to explain why Italy is suffering from the violence of these would-be revolutionaries more than most other countries. Sociologists have been at it, so have politicians, historians, psychologists, et al. Insufficient reforms, the Communist Party’s shift to the centre, high unemployment, inefficient education system, traditional Italian leaning towards extremes Italy’s late and rapid development in the industrial field not being matched by progress in its infrastructure, social services, etc: these are all reasons offered to account for this phenomenon. And there is probably a good deal to be said for many of them. But when looked at closely none of them is a cause but an effect of the system of society in which we live. The effects of capitalism itself, which is the real cause of political violence in the world today wherever and whenever it takes place.

Howard Moss

The Guardian solves unemployment (1978)

From the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing is inevitable about unemployment. It is man-made and man can abolish it.

The above quotation is contained in a box attached to an article in the Guardian (May 19) and is thus the distilled wisdom of perhaps the most distinguished columnist of perhaps the most distinguished paper in the English-speaking world and I dare say a good case could be made out that he is the most distinguished columnist in the entire universe. Unfortunately, without even looking too critically at the statement above, one’s immediate reaction must be—with such geniuses, who needs fools?

We can all, of course, agree immediately that unemployment is man-made. We are well aware that it was not given by God because it was laid down that Mr God (or maybe in these days we should say Mrs God or Ms God) chased out Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden because of some monkey business with fig leaves and there and then laid upon the human race the injunction to work. ‘By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread’. No question of unemployment there. It is one of the cardinal points in socialist propaganda that the capitalist system of society, which now obtains all over the world, produces a variety of social evils, prominent among which is unemployment. And as it is obviously true that man makes his own society, it follows that he also makes the evil of unemployment. And can therefore unmake it. Nevertheless Peter Jenkins is talking ignorant nonsense. For what he is saying, throughout this article, is that we have only to put our thinking caps on and, within the context of capitalism, we can simply eliminate the curse of unemployment.

The conceit of this man is truly alarming. It does not even seem to occur to him that unemployment has been a recurrent feature of the world we live in for nigh on two centuries. So what this conceited hack seems to be saying is that, whereas all the other conceited hacks (not to speak of conceited statesmen, academics and similar natural-born leaders of the human race) have lived and died through numerous periods of unemployment, some of which, for example in the 1870s and the 1930s, were far worse than the level being experienced today, yet none of them found the magic cure to unmake this man-made scourge. But he, Peter Jenkins, can provide the cure that has eluded all these other mighty intellects who have wrestled with the problem in all the industrialised nations of the earth.

No doubt the answer came to him in his bath like Archimedes of old. The only difference is that when the latter called out ‘Eureka!’ — I have it — he really did have it and his answer to that particular problem is accepted right up to this day. Somehow one fears that Jenkins’ name will not go down to history in this way. His notion that you can find a cure for unemployment, while still retaining the system which gives rise to it, is no better than looking for the philosopher’s stone.

Jenkins says the answer is to modernise British industry so as to bring the productivity of British capitalism into line with its main competitors. It only needs a moment’s thought from an ordinary mortal to demonstrate that, as a cure for unemployment, this must be nonsense. If it were true that Britain’s competitors who have indulged in so much more investment in industry and have thereby procured a higher rate of productivity (or a higher rate of exploitation of their respective working classes) have solved the problem, then of course the suggestion that all we have to do is to copy them and, hey presto, the problem is solved would sound fine.

But the whole thing is a joke, of course, even though Jenkins is apparently blind to it. Everyone else knows that, even in the currently most successful country in the western world, namely Western Germany, which has a trade surplus running into billions of marks, unemployment is proportionally almost as high as in comparatively backward Britain. Similar considerations apply to all the other relatively successful countries such as France and the USA. Unemployment is rife in them all, yet they all have highly paid scribblers like Jenkins, they all know that unemployment is man-made and not a fact of nature (it is understood that unemployment was not a serious problem among the slaves of Egypt or the peasants of medieval Europe) and yet none of them have ever been able to solve the problem.

The simple fact which Jenkins doesn’t see, is that unemployment is a built-in feature of the anarchic system known as capitalism. So-called crises are a feature of this system and always have been. Slump follows boom follows slump. And a slump simply means that markets are glutted, that more goods have been produced than purchasers have money to buy and consequently there is no profit in producing a still greater surplus of goods. Production is curtailed and workers become unemployed.

It is as simple as that and yet it is, by definition, incurable. What is needed is a system of society in which markets cannot become glutted because there will not be markets. Goods will be simply produced for the direct use and enjoyment of human beings. If, because of the powers of technology, more food or clothes or houses are produced than the human race requires for its convenience and enjoyment, then society may decide to work shorter hours.

Unemployment of this nature, however, would obviously be a boon and not a curse. After all, nobody worries about the sorrows of the class which is permanently unemployed because it is in fact the employing class itself. They are perfectly happy in the Bahamas or Ascot. Nobody seeks to solve their problem of unemployment, because nobody thinks it is a problem. It is no doubt too much to hope that the Jenkinses of this world will ever realise that it is impossible to solve the problem of unemployment in isolation. What we need is the abolition of employment and the introduction of a new, man-made system in which there will be no employers and no employed. And consequently no unemployed. There is no other way.

L. E. Weidberg

From America: Carter, credibility, confusion (1978)

Letter From America from the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ebb and flow of popularity “out there”, where it counts, is a matter of grave and continuing concern to political leaders. Whether it be a totalitarian regime, such as exist in the “Communist” nations or the limited parliamentary democracy as we have in the West, the ruling clique must keep its collective ear to the ground at all times if it would keep its collective head on its shoulders.

In the United States of America, where Presidential power is now constitutionally limited to an 8-year maximum (two terms), it is no less true. The popular surge that sweeps one group to control of the White House can dissipate quickly in the wake of adverse events that are beyond the control of whoever may be, supposedly, at the helm. Not much more than a year after taking office, a great many of his erstwhile supporters have all but ditched Mr. Carter and are casting their lines for a substitute to challenge him in the next Democratic Party Primary elections in 1980. They are already gambling that their Jimmy, their latest Man on the White Horse, has had it. And President Carter, in the prescribed manner, has been compelled to return to campaigning and waving a big stick (“jawboning” as they call it) at Big Business, Big Labor, the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association, all of which is calculated to endear him to many millions of voters and to shore up his sagging popularity.

It is, to be sure, early and “our” Jimmy could, conceivably, be pulled out of his current tailspin by some political “victory” in Congress, by an apparent sharp improvement in inflation and/or unemployment figures, or even by escalations and outbreaks in the Middle East, Africa, or elsewhere that might rally the majority around their current leaders. But for those whose careers are intertwined with the politics of Presidential aspirants, it not too soon to seek a new bandwagon. Their eyes are fixed upon the opinion polls and they seem to see the handwriting on the wall: a significant majority of the voters, according to the polls, feel that President Carter is “not doing a good job”; over 65 per cent of “influential” Americans believe that Carter is doing “somewhat worse” or “much worse” than expectations; and Senator Edward Kennedy, by a whopping majority, leads Jimmy Carter as an acceptable candidate in the 1980 elections (even though Kennedy has stated, with apparent firmness, that he will not run for the office and will support Carter).

At this point, it should be noted that there are certain more imminent dangers facing the Democrats in the wake of their current leader’s plummeting popularity and credibility. In the Congressional (“off-year”) elections scheduled for next November, there will be about twice the usual number of House seats up for grabs because some 40 Congressmen are calling it quits — not contesting. Normally, the party in power loses seats in the “off-year” races but this time, Republicans are drooling at the opportunity to make big gains because of a Democratic President who is widely regarded as inept.

Now that, in substance, is the situation in US politics today and no more need be stated here. Public opinion polls — and elections — are political barometers and everyone reads them in their own way. It does not matter a tinker’s damn which clique captures power in Washington; whether the Man (or perhaps, someday, a Woman) is good looking or ugly; white, black, or “other”; “straight” or “gay”; religious — of whatsoever variety — or atheist; liberal, conservative or radical (right or left). If the mandate is one of continuing a society based upon wage labor and capital; buying and selling; private or state ownership of the means and instruments for producing wealth; the politicians’ performance is going to be, basically, the same. The brand name is of no importance, it is the generic name that counts. Wage labor and capital, whatever it might be called, means capitalism and while capitalism may be manipulated, in one way or another, by one variety or another of political and economic theorist it cannot be controlled.

So let us read America’s political barometer as it registers today, disregarding the particular, preferential indications and concentrating upon the general ones. The polls tell us that there is no discernible opposition in America to the present Capitalist society. The very fact that Carter has lost credibility and popularity among masses of the population and that these disappointed and disgruntled ethnics, blue collars, white collars, and whatever, are searching for a new champion to lead them proves the point. True, neither Gallup nor Harris nor any other polling organisation has ever put the one, important, question to a test: do you favour the outright abolition of the system of production for sale on a market with view to profit and the immediate introduction of a society based upon production for use, free right of access by all mankind to all that is in and on the earth? Do you favour capitalism or socialism? Such a question, at this stage, would cost the pollsters, themselves, credibility.

And yet that is the only question worth asking the electorate. We will continue to watch the political barometers for signs of meaningful change and do whatever is possible to spread the word. What else can one do that makes sense in a world of so much nonsense and confusion?

Harry Morrison,

WSP Boston