The Politicians and the Cost of Living (1955)

From the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

In all the elections of the ’twenties and ’thirties the chief issue was unemployment: who caused it and how to cure it. Since the war pride of place has been given to the cost of living: who sent it up and who will bring it down again. The attitudes of the Governments and the Opposition parties towards unemployment in the first period have been paralleled by their attitudes towards rising prices in the second. Each party claims that it will keep prices (or unemployment) down because it alone knows how. Each party when in power pretends to be surprised and displeased to find prices (or unemployment) rising, and trots out a glib excuse: it is due to strikes, high wages, or low productivity, or to world factors beyond the control of the Government in this country.

At no time has there been agreement between what the parties promised at elections and what they produced in office. Conservatives, Labour and Liberals, were all subscribers to the policy laid down in the document “Employment Policy" issued by the Coalition Government in 1944. Among other things it committed them to the policy of keeping prices down, and at successive elections they all promised to pursue the policy of avoiding a rising cost of living.

In or out of office they have put forward a number of schemes for achieving this, credit restrictions, higher Bank interest, rates, budget surpluses, increased national savings, bulk buying, price controls, limitation of dividends, restraint in wage demands, action against monopolies and price rings, food subsidies, etc., etc., without the upward movement of prices since 1938 being arrested.

Indeed prices have in fact risen since 1914 with only one downward movement—that which marked the deflation of the ’20’s. The cost of living in October, 1951, when the Labour Government left office, was about 40 per cent. above 1945, now it is 60 per cent.

We are faced then with the remarkable happening that those who keep on telling us that they can and will keep prices down if we put them into power go on asking for votes on no better ground than their total failure to do so when they were in power.

Yet one thing is certain. The Government’s financial advisers and at least some members of Tory and Labour Cabinets have known all along how to keep prices down or reduce them again to a former level. They know how to reducer the cost of living—which most electors want—but they dare not do it because they fear it would be accompanied by something most electors do not want—an increase of unemployment.

So by tacit agreement the party leaders fiercely fight a mock battle over the cost of living but avoid even a mention of the remedy known to them.

That is why no party has suggested that the method which did produce a fall in prices when it was adopted in 1920, namely currency control and limitation, should be tried now. Prices rose from 1914 owing to the expansion of the note issue and so long as that continued went on rising despite everything the Government did. Then by minute of 15 December, 1919, Austen Chamberlain announced that the Government would act on the recommendation of the Cunliffe Committee and would limit the fiduciary note issue for 1920 to £321 million, the maximum then reached in 1919, and that in subsequent years the permitted maximum would be the actual maximum of the preceding year. After a few months the effects of this policy of currency limitations became apparent and the trend of prices was reversed, affecting wholesale prices in the middle of 1920 and retail prices before the end of the year.

Later on the 1919 decision was abandoned and the note issue has been steadily increased, particularly since 1939. It now stands at £1,775 million, £50 million of which was added this year in April and May, £25 million on each occasion, and the Labour and Tory leaders who were responsible still affect to be surprised that the cost of living and prices generally have mounted accordingly.

If the Tory and Labour leaders now really believe their professed determination to lower prices why their reluctance even to suggest the renewed application of the policy which proved so effective when it was applied 35 years ago?

It is because both parties are convinced that such a policy is incompatible with "full employment,” that in fact full employment can only be kept going by a “little gentle dose of inflation.” As an unsigned article in the Financial Times phrased it:—

"Among considering people there can be few illusions over what the election is really about. It is a matter of voting for the party that is likely to do the least harm to the precarious economy in which we live. In short, for the party that will inflate the least.”—(Financial Times, 9/5/55.)

It might be thought that at least the politicians and their economic advisers have been right to practice this deception on the voters for it has been through their foresight and skill that we have been spared heavy unemployment. But before anyone starts complimenting them on their cleverness in thinking beforehand that the way to avoid heavy unemployment was to pursue a policy of inflation and consequent rising costs of living he should turn to the 1944 statement on “Employment Policy,” which shows that they did not foresee this at all but then believed the opposite. They were all committed to maintaining “full employment,” but the 1944 policy statement held that it could only be achieved if prices and wages did not go on rising but remained “reasonably stable.” The idea was that if prices were kept down the workers could be persuaded to accept “wage restraint.”

Between the wars, when prices were falling, workers’ struggles to raise or even to maintain money wages were impeded by the heavy unemployment.

After the war, when the Labour Government came into office, they intended to operate the policy of the 1944 statement and have both prices and wages stable. In the “Labour Party Speakers’ Handbook,” 1949-50 (p. 207) it was claimed that during the first two years of Labour Government from 1945 to 1947, “prices were kept fairly stable”; though critics maintained with undeniable evidence that it was the cost of living index that was kept down, not the cost of living. After 1947, when even the Labour Government could not, in face of its own figures, deny that the cost of living was rising the “wage restraint” policy was restated and emphasised by the late Sir Stafford Cripps. It was only partially successful and money wages went on rising, though all the time lagging behind the soaring cost of living. The situation was unlike that between the wars but it was a distinction without a real difference. Then the employers' ally against the workers’ efforts to raise their standard of living was unemployment, now the usefulness of every increase of wages and insurance benefits was subject to ceaseless erosion by higher prices, which whittled away the purchasing power of every pound.

And this has been the chosen policy of all post-war Governments. A milestone in the inflationary trend was the devaluation of the pound by the Labour Government in 1949. They knew this must raise the cost of living though they continued to make their stock speeches about their resolve to keep it from rising.

Also all the Governments since the war have made great efforts to persuade the workers to go without purchases they would normally have made and to save the money instead. Since the Governments knew that their currency and devaluation policies would raise the cost of living this savings drive was but a further deception, the losers being those who put their money into National Savings.

True, if they invested £50 they have received interest and eventually have the £50 back, but at that later date it buys very much much less than could have been bought with the original £50. The big investor who went for company ordinary shares suffered no such loss as the prices of their shares went up along with other prices.

We may be sure that future Tory and Labour Governments, so long as they go on fearing that heavy unemployment would put them out of office, will continue their policy of gentle inflation and their two-faced policy of promising to reduce the cost of living without any intention of doing so by the means they know would be effective.

What happened between the wars and what has happened since are just two faces of the capitalist system of society. Of course a disturbance of the precarious balance of world production and markets of the size and pattern of that which occurred in 1931 will find the currency inflation remedy helpless to stop a collapse.

In 1931, as now, the S.P.G.B. pointed out that the one way not to have unemployment and price fluctuations to be have a system of society in which commodities, among them the workers power to labour, are not bought and sold—the system of society known as Socialism.

Edgar Hardcastle

Hire Purchase (1955)

From the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

“To Have and Have Not”

It is often said that Punch is the great social historian of the last 100 years. Since comic journals thrive on aptness rather than humour, they do in fact provide a minor guide to changes in manners and morals.

A joke that has entirely disappeared now is the one about “the instalments on the furniture.” Continually, in magazines of the 1920’s little boys blurted out that the settee wasn't paid for, and men called to take back the chairs when guests had come to tea—the psychology being that, 25 years ago, to buy on hire-purchase was to have a guilty secret.

All different nowadays, of course. There are even good, wise reasons for instalment buying: for example, if the thing goes wrong the firm will see to it. Hire-purchase is an accepted social fact. Last year, half the radio sets, seven-tenths of the furniture and bedding and vacuum cleaners and TV sets, and nearly all the refrigerators and washing machines sold in this country were bought on hire-purchase. “Cash only” shops are the exceptions now, and very recently the instalment system has spread as far as air travel and holidays.

That is not to say all reprehension of hire-purchase has ceased. Generally, there have been two sorts of objections to it. The one voiced by most working people in the past was strictly practical: “I’m hanging no millstone of weekly payments round my neck,” said the poor, poverty-hardened man in Love on the Dole. The other objection was that to have something before paying for is wrong—apparently a moral view but in fact only cash customer’s attitude. The people who largely held that view were the better-off, professional and black-coated workers; since the war their position has declined, and so consequently has their moral objection to hire-purchase. Many of the “swell” shops, in fact, now advertize hire-purchase facilities.

Hire-purchase trading has gone on for at least a century. Before 1914 it was mainly a hole-and-corner business (nevertheless, plenty of suits were bought at a shilling a week). Its growth between two wars went with the mass-production of cheap luxuries—gramophones, bicycles, radio sets; the first legislation to regularize it in this country was in 1938. The great boom in instalment buying came after the second war, however. Some idea of its extent is given by the banks’ statement of their loans to hire-purchase finance companies. The total in February, 1955, was £30,493,000, compared with £11,188,000 in February, 1954. The sum actually was greater, since many loans for general trading went mainly into hire-purchase; and in the same period several of the companies made capital issues.

Few shops finance their own hire-purchase trading—in fact, only the very big ones. Most of them borrow from hire-purchase credit companies, which often buy the goods themselves, receive the instalments themselves, and leave the shopkeeper as little more than an agent. There are several organizations for checking on prospective buyers. Every hire-purchase customer has his particulars filed (including how he pays); investigators discover all they can about him, and the information is filed for future reference. In America, according to a recent Picture Post article, the files include; “. . . intimate details and frank character assessments. Facts include positions and salaries of all members of a family, bank balances, litigation records, all past time buying deals, estimates of business or professional prospects, value of house or mortgage position, or amount of rent and how paid, local reputation and probably social habits. Police records are included.”

Hire-purchase buying is dear. It has to be. There are the book-keeping and the postage and the enquiry fees and the advertisements (last year the Gas Council and Hoover Products each spent about a quarter of a million pounds on advertizing); the “free” maintenance is really, of course, covered in the cost. The rates of interest range from five to ten per cent. At least, those are the nominal figures: calculated on a diminishing debt they are much higher—over two years, the usual period for furniture, they actually average out at something like 20 per cent. The number of bad debts is said to be small, and hire-purchase firms try everything before resorting to court action, which usually is fruitless for them.

Outside the main stream of instalment trading, there are innumerable related concerns; for example, the cooperative societies’ “mutuality shares,” where vouchers are issued to be exchanged for all sorts of goods. Then there are the clothing clubs, and a host of door-to-door easy-payment salesmen—many of the latter charging rates of interest which are exorbitant even by hire-purchase standards, and having no advertizing or accounting costs to speak of. Incidentally, cars do not figure in hire-purchase as much as would be imagined; most are bought by bank overdraft and re-mortgaging houses.

From the economists’ point of view, instalment buying is simply the form taken by the demand for certain sorts of goods today. Thus, when the number of new contracts fell last year in America, the Government hurriedly urged traders to get things back to normal. And in this country the recent restrictions on hire-purchase were headlined by the Manchester Guardian as “Plans to Limit Demand for Goods.” A fair enough estimate; with the minimum deposit raised to 15 per cent., the demand for furniture has fallen to not much more than half what it was a year ago.

To see hire-purchase as something which—vide Fyfe Robertson in Picture Post—"puts real wealth, which otherwise would not be acquired so quickly, into consumers’ hands and raises living standards,” is to grasp flight appearances, however. It is easy enough to point to all the television sets, but television is only the newest replacement for the piano, and pianos were a far greater luxury in their heyday. Before the wireless era, one cost as much as a television set today—that is, anything between £40 and £70, at a time when money wages were much lower.

But to consider living standards in terms of luxuries is to succumb to advertizers’ patter. The fact is that working people obtain luxuries only at the expense of other things. How can a family with £8 a week get them otherwise? The other things may, of course, be minor luxuries themselves—drinking, pictures, smoking; a small boom in smoking cures has accompanied the big one in hire-purchase. They may, on the other hand, be necessities—food and clothing; or the “solution” for a good many families is the wives’ going to work. Whichever way it is, there is not much to confirm the idea of better, more gracious living for the working class.

“Luxuries” is the wrong word, anyway. There is nothing luxurious about buying clothes by instalments, knowing they will be half worn-out before they are paid for: “pay as you wear” has the sound of eternity. True, furniture is more durable—it is outmoded instead of wearing out in two or three years. A favourite sneer of precious suburban aesthetes is that working people lack taste. An ignorant untruth, as the beautiful little gardens in the dingiest surroundings show; but in any case, there is no scope, for modishness when things are bought over two years to last for 20. Most people, in fact, buy furniture only once in their lives—as the hire-purchase advertisements, with their single-minded appeal to the newlywed testify.

Probably the best example of this sort of thing is the way in which television sets have superseded one another since the war. Each latest model, gaining its owner the maximum of prestige, has been rendered inferior long before the final payment. There cannot be much feeling of luxury about having given up smoking to buy a set with a nine-inch screen five years ago and finding it primitive by today’s 17-inch standards.

The truth is that hire-purchase is a monument to poverty, not a pillar of prosperity. People can buy more things, by whatever method, only if they have more money. For a year or so after the war there was no hire-purchase; it began as the briefly spectacular spending of the gratuity era faded. It is hard to believe that anybody enjoys paying instalments—indeed, these commitments add to the tension of modern living. There is no alternative except going without, however. It is all very well to think people can save up to buy, but it doesn’t work out like that—and in any rase, it means going without just the same. The rise of hire-purchase and the decline of the pawnshop are probably not unconnected.

The average gross wage of male workers today is just under £9; for women, it is just over £5. According to the Chancellor of Exchequer in November last year, there were 8,600,000 receiving less than 96s. a week. Compare those figures with pre-war ones, remembering the cost of living today as 2 1/3 times what it was in 1938. In that year, 63.2 per cent, of the families in Britain received under £5 a week, and 11.8 per cent, between £5 and £10. About the same time, John Strachey did some calculations—slightly tortuous, admittedly—in “The Theory and Practice of Socialism” to show that “the real earnings of the working class in 1934 were only 91.1 per cent., of what they were in 1900.” The only conclusion is that the buying power of working people is much the same as it has always been—small; hire-purchase is the latest manifestation of the smallness.

One other aspect of hire-purchase needs to be mentioned. It helps to discipline the working class. The man with heavy commitments—or the American worker who values his “credit rating”—is the man who must keep his job at all costs. Bernard Shaw’s Andrew Undershaft preferred religious workmen because they were sober and honest and amenable; nowadays his ideal would be the employee buying a dining-room suite. The recent Government Economic Survey mentioned that more than a quarter of industrial operatives worked overtime last year, and it is a sad but fair comment that more than a quarter probably want to work overtime this year, too.

Ours is the age of mass-production. One would imagine it to be an age of plenty, but it is not so. It is a queer reflection that, in this world of science and power, the majority of people have to buy trashy products bit by bit and perhaps abstain from necessities in the process. Profit is often imagined as the greatest incentive to progress; in reality, it is the fetter. The hire-purchase system is a fresh pointer to the outstanding contradiction of capitalism: the inability of a productive system which has industrialized the world to perform the only real function of production—the satisfaction of people’s needs.

Robert Barltrop

Party News Briefs (1955)

Party News from the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ealing Branch. The special May campaign to increase the sales of the S.S. has got off to an exceptionally fine start. At the time of writing (the middle of the month) over 35 dozen copies have been sold, and everybody is confident that the target of 50 dozen will be more than realised before the end of the month. The regular canvassers have been heartened by the support of members new to this form of activity, who in turn have been agreeably surprised by the results obtained. The Branch Literature Committee are confident that there is no reason why these figures should not be further increased; all that is required is a steadily increasing number of members prepared to canvass. It is as easy for the Committee to organise a canvass with a dozen members, as it is to organise a party of six—and even more stimulating!

Approval of the Branch’s scheme to distribute back copies of the S.S. has been given by the E.C., and several hundred have already been disposed of in this way. Members unable to canvass are asked to get in touch with the Branch Literature Secretary and offer their help in this form of literature activity.

The first of the Branch’s propaganda excursions takes place on Sunday, 5th June, when two cars will be taking members to Southsea. Other meetings will follow in the course of the season.

Finally, will all members note that outdoor meetings will be held, weather permitting, every Saturday afternoon, at Ealing Green. Please give your support, if you can.

* * *

Bradford Branch say that their canvassing drive at Dewsbury is still going strong. They report that they sell four to five dozen Standards each month (not three dozen as mentioned in April) and of the former, three dozen Standards are sold to regular readers.

* * *

May Day arrangements in London and the Provinces were hampered through the very bad weather. In London the Hyde Park meetings were cancelled but despite this, there was a good audience in the evening at Conway Hall, where Comrades May and Coster gave very interesting talks on May Day and aims and objects of die Party.

Reports are not in from Glasgow, but we understand that very good evening meetings were held there.

Nottingham Branch report that Comrades Keys and Warlow addressed about 250 workers on Market Square on the Saturday before May Day, the meeting lasted from 7 to 10 p.m. On the Sunday morning the “Nottingham Labour Day Demonstration” was held, although it was raining heavily. Our speakers attempted to hold a meeting but the rain forced them to abandon it. A good meeting, however, was held for about an hour, between heavy rain showers, in the afternoon. About 10s. worth of literature was sold during the two days. Branch members find that Market Square is a good station for propaganda meetings and they are aware of sympathetic interest from the audience.

* * *

Swansea Branch has not been in a position to hold any propaganda meetings during the last four months, but their activities have been directed in writing to the Press —letters stating the Party’s Object have appeared in the South Wales Evening Post, Llanelly Star, Neath Guardian, Western Mail and Swansea Voice. An attempt is also being made to advertise the Party’s literature in the Swansea Voice.

Phyllis Howard

Notes by the Way: Whose May Day? (1955)

The Notes by the Way Column from the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whose May Day?

At one time May Day was an occasion on which workers demonstrated international solidarity and drew attention to current claims and grievances. Such May Day meetings were frowned upon by governments and employers, but things are different now. Many governments have taken over May Day and from the side of the workers the demonstrations are often nationalist not internationalist. The following are reports of May Day activities in various countries.

CELEBRATIONS IN MOSCOW 

“Moscow, May 1st.

“Four giant new cannon, which might be capable of firing atomic shells, took part to-day in Moscow's traditional May Day military parade. The emphasis in planning the parade was on air power but because of low cloud and steady rain there was no fly-past”—(Manchester Guardian, 2/5/55.)

“CHINA.—Buddhist monks and nuns in long, flowing saffron and red robes marched with long columns of workers past Mao Tse-tung and other Chinese Communist leaders.

“Mr. Harry Pollitt, Secretary-General of the British Communist Party, was among the foreign guests,

“The Mayor of Peking, Peng Chen, called for the strengthening of national defences and opposing of American occupation of our sacred territory of Formosa.' Balloons with 'Free Formosa’ slogans were carried.”—(Daily Mail, 2/5/55.)

“GERMANY.—East Germany’s growing armed forces were paraded in the Soviet sector of Berlin in a giant demonstration evidently designed to impress Berliners with the Communist capacity to counter West German rearmament.

“West German trade unionists at mass meetings issued a demand for a 40-hour week to replace the present 48-hour week.”—(Daily Mail, 2/5/55.)

“GREECE.— Free Cyprus was the theme of May Day in Athens, with prayers in churches calling for Divine blessing on the ‘liberation struggle '."—(Daily Mail, 2/5/55.)

THE POPE BLESSES WORKERS 

MAY DAY IN ROME 

From our Correspondent 

Rome, May 1st.

“Labour Day was celebrated with great pomp in Rome, where the tenth anniversary of the foundation of the Italian Workers’ Catholic Association (A.C.LI.) was made to synchronise with it. Some 150,000 Catholic workers from all over Italy made a pilgrimage to St. Peter’s, where they were addressed this afternoon by the Pope.

"The Pope, who came down to St. Peter’s Square to bless the workers, announced the institution of a new feast that of St. Joseph the Workman, with which Labour Day will henceforth be celebrated by the Church. He said that he did this in order that May 1st might receive Christian baptism, so that, 'far from being a stimulus for discord, hate, and violence,’ it should be 'a recurring invitation to modern society to accomplish that which is still lacking for social peace.” —(Manchester Guardian, 2/5/55.)

MAY 1, “LOYALTY DAY” 

Washington, April 28th.

“President Eisenhower to-day proclaimed May 1st as loyalty day and called on citizens to observe it 'by reaffirming their loyalty to our beloved country'." Reuter.—(Manchester Guardian, 29/4/55.)

More Prisoners, In Worse Prisons

There are more people in prison today than there were before the war and more than at the beginning of the century. In the debate on Prisoners in the House of Lords on 4th May, 1955, Lord Pakenham commented on the decline of the number of people in prisons and Borstal institutions from 24,000 in 1953 to 21,000 at the present time, but added: “There is still nearly twice the pre-war figure of about 11,000.”

His figures related to England and Wales only. The total for the United Kingdom, after adding Scottish and Northern Ireland prisons, was 13,005 in 1938 and 26,224 in 1952. (See “Annual Abstract of Statistics, 1954, pages 58-68).

A corresponding figure representing the daily average prison population for the years 1900-1904 was 18,775, and the number in 1913-14 was 17,056. (“English Prisons Today” Brockway, p. 28).

In the House of Lords debate Lord Templewood, who has long been active as a prison reformer, regretted that our “Welfare State” has not dealt with this problem “in a common sense and urgent manner.” He said that though “over the last generation we have had a series of great prison reformers . . . in certain respects, particularly in the matter of accommodation and work, so far from making any progress in a world in which a great deal of progress has been made in other walks of life, we have actually fallen back, I would almost say 50 or 60 years.” (Col. 758.)

He went on:—

“To-day there exists a thing unheard of in the days when I or my predecessors were connected with the Home Office. No fewer than 4,595 prisoners are confined three in a cell; they are shut up in that cell about tea-time in the afternoon, and left there with nothing to do until the following morning. A state of affairs like that would have horrified the great penal reformers of the past, who made our system one of the best in the world.”

Lord Huntingdon thought that something should be done, “not only from the humanitarian or Christian standpoint,” but also from the economic point of view—the cost of prisons is nearly £10 million a year and this could be reduced if the prisoners did more useful work.

He described appalling sanitary conditions which would be a “ disgrace to a Hottentot village.”

Lord Chorley said:—

“There are still in existence jails which were condemned long before the First World War and which are not fit to house swine, let alone human beings.”

Taxing the Rich out of Existence ?

For half a century the Labour Party has been lamenting the existence of the very rich and promising to do something to end, or at least to diminish, inequality of property ownership. The rich themselves and the Tory Party joined with the Labour Party in agreeing that as a fact, whether desirable or not, the rich were disappearing. From time to time, however students of the subject intervene to point out that extermination by taxation had plainly failed and the rich were still with us, not noticeably reduced or inconvenienced.

It is a fact that the concentration of property ownership in the hands of a very small minority has not been materially altered by the ups and downs, war and crises of the past half century.

A special correspondent of the “Times Review of Industry” (April 1955, page 109) has bean analysing the report of the Inland Revenue Department and has drawn some interesting conclusions.

Dealing with duties levied on properties left at death he remarks on the very large proportion of the total payments that came from the small number of large estates: “ This year 97 per cent. of the total duty was paid by 16,514 estates (those over £10,000), and 5,205 estates (those over £25,000) paid 87 per cent.”

The year in question was 1953-4, in which there were in all 71,510 estates that paid duty (estates under £2,000 are not included in these figures as they paid no duty in that year).

The writer of the article had forecast a year ago that the Chancellor of the Exchequer would receive less revenue from estate duties. This turned out to be wrong and the Chancellor actually received £10 million more than on the previous year. Part of this increase is attributed to the rise in share prices on the Stock Exchange— “no doubt the rise in stock market values has helped to swell the capital value of estates. . .”

The writer makes an estimate from the official figures of the income and property of the wealthiest group, those with income above £12,000 (before tax) and with estates above £250,000.

He finds that this group (at present numbering about 2,900) have investments worth £1,300 million. The net income of the group (after paying tax) is about £10 million a year whereas the same group are paying out on estate duty some £40 million a year. In spite of this, he writes, “the class is by no means declining in numbers. . .” and note his final comment:—

“No doubt in many instances the high taxation is offset by tax-free capital profits, but even so the steady increase of a class which, in theory, is being taxed out of existence shows the remarkable resilience of capital in a welfare State."

Crime in America

“The crime rate in the United States rose in 1954 for the seventh consecutive year, Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, reported to-day. Major crimes committed last year numbered 2,267,250.

The statistics, published in the bureau’s annual crime report, showed that the crime rate has increased by 26.7 per cent since 1950, while the population increased by seven per cent, in the same period. On an average day last year an estimated 34 persons were feloniously slain and 256 other felonious assaults were committed; 49 rapes occurred; 3,674 larcenies were committed; 592 cars were stolen; and there were 185 robberies and 1,422 burglaries.” (Manchester Guardian, 26.4.1955.)

Mental Illness Hits One in Twenty

The following is taken from a report in the Manchester Guardian (24 March, 1955) of an address given by Mr. Walter Maclay, of the Ministry of Health, at a Mental Health Research Fund Meeting at the Mansion House on the previous evening:—

“Nearly half of all the institutional beds available for all forms of illness, he said, were, in fact, required for patients suffering from mental illness. Anything from 10 to 30 per cent. of all patients seen in general practice were not suffering from physical illness at all, but from some form of psychotic or neurotic condition. One in 20 of all children born would spend some time in a mental hospital. It was most important in the national interest that more should be found out about the causes of such illness and how to cure and prevent it. Research was going on continuously, but it was not enough—it was the object of the Research Fund to provide more opportunities for such research in related fields and, if possible, to co-ordinate them."

Edgar Hardcastle

Editorial: Slums doubled since 1933 (1955)

Editorial from the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

In their election manifesto, “United for Peace and Progress,” the Conservatives promised to start a programme for clearing the slums and aiming to rehouse “at least 200,000 people a year from them.” (P. 23).

As the Conservative Minister of Housing, Mr. Duncan Sandys, put the probable number of slum houses at a million (Manchester Guardian, 12/1/55) and as you can reckon that there are between three and four million people living in that million slum houses, it would take a very long time to clear the existing slums at the rate proposed. And in the meantime more slums will have appeared out of the other millions of old and dilapidated houses.

The Conservative manifesto went on to make the claim that “there has been only one full-scale slum clearance drive in British history, and that was when Conservatives were in office in the late ’thirties.”

But, according to the Labour Party’s “Handbook 1951” (p. 234), that Conservative slum clearance programme had closed or demolished only 245,000 slums by March, 1939, so that nearly half of the original 1933 estimate of 472,000 slums were still being lived in.

It will be observed that, according to this estimate, there are about four times as many slums now as there were in 1939 and double the number that existed in 1933.

Slum clearance fares no better in New York according to an article by Mr. Gerard Fay in the Manchester Guardian (9 May, 1955). There, too, they plan to abolish the slums and “the housing now planned, when built, will be a victory over a problem which must once have seemed insoluble, but it will be far from total victory.”

“At the end of 1952 there were still 426,792 apartments in the city which were more than 50 years old. This does not sound alarming by European standards but New York tenements more than 50 years old, especially in Manhattan, are often below, far below, any decent housing standard.”

He writes of “ the more than a 100,000 apartments in New York which have no private bath or toilet . . . an equal number which have no running water or are classified as * dilapidated,’. . .  the more than 50,000 which have cold water only.”

Lastly, “the housing shortage could be ended and the slum problem finally solved only by building something like 400,000 apartments. The present plans fall far below this ideal."

Spring Song after the Election (1955)

From the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another Election has come and gone.

The tumult’s ended, the shouting’s done.

Tweedledum’s lost, and Tweedledee’s won.

Loud sing cuckoo!

Lib., Lab., Con.,—and C.P. too,

Made up a right reformist crew,

Dispensing the usual vote-catching brew.

Loud sing cuckoo!

Liberal and Tory, C.P. and Lab.,

All full of promises, all full of gab.

Labour with ’Erbie, Tories with Rab,

Loud sing cuckoo!

Sugar and soft soap again the rule.

Kissing the babies, playing the fool,

Nice glossy photos to make the girls drool.

Loud sing cuckoo!

Candidates handsome, candidates plain,

Candidates pleasing with might and main,

All to keep capitalism running again.

Loud sing cuckoo!

All the old catchcries out once more,

Canvassers knocking at every front door,

First they’d been seen since the barney before,

Loud sing cuckoo!

Street-comer meetings, things of the past, 

Democracy’s symbol’s a radio mast.

Now its the “ telly ’’—with all star cast.

Loud sing cuckoo!

Millions of workers put down their crosses, 

Applauded the “gains,” regretted the “losses,” 

Fine difference it made, they still work for bosses, 

Loud sing cuckoo!

So the farcical game goes on.

Tweedledum’s lost and Tweedledee’s won.

Another Election has come and gone,

Loud sing cuckoo!

Stan Hampson

The Question (1955)

From the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

On January 7 the magistrate of Clerkenwell Court was asked: “The railways are public property, aren’t they? ” and he gave the following answer:—

“The nationalised railways don’t belong to you and they don't belong to me. They may belong to us—in a peculiar kind of way.”

Now, dear reader, if they do not belong to me and do not belong to you, it is obvious that they do not belong to the plural pronoun, us, just as the National Consolidated Debt does not belong to us.

The Fruit of Illusion (1955)

From the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the American periodical The Nation (April 23rd) an article appears by G. D. H. Cole. It is a very pessimistic article. Cole considers that the Socialist movement has lost its way and is not what it was when he joined it long ago in the days of Jaures, Kautzky, Keir Hardie, and the Webbs. His principal disappointment concerns the International aspect of the movement and the national concentration upon ends that are not Socialist.

 

In the early part of his article Cole writes:

“When I joined the Socialist movement in England, it never occurred to me to doubt that I was accepting an international obligation and a loyalty that transcended national frontiers. My task, as I saw it, was to play my small part in a great crusade for human brotherhood that would make an end of the exploitation of man by man and of country by country, destroying capitalism and imperialism together and putting in their place a world society set free from war and hatred to devote its energies and vast resources to banishing poverty and slavery from every country.”

He then goes on to ask “Where are that task and those efforts now?”; and he claims that since 1917 there have been “two sharply antagonistic movements, each claiming to be the torch-bearer of the true Socialism but at bitter conflict about the means of advancing towards their goal and even about the goal itself.” Cole did not go far enough back. The trouble started tong before 1917. It started with the groups he thought so much of in his early days—the German and English Social Democratic Parties, the Fabian Society, the Independent Labour Party, and, finally, the Labour Party. It was their concentration upon “immediate aims,” which included a multitude of reforms, that landed the movement in the morass in which it finds itself to-day. The result is a logical development «of the early policy. But Cole can‘t see this; he wants to go back and start all over again the policies that can only bear its present fruit. His disappointment is the result of his failure to grasp the essential difference between a revolutionary and a reformist policy, and the inevitable result of the latter.

Later on in his article he writes, referring to the cleavage between the Social Democratic and the Communist movement:

"I have never been able to accept as final this sharp cleavage in what I still think of as fundamentally a single world-wide movement against oppression. I am no Communist, for I detest the suppression of all free thinking which Communists not only regard as needful, but seem positively to admire. 1 hate cruelty, rigid discipline, and the vindictive mistrust which the Communist philosophy appears to involve. I cannot, however, for that reason consent to regard the peoples of the Communist countries, or the Communists of my own or other countries, as enemies with whom I have nothing in common. I have much in common with them. I share their wish to help all the subject peoples of the world to emancipate themselves from foreign imperialist rule; I admire their planned economies and their vast achievements in economic construction; and I see them, on one condition, as advancing, however deviously, toward a classless society and an expansion of freedom for the ordinary man and woman in the affairs of everyday living. The one condition is, of course, that they escape from the ever-present peril of utterly destructive world war, fear of which poisons their behaviour and forbids them luxuries of common honesty and decent tolerance."

The above is some measure of Cole’s lack of insight, and how much the fear of war has clouded his vision. To suggest that fear of world war is a determining factor in the behaviour and the dishonesty of the leaders of the Russian Communist Party is just nonsense. Their reformism, their twisting of Marxism, their internal strife and their mutual wiping out of each other, is based on far more than that. And Cole’s admiration of their achievements is in line with his own life-long support of reformism. His description of the present position of the Social Democrats is interesting from two points of view; he recognises the position of futility they have reached but he also accepts that Socialism does include “national endeavours to advance gradually.” Here is his description:

“I am assuredly no Communist. But no more am I a Democratic Socialist if this means renouncing the Socialist revolution and reducing socialism to a set of independent electoral movements designed to gain parliamentary majorities with the support of non-Socialist voters. I do not deny the need for parliamentary action, but I do deny that Socialism means no more than a number of national endeavours to advance gradually and constitutionally toward the welfare state. Even where nominally Socialist parties have gained majority support, they have never attempted to establish Socialism; even their attempts to further welfare have shown signs of petering out after their initial successes, owing to the difficulty of advancing further without disturbing the smooth working of the capitalist structure—to which they are supposed to be hostile—and the fear that by attacking it they will alienate marginal support. This seems to be the position in the Scandinavian countries, as well as in Great Britain."

He adds to the above that in Europe “the Democratic Socialist parties, in their fear of Communist aggression” seem to be prepared to acquiesce in rearmament, including atomic weapons and hydrogen bombs and finishes a paragraph about these measures with the following remarks:—

"They are being forced on the Socialist parties by a reactionary leadership that has come to be more anti-communist than pro-Socialist and sees nothing amiss in turning to capitalist America as its ally against the Communists."

Cole then proceeds to outline his own position, stating at the outset that old Socialists like himself—"Internationalists and non-Communists ”—find themselves in a terribly difficult position, faced with a conflict of loyalties, loyalty to their parties or loyalty to Socialism as an essentially international cause. The Labour Party, he says, has no clear vision of what to do and “its recent programmes have been quite remarkably ineffective and even trivial.” And then he puts the question:—

"What, then, is to be done? The Socialism to which I was converted in my youth was the fruit of long, hard, and passionate thinking, subsequently translated into policies, not for the full establishment of a Socialist way of life, but for the first steps towards it."

Earlier he had claimed something was badly amiss "with the development of Socialist thought in face of the vast change in the problems mankind must face in order to progress, or even to survive.” To meet this and to get out of the mess in which social democracy had landed he makes his proposals. Before doing so he gives voice to the deep-rooted feelings of the intellectual who has cursed the radical movement by his self-appointed function of leading the ignorant. Here is how he puts it:—

“Besides, mass parties cannot think; they can only be influenced by the thinking of individuals or small groups of people who are prepared to think for them." 

and here is the thinking of one of those individuals:—

“With these ideas in mind, I have come to the conclusion that an attempt should be made to establish internationally a small society, or order, of Socialists who would pledge themselves to do their best to restate the essentials of their Socialist faith in terms applicable to the present world situation. . . . The immediate task of this group would be not to act but to think together and to plan— to restate Socialist principles in relation to the most pressing contemporary problems, and to base on these principles a broad programme of action in which the various national movements could be called upon to play their part. Each member of the group, or order, would publicize its ideas in his own country and try to induce the national leaders to take them up."

So there we are, back to where the Labour Party came in, with the Fabian Society producing the ideas and policy that helped to lead them into the present mess. No fundamental change in outlook, just a different bottle to contain the same old illusions. And far from the problems having changed, they are just the same, only in one direction aircraft, mechanisation and the bomb, have replaced horse-drawn cannon and the maxim gun.

These are some of the practical suggestions Cole thinks come from this new group:—

"first, a clearly defined attitude toward the making and potential use of atomic weapons; second, a well-thought-out plan of campaign for a 'war upon want' designed to equalize, as nearly as possible, conditions of living in all countries; third, plans for a world economic structure that will avoid the evils both of capitalism and of bureaucratic centralization and will open up for the workers in every country rapidly increasing opportunities for democratic, responsible self-government in their working lives; and fourth, the complete ending of imperialist domination, both political and economic, and the extension of self-governing independence to all peoples.”

Here they are, the same old windy type of high-faluting propositions, the practical application of which would only land the proposers in the present position of the movement they have supported, and this is the result of a life-time of experience! The intellectual never learns, he only prophesies and proposes; then weeps at the result and lays the blame on others.

When Cole started operations there was a party in existence which kept its course steadfastly to the accomplishment of Socialism and opposed all reformist policies. This Party was the Socialist Party of Great Britain, but Cole would have nothing to do with it because it opposed reformism. There is the World Socialist Party of America, and parties in other countries, which take the same line as we do, but Cole still ignores our existence, preferring to follow the path of reformist illusion.

Gilmac.

Prisoner’s Story (1955)

Book Review from the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the summer of 1953 Rupert Croft-Cooke, a novelist by profession, was arrested on a charge of homosexuality. A few months later he appeared before the Quarter Sessions at Lewes, was found guilty on some charges and not guilty on others, and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. Apart from a few days at Brixton he served out his sentence (actually six months, allowing for remission) in Wormwood Scrubs. His book, “The Verdict of You All,” is the story of his experiences there.

Rupert Croft-Cooke, to judge by the scraps of personal information scattered throughout his book, has not been too hardly dealt with by life. Well-educated, much-travelled, a lover of things good to eat and drink, he was living a well-ordered and comfortable existence in the Sussex countryside until he was rudely awakened one night by the village policeman and two detectives. These, after due observance of the usual legal ceremonial, took him off to the local police station, and from then on he found himself in a world he had hardly known existed. “The Verdict of You All” records his reactions to, and observations of, this world into which he was so suddenly and so rudely thrown, an alien world inhabited by beings he had heard about only through the crime stories of newspapers, a world a million miles removed from the bright and comfortable surroundings he had been accustomed to enjoy.

To those who cherish comforting delusions about the wonderful reforms that are supposed to have been wrought in our prisons, this book will come as a shock. The tale told by the author is of a penal system grim, drear, unimaginative, means, and degrading – to prisoner and keeper alike. It tells only of Wormwood Scrubs and Brixton the first a prison for first offenders serving sentences of six months and over, the second for men sentenced to less than six months. Only briefly and occasionally does he make mention of places such as Dartmoor, most notably on the occasion when some of its inmates were sent up the Scrubs to receive their annual visits from relatives unable to make the journey to Princetown. To the author these men conveyed

“by their very appearance and movements, dark horrors suffered, depths of evil and desperation, which the Star prisoners of Wormwood Scrubs had never known.”

Yet the picture he draws of even a Star prison like Wormwood Scrubs is frightening in its grimness; and of Brixton, which he thinks is much worse, he is vitriolic. This is his account of the sight that met him on his entry for the first time into Wormwood Scrubs:–

“A long interior street on each side of which are rows of identical cell doors. The floor of this street is of concrete, the doors are blank and painted a dull cream with formidable black bolts on each and a small eye-hole. The street is a hundred yards long, lit with naked not-too-powerful electric bulbs and running down to iron railings and a gated wall at the far end… There was, as we entered, complete silence in this grim and ugly street and it was hard to realise that behind each of the uniform doors was a man in a cell.”

There are four floors like this, each containing 80 cells. At the level of the first floor is stretched wire-netting to lessen the risk of suicide from those throwing themselves over from the upper floors, and also prevent injury from articles dropped intentionally from above. The author adds:–

“A prison ‘hall’ realises the hopes of its original architect for it is probably the ugliest structure ever conceived by man… From entry to discharge the prisoner never sees anything inanimate which is not positively ugly, and of living things there is nothing on which the eye can bear to dwell, except occasionally the faces of some fellow-prisoners.”

So much for Wormwood Scrubs. His description of Brixton is even more horrifying.

“It would be difficult to imagine and impossible to create a more rank and stagnant breeding-ground of evil than Brixton goal. Life at the Scrubs was not without a certain gloomy dignity; a prisoner could pass his days there with no affront to his manhood and the men he met were often rumbustious sinners with a tale to tell. Here everything was mean and degrading – the very appearance of the place was grimed…

“C Wing, in which most of the convicted men were herded, was a ‘hall’ about half the size of those in the Scrubs, but housed more prisoners, since they were crammed three to a cell. This leads to the most filthy pollution. Imagine an airless cell, scarcely large enough for one man, filled with the bunks, the bodies, the clothes and the chamber-pots of three. If it were an ordinary bedroom or a ship’s cabin it would be monstrously unhygienic, but when it is an almost windowless cell in which men are locked without respite from half-past five in the afternoon to seven o’clock the next morning it becomes foul and pestilential beyond all words…

“The whole place stank. The cells at night were pigsties and the effect of this gloom and neglect on the wretched prisoners was evident. Abject creatures, for the most part they made no attempt to keep their spirits up, or show any of the generous geniality of men suffering together, but grumbled and blasphemed in the filthiest terms, abandoning themselves to the atmosphere of shame and abomination which filled the place like a cold miasma.”

“The Verdict of You All” is a book of highly personal comment and description – one man’s account of his experiences in prison. His account may be true, it may be false, it may be a mixture of the two. Every reader must be his own judge of the category in which it should be placed. The author is a novelist, has naturally a good command of words, can tell his story well. Inevitably, there must lurk a suspicion that harbouring a feeling of injustice (he strenuously denies that he was guilty of the charges brought against him) he may tell the story too well. In spite of himself, indignation may get the better of judgment. Resentment may carry him beyond the limit of accuracy. Situations, conditions, may become over-coloured. In the last analysis, only those who have themselves been subjected to his experiences can confirm or deny his story.

This much, however, can be said: If it is, in fact, an essentially reliable and authentic account of life as it is actually lived in such prisons today, then it is a downright, uncompromising challenge to all the fine words that have been said about the reforms in our penal system. If it is but half true, it is a grim and sorry reflection on the efforts of those reformers who have laboured over the years to improve conditions in our prisons.

Stan Hampson

SPGB Meetings (1955)

Party News from the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Work and Leisure (1955)

From the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Leisure," he said, “if people only knew: Its the most precious thing a man can have and they are such fools they don't even know its something to aim at. Work? They work for work's sake. They haven't got the brains to realise that the only object of work is to obtain leisure."

“Most people, the vast majority in fact, lead the lives that circumstances have thrust upon them, and though some repine, find themselves square pegs in round holes and think that if things had been different they might have made a much better showing. The greater part accept their lot, if not with serenity, at all events with resignation. They are like tramcars travelling for ever on the self-same rails. They go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards inevitably till they can no longer and then are sold as scrap iron.   . . ."

(From “The Lotus Eater," by Somerset Maugham.)

Class and colour in South Africa - Part 2 (1955)

From the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

Hands off our workers

The South African Capitalist looks on the Negro not as competitive but as complementary. Already many Negroes have been drawn into industry as wage-workers; and those who have not form a valuable reserve on which to draw for future expansion, and to use as a threat in order to keep down wages. To the factory-owner in Cape Town or Durban, to the shareholder in the Rand mines or the Port Elizabeth car-assembly-works, Negro labour is an essential ingredient in his profits. He is, therefore, resolutely opposed to the Nationalists' schemes for apartheid.

The Government, although theoretically committed to apartheid, is thus faced with the fact that its opponents regard it as anathema, and that its own supporters are unenthusiastic about translating the ideal into the practical. Few whites are prepared to attack separate seating in buses or separate queues at the Post Office counter, but serious measures of apartheid have a much more mixed reception. Even the removal of the Sophiatown Natives to a distance of no more than 11 miles outside Johannesburg, with rail transport available to bring the workers into Johannesburg, has roused much hostility in English-speaking circles. British Capitalists sympathised with South African Capitalists over this interference with “their" workers, and British workers were able to enjoy the spectacle of the English Conservative Press apparently defending the rights of the South African proletariat.

Stagnation of Industry 

In all their seven years of power, the Nationalist Government have only produced one serious plan for apartheid. In the western part of Cape Province, the numbers of Negroes have increased since 1921 from 30,000 to 178,000. But in this area of South Africa, there was already a large population of Cape Coloured people. If apartheid was possible anywhere in South Africa, a start might be made on it here—so the Government reasoned —because even if the Bantu were removed, there would still be Cape Coloureds to do the work. Even this scheme, it will be noted, is not full-blown apartheid: for even if all the Negroes were forcibly ejected from western Cape Province, the whites would still rely on the Cape Coloured population; the Government did not dare propose that the Cape Coloureds too should be sacrificed to “apartness." As could have been expected, the plan came under heavy fire from the industrial interests. “The long-term Government plan for the removal of Africans from the western Cape which was announced on Friday by Dr. Eiselen, the Secretary for Native Affairs, has received a hostile reception from the spokesmen of industry, which depends heavily on native labour.  . . . The Cape Times to-day attacks the proposal on the ground that it is impracticable, as commerce, industry, and agriculture, are too dependent on African labour. .. . Natives at present do nearly all the unskilled labour in the western province.  . . . The Cape Times also argues that, if the new policy is seriously implemented, it must be accompanied by a control of industry as drastic as in any totalitarian country to avoid increasing labour needs" (18-1-55). In Parliament a former Minister for Native Affairs strongly attacked the Eiselen plan “as impracticable and likely to depress the living standards of both Coloured and Europeans, through the stagnation of commerce and industry" (21-5-55).

Where can it be done?

What was even more significant was that the proposal, although it was for only partial apartheid in only one part of a single province, and although the long-term nature of its implementation was stressed by Dr. Eiselen, received nothing more than lukewarm support from the Nationalist Party newspaper itself, Die Burger. Die Burger, the Nationalist newspaper, applauds the plan, but does not gloss over the difficulties. “Let us not be under any illusions," it says. “The natives are here because of the economy of the western province as it has evolved, and as it is to-day it needs their labour.” . . . Die Burger sees this matter as an important and perhaps decisive test of apartheid. There are fewer Africans in the western Cape than elsewhere in the European areas, and the western Cape has a large coloured working population. If the plan to reduce the number of Negroes here fails, where in South Africa, Die Burger asks, can it be done, and what then of the policy of progressive territorial separation? " (18-1-55).

The Nationalists receive electoral support not only from the Afrikaner farmers but also from the “poor whites” in the towns. These failures of white society listen eagerly to a party which proclaims that, low as they are, they can still look down on men of a different coloured skin. And those of them who work for wages fear that the Negroes will soon be able to do their jobs for less pay. With these people “apartheid" is a valuable rallying-cry for the Nationalists. But the landed interest is the mainstay of the Nationalist Party, and in the long run determines its policy. In these circumstances it seems probable that thorough-going apartheid will remain a word on the Nationalist banners rather than an item of their practical policy, just as in this country the Conservative Party, while remaining theoretically opposed to all nationalisation, nevertheless makes no effort to restore the coal mines and the railways to their private owners. 

Education

The difference of opinion between the landed class and the industrial interest over apartheid or the lack of it is then, perhaps, more apparent than real. But there are other issues where the two classes are divided by a deep gulf. Whereas the Afrikaner farmer will not hear of African ownership of land outside the Native Reserves, the capitalist has no such objection to it. Indeed, a worker who feels he has a stake in the country by his ownership of his house and garden is often a better worker than the completely propertyless man. He is rooted to one spot, and is less likely to go off to another job, leaving his employer with the trouble of training a successor. He can only buy a house with the help of a mortgage, and a worker who has regular repayments to make is less likely to go on strike than one who hasn't. On this question, then, there is a clear division of opinion.

But the self-interest of the two classes is most clearly in opposition in the sphere of education. In the eyes of the Afrikaner the Negro is and must remain merely a hewer of wood and a drawer of water; he should have the very little education needed to fit him for his task, and no more. For more education would lead him to consider himself as good a man as the Afrikaner, and would tempt him to agitate for a share in the land of South Africa more consonant with his numbers. But the Britisher sees the Negro as a workman at a modern factory bench or conveyor-belt; and modern methods of production need skilled and educated workers. Which view is to prevail? In the long run, there seems little doubt that capitalism's inevitable demand for educated workers will become more vocal and will eventually carry the day; but at present, the Afrikaners seem to be trying to put their theories, in this field at least, into practice. As a start, the Nationalist Government is making a determined effort to get all education into its own hands. Under the Bantu Education Act, the subsidies which previous governments have paid to high schools and industrial schools, are to be cut immediately by a quarter of their former figure, and may ultimately be stopped altogether (8-1-55). The Act is designed to take native education out of the control of the provincial authorities and the English-speaking churches, and put it into that of the State. In the State-run schools, the Bantu will have a “special education"—that is to say, an education which the Afrikaners hope will ensure that they never rise above their present lowly status.

Mr. Strauss, leader of the United Party, indicated recently that his party might be prepared to accept a compromise on the Native question. “The Native as such,” he remarked in a speech at Bloemfontein, “is not even a homogeneous entity. What is right for the primitive tribesman in Pondoland may be wrong for the educated and cultured Native professor. What would be necessary for the Native urban worker in Johannesburg would not be desirable for the labour tenant on the Transvaal platteland ” (13-1-55). This naive “You do what you want with your workers if we can do what we want with ours" offer has so far, it seems, awakened no response among the Nationalists.

Religion

The question of education is bound up with the question of religion. As usual, each of these two contending upper classes has the support of its own churches. The Afrikaners’ church is the Dutch Reformed Church, of which, it will be remembered, the former Prime Minister Malan, Doctor of Theology, was a pastor. The divines of this Church bend their energies to demonstrate, with the aid of Biblical quotation, how the white man is by nature superior to the black, and how he is thus clearly designated, in the eternal order of things laid down by the Almighty, to rule over him. This kind of rubbish is refuted by the Anglican and Catholic Churches, which depend for their existence on the support of the capitalist class; they therefore select other Biblical quotations to "show that the Bantu, with the help of and under the suzerainty of the particular church concerned, can become a reliable and responsible member of society. In mid-twentieth-century South Africa this means, in effect, that he can become a trustworthy wage-slave. The English-speaking churches are supported in this by their brethren overseas: many British clergymen have been able to gain a cheap reputation for liberality by descanting on the evils of the Nationalist administration in South Africa, while closing their eyes to the exploitation of the workers on their own doorsteps.

Colour and Class

The colour problem in South Africa is not distinct and separate from the other problems which arise inevitably out of a society which is based on private property. Under Socialism there will be no landowner, no capitalist, no poor white, no “worker": there will be no fear of competition for land or for jobs, no fear of a rival class, no fear of loss' of dividend, and therefore none of the hatred to which these fears give rise. When South Africans understand and want Socialism, their hatred for persons of a different colour will disappear; for no man, black or white, can continue any longer in his hatred when he understands the real reasons for it. To treat the colour-bar as an issue outside of and beyond the class- struggle, and to believe that it can receive any real solution while the class-divisions in society remain unresolved, is to stultify oneself at the very outset. The answer to South Africa's problems is the same as the answer to the problems of Britain, America, Russia: it is the introduction of a Socialist system of society.

Joshua.

50 Years Ago: A Retrospect (1955)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 12th of June witnesses the first anniversary of the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. It thus affords a meet opportunity to review our year’s work to ascertain whether our hopes have been fulfilled and our efforts justified.

The formation of a new party was rendered imperative by the falling away of the S.D.F. from the path of political right doing. Those who formed the new party had, almost without exception, been members of the S.D.F., the primary and for many years the only Socialist organisation in Great Britain. During many years of its life it had held aloft the banner of uncompromising Socialism in this country and many of us hoped that it would continue to work along the lines of no compromise with other political parties which is dictated by the existence of a class struggle.

Some years ago, however, when reaction dominated every sphere of thought—political or scientific—throughout Europe and America, new ideas were introduced into the S.D.F. by members of the organisation whose Socialism was rooted in sentiment rather than in scientific knowledge. Looking around them in the political world they saw that organisations of the half-way house character were obtaining a larger measure of support than was their own organisation. Unwitting that such must needs be the case in the present stage of capitalist development, they set themselves to the task of winning their own organisation to a similar position and to the adoption of a similar line of action. In this they were highly successful and the manner in which the S.D.F. adapted itself to its new way of looking at political events is of exceeding interest, and at a more convenient season we shall unfold the manner of its development from a no-compromise organisation to an organisation believing in and accepting entangling alliances.

The falling away of the S.D.F. from its traditional method was viewed with the deepest regret by those members of the organisation who still adhered to the ideas of uncompromising Socialism. They hoped against hope that their organisation would be recalled to a sense of its wrong-doing—that once again it would return to the path of Socialist progress and weld itself into an organisation deserving the support of every Socialist.

Such was not to be the case. Reluctantly there was forced upon them the opinion that the organisation to which they had hitherto given a whole-hearted support was unworthy, and they decided to withdraw from its ranks and form a Socialist organisation into which they could throw their entire energy and untiringly work towards the making it into a strong political organisation.

This, then, was the idea of those who, in June 12th, 1904, decided to form the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

The Editorial from the June 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard.

"The Prisoner" (Plaza) (1955)

Film Review from the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Prisoner is based on Bridget Boland’s play of the same name which had a short run in London a few months ago. The play, which was one of the very few worthwhile serious plays shown in London in the past year or so, had two of the main characters in common with the film—Alec Guinness as the Cardinal and Wilfred Lawson as the warder. The interrogator, the other principal character, is played in the film by Jack Hawkins.

It is a story of a Cardinal in an iron curtain country who has fallen foul of the regime by his outspokenness. The authorities, however, are unable to merely arrest and liquidate him owing to his fame and popularity, and it is therefore necessary for them to extort from the prisoner a confession of crimes sufficient to discredit him and to ensure his fall from public favour. In the words of the interrogator: “You are a public monument and that monument must be—defaced.”

The story, then, deals with the efforts of the interrogator to discover the chink in the Cardinal’s armour that will enable him to break down his resistance and eventually bring about his public recantation and “confession.” The interrogation takes months and although the prisoner is subjected to no actual physical torture, his spirit is broken by solitary confinement, the complete absence of sunlight and other well-thought-out “psychological” methods of torture. Inevitably roe chink in the armour is discovered and exploited and the State triumphs, although the interrogator discovers in the process that he himself is not free from pity, and is bringing about his own destruction as much as the prisoner's. The interrogator's method of breaking the prisoners’ will (or “curing him” as the interrogator puts it) and the Cardinal’s struggles to thwart him make a fascinating, although horrifying, study.

Any other conclusion to the story would have been dishonest for, in fact, in the so-called “Communist peoples' democracies” the State has always triumphed.

Bridget Boland has also written the script for die film and, unfortunately, has been prevailed upon to embellish the severity of the play with some romantic interest and some other tiresome, Hollywoodesque, film conventions, presumably at the instance of the box-office experts. The action of the play took place completely in the interrogation room and in the prisoner's cell, but there are a number of outside episodes added to the film that are both distracting and pointless. For instance, there is the disjointed love story of one of the police-warders; then a young boy is shot by the police while chalking “ Freedom” signs on a wall; a gun-battle breaks out between troops and an armed man in a house; a subversive journalist is arrested in a cafe; and so on. The addition of these episodes ruins the original unity of the play, and makes the film crudely anti-Communist, sprawling and inconsequential. Less reprehensible, perhaps, is the addition of the Cardinal's arrest in the cathedral and the trial. Both are quite effective but again, add little to the unity and point of the original.

The political trials that have taken place in Russia and the other so-called “Communist” countries generally follow a consistent pattern. At the trial the accused generally gives an abject “confession”; admits to all his crimes; extolls the virtues of the leaders of the party; admits the complete wrongness of his thought and sometimes even demands that the maximum penalty be exacted for the benefit of the people he is confessing that he has betrayed! A few extracts from the accounts of some of these trials should be sufficient to demonstrate this.

Trial of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. (Russia, 1936):—

“Vishinsky: How is one to judge the articles and declarations which you wrote in 1933 and in which you expressed devotion to the Party? As deceit?
Kamenev: No, worse than deceit.
Vishinsky: Breach of faith?
Kamenev: Worse.
Vishinsky: Worse than deceit, worse than breach of faith. Do you find this word? Is it treachery?
Kamenev: You have said it.
Vishinsky: Zinoviev, do you confirm this?
Zinoviev: Yes.”

Trial of Traicho Kostov and others. (Bulgaria, 1949):— 

Kostov: “So I repeat, I plead guilty of nationalist deviation in relation to the Soviet Union, which deserves a most severe punishment”—and—“I must confess that my readiness to put myself at the disposal of the British Intelligence Service was due partly to my left-sectarian, Trotskyist convictions of the past as well as to my capitulation before the police in 1942 . . . "

Nikola Nachev at the same trial:—

“Citizen Judges, having fully realised my criminal and hostile activities, carried on by me against my Fatherland and the Bulgarian people, I have described these activities in my written depositions before the People’s Militia. I will now tell you about what I did and what I know, so that the criminal conspiracy in which I also participated may be revealed. . . .”

One could go on quoting indefinitely this kind of thing. No one in their right mind could accept these confessions as being genuine and it is impossible not to feel uneasy when thinking of the methods which must be resorted to in order to obtain them. George Orwell in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” has, perhaps, described these methods in their ultimate form. For example, when O'Brien is explaining to Winston Smith the methods and ideals of the party he says, “Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act; the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them."

It is ironical to think that after thousands of years of human progress, a large part of the world's population exists without even those elementary freedoms that the workers in this country possess, but this in itself does not justify despair, for though tragic failures, the Berlin riots and the Vorkuta rising are two signs that the “Communist” dictatorships do show cracks.

However, to return to the film. It merits a visit in spite of its faults, not only because of the superb acting performances of the three principals, but also because it throws some light on one of the most remarkable social phenomena of our time:—the political trial.

Albert Ivimey

A Peep into the Art World (1955)

From the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Financial Times (27/4/55) has an article under the title "High Prices for Venetians"; dealing with the spectacular rise in prices of works of art sold in London Sale Rooms, instancing a painting by Canaletto £10,500, a pair of F. Guardi £9,000, one by Zuccarrelli £1,900, one by F. Post “View in Brazil 1661” £1,650, and a very fine copy of Audubon’s “Birds of America,” published 1827-1838, £9,200. These prices represent a ten to 20 times increase in the last 10 to 20 years. What a fine racket thinks the speculator, better than whiskey, or bomb making.

What is behind it, you may wonder. While one must remember the fall in the purchasing power of the pound, that is not the great part. The supply of such works of are as these mentioned above grows less each year, but the demand increases with the growth of immense fortunes in countries that did well in the last two world wars: the South American Republics, the Scandinavian countries, U.S.A., and also the great oil fortunes in Western Canada. The last are a great factor in the prices of Canadian paintings by Krieghof (painted 100 years ago) which sell at as much as £1,000 as against £100 in pre-war days.

S. America is coming up fast and it was Brazil that put on the San Paulo collection at the Tate Gallery last year. F. Post was one of the very few well trained artists to go to Brazil in the 17th century, so for buyers of S. American early art the choice is strictly limited; the £1,650 “View in Brazil” could be bought 20 years ago for £100 and the Audubon book for a tenth of the recent price.

The present writer’s memory goes back to a day in January at the winter Royal Academy Show of 18 Century Art, to Exhibit 361, “Making a Road,” a painting by J. Vernet, signed and dated 1774. The picture shows a French Landscape by a river with a castle in the distance, a three-arched bridge being built in mid-distance by many workers with a high wooden crane. Up on the right is a windmill with two donkeys being loaded, beyond the bridge a group of men pulling a long waggon filled with huge blocks of stone, and all along the road dozens of men with hammers, picks, ramrods, chisels, etc., constructing the road. In the foreground are four horsemen. The first, splendidly dressed, is looking at a document that the ganger, hat in hand, has given to him, on the pommel of his saddle a brace of pistols. By his side another well dressed and pistoled gent sits with whip held erect in his hand and behind him two men, who look like guards. While admiring the picture another visitor approached and remarked: “Nice picture! Who owns these beautiful things? Who were they painted for?” This one, I replied, now belongs to The Louvre, but you will notice by the catalogue the great array of Lords, Baronets, etc., who own the bulk of this splendid exhibition. As to who this Vernet was painted for, perhaps for the pistoled gent or at least someone such as the owner of the distant castle. What you see there in the painting—well over 50 men working and two well armed gents not working but obviously of the class who own the means of production—sums up nicely who owned such works of art and who owns them now. There stands the master class whip and pistol in hand: the pistol you put and keep in their hands every, time you vote them into political-power and the whip of necessity that keeps you working for those who own the means whereby you live. The fine art trade, like the fine jewel trade, is patronised almost exclusively by that very small class who own the means of wealth production; while the vast bulk of the people get a trickle of chain store art and “ fine ” jewelry. It is up to the latter, the working class, to say yes or no to such a system. Look at the world you live in and get an understanding of Socialism, which will finish all the luxury racket and make possible a world in which art will cease to serve the ostentation and speculation of the wealthy and be a means of enjoyment for all.

Ted Kersley