Political Notes: Abandon-ships! (1981)

The  Political Notes Column from the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abandon-ships!

Many muffins must have been choked over, in the tea shoppes of places like Tunbridge Wells, at the news that a Tory government may be thinking of scuttling the Royal Navy. In such places there is a perceptible effort to get time, if not to stand still, at least to be reined in. Retired admirals perambulate the streets in hazy dreams of those days of the great, grey battleships looming out of the Channel mists, of royal reviews of line after line of floating fire-power at Spithead or Scapa Flow.

Such people—although they would rather die among the muffins than admit it—have a marked affinity to Labour lefties. Both types vote for their party in the belief that it will not face up to the realities of capitalism. The only difference between them is in the differing realities that they believe will be evaded. And both undergo a nasty shock, when their delusions are blown aside.

Tory governments have done a lot of this blowing. Since they came back to power in 1951, they have not shown any great reluctance to move with the times. Under their rule British capitalism, as it had to, has pulled in its horns. The old British Empire has been dismantled, the armed forces reduced in keeping with the new, restricted influence in world affairs. Eden’s lunatic adventure into Suez in 1956 was a hiccup in this process, soon put right by the saner, smoother MacMillan who worked hard to get the Tories to accept what he saw was inevitable.

Now there is very little left, except for the dreams in Tunbridge Wells—and the Royal Navy, which once expressed in its flags, its guns and its vast ships the world wide expansion of British capitalism, has very little left too. There is no reason for a Tory government not to face this fact. It would be near madness for them, at a time of recession, to spend a lot of money on a navy for which the British capitalist class has little use, simply to placate some of its wilder supporters—in Tunbridge Wells or the Bacup working men’s club.


Mitterrand’s soft ‘socialism’

Francois Mitterrand, the new president of France, is treading a tightrope at the moment, trying on the one hand to retain his popularity with French workers by offering them sops such as increased minimum wages and security benefits, and on the other hand to remain respectable to the French Establishment.

Perhaps Prince Charles will have given him a few tips on how to do that when he went to see him recently. Certainly, his announcement that he will fully maintain France’s arsenal of nuclear weapons for the defence of French property will have reassured a number of people with property interests there.

This opportunist posing is not quite as curious as the headline which appeared in the Sunday Times on 24 May: “Mitterrand softens his socialism to win electors’’. Socialism means the abolition of all property and profit, and the planning of production for use on the basis of common ownership. It is not by its very nature something which can be “softened”, watered down or dressed up to “win electors”.

It is a harmonious social system which would solve the world’s present social problems. Mitterrand stressed right from the start of his campaign that he wishes to modify the present system, not end it. It can only be ended when the majority reject the inflated promises of all capitalist politicians, regardless of their labels. Do not trust anything, including this journal. We can only suggest the cause of our problems to you. The solution lies with us all. The need is to organise democratically, without leaders or promises.


No choice

An awful lot of venom is currently being excited, and expressed, in what is politely known as political debate. The unemployed—or rather those of them restless enough to demonstrate about their plight—shriek their loathing of Margaret Thatcher. To the Tories and to not a few Labour supporters—Tony Benn is a wild eyed fanatic who wants to legislate some nameless dreads into our lives. All of this is based on the theory that political leaders can initiate the crises of capitalism. If that theory were valid, capitalism’s history would be different, for if leaders can initiate a crisis they can just as easily terminate it. Yet this they never seem able to do.

Then again why is it that this turbulent, endless search for the perfect leader — or the perfect combination of them — never succeeds, so that there is always a clutch of the wretched people being reviled. spat upon, bombarded with stale eggs? Why is there always some threat, potential or actual, to set back the programmes for peace and plenty? There can be only one consistent and satisfactory answer. Political leaders do not initiate crises: they only respond to them. So it is more useful to regard their personalities in that light, as shaped by events rather than being able to shape them.

But such rational, supportable views of politics would deprive the competition between the capitalist parties of much of its excitement, a lot of which revolves around a personal dislike for the others' leaders. Except that there is an alternative to this futility—a proper understanding of the basis of capitalism and thereby of the ideas, political and religious theories, the philosophy and the morals, which spring from that basis. Such knowledge is much more exciting—because it is much more powerful—than parading the streets shouting for the demise of some leader or other. It is knowledge to change more than leaders—it will abolish them, and change society itself.

Hunger marching in the 1930s (1981)

Hunger Marching in Britain, 1934.

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was an awesome predictability about the comparisons drawn between that People’s March for Jobs in May and the Jarrow Crusade in 1936. Awesome because the comparisons were blind to an important fact: this is a sick society and its history is not so much repeated as regurgitated.

The 1981 March, much publicised, had some impressive sponsors—like Harold Wilson, whose second government saw unemployment begin to rise to its present level and who was always inveighing against “overmanning” in industry and was fond of referring to redundancies as “shake-outs”. Like garrulous Brian Clough, who doesn’t mind sacking footballers if they don’t play up to standard. Like compulsive protester Peter Main. Yes, it was impressive and exciting, and thoroughly predictable.

The Jarrow marchers were selected for their physical fitness: they marched in ground sheets and flat caps, fed at wayside soup kitchens, and had their boots mended at the local Co-op. One participant (Sunday Times 26/4/81) remembers it as “. .. a holiday . . . they were feeding like fighting cocks. And they got 1s 6d (9p) pocket money at a time when the Means Test Commissioners said you could keep a child on a shilling (5p) a week”.

That stark memory says a lot about conditions in the thirties. In Britain the effect of capitalism's global depression was the crumbling away of the foundations laid down in the Industrial Revolution—the coal mines, textiles, iron and steel and shipbuilding. (In 1932, 62 per cent of shipyard workers were unemployed.) Thus what had once been the boom spots of British capitalism became its Depressed Areas, where the plight of the workers was particularly wretched:

  Most of our children are suffering not so much from tuberculosis as from starvation. Seventy-five per cent of the cases admitted to the Society’s sanatorium were suffering from undernourishment. (Dr. O'Hara at the 1933 meeting of the Durham County Society for the Prevention and Cure of Consumption.)

But the government were not impressed. John Boyd Orr, who found that in 1935 30 per cent of the British population were trying to survive on a seriously deficient diet, remembered:

  Mr. Kingsley Wood, the Minister of Health, asked me to come and see him. He wanted to know why I was making such a fuss about poverty when, with old age pensions and unemployment insurance there was no poverty in the country. (As I Recall.)

Any surprise at Kingsley Wood’s denial of something which was all to obvious should be tempered by the consideration that he was, after all, a politician—and governments had for some years been busily turning the screw on the unemployed. In 1931 an unemployed man received 85p a week, with 45p for a dependent wife and 10p for each child. “Unemployment benefit”, insisted Ramsay MacDonald, “is not a living wage; it was never meant to be that’’. MacDonald’s rare flirtation with the truth can be explained on the grounds that at the time he was arguing for a reduction in the benefits. This was introduced a few months later by MacDonald’s National Government, under an Act passed by his earlier Labour Party administration.

One result of the cuts was that many people were disqualified from receiving state benefits as of right and were left at the mercy of locally based Public Assistance Committees (PAC), whose decisions were often distinguishable only by a variation in harshness. In January 1935 there was another turn of the screw, when unemployed benefits were placed under the central control of the Unemployment Assistance Board (UAB). This change led to even lower allowances than those under the PAC; Tory MP Robert Boothby summed it up: “The new administration is brutal. I can use no other word”.

But the UAB were fretting about the profligacy of the unemployed on those generous allowances. Their 1935 Report was shocked at one who, having inherited some money “. . . immediately took his whole family for an expensive seaside holiday”. One remedy for this sort of behaviour was in places called “residential instruction centres and camps” where, under the watchful repression of ex-army officers, young men were disciplined back to “employability”.

The Times (22/3/38) was ecstatic about the camps (some of its readers had been writing in to say how well this very matter was being handled in Nazi Germany):

  . . . hundreds and thousands of young men . . . do not show any disposition to bestir themselves to get themselves out of unemployment and into employment . . . there is a slackness of moral fibre and of will as well as of muscle . . . the breakdown of morale can only be made good by applying compulsion.

Strangely, no lack of moral fibre was descried—and the UAB did not fret about—the country house parties remembered by Harold Macmillan (Winds of Change) where: “There were no rules except the necessity of appearing at dinner . . .Otherwise, in a large company the groups organised themselves for golf, tennis, walking, talking or quiet reading”. Nor in the world of Tory MP Henry Channon, who had married into the Guinness family and who complained in July 1935: “I am tired of being ‘tiddly’ by night and ‘gaga’ by day: the season has lasted long enough”.

By then marches by unemployed workers had become an established routine of protest. At the spearhead was the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), led by Communist Party member Wal Hannington and widely regarded with the sort of hostility and contempt expressed for the flying pickets a few years ago. “Hannington and the revolutionary riff-raff of London” was the Daily Telegraph's (1/11/32) description. The NUWM was proscribed by the Labour Party and the TUC, was under continual police surveillance and the subject of many a worried Special Branch report.

In spite of this the NUWM organised numerous marches and protests, many of which were on the receiving end of violent repression from the blue uniformed guardians of capitalist law and docility. At the peak of the violence, in October 1932, a crowd of tens of thousands in Hyde Park was attacked by the police, who then stole—there is no other word for it—the petition brought by the marchers to London. Later NUWM demonstrations were on a lower key; in 1936 they finished an orderly march with a rally in Hyde Park, where Attlee and Bevan spoke from the same platform as Hannington. There was nothing to cause alarm, except to any workers class-conscious enough to understand what Bevan meant when he proclaimed, “This demonstration proves to the country that Labour needs a united leadership”.

But the NUWM protests, although they were bigger and more violent, they have been historically overshadowed by the Jarrow Crusade. This latter march sprang from the 1934 closure of Palmer’s shipyard in Jarrow, which threw 80 per cent of the town’s workforce on the dole. Both the Labour Party and the TUC, although they now lay claim to the Crusade as part of their glorious history, condemned it at the time as a publicity stunt by Jarrow’s Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson. The march was orderly; almost the loudest noise it made came from the mouth organs in the lead, until they got to London and saw King Edward VIII in the Mall. At this they forgot any indignation they might have felt about their poverty as against ruling class privilege and. said the Special Branch, “cheered lustily”.

Benignly, the Home Office agreed that, as “. . . the marchers show every sign of being orderly, it would be a good way of encouraging them and placating them” if they were to be entertained to tea at the House of Commons, where much of their misery was discussed and legislated upon. That was about all they got, and Ellen Wilkinson was scathingly rebuked by the Labour Party NEC at their Annual Conference that October. One Jarrow councillor said ". . . you have drawn a blank” but that was not entirely true. Because the marchers had not been “available for work” while they were away from Jarrow the UAB, overlooking the fact that there was no work to be available for, reduced their benefit by up to 55p a week.

Little more could be claimed for the protests than the restoration of some benefit cuts. Unemployment remained stubbornly high; Jarrow did not come back to life. Until the war in 1939 enforced a change, the UAB continued as the scourge of the unemployed. And now, nearly fifty years on. the failure is starkly illuminated: it is all happening again because we are almost back where we began, with 2½ million unemployed.

This is no accident. Wal Hannington (Unemployed Struggles 1919-36) claimed some massive demonstrations in 1931—30,000 people in Dundee, 50,000 in Glasgow, 40,000 in Hyde Park, and much more. Yet that same year the British working class voted overwhelmingly for capitalism to be run by the National Government—the very government who were imposing the cuts in dole money, the police repression of the hunger marchers and all. The total government vote at that election was over 14½ million against just over 7 million for the equally futile, equally culpable, opposition such as the Labour Party.

So capitalism was allowed to continue and now, 50 years on, there can be no optimism that the protesters would have it any different. Like the battlers of the NUWM, like the pathetic men from Jarrow, the 1981 marchers demanded the unobtainable—capitalism without its inevitable ill-effects. One of their leaflets urged: “Unemployment is a human tragedy . . . People must act now . . . Say no to unemployment. . . Demand a return to full employment”.

These ringing phrases could only have reinforced the demonstrators’ confusion, when their overwhelming need is to grasp that working class life under capitalism is tragedy, whether they are in or out of work. There is no dignity in the degrading experience of a person who sells their labour power as the only way of getting a living. It is futile for workers to say no to unemployment, for an economic recession does not happen through a mistake, because someone has not listened. And even if they—the politicians, the economists, the experts—had listened, they would still be powerless to end the recession, to put all the unemployed out of their misery of idleness into the misery of active exploitation.

There is much, much more to it. Those who protest about the effects of capitalism would do better to look for a more radical approach—or else contribute towards generations to come suffering the same sore feet, the same sore heads—and the same bitter disillusionment.

Ivan

The Shamefaced Middle-Class (1981)

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Britain today, the richest ten per cent of the population own sixty per cent of the wealth. The other nine tenths of the people share between them less than half of the wealth. And yet it is precisely those nine tenths who, not having any substantial property or unearned income, are forced to work for a living, and so to create all that wealth. These figures were quoted in the 1979 report of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth.

The few who own all the factories, offices, plant and property, can therefore accumulate more and more by employing thousands of workers, while the bottom nine tenths have practically nothing but their ability to work. So about ninety per cent of the population are employees, they work for wages or salaries, and accumulate practically nothing. The wages and salaries paid to employees are generally consumed by every-day living expenses. Even high-paid managers are only getting a “living wage” if their salaries are eaten up by paying a mortgage, running a big car and so on, for these expenses are all part of their job. Only seven per cent of adults in Britain own shares, and more than eighty per cent of privately owned shares are held by one thousandth of the population. (See The Wealthy, CIS Report, 85p.) The Supplementary Benefits Commission has found that nearly three in five unemployed people have no money at all after one month out of work.

Who are the working class?
What is class? Some try to define it subjectively, saying that it is “up to the individual" to try to say what class they think they are in, if any. This produces chaos: Gallup polls in 1953 showed half the British people questioned, and nearly nine tenths of Americans questioned, claiming to be “middle class". What are they in the middle of? Class needs to be objectively defined—not by what clothes you wear, where you live, your accent or what job you happen to do, but by your real economic position in society, conditions of life, how you are able to live.

Nine tenths of the population are forced by economic necessity to go and look for a job, to work for a living. Hundreds of years ago peasants were driven from off their strips of land into the growing towns, and forced to hire themselves out as wage-workers. They are the ancestors of the workers of today, of the managers and the professors as much as the miners and dockers. Tools were replaced by machinery, work-rooms by factories, and small shopkeepers and craftsmen were squeezed out by the competition of the early manufacturing capitalists. Class today is still determined by people’s relation to the productive machinery of society: do you own the factory, or do you work in it? Do you organise the production of wealth or do you sit back and receive it as profit dividends? People who are cut off from ownership of the means of production are forced to work for wages and salaries which are worth less than the total wealth they produce. The owners, who do not depend on wages or salaries for their living, depend on getting the surplus which results.

All those who have to work for a living are in the working class, and share a common interest to improve their condition of life. A salary is only a monthly wage; Arthur Scargill’s proposal that all miners should be paid salaries would not actually improve their conditions. Many employees do not directly create wealth, but they administer, mend, teach, distribute and ensure the smooth running of the profit system which benefits their employers. They belong to the class which builds all housing from palaces to pigsties, makes all food from caviar to carry-outs. We are all turned into mere commodities on a shelf: pasted-up pieces of card in the labour agency windows. We have different prices pinned on us, because what has been necessary to make, mould and maintain each of us will itself vary.

The employer may want some of the labour power to be more trained than others. But the principle is always the same: selling our ability to work for a weekly or monthly price. According to the Royal Commission report referred to above, “Average earnings in different occupations have come to differ much less" (page 11). If you didn’t inherit great wealth, then all you can do is create great wealth but it won’t be yours, it will belong to the employers, the shareholders or government-bond holders who own the means of wealth production. According to Class in a Capitalist Society by J. Westergaard and H. Resler. (Penguin, 1975):

  The crucial common component in the life circumstances of the mass of wage earners is their dependence on market sale of the labour. How crucial is evident from the wide range of other terms in life which they share, and which clearly separate them, by a gap incomparably greater than the internal divisions among them, from the minority for whom the wheels of private capital turn.

A social class is a group of people who share a common economic and political interest, because they share the same basic position in human society. The working class is the vast majority in modern society, who between them own practically none of the stocks and shares, land, companies and raw materials. The “middle class” is a myth—as can be seen by looking at the people most commonly described in that way.

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

Is there a middle class?
1. Managers. More than a hundred years ago Karl Marx clearly summed up the position of most managers:

  An industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and NCOs (foremen, overseers), who command during the labour process in the name of capital. The work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function. (Capital, Vol. I, Pelican p. 450.)

In the recent national Census, this type of worker was covered by the category “employee supervising other employees”. A kind of industrial police, managers are given some measure of power over other workers, and are expected to maintain profitability, doing the shareholders’ dirty work for them by getting the most work for the least money out of the other employees. But the main point is that they are still just employees, dependent on their work and their wages for their living. They are also often particularly burdened with debt, through struggling to accumulate wealth after the manner of the chairmen and managing directors they idolise, by saving, borrowing and biting off more than they can chew.

They have not realised that capitalists build up wealth through the work of others; workers are exploited through their own work for companies they do not own. The Royal Report on Income and Wealth shows that people with less than £20,000 are generally in debt for about thirteen percent of what they own; for those with more than £200,000 the average debt is only about five per cent. Managers suffer the insecurity of all workers; they are threatened by redundancy. If profits begin to fall, it can be the more expensive “labour units” at the managerial end which are knocked off the pay-roll first. By the end of last year there were about 120,000 on the Professional and Executive Register of unemployed, and the Sunday Times published an article entitled: “The Redundant Executive”:

  Executive redundancy can be a brutal business. Firms often like the victims to go as quickly as possible, fearing an outburst of anger or resentment. Others shy away from the whole business and call in consultants to do the dirty work. Having built their careers around loyalty to the firm, redundant executives are often deeply wounded . . .The really loyal man with twenty years’ service can be a tragic figure, out of touch with the job market and inexperienced at winning in a job interview. He will be exceptional if he can even type his own job application letters and he will be shocked to learn that at 45. he may be considered too old. (14/12/1980.)

A course for redundant executives run by the Professional and Executive Recruitment section of the Manpower Services Commission, advises that they should “cast loyalty aside”, and suggests. “In panel interviews, remember you are a pawn in their game” and “If offered a job, ask immediately for written confirmation”. This is the kind of humiliating indignity which being in the working class involves.

2. Administrative and “White-collar” workers. The division between manual workers and “brain” workers is generally a false one. Could manual workers build a house without having brains? Could clerks work without manning the increasing bulk of manually operated office machinery? Recent action by workers in the Banking Insurance and Finance Union, the Council of Civil Service Unions, teachers, journalists, French magistrates (Guardian, 23/1/81) and even Finnish ecclesiastical workers (Guardian, 25/3/81) proves the point that all those who have to work for wages and salaries are in basically the same position. They must organise together to improve their conditions, by forming trade unions to maintain wage rates and by joining the political movement for a classless society. People who for years have clung on to the idea that they have a “middle class’ respectability are finally forced through economic pressure to concede that they, too, have to use the strike weapon to defend their living standards.

3. Shopkeepers and the Self-employed.
Most shopkeepers are really distributive workers, who work full hours running their shops, and have to struggle increasingly hard to compete with the ever-growing multinational supermarket chains. Although they are not directly employed by the large companies whose products they sell, they play a vital part in getting the goods from the production line to the consumers, and they are allowed to have a commission, a small cut of the profit involved, which rarely adds up to much more than the average salary of an accountant or an engineer. Few shopkeepers are able to retire at an early age with a financial empire to support them. In fact, they have no substantial property; they are members of the working class, struggling to hold on to a false independence. No lasting security or independence can be achieved without the ownership of substantial capital. Some of those officially described as “self-employed” are in fact capitalists, at the heads of enormous companies, so that the richest fifth of “self-employed” people receive more than half the total self-employed income (Income and Wealth report, page 18). But this does not alter the fact that generally, self-employed people depend for their living on their own daily work, and not on the work of others or the accumulation of capital. So they share the insecurity and poverty of the rest of the working class.

4. University graduates, artists and others. The small proportion of workers who go through university are being trained for particular kinds of jobs: mathematicians to analyse profitability, engineers to design productive machinery, historians to justify the existence of the profit system. They are all necessary to the owning class of employers, although at the moment provisions for universities are being cut back on the grounds that they are not absolutely essential to the production of profit in industry. If graduates cannot find jobs, they are reduced to the dole like any other worker. The Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services recently reported that there were 55,000 graduates looking for jobs. Since only a small fraction of people go to university, this is roughly the same proportion of unemployed as the general level.

According to the Central Services Unit for Careers, fifteen per cent of arts students who graduated in 1979 were still unemployed by the end of the year. One university careers adviser makes it clear what class most students are in:

  It’s this discrepancy between the occupations for which arts graduates feel they are qualified, and the jobs they tend to end in, which causes a lot of unhappiness . . .The more idealistic will sometimes refuse to compromise, and may finish by having to learn the hard way. (Guardian, 6/1/81.)

Who are the capitalist class?
The capitalist class is a minority group which owns and controls the machinery of wealth production and distribution in modern society. It is highly exclusive and generally hereditary. The capitalist has power over the lives of the rest of us, because he or she possesses the land and factories which are needed to make the food and shelter we need if we are to live. They make sure that the transport, the schools, the industrial plant, the seas, are all run to provide them with profit out of the labour of others.

The capitalist class includes people like Rupert Murdoch, whose newspapers. The Times and The Sun are read by millions of workers every day. “Tiny” Rowland, who buys chain stores for millions of pounds, while most of us can’t even afford to go shopping in such places as Harrods and Barkers of Kensington. It includes Sir James Goldsmith, Sir Keith Joseph, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, Peter Cadbury, Lord Sainsbury and anyone else who receives an unearned income of rent, interest or profit from owning land, financial or industrial capital. Wages and salaries may vary from £50 to £400, but each million pounds invested can yield an unearned income of thousands each week.

It is almost as if the capitalist class inhabits a separate world. Not having to spend time working for money, they are able to go shooting, hunting, ski-ing, travelling . . . asked in a recent television interview whether he meets people with much less money than himself, the outspoken millionaire Rupert Dean said “Not if I can help it”. Inside the showrooms of Bonhams, Cartier, Sotheby and Christies, behind the oak doors of the Turf, Boodles, Whites, the Royal Yacht Squadron and in dinner parties at Claridges, the Dorchester and Annabels, the parasite elite eat, drink and spend lavishly. They do not experience our menial cares and worries about money.

The Duke of Westminster, aged 28, recently inherited nearly 200,000 acres of land across the world, including 300 acres of Mayfair and Belgravia valued at £1,000,000,000. To him, it wouldn’t matter whether you are a manager, a poet, a printer or a gardener: you are a worker, to be hired to increase his wealth. At his wedding last year, he was reported as saying: “It’s absolutely true that we won’t have to worry about rents or mortgages or anything like that”. When Lord Brownlow’s four-year-old son inherited £3 million in 1979. he said that “he will remain a very normal little boy”: it is “normal” for children of capitalists to get more for their birthday than a worker on £100 a week would earn in six hundred years.

At Christies on 30 March 1981, Dr. Marino Chiavelli spent £1,364,000 on seven paintings (The Times, 1/4/81). These are to decorate his 48-room Johannesburg villa and his London eighteenth- century mansion. The night he was interviewed he was leaving London to visit Switzerland, The United States and South Africa, but he had time to explain that he owns about a dozen companies in the construction and crude oil businesses.

The way ahead
The capitalist class and the working class live totally different lives. Some workers are just paying NHS contributions, others pay BUFA private contributions; the capitalist's insurance for the future is a lasting hold over the bulk of the earth’s resources. The Duke of Westminster is not employed, but he doesn’t need the dole either. You can't get the sack from the security of property. It is the minerals, companies, share portfolios, lands, properties and industrial plant of the capitalist which provide real security and dominate society. A hundred years ago, clerks could hope sometimes to become partners in the small family firms they worked for. Now, ownership has become concentrated, and divorced from managerial work. Small firms are forced out of business or swallowed up by larger ones.

Units of production grow, and production takes on an increasingly socialised form, with millions working together to produce wealth. There is no room for snobbishness in the expanding class of employees who hold the key to a socialist future. Social mobility is a myth. To save up to buy the Duke of Westminster’s London land at the rate of ten pounds a week, would take two million years. World capitalism causes war, poverty and insecurity; but it is perpetuated by the futile ambitions of some workers who shirk class unity for the sake of their false hopes of becoming capitalists themselves.

Clifford Slapper

Gruesome politics of Orange & Green (1981)

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are the killings, the bombings, the hunger strikes, the stone-throwing in Northern Ireland really quite as pointless as they seem on the surface? The short answer is, yes, they really are. They are completely pointless, both from the point of view of the wage and salary earning majority and also, nowadays, from that of the capitalist minority too.

Of course sectarian violence, which has been a recurring feature of Belfast life since early in the 19th century, was always pointless for the working class, but in the past it did make some sort of sense from the capitalist viewpoint in that it represented an expression of rival capitalist interests. But this is no longer the case.

What we are witnessing in Northern Ireland is a minority of workers fighting their masters’ battles of yesteryear, long after their masters have settled the differences which once divided them. We say a minority because the vast majority of workers in Northern Ireland, whatever their religious background, only want to be left alone to earn their living and live their lives under the sort of “normal” capitalist conditions as exist in Britain and the South of Ireland, free from the violence of both terrorists and so-called security forces.

A historical detour
At one time the capitalist class in Ireland was so divided that its two sections resorted to sectarianism in order to protect and further their divergent interests. The roots of the present situation go back, not to the Norman barons’ invasion of Ireland in 1169 nor to the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, but to the uneven development of capitalism in Ireland in the 19th century.

In the North, in and around Belfast, industrial capitalism developed just as it did on the other side of the Irish Sea in Lancashire and on Clydeside. The industrial capitalists of Northern Ireland in textiles, shipbuilding and related engineering industries-were in fact an integral part of the industrial capitalist class of the British Isles. The South, on the other hand, remained overwhelmingly agricultural. The interests of its infant capitalist class were different from those of the industrial capitalists in the rest of the British Isles: they wanted the erection of tariff walls behind which they could develop, protected from the competition of English capitalists. Their interests were expressed by the politicians of the Home Rule, or Irish nationalist, party.

When in 1885 the leader of this party, Parnell, perfectly expressing the interests of the Southern Irish capitalists, demanded that a Home Rule parliament should have the power to impose tariffs, alarm bells began to sound in Northern Ireland, especially as the nationalists were playing the Catholic card (although Parnell himself was a protestant). This was a shrewd move on their part since, the Catholics being in a majority in Ireland, it was an easy way of ensuring majority support for their programme. Election results from this period confirmed the effectiveness of this tactic.

Faced with the prospect of being cut off from the rest of Britain, and its overseas markets and sources of raw material, behind the tariffs walls of a mainly agricultural Ireland governed by obscurantist and incompetent nationalist politicians, the Belfast and district industrial capitalists decided in their turn to play the Orange card: to stir up and play on Protestant fears of “Rome Rule”. This worked too, so that from the 1880s onward the workers and small farmers of Ireland were lined up, according to their religious background, behind one or other of the two rival sections of the capitalist class in Ireland; the Protestants behind the big capitalists of the industrial North-East and the Catholics behind the fledgling capitalists of the South.

It is from this period that dates the mythology and rhetoric which still has some sway over sections of the working class in Northern Ireland. The Unionists beat the Lamberg drum and shouted “No Surrender”, “Not An Inch”, “Remember 1690”, “No Popery", “Home Rule is Rome Rule" and other such crudities. The Nationalists rewrote Irish history to make it appear as a 700-year long struggle (800-year long now!) of the “Irish Nation” to free itself from English domination. And they created an artificial pseudo-Gaelic culture—with harps, “Gaelic” games, Gaelicized names and other such affectations—to replace the real one which had long since died out on the East coast of Ireland where the bulk of the population lived.

Enter the Republicans

The only addition to this mythology since this period, and it is an important one, of course, is Republicanism. The Irish nationalist politicians were not republicans: they only wanted autonomy within the British Empire, a Home Rule parliament with certain economic powers. There was, however, a small minority, mainly “intellectuals” and Irish emigrants in America, who wanted to establish an independent Irish Republic by force of arms if necessary. The Irish Republican Brotherhood had been formed in 1865 but, apart from the Fenian “rising” in 1867 and the subsequent bombing campaign to try to secure the release of the Fenian prisoners, did little until Easter 1916. Then they staged what, if human lives had not been sacrificed, could only be described as a comic-opera rising: a relative handful of republican fanatics tried to take on the might of the British imperialist state in the middle of a war! Needless to say. they were easily crushed, and ruthlessly—the leaders, including the wounded James Connolly, propped up on a chair, were shot. The severity of the repression earned the republican cause considerable sympathy and support and after the end of the First World War the republicans, re-organised as the Irish Republican Army, waged what in Irish history books is called “the war of independence” against the British state and its army.

This conflict ended in 1921 with a treaty which established a more or less independent Irish state, but at the same time excluded from it six counties in the North-East of Ireland which remained attached to the United Kingdom. This arrangement was not to the liking of the IRA which then turned its arms against the pro-treaty elements who formed the first government of the so-called Irish Free State and has been fighting on and off against all governments in Ireland, North and South, ever since. This gave rise to yet another myth—the need to liberate the “Six Counties" from British rule and re-unite them with the rest of Ireland.

The Partition of Ireland

The 1921 Partition of Ireland was, in the political circumstances, the most practical solution from a capitalist point of view, and it suited both sections of the capitalist class in Ireland. The Belfast capitalists remained united with the rest of the British capitalist class, while the Southern capitalists got their own state with which to protect and further their interests. When the republican party (whose absurd name, drawn from 19th century Irish mythology, Fianna Fail, comes out better in English: Soldiers of Destiny!) came to power in 1932 under De Valera, tariff barriers were put up against British goods and an attempt was made to develop a native Irish industry behind them. In Northern Ireland, the “statelet” that was established there was given a virtual free hand by successive Westminster governments. Labour as well as Conservative, to run its internal affairs as it wanted. The term “statelet” is justified as the Stormont government was not simply an administrative unit of central government like the the local authorities in the rest of Britain. It had at its disposal armed force: the notorious B Specials. These were little more than an officially-recognised Protestant militia and were used by the Stormont government to intimidate the one-third Catholic minority who, ever since 1921 and still today, have been “loyal” to the Irish State south of the Border rather than to the British state.

Despite the fact that any system of election would have given the Unionist party victory, (there is a two-thirds Protestant majority in Northern Ireland) local election boundaries were gerry-mandered to keep Catholic Nationalist representation to a minimum. When in 1948 one-man, one-vote was introduced into local government elections in Britain, this was not applied in Northern Ireland as it would have enfranchised more Nationalist than Unionist voters. An unofficial, but nevertheless effective, system of “job reservation" for Protestants grew up, especially in public employment but also in some industries.

By the end of the 1950s it was clear that the attempt by the successive Fianna Fail governments in the South to develop Irish industry behind protective tariff walls was not going to succeed. The government decided to recognise this and in 1965 signed the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement which, as its name suggests, provided for tariff barriers between Ireland and Britain to be lowered and eventually abolished. In addition, Ireland was associated with Britain’s various unsuccessful attempts to join the Common Market in the 1960s and went in when Britain was admitted in 1973.

In other words, by the 1960s the Border had ceased to have any economic significance. The conflict between the two sections of the capitalist class in Ireland, which had arisen out of the uneven development of capitalism there, had been settled. Sectarianism no longer served any capitalist interest and could be and was abandoned. However those who had stirred it up to defend their economic interests found that it was not something that could be turned off at will. Too many people had come to accept the poison they had been fed on. All the same, with the economic basis for sectarianism gone, it could have been expected to die out slowly and in fact at the beginning of the 1960s this was beginning to happen. The IRA campaign launched in 1956—which was nothing compared with what’s happening today was ignominiously abandoned in 1962. Flags on official buildings in Belfast even flew at half-mast on the death of the Pope in 1963.

Illustration by George Meddemmen

Capitalism breeds divisions 

Why, then, did sectarianism not gradually disappear? When in the middle of the 1960s the Civil Rights movement was launched in Northern Ireland, the Unionist government in Stormont could have granted all its demands basically for the dismantling of the undemocratic features of the Northern Irish statelet since even the purest democratic system would still have left them in power, as subsequent events have proved. All the demands of the Civil Rights movement have now been granted and yet still, as the recent district council elections show, the Unionists can rely on winning.

The Unionist government, however, chose to react to the Civil Rights movement as if it were a Republican plot and unleashed the B-Specials. The result was predictable: the revival of the IRA as an armed protection against the club-wielding, trigger-happy official state thugs. The IRA was able to establish a basis from which to develop as a Catholic sectarian murder gang. But the leaders of the Civil Rights movement are not entirely free from blame for the worsening of the situation. In their political naivety—many of them were influenced by Trotskyite ideas that thrive in student circles they decided to supplement the basic demands for “civil rights" by social reform demands on which they hoped to unite Catholic and Protestant workers.

Their solution to the traditional Protestant/Catholic rivalry for houses and jobs in Northern Ireland was the apparently obvious and simple one of building new houses and opening new factories. But that is not the way capitalism works. Houses and jobs are limited under capitalism because it is a system of production for profit and not a system of production for use. Thus to talk, as Bernadette Devlin and the rest of them did, of establishing “equal opportunity” in housing and jobs when one group had come to acquire some priority in these fields as against another was bound to be interpreted by the first group as an attempt to take away jobs from them. The Protestants regarded this as an attack on their “rights” and “privileges” and responded by abandoning the Unionist wets (O'Neill, Chichester-Clark, Faulkner) and rallying round the more sectarian Protestant groups. Hence the rise of Paisley. Thus did the admittedly well-meaning attempt of the Civil Rights movement to overcome sectarianism have the opposite effect.

Crimes against the working class 

Thus, apart from the political bungling, the situation in Northern Ireland, even though taking an irrational form, still does have an economic basis. For historical reasons, the frustrations and indignities suffered by the workers in the Catholic ghettoes of Belfast and Derry and along the border areas of Northern Ireland—where percentage unemployment has long been well into double-figures—have expressed themselves as a support for the imaginary solution of a united 32-county Ireland. A number of unemployed young men and women from these areas, given the strength of republican and Catholic nationalist mythology in their communities, have been prepared to go so far as to take up arms to achieve this irrelevant objective. They have been prepared not only to shoot and kill other young men from a similar background who joined the British Army to escape from unemployment, but also an unforgiveable crime against the working class—to place bombs in pubs and shops, knowing full well that the victims would be ordinary working-class men and women. We hasten to add that the private murder gangs on the other side of the sectarian divide—the UVF and the like have been equally guilty of such atrocities.

This is one of the reasons socialists do not support the IRA but denounce it as an anti-working class, sectarian murder gang. The other reason is that the “solution” they propose—a united Ireland—is no solution at all. Apart from the violent methods they use, they share the illusion of other nationalists in the British Isles that the problems facing workers of Catholic background in Northern Ireland or workers in Wales or in Scotland are caused by some faulty political arrangement: rule from London rather than from Edinburgh, Cardiff or Dublin. In actual fact, however, these problems have an economic cause: the capitalist system of class ownership of the means of production and distribution. As long as capitalism continues to exist these problems will remain, however the political superstructure is re-arranged and no matter how radical or violent the rearrangement. The experience of the South of Ireland since independence in 1921 is proof enough of this.

Bobby Sands, Frank Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Patsy O'Hara . . . died, in the light of cold logic, for nothing more than to have the pillar-boxes in Northern Ireland painted green. While other young men, in the so-called “security” forces, are dying to ensure that these same pillar-boxes stay painted red. Nothing more, nothing less in the end.

Adam Buick

Letters: Class Struggle in Poland (1981)

Letters to the Editors from the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class Struggle in Poland

Dear Editors

I was astounded when I read the article in your December (1980) issue, "The Class Struggle in Poland". I not only find it nonsensical. but hypocritical. During the 1950s and the 1960s I attended many of your meetings and debates in Manchester and your speakers constantly attacked the trade union movement as part and parcel of the capitalist system. Now I see you support the new so-called Polish independent trade union. Solidarity. If you think that this struggle is a workers’ united movement for socialism, as printed on your front page, you must be a lot of political illiterates. Who are the people backing them? The Catholic Church and Right wing organisations all over the world who are filling their coffers with capitalistic money. To find that the SPGB have found new allies with the Catholic Church and some of the most reactionary capitalist organisations in the world, the pioneers of the SPGB must be turning over in their graves.

I. Brown 

Manchester

Reply

It is ironic that I. Brown refers to us as illiterates. when it is his own failure to read the front cover of the December 1980 Socialist Standard which leads him to imagine that the setting up of independent trades unions in Poland is seen by the SPGB as a workers’ united movement for socialism. Nothing of the kind was said. The EC statement which was published in the Socialist Standard pointed out the severe limitations of a purely defensive struggle, while recognising the important uses of trade unions. It has never been the case that SPGB speakers have attacked the existence of trade unions. Far from it, we recognise the use which they can have and have had.

Indeed, there are many Solidarity members who follow the Catholic Church, although for some of them it may be only for tactical reasons. But there is no evidence to show that the Church, as such, is backing the new union and there is some evidence to show that the Church is in league with the Polish government. The following article, which appeared in the West German newspaper, Der Spiegel, in January 1981, provides evidence of the Catholic Church’s real role in the recent developments:

  Ever since early September 1980 there have been secret contacts between the Soviet leadership and the Vatican. The aim has been to find a method of damming up the revolt in Poland which has been inconvenient for both sides. One of Moscow's first emissaries to Rome was one of the directors of the foreign dept., of the CPSU, who in September met the Vatican representative responsible for Eastern policy together with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, Secretary of the Curia . . . the secret talks were mainly concerned with the situation in Poland. Cascroli assured the Moscow representative that the Pope and the Vatican would do everything possible “to ward off the misfortune facing Poland”.

The SPGB has not changed its position regarding the uses and limitations of trade unions, although we suspect that I. Brown, after years of listening to SPGB speakers without hearing what they were saying, has at last understood where we stand.

Editors

End Charity

Dear Editors

This week 1 read for the first time The Socialist Standard and I was struck by the quality of its articles: well thought-out and well written. However, I disagree with the article, "Let’s End Charity’’ because I don’t think charities pretend to “solve" basic problems, but to solve the problems or at least alleviate the fate of individuals or communities crushed by the world situation or by official machinery. They have not the time to wait until the whole world has turned socialist. I see that my copy bears the number 918, vol. 77 and that vol. 27 appeared 50 years ago. The Socialist Standard hasn’t changed the world nor solved the basic problem. Meanwhile Oxfam has been digging wells in India and saved hundreds from starvation. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has saved many of them. Dr. Barnardo has housed orphans; Shelter has found shelter for quite a few people without roofs over their heads. All partial benefits, I agree. But benefits all the same and for some of the beneficiaries it made the difference between life and death. And, come to think of it, if I hadn’t taken pity on the chap who was peddling your periodical in front of the tube station I would not have had the pleasure of coming to know it. Made me feel good . . .

R. Leys

Dorset

Reply

Thank you for the compliments and we hope that you will become a regular reader. You are correct when you say that the SPGB has been working for a long time and yet socialism has not been established. But at least we can say that the work we have done has helped to build up a principled socialist movement and that we are now nearer to establishing socialism than we were when we started. Oxfam and the other charities have been going for a long time too. They have had larger funds than the SPGB, many more supporters and much greater official approval. And yet they are further from eradicating poverty now than when they started. More people are starving throughout the world today than when Oxfam was formed. More communities are being destroyed. More poverty exists worldwide, in both absolute and relative terms, than it did fifty years ago. Indeed, the NSPCC, which you mention, has recently had to appeal for funds in The Guardian not so as to stop parents beating children (and why do parents beat children?), but so as to pay the salaries of their full-time officials and keep the administrative machine going. Charities have done a great deal of hard work and achieved many specific beneficial results. But the general problems of the working class are more important than specific examples of amelioration. The point is that the profit system as a whole is bigger and more ferocious than the goodwill of charities. Capitalism cannot be humanised by the rich giving to the poor. What is needed is for the class which is poor to dispossess the class which is rich so that we may have a society in which we will all live in a condition of security and equality. If every worker who donated time, energy and money to charitable causes would have been working for socialism we would now be much nearer to such a condition. So, our message to R. Leys is that he should stop feeling sorry for others and start looking after his own material interest. When he does that he will realise that there are millions of workers throughout the world who are impoverished due to their own acquiescence in a system which robs them of the fruits of their labour.

Editors

Different Socialisms

Dear Editors

Because there are several different kinds of socialism available to the casual reader, I am somewhat confused as to the real meaning of socialism. I do not really understand why there are several different kinds of truth (socialism) instead of just one. People want a better life. That is a single, simple truth. If people could work together, co-operatively, towards a common goal, they could possible achieve a better life. Is there a difference between socialism and the co-operative movement, or sharing together in a group for the common good? I feel that capitalism will no longer be an effective method for improving society, but neither is argument between socialist groups.

The Soviets believe that they are socialist, which means total government control. I think local control is a better method, but competition between groups could result in one group taking control of another, which would not be local control. A larger food co-op can buy products cheaper than a small co-op, but how big is too big?

I am not theoretical and do not care to read theoretical articles which result in more useless verbiage. People talk and write as they will, but the poor are today in great need. The point should be to stop talking and move towards a common goal, such as a workers’ co-operative in an agricultural setting, where the people are as self-sufficient as possible, and even export food and clothing for sale to the outside. That would be socialism in action, which would be an example for all the world to examine.

I should think that co-operative socialism would, in fact, be revolutionary, because it would give hope to the members Books and magazines are important, but socialist groups have been talking for years and I can’t see any real, visible progress towards socialism. If some sort of progress isn’t made within a few years it will be too late. Reagan and Haig seem to be determined to destroy the world in their own way, and I believe that to form a workers’ cooperative movement is the only way out of this capitalistic retrogression.

I enclose a contribution, not for your magazine, but for your general fund, because I can buy your magazine at a nearby store and I don't wish to read articles that can’t be put to immediate practical use. Time is short, as mentioned. We don’t have time to read and argue. There is only time to do. Socialism must be promoted by whatever means possible, even on the BBC and I TV.

Tom Todd 

Moseley, Birmingham

Reply

We do not accept that there are different kinds of socialism. There is either capitalism (production for profit) which exists throughout the world today, including the misnamed communist countries, or socialism (production solely for human need) which the SPGB is the only party in this country standing for. Socialism will be a worldwide co-operative community and will replace the worldwide system of production and distribution which capitalism has created. Some aspects of socialist living will be localised for the sake of convenience, but the primary concern of socialist society will be to provide for the complete needs and desires of the people of the world.

Your ideal of an island of socialism within the sea of capitalism will not be achieved so long as the resources of the earth, and the means of producing and distributing wealth, are the private property of a minority class. You refer to workers’ co-operatives selling food and clothing to the outside world. But production for sale is a feature of capitalism. Where would the co-operative get the capital to invest in production? How much would it sell its commodities for? Would it have trade unions to protect the wages and conditions of those working on the co-operative? What would the co-operative do if a rival firm produced goods at a cheaper rate? In short, how could a community within capitalism detach itself from the inherent features of that society? It could not.

What is needed is a worldwide movement of the people who produce all of the wealth of society (the working class) to take political action to gain control of the productive and distributive machinery of society. Then we can have world socialism. Practical action is useless without theory and Tom Todd is advised to visit the Birmingham branch of the SPGB and help to turn the vision of socialism into an immediate, practical reality.

Editors

50 Years Ago: Russian Illusions (1981)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is claimed by many that the Russian Government has discovered a means of developing Russian industry on Socialist lines and free from the disturbing effects of the world trading conditions that affect the other capitalist countries. Actually, the more Russian industry enters into the world market as importer and exporter, the more Russian industrial conditions will be affected by conditions outside.

For example, the world slump in prices has hit Russian industry as badly as any, and has necessitated hasty and difficult modifications of the so-called Five-Year Plan. Estimates were based upon the exporting of certain quantities of goods at certain prices, the yield from which was to be used for machinery and other imports. Owing to the unforeseen slump, Russian exports in January and February of 1931 decreased in value by nearly one-fifth as compared with the corresponding period of 1930, and this in spite of a big increase in the quantities of goods exported. The output of the exporting industries had to be increased above the planned amount owing to the fall in the prices obtained for the exported goods in the world market, and in order to pay for the imports. The machinery and other imports either have not fallen in price at all, have not fallen as heavily, or have been contracted for at a stated price. The final result has been that imports have had to be curtailed. The imports for January and February, 1931, were one-third below those for January and February, 1930. Thus does capitalism frustrate attempts at planning.

Mr. Fenner Brockway, the new Chairman of the I.L.P., writing in the New Leader (April 17th), assumes that Russian industry is being run on a “ Socialist basis.” This is quite incorrect and indicates either a misreading of the Russian industrial system or—more probably—a failure to grasp what constitutes Socialism. In Russia, as elsewhere, goods are produced, not for use, but for sale. The producers are a wage-earning class with no effective control over the machinery of production. There is great inequality, as in other capitalist countries. The first charge on industry is the payment of interest to the investors in the State loans. The way in which inequality of wealth is growing is shown by the increasing yield from the graduated income tax. Already the yield is over £60 millions a year. The Government is now itself catering for the wants of monied people by opening shops at which goods are sold at rates far above the official prices.

(Editorial from the July 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard)

Running Commentary: Behind the Iron Curtain (1981)

The Running Commentary Column from the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Behind the Iron Curtain

On 8 June, Panorama (BBC television) showed a film called “Behind The Curtain” made by Antoine Fournier, which consisted of interviews with workers in Moscow. The similarity with life in the West was quite remarkable, as the camera panned over Coca-Cola adverts, horse- and car-racing and amusement arcades. One assistant salesman on £45 a month explained how he is forced to try to earn some money “on the side” dealing in the black market. Another, dealing in the foreign clothes market, explained:

  Underground market is a very popular thing in the Soviet Union. All the young people I know do the things I do because, for two reasons. The first is a great profit, and the second is a simple interest to connect with foreigners. But there are lots of police in civil clothes who control the situation and if they catch you with the clothes, they never take you to the police station, they simply take your clothes and then resell them. Policemen have a little salary too, so we can understand them.

Here are some more excerpts from the interviews.

Can we film you at work? The bosses would never allow it.
Do you get good wages? Good pay? You must be joking . . . If I make 150 roubles a month. I’m doing alright . . . I’m just slaving away.
Do many women do your job? What can I say? There are so many of them. They need money, or they want to get a flat. But we're told a pack of lies. They’ve been lying for five years now about the flat, saying they’re going to give it to us. But we’re still living in a room like this one, we still haven’t a flat, just a room. When will you get your flat? We haven’t any idea. That depends on the boss. Go and ask him yourself. Looks like we haven’t earned it yet so they haven’t given it to us.
Are you going to vote tomorrow? Of course (they laugh) what a stupid question!
And who are you going to vote for? Don’t you have an easier question? (They all laugh cynically.) The portrait of our deputy is already hung up in the entrance!
What about Party members? If somebody joins the Party, either that means he’s a careerist, that he's already decided he wants to make a career of it, or, well it means that he’s just no good.
And Western people? First of all, I think they shouldn’t be afraid of us. We are people just like them. We live like they do.

Brixton

The hysteria over the Brixton riots has faded now, but with unemployment and resentment mounting all the time, it is quite possible that there will be further outbreaks of violence in inner-city areas. Brixton was quite clearly not a “race riot”; the police were attacked as representatives of state harassment and authority. But in the aftermath, references to the “black community” in the press suggested that the main division is between blacks and whites. In fact, the whole community, black and white, is divided into two classes. There are both black and white investors, property-owners, who profit from the poverty suffered by black and white workers.

For example, a Nigerian called Chief Francis Nzeribe has said he wants to invest money in Brixton. Some people in Brixton will be allowed to have jobs, to get wages which are just enough to live one, while Nzeribe will own all of the wealth they produce for him. He owns £50 million worth of assets around the world, and heads twenty-seven companies. He has been a private arms dealer and lives in a flat in Mayfair. He has said of his plans for Brixton: “I see this as an opportunity to make money” (New Standard, 5/5/81). Colour is irrelevant.

Gluts

A few years ago, the media were stirring up a popular fear that oil resources were going to run out. There was a danger of a shortage. Now the tune has changed, and they are getting worried about a “glut”. OPFC and other representatives of oil interests are complaining about the threat of falling prices and profits as hundreds of barrels of oil pour out from the Middle Fast each week, to say nothing of all of the other sources in the world. Because of the recession, world market demand is down, so supply seems to be too high to satisfy the profit demands of the owners.

Resources today are not measured by simple human needs, any more than production is controlled by them. The market rules. This is why today's glut becomes tomorrow’s scarcity. The present crisis in world capitalism is not just affecting oil, though. America has a “butter mountain” which is “growing by ten million pounds a week” (Guardian, 30/5/81); and on 26 May a Guardian article entitled: “There's an awful lot of coffee” referred to “the prospect that the world is likely to be oversupplied with coffee during the next twelve months or so”. But in today’s insane system, that will not prevent millions of people from starving to death this year, and millions more from drinking tea because it is cheaper.

China-Cola

China is supposed to be a People’s Republic. Its government claims to have saved its workers from the ravages of capitalist exploitation. So it is rather odd that on 15 April, Coca-Cola, the epitome of world capitalism, opened a bottling plant in Peking. But the Chinese workers will, it seems, be saved from this danger by their benevolent masters after all. At first, the drink will only be sold to people with hard currency (the Chinese ruling class). Later it may be available for “ordinary” Chinese people (the working class), but probably at a price well over what most of them could afford, (Times, 16/4/81) so thoroughly are they being drained dry by the “People’s” Parasites.

Capitalism's Casualties

Dr. Jay Herbert, chairman of the Hospital Doctors’ Association, remarked recently that more than half the country’s junior doctors work more than eighty hours a week, and that their resulting tiredness was a major cause of death in hospitals (Guardian 30/5/81). He pointed to Sunday evenings as a critical time, and said that the massive amount of overtime worked by doctors was allowed to continue for economic reasons: “Juniors are still expected to work for an overtime rate of one-third the basic rate. It is cheaper for hospitals to employ fewer doctors for longer hours than more doctors.”

Clifford Slapper

SPGB Meetings (1981)

Party News from the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Message for school leavers (1981)

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

What do you feel about the school year which is just ending? “Stand up . . . Sit down. . . Do up your tie . . . Don’t run in the corridors . . . ". Did you find it daft to traipse into School Assembly to sing hymns to the skies and then file out into a history lesson to be told about how superstitious they were in the Middle Ages? Were you bored by having to learn the French for ‘My house is small' and ‘My pockets are empty’?

It is while you are at school that you are supposed to learn how to behave when you ‘grow up’. You are being prepared for a certain lifestyle which awaits you when you leave. If you can get a job when you leave school, your boss will want you to be obedient to him. He will expect you not to challenge what he says. At school they will try and teach you to obey a whole set of rules and not to dare question why the rules were made. They want to get you in the habit of obedience so that you will not be likely to start asking awkward questions later on in life.

At school you must wear the correct uniform, the same as all of the other pupils. In this way you are conditioned to see yourself as someone who is no different from all the other pupils. Together, you are just one large unit of people, you must look the same, behave the same and have the same general ideas as everyone else. They are trying to mould you into just another brick in the wall.

Outside of school the usual punishment for people who break the law is deprivation of liberty. You are put in prison. If you have no spare money but take food from a shop anyway, because you are hungry, you can be locked in a cell like an animal. Schools try to train us to accept the idea of being deprived of liberty for breaking rules, by punishing rule-breakers with ‘detentions’.

Almost the whole of school life is spent being made to do things you don’t really want to do. Eventually, if you are not strong-willed enough to resist, the process will grind you down. Then you will have been well prepared to spend the rest of your days swimming with the tide, and accepting all sorts of problems without any stroppy opposition, because — like the teachers say — “that’s just the way things are”.

At a first glance there are certain aspects of life which seem absurd or terrible, but which most people never make a fuss about. In order that these strange things can carry on without coming under attack, people have to be taught to look at the problems in a very distorted way, and most of the teaching is done in schools.

From time to time wars break out and we arc told we must go and slaughter millions of The Enemy, the French, the Germans, the Russians, whoever they happen to be. If Britain declared war on Russia tomorrow it would not be because British people had fallen out with Russian people. We do not know Russian people, most of us can’t even speak their language. In fact, wars are really fought over the arguments of a few wealthy and powerful people, but it us who have to bear the brunt of all the killing and destruction. Yet, most people are leaving school believing that in the event of a war it would be right to go and murder the enemy of ‘Britain’.

Again, we are living in a world where a small minority are able to enjoy great wealth while the majority of us are generally hard up. It is obvious that we could produce enough for everyone to have what he or she wants, but we are told we only get what we deserve. How did the very wealthy people get what they’ve got? If you start asking questions like this in school you will probably be sneered at as a “communist” and if you persist in asking unsuitable questions you may be branded a “disruptive element”.

This may have been your last year at school and finding someone to buy your abilities for a wage or salary might not be easy, as there are over 2½ million people looking for jobs. Thatcher can’t solve the unemployment problem, she doesn’t even seem particularly bothered. But neither could a Labour government. In fact, the last Labour government was thrown out of office in 1979 after the number of unemployed had risen to over 1½ million while it had power. The problem is that so long as we all agree to run Industry for a profit, then no boss will want to employ us in a time of ‘economic crisis’ if he can’t actually sell his goods to make a profit.

If the school has done its job properly you will ditch your uniform when you leave only to clothe yourself with another uniform: the invisible uniform of the School of Social Conformity. This uniform is handy because it can be worn quite comfortably over even the most bizarre of the latest rebel fashions, and will slip nicely over political badges like ‘I Didn’t Vote Tory’ and ‘Save the Whale’. The School of Social Conformity has many mottos including “Rich and Poor, Forward Together”, “Let’s Follow Leaders” and “Rely on Reforms”.

If you have refused to swallow the teachings of the school you may decide to simply disobey some of the present laws but this is not a solution to the problems you face and you run the risk of ending up behind bars. On the other hand you may decide, as Socialists have done, that the only way for us to get a society fit to live in, is to get a majority to change the whole set-up. You might be going back to school next September to be put on the anvil once again for the hammer to try and knock you into the right shape. How much you resist is up to you, and remember, they cannot stop you from thinking questioningly about anything they teach you. If you have got awkward questions, they cannot stop you finding out the answers for yourself.

Gary Jay

Peter Sutcliffe, mad or bad? (1981)

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Enough has been written in the press about Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, to last at least until the next mass murderer appears on the scene. He is now locked away, safely out of sight. But there is one absurdity remaining from the case which has not been generally observed. The jury were instructed to decide whether he was guilty of “murder” or “manslaughter” according to whether he was mad, or just plain “evil”.

You might have expected such distinctions to have ended with the drowning of witches. But the religious mania of the legal establishment is alive and kicking. Sutcliffe himself claimed that he was not mad. Some of the innocent flock around him decided that he was, while others preferred to give him the full epitaph of pure, knowing evil, in this case, however, they were somewhat embarrassed by his insistence that “God” had instructed him to kill prostitutes, and had for years protected him from the police.

Sutcliffe, like most of those questioning him, had a strict religious upbringing. Around the time of the trial, the Pope was shot, and “pardoned” his assassin on the grounds that everything was in God’s hands. When he visits Britain next year, he is going to have marksmen from Scotland Yard’s D11 Unit to guard him. He heads the holy institution which has blessed countless battles and sanctified millions of deaths for the sake of one “national interest” or another. The question will arise, when is a God not a God? When a murderer is not in an army.

When a man viciously kills thirteen people, quibbling about ridiculous labels, such as whether he is “mad” or “bad” adds insult to injury. Disturbed mass murderers are produced by present-day society. If we evade the issue by branding them as “evil” and locking them up, the problem remains, as the next generation of troubled and frustrated people are fostered by a sick society which teaches violence.

Some of the notaries in the courtroom were responsible for many more than thirteen deaths, but because their murders were in defence of British property and privilege, they are virtuous and normal. Over the last decade, the world has spent four million million dollars on arms. That figure, which has twelve noughts, has just been published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Britain alone spends £1.4 million per hour on machines of destruction. The Imperial Cancer Research Fund, investigating the possible use of interferon as a cure for cancer, collected just £1 million throughout 1979, and even that had to come from charity. That is the scale of priorities of the profit system which dominates the world today. This is the society which condemns thirteen horrific murders as "evil", but continues to sanctify unlimited violence in the defence of trade and commerce.

Clifford Slapper

Obituary: Bob Lees (1981)

Obituary from the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is with deep regret that we report the sudden death of Bob Lees, a consistent socialist and comrade. Bob was already a party member when he arrived in Manchester from Derby in the late 1930s. He immediately became involved in the activities of the Manchester Branch, which then included many outdoor meetings in Manchester and Oldham. Bob regarded the sale of party literature as vitally important and for over 40 years had a round of regular readers to whom he would take the Socialist Standard. He had a considerable knowledge of the working class movement, with a particular interest in the Lancashire area, and was well versed in socialist theory. His bookshop in Oldham always had a good supply of Party literature. The outbreak of war caused many difficulties for the Manchester Party members. Bob took on the job of Branch Secretary during that period and played a large part in holding the Branch together. He regularly attended Branch and public meetings throughout his membership and played an active part in the movement; such comrades are hard to replace. We extend out sincere sympathy to his wife, Marion, and son. 

Wally Preston

The whole loaf: nothing less (1981)

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Occasionally we are told: yes, socialism is a great idea, I go along with your critique of capitalism, but sorry. Can’t join you. The problems we face today are just too compelling, too urgent to be ignored. Let’s tackle these first. Then we can get round to establishing socialism. If we don’t, if we allow them to overwhelm us, this could rule out your socialist alternative altogether. How for instance could it take root in the barren landscape of a world devastated by the bomb?

Such a response is at least understandable: who could doubt the gravity of the problems around us? Regrettably however, and without imputing dishonesty to our sympathiser, it does not convey acceptance of our “critique of capitalism". In a nutshell, that critique yields the conclusion that the reformist approach to politics, however sincere, however well-intentioned, is doomed to failure.

What is reformism? Quite simply, political action designed to alleviate specific social problems arising within the framework of the capitalist system which thus precludes the revolutionary aim of abolishing capitalism. These problems, we argue, are a direct manifestation of the way the system operates and has to operate. They are an essential by-product of its economic conflicts, its remorseless search for profit necessarily at the majority’s expense. They will not disappear until the system itself, of which they are an organic part, has been scrapped by making the means of producing and distributing wealth the common property of everyone in society. It means therefore ending the exchange relationships of buyer and seller with their conflicting interests, in social affairs. As an attempt to doctor the symptoms of the disease while keeping intact its cause, reformism has all the efficacy of a band-aid covering a malignant growth.

To postpone socialism because certain problems present themselves which we should “in the meantime” try to resolve, not only contradicts all this. It makes the vital task of socialist propaganda that much more difficult. It implies that such problems can be solved within capitalism, that they do not derive from the capitalist basis of society.

War, for example, is seen perhaps as an act of god or some perverse politician aping the genuine article; pollution as a product of the malicious desires of greedy manufacturers. Neither is seen as the direct outcome of the competitive pressures capitalism exerts on both politician and manufacturer alike, constraining them to act in the way they do or removing them if they don’t. As Margaret Thatcher rightly observed, there is no political capital to be gained from a poor record in office. Politicians competing for votes would give the voters all they wished to remain in power—if they could. They fail to do so in spite of, not because of, their efforts.

Further, to propose action “in the meantime” to remedy such problems as war, poverty and social strife, is to invite us to believe the incredible: that these had mushroomed into existence just yesterday, or alternatively that nothing had ever been done “in the meantime” about them. On the contrary, it is precisely because such problems have survived all manner of attempted remedies throughout capitalism’s history, that the futility of reformism is evident. And it is precisely because of this that the need for socialism is specially urgent, in this age of potential plenty, in which the technology and productive powers at our disposal have long outgrown the social relationships that have brought them to this point and now work to straitjacket them. Socialism then must entail an unequivocal rejection of reformism for all its will-o’-the-wisp attractions. It must entail an awareness that the divergent aims of reform and revolution cannot be harmonised, that one cannot at the same time help patch up and perpetuate the very system one intends to overthrow.

This is where our sympathiser goes wrong. He does not grasp that to see socialism as an ultimate and long term aim pending the solution of existing social problems is in effect to forsake it altogether: capitalism will never present the opportunity to convert that ultimate aim into something immediate. Still less does he appreciate that propaganda for socialism can extract from capitalism, within the limits possible, more than any amount of reformist agitation.

There is a saying in socialist circles which sums this up: if you want more crumbs from the capitalist table then organise to take over the bakery. As socialism draws nearer the pressure on capitalist parties to contain by bribery the growth of socialist consciousness will correspondingly increase. Given this growth, the effectiveness of trade unions would be enhanced. The ability of workers to improve their lot depends on the respective strengths of the combatants in the class struggle. To the extent that more workers become socialist their collective strength will grow, through greater class unity and a knowledge of capitalism. Trade unions that now display their political ignorance of the role and nature of the Labour Party by affiliating to it, allowing that party when in power to exploit this tie in the course of demanding further sacrifices from workers in the interests of profit, will sever completely all such connections.

But this does not exhaust the matter. Obviously, socialists do not put forward their ideas in a vacuum but in a political environment already charged with prejudice. Resistance to socialist propaganda is not something innate but is conditioned by that environment. To the extent that socialist ideas penetrate popular consciousness, the efficacy of capitalist conditioning must weaken and so also must resistance to those ideas. Capitalist and socialist ideas rooted in the opposing interests of the capitalist and working class are fundamentally opposed: the one can only prosper to the detriment of the other.

Let us see what this means in more concrete terms. The purpose of capitalist ideology is to persuade workers to identify with ruling class interests. This is the function of capitalist ideology—to distort social reality, to draw a smokescreen over the basic class cleavage of society; rather than to get workers to see themselves as a class united by common interests against their exploiters.

Thus phoney classes are invented like lower middle or upper lower based upon some specious difference of occupation, dress or speech. Even in jest, the mock “Battle of the Sexes" has a serious underlying intention—the age old tactic of divide and rule. Workers with a darker skin are held to be the cause of problems from housing shortages to unemployment, against whom white workers vent their frustration.

If racism, sexism and nationalism serve the interests of capitalism by setting worker against worker, then only socialist propaganda with its appeal to class unity can effectively combat them. It alone unmasks the myths they feed on, reveals their hidden motive and attacks them at their source. Socialism, to paraphrase Aneurin Bevin, is the sword pointed at the heart of capitalist ideology.

There are those who, despite their sympathy, refrain from joining the struggle for socialism because of the urgency, as they see it, of warding off the dreaded prospect of nuclear war. Like those who join such organisations as the ANL to fight racism—or rather, racists—their viewpoint is a mistaken one. Firstly, their concern is doomed because it is confined to the effects of the problem and not its cause. Secondly, because of the incorrect assumption that since socialists have only socialism as their objective, they cannot have any impact on the issue of war.

This matter merits closer examination in view of the recent upsurge of interest in the CND. Not that we wish to deprecate the concern members of CND express—which indeed, we share. But they should be asked to explain some simple facts.

One fact is that there is hardly a political leader—the people CND urge us to put pressure on to disarm—who has not declared themselves earnestly in favour of world peace. Indeed, organisations like the UN have been set up with that as an ostensible aim while its member states busily thrust daggers into one another. Literally hundreds of disarmament talks have been held down the decades but to no end. The slaughter continues and with it, the unabated accumulation of increasing destructive weaponry.

Another fact is the CND itself, now rising phoenix-like from the ashes of its recent past. Once an organisation that claimed at its peak the support of hundreds of thousands, it plummeted towards virtual extinction. But the very fact that mass support—which we are now urged to rebuild—was achieved only to result in abysmal failure is cause for suspicion. If it is not for any lack of support that CND failed it must follow that their approach is fundamentally wrong.

War is the result of the economic rivalries inherent in capitalism. Certainly, very little can be done about the developments in capitalism that lead to war: the contraction of markets, conflict over resources and so on. But wars don’t just happen out of the blue. They depend for their successful prosecution on a considerable measure of support among the population. To this end governments are able to contribute, through their propaganda machines, to a sustained build-up of a war frenzy by skilfully and systematically exploiting the nationalist sentiments of their subjects.

Socialist propaganda can blunt any such build-up. Indeed only it can do this to any effect for it alone can answer the nationalist justification that wars require. When it came to the crunch, many who left the CND in the sixties went on to join the Vietnam Solidarity campaign in support of Vietcong nationalism. Their interpretation of war being founded on the shifting sands of moralistic idealism, it is not surprising they so easily abandoned their anti-war sentiments to support a “just” war.

Paradoxically, it is the Socialist Party of Great Britain, refusing to lend its support to the great anti-war, anti-bomb campaigns of this century, that has stood out consistently against all wars, declaring them not to be worth the shedding of a single drop of working class blood. Socialist opposition to nationalism and capitalist butchery is anchored firmly to a coherent analysis of society. Workers have no country in the possessive sense and therefore none to die for; a small minority of the population own the means of life, throughout the world. It is in the interests of competing groups within that minority that wars are fought. Whoever wins, it is the workers—who die in the battlefields—who lose on the shop- floors.

The CND failed in spite of its mass support. That could only mean, we said, that its views are mistaken. The socialist movement has achieved nowhere near the same support so far. But it is something altogether different that we ask you to consider. We are out in the cold now but just as the fire grows by the addition of twigs so our movement can become a conflagration.

Robin Cox