Running Commentary: Barbara’s response (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Barbara’s response

In their widely used double whole-page advertisement the Conservative Party claimed that “putting a cross in the Labour box is the same as signing this piece of paper” and one of the items on the imaginary piece of paper was: “I waive my right to choose any form of private medicine for my family”.

This was of course completely untrue but, on the basis that if you are going to tell a lie you might as well tell a big one — in letters half an inch high — it might have frightened some readers into voting Conservative if they had not already decided to do so.

One response was an article in The Times (26 May 1983) by Barbara Castle who was at pains to point out that "What Labour’s manifesto actually says is: ‘We shall remove private practice from the NHS’.” In other words. Labour has no objection to people queue jumping (her expression) provided they do it in Harley Street but not under the noses of the workers who build and run the hospitals and who might feel that they are entitled to as good a health service as anyone else.

But then, it has always been Labour’s policy to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds in the scramble for votes. Those workers who yet again voted for the Labour Party were voting for second class NHS treatment when they could receive of the best in a socialist society.

Exit with dignity

Len Murray, General Secretary of the TUC, is like a lot of other people. He is keen that everyone should have a job because, he thinks, anyone who is unemployed is not just penniless and hopeless: “These marchers,” he cried at a People’s March for Jobs demonstration in June, “have been cheated of their dignity by not being given a job".

Christopher Smith, devoted husband and father, was dignified alright. He had had the same job since he left school fifteen years ago and had been raised to assistant manager at the supermarket where he worked. One drawback to being assistant manager was that, as the company cut back on the staff forcing a lot of people into the indignity of the dole queue, Christopher was left to run the shop on his own.

In what the company probably thought of as his leisure time Christopher took the paperwork home to wrestle with. The responsibility and pressures became so great that a judge later described them as an “overwhelming terror”.

One day Christopher left the shop early, went home and stabbed his wife and daughter to death. He tried five times to kill himself and then told the police what he had done. At the Old Bailey the judge, probably reasoning that even for capitalism this man had been punished enough, put Christopher on probation with a condition that he accept medical treatment.

Employment, which is the process of being exploited for the benefit of a class of social parasites, is an outrageous indignity. One measure of this is the fact that, if it is not profitable to employ workers, they are brusquely thrust away onto the scrap heap. Those who arc kept on have to cope with the pressures of a fiercer exploitation.

Some can manage this without too much damage to themselves. Others fall ill, sprout ulcers, suffer heart attacks and strokes. A few. like Christopher Smith, in one way or another destroy their lives. For them, there is often a final indignity — to be told that it is they, and not this wretched social system, who are sick.

Ah, yes: which firm was it, to do this to this man? They call themselves Your Sharing, Caring Co-op.

Target practice

Like someone at a fairground shooting gallery, Margaret Thatcher has now picked off two Labour leaders and is probably at present squinting along the barrel waiting for the next target to come into view.

The Labour and Conservative parties continually tell us that political processes are something of a shoot-out between two intellectual Titans. For example the 1983 election was reduced at times to a personal battle between Foot and Thatcher, which implied that they are two specially capable people and that there was some reason to make a choice between them.

This theory of the need for leadership is essentially exclusive. Running modern society is so difficult and complicated a matter that it can be understood by only a small minority of specially gifted men and women. The rest of us must leave it up to them and be satisfied with an occasional opportunity to express our gratitude and admiration at the polls.

Well there may well be a rare technique in running a social system in which millions of people are idle in spite of the fact that there is an urgent need for wealth to be produced and distributed. A system in which every week human beings die on the scale of Hiroshima but not from a nuclear assault — from starvation in spite of the fact that huge amounts of food arc stockpiled and destroyed. A system which gives priority, not to the production of useful and constructive things but to weapons of mass destruction.

But to understand this society is not a difficult or an exclusive business. The knowledge is easily available for the Marxian analysis of capitalism, exposing its foundations, its development and its workings, is as vital and relevant now as it was when it was first set down over a century ago.

There is every reason for workers to understand that capitalism cannot satisfy its people's needs and that it must exploit and debase the majority who do all its useful work. They can easily grasp the fact, because the evidence is all around them, that none of the political parties who appeal for their support to continue capitalism can effectively deal with the problems of the system.

From that understanding it is a simple, logical step to the conclusion that only a democratic revolution to establish a society with a different basis, and different social relationships, will be effective. And this revolution cannot come about through leaders; it must be the act of a conscious, participating majority of the world’s working class.

For most workers — which means for most of the world’s people — this is suspiciously simple. They prefer submission, keeping their place in society as surely and predictably as the targets moving across the fairground booth.

Keeping a promise

It took rather a long time but at last, it seemed, something happened as a politician had promised. When he was the minister responsible for housing in the 1945 Labour government, Aneurin Bevan one day pronounced that housing would not be an issue at a future election. And in 1983, sure enough, it was hardly mentioned.

Of course Bevan meant that his government would have been so successful in dealing with housing that there would no longer be any reason to discuss it. What happened in the election was that it was overlaid by other matters of current interest to the voters — would Thatcher or Foot be the more futile leader, how should British capitalism deploy its nuclear weapons, which party would most effectively get those three million unemployed back into active, full time exploitation? Such developments in political debate are sometimes known as the onward and upward march of the working class.

It was in the background, then, that Shelter announced its opinion that one of the urgent matters awaiting the new government is a “shortage" of 800,000 homes, which is another way of saying that millions of people are without a decent place to live.

Now this is not really a shortage. For a long time bricks and other building materials have been stockpiled and among the three million on the dole are many skilled building workers. This situation exists because, for one reason or another, it is not profitable to use the materials or to employ the workers. However desperate people’s needs may be, capitalism does not produce unless there is the prospect of profit.

Then there arc those people whose housing problem consists of difficult decisions about which one of their homes they should live in at any one time. These are the people in whose interests production is carried out, the people who accumulate the profits without which there is no production, the people who live parasitically on the workers who suffer in the housing problem.

Much water has flowed under Westminster Bridge since Bevan made that claim all those years ago, and much suffering has been endured by the homeless, the slum dwellers and by those who exist in the social deserts of the high rise and the council estates or in the pressured neurosis of suburbia. And the problem is still there, as troublesome as ever. It may have been ignored in the election but as long as capitalism lasts it will not go away.

Down the drain

Speaking in Bolton during his election campaign, Michael Foot was reported as promising that Labour would create 500,000 jobs during its first year in office. 

We are not setting impossible targets. When we reduce unemployment to the level we left it in 1979, it will save the government enough money to pay for the whole of Labour’s emergency programme (The Times, 28 May).

In other words, during a Labour Government’s first year half a million workers would be paid with money later to be saved by an imaginary reduction in unemployment of more than two millions.

Leaving aside the “spend now, pay later” aspect of this form of book-keeping, one is left wondering why, with this remedy for unemployment available, there was anybody at all out of work during the period of the last Labour government.

It is of course a fallacy to suggest that jobs can be created just by taking workers off the dole and paying them with the money saved in benefits.

The kind of work Labour politicians had in mind (such as new sewers) shows no financial return on expenditure. One might almost say it is “money down the drain” which will have to be found by increased taxation. But this proposal would not have attracted many votes.

Election nasties (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

When it got to the point of the politicians telling us that 1983 was to be one of the most important elections ever, we knew we were in for a campaign of stupefying bathos and irrelevance.

While there was much sympathy for the apparently doomed Labour Party (the Daily Telegraph, in a leader a couple of days before the poll, said "For a party that is supposed to be terrifying us . . . Labour looks oddly loveable”) it was really the Tories who began with the more testing task. As the outgoing government, they had to convince millions of people that several unpalatable things were actually good for them and that they should volunteer for another five years of the same. As indeed they did.

Things like class society with the profit motive rampant. Things like unemployment forcing workers out of their customary poverty and into deep hardship. Things like the sexual and personal repression which are often thought of, through a misreading of history, as Victorian moral values. Things like patriotism which is used to inspire ordinary, peaceable people to attack other ordinary, peaceable people they don’t know and have no quarrel with.

In order to get some advantage from persuading people that such things are good for them, the Conservatives needed also to claim that they came about through their deliberate policies. Unemployment, for example, had to be represented as something which could easily be abolished or diminished through high state spending but which is kept in being as the price of something else which is good for us called Beating Inflation. As everyone should know by now, because politicians of all parties have been telling us for many years, inflation is one of the few things a government does not claim to be able easily to control. It is, they say, an enemy which can be kept in check only through great skill (theirs) and hardship (ours). But what everyone should, but does not, know by now is that inflation is actually in the government’s control; it is a contrived policy which they choose not to reverse and actually has no overall significant effect on our living standards.

Perhaps it was the exertion of pretending that the Tory government had planned all these things for our especial benefit and had them under control, rather than having them foisted on them, which caused Margaret Thatcher to go mad during the campaign. The famous image of the Resolute Approach is not really an initiative but a cobbled up response to events. Ignoring this piece of reality had its effect on Thatcher and television watchers throughout the country, although not qualified in psychiatry, became worried at her obvious mania.

Foot’s problem was to paper over the wide and deep cracks in his party by relating almost every question and argument to the issue of unemployment, presumably because he thought that this was a vote winner for the Labour Party. There was small chance of his succeeding and it must also have been rather exhausting for him as it required him to forget that under the last Labour government, in which he served so fanatically, unemployment doubled and was on the upward path when they lost power. In this Foot showed he has the amnesic talents required by many a mental patient and by all serious politicians. Throughout the campaign Labour’s inconsistencies — on nuclear weapons, on what they call defence, on how they relate to the wilder fringes of loony reformism called the left wing — kept catching up with Foot. Under close questioning he tried to be nimble but was exposed as evasive, cynical and politically bankrupt.

The press — even so normally sympathetic a paper as the Observer — were notably cruel to him. Yet Foot could still pull in the crowds, large affectionate gatherings of devotees of the idea that he is a man of unswerving principle who, provided he does not disappear altogether through the personality change, will one day deliver us all to the Promised Land. As polling day drew nearer he seemed to lose heart. Perhaps he was reading the Sporting Life; the bookmakers, with a properly hard-nosed assessment of reality, began to discourage bets on the election result and started offering odds on who would replace Foot when the Labour Party lost.

Perhaps the SDP/Liberal Alliance claim to be the mould-breakers of British politics who will cast out the Old Gang would have appealed to someone in a natural despair at the alternating futility of the two parties which have shared power over British capitalism. But the SDP leaders themselves sprang from the Old Gang and were responsible, when they were ministers, for many of the policies they now so heartily denounce. Of course the other part of the Alliance, the Liberals, have a trump card; they can claim not to have recently had the chance to fail which is just as well for them in view of their record when, all those years ago, they were in power. In any case their policies now are no more than a variation on the same reformist hash as offered by the Labour and Conservative parties. It was when they were faced with an unexceptional political crisis that the mould breakers showed how similar they are to the despised Old Gang.

Worried at first by their poor showing at the opinion polls, they moved quickly to make Jenkins their scapegoat. A nasty, but revealing, clash was narrowly avoided when in the nick of time the Alliance poll ratings went up which allowed all SDP/ Liberals to go back to saying how much they admired and supported Jenkins.

This disreputable incident illustrated the ability of the opinion polls to inspire panic or complacency, according to their findings. It was poll ratings which caused the initial assumption that the Labour Party would lose the election, hardening into the certainty that Thatcher would have a majority comparable to Attlee's in 1945. Labour’s depression at their years of schism and confusion, their weak showing at by-elections, their failure to profit from the Thatcher government’s problems and to win some of the nauseous flag-waving glory from the Falklands war, seemed to blind them to the fact that the polls have a history of fallibility. In 1970 the Wilson government, at first confident of victory, lost the election although at one point the polls had them leading by over 12 per cent. In February 1974 the Tories, fighting among the black-outs of the Three Day Week on the theme of Who Governs the Country, were at one time ahead in the polls by 6.5 per cent but in the end they narrowly lost. In October 1974 and again in May 1979 the polls gave the winners a much larger percentage of support than they eventually notched up.

Perhaps more important for them, the Labour Party’s reliance on unemployment as a vote winner was also not supported by history. The only comparable period, in terms of numbers out of work and general elections on a popular franchise, was the twenties and thirties. Labour were in office, as a minority government, in 1929 partly on a pledge to cure unemployment and when their brief, wretched span was ended in 1931 they suffered the most crushing defeat in their history. The monthly average of unemployment during 1931 was 2,717,000 or 21.3 per cent of total employees. At the election the National government won a majority of 497 — a result caused, not by concern at unemployment but through patriotism and fear at the crass failure of the MacDonald government to control capitalism. When the next election came in 1935 unemployment had fallen to 2,027,000 but at 15.5 per cent it was still a serious problem: ". . after four years (of National government) unemployment, depression, misery still overshadowed the land” (Britain Between The Wars, Charles Loch Mowat). But the voters were still mainly satisfied with Conservative government; the best the Labour Party could do was to increase their MPs from the freak number of 51 to 158, leaving Baldwin with a majority of 247 over all other parties.

Whatever success might have attended Foot’s desperate efforts to conceal his party’s miserable disarray on other issues was effectively nuked by Jim Callaghan's headline-catching declaration in favour of British capitalism keeping its own nuclear armoury. Foot might well have been deeply hurt by this act of ingratitude for when Foot was one of Callaghan's ministers his standing as Labour's left-wing conscience was useful in reconciling the party's doubters to the policies of strikebreaking. holding down wages, cutting public spending, racist immigration laws and so on for which that government will always be remembered. After Callaghan’s intervention Labour spokespeople grew increasingly despondent while Thatcher, seeing an unexpectedly emphatic victory looming over the horizon, became ever more manic. At times she went too far even for seasoned media hacks, addressing the galactically great Robin Day without his title and upsetting the faithful Daily Telegraph, which may have been responsible for an element of objectivity creeping into their reporting, the crux of which was their giving some space to a reasonably accurate piece on the Socialist candidate in Islington South.

So yes, it was an election of familiar bathos. Labour supporters were excitedly convinced that at all costs the Tories must be thrown out without knowing why since Labour is fundamentally no different. The Conservatives treated it as a crusade against the threat of revolution although they could not explain why something they called a revolution was designed to keep the same capitalist social system in being.

For the unwary it might have been very confusing because in one sense all sides could take heart from the result. The election spelled out again that, whatever stress and degradation capitalism subjects them to. the working class have a large and enduring appetite for the system. The people in the advertising agencies could be excused for believing in a diabolical power to convince the workers that facts and experience go for nothing and that what counts is an ability to present those facts and that experience in a distorted and deceptive way. So yet there is hope for the Labour Party and the Alliance.

Amid all despair, only the Socialist candidate in Islington stood apart. There was no bathos in that campaign, only a rational, conclusive case for the new society. It was a small effort compared to that of the big parties, and solitary, but as significant as the oyster's grain of sand.

Ivan

Crisis of the Left (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whatever happened to the Labour Party? Remember how they used to tell us that Labour was “the mass party of the working class” — the party that workers would instinctively turn to, like Mullahs to Mecca. If you wanted to be “in with the workers”, said the Left, the Labour Party was the place to be. On 9 June the workers made it clear to their patronising would-be leaders that the party was over — that they could not be relied on to flock to the support of Labour Party capitalism, like cattle voting for “compassionate” slaughterers. The workers of Britain gave the party which tried to con them that it stood for their interests the biggest kick in the teeth for fifty years. These are the facts:

• In 1979, 11,506,661 electors voted Labour — just under 37 per cent of those who voted. In 1983, 8,460,860 electors voted Labour — less than 28 per cent of the total national poll, which was itself 3.3 per cent lower than the total national poll in 1979.
• In 1983 the Labour Party lost its deposit in 125 of the constituencies contested: well over one in five of the deposits it paid. This was a larger number of losses than the Labour party sustained in all four general elections in the 1970s added together.
• Not since 1931, when Labour polled just under seven million votes, have so few electors voted Labour; not since 1918, when Labour’s percentage of the total votes cast was 24 per cent, has Labour received such a low poll.
• More than one in four electors did not vote on 9 June; a quarter of the electorate regarded the differences between the main parties as too insignificant to go out and vote about.

The Labour Party has all but had its death certificate written for it by the workers of Britain. Frantic efforts are now being made to revive its fortunes; a leader of the Wilson-Callaghan calibre is being anxiously sought; the Right is blaming the Left and the Left is blaming the Right. Fraternal purges are on the agenda.

Why did the Labour Party fail to defeat a government presiding over capitalism in the midst of a recession which is hitting the workers hard? The answer is that workers preferred the openly capitalist policies of the Tories — whose disgusting prejudices appealed to the mass of the pro-capitalist workers — rather than the vaguely idealistic capitalist utopianism on offer from the Labour reformists. Margaret Thatcher offered “more hard times ahead”, to be followed, if the wage slaves behaved well, by a higher standard of poverty; the Labour Party offered a relative capitalist paradise, where unemployment would be brought down to “acceptable levels”, nuclear weapons would be removed to foreign soils and the exploited would be legally robbed with humanitarian administration. The workers have tried the utopian recipe before and concluded that if the governments of Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan — not to mention Mitterrand, Andropov and other Leftists — is what the reformers have to offer, then they would stick with the more accomplished thieves of the Tory Party. The fact is that the Labour Party has no alternative; it never did have a remedy for the ills of the profit system, and it never will, because capitalism is an inherently anti-social system which continuously throws up more problems and contradictions than the reformists can solve.

The Labour Party, which was formed after the Socialist Party of Great Britain, has always claimed that it is impossible to persuade a majority of workers to understand and want socialism. The advocates of reform politics have persistently argued that workers must be drawn to “radical politics” by the carrot of reform and then led to the new system without them knowing it. Socialists have heard this elitist, patronising drivel from Labour politicians for a long time: “leaders” like Tony Benn who saw himself as a man who would win the masses to Labour by making promises to change capitalism which could not possibly be fulfilled; like Joan Lestor who argued that it was only in the Labour Party that real social change could begin; like Ossie O'Brien who, in a debate against the Socialist Party, admitted that the socialists may be right, but the Labour Party would get more votes come the elections. These deposed leaders, and the others who received the message from workers they had expected to follow them, can contemplate where their opportunism got them on 9 June. Our candidate was defeated because the workers rejected the revolutionary socialist ideas which were clearly stated in our manifesto, and which we urged workers not to vote for unless they agreed with them — the "populists" of the Labour Party lost despite their opportunist grovelling for votes.

As usual, the vast majority of sects and factions on the non-Labour Left abandoned their opposition to both the Labour Party and elections in order to work like horses for the election of a Labour government of British capitalism. As usual, they all had plenty of small-print qualifications, lumps in their throats, "no illusions”, “conditional” backing and the rest of it, but when the campaign opened and sides had to be taken, the Left chose the side of capitalism with a red rosette.

The Socialist Workers’ Party is as good an example as any of the absurd twisting of these 'reformist hypocrites. Consider the words of Paul Foot in Socialist Worker on 5 December 1981:

Again and again, since the war the hopes and ideals of hundreds of thousands of people who have worked for Labour governments have been frustrated. . .

A good enough reason for not voting Labour. Alex Callinicos. in the same paper on 28 May 1983, gave an even better one:

Labour’s is a programme aimed at harnessing and controlling capital, not destroying it . . . Labour in office would attack the living standards of its own supporters in an effort to restore profits.

Quite correct. So did the SWP urge workers to reject this party which frustrates the hopes of those who support it, exists to defend capital and would attack workers’ interests in order to restore profits? On the front cover of Socialist Worker of June 4 the headline said it all: “STOP THE TORIES — VOTE LABOUR". Such hypocrisy is not something to be ignored; to urge workers to waste the power of the vote on a party which they know to be anti-working class shows just what contempt the SWP’s leaders have for their dwindling flock of followers.

The Workers' Revolutionary Party manages to carry out the Oppose Labour — Vote Labour political somersault within the course of the four pages of its turgidly written manifesto:

They (the Labour Party) have capitulated to every attack by the Thatcher government on the working class. Labour’s leaders unconditionally support capitalism and its state machine.

Therefore it follows, does it not, that:

In constituencies where we are not standing we call for a massive turn-out by the Labour and trade union movement to vote against the Tories by casting a critical vote for Labour.

Why did they not be more clear and tell workers to “critically" vote for the party which “unconditionally support(s) capitalism and its state machine"?

The Communist Party, as usual, advised workers to vote Labour where its candidates were not standing. The Militant Tendency, like guests who are thrown out of the party and run around the houses telling everyone what a great time they had, strained every muscle for the election to state power of the party which devoted a day of its last conference to passing overwhelmingly a resolution to kick them out.

At the end of the day, the leaders looked behind them to see that the sheep were flocking in their thousands to follow other shepherds — or to follow none. The Trotskyist logic of electing your enemies to power was swallowed by the gullible fools who think they are a vanguard; but the rearguard, once again, was not there. The Labour Party is one step nearer to the political grave which its record of broken promises has dug for it. Of course, the working class followers of the politically bankrupt Labour Party opted not for socialism, but to abandon their futures as sacrifices to Thatcher’s god of Profit. In the days to come socialists will be working with all the force at our command to show the workers that there is an alternative to the corpse of Left reformism and the viciousness of naked capitalism. The election is over, but the struggle goes on.

Steve Coleman

Voices in the wilderness (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

More than half of the workers we canvassed in last month’s election campaign were cynical about the promises of all the main parties standing. For three weeks every five years, the British ruling class expects us to think about “politics”, that is, about which band of professional liars will administer our poverty for the next period. We attended all of the main parties’ meetings in order to sell socialist literature, as part of our campaign in Islington, and at each meeting we saw the same few faces, sadly devoted to the empty rhetoric of their indistinguishable leaders.

In Islington South and Finsbury, where the only genuinely socialist candidate was standing, the Tories kept quite a low profile. Thatcher’s talk of Victorian Values had been dropped for the duration of the campaign, since for most workers, the only way in which hard work and thrift prove profitable is when our bosses profit from our hard work and thrift. The Tory leaflet spoke of “the quality of our armed forces”, “controlling secondary picketing” and “larger export markets”; all matters only of interest to those who own and control the wealth of Britain, not the millions who produce it.

The two favourites in the race for power in Islington South were the Labour and SDP candidates. The Labour Party relied almost entirely on the “lesser evil" myth. Realising that capitalism under the Labour varnish is quite unsavoury to many of the workers it exploits, they told us that we had to vote Labour, to avoid the greater horror of capitalism tarnished by the leadership of Thatcher. The idea that to get rid of Thatcher’s capitalism the only possibility is to support Foot’s capitalism is as stupidly dogmatic as the Tory claim that there is no alternative to their policies. Tactical voting is based on the assumption that sheep must follow one another on to a limited number of bandwagons, then shuffle around until the least obnoxious compromise can be found. It denies any kind of clear principle or aim, and any possibility of real social change through democratic persuasion.

The election was taken over, especially in Islington, by the most cynical slander and manipulation on all sides. The social system represented by all the major parties has become bankrupt of ideas. They have almost run out of ways to secure workers’ loyalty to the system which exploits us. Consequently, more time was spent attacking their opponents than claiming any positive merits for their own policies. Many people we canvassed said they agreed with the revolutionary alternative we were standing for, but would vote Labour through an almost religious, irrational attachment to traditional loyalties. When they start to act more in accordance with their real disgust at the Labour Party’s cynical running of the profit system, what is regarded as possible and impossible will rapidly change. Perhaps the most ludicrous example of this contradictory attitude came from the misnamed Socialist Workers Party. Some of their members passionately attacked the Labour candidate at a public rally, shouting out that Labour had always inevitably betrayed the workers because it was running the capitalist system. Finally, they were told from the platform, “No, no. You should be campaigning for a Labour victory”. They replied, to the audience’s bewilderment, “We are" and, sure enough, their paper told people to Vote Labour, even though the Socialist Party of Great Britain was posing the revolutionary socialist alternative.

We were faced with three well-oiled machines, prepared to stop at nothing in their desperate vote-catching. The Labour candidate even referred at a public meeting to the SPGB campaign slogan, "Vote for Yourself for a Change”, and claimed that the Labour Party embodied this no-leaders democracy! Their confidential instructions (from above, of course) tell a different story:

DO NOT ASK: "Will you be voting Labour?" That is bad canvassing. Voters say yes to get rid of you/make you happy/ deliberately confuse you . . . If person says "I never vote”, mark on card. We do not wish to antagonise by calling again. Sometimes people tell the truth!

One of the most infamous careerists in the constituency was the sitting MP, George Cunningham. He was elected through the Labour Party in 1979 and then transferred to their Old Boys’ Club, the SDP. In some circles he is known as George Conning’em, since that’s what he’s been doing for the past five years. Most people wouldn’t mind a pound for every baby he’s kissed. When we challenged him to a public debate, he arrogantly replied that we would have to find someone to give us publicity elsewhere, he was too busy proclaiming his commitment to democracy and free speech to mess about with petty things like public debates. Now that he has lost his job at Westminster, we plan to offer him the publicity he once denied us, by repeating our challenge to debate.

One leaflet contained compliments about Cunningham from the Daily Mail, The Times, Observer, Guardian, BBC and Punch. In other words, he is a model capitalist politician, expert at persuading people to leave control in the hands of a minority. Another shows a cartoon of him with a big, tightly-clenched fist, and another with a foot stamping on the neck of an alligator marked Creeping Extremism. The local SDP campaign was based on the "left extremist" scare, traditionally popular with the fascists. SDP Agent Chris Pryce was quoted in the Islington Gazette as saying:

Make no mistake, Chris Smith is one of the most extreme Labour candidates in the country. His constant harping on gay rights, his open support for punks and squatters and other fringe groups is now common knowledge.

Of course, at the time Pryce was not aware that the SDP were soon to join the fringe groups in Islington; on the other hand. Smith is now at Westminster, and there has been no revolution in the conditions of the workers in Islington or anywhere else.

One day, while leafletting in Chapel Market alongside the SDP, one of their members explained to us that they only had short leaflets there, since the people wouldn't understand a more detailed manifesto. It was claimed that Labour posters were displayed in the windows of empty flats by the Labour Council because there was so little genuine support for them on many of the estates. Some Labour canvassers were reported to have resorted to telling people that Cunningham was ill or not standing, and that it was illegal to display his posters. All of this vicious in-fighting among politicians standing for the profit system took the place of real debate over policies. It was not just Cunningham who refused to debate with us; we had also been refused by the Labour candidate Smith, and by both the SDP and Labour candidates in the Islington North constituency.

Islington CND planned and advertised a public debate between the candidates on the question of nuclear weapons, but this had to be abandoned since they refused to comply with the regulations which demand that all candidates be invited to such meetings; they did not want to give a platform to the candidates from the National Front and the British National Party. They even tried to use a legal loophole by asking if we would formally put the costs of running the meeting on our election expenses, which would have allowed them to leave out the fascists. We refused, pointing out the illogicality of opposing somebody because they are against free speech, and then denying them the chance to air their ideas. If the NF and BNP had to explain themselves on a public platform, most workers would be quite capable of rejecting their vicious and divisive racism, without having CND to censor it for them. Moreover, the NF, like CND. is against the American nuclear bases and missiles because they are nationalists. Indeed, the manifesto of the NF, with its support for import controls and getting out of the Common Market, shares with much of the Left the nationalist, anti-working-class policy of British state capitalism.

The real local issues were hardly dealt with at all by the six parties who stood against the SPGB and world socialism. One in five workers in Islington are unemployed. Over ten thousand are on the housing waiting list, despite there being many empty homes. An increasing number of young people there are turning to heroin, despite having friends who have died on it. On certain housing estates, violent racist attacks constantly threaten thousands of people. Since 1975, under Labour and Tory governments, the number of hospitals in Islington has been reduced from five to two. The Labour Party has failed again and again to live up to the expectations of its supporters, because it operates within the confines of the anti-human system which lies at the root of all these problems. When challenged about the possibility of a genuine socialist alternative, the Labour candidate told us, as would any Tory, about the need for “realism”. In other words, keep a system of war, poverty and institutionalised misery, rather than end the sacred rights of property.

The contradictions of the present social system cannot be reformed away by the rhetoric of individual politicians. In health, housing and so on. profit comes before need, accumulation before consumption. In the week of the election, houses in Islington (Barnsbury and Canonbury Square) were advertised costing £130,000, £154,950, £197,500 . . . The people buying these properties do not suffer the housing problems for which the area is notorious. As long as this class division remains, the majority will be in an inferior, insecure position. The Labour Party’s Plan for Jobs was just a policy to retain profits for a minority and wage-slavery for the rest. As the local community paper, the Islington Gutter Press explained:

None of these (Labour) objectives will be possible without the co-operation of the trade unions . . . Yes. the trade unions will have to show restraint and they will have to abide by the National Economic Assessment. But we believe in them and we believe in the future of this country.

As long as capitalism has lasted, not a single day has gone by without discontent and dissent burning on somewhere. But the enormous potential for revolutionary change has, for the past century, been channelled into fruitless reformism. Workers won the vote in the late nineteenth century but instead of using it to end the profit system, they have used it to give capitalism a longer lease, sometimes through Labour governments which have understandings with the unions. The Socialist Party of Great Britain stood in the election on a uniquely different basis, of working-class unity and democratic revolution. The solution to the chaos of the market system is. like the problem it solves, world-wide despite the nonsense spoken about the Socialist Republic of Islington and despite the fact that one of the local candidates was the Islington and Finsbury Party.

85 more nails . . .

In our manifesto, we asked people not to vote for us unless they were fully in agreement with what we stand for. After all, socialism could only be established if a majority were prepared to take the necessary action democratically, and with responsibility. True democracy cannot be enforced or introduced by methods of secret infiltration. The little media coverage we received during the campaign thought this was quite a joke, since to them democratic elections must involve not open persuasion and consistency but slander, vote-catching and opportunism. The electorate of Islington South and Finsbury were happy to oblige with our request not to vote for us if they were still suffering from capitalist conditioning and prejudice: we polled 85 votes, against 13,460 for the Labour Party, 13,097 for the SDP, 9,894 for the Tories, 341 for the National Front, 94 for the British National Party and 102 for the Islington and Finsbury Party. But as many as two in five voters in Islington abstained, sick of the failed promises of these political leaders.

Abstention, however, is in its effect little different from acceptance of the status quo. We are gradually building a separate political force which will be able to use the vote in a revolutionary way. The local Socialist Party branch in Islington has multiplied its membership more than five times over since its formation about five years ago, without admitting to membership anyone who is not a socialist, fully aware of the nature of the change we propose. Unlike the politicians who have been elected to run the system of class division, we will not vanish from the scene or suspend canvassing for five years. The debate between production for the profit of a few and production for the use of all is now more pressing than ever. We will be stepping up our activities of street-selling, canvassing and running meetings in Islington in the months ahead. Each worker declaring a practical commitment to a classless, world society of democratic control and common ownership represents another nail in the coffin of capitalism.

Clifford Slapper

World hunger — why? (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is now common knowledge that up to two-thirds of the world’s population suffer from malnutrition while millions actually die from starvation each year. Why is this? Why in a world of potential plenty is so elementary a human need as food neglected for so many people?

Some would deny that we live in a world of potential plenty and claim that the cause of world poverty and hunger is natural scarcity. That, in other words, some people starve simply because not enough food can be produced. Certainly today sufficient food is not produced, but this is beside the point. What we need to know is whether or not, in the present state of scientific knowledge and productive techniques, enough food could be produced adequately to feed the whole population of the world.

There can be no doubt about the answer to this question: agronomists and other scientists who have studied the problem are all agreed that the world has the potential to produce enough food to adequately feed its present population, and more.

Here, for instance, is the view of one of the contributors to a special issue of the Scientific American on Food and Agriculture in September 1976. In his article on “The Development of Agriculture in Developing Countries" W. David Hopper writes:

  As one considers the tropical farming world and the technology now available or soon to be available, there can be no grounds for pessimism about the latent potential of the world to feed increasing numbers of people for a long period ahead. Whether that latent potential will be harnessed to the benefit of man is the question.

  It is important to recognise that the world’s food problem does not arise from any physical limitation on potential output or any danger of unduly stressing the “environment". The limitations on abundance are to be found in the social and political structures of nations and in the economic relations among them. The unexploited global food resource is there, between Cancer and Capricorn. The successful husbandry of that resource depends on the will and the actions of men.

World malnutrition and starvation, then, is not a natural but a social problem. Its cause must be sought not in any lack of natural resources but in the way society is organised.

World society everywhere rests on the basis of the monopoly of the resources of the world, natural and manufactured, by minorities, either privately as individuals (as generally in the West) or collectively through the state (as generally in countries like Russia and China). As a result the world’s resources are used to produce wealth, not to satisfy human needs but to be sold on a market with a view to profit.

Each economic or political unit (enterprise or state) into which the world is divided is in competition with every other such unit, both to acquire raw materials as cheaply as possible and to sell its products as profitably as possible. This economic competition brings into being economic forces — the world market — which are beyond the control of any of the competitors and to which in the end they must submit.

It is in fact the world market that rules the world. Acting like a natural force beyond human control it has much more power than any national government and forces governments to comply with its economic laws whether they want to or not. At the moment the world market is in the depression phase of its economic cycle, an economic fact about which governments can do nothing and to which they must adapt their economic policies. In other words, as the French Minister for Economic Affairs, Jacques Delors (who speaks from first-hand experience) has put it. the world "is in the grip of forces which nobody masters" (Club de la presse, 19 December 1982).

It is this anarchical world market system of artificial scarcity and organised waste that is responsible for poverty and hunger in the world today. The law which governs production everywhere is “no profit, no production”. Which means that if there is no profit to be made from producing and selling a good then that good will not be produced, even if people desperately need it. As the mass of the unemployed or underemployed in the so-called Third World do not have any money incomes and therefore do not constitute a market, they do not count for the present system of production geared only to meeting profitable market demand. Their very real human need for food is not “effective”, to use the jargon of modern economics, so they are badly fed and, in many cases, starve to death.

What makes matters worse is that under the present system every year, despite mass hunger, food is destroyed: fruits are left to rot, milk is poured down mines, coffee is used to fuel trains, and so on. From a human point of view this is quite scandalous but we are dealing with a system that has a logic other than the satisfaction of human needs, as is also shown by the well-established American policy of paying farmers not to grow food. The Common Agricultural Policy in Europe too has paid farmers to pull up trees and to slaughter cattle as a way of maintaining price and profit levels. But giving away these alleged "surpluses" is no solution. Quite the reverse, for within the context of a market system giving food away free makes matters worse by narrowing even further the market and so discouraging production.

The present world system is also one of organised waste — the most obvious being armaments — which is directly linked to the competitive, ever-raging struggle for profits. For, although in the end it is a state’s economic strength — its competitiveness — which enables it to succeed, its political strength — its armed clout — is also an important factor.

When a conflict arises (over markets, sources of raw materials, trade routes, investments, outlets) it becomes a trial of strength and, even if the matter is settled peacefully by negotiation, the outcome still depends on the relative strengths of the two sides. The Labour Foreign-Minister-who-never-was, Aneurin Bevan, once expressed this fact of present-day life quite well when, opposing CND at a Labour Party Conference, he said that he didn’t want to go into the conference chamber naked. No statesman wants to do this, which explains why each state (including those in the so-called Third World with underfed and starving populations) seeks to have the most powerful armed forces that it can afford. The waste of armaments is immense, not just the arms themselves and military expenditure generally but also the destruction caused by the wars which are always going on somewhere in the world.

If all this waste and destruction were eliminated and the resources involved redirected to constructive ends then the world could more than adequately feed, clothe and shelter its present population. World poverty, hunger and ignorance could be completely eliminated. But this would require the abolition of the present system of minority ownership and production for profit, and its replacement by a new system organised on a completely different basis.

During the early stages of the discussion of the law of the sea-bed. President Nixon (of all people) referred to the oceans as "the common heritage of all mankind”. The same phrase occurs in the treaties about Antarctica and the moon. These treaties declare that no state can establish territorial rights nor any individual private property rights over these areas — that, in other words, they belong to nobody. What is required is that this same principle should be extended and applied to the whole globe: all that is in and on the Earth should become the common heritage of all humanity.

On this basis there would be nothing to prevent the world’s people organising the production and distribution of wealth simply and solely to satisfy their needs as individuals and as a community. Production would no longer be restricted by the law of “no profit, no production” nor any longer governed by the blind economic force which the world market represents. Instead it would come under conscious, democratic social control and be oriented to what after all is its only rational end — satisfying human needs and wants. In these circumstances production could be rapidly increased to levels which would ensure that every man, woman and child on this planet was adequately fed, clothed and sheltered. The mass hunger and deaths from starvation which characterise the world today would remain only as bad memories of what no doubt will be commonly agreed to have been a barbarous past.

The Earth the common storehouse of all humanity; the production of wealth solely for use not sale or profit; a world without arms — is this an unrealistic Utopia? Not at all. It is the only logical and rational way to run the world given the present high stage of development of the forces of production. Because a solution is so simple and obvious does not mean that it won’t work.

Adam Buick

Prisoners on the roof (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even as prisons go, Albany is especially difficult to get out of — or into, for that matter. The high outer wall is topped by a cylindrical cowling, black and smooth, which would throw off a grappling hook or a rope, or anyone determined enough to get up there. Behind that is a sensitive ground zone, where an intruder would set the alarms going. Then another high wall, made from concrete sprayed onto a strong steel mesh. Dogs are on patrol along the walls and all movements are watched by cameras strung high above on slim steel posts. Other posts hold lights which spread a deathly orange, shadowless glow over the prison; when dark falls Albany can be seen for miles around.

Keys do not rattle in Albany as pervasively as in other prisons. Most of its doors are remotely controlled from a central security block. This has some advantages for the prisoners; after lock-up they can ask to be let out of their cells and, provided the central control approves, a man can be allowed to go to the lavatory, take a shower, or whatever. Albany does not, then, endure the noxious routine of slop-out, the emptying of chamber pots brimming with urine and faeces with which the older prisons begin their day.

Albany was built in the sixties, originally to hold men of low security category. It was converted, after the Mountbatten Report and then the Radzinowicz Report, into a dispersal prison, which was an official compromise with Mountbatten’s recommendation to build a fortress prison on the Isle of Wight to hold the hardest, most determined criminals in the country in relatively humane conditions behind an impregnable perimeter. The concept of dispersal meant that men serving very, very long sentences — life several times, perhaps, or with a judge's recommendation that they stay inside for twenty or thirty years — share a prison with others doing only a few years.

Albany began its life with the declared intention of being a place where prisoners existed in what was called "constructive tension”, the meaning of which was obscure but fuelled many a seminar on enlightened penal measures. In any case the policy could not survive the prison's change of role and in place of “constructive tension" Albany offered other things. It was a clean, modern prison with good sports facilities — a “proper" prison where “you know where you stand — you get nothing so you don't ask for anything". Outside the cell blocks it has an open aspect, with views of distant green hills, unlike other prisons where grey walls loom over everything. But at the same time it was regarded as the end of the road of the prison system; men went there with little hope of even the gestures towards “rehabilitation” which the Home Office feels obliged to make.

There is another way in which Albany differs from the older British prisons. In those stark, crumbling, often verminous, relics of Victorian moral correction it is common for three men to have to live in a cell barely big enough to accommodate one for nearly twenty-three hours out of every day. The tension caused by such overcrowding is often assumed to be the cause of much of the trouble in prisons. Certainly, it provides a handy excuse for the Home Office, who can represent it as a problem not of their making; there are so many people in prison because they commit offences and because the courts send them to prison rather than applying other sentences.

But these older, overcrowded prisons do not have serious trouble, on the scale of the recent riot and rooftop protest at Albany. Indeed, every major disturbance at British prisons in recent years has been at establishments where there is no overcrowding. This was so at Parkhurst in 1969, at Hull and Gartree and again at Parkhurst and at Albany in more recent times. Even the trouble at Wormwood Scrubs, where there is overcrowding, in 1979 (which is more accurately described as a riot by the prison officers rather than by the prisoners) was in the long term wing, where all the men are held in single cells.

What then caused the riot at Albany? It is a place of instantly palpable tension. Many of the prisoners there are what the Home Office categorises as hardened criminals, who have committed their offences with some deliberation, accepting the risks involved. This applies not just to the likes of professional bank robbers but also to the politically motivated offenders such as the IRA bombers. Between these on the one hand and the prison authorities on the other there exists a state of persistent antagonism. There is communication of a sort between each side but only as shells communicate across No Man's Land. Some of these prisoners will tell you — as they have themselves perhaps been told by a judge — that they are at war with society (we shall return to this in a moment) and that for them society is represented by the prison.

For the most part this war is a matter of sniping or trench raids; only occasionally does it burst out into a full scale battle. Frustration and repression is breathed daily by the prisoner, like gas in shell holes, and prisons are not places designed to relieve tension. When the frustration reaches an explosive level — and when there are enough determined, or desperate, men with little to lose and ready to give vent to it — then there is the material for a battle. The predictable response to a riot is a more stringent application of the frustrations which aggravated it in the first place. When the protesters eventually came off the roof at Albany they were immediately whisked away, in scaled vans with a heavy escort, to other prisons to be punished.

It is expected that all the political parties of capitalism will have a readily available policy on what they call Law and Order. This may entail harsher laws and punishments or some administrative reforms which do little more than shift the official responsibility for dealing with offenders from one agency to another — like the Children and Young Persons Act of 1969, which was never fully implemented and parts of which have now been overtaken by the latest measure, the Criminal Justice Act 1982. It is the same with troublesome prisons — some experts are sure there should be more restrictive regimes such as the infamous Control Units at Wormwood Scrubs and Wakefield, while other experts favour more “rehabilitative” measures by which they usually mean at most short courses in painting or bricklaying. All such theories share a common motivation — the acceptance of capitalism’s class structure and the condition that one class must labour to the benefit of the other as a morality providing all that is needed for a happy, fulfilled human life.

This comfortable delusion is continually undermined by reality. There is no satisfaction in the drudgery of wage slavery. Class society offers no fulfilment — only alienation. It provokes conflict which is often expressed in forcible attempts at breaching the laws of property. Very, very few criminals have any conscious notion of what their offences actually represent. Far from being at war with society — with capitalist society — they are among the most ardent defenders of property rights, with the ambition to quickly gain enough of it to make it worth their while to defend. However complex criminal motivation, it is essentially a reaction to deprivation, to a socially repressed life, to an inability to attain to some norm of capitalism such as a stable family. So the reaction emerges as anti-social. by offending against this social system's most representative, cherished and defended feature — the rights and privileges of property.

Prisons are not, then, simply places where people are confined. They are monuments to the inhumanity of a social system which exists on the repression of the majority by the minority. They bear witness that the majority are deceived into the belief that this repression is so much in their interests that they should themselves work, as police officers, prison officers, servicemen, to impose it. So the sentence which the working class serve under capitalism — to be exploited, degraded, murdered — is self-administered. And there is no time off for good conduct.

Blogger's Note:

This article was unsigned but I'm 95% sure it was written by Ivan who, because of his employment, was unable to attach his name to it  . . . even his 'pen-name'.

Editorial: Williamsburg conference (1983)

Editorial from the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the end of May a conference to solve world economic problems was held at Williamsburg, Virginia, attended by representatives of four European countries, America, Canada and Japan. It was one of a regular series of such conferences, the next to be in Britain in 1984.

Verdicts on the conference ranged from the self-congratulatory official statement — “Our discussions give us new confidence for recovery" — to the Financial Times — “Two Cheers for Williamsburg" to “Playacting" (Liberal/SDP Alliance) and “Fiasco", "Catastrophe for the whole world" (Labour Party). Margaret Thatcher claimed that the conference decisions were an endorsement of the policy of her own government.

In the agreed statement of aims the conference declared itself in favour of reducing inflation, interest rates, unemployment, government spending and budget deficits; encouraging investment and aid to poorer countries; stabilising foreign exchange rates; getting rid of trade barriers, conserving energy and developing alternatives to oil.

The Times (31 May) reported that in the private discussions the European leaders, especially Mitterrand, were highly critical of America for its current budget deficit of £125 billion which, they said, is the cause of high interest rates in America and prevents interest rates from falling in other countries. Mitterrand. before the conference met, had been pressing for a world monetary conference like that at Bretton Woods at the end of the last war, which set up the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He did not get his way but the conference did agree to consider a high level international monetary conference at some unspecified time in the future.

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have a particular relevance to the present situation because it was the declared aim of those institutions to expand international trade, keep unemployment down, increase production, raise living standards, encourage investment and make exchange rates stable — all problems which the Williamsburg conference found itself once again considering nearly forty years after Bretton Woods. And Bretton Woods was not the first. Some twenty years earlier, after the first world war, a series of international monetary conferences took place also dealing with inflation, unemployment, falling production, trade barriers and unstable foreign exchange rates. There was a link between those conferences and Bretton Woods, in that the economist J.M. Keynes played a part in both.

And earlier still, in the 19th century, a number of inter-government conferences took place to deal with monetary problems, including the stabilising of exchange rates by setting up the gold standard in most of the industrialised countries. This did not prevent the Great Depression in the last quarter of the century, during which the British government set up a series of committees of enquiry to try to discover why the depression and heavy unemployment had happened and how they could be avoided in future.

Capitalist economists have always taken the view that stable exchange rates arc desirable in the general capitalist interest. A British company importing from abroad wants to know that the American dollars or German marks it pays will cost a known and unchanging number of pounds. The British company exporting to foreign countries likewise wants to know that it will receive a known and unchanging number of pounds. But, as in all such questions, there are sectional conflicts of interest. While not wanting constantly changing exchange rates. British exporters have an interest in the pound being fixed at a low rate against foreign currencies because, for a given number of dollars or marks for which their exports are sold, they receive a larger number of pounds. Conversely, British importers have an interest in the pound being fixed at a high rate because these imports will cost them fewer pounds.

The gold standard was a method of stabilising the exchange rates between all countries on the gold standard, as each of the national currencies was legally fixed at an unchanging weight of gold. (The British pound at about a quarter of an ounce of gold.) In the years 1900 to 1914, for example, the exchange rates between the pound, the dollar and the German mark (all being gold standard currencies), were completely stable, showing only minute fluctuations. The gold standard also brought comparative stability of prices because all the gold standard currencies were tied to gold. It did not prevent changes of prices due to other factors, such as the rise of prices in booms and fall of prices in depressions. The gold standard ruled out anything like the multiplication of average prices by about eighteen that has occurred in Britain since 1938.

It is here that we see the outstanding difference between the Bretton Woods agreements after World War Two on the one hand and the gold standard agreements of the 19th century and the international monetary conferences after World War One. Capitalism's major problem, as the Bretton Woods conference saw it, was not inflation and prices but unemployment and depression. It was the beginning of “The Age of Keynes" who had shown them, as they thought, how they could for ever get rid of both, and maintain a state of permanent boom and low unemployment.

For many years events seemed to support their trust in the Keynesian doctrine, though in fact low post-war unemployment happened for other reasons. Then came the day of reckoning, the present world depression, in which it is not a question of having to deal with inflation or deal with unemployment, but having to deal with both together.

Robert Skidclsky, Professor of International Studies at Warwick University, told their sad story in The Times (4 June):

  In the last ten years things have gone terribly wrong. The talisman has failed: economics — and economics — are in a mess. There is scarcely a government of a major country in the world which would now call itself Keynesian. The charge against Keynes is that in putting out one fire, unemployment, he started another one, inflation, which in the opinion of many economists was bound to bring back unemployment too.

Those economists have one thing wrong. It is not inflation which brings about unemployment and depression, or deflation, or the gold standard, or Keynesian doctrine or anti-Keynesian doctrine, but capitalism itself. That is the way capitalism operates, with the cycle of alternate periods of expansion and boom and periods of depression and heavy unemployment.

There was one set of economic doctrines not present at any of the international conferences of the past hundred years — that of Karl Marx. Indeed it was specifically claimed by the Keynesians that Keynes had destroyed Marxian economics for ever. This has led some economists to wonder, now that the Keynesian doctrine has failed them, if perhaps they can find in Marx the real way to maintain capitalism in permanent boom. They won’t find it. Marx’s conclusion was that capitalism can only operate in accordance with its own structure and economic laws and that the way out is to abolish capitalism and establish socialism.

50 Years Ago: London Passenger Transport (1983)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

This Act (the London Passenger Transport Act) was first introduced by Mr. Morrison as Minister of Transport in the Labour Government. and after being amended in some not very important respects, has been carried through by the Conservative “National" Government. Briefly, it replaces the multiplicity of tram, tube and bus concerns by a single undertaking, the London Passenger Transport Board. The members of the Board are appointed by a committee which, in turn, is appointed by the Government. The Board will operate under restrictions laid down in the Act and the shareholders of the separate undertakings will continue to draw dividends from their holdings in the undertaking approximately equal in amount to the dividends they drew before. The Act provides also that the workers employed shall be taken over on terms equivalent to those they formerly worked under.

* * * * *

He (Morrison) used the form of undertaking known as “public utility corporation”, thus copying the Liberals and Tories, who created the Port of London Authority, The Central Electricity Board, the British Broadcasting Corporation and Imperial and International Communications Ltd. But apart from the attempted solution of certain economic problems thrown up by the development of transport, all of these public utility corporations leave ownership and the problems of the wage-earners exactly as they were before.

(From an article “The Labour Party at the Crossroads”, Socialist Standard, July 1933.)

Science and madness (1983)

TV Review from the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last programme of Jonathan Miller’s series on BBC2 entitled States of Mind brought to a head one of its recurring themes: can psychology in any of its forms be considered as a science and, moreover, what exactly is a science? This question is of interest because its resolution parallels the debate between the “idealist" and "materialist" approaches to politics.

Dr. Miller’s guest in this programme was Dr. Thomas Szasz, and his hypothesis was that there is not, and never has been, anything to prove that certain mental states are to be considered as medical conditions. He then went on to make several very persuasive points to this end. He said that it is only since around 1800 that mental institutions (mad houses) have existed and that society did not recognise "madness" before that time. He thought it highly significant that only in so-called “mental illnesses" did the state have the power to forcefully administer “treatment" (like locking away). Unlike other medical conditions, he said, no physical agent could be discovered in causing symptoms of mental disorder. And finally he stated that the victims of such medical treatment by the state were mostly those who rejected the values of society; the fact that theirs is a minority opinion is no proof of insanity, since all majority opinion was once a minority one at some time. It is not claimed that early Christians were all mad because they were in the minority. His conclusion in the light of all this was that a scientific (medical) approach to mental conditions was fundamentally inappropriate and dangerous, and that it should be replaced by a moral and ethical one.

It is undeniable that capitalism has used psychology for its own ends, as it does with every discovery, but this misuse can be seen as a direct result of the morality to which the doctor wants to turn, and not as a logical result of the scientific method itself. As Marx showed, by using the same scientific method, the morality of any social epoch is that of its ruling class, and as the doctor pointed out, it is no coincidence that it is the non-conformers who are removed by this misuse of science. The majority prejudice in society against so-called mental cases is fostered by the state so that this removal can continue. To claim that it is science which causes such abuse is like saying that physics, and not the political regime under which it has to work, is responsible for nuclear weapons.

Dr. Szasz’s confusion lies in his misunderstanding of what science really is, and it seems appropriate to let Sigmund Freud enlighten him. Freud says that science endeavours “to understand the phenomena, to establish a correlation between them and, in the end, if it is possible, to enlarge our power over them” (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis). The doctor, in contrast to this, seems to see science as many intellectuals do, in terms of a metaphysical dogma of black and white, right and wrong. But science is in fact the direct opposite to this moral idealism, because it concentrates on the dynamics of nature where there are none of these absolutes: Hence the doctor's misplaced criticism when he reverses the qualities attributable to science and morality and completely overlooks the real problem, the social power of capitalism.

As Freud continues in his article: “Its (science’s) findings are bound to canvass on its behalf and it can wait until these have compelled attention to it". In other words, it is the scientific method and its discoveries which can help to undermine social prejudices. This is exactly what Marx did with his analysis of history and it has proved, together with such as physics, chemistry, biology, psychology that the scientific method, however incomplete, is alone to be considered as the relevant method of analysis of society today.

Andrew Westley

Marx's conception of socialism - Part 1 (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

(The following is a transcript of a talk given earlier this year.)

As Marx envisaged society moving forward from capitalism to socialism, anything he had to say about the society of the future is of interest, but it is important to notice two things about what he said. Firstly, he never set out a comprehensive outline of socialist society. Secondly, he made scattered incidental references to the society of the future at different times in his life and in dealing with different subjects, so a lot of these ideas are in the air, as it were, and we have to do our own thinking about them.

About never having set out a comprehensive view of socialism, one of his French critics of Capital asked Marx why he didn't write “recipes for the cook shops of the future”. Marx accepted that he was not doing so. Marx was not outlining future society and he explained what he meant about this. In The German Ideology he said this: communism (by which we mean socialism) “is not for us a state of affairs, an ideal to which reality will have to adapt itself. We call Communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things, and the conditions for this movement result from the premises now in existence". What Marx meant by “movements” we find in what he set out in his introduction to Capital. This “movement" was the economic laws of motion of modern society and he explained that his purpose in writing Capital was to discover these economic laws. So the only worthwhile ideas you can have about socialist society have got to be related to what Marx insisted was the existing state of society. You cannot just pluck these ideas out of the air.

This introduces an immediate complication. You have Marx or Engels writing in 1848 or even earlier, producing ideas about the socialist future, but the existing state of affairs is very different now to what it was in 1848 and also different to what it was in 1875. In his 1867 preface to Capital, where he referred to the progress of the Trade Unions. Marx talked about “a radical change in the existing relations between Capital and Labour". They show that the present society (that is capitalism) is no solid crystal but an organisation capable of change, and is constantly changing. So whatever was in Marx’s mind in 1848, he would have thought differently in 1875, and we of course would have to think differently now.

One thing to notice about this in the Communist Manifesto is that Marx and Engels talked about the “spectre of communism haunting Europe”, but in fact they did not think that there was the slightest possibility of communism being established at that time. This is clear from a reference they made in the Communist Manifesto to the “utopians". They criticised the “utopians" on the ground that "the economic situation does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat”. What was true of the “utopians" was also true of Marx and Engels. They were looking in the future in the light of the unready conditions of the time. So, in fact, socialism was not a practical proposition at that time.

In 1848 there was inadequate development of the productive forces, which is one of the things Marx meant when he said that the material conditions were not present for the establishment of communism. In addition to this, in Europe as a whole in 1848, the peasants vastly outnumbered the workers, so the working class was not in a position to do anything democratically anyway. They were outnumbered, and as well as this the working class were not socialists: they had not reached the level of maturity to make it possible to contemplate introducing socialism. This is what Marx and Engels meant when they criticised the “utopians".

I want here to throw in a suggestion of my own and in excusing doing it I would say that this whole field is speculative and therefore one person's speculation is as good as anybody else’s. You have the idea put forward by Marx of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. They anticipated this in the Communist Manifesto and they also put it forward in 1875. I would say that the obvious explanation was that they were looking at a world in which the material conditions did not exist for the emancipation of the proletariat. As late as 1891 you will find Engels in a letter to Bebel, writing about the possibility that the working class might get power prematurely. He did not rule this out. He said that in the event that we might take power prematurely we shall have to use “terror". It was directed in this case against what he called the technicians, as he described the people with technical training. My own comment on this is that we should throw the whole thing overboard and have nothing to do with it in any circumstances. It does not matter how Marx or Engels may have later on tried to interpret or explain away "the dictatorship of the proletariat”, we do not contemplate that the working class shall take power prematurely to get socialism, so I think we should write the whole thing off and have nothing whatever to do with it.

I have mentioned the fact that, as Marx said, capitalism changes and conditions develop, but in the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels wrote about some things which they said existed but which in fact did not exist. They talked about for example the world market being established and it had not. It has been a slow development for the world market to really become a world market. They also talked about society being divided into two great classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It was developing that way, and you could have said it about some countries, but they were anticipating something that would happen later.

In the Communist Manifesto you will find Marx and Engels putting the view, for which they have been often criticised, that average wages were nothing more than bare subsistence. This was a legitimate comment on capitalism at that time but it has long ceased to be true. Marx and Engels recognised this fact. You will find Engels in 1895 in the preface to the Condition of the Working Class in 1844 looking back and saying that there had been a remarkable improvement in the standard of living of the workers in the big trade unions.

Marx, of course, allowed for this to happen. In Value, Price and Profit he says that the division between wages and profit depends upon the "respective powers of the combatants". The fact that there has been a change in the distribution of the national income since 1865 when Marx wrote about it has a bearing on how you get from capitalism to socialism and I will explain later why I think this is important.

In coming to the question of production under socialism, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels said that the first task of socialist society would be "to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible". Marx returned to this again in the Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1875, where he attacked what he called "vulgar socialism” for thinking that the question of socialism turns mainly on the question of distribution. Marx developed his view on this in volume 3 of Capital and he also touched on it elsewhere. Marx described depressions in which a certain number of industries overproduce in relation to their particular market. Marx went out of his way to demonstrate that the fact that capitalists produce more than they can sell at a profit has nothing whatever to do with the quite different question: "Do they produce enough for the needs of the population?”

Marx said that capitalism never had produced enough to meet what he called the wants of the whole population "decently and humanely". It is still true that capitalism does not produce enough for the mass of the population. This is as true now as it was when Marx wrote about it. The point is that the first task of socialism would be as Marx and Engels said, to increase as rapidly as possible the production of socially useful consumption goods and services. Undoubtedly, powers of production have increased since 1848 and they have increased since 1867, but if we look at the fact that since 1867 the working class share of national income has

increased, the problem has not become less important, it has become more important, because there is less available for the working class to take out of the existing level of production.

There is another question here. Marx in his early life, and Engels in his later life, greatly exaggerated what the existing powers of production are. Marx corrected himself, more or less, but he still had an exaggerated idea. The relevance of this is that if you have an idea of the existing powers of production and the rate at which they are increasing which is greatly exaggerated, you are on very dangerous ground when you try to look at what has to be done in socialism. You are assuming that you have got productive powers which don't exist.

Getting the needle

In his early days Marx was quite wrong, but this was before he had worked out his labour theory of value. In The Poverty of Philosophy in 1847, he accepted a statement by Proudhon, that in the 70 years between 1770 and 1840, the average output of each worker had been multiplied 27 times. In fact it might have perhaps doubled. It is understandable that Marx should think like this because a whole lot of economists were in the same error. If any of you take the trouble to look up Adam Smith's fairy story about the pin factory in the first chapter of the Wealth of Nations you will find Adam Smith talking through his hat about productivity.

He was talking about the supposed increase of production that comes through division of labour. He goes through his pin factory and imagines pin workers, taking the wire and dividing the cutting and sharpening into 18 separate operations. Adam Smith ends up by saying that it will be seen that the output of the worker has been multiplied by 240 or possibly 4,800 times. If you were to ask somebody for a quotation for a job and he were to say. “Well, £240 — or perhaps £4.800," you would say that he does not know anything about it. and Adam Smith didn't know anything about it!

Where Marx went wrong in his early life, and Engels went wrong afterwards, was that they worked out productivity as Adam Smith did — that is, they worked on the assumption that pins are made in pin factories. But they are not. Pin factory workers started with wire and at a guess about nine-tenths of all the labour involved in making pins has already been embodied in the wire before it gets to the pin factory. Imagine that there are 100 workers producing millions of pins, and that ten of them work in pin factories. If you can cut the number of workers in the pin factories from 10 to 5, Adam Smith would say that this is a 100 per cent increase in productivity. But the real reduction in the number of workers is from 100 to 95, in other words it is an increase of about 5 per cent.

This is a vital question because if you are going into what socialism has got to do you have got to know what the productive powers are. Concerning the real rate of increase in production, taking 1970 to 1980, the official overall figure is that productivity per worker in those ten years increased at the rate of about 1¼ per cent per year. This is something that you can work with. The important thing to notice is that Marx, in Value, Price & Profit, explained the real basis for calculating productivity. He emphasised that in any production you must not only look at what he called the final process like the making of pins from wire. You have to look at the whole process from the beginning, the mining of the ore. the smelting, the transport, the engineering, buildings and therefore the whole lot. That was the way to look at productivity and its increase.

Arising out of this idea of how you are going to increase productivity, and what the powers of production are. Marx also looked at the question of work and leisure.

In Capital, Vol. 1, page 581 (Kerr edition), Marx emphasised that the capitalist had unlimited leisure, achieved by “converting the whole life time of the masses into labour time". He contrasted this with socialist society in which the time that society is bound to devote to material production is shorter. As a consequence, the time at its disposal for “the full development intellectual and moral of the individual" is greater. Under capitalism the workers work and the capitalists are idle, their time is leisure. With socialism everybody works so that the amount that each needs to work is less. But Marx did not look at this as a simple proposition, as some people would have it, that in socialism we will simply aim to work less and less and have more time for leisure. He did not take this view at all.

You will find that in the Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx used the phrase "when labour is no longer the means to live, but is in itself the first of vital needs". Marx is saying that labour is a vital need along with food, clothing and shelter and education. It will be remembered that with this phrase “from each according to his ability — to each according to his needs”, the original version had put the need first. Marx reversed it, and he did so because he attached great importance to "from each according to his ability" which is in line with this statement that “labour is in itself the first of vital needs”.

Marx also made some reference to the problem of the extent to which socialist society will have to choose between what in the capitalist world would be producing consumption goods and producing capital goods. In socialist society there will not be capital goods but the problem will still remain. Under capitalism, if you want to expand some industries you have to withdraw labour and material from producing consumption goods. It's true that later on you can increase productivity and get more consumption goods, but in the first place you have capital investment by withdrawing labour and materials from the production of consumption goods. Marx pointed out that the same problem will exist in socialism.

Socialist society will have the problem of deciding how much of its productive resources will be devoted to consumption goods and how much will be withdrawn from producing consumption goods to be devoted to long term projects designed to increase the production of consumption goods in the future. Marx used as an example the railways, which he said “do not produce any useful effect for a long time — a year or more.” Marx didn't know about modern capitalism, they would take far longer than a year if they were at it now. A similar idea was put in the Critique of the Gotha Programme where Marx points out the amount of annual production that has to be provided for the maintenance and extension of the means of production, and also the provision of reserves of goods to meet destruction arising out of natural catastrophes. He pointed out that capitalism always has to produce more of everything than actually reaches the market. Some of it gets destroyed by deterioration, there are earthquakes and floods and so on, and Marx is saying that with socialism you will have the same problem. You won't be able to abolish earthquakes by resolution. So society will have to set aside labour and resources for developing its productive forces and also to maintain a reserve against natural catastrophe.

Another remark made in the Communist Manifesto which has got a very modern ring, is that socialist society will have to devote some of its energy to bringing into cultivation waste lands and the improvement of the soil generally. Marx and Engels had already put on record in 1848. in the Communist Manifesto, that socialism involves the abolition of buying and selling, it involves the abolition of the wages system, and that in other words, socialism means what we would describe as having “free access". But in the Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx also put forward the idea that you could not go straight into what he called the higher phase of communism. Society, as it emerged from capitalism had to go into a lower phase, when as he said, it was suffering from what he called a narrow bourgeois outlook. He wasn't talking about the narrow bourgeois outlook of the capitalist, he was talking about the narrow' bourgeois outlook of everybody, including the workers. Marx said from this that you would have to have a labour voucher system.

Labour vouchers?

He said that in this "lower phase", because production wasn't enough for “free access" that is unrestricted free access, and also because people would suffer from a “narrow bourgeois outlook” and would not know how to run socialist society, you would have to have a labour voucher system. Every individual would work and would be issued with a labour voucher according to either the duration or intensity of the work. On the strength of whatever was marked on the paper the individual would withdraw consumer goods from the communal store.

My reaction is this, I know a lot of people treat it seriously, but I think we should throw the whole thing overboard for various reasons. We do not contemplate that the working class will take power for socialism while they are all suffering from a “narrow bourgeois outlook". In 1875, Marx and Engels knew that the material conditions for socialism did not exist, not in our sense of the word, nor in their long term sense of the word. Therefore they were saying that we would have a “dictatorship of the proletariat" which however way you interpret it means that you are basing it on the fact that there is a “narrow bourgeois outlook”.

Marx dodged all the real questions here. He says that you give people labour vouchers based either on duration or intensity of work. In spite of all the experts who deal with job evaluation and so on. I do not know for most industries any way at all by which you can measure the intensity of every individual’s work. There are some industries where you can look at the quantity produced in a day or a week or something like this, but Marx himself then goes on to say that this will result in some people having a higher standard of living than others because, to use his words, some individuals are mentally or physically superior to others and can therefore produce more in a given time or work longer hours.

I think we should reject the idea. Who is going to have the authority for issuing these tickets, how is it going to be done, and how is it going to satisfy these workers with a “narrow bourgeois outlook"? Imagine saying to half the workers, "of course you are going to have a higher standard of living than the other half".

Marx also mentioned that, apart from some people being mentally and physically superior to others, some would have larger families than others, so that as for 40 hours work, they both get the same, the ones with the larger families would all be on a lower standard of living. How did Marx contemplate making the dissatisfied workers accept this; how is he going to prevent them from raiding the food store or forging tickets or something like this? I would say that as we are not contemplating socialism coming when there is a "narrow bourgeois outlook”, we should have nothing whatever to do with it.

However, we do not get rid of one problem. This is the problem that in the early stage of socialism there will be not enough produced to have “free access" in our sense of the term. We have got to accept that there won’t be enough for free access all over the world.

We have also got to accept that sometimes there are big differences between the standard of living of some workers and the standard of living of others.

I read from The Times correspondent that he reckons that the highest paid craftsmen in this country are what he calls compositors working with obsolescent lino type machines who are getting £548 a week and they are working alongside people who are getting £70 or £80 a week. Well, imagine Marx with his labour voucher system going to these compositors and saying: “Well, of course, you will have to come down to some more realistic level for the time being".

I would suggest that as we don’t accept that there will be a “narrow bourgeois outlook” we are saying that the workers in the mass understand socialism, know what they are doing and know what their responsibilities are. That faced with the problem that there are 1,000 million people in the world in absolute poverty and that there are workers ranging from quite high standards of living down to a very low one, that with the advent of socialism, the obvious thing to do with the production problem is this. That it would be put to the workers that we are going to have free access, but the administrative organisation, whatever it is. appeals to the workers on a high standard of living: "Don’t take advantage of it”. In fact, ask them, in the early days of socialism, not only “don’t take advantage of it” but accept a lower standard of living and devote your energies, if necessary work longer, to try to help the people in the rest of the world who are on a standard of living far below you. This is the only socialist answer to this problem.

Edgar Hardcastle

(To be concluded next month.)