Steering the Economy (1982)

From the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those who seek political support for capitalism have two differing solutions for its present economic troubles. Supporters of Margaret Thatcher believe that the solution lies in a reduction in government spending combined with “wage restraint” which, in effect, means a reduction in real wages. Even among Conservatives, support for this policy is not whole-hearted. It has been described as the “right wing” view. This policy is bitterly opposed by the “left”, composed mainly of Labour Party supporters, and by some Liberals and Social Democrats. These exponents of capitalism are united in believing that government spending should now be increased “to stimulate the economy”and reduce unemployment. It should here be noted that the last Labour government, faced themselves with the problems of administering capitalism, carried out a policy of cuts in public expenditure.

So, which way to turn? Left or Right? The purpose of this article is to show that along neither path lies a solution to working-class problems. In attempting to explain the dilemma clearly and in the space of a short article, some simplification will be made in what is obviously a very complex set of interacting factors.

Those politicians who claim to represent the working class assert that government spending should be increased to build council houses, improve health services, maintain educational standards, repair roads and sewers and, above all, to provide employment. Such activities do not themselves realise a profit, otherwise the government would not be called upon to provide the finance. The purpose of such “social” expenditure is not normally to provide employment but rather to provide the conditions in which workers can be employed in other, profitable, enterprises.

The three sources of government finance are: taxation, loans and currency inflation. Taxation takes many forms, direct and indirect: company tax, income tax, value added tax, excise duty and the like. On the other hand, the government may borrow money, again from many sources: finance houses, banks, insurance companies, the general public, and soon. Finally, when this country abandoned the gold standard in 1931 the way was clear for governments to meet part of their expenses by authorising the Bank of England to increase the supply of inconvertible currency—in other words, by printing an excess of paper money.

We come now to examine the repercussions of these three forms of government spending. Increased taxation reduces profits in a number of ways. Company tax reduces it at the source. Personal income tax on unearned income reduces the dividends received by shareholders. Personal income tax on earned income is also a drain on profits; broadly speaking, wage workers have to be paid enough to allow them to work efficiently and rear children to replace themselves. Their wages must therefore provide for the payment of income tax—as well as various forms of indirect taxes. This is not to say that a general change in taxation does not temporarily affect the standard of living of wage workers. But, in the long term, resistance to any downward pressure on living standards brings wages back to what is socially necessary for efficient production.

To the extent that profits arc reduced by increased taxation, one result has been an increase in investment abroad, in the search for higher profit margins. Another effect is a loss of competitiveness on overseas markets. Reduced profits result, in these and other ways, in reduced production. As an alternative to increased taxation, governments may increase their borrowing. Not only is this merely postponing the repayment of loans (and interest) by other means but also it has the effect of increasing interest rates. The government competes on the money market against the needs of private enterprise, with a consequent increase in interest rates and curtailment of expansion—and in many cases a reduction of production. The third source of government finance, currency inflation, also has the effect of increasing interest rates. The excess issue of paper currency by the Bank of England results in a reduction in its purchasing power. Those who lend money expect to receive an increased return to take account of the effects of inflation. Building Societies find that they have to increase their interest rates to investors, which they will try to pass on to present and prospective borrowers— further impoverishing those workers with mortgages.

Currency inflation reduces real wages by the resultant increase in prices. In 1975, according to the government’s Retail Price Index, prices rose by 25 per cent. This led to demands for wage increases which in many cases could only be achieved by strike action. The present government’s policy of “wage restraint” means a reduction in real wages as prices continue to rise. The major reason at present for the reduction in production and massive unemployment is a worldwide trade depression; but an increase in government spending, although it may provide a limited increase in employment in some areas of the economy, causes a reduction in production in others. This is why all previous attempts by governments to “spend their way out of a recession” have always failed.

To complete the explanation it should be noted that the increase in unemployment due to reduced production means an increase in the total of unemployment benefit. This in turn involves increased government spending—unless the rate of benefit can be cut in the same proportion as the increase in unemployment, and there are obvious limits to this. Moreover, increased unemployment means that the total purchasing power of the working class is reduced. This reduction in purchasing power causes a further reduction in production in those areas of the economy related to working class spending. In such areas there will be a consequent increase in unemployment.

As compared with a policy of increased government spending, the repercussions of a reduction are more direct and immediate. For example, economies in education result in fewer jobs for teachers. Government curbs on local authority spending not only result in a direct reduction in manpower but also in enforced savings in money spent on materials. The slowing down of local authority housing programmes is an example of this. Examine any attempt to reduce central or local government expenditure and it will be seen that a reduction in employment follows. It should also be pointed out that, even where such expenditure is not reduced in money terms, there may in fact be a reduction in real terms due to inflation.

Whether government spending is increased or reduced, there is no way out of the maze of contradictions inherent in the capitalist economy—whether this be private enterprise capitalism or state capitalism (as in Russia) or a mixture of both. The gains made by the working class (those who have to work for wages or salaries) during periods of economic prosperity for the employing class, are rapidly eroded during periods of trade depression. The key to an understanding of the limitations of the present economy can be found in the fact that, in the main, unless capital can be invested at a profit, production ceases. This is a fundamental law of the capitalist system. It is no matter that raw materials and labour, the sole requirements for wealth production, are available in abundance without the prospect of profit, production ceases.

In a socialist society this restriction would be removed. Wealth would be produced solely to satisfy human needs—and in the modern world we have the potential to produce wealth in abundance. There would be no trade depressions because there would be no trade—just distribution. There would be no money because money is only required for trading. There would be no “unemployment” as the working class experiences it—work and “leisure” would be undistinguishable. In fact most of the terms in this article would become obsolete. The “left” and “right” would only be remembered as wings of the same predatory bird: capitalism.

John Moore

The State of Medicine (1982)

From the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The National Health Service was sold to us as a guarantee of health and security but is itself now the invalid of the Welfare State. If not actually bankrupt, it suffers from a lack of much needed investment. If not completely chaotic it is periodically shaken by massive reorganisations which attempt to relieve its administrative problems, often by reintroducing a system previously condemned as restrictive and inefficient. In April 1974 a “three tier” structure was imposed, which severed all links with local authority control; now the latest reorganisation has brought back the District Health Authorities, which include local councillors. At the receiving end of all this are the aptly- named patients, who bring their ailments to the surgery or the hospital in the hope that the NHS is alive and well and competent.

This hope is sustained by a popular misconception of the role of the state as the beneficent, munificent parent of us all its children. This concept springs from the belief that only the state has the resources to run something which is both essential to everyone’s interests and wide enough to operate in that way. For example, the Armed Forces are supposed to protect “our" country, “our" freedom, “our" way of life. The driest of Tories would never suggest that the forces should be owned and financed by private companies—quoted on the Stock Exchange, subject to take-overs, asset stripping and the rest. In the same way, when the coal mines were seen as necessary to the efficient and profitable operation of British industry they were taken away from the fragmented, competitive set-up of the private pit owners and were nationalised.

It was on the same theory that the NHS was born. Before the war, medical services in Britain were disjointed and unco-ordinated, varying in resources and efficiency from one area to another—and not necessarily in accordance with the demands for them. There were over a thousand voluntary hospitals, from large establishments with the most modern equipment and some weightily distinguished consultants down to the small, struggling cottage hospital. About 2000 more hospitals had been founded by local authorities or had sprung from the sick wards of workhouses. They were often precariously financed, living off donations, bequests and flag days, even selling their wall space to the advertisers of patent medicine, which must have been rather confusing to the patients. This haphazard development extended to the other branches of medical care such as GPs, medical inspectors and so on. There was a compulsory medical insurance but this covered only wage earners, excluding their families and was not valid for any treatment other than by a GP.

The war gave an opportunity radically to reshape this confusion into some sort of order and a basis for this was provided by the state-run Emergency Medical Service (EMS) which was at first designed to deal with air raid casualties but whose scope was widened to take in other categories such as evacuated children. The EMS directly employed doctors and nurses, for a wage, and it took over entire hospitals so that by September 1941 it controlled ½ million beds.

At the same time the government was aware of the need to proffer some promises of a better world after the war. as an encouragement to the people who were suffering in the battles, under the bombs and so on. The most famous of these pledges was the Beveridge Report, prepared by a committee which started its work just as Germany was invading Russia and which produced its findings in late 1942. Beveridge promised that “a comprehensive national health service will ensure that for every citizen there is available whatever medical treatment he requires, in whatever form he requires it”.

The coalition government accepted Beveridge’s health service proposals and before their defeat in 1945 two ministers Ernest Brown (National Liberal) and Henry Willink (Conservative) presented plans for a National Health Service on the model suggested in the Report. It was of course left to the Attlee government to push through the necessary Act, to fight the British Medical Association over doctors’ pay and conditions—and eventually to take the credit for what they wrote into history as a great humanitarian reform.

Experience, and the adaptation of the NHS to the everyday needs of a society based on class privilege, have exposed the reform for what it is. Only the most myopic devotee of the NHS would now claim that its services are of the highest possible standard and are freely and equally available to everyone. There is a swelling tide of frustration and disillusionment with the NHS; the 1979 Royal Commission on the NHS commented: “Nor does the evidence suggest that social inequalities in health have decreased since the establishment of the NHS. The position (of partly skilled and unskilled workers) appears to have worsened relative to those in (professional and managerial jobs).”

An essential part of the best treatment is that it should be immediately available; most conditions which need attention can only get worse the longer they are neglected. But one of the big problems of the NHS are the waiting lists, which are well above the half-million mark. An especially grisly economy operates in the waiting lists: economy because it is a matter of resources which are expensive and therefore scarce, and grisly because it often means the death of some of those who are kept waiting. As might be expected, Enoch Powell has described the situation in stark, heartless words:

  If the hospital resources are to be continuously used, there must be awaiting list, a cistern from which a steady flow of cases can be maintained. Private practice can afford to have gaps because patients are buying time. (A New Look At Medicine and Politics.) 

This probably sounds very sensible on the Stock Exchange, or to government ministers who are aware of their responsibility to run this society in the interests of a small minority. The actual flesh and blood people, who suffer and die in the queue, can be expected to see it differently. In the case of kidney disease, for example, the decision to treat or to abandon the sufferer to die is largely dependent on their place in the economic order of priority. One leading kidney specialist has described the dilemma:

  The financial situation is now so acute that children are having to compete with adults for treatment and they tend to lose out because priority has to be given to adults who have families to look after and mortgages to maintain. (Quoted in The NHS — Your Money Or Your Life, by Lesley Garner.)

Many people are trying to escape these obstacles by buying their way into private treatment. The result has been a boom in the insurance schemes like BUPA and Private Patients Plan. Most of this expansion comes from companies who are paying to insure their workers; from their point of view the pay-off is in a quicker, planned admission to hospital, less time off work and easier access to the patient while they are in hospital. (The numbers of people insuring themselves, in contrast, is falling.)

But the private sector too operates on something of a delusion. The kind of insurance which is affordable by wage earners covers only a limited range of ailments—typically, an operation which requires only a brief stay in hospital both before and after the event. It does not cover the chronically sick, the lingering terminally ill, the physically or mentally handicapped, the old people who need intensive nursing during a senility which intensifies towards death. These sorts of ailments can be treated privately but to do so would cost the sort of money which is beyond the scope of the insurance schemes. As one consultant in mental handicap put it: “In mental subnormality you see the patient for the rest of their life”. It is, then, no surprise that BUPA favours a mixed state and private medical service, with the private schemes taking the cream of the short-term patients while the NHS grapples with the rest. A foreseeable result of that would be to depress the state service even further, as investment, doctors and nursing staff were attracted into the private sector.

Whatever the outcome of this conflict, we can be despairingly confident that the basic, vital facts about health and sickness will receive only scant attention. The vast majority of death and disease today does not happen through an accident, nor is it unavoidable. For example, thirty million people die every year from starvation, simply because they are too poor to escape from a famine which itself is the result of the production of food as commodities rather than to meet human needs. Then there are the “industrial” diseases like asbestosis, which are a direct consequence of the way in which some workers get their living and which inflict a brutally slow, agonising death on their victims. More subtly, there is the sickness which can be written into the death certificate as due to other causes but which is in fact the result of the jobs their victims do or the places where they live.

The Working Group on Inequalities In Health recently reported that a labourer, a cleaner and a dock worker are twice as likely to die as is someone in the “professions”; they are twice as likely to suffer respiratory and infectious diseases, have trouble with their circulatory and digestive systems. The distinction is a false one, since both “labourers” and “professionals” are members of the same class but the point is made; it is the former who in many ways suffer the harsher degree of exploitation, the heavier weight of impoverishment. More evidence comes from Professor Harvey Bremner of John Hopkins University, who has spent some twenty years studying the subject. Bremner is convinced that economic stress on workers stimulates physical and mental illnesses; specifically he says that a rise of one million in unemployment over five years could cause an extra 50,000 people to die and 60,000 more cases of mental illness. He also says that Scottish workers are under a peculiar stress, due to a more severe competition between industries there and this is reflected in sickness striking quicker, and more harshly, when there is unemployment.

So it comes down to a matter of class. The working class—those people who need to sell their working abilities in order to live—include those who do the dirty, monotonous, dangerous work as well as those who do the stressful, ulcerative jobs in “management” and the “professions”. It includes the people who crowd into cramped, jerry-built homes under the pollution of industrial capitalism. The other social class, who do not have to work because they own and control the means of life, can afford to live away from all this; they experience no stress of insecurity, their homes are spacious and leisured, they have access to the best of diets. If they want it that way, their lives can be a continuous recreation. The medical care they can command was typified in Tudor Hart’s Inverse Care Law. which laid down that the availability of good medical care varies inversely with the needs of the people it serves. Simply, they can have the best of everything—the best homes, food, education, medicine.

This class do not need the National Health Service, which was designed for the workers, to patch them up and get them back to work as quickly and as productively as possible. Whatever medical care is available to the working class exists only because it contributes, in the short or the long run, to the production of profit and the accumulation of capital. One of the reasons for setting up the NHS, for example, was that it is cheaper to pay for the hospitals, GPs, health centres and the rest through taxation than through the complex process of means testing, claims and rebates which was operated in the private system. Doctors who have trained for years to relieve sickness are persistently faced with agonising choices, based on the demands of a balance sheet rather than human comfort and survival:

   If I abandon or downgrade the patient with advanced cancer of the stomach in favour of two patients with hernia, how do I make a cost benefit analysis? How do I equate the loss of six months dyspepsia-free survival with the economic utility of the return of two breadwinners to work? (Garner, op. cit.)

Well, she or he can’t. The NHS is sick because at best it is struggling against the inexorable demands of the social system in which human needs count for little. Capitalism deprives its people of their dignity in many ways — in sickness and in health and in the end in their tragic, unjustifiable deaths.

Ivan

Playing with Apartheid (1982)

From the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The present use of sport for political ends was foreshadowed before World War II by the attitudes of the dictators Hitler and Mussolini, who encouraged and financed the endeavours of native footballers and athletes. The disappointment shown by Hitler and other leading Nazis at the win of the negro Jesse Owens over their own German favourite at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, is still well remembered. Most governments nowadays assist the efforts of “their” athletes of international class. They value success at this level because it engenders patriotic feeling and distracts the working class from problems at home. By publicising the country it helps exporters to gain ground on competitors. So sport today often spills over from its allotted place on the back pages of newspapers into front page headlines.

Although coming into a somewhat different category, in one way or another the apartheid policy operated by the South African government is often involved in such instances. Scarcely a week passes without news of some projected sporting conflict being jeopardised by the “South African Connection”. The latest major incident burst on a sick and weary world last February in an announcement from South Africa that a team of “rebel” English cricketers had arrived to start a tour sponsored by South African Breweries. Many South African cricketers, boycotted internationally for years, welcomed this chance to test their skills against top class opposition.

There have of course been many examples of discrimination in sport not involving apartheid. In many cases—polo, racquets and equestrian events—the high cost of competing eliminates the average worker before the event begins. In this country, cricket was for a long time bedevilled by the distinction between amateurs and professionals. Among other things, the latter—working men playing for a living—had to stay at inferior hotels to their amateur team mates who, in the main, had enough unearned income not to need payment. In some cases however, including that of W. G. Grace, amateurs were secretly paid to ensure that they did not have to openly turn professional. Although officially abolished 20 years ago, vestiges of this traditional separation linger on today. Similar distinctions arose in the United States where, until 1947, the major league baseball teams consisted of white players only. There were separate leagues for negro players. Now many of the major league teams have more black than white players on their staff. In none of these cases was their any legal backing for discrimination, whereas in South Africa apartheid operates within a legal framework, as a result of legislation passed by successive National Party governments since 1948.

The aims of the apartheid policies pursued by the South African government since 1948 are analysed in depth in our pamphlet The Problem of Racism, published in 1966. This government has represented the interests of the Afrikaner farming section of the ruling class, and the policy has been an attempt to preserve the values and attitudes of the old agricultural order and hold back the development of industrial capitalism. The latter is largely controlled by the English speaking capitalists, who would much prefer a free market in labour to the present restrictive situation. Until a few years ago the Afrikaners had a big advantage because of their unity, while the opposition became fragmented. However the increasing Afrikaner involvement in industry and the development of modern capitalist farming have led to dissensions within the National Party, as a section want some relaxation of apartheid rigidity, and others see this as “the beginning of the end”. In the case of its policy on sport, pressure from outside has combined with a shift in Afrikaner attitudes to produce some quite significant changes.

When the National Party government took power in 1948 they applied a rigid apartheid policy in sport as in all other walks of life: sportsfields, seating and clubs were segregated. World reaction took some time to gather pace, but eventually boycotts of South African players started to mushroom. Eventually an attempt was made to apply the policy to visiting teams also, and the situation reached a critical point when it was announced that a New Zealand rugby team, including Maoris, would not be allowed in. On 4 September 1965 the then Prime Minister, Verwoerd, addressing a meeting at Loskop Dam, spelled it out thus:

Our standpoint is that just as we subject ourselves to another country’s customs and traditions without flinching, without any criticism, and cheerfully, so do we expect when another sends representatives to us they will behave in the same way, namely not involving themselves in our affairs, and that they will adapt themselves to our customs.

(Quoted in The Broederband, Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom, Paddington Press 1979)

This statement was like fuel on the fire but, for a time, the government stood firm. To them, the policy seemed quite fair and they may well have expected it to be accepted. When it became obvious that it was seen very differently abroad, the next Prime Minister, Vorster, changed the policy and allowed the Maoris to tour. However he told Parliament a few weeks later: “Inside South Africa there will not be mixed sporting events, irrespective of the proficiency of the participants. On this there can be no compromise, negotiations or abandonment of principle” (Ibid).

Wilkins and Strydom also relate how the Prime Minister had to ride a tremendous backlash from hard line Afrikaners. These reactionaries did not consider sporting prestige important enough to justify any weakening in apartheid, and were perfectly prepared to accept complete isolation if that was the only alternative. It was very probable that Vorster decided in 1968 to “sacrifice” cricket as a sop to these critics. Although both games have their origin in Britain, in South Africa rugby is primarily an Afrikaner game while cricket is mainly played by the English speaking population. This was the year of the “D’Oliveira crisis”. Basil D’Oliveira, a Cape Coloured and as such ineligible for selection by South Africa, had qualified for England and been chosen to tour. “To a cheering (Orange) Free State National Congress, Mr. Vorster announced that D’Oliveira’s selection was political and unacceptable” (Ibid).

Except for a visit the following season by an Australian team (which incidentally lost every Test Match by enormous margins). South Africa has played no cricket at international level since then. The position with rugby was only slightly different. The 1970 New Zealand tour was a great success, the Maori players being among the most popular. In 1974 a British Lions team arrived and shocked the Springboks by winning three of the four international matches and drawing the other. It was now obvious that South Africa faced an indefinite period of total sporting ostracism and a decline in standards through lack of the necessary level of competition.

The Afrikaner government was in a terrible dilemma. Wilkins and Strydom report that a 1974 survey of opinion within the Broederband, and exclusive Afrikaner body, showed 97 per cent in favour of national sporting policies for every “nation” to be affiliated with world bodies (a policy rejected by these bodies because the “nations” were not considered to be independent); 92 per cent were opposed to mixed teams being fielded in sports other than athletics; whereas 93 per cent accepted the inclusion of non-whites for the Olympic Games, but as an interim measure only. Yet despite this, writing only four years later, Wilkins and Strydom could predict that “in about two years all races will play together on club, provincial and national level, will sit together on stands, will use all the club facilities such as bars and toilets, and that no more applications for permits will be needed”.

Certainly significant changes have been made. The pressure from abroad, combined with internal pressure from inside and outside Afrikanerdom, has overcome a white backlash which, observing events elsewhere on the continent, was and still is terrified of the consequences of “giving in to the blacks”. A British Lions rugby team visited South Africa in 1980 and played against non-whites in some matches. A South African touring party, containing some coloured players, visited New Zealand in 1981. Despite these isolated events however the sports boycott of South Africa is still virtually complete.

Internationally the capitalist class has reacted in fairly predictable fashion to the anti-capitalist policies pursued by the National Party governments. While perfectly prepared to trade with and invest in South Africa, openly or secretly as circumstances dictate, they have nevertheless made it clear that they expect conformity to normal capitalist practice; for example an open labour market, without the reservation of certain classes of jobs for whites. The expulsion of South Africa from the Commonwealth in I960 was a result of this stand.

However, whereas countries like Great Britain—where capitalists are mostly white—would be satisfied with a South African capitalism dominated by a white ruling class, this does not appear to be the case generally. Countries like India and the emergent ‘Third World” nations, where the capitalists are mostly non-white and perhaps under pressure from extremists in their own ranks, want rather more. South Africa has now become an anomaly in another sense: it is the only part of the continent still under white rule. It could well be that India, for instance, feels that better trading terms could be obtained from a non-white ruling class (a class of wealthy Indians has long been in existence) rather than from white capitalists still harbouring old prejudices from the apartheid era.

This difference is reflected in the field of sport. Sporting bodies in states such as Britain and New Zealand, expressing satisfaction with efforts in South Africa to provide multi-racial sport, show some willingness to resume relations. The position of New Zealand is particularly delicate. The large farming element there may to some extent sympathise with Afrikaner attitudes, and their main sport is also rugby football. South Africa and New Zealand have traditionally had the best teams, so New Zealand players and turnstiles have keenly felt the loss of fixtures with the Springboks.

Walter Hadlee, past New Zealand cricket captain and test selector, gives expression to his frustration in an article in the 1982 Wisden Cricketer’s Almanack entitled "The Escalating Effect of Politics in Cricket”. He criticises the Gleneagles Agreement drawn up by Commonwealth governments in June 1977 to effect a common policy on sporting links with South Africa, aptly noting: “Different interpretations have given rise to endless controversy, much of it still continuing . . . Governments and anti-apartheid groups never seem to clarify their demands by setting out the precise requirements to be met either by the South African government or the sporting bodies concerned”. Hadlee interprets Gleneagles as meaning that when apartheid is no longer practised in any particular sport, normal relations can be resumed. From this viewpoint he comments on South African cricket that “they attained this in 1977”. Similar impatience was displayed in an editorial in the April 1982 issue of The Cricketer International". “India, Pakistan and Guyana, for instance, exercise some repression on ethnic or religious grounds. Moreover cricketers from these countries have cheerfully played with and against South Africans in England. Where should principles stop being applied?”

In non-white dominated countries a different view is taken. Here the Gleneagles agreement is interpreted as demanding an end to apartheid—not just on the sports field. They question whether the multiracial South African teams now being fielded are in fact selected on merit. Here there is a practical problem. Because of years of discrimination, only a few non-whites have achieved the necessary standards. What may be a genuine selection on ability can appear to an outside observer as an attempt to appease critics by fiddling one or two non-white “passengers”.

In this case the counter discrimination does not stop at a refusal to play against South African representatives. Teams and individuals who have previously played in, or against, South Africa are also boycotted. The England cricket tour of India last winter was jeopardised because Geoffrey Boycott and some other members of the party had played and coached in the Republic (coaching mainly non-whites, incidentally). On that occasion a declaration by Boycott of his personal opposition to apartheid was accepted by the Indian government. However, when Boycott and other current England players travelled with the rebel band earlier this year, the only way in which India and Pakistan would agree to go ahead with their projected tours of England this summer demanded that these individuals be prevented from taking the field against them.

To prevent a crippling loss of much needed gate receipts, the Test and County Cricket Board had no alternative but to impose a ban lasting for three years on the selection for England of these rebel players. More extreme action has been taken in the West Indies. The Guyana government cancelled a Test Match because the England team included Robin Jackman, a player with a South African wife, who had played in South Africa. The West Indies Cricket Board cancelled a projected cricket tour by a New Zealand team because of the 1981 tour of New Zealand by the South African rugby team. In neither case, it appears, were the opinions on apartheid of the individuals objected to considered to be of any importance.

Criticism is often directed at individuals for allegedly introducing politics into spheres of activity which, it is said, should be outside the political arena. Sport is often considered to be such a sphere, but the criticism is manifestly absurd. Because the class division of present-day society is to some extent reflected in all aspects of life, informed comment on any of these activities, particularly by those who seek to abolish this class division, must of necessity be political in content. We have seen, how pressure applied in the field of sport, but with the broader aim of modifying the wider South African society, does appear to be meeting with some success. It does increasingly look as if this story of sport and apartheid will not end until South Africa has a non-white capitalist government. The present white ruling class can scarcely be expected to acquiesce in this, as it will inevitably mean the reduction of many of them to the status of wage workers. The present unstable condition of many black African states increases still further the paranoia of the rich South African whites. Yet even the establishment of a black capitalism in the Republic will not prevent sundry prejudices from bedevilling sport, as in all aspects of life.

E. C. Edge

Running Commentary: Refugees (1982)

The Running Commentary column from the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Refugees

The aim of the United Nations at the time of its establishment was to “cut the causes of war at their roots”. But because the causes of war are related to the struggle among sections of the ruling class, organised in separate nation states, for markets, trade routes and natural resources, and because the United Nations was not established to end class-divided society, it is hardly surprising that the organisation has failed completely in its objective.

Since its foundation the destruction and slaughter of war has continued unabated all over the world. Even in recent times, over Vietnam, Korea, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan and now in the Falklands, we have seen its manifest impotence to control military disputes with sanctimonious resolutions of the “502” variety.

Another aim of the UN was to deal with the problems of refugees. What are refugees? They are walking, sandwich-board-like indictments of the lunatic way society is presently organised. They are millions of people, both en masse and dissipated, escaping from one part of the globe to another. People from Afghanistan escaping to Pakistan while people from Pakistan escape to the West. People fleeing from El Salvador and Guatemala. People on the run from one part of Africa to another. Recently, the UN Commissioner for Refugees, Mr Poul Hartling, told a press conference that:

  In global terms, we can say that the UN is responsible for some 10,000,000 refugees throughout the world at present. Of these, between four and five million are to be found in Africa, between two and 2½ million in South East Asia and the rest in South America and elsewhere. (Guardian 2014/82)

Unrecognised as “refugees” (although that is what they really amount to) are the thousands of people who depart from places like Britain, particularly in times of economic recession, for Australia and Canada to seek a way out of the grimness of life in their country of origin. But for members of the working class there is no escape from poverty by travelling from one continent to another.

Cashing In

Down in deepest Surrey is a firm called Pubjoy Mint, which is in the business of producing medallions to commemorate all sorts of forgettable events like royal weddings and anniversaries. These are then sold to people who are impressed by Pubjoy’s enthusiastic utterances that the medallions are of lasting beauty, intrinsic value and historic significance.

Nothing is safe from this firm. Any day now, they could announce a medallion—which everyone will cherish and show to their children in its unique plastic clearview cover and handsome display case—marking the achievement of three million unemployed.

Meanwhile they are cashing in on other events. Their latest creation commemorates the Falkland Islands Task Force. On one side are the aircraft carriers Invincible and Hermes; on the other the indomitable Britannia stands, trident across the Falklands.

“It is not an approval of war in any way,” said The firm’s marketing manager. “It is to commemorate Britain’s response to what has happened in our territory.” The medallions cost £600 for the 22 carat gold version and £7.50 for one in silver plated base metal.

The Task Force was sent to protect the property and the investments of a section of the British ruling class (the sort of people who can afford that 22 carat medallion) against the ambitions of a part of the Argentinian ruling class. Workers on both sides (who can afford only the silver plated medallion) have no interests at stake in the struggle, although they take their masters’ part in it and will suffer and die in it.

Such episodes are black tragedy in world history. That they can be further exploited by the sale of ghoulish mementoes is evidence of the urgency to end the social system which causes it all. The only fitting commemoration in these cases would be the workers’ strengthened resolve for a basic change in society.

Sick Pay

Most people who have to spend time in hospital leave the place profoundly impressed by the work of the nurses. Often unpleasant, physically and emotionally stressful, unrelenting, usually under extra difficulties caused by shortages and “economies”. And very badly paid, although it would be difficult to imagine a wage high enough to be “fair” for such work.

The Confederation of Health Service Employees states that nearly half of all full-time nurses, most of them in training or auxiliaries, are getting wages which are below the poverty line the level at which they qualify for Family Income Supplement.

The employers may argue that the union has produced these figures in support of its current pay campaign, in which it hopes to raise the government’s 6.4 per cent offer. This is the latest episode in a long battle over nurses’ pay (remember Selwyn Lloyd in 1961?) in which successive governments have cynically exploited the fact that, when it comes to the point, nurses shy away from the ultimate and in their case the frighteningly powerful weapon of a strike.

Because of this we can expect the nurses always to be among the lower reaches of the wages league. Workers’ pay is not a matter of morality, a reward for the job which they do, a reflection of how stressful or how necessary their work may be. If those guidelines did apply in society at large there would be a lot of members of the Stock Exchange and aristocrats starving to death.

Wages are the price of a worker’s labour power and, like any other price, they move up or down in response to pressures like booms and slumps, a shortage or a surplus of the labour power. This is a hard, unromantic reality of capitalism—a system which must first concern itself with its profitability and leave human welfare a long way behind.

Nurses are not angels. They are just another bunch of motivated, essential—and harshly exploited—workers without whom life under capitalism would be even more unpleasant than it is.

Cartoon by George Meddemmen.

Increasing Poverty

According to a report published earlier this year by the Low Pay Unit and the Civil and Public Services Association the poor are getting steadily poorer. The same day the report was issued (April 3) it was confirmed that the salary of Michael Edwardes, the chairman of British Leyland, had been increased last year from £65,400 to £95,500.

The job which Edwardes performs for this modest reward is to keep down pay rises for the workers and to ensure that the company pays out as little as possible on improving the conditions of the workforce—as little, that is, as is compatible with the best efficiency which can be squeezed from the wealth producers.

The week after the poverty report of the Low Pay Unit, the Department of Health and Social Insecurity released figures which showed that the number of people in Britain living below the official poverty line—supplementary benefit level—has risen to over two million for the first time. New statistics sent to a Labour MP in reply to a series of parliamentary questions disclosed a rise from 1.9 million to 2.1 million between 1977 and 1979.

The Labour MP who requested the information was that self-righteous friend and patron of the poor, Frank Field. On learning the facts, Field became very indignant and described the revelation as “alarming”. One fact that must have slipped his mind, what with all that ringing in his ears, is that there was a Labour government in office between these years.

Gary Jay

Political Notes: Unhappy Birthday (1982)

The Political Notes column from the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unhappy Birthday

May 10 this year was for some the first birthday of socialism in France. It was on this day last year that Francois Mitterand was elected President. He has not stood, and does not stand, for socialism and of course even if he did decide to support the idea of common ownership he would be incapable alone, or with the help of his fellow government ministers, of introducing such a system.

As it is, capitalism has ground on during the past twelve months under the diligent administration of the “socialist” government. When Mitterand won the election there was some anxiety that dramatic social change was on its way and a revolutionary new system was to be introduced. Those who were anxious soon had their worries quelled as it became evident that the real goal of the new government was to re-organise the poverty of the working class, and to oil the machinery of the profit system, in order that it might operate more smoothly.

Minimum wages and family allowances rose by 25 per cent and pensions by as much as 50 per cent, but prices were running high, taxes and social charges were raised steeply and wage-earners suffered a special surcharge to help fill the widening gap in the social insecurity budget. Unemployment, which Mitterrand vowed would never reach two million, passed that figure last October: and as the government wrestles with the problem of running a system of exploitation while making pious remarks about socialism, its inability to deliver the goods it promised becomes more apparent.

Among the reforms that have been introduced by the government was the abolition of the guillotine. As the rich get richer while the poor remain poor, and with mounting discontent in the working class in France, perhaps that reform was one of the more cynical proposals of the regime.


Good Idea

In a recent interview Tony Benn was asked the question: “Would-be socialists are worried that we don’t see a socialist country anywhere in the world that is working perfectly. Does that worry you?” His reply was as follows:

  We’re not looking for perfection, are we? Can you name one capitalist country that is working well? If you want to see where socialism is, it’s in a comprehensive school and in the Health Service where people are dealt with without regard to their wealth.

 (New Musical Express, 1 May 1982.) 

With these beliefs, Benn could probably be accepted tomorrow for membership of the Liberal Party. Comprehensive schools and the National Health Service are badly-equipped, second-rate services run on the basis of skimping and making the best of a bad job. They were designed to be cheap methods of conditioning working-class children for a life of political conformity, adequately (but no more than that) preparing us for lives of wage-slavery and providing a “patch ’em up and send ’em back to work” service for when injury or illness befall us.

Meanwhile members of the ruling class pay huge sums of money to have their children properly educated for the lives of idleness and leisure that they are to lead, and there is no trace of the NHS queues, inadequate apparatus, or brusque treatment to be found in the exclusive private hospitals.

Tony Benn’s interviewer was almost right. In fact there is no socialist country in the world working perfectly or imperfectly. At present socialism is only an idea: but remember that all products of mankind whether technical devices, like the typewriter, or social arrangements, like the trade union were ideas before they were put into practice.

Economic Crime

The Deputy Fisheries Minister thought he was on to a good thing when he found he could arrange the export of caviar marked as herring. The buyer abroad paid the lower herring price then sold the caviar at an enormous profit which was split with the Minister.

But all good things come to an end and the Minister was found out. This was especially nasty for him because he was a Deputy Minister in the Russian government and as his was an “economic” crime there could be only one outcome. He was shot.

The episode was reported in a long article, by the Russian Chief Prosecutor, in a recent issue of Pravda, which was heavy with dire warnings of the consequences for any more economic criminals. In fact such offences—bribery, embezzlement, currency fiddles are said to be increasing in Russia. Recently, for example, the mayor of a South Georgia town was executed after making about £100,000 in bribes in exchange for illegally allocating apartments to his “clients". The Chief Prosecutor storms that such offences are costing the Russian state millions of roubles every year: “No clemency should be shown” he warns.

Clearly, it is necessary to ask one or two questions. If, as is claimed, Russia is a “socialist” country in which everyone stands equally, how can a person commit, and benefit from, an “economic” crime? How can such crimes exist? How can bribery be effective unless there is an inequality of access to necessary things like food and housing? How can caviar be sold as herring unless there is a caviar- eating class and a herring-eating one? Is it not proved, by such evidence, that there is in Russia a privileged class and therefore an unprivileged one?

There are no two ways of answering these questions. Apart from the fact that socialism cannot exist except as a worldwide system, all the evidence supports the case that Russia is an unexceptional capitalist state. This means that we will find there all the elements of class privilege, with the unpleasant, conditioned behaviour which goes with it.

Wages and Profits under Thatcher (1982)

Cartoon by George Meddemmen.

From the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is the prospect of making a profit that promotes the activities of companies and nationalised industries. Except for comparatively short periods, companies which make losses go out of business or close down unprofitable branches, and get rid of workers. Nationalised industries can extend their period of loss-making to the extent that they can get subsidies from the government. It is one of the features of Thatcher government policy that it is much less willing than were Labour governments to give continuing subsidies. Employers, generally, have an interest in this. They want government expenditure, and therefore taxes affecting their profits, to be kept to a minimum. So they support government efforts to hold down pay levels in the Civil Service, local government, health service and so on and its attempts to reduce the numbers employed in these services.

With the same end in view, that of reducing expenditure and taxes, the government is making unemployment pay taxable (after reducing it by 5 percent in 1980) and has introduced the rule which assumes, for the purpose of the eligibility of a striker’s dependants to receive social security payments, that the striker is receiving £13 a week strike pay from the union whether or not this is so. Most employers have also supported the changes in trade union law (with more to follow) to reduce the effectiveness of trade unions in striking for pay increases.

While Labour governments have not passed legislation to curb the unions, and the Labour Party is pledged to repeal the Tory legislation, the attitude of Labour governments towards wage increases has been much the same as that of the Thatcher government. It will be recalled that in the “winter of discontent” at the end of its term of office, the Callaghan government was trying to restrict the wage increases of local government and other workers to five per cent, against a rise of prices of about twice as much.

In a childishly unrealistic policy document adopted by the Labour Party Conference in 1944, they held out the prospect that Labour governments would double or treble the workers’ standard of living. But within four years the Attlee government had introduced its “wage-freeze” policy—an example followed by every government, Labour and Tory, up to 1979. The present government, while formally disclaiming any intention to do that again, is trying to achieve the same result by exhortation and other means.

For civil servants, and workers in the health service and education, government policy is to hold pay increases this year down to about half the current annual rate of price increases of 10 per cent. Civil Servants claimed 13 per cent and were offered an overall increase of four per cent, but which included no increase for some, and up to 5½ per cent for others. The government argument was that in some areas of the Civil Service there was no case for any increase at all because, at current rates of pay, there are more applicants than vacancies, and it is the intention to let “market forces” have full play. The government agreed to let the claim go to arbitration and the Tribunal awarded some increase to all, ranging from 4½ per cent to 6¼ per cent. For the police and armed forces the government recognised “a special case” and gave substantially higher increases.

In their own field the employers are always trying to keep wages as low as possible and (which has the same effect on profits) trying to intensify work and get a given volume of output produced by a smaller number of workers. For a considerable period after the war, because unemployment was very low (usually under 2 per cent), trade union resistance was too strong and the employers could make little headway, so that the workers’ standard of living rose considerably.

Now there is a deep depression and the case is altered. In many undertakings including coal, railways, steel and the rest of the nationalised industries “productivity” schemes have been imposed, raising output per worker and reducing the number required for a given total output. Though some of the 3 million unemployed have lost their jobs because the depression has reduced sales, a considerable proportion have been squeezed out through greater “productivity”.

The reaction of some unions to employers who have attempted to keep wage increases below the rise of prices has been naive. Though they no longer claim and expect (as they did in the early post-war years) that wages should all continuously move ahead of the cost of living, they have fallen back on the argument that it is “unacceptable” that real wages should ever go through periods of decline. Capitalism never has given, and indeed could not give, any such guarantee. With declining sales and falling profits (in some cases losses) there has been in every sizeable depression in the past a temporary fall in the living standards of most workers. In the present depression workers in some industries have been compelled to accept wage increases which fall short of price rises. In some, like the airlines, they have had to accept wage cuts.

But experience has been far from uniform and the official index of average weekly earnings of all workers (manual and non-manual) has continued to keep ahead of inflation. In this respect the present depression is unlike those in the past. In the 19th century far fewer workers were organised in unions and there was no state unemployment or social security scheme. Workers on strike or thrown out of work had to rely on the limited trade union or Friendly Society funds financed out of their own contributions, or on charity, with the consequence that in times of bad trade most workers were quickly forced to accept wage reductions. In the present depression this has so far happened to only some workers.

The government statistical service also publishes figures showing total payments by employers as wages and salaries to all employees, and the total profits of companies and nationalised industries. They show that from 1977 onwards there has been a continuous and sharp fall of profits in relation to wages and salaries.

In 1977 profits were 33 per cent of wages and salaries. They fell in 1978 and 1979 to 32 per cent then to 25 per cent in 1980 and to 23 per cent in the first three quarters of 1981. (The latest published figures.) There is indication now that the trend has been reversed. Profits are rising again and it is likely that in coming months average weekly earnings of all workers will fall behind the rise of prices.

In addition to the depression. British capitalism has a long-standing problem of its own. It is that a lot of plant, machinery and processes is out of date by the standards of competing countries. This was spelled out during the Attlee Labour government, 1945-51, by Sir Stafford Cripps and Aneurin Bevan. Urgently needed modernisation, they said, requires a vast investment of capital, which can be provided only by holding down consumption, including wages, and this, for political reasons, is extremely difficult.

Consistently since World War II the expansion of production in Britain has been far below that in most other countries. The Financial Times (19 April 1982) published a table showing the annual rates of growth in fifteen countries, mostly European but including Japan and USA. It shows the annual rate of growth in the years 1975-1980 was in Britain by far the lowest of the fifteen. It stood at 1.6 per cent compared with 3.9 percent in USA and 5.1 percent in Japan. This low productivity means inability to produce at competitive prices and helps to explain why unemployment in Britain is higher than in most industrial countries. The British unemployment rate of 12.6 per cent compares with 2.2 per cent in Japan and under 1 per cent in Switzerland.

The many “productivity” schemes in British industry are designed to make it more competitive and doubtless will have had some effect in that direction. All the problems of the Thatcher government are concerned with this problem of British capitalism. The Labour Party is equally concerned with it. In a debate in the House of Commons Shadow Chancellor Peter Shore said:

   The major concern must be to restore the competitiveness of British industry in relation to its overseas rivals. Despite the government’s boasting, competitiveness has suffered dreadfully. There must be a major attack on the unnecessarily high cost of British industry. (The Times, 29 January 1982.)

Among Shore’s policies to bring this about is a revival of some form of “incomes” policy to hold wages down.

Edgar Hardcastle

Letter: Ultra-Purist Approach (1982)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

It has been extremely interesting to read your views, but I find that while I share the SPGB’s objectives, I am unhappy with the party’s tactics for achieving them. If there were any real hope of arriving at a socialist society in one country—let alone world-wide—in the foreseeable future, I could accept your ultra-purist approach, but under present conditions (and any I can imagine coming about, with or without my help) it seems a case of cutting off the working-class' nose to spite your face.

You are very close to saying that we should be making things as bad as possible for the workers, to encourage them to rise up and throw off their oppressors, but I believe that while only true socialism on an international scale is really worth holding up as a long-term objective, we should work at the same time to ease the worst effects of capitalism.

Despite this difference, I hope I am very wrong and that our joint efforts will herald a new future for all before it’s too late for me to see it!

Mike Scott

Barnstone

Notts

Reply:
You say that you agree with our objective socialism but you disagree with our view of how it should come about. Well, the important thing is that we agree about the socialist objective. We’re sure our differences about methods can be reconciled.

Let us say at first that we support the activities of trade unions where workers are trying to improve their position as wage workers on the industrial front, where these actions are consistent with the interests of workers as a whole. Members of our Party are also trade union members. There is scope for workers to improve their positions under capitalism through increased wages and better conditions. We think you will agree that, for the most part, these are defensive actions which over a long period still leave workers as being exploited under capitalism.

The struggle for socialism is different. This is political action and its object is to achieve the abolition of capitalism and its replacement with socialism by a majority of socialists. On the political front there is only one kind of action which is consistent with the socialist objective—work to persuade the majority of workers that only socialism can achieve the common ownership of the means of production and the establishment of a system of production for use on the basis of equality and co-operation.

There cannot be, as you suggest, a long-term objective which can be reconciled with short-term actions to ease the worst effects of capitalism. You will find that these "short-term actions” commit you to advocating a modified form of capitalism which would surely be hostile to your socialist principles. You cannot seek the abolition of capitalism by advocating some modified form of it. This is surely contradictory.

In fact this is a very old argument, and was the subject of much controversy when various labour groups, the Labour Party and our Socialist Party were being formed at the beginning of the century. Members of the Socialist Party stuck by their principles. Others formed the Labour Party and it is as well for you to consider what has happened since that time. How far have the workers come in political terms since that time? The improvements in workers' living standards have been as a result of trade union action and the productivity of their own labour. They have produced more wealth and they have been able to negotiate a share of the extra wealth that they themselves have produced.

But the decision to support reformist parties of an allegedly working class nature has been a complete waste of time. The working class the world over are still an exploited class; we still have poverty, unemployment, wars and all the social problems that go with capitalism. Some would agree that the development of nuclear weapons has brought us to the brink of destruction. Still the priorities of the profit motive prevail over the needs of people. For example, thousands of millions of pounds are spent on armaments while 40.000 children die from hunger and hunger-related disease every day.

If all those who argued that the socialist objective should be set aside in favour of political attempts to improve capitalism had instead joined the socialist movement based uncompromisingly on socialist principles, then we would have a large and influential Socialist Party.

The choices in the real world are these you either have capitalism with all its unavoidable consequences in terms of its problems, or you have a socialist system of production for use which would enable the people of the world to solve those problems. The political and economic realities are that there is no ground in between. By its very nature capitalism cannot be run in the interests of the community; its social and political limitations are essentially economic in nature and cannot be controlled. This is what the Labour Party has found.

Editors.

50 Years Ago: Hurrah for Inflation (1982)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The General Election in October last was fought largely round the fear of inflation. The national government leaders waved worthless German 100,000 mark notes before the eyes of their listeners and told horrifying stories of the hardships inflation and rising prices would bring in their train. Now, six months later, inflation is all the fashion.
The Sunday Express, one of Lord Beaverbrook’s papers, says:

   How rapidly the situation has developed! How swiftly minds have moved! Inflation is now no longer left to Lord Beaverbrook. Or, in the House, to Mr. Boothby. The movement is growing and spreading. Most public men are now in favour of inflation. Practically every Member of Parliament speaking in debates is an inflationist. (Sunday Express, 15 May 1932.)

(From an editorial “The Campaign for Inflation" published in the Socialist Standard, June 1932.)

Falklands Comment (1982)

From the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is There Life After Jingoism?

The children who were taken off the requisitioned ship Uganda might have been bitterly disappointed at losing their cruise but instead they lined its rails singing Rule Britannia. The message that South Georgia had been taken was in a style which might have been used by Nelson and ended with “God save the queen”. Jingoism is not dead.

More significant was the absence of any popular protest of a size to disturb the government. Have the working class been duped yet again, after two world wars to end war, after Korea, Cyprus, Suez? What now of the peace movement, of the great marches and demonstrations, and the gentler protest of flowers slipped into the advancing rifles? We were told then that this movement was irresistible. that it was the way to build peace in the world and that peace was a priority above socialism. Yet another reform movement has been exposed as futile.

Workers who support capitalism are easily overborne by the propaganda supporting its class rule, exploitation, poverty, famine, war . . . Only the socialist—who is conscious to the facts of capitalism and the need to replace it with socialism—is immune. Socialists are not alone in hating what capitalism does to its people but they are unique in their understanding of why it does and of how to end it. Only a socialist society will abolish war. Socialists are the only true peace- mongers.

Gutter War

That prime example of gutter journalism, the Sun, published an article boasting that its man with the British Fleet in the South Atlantic had signed a missile sent to blow up an Argentinian ship. The missile, according to the Sun, had written on it, “Up Yours, Galtieri”. Needless to say, the missile was not aimed at Galtieri, but the uniformed wage slaves who serve his regime.

Church Comment

The Archbishop of Canterbury announced that he is opposed to wars unless they are necessary in order to protect life and property. So now we know: “Thou shalt not kill, unless . .."

His Own Petard

Even before the sinking of the Sheffield it was expected that the Argentinians would be pretty tough opponents—especially as they would be using a lot of weaponry made in Britain.

It was not, in fact, ironical that British servicemen should be shot at by ships, guns and missiles made in this country, directed by Argentinians who had been trained to use the weapons effectively over here. Britain is one of the world's great arms manufacturers and the armaments trade is highly competitive. Every arms producing country sends its salespeople out into the world to get orders, trying to persuade other states that their weapons are the most accurate, destructive and murderous on the market.

Armaments are commodities, made to be sold at a profit. Workers in the weapons factories use their abilities to turn out things which may at some stage be turned against them or against their fellow workers abroad. It is all good business, strictly in accordance with the precepts of capitalism. In any case, the country of origin of the missile which kills a worker is of no importance. What matters is that he or she dies in the interests of their masters, when they should be living and struggling for a society free of war.

Smashing Fascists

“Fight the fascists wherever they dare to show themselves”, said the Socialist Workers’ Party. Now that the Tory government is giving them the opportunity to pursue their futile fight against the fascists, SWPers are nowhere to be seen. Can it mean that they favour fighting ignorant fascist bootboys on the streets of this country, but they oppose the same dangerous tactics on an international level?

Money and Life

“Let’s get on with the war and damn the expense’’, demanded excitable Manny Shinwell in a House of Lords debate on the Falklands. It was assumed that the ageing ex-boxer, left-wing rebel, pacifist Labour minister, was talking about money but workers’ lives are also part of the expenditure of war.

As the first British ships sailed out of Portsmouth, one reliable estimate was that it would cost about £50 million just to get them across to the South Atlantic and back again, without staying for any length of time or doing any actual fighting.

Now we all know that these are hard times. There must be cuts. There must be no wasteful spending, so frivolous things like hospitals and old people’s homes must be slashed to the bone or we shall all sink beneath abject penury.

There were in fact a few feeble protests, from the customary feeble quarters, at spending so much on a military expedition instead of on schools, hospitals. social services and the like. The protesters, as usual, missed the fact that we live under a social system in which the priority is profit, not human comfort and safety.

Capitalism is always prepared to spend a huge part of its resources on destruction, regardless of how much deprivation there is in the world. It is no coincidence that it is at its most inventive, efficient and productive in wartime, when its aim is to destroy as much, and murder as many, as it can. It will need no help in this from outworn cynics like Shinwell.

Messages in the Media (1982)

From the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is increasingly difficult to take in the flood of words which is poured out daily by the various media, and we offer a few definitions in the hope that they may help the reader to make sense of the world.

Aggression: use of force by a hostile state,
    cf Self-defence: use of force by one’s own state.

Anti-colonialism (Argentine): seizing by force a small group of islands 400 miles away, entirely inhabited, by foreigners.

Anti-colonialism (British): killing Argentine servicemen in order to re-establish the right of the Falkland Islands Company to exploit the people of the islands.

Bicycle ride: the means by which three million unemployed could find jobs immediately.
  cf Bicycle rider: Norman Tebbitt’s father.

Bicycles, shortage of: the only reason why three million unemployed stay out of work.

Capitalism: a system of society in which the great majority of people own no capital.

Catholic priest: a man who thinks all Catholics should have large families, who refuses to have any family at all himself, and who is known as Father,
  cf Monk: a man who has renounced his family, and is known as Brother,
  and Nun: a woman who has renounced her family, and is known as Sister.

Day off: a month at Windsor.
   cf Brief break: two months at Sandringham.
   and Short holiday: three months at Balmoral.

Defence: attack.
  cf Defence expenditure: money spent preparing to attack other states in the next war.
  and Ministry of Defence: government department in charge of attacks on other countries.

Democracy, definition of Theodore Parker 1810-60: government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.
 cf British democracy. 1982: government of the people, by the politicians, for the capitalists,
 and Socialist democracy: system which will replace the government of people by the administration of things.

Education: process of preparing the children of the rich to give orders, and the children of the poor to obey them.

Food: trace elements found in some supermarket groceries.

Freedom of the press. British version: right of any very rich person to spread their views effortlessly to millions every day; right of groups of workers to spread their views with great difficulty to thousands every month.

God is on our side: message from Christian British chaplains to British troops fighting in the Falklands conflict.

God is on our side (in Spanish): message from Christian Argentine Chaplains to Argentine troops fighting in the Falklands conflict.

God: one who seems to have difficulty making his meaning clear in two different languages; one who needs to brush up his Spanish (or his English, according to the view taken of the Falklands conflict).

God save the king/queen: request to someone who doesn’t exist to preserve someone who shouldn’t.

History lesson: recruiting drive (“we have a passionate attachment to the [Falkland] islands which has been imbued throughout our schooldays”-young Argentine, The Times 5 May 1982).

Human nature: unexplained compulsive urge to murder, rob, rape and pillage possessed by everyone except the speaker and friends.

Human nature theory: an invention of the ruling class for use as an alibi explaining away the excesses of their system.

Idle dreamer: anyone who believes that the producers of the world’s wealth could produce it for themselves instead of for the property owners,
  cf Practical politician: person who believes the exploitation of one class by another is part of the natural law.

Inflation: device (advocated c.g. by J. M. Keynes) consisting of printing more and more paper money, by which governments have tried to keep wages, and salaries, in check.

Inflation, advantage of: the government that creates inflation then alleges that it is caused by the workers who try to defend themselves against it.

Inflation, expert on: person who says workers trying to achieve the same real wages they agreed to work for a year ago are in fact causing inflation; one who believes that workers can force up indefinitely or in some way fix the level of their own pay; one who believes (theoretically) that all workers therefore must be millionaires.

Inhuman behaviour: human behaviour under the stresses and strains of capitalism

Murderer: person punished for killing one human being.
   cf Military leader, person rewarded for killing many.

National catastrophe: hundreds of workers not working for several days after disagreements on wages and conditions.
   cf Salutary economic re-adjustment: millions of workers not working for years.

News: what is left in a newspaper after discounting the advertisements, instant-wealth competitions, attacks on strikers, salacious details of entertainers' lives, agony columns, strip cartoons, astrology, pictures of sporting heroes, praise of rich men, photos of nude women, gossip about the royal family, denunciations of workers’ idleness, stock-market prospects, snapshots of kittens, proprietor’s opinions, letters from the converted, forecasts of women’s fashions, speculation on sporting events, and rude gestures at the Press Council.
   cf Dissatisfied reader: one who has discounted editorial bias as well, and finds nothing whatever is left.

Patriotism: blind obedience to the group of capitalists who live in the same country.

Patriot: worker who is exploited by capitalism, and who is prepared to die in defence of the right of capitalism to do so.

Peace: war (peace “means being prepared to fight for that peace”, Rhodes-Boyson, The Times, 4 May 1982).

Poor, the: a large group of self-denying people who produce the world’s wealth and hand it over to a small group of rich individuals.

Rewards of religion: pie in the sky; meals beyond wheels; in the great by-and-by we shall eat you and I.

Right to life campaigner: person who supports the right to life of a two-day- old fertilised egg, but not the right to life of a twenty-year-old worker in uniform.

Right to strike: an integral part of human liberty in all foreign countries,
   cf Right to strike in this country: slogan of a gang of malcontents and trouble-makers.

Schooling: indoctrination.
   cf Free schooling: compulsory indoctrination.

Tomorrow: point of time at which the workers will be prosperous under capitalism.

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: propaganda title for the Russian state-capitalist empire.

Visionary: person who believes we should work for a sane social system in the world we live in.
    cf Realist: person who knows he will be rewarded after his death with a splendid time in Heaven, Valhalla, Nirvana, Elysium, Paradise, etc.

Youth Employment Scheme: project to keep the young unemployed off the streets and out of the unemployment statistics, paying them small sums of money.
   cf Life Peerages: project to keep a few of the old unemployed off the streets, paying them large sums of money.

Alwyn Edgar

Editorial: Looking at Unemployment (1982)

Editorial from the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everyone is interested in unemployment. Local authorities are running courses and conferences on its social and mental effects, academics are writing books and papers on it. professional economists are issuing complex and wildly divergent forecasts about its future. Above all, with the next election in view, political parties are producing programmes and making promises which claim to solve it.

What has always happened in the past is that unemployment has gone up when shrinking markets have made existing employment levels unprofitable, and come down when the market has expanded and employers have needed to take on more workers to produce goods to sell at a profit. The interest shown by the “experts’" and politicians has never in itself made much difference to the course unemployment has taken.

Despite this the politicians still hope, or at least give the impression they hope, that they can do something about the problem. That is why Thatcher’s economic advisers are formulating proposals to deal with unemployment and why both the Labour Party and the SDP have produced detailed plans for combatting it. The Tories’ record on unemployment over the last three years speaks for itself and Thatcher will find it hard to carry conviction with any new plan her advisers might think up. The Labour Party may put their trust in short electoral memories but cannot get away from the fact that every Labour government since 1929 has promised to get rid of, or reduce, unemployment and every single one has left office with unemployment higher than when it came in. As for the SDP, it has no record to defend but who can forget that its leaders spent many years in Labour governments helping to administer high rates of unemployment?

How do Labour and the SDP hope to deal with unemployment? Both their programmes, looked at in broad lines, turn out to be very similar to the sort of policies adopted by most Labour (and some Conservative) governments in the past. Both are opposed to “monetarism” and both intend instead to “reflate”- to print and spend large amounts of money to try and stimulate economic activity and “create employment”. The Labour Party aims at “full employment” while the SDP looks to an unemployment figure of 1¼  million or five per cent. These policies and aims resemble very closely the programme to which the left-wing French government under Mitterrand has been committed. Indeed, in a rally in Cardiff last July, Michael Foot praised Mitterrand for deciding to spend his way out of the crisis and said that the French leader’s policies were just the ones a future Labour government would use to get rid of unemployment. In the year since he took office Mitterrand, who had promised to reduce unemployment by 200,000 a year over his seven-year term, has seen the number of French jobless rise from 1.6 million to 2 million plus. So Mitterrand, using the same policies as advocated by Foot and Jenkins, has achieved the same results as Thatcher—increasing unemployment.

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this and from the past record of governments is that there is absolutely nothing that politicians can do about unemployment. Unemployment goes up and down according to the natural boom-slump-boom-slump cycle of the world market and does so regardless of the policies of individual governments. If capital cannot be invested at a profit, it is not invested at all and the result is reduced output, closures and fewer jobs. The world economy is in one of its slump phases at present and, inevitably, unemployment is rising everywhere. Even countries with a reputation for “efficiency” like Germany and Japan are seeing cutbacks in production, record bankruptcies and increasing numbers of workers without jobs.

In these circumstances it is hard to see the promises of more jobs and more security made by the different political parties as anything but, at best, exercises in wish fulfilment and at worst barefaced vote-catching frauds. It is equally hard not to see that unemployment and the threat of it are an integral part of the present world economic system which operates on the basis of profit, money, buying and selling and the employer-employee relationship. The only way to solve the problem is to bring in new economic arrangements based on production directly for use, moneyless free access to all goods and services and work carried out in voluntary association by free and equal producers.

Themes from Marx (1982)

Book Review from the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Penguin Books have recently reprinted the third volume in their selection of Marx’s political writings. Titled The First International and After, it contains much of Marx’s work between the founding of the International Working Men's Association in 1864 and his death in 1883. Two themes that occupied Marx during this period seem particularly worth commenting on: the making of socialist revolution, and the nature of socialist society.

Marx made it quite clear that the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class. In his Provisional Rules for the International, he stated:

That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves: that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies. but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule.

A letter circulated jointly by Marx and Engels in 1879 reiterates this view:

When the International was formed, we expressly formulated the battle-cry: the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. We cannot ally ourselves, therefore, with people who openly declare that the workers are too uneducated to free themselves and must first be liberated from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois. 

Years of writing and activity had taught that the workers cannot be liberated by leaders or vanguards, but only by their own efforts.

And what would be the nature of the revolution bringing about this emancipation? Here there is no doubt that, while Marx considered that force would generally be necessary, he did envisage the possibility of a peaceful revolution in certain circumstances. In 1872, Marx made a speech in Amsterdam at the Hague Congress of the International:

   The workers will have to seize political power one day in order to construct the new organisation of labour . . . We do not claim, however, that the road leading to this goal is the same everywhere.
   We know that heed must be paid to the institutions, customs and traditions of the various countries, and we do not deny that there are countries, such as America and England, and if I was familiar with its institutions, I might include Holland, where the workers may attain their goal by peaceful means. That being the case, we must recognise that in most continental countries the lever of the revolution will have to be force; a resort to force will be necessary one day in order to set up the rule of labour.

To a journalist who interviewed him in 1881, Marx said:

 In England. for instance, the way to show political power lies open to the working class. Insurrection would be madness where peaceful agitation would more swiftly and surely do the work. In France a hundred laws of repression and a mortal antagonism between classes seem to necessitate the violent solution of social war.

In the last hundred years, the circumstances which favoured a peaceful capture of political power have expanded at the expense of "laws of repression", so that Marx’s emphasis on force is now outdated.

Developments since Marx’s time have also affected the relevance of his remarks on the nature of socialism continued in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. This is the work relied on by leftists for their claim that socialism and communism must he distinguishable. But the text provides no justification for any such distinction; rather Marx speaks of two phases of communist society, in the first phase, distribution might be on the basis of the amount of work done by each producer, while in the "more advanced phase", the precept to be followed would be: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!" Our insistence on Marx's exact wording here is not mere pedantry, but is intended to make it clear that the distinction he is making is not between two different types of society, but between two phases of a single society, both phases being characterised by common ownership and abolition of wages, prices and profits.

This point is also relevant to what Marx says in the Critique about the dictatorship of the proletariat:

  Between capitalist and communist society lies a period of revolutionary transformation from one to the other. There is a corresponding period of transition in the political sphere and in this period the state can only take the form of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marx, then, envisaged three stages: the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into communism (= socialism), the lower phase of communism. and the higher phase of communism. The leftist distortion is to call the lower phase "socialism", and then to identify this with the dictatorship of the proletariat. For Marx, however, the dictatorship of the proletariat was not a type of society at all but a type of state, as the above quotation shows. There is no warrant in Marx for the view that the dictatorship of the protetariat means the kind of society which has existed in Russia for three-quarters of a century. As for the two-phase conception of socialism, technological advances mean that it would not take long till “all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly”, and free access could be introduced.

Paul Bennett