Sting in the Tail: An open letter (1996)

The Sting in the Tail column from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

An open letter

To: Colin Tudge,

Centre of Philosophy,

London School of Economics.

Dear Colin,

We enjoyed your recent diatribe in the Independent on Sunday against the effects of the profit motive on agriculture.

You explained how your researches into famine convinced you that food production in “the modern world” is not aimed at feeding people but at making money. Then you condemned the “bad husbandry” which led to BSE and the tortures inflicted on farm animals and provided the reason:

"When profit is the driving force. .. those who do not cut corners go to the wall."

Yes, you certainly put the boot into the profit motive in agriculture, but that doesn’t go nearly far enough, does it? After all, food is only one of society’s necessities: housing, clothing, medicine, in fact all the things we need are produced for profit and not people.

So, Colin, what you call “the modern world” is really the capitalist system and that’s what you should be attacking, not just one aspect of it.

Science and profits

The Observer (28 April) has revealed another piece of capitalist skulduggery in the relentless pursuit of profit:

"Boots, one of Britain's most trusted companies, commissioned research and then suppressed it after the results showed that its most lucrative drug could be replaced by products three times as cheap and just as effective. ”

After paying $250,000 for the survey by the University of California to test their drug Synthroid against cheaper ones produced by their rivals, they threatened legal action against publication. They used a team of private investigators to discredit the report, another example of the waste of human effort and the distortion of science caused by a society based on the profit motive.

Inside a society based on production for use the disinterested pursuit of human knowledge will be essential. Inside that society distortion of scientific research for profit will be impossible.

Learned fools

Below are some examples of “howlers” from last year’s GCSE exams:

Q. If the letter MW appear on a radio, what does it mean? 

A. Don’t play it on top of the microwave.

Q. Name some key figures from the industrial revolution. 

A. Harold Wilson and Arthur Scargill.

Q. Give an example of the use of the word “judicious”. 

A. The hands that judicious can be soft as your face with mild, green Fairy liquid.

Here are some howlers provided by very important public figures:

The core of empire was not profit but governance (Prof Max Beloff).

Iran is a theocracy but it is also a democracy (Louis Farrakhan of the Black Muslims).

Private ownership is the basis of all ethics on which man’s personality is built (Cardinal Józef Glemp, Primate of Poland).

Prescott’s pretensions

John Prescott, deputy leader of the Labour Party, declares that he is middle class, so Barry Hugill writes in an article in the Observer (14 April) entitled “We’re all middle class now”.

"It's a tricky question because there is no right answer. Karl Marx, never the snappiest of writers, dreamed up ‘relationship to the means of production’ as the key factor. So an engineer earning more than £40,000 per year would be working class because he doesn't own the company he his working for—he is just a prole like the rest of us. "

This won’t do for Hugill. After discussing education, vocabulary, occupation, housing, income and snobbery he concludes “So what are you? And does it matter?”

Well, yes it does. Class is determined by none of the categories in Hugill’s 600-word article, but by Karl Marx’s “relationship to the means of production”. Snappy enough for you, Mr Hugill?

Hattersley’s hesitations

Somewhat surprisingly, Prescott’s predecessor as Deputy leader of the Labour Party, Roy Hattersley, has an inkling that this might be so, writing in The Guardian (22 April) that:

"Social groups are determined by their relationship to the means of production. It is just my luck to begin spouting Marxism at the moment when nobody else believes a word that he wrote. ”

Hattersley’s comment on Marxism is wrong, but if by “social groups” he means classes then he is right. People who work for a wage or salary are working class whether they know this or not, and those who think they are “middle class” are only kidding themselves.

Alderson in Wonderland

The left was delighted, the right were enraged, and socialists were amused.

John Alderson, ex-Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall, wrote in the left-wing journal Red Pepper claiming that Britain is becoming a police state and anti-road protesters and protesters against the export of veal calves are the hope for the future.

Alderson gave his Humpty Dumpty view of the world in the statement:

"The primary task of policing is to uphold and safeguard human rights, he says, calling for an independent police commission to resolve conflict between police and public ” (Observer, 21 April).

The primary task of policing is to protect private property. The hope for the future is in workers organising for a society based on common ownership.

Alderson, Red Pepper, its left-wing supporters and its right-wing opponents, are united in their opposition to that revolutionary aim. Curiouser and curiouser.

‘Money is Irrelevant' (1996)

From the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

That’s the verdict of Sir James Goldsmith, the financier turned politician. A new convert to the Socialist Party, perhaps? Unfortunately, no. When Sir James says that money is irrelevant, he means he has so much of the stuff that he couldn’t spend it all if he tried, he is worth £1,200 million. However, this hasn’t stopped him from making the effort, and he recently pledged £20 million to the campaign for a referendum on the European Union and its single currency, thereby donating irrelevant money to an irrelevant cause.

Sir James’s offensive comment was quoted in the Sunday Times's eighth annual tribute to Britain’s super rich, published in April. This year’s wallow in the cream of the capitalist class appraised the fortunes of five hundred fat cats, worth collectively a staggering £70 billion. This figure is a massive 28 percent higher than that of last year, the highest total since the survey began in 1989:

“Britain’s rich became more than £15.5 billion richer in 1995 in what proved to be a vintage year for personal wealth creation. "

Recalling your miserly two or three percent pay rise (assuming you got a rise at all), you may be forgiven for wondering how you managed to miss out on this bonanza. For most of us, of course, it was more likely to have been a “vintage year” for debt, job insecurity, negative equity and the inexorable struggle to make ends meet. You may be wondering just how the fortunate few came by their even greater wealth. Was it hard work? Thrift? Fiddling their expenses? On the contrary; they didn’t actually do anything:

“A rare combination of record stock market performance, a sharp increase in land prices, a steady rise in art values and a thriving market in the sale of companies has created a sudden improvement in the lot of the rich. ”

If only you’d sensed that thriving market in the sale of companies, you could have got yourself down to the local car boot sale and unloaded a few of those old companies you’ve had cluttering up the garage for years.

Richer and richer

Yes, it’s a funny old world isn’t it?

There you are, packing in the overtime to cam a few extra quid, while Hans Rausing has seen his wealth rise by a stratospheric £880 million—and that’s following his retirement! In fact the average increase in assets amongst this tiny group was £30 million. There were so many millionaires with bigger fortunes queuing to get onto the Sunday Times list that the threshold for entry had to be raised from £25 million in 1995 to £35 million this year. And if these estimates seem astounding, bear in mind that they do not include cash in private accounts!

So what are your chances of joining this well-heeled band? Even less than your chances of winning the lottery:

". ..  no lottery winner has yet made it to the 500 despite . . . rollover jackpots. Until a . . . winner emerges to claim £40m, the most that a winner can hope for is to scrape into the top 1,000 where the bottom line in our database is £10m. Not a bad sum but not serious money."

No, not serious money. If you want to play with the big boys (and they are mostly boys—only 8 percent are women), you won’t be taken seriously without at least thirty five million to your name.

The big boys are people like David Sainsbury, of the supermarket giant, who is worth £1.26 billion. His “salary” rose from £311,000 to £389,000 last year, a cool 25 percent increase. Not that impressive, some might say, for the boss of Britain’s leading grocer. However, this didn’t include his whopping £37.5 million share of the company’s dividends. Interestingly, Sainsbury is quoted as saying: “If I vote at the next general election, it will be for Tony Blair.” Confirmation, if any were needed, of whose interests “New” Labour represents.

Other top dogs include Viscount Rothermere the newspaper publisher, whose family’s wealth tops £1 billion, and there are “unconfirmed reports that his personal wealth in cash alone matches that sum”. Then there is the Duke of Westminster, worth £1,650 million, who “tries to stay in touch with the harsher side of life”. Apparently, he recently took his two children to a drug rehabilitation project “to show them what it was like”. It’s a bit like us going to visit a stately home to see how the other half lives, but instead of pleasure by proxy, the Duke likes a little pain by proxy, just in ease he’s deprived of the pleasure of knowing just how stinking rich and privileged he is.

Different world

Not all aristocrats have fared as well as the Duke, however. The aristocracy of course is no longer in the position of ascendancy that it once was, and incomes for many have reduced dramatically in recent times. If you’ve fallen on hard times lately, you may be eager to hear how these pillars of the community have coped; they do, after all, have much more substantial commitments. Well, the answer can be very simple:

“Though landowning aristocrats no longer dominate the 500 list, they will not disappear completely for several generations. As Simon Howard has shown with his stewardship of Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, it simply takes the auction of one £5 million painting to provide enough liquidity for some years . . ."

So there you have it. You know' those ugly old Van Goghs and Picassos which are making your drawing room look untidy? Get them along to the boot sale with your old companies and you’re quids in.

One of the interesting things about the Sunday Times’s survey is its raison d'etre. It’s difficult to ascertain whether it’s aimed at envious poorer readers, who may drool over the enormous fortunes enjoyed by others, or if it’s aimed at the people who actually feature in it, so that they might also envy those with bigger wads, while at the same time feeling superior to those with less. For many it’s a double-edged sword: if they’re not included they complain, yet when they are included they still complain that they’re either under- or overvalued, depending presumably on whether they are tax exiles or not.

Clearly, the people in this survey inhabit a different world, a world that the rest of us can barely imagine. Many inherited their wealth, while the majority are “self-made” men. Defenders of capitalism try to persuade us that entrepreneurs have acquired their money through some sort of super-human effort, and that they deserve more than the rest of us. But there are only twenty-four hours in a day; only so much work that any one person can do; and whose contribution is more valuable? The entrepreneur who chooses to work ten or twelve hours a day, or the farmer, or miner, of fitter, or firefighter? No matter how hard a worker toils, they will never be rich—but somebody else will. Yes, the fortunes of the wealthy are indeed the results of hard work: yours and mine.

The Sunday Times has at least cleared up a little problem for the government: the whereabouts of the mythical “feel-good factor”, for which the Tories have been patiently waiting to persuade a jaded electorate to vote for them. The feel-good factor is alive and well and living with Britain’s rich, while the feel-conned factor, as ever, stubbornly resides with the working class.

Nick Brunskill

Facing the facts (1996)

From the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

• Inequality - The rich are getting richer. The top 1% of adults — 440,000 people — own more than twice as much as the bottom 50%. We produce, they take
• Insecurity - Only 4 in 10 workers have jobs that are relatively secure. By the year 2000, full-time employment will be a minority form of work. No profit, no work.
• Poverty - In Britain 36% of children live below the poverty line and about 10 million people are dependent on Income Support. There is worse to come. Social Security spending is to be reduced by £5 billion by the year 2000.
• Stress - Office staff in Britain are working longer hours. About 500,000 workers suffer physically as a result of their working environment; stress is identified as a problem in 9 out of 10 workplaces.
• Pressure - 1 in 4 of the population will suffer some type of mental health problem in a year. Poverty and loneliness are increasingly important causes.
• Homelessness - In 1995 about 360,000 people were classified as homeless and repossessions increased to 49,410. 389,780 home owners were in mortgage arrears and 75,258 possession orders were made against home owners. Meanwhile at least 300,000 building workers are currently unemployed.
• Poverty - More than 1 billion people in developing countries live in absolute poverty, and about 13 million children die each year from easily preventable illnesses.
• Hunger - 550 million people suffer hunger and every 3 seconds a child dies of hunger even though the world produces enough grain to provide everyone with a minimum diet Meanwhile crops which can’t be sold at a profit are destroyed and farmers are paid not to grow food.
• War - 25 wars rage over the globe, world capitalism spends $1,000,000,000,000, on armed forces each year with 500,000 scientists in military research. A huge waste of human and natural resources.
• Environment - Globally, forests are being destroyed at the rate of 11 million hectares per year while 6 million hectares of land are lost to deserts and a further 21 million are ruined so badly that they can no longer grow food. 

The Coming Election (1996)

From the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the election comes you will be promised the earth. The Tory Party will claim that the "feel good factor” is just around the comer. They are hoping that you forget the last 17 years of broken promises and shattered dreams. The Labour Party are out-Torying the Tories in a bid for your support. Don’t be deceived. They favour the same market system as the Tories, Liberal Democrats, Nationalists and all the other candidates will promise a variety of reforms. Despite their differences they all have this in common—they want to run the buying and selling system. Only the Socialist Party candidates will be standing for a complete transformation of society from capitalism to World Socialism.

Behind all the fine words of the politicians about democracy and freedom is the reality of a system based on production for profit. The rule of capitalism is no profit— no production. That is why we have thousands homeless, and thousands living in substandard housing while building workers are unemployed. That is why we have people living on inadequate diets while farmers are paid not to produce food. That is why we have well over 2 million workers unemployed in this country—banned from producing the goods we all need to live. That is why world-wide the day-to-day experience of millions is one of unemployment, hunger, war, pollution and crime. That is why we must get rid of capitalism and bring about World Socialism.

John Major said he was going to create the classless society and Tony Blair promises a stake-holder society. This is nonsense. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of the population own little or nothing but their ability to work. In order to live we must work. We are the working class. Whether we work as railwaymen or doctors, labourers or university professors, we must work for wages or salaries. A small minority own enough of capital to be able to live without working. They live off the unpaid labour of the majority. This is the capitalist class. This class difference is based on ownership or non-ownership of the factories, the workshops, and all the commercial and transport undertakings. Between these classes, there is a conflict that shows itself in strikes, lock-outs, speed-ups and productivity drives. While the buying and selling system lasts this class division will always form its basis.

The major illusion in politics today is that by voting for one of the reformist parties the present system can be made to run in the interests of the majority. This is a fallacy. In this country over the last 100 years we have had Liberal, Conservative, Labour and Coalition governments. None of them has altered the class basis of society. In other countries they have had Republican, Democrat, Communist and Nationalist governments. Again the profit system has remained intact. Any reforms that have been brought about, such as the National Health Service, have left a two-tier provision—and recent experience has shown even these reforms can be taken away. Capitalism can only work in the interest of the owning class. For the working class a century of reform has proved virtually useless in dealing with social problems.

Socialism would be a world-wide system. It will mean that the earth— everything in it and on it—will be owned in common by the whole population. It is a new system of society where everyone capable of it would work according to their ability and take according to their needs. It is a society based on co-operation, where wealth would be produced solely to satisfy human needs without recourse to the market system with its profits, prices and wages. Inside a socialist system the problems of world hunger, war, poverty and environmental damage would be capable of solution because their cause—world capitalism—would have been abolished. Socialism will be a real democracy, where men and women can decide what will be produced and how society would be organised without the necessity of shareholders, directors or politicians.

No one can give you socialism. We in the Socialist Party do not claim that we can give you it It can only be brought about by a majority understanding it and organising for it. Only you, the working class, can make socialism possible. The choice is yours—another 4 or 5 years of the same or the start to building a better new society?

Richard Donnelly

Greasy Pole: Something in common (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here is a question. Can anyone think of anything in common between Asil Nadir and about half the voting population of Britain? For those of you who have forgotten. Nadir— a particularly apposite name considering what happened to him—was once a man who convinced a lot of people that capitalism does not have to work in the way in which it naturally, inexorably does work. He was what is known as a tycoon, who devoted a lot of this time to developing a business conglomerate called Polly Peck. This was such a profitable company that it was often mentioned as evidence that there is really no need for the economic cycle of boom and slump. There is no need for any business ever to be anything but profitable, no need for it ever to make a loss or go out of existence. All that is necessary to have at the head someone like Asil Nadir, who will ensure that the enterprise will be endlessly profitable. The City loved it. They loved Asil Nadir. They rushed to invest in his business empire.

For his part Asil Nadir loved the City and he must have pleased many of his admirers there, when he gave £400,000 to the Conservative Party, presumably in the hope that the money would help the Tories to foster this mutually attractive and remunerative relationship. However this cosy set-up began to look less comfortable when Asil Nadir’s methods came under the detailed scrutiny of the Serious Fraud Office. Not to put too fine a point on it, the glamorous tycoon was suspected of running a highly unstable operation, which was not improved by his alleged tendency to help himself from the till. The investors in Polly Peck were rudely awakened from their dream of an eternally prosperous capitalism by the reality of losing hundreds of millions of pounds in the company’s collapse.

Jumping bail

Facing trial on 13 charges of fraud and false accounting, Asil Nadir decided that he could no longer rely on a little help from his friends, whether in the City or the Tory Party. Discretion, he decided, was the better part of valour and he jumped bail, fleeing to Northern Cyprus to make sympathetic noises at the news that his former aide in Polly Peck, Elizabeth Forsyth, had collected a five-year prison sentence for helping to launder some of the money Nadir was said to have stolen.

Let us leave, for the moment, the disgraced and hunted tycoon in his Mediterranean hideaway and consider the other part of our question—the half of the voting population in Britain. We refer to the millions of people who support the Labour Party whose vote at elections, give or take a bit, usually amounts to about half of those cast. Now these people are not business tycoons, they are not popular in the City and they don't have readily available hideaways in the sun. If they appear in court it is not for helping themselves to large sums of somebody else's money but normally for shoplifting or burglary or stealing a mobile phone from a parked car.

These people can’t give hundreds of thousands of pounds away because after they’ve paid the rent or the mortgage and the cost of gas and water and electricity and they've bought some clothes and food there is very little left. They pass their lives in poverty, on the knife-edge of destitution so that if something disastrous happens, like losing their job or getting chronically sick, they slip down into a kind of sub-existence where malnutrition and fear are such everyday features of their lives that they become almost inured to them.

Coping with poverty

But this is achieved at considerable cost. The Observer, in a recent article about food and poverty, quoted parents who are struggling to survive, and to protect their children, on Income Support: ”. . . I don’t eat . . . I've walked about with holes in my shoes, no winter coat and haven’t eaten for three days to look after them . . . I won’t let my kids go without." A recent government survey found that among the unemployed 20 percent of men and 38 percent of women had suffered a neurotic disorder. And for those who are in work stress is still a potent factor, not least because of their fear of losing their job.

So let us return, now that we know who we’re talking about, to our original question about what is common to Asil Nadir and the Labour voters of Britain. Well Nadir has recently informed the world that while he does not regret giving all that money to the Tories ("I never regret anything that I have done in my life") he is no longer among their supporters. "No government is in power for ever," he says. "Thank God there is a certain amount of democratic election and we know the elections are approaching. I hope the British public will give their view of what they think of the British Government.” In fact, if the Labour Party win the next election. Nadir says, he will return to Britain (although it is not clear whether this is intended to attract support for Labour or drive it away).

The point about this is that both Asil Nadir the opulent wheeler-and-dealer and the stressed and exploited Labour voters are agreed that a different government here will bring some significant changes to capitalism in Britain.

Labour wheezes

Now this is very unkind to Tony Blair and all his spin doctors and hangers-on who are labouring night and day to convince us that a Labour government will be so similar to the Conservatives that we may hardly notice there has been an election. Gordon Brown will sit in the Treasury searching for new ways to disappoint his supporter's expectations by slashing government spending. His latest wheeze—to abolish Child Benefit for those aged between 16 and 19—has provoked even Peter Lilley to a kind of protest, describing Brown’s proposal as “. . . deeply unpopular in the country . . . a pernicious tax on learning". Jack Straw will occupy the Home Office and try to outdo Michael Howard’s reputation for bashing criminals, perhaps creating a new offence of washing someone's windscreen at traffic lights when they haven’t asked you to. Tony Blair will be in Number Ten thinking up new phrases like stakeholding society to convince us that it isn’t happening and if we are sure that it is then it’s not what we think it is.

So that’s what they have in common— misconceptions about what Labour will rule capitalism means. Of course there are differences between Asil Nadir and Labour voters. He has reason to think he may benefit from a Labour government. They may also think like that but have no reason to.

Ivan

World View: Is Marxism Eurocentric? (1996)

From the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Racism remains one of the main features of Western capitalist society. It is institutionalised in the systematic discrimination which black people experience in jobs, housing and the education system, and the harassment they suffer at the hands of police and immigration authorities.

A striking development in European politics since the East European events of 1989 has been the resurgence of racism, expressing itself in the rise of the fascist and racist parties which have been able to make significant electoral gains, especially in France, Italy and Germany. This development has not surprised us.

Black Nationalists argue that “black liberation can be achieved only by black people organising themselves separately from white anti-racists and Socialists". Socialists, by contrast, regard racism as a product of capitalism which serves to reproduce this social system by dividing the working class. It can be abolished, therefore, only through a socialist revolution achieved by a united working class in which blacks and whites join together against their common enemy.

A major difference between socialists and black separatists is that black nationalist intellectuals tend to see Marxism as a Eurocentric political tradition, as a body of thought so deeply rooted in European culture that it is simply incapable of identifying with the plight—and expressing the aspirations of—the oppressed black masses, both in the Third World and in the advanced capitalist countries.

Black Separatists wrong

The resulting conflict between Marxism and Black Nationalism is systematically explored by Cedric Robinson, an American scholar associated with the Institute of Race Relations in London, in his book Black Marxism. Robinson’s basic thesis is that Marxism is, in the very way in which its concepts are ordered, a Eurocentric ideology.

Marxism, Robinson claims, isn’t only European in its origins, but in its “analytical presumptions, its historical perspectives, its points of view”. It consequently has failed to confront a recurring idea in western civilisation, namely racism, and in particular, the way in which racialism inevitably permeates the social structure emergent from capitalism. Socialists reject these arguments and are well aware of the links between racism—all over the world—and capitalism.

It is often claimed that racism is as old as human nature, the implication being that we can’t get rid of it. On the contrary, racism as we know it today first developed in the 17th and 18th centuries in order to justify the systematic use of African slave labour in the great plantations of the new world which were central to the original emergence of capitalism as a world system. Racism, that is, was formed as part of the process through which capitalism became the dominant social and economic system.

Thus racism today arises from the divisions that are fostered among different groups of workers whose competition on the job market is intensified by the fact they often come from different parts of the world and are drawn together within the borders of the same state by capitalism's insatiable appetite for cheaper labour power.

Racism serves to set workers against each other, and to prevent them from effectively fighting against the bosses who exploit them all, irrespective of their colour or national origin. It operates against the interest of all workers, white and black alike. A divided working class harms even those workers who are not the direct victims of racism. White workers should identify their interest with those of black people who suffer racial oppression and black separatists are wrong when they dismiss all the white working class as an irredeemable racist rabble. Racism has grown up with capitalism and helps to sustain it; its abolition therefore depends on socialist revolution and the abolition of capitalism and that will break up the material structures with which it is bound up.

Fighting Racism

Fighting racism depends on understanding its causes. This is essential if the hold of racism on white workers is to be broken. Racism appeals to white workers because it offers an imaginary solution to the real problems—poverty, unemployment, exploitation and so on.

Socialists are anti-racists not only because we despise racism for the obscenity that it is, but because a  class movement which does not confront racism will not be able to change capitalism to socialism. Breaking down the social barriers which this process helps erect between different groups of workers is a necessary condition of any successful socialist revolution.

The charge that Marxism is “Eurocentric" made by Black Nationalists such as Cedric Robinson is mistaken. Marxism indeed emerged in Western Europe in response to the appearance of industrial capitalism, the capitalist mode of production in its developed form. At the centre of Marx's theory was his analysis of this unprecedented phenomenon. In the Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse in particular he stressed capitalism's universalising role, the way in which it dragged humankind willy-nilly into the first genuinely global social system in history. But he also recognised how private property society engenders competition and exploitation at the same time. Marx was equally clear-sighted about the terrible suffering this entailed, especially for the peoples of what is called now the Third World—"the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of [America] . . . the beginning of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins are all things which characterise the dawn of the era of capitalist production” (Capital, Vol. I).

Marx crucially maintained that only a society of common ownership could provide the framework for the eradication of racial prejudice in its entirety. Capitalism and racism go hand-in-hand—only socialism can abolish both.

Michael Ghebre

World View: Voluntary Simplicity (1996)

From the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

A large number of Americans are turning away from commuting back and forth from "stressful” and “unfulfilling" jobs and rejecting the world of consumerism in favour of environmentally friendly lifestyles. They are adopting a new set of values: "The Three S's"—sustainability, spirituality and satisfaction, while searching for “meaning" and "aesthetic expression." This is the picture presented by Duane Elgin of the "voluntary simplicity" movement in the US at a recent debate of the Oxford Centre for Ethics and the Environment. The question for debate was “Does voluntary simplicity provide a realistic path toward ecological sustainability?" Elgin’s answer to this question was “yes".

Like many in the environmental movement, Elgin talks about changing society solely in terms of the consumer’s values changing. Dr Juliet Schor, author of The Overworked American who debated Elgin argued for changing the economic structure of society. Schor who has helped set up the New Party in America, advocates a collective "downshifting” by western industrial nations. "Downshifting" is defined as making a "lifestyle decision" which reduces the amount of paid employment you do and/or reduces the money you earn in the hope of "regaining control" over your life. In a survey, 28 percent of Americans of working age said that, in the last five years, they had decided to “downshift" in this sense. Indeed. This trend among workers has been reported to have worried the stock markets, being a far broader phenomenon than that of mothers giving up work to look after children. The trend, says Schor, can be seen among both sexes, whether or not people have children and across all age groups up to those in their 50s and all income spectra.

The stereotyped view of America as a country having swallowed materialist/consumerist values whole is thus misleading, even among relatively wealthy US workers (and Schor’s statistics do not tell us how many non-downshifters remain unhappy with their “lifestyles"). Ninety-five percent of all downshifters, she explains, say they are now happier than they were before.

New Party, Old System

The ideas of Schor’s New Party are reminiscent of those of the Green Party in Britain. Schor advocates that Britain should opt for slower, “sustainable" growth (about one percent per year) and, in exchange, spend more on health and education. This assumption that capitalist economies can simply pick and choose their growth rate is naive. The economies of Britain, France and Germany, for example, are currently trying to cut back on welfare expenditure at the same time as they try desperately to boost their growth rates up and out of this current uncertain period.

Another fundamental problem with the "voluntary simplicity"/downshifting response to society’s current problems (of which the ecological crisis is just one) is obviously that most of the world’s people do not have the choice of such a "lifestyle change” open to them. Duane Elgin tells u how he was able to move to a more "modest" house in order to fund his book Voluntary Simplicity. Clearly, not everyone has a house which they can sell, or a job from which they could "downshift". Most parts of the world do not even have a welfare state that they can "downshift" into. The only kind of simplicity available to the majority of the world’s population is of an entirely involuntary nature. It involves no choice about how fulfilling one’s work will be or whether the capitalist one works for will use their resources "ethically". (It is debatable whether the capitalists have much choice about this themselves if they are to get a good return from their investments.)

The debate was billed as a confrontation of the question of how we create an ecologically sustainable society. It seems that, in answer to this, the ever-growing environmental literature, research and discussion such as that of Elgin and Schor will talk about everything other than the world’s population gaining common ownership and control over the world's resources as a necessary first step. 

Dan Greenwood

Growing pains of capitalism (1996)

From the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

How far the present Tory — or a future Labour — government is
 willing, or able, to spend money is a question which is at the heart
of every other issue — from education to the NHS. No government,
regardless of which economic guru it paid lip service to, has ever
 intervened to make the capitalist economy run smoothly. As even a
cursory look at its own history reveals, the idea that the Labour 
Party will succeed where every other party in the history of
 capitalism has failed is an insult to the intelligence of the working 
class on whose votes the fate of the Labour Party's
 bid for power depends.

Once upon a time governments believed that they could intervene in the economy to ensure its smooth operation without economic crises, slumps and unemployment. The seminal 1944 White Paper on Employment, issued under the National government of Churchill and Attlee, affirmed that governments should intervene to maintain adequate levels of employment and growth in the post-war period. It was inspired by the doctrines of John Maynard Keynes, the economist who claimed that capitalism could operate without the existence of slumps given correct government intervention and appropriate state expenditure. The Keynesian doctrine led the labour Party to famously state that “if bad trade and general unemployment threatens, this means that total purchasing power has fallen too low. Therefore we should at once increase expenditure, both on consumption and on development, i.e. on both consumer goods and capital goods. We should give people more money and not less, to spend” (Full Employment and Financial Policy). The view that full employment and economic growth were the overriding considerations of government was repeated in the Radcliffe Report of 1959 and publicly by ministers. Today, in the wake of the return of seemingly permanent mass unemployment and severe economic crises, no major political party in Britain (or elsewhere for that matter) still holds to what was termed the‘‘past-war consensus” on government spending, growth and employment.

It was Jim Callaghan, when Prime Minister in the late 1970s, who told the Labour Party conference that the option of governments spending their way out of an economic crisis ‘‘no longer existed” after years of Keynesian intervention failed to stop the reappearance of slump. This was a view enthusiastically endorsed by Mrs Thatcher and her successor, whose aim has been to reduce government expenditure as a way of assisting the economy, instead of selectively increasing it as a stimulus to trade. The current government aim is to reduce government spending to under 40 percent of GNP, a target which they do not look like achieving in the near future or anything like it. In actual fact, despite protestation to the contrary over the last twenty years or so, government spending has been rising as rapidly as ever.

That this is so is not because of any systematic attempt to boost spending to avert unemployment and economic disaster on Keynesian lines, but is precisely because these factors (unemployment, etc.) have been in operation due to the normal workings of the capitalist economy, and the governments of the world have all but given up trying to do anything about them. No government or major party pledges itself to a swift return to what used to be called "full employment" and none is likely to because they realise, implicitly if not explicitly, that the capitalist trade cycle is beyond their control. Furthermore, government expenditure has been rising fast without any conscious reformist action by governments to avert the problems. All governments now do is attempt to clean up the mess left by innumerable market failures and this alone costs them an increasing amount.

Spend, spend, spend

Economics correspondent David Smith has claimed that “public spending, once lifted, is virtually impossible to lower” (Sunday Times, 24 March) and this seems to be confirmed by recent history of the ongoing costs of the inefficient capitalist system and the failures of the market economy keep building up. During the last Labour government, for instance, real government spending rose by 9.4 percent, which was matched by a 9.4 percent rise during the first Thatcher parliament, excluding proceeds from privatisations which are a one-off bonus. Thatcher’s second term, aided by signs of economic recovery, saw the increase in expenditure slow to 7 percent. Between the 1987 General Election and 1992 the increase slowed further to 5.9 percent, but since then with the return of slump government spending has risen by a colossal 11.3 percent in real terms, the biggest rise since the onset of economic crisis under Ted Heath in the early 1970s. The 1992 Conservative Election Manifesto claimed “Our policy is . . . to reduce the share of national income taken by the public sector”, but this has not happened.

This increase in state expenditure in recent decades has caused a massive burden to be placed on the surplus value extracted by the capitalists from the workers, which ,as we have explained on many previous occasions, is in the last analysis the sole source of state finance, whether through taxation or borrowing. As everyone should by now know, the tax burden has continued to rise under the Conservative and government indebtedness is heavy, the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement being £32 billion at present even though the slump “officially” ended three years ago (this in turn is one of the factors behind the still historically high real rates of interest being charged in the financial system).

The only conceivable way this huge burden of government expenditure is going to be cut back, easing the pressure on surplus value, is for there to be an unusually strong period of economic growth. This what all the parties — especially Labour — are banking on after the next general election. But is it a realistic prospect?

Road to nowhere

It seems that even many of the capitalists and their representatives doubt this. A recent report from the Directorate-General of Economic and Social Affairs of the European Commission is a good example. It suggests that even on an optimistic basis, a growth rate of 3.3 percent annually across the European Union is needed if there is to be “a serious contribution” to reducing unemployment and reliance on state benefits, the biggest factor in state expenditure rises. But over the past five years the growth rate has been only 1.6 percent. The average annual growth rate since 1973 has actually been little more than 2 percent, rising in booms and falling in slumps, with a general downward trend since the previous period.

The plans of the European Union for “an optimal growth path” were last met at times during the period 1950-73 after which there was a break in growth and labour productivity, rises in real interest rates and soaring unemployment as the crisis began to bite. And yet the report accounts for this by suggesting that “in secular terms the 1950-60 period was an exceptionally favourable period of reconstruction and catching up in Europe and was thus not likely to last forever . . . " That the EU growth and employment plans were last met during, and in the aftermath of, an “exceptional period” characterised by post-war reconstruction really says all there needs to be said on the matter.

The European Union still intends, however, to implement measures at the bloc level to attract employment and stimulate growth. These include reforms in the hours of working (notoriously difficult to implement and likely to be successfully resisted for their own good reasons by the capitalist class), minor changes in tax laws relating to the labour supply, and what the Commission calls “the widening of wage-cost distribution”, encouraging workers to take lower-paid jobs, if necessary subsidising them do so. This latter proposal would, as the report admits, “have a high budget cost” and could not be guaranteed to solve the problem. Interestingly, the report also adds that any measures taken should also act “to safeguard the existing human capital of the unemployed in order to prevent social exclusion and to maintain social cohesion”.

Afraid of the consequences should they not, it is quite clear that the EU, its member states and capitalist political parties are incapable of restoring the levels of growth characterised by the post-war reconstruction. The situation in Britain is typical. Labour and the Conservatives are vacuous political entities now even by reformist standards. In the face of mass unemployment, burgeoning debt, rising taxation, expenditure and burdens on profit, they have nowhere to run. They have no solutions other than to pray that the miracle of economic growth may somehow descend from the heavens to save them. All the indications, even from their own economists, is that it is a pious hope indeed barring capitalism’s own particular solution, the barbarism of world war and “reconstruction”.

Dave Perrin

50 Years Ago: Lord Keynes: Economist of Capitalism in Decline (1996)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the sickness of its declining years capitalism is being nursed by the Labour Party. Lord Keynes, who died on April 21st, was the doctor who prescribed the treatment. His theories, on which rest the belief in the possibility of “full employment" under capitalism, have come to be widely accepted not because of intrinsic merit or originality, but because capitalists and Labour politicians alike have dire need of a panacea that will, they hope, make capitalism work or at least persuade the workers that it will. Faced with mounting unemployment and the political discontent that it causes, many Tory and Liberal politicians had lost confidence in their ability to save capitalism. Lord Keynes promised them another lease of life. The Labour Party new to power, never had much confidence in its own ability, and the "economic blizzard” of 1931 that wrecked the Labour Government destroyed even what it had; so Lord Keynes was their hope, too.

He believed that investment and price trends could be made subject to governmental control and thereby booms and slumps could be ironed out and approximately full employment secured . . . Socialists have no hesitation in saying that if the Labour Government attempts anything of the kind—it may, of course, get cold feet and scurry to the safety of “orthodox" financial policies, as did Snowden and MacDonald—it will not succeed in avoiding unemployment and crises.

(From the editorial in Socialist
 Standard, June 1946)

Not any answers (1996)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Knob-twiddling, the perennial pastime of the compulsive radio listener, has been greatly stimulated by the growth of deregulated airwaves, allowing for new stations of aural passion to be visited by the rover in search of a casual broadcasting relationship. Like trainspotters, the lowest of the lonely in the world of atomised leisure pursuits, the wireless addict delights in finding new programme timetables to collect and tune in to. While the rest of humanity lives its life (or pretends to), the radio junkie listens in to the one-way conversations of radio which serve as cultural life-support machines to the alienated, uncertain aural consumers who want reality sorted out for them on the hour every hour.

I grew up in a world which had just stopped listening to wireless, but in which some of us still listened to radio: the poor cousin of the telly. We laughed at The Clitheroe Kid, worried along with Mrs Dale, squirmed at the pompous smugness of Any Questions (still there; still smug) and went to sleep with the pips from The Shipping Forecast. As infancy' turned to adulthood the Home Service became Radio Four (arguably one of the greatest quality services still relatively undamaged in Britain), the Light Programme became Radio Two (the home of the terminally middle-aged) and the pirates, having been destroyed by the authoritarianism of the then Postmaster General, Tony Benn, gave way to the vacuous ramblings of Tory Tony Blackburn and Radio One.

Deregulation of the airwaves has been a gradual business (and business it is), starting in the early Seventies and culminating in the effective auction of the airwaves which has flogged off licences to whoever thinks they can make a fast buck out of grabbing listeners’ attention. Most people who still listen to radio are fairly fixed in their dial location (with occasional moves within one format, such from Radio One to Virgin or from Radio Three to Classic FM), but for some (the hard-core addicts) the urge has been to roam into hitherto unknown territories.

All of which is to explain how and why it was that a terrible thing happened to me on the way to the phone-in. There I was twiddling merrily in search of the latest from Harry of Hatfield or some other undiscovered philosopher (for, had he been alive today, Socrates would surely have been a regular caller to any phone-in going) and suddenly this lunatic is screaming at me in a fashion reminiscent of an out-of-work evangelist. Now, many a time I have sat transfixed and mortified before my TV set when travelling in the USA, where Coming To Jesus is a big industry. Listening to this previously undiscovered radio station was no different, just more amateurish and more embarrassing for being on the same dial as Radio Four.

Premier Radio is London’s Christian station and, at least at the time of writing, its awfulness has become compulsive. Its presenters, who mainly recite passages from the bible and play songs about clapping your hands for god, do their best to appeal both to the blue-rinsed ladies of Surrey who believe that wireless went downhill the day they allowed an unmarried mother on the The Archers and the fully-certifiable God Squad whose permanent stupor of gullible belief is know by them as being saved. So, the station balances precariously between phone-ins peppered with dull hymns on which old ladies call into to pray that Jesus will come to shoplifters and bad sorts and occasional touches of raving barminess.

An example of the latter was a twenty-minute talk by a born-again vicar whose justification for the laying on of hands so that “Jesus will come all over the sick and cure them” was in no need of Freud to decipher it.

Quite why Premier Radio should exist when socialists are not even allowed to buy advertising space on the airwaves is one question; another is why anyone can still be satisfied by this unadulterated crap. And then yesterday evening, in self-torturing pursuit of the clues, a mock-sincere voice came on and explained how this station was different, for it was there to appeal to those with nobody in the world to care about them: the lonely, the poor, the distressed and lost. God, they were informed, cares about them—as he will carefully explain once they snuff it. And then, instead of turning to Luke or John, as the presenter urged us to, I took another look at that brilliantly descriptive passage by Marx: “the heart of a heartless world . . . the sigh of the oppressed”. Be it from pulpit or high-tech studio, where there is religion there is misery and where religion meets misery its job is to tell the miserable to wait for hope in the next life. The experiment is over; I have heard the voice of salvation and twiddled the knob on my radio until it went away. Of pseudo-saviours the world has had more than its share; and at least everyone knows that The Archers made it up.

Steve Coleman

These Foolish Things: The system dictates (1996)

The Scavenger column from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The system dictates

[PilkingtonJ is one of the few UK companies to have accepted that works councils, the elected consultative bodies beloved of the European Union, aree a good way to build consensus on key strategic issues. When it comes to sacking people, however, Pilkington found that the rules governing the release of price-sensitive information to the stock exchange, meant that the first that Pilkington’s workforce knew of this particular strategic decision [to axe 1,900 jobs] was on the radio rather than through any consultative mechanism. Guardian, 28 March.

Are jobs bad for prosperity?

Another healthy rise in American jobs yesterday sent the Treasury bond market into a bout of heavy selling again and appeared to rule out any further cuts in the US interest rates in the short term. The economy created 140,000 jobs in the non-farm sector in March, many more than Wall Street economists had been expecting, this followed a rise of 624,000 jobs in February', revised from last month’s initial estimate of 705,000, which had sent the Dow Jones industrial average into a 171-point plunge and wiped three full points off bond prices. Times, 6 April.

Smoking, poverty and profits

BAT unveiled record pre-tax profits of $2.4 billion for 1994, fuelled by the sales of 670 billion cigarettes worldwide . . . Among the countries where BAT cigarette sales have started to increase are: Poland, Romania, Russia, Uzbekistan, Hungary and Vietnam. Guardian, 7 March.

Capitalism’s iron fist

The International Monetary Fund, the Treasurers of world capitalism, has prescribed even more grinding poverty for the world’s working class. Its recently published World Economic Outlook stated that there would need to be further cuts in spending on health and pension benefits by the governments of industrialised nations in order to reduce the high interest rates which damage the profitability of capital. Tax increases, the report said, would not solve the problem because that would hit capitalists.

Telling figures

Car-makers spent a record £515 million on advertising last year. With 1,945,366 sold in Britain, that made the average spend per new car £265 . . . More than half [the cars] went to fleets, say industry sources, so the cost for every private sale was an incredible £1,800-plus. Financial Mail on Sunday. 14 April.

Both couples remain friends

Carlo Giambrone was “gobsmacked” [at being on the same divorce list as the Yorks). The unemployed mechanic arrived at court No. 1 in Somerset House yesterday in a bomber jacket and jeans to tell the judge he could not afford to pay the costs awarded him after his divorce . . . “I have my kids every' weekend. I shall carry on giving my wife what support I can, though at the moment I’m only getting £74 benefit every two weeks . . ." Few observers believe that the £2 million settlement, £500,000 of which has been set aside for the Duchess, will be sufficient to keep her in the lavish lifestyle she has become accustomed to. Guardian, 18 April.

The Scavenger

Keeping up with the Joneses (1996)

TV Review from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Popular investigative programme 3-D (Thursdays, 7.30 pm. ITV) featured a welcome, if brief piece on conspicuous consumption—that is, consumption of commodities for show. Two families depicted in the programme had undertaken a comparative orgy of competitive consumption in order to impress—and ultimately outdo—their neighbours. The interior designers must have been falling over themselves to get the contract for both their houses, which as the programme demonstrated, are fully decorated and redesigned at least once every twelve months.

This attempt by the two households to "keep up with the Jones’s" has had slightly divergent results. One family has become so obsessed that they have landed themselves in debt to the tune of several thousand pounds and have resorted to the advice of a “money counsellor”. The other family, with both adults unemployed, have amazingly managed to avoid this trap—at least so far—with the wife asserting that if her obsession with bettering her neighbours led them to get into debt, then she would know she had a problem. But nobody on the estate of small semis on which her family live had taken the bait in a major way, and she was forced to admit that if anyone did, then she would indeed be prepared to get into debt in order to compete.

In an attempt to explain this phenomenon 3-D wheeled out an obscure "social psychologist" from one of the educational factories. "A fair amount of competitiveness is inherent in the human condition" was his answer to this enigma of competitive consumption, precisely the type of comment we have become used to on TV, radio and in the press from those who are paid by the ruling class to tell lies for a living. We can assume, if his statement is correct, that rabid competition has been a feature of the human condition throughout history.

But, frankly, anyone who believes that there is something "natural" about the behaviour of such people as the two families featured is seriously misinformed, and that is putting it politely. Is it really being suggested that people behaved in such a way in primitive communist society, which existed for over forty thousand years before the advent of private property and class division? If this is so, then 3-D would have been better employing a social anthropologist to do the pontificating rather than a shrink—then we might have really learned something about the evolution of this behaviour.

Market madness 

The fact of the matter is that such competitive methods of behaviour are not "inherent" or part of our human nature as a species, but are generally socially conditioned and promoted. Humans are capable of behaving in all manner of ways given different circumstances and backgrounds—indeed, it is largely our ability to adapt that has made us such a successful species, by far the most successful on the planet Placed in an environment of private property, effective rationing of resources and opulence amid squalor, then humans are likely to develop competitive traits. In the case of the families featured on 3-D, a type of personality disorder known as compulsive behaviour can develop, in this case stemming from competition for "scarce" resources.

What these families had most in common was their status as typical members of the working class who wanted to be seen as anything but working class. Both had nice homes, but their efforts in this respect were futile—their real status in life was reflected in unemployment and indebtedness rather than in the commodities they were able to consume in front of the hopefully watchful eyes of the neighbours. Moreover—and this is the crucial bit— their lifestyles in no way reflect the lifestyles of the really rich in society they apparently wish to emulate. Their behaviour is a product of their poverty and subservience and makes no sense outside of the confines of a class-divided society based on (artificial) scarcity.

If it came to a real test of conspicuous consumption, the capitalists would be able to win every time because they have a disproportionate share of wealth and power. The competitive behaviour engaged in by these workers is the social equivalent of the little boy playing at war games with this Tonka toys and plastic figurines. Being faced with the real thing would be an entirely different story.

The lesson from 3-D is that consumption in capitalism is rationed for the vast bulk of the population, those who do not derive a privileged income from their ownership of capital. If an attempt is made to live even a fraction as well as the really rich, indebtedness—sooner or alter—will be the result. If not house repossession, social break-up and other calamities.

Socialist values, of course, stand opposed to the notion of conspicuous consumption merely as an expression of competition with other people—in a socialist society of free access without payment to available and generally abundant wealth, such behaviour would not only be anti-social, it would be meaningless. The values of capitalism— bitterness, mean-spiritedness, envy and jealousy as a way of life—would remain only as memories of a social system based on the brutalisation of the many in the interests of the few.

Dave Perrin

Letter: Position of power (1996)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I hate having a job interview. The person who interviews you thinks that they own everything, you, your partner, your family life, your education, besides everything their company owns. They are the one in a position of power and can therefore question you from top to toe. They can ask you the most intimate and private questions you wouldn’t even ask a friend: Where did you meet your husband? Are you planning to have children? How long have you been married? What is your husband's job? What is your social life like? Can I see your birth certificate?

It was only an interview for a post in a business bank. I had written to them over a year ago and they must have kept me on file because they had just written to me to offer this interview. The manager of the bank, with a smirk on his face, assumed the right to ask me anything he liked. Whether he liked it or not, I told him I hate money although I would have to handle it in the bank as a cashier, working for £12,000 a year from 9am till 6 and sometimes 7pm.

Question followed question. I felt as if I was the guilty one applying for a place in prison without knowing what l was guilty of. To make matters worse, although I did not like anything about this job. I had to show enthusiasm to get it as I was desperate for one.

As if he didn’t insult me enough with his digging questions he called in one of his companions who went over the same questions again. I was put under great pressure for an hour. The second boss was even harder with the questions about me. Some of the questions were asked by him and then also answered by him. "Have you agreed with the wages?’’, "Look, there are times we work very late but we won’t pay you for that.’’ He carried on "See that chair,” pointing to a chair in front of the cash till, "would you be happy to sit on it all day long?” "Have you ever handled money?” I hate money, but I can handle it all right.

To cut a long story short, after putting me down and down, we shook hands. "Hope to see you." Having been shocked by the experience I just couldn’t believe that I had lied and lied just to get this job. While I was walking through the Bank tube station to leave it all behind me, I wanted to go back and scream at them: "I hate you, your business, the job you have on offer; I hate money and I hate capitalism and anyway one day we will not need you!”

Meltem Celebi, 

London SW11

Letter: Part of the struggle (1996)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

To me Colin Skelly in his letter to the April edition of the Socialist Standard reveals an almost religious zeal in his description of his efforts to resist the "temptation" to join a rally protesting about the proposed Newbury Bypass. I wonder, does he think he may have been in some way tainted by reformism had he succumbed to this "temptation”?

Surely, we are all involved in the class struggle (I know I am and have been for most of my life) whether we like it or not. Under this senseless and barbaric system of society we all have to compromise our principles every day of our lives and in fact those of us who still have a job may sometimes be faced with the prospect of industrial action. So tell me, Colin, would you avoid the "temptation” to strike along with your fellow workers for higher pay or better conditions? Would you honestly remain alone in the factory or office muttering "reformism" to yourself?

If we spent all our lives trying to avoid being involved in achieving “small, meaningless actions" then we truly risk becoming an elite and we also miss the opportunity of experiencing solidarity and comradeship with other workers. But what we most miss out on is the chance to tell other people about what we believe and why we think reformist action will not solve the problem.

To me being a Socialist means being a part of the struggle but without any illusions. If we do choose on occasion to unite with others against capitalism then we learn and grow as people. The end of capitalism is surely not some deadline that we must all sit down and wait for! Do you really believe that, Colin? Somehow that notion makes me feel very uncomfortable.

Heather Ball, 

Norwich, Norfolk

Letter: Quite a simple concept (1996)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I was interested to read your April issue and in particular the article, "How to tell a real Socialist". I thought the article was very interesting and made the point well that Socialism is actually quite a simple concept. Part of the reason, as you point out, is that many self-styled Socialists have no faith in ordinary people and their potential. The Leninist sects hold people back from an understanding of real Socialism but most of the people attracted to these organisations do genuinely believe they are working for Socialism.

The task must be to create dynamic and effective organisation(s) that can win some of these people over to Socialism and win the majority of the population over in the long run.

My point though is can the Socialist Party do this alone? Are you willing to work with other people, with similar views? Or do you see yourselves as in competition with them?

I believe there should be an alliance of Green and left groups prepared to work together in a non-hierarchical way. What do you think?

Ray Kent, 

London E8

Reply:

Since socialism can only come about when a majority want it, we see the task of socialists at the present time as being to do all they can to spread socialist ideas. We think that, to do this, all socialists should organise together in a separate organisation whose only aim and activity is to campaign for socialism.

As we campaign only for Socialism we are not in favour of allying ourselves with other groups to campaign for other things, however desirable some of these might be. Other organisations, such as trade unions, exist to do this. Campaigning for higher wages, better conditions, a better local environment and other ameliorations within capitalism—or, these days, campaigning to stop things getting worse—is not the job of a socialist party. It is the job of these other organisations.

Although we, as a party, don’t get involved in these organisations and their struggles, our members, as individuals, are members of some of them. In them they urge that these organisations be run democratically and that any struggles be conducted on a democratic, no-leadership, non-hierarchical basis. Naturally, our members are only too pleased to find others in these organisations who share this approach and to work with them to prevent these organisations and their struggles being hi-jacked either by Leninist vanguards or by Labour Party and other careerists.

Do we think that we alone will bring about the majority desire for socialism which will have to exist before socialism can be established? No, we don’t and never have as it is capitalism itself that does most of the work, creating discontent over its insoluble problems and getting people to think about alternative ways of organising society. If, as is conceivable, capitalist conditions throw up other groups of workers, whether from the traditional labour movement or the alternative green movement or anywhere else, which have the same aim and approach as us we would not only be prepared to work with them to campaign for socialism but we would be duty-bound to amalgamate with them. For all we know, this may be how the mass socialist party without which socialism cannot be established will come into being. Who can know at this stage? In the meantime, in the absence of any other groups that favour campaigning and democratically organising for socialism and nothing but, we continue doing this on our own. 

Editors

Stepping stones to nowhere (1996)

Book Review from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reform and Revolution: Three early Socialists on the way ahead. William Morris, John
 Carruthers, Fred Henderson.
 Edited and introduced
 by Stephen Coleman
 (Thoemmes Press 
£9.75.)

The first organisation in Britain to put forward Marxian views was the Social Democratic Federation which had been founded in 1881 as a federation of Radical (i.e. left-wing Liberal) political clubs and which two years later adopted socialism as its aim and added “Social” to its title. The second was the Socialist League, formed as a breakaway from the SDF in 1884.

The main difference between the two organisation was over reforms (legislative measures within capitalism aimed at improving social conditions or extending political democracy). The SDF believed that a socialist organisation should advocate reforms as "stepping stones to socialism", but the reforms it advocated were the same as it used and to when it had still been a left-wing Liberal organisation.

The concept of reforms as stepping stones to socialism implied that socialism would come about as a result of a gradual accumulation of reforms passed by parliament. The Socialist League disagreed with this position, arguing not only that reforms were not stepping stones to socialism (they were more inclined to regard them as measures to consolidate capitalism) but also that a socialist organisation should not advocate reforms at all but should concentrate exclusively on propagating socialist ideas with a view to building up a mass class-conscious working class organisation to challenge capitalism.

Until now, with the publication of this book which reproduces three contributions by members or ex-members of the Socialist League with a modern introduction, the anti-reformist arguments of the League have not been readily available. Many people have heard of Morris the poet, Morris the craftsman, Morris the wallpaper designer, even Morris the socialist, but few will be aware of the grasp of political realities and analysis that Morris revealed as the main defender of the Socialist League's anti-reformist position, Morris the socialist theoretician, if you like.

In his talk “The Policy of Abstention", first given in 1887 and reproduced here, Morris argues against the SDF position of trying to get elected to parliament in order to get reforms passed as supposed stepping stones to socialism. Socialism, he argues, would not come through parliament (which he regarded as part of the government of capitalism) but through the mass action of workers outside parliament This was why, in his view, socialists should "abstain" from parliamentary action and seek instead to build up a mass anti-capitalist workers’ organisation. This would be political but not parliamentary and have socialism as its aim. As a mass organisation able to organise strikes and demonstrations it would be in a position to extract reforms from the ruling class, though not as stepping stones to socialism but as concessions to try to stop its growth. Reforms, in other words, could be obtained (if that was what was wanted) without needing to go into parliament, as a by-product of uncompromising agitation and organisation for socialism.

Although he came close to it, Morris’s position was not totally anti-parliamentary (he clashed with and opposed the anarchists, who eventually took over the Socialist League and committed it to "propaganda of the deed” as they called bomb-throwing). He always envisaged the possibility, as he repeats here, of the mass Socialist organisation sending delegates into parliament on the eve of the socialist revolution, with a view to neutralising it and depriving the pro-capitalist minority in society of any legitimacy for violent resistance to the establishment of socialism that having a parliamentary majority might give them.

What Morris was saying was that socialists should abstain from going into parliament to get reforms rather than they should abstain from going there altogether. John Carruthers, in his talk on "Socialism and Radicalism" that was published as a pamphlet by the Hammersmith Socialist Society, argues that, even were the sort of reforms advocated by SDF, ILP. the Fabians and others to be achieved (as they had been to some extent in countries like New Zealand), this would not solve working-class problems as their cause—the capitalist ownership of the means of production—would be left unchanged. Carruthers saw clearly that nationalisation of certain industries would only benefit the rest of the capitalist class and not the working class, and so should not be supported by socialists. As to political reforms, he made the point that sufficient political democracy already existed in Britain for workers to be able to use it to gain power peacefully to establish socialism once they had come to want it. So there was no need for socialists to campaign for political reforms either.

The real issue was that most workers didn't yet want socialism, and that was what socialists should concentrate on trying to remedy. Fred Henderson’s contribution—"The ABC of Socialism"—was written some fifteen years later, long after he had ceased to be a member of the Socialist League and indeed long after the League had gone out of existence. By then he was a member of the ILP—he was later to become the Labour Lord Mayor of Norwich—and so was not opposed to campaigning for reforms. But even he argues that as long as the cause of working-class problems remains—the private, or class, ownership of the means of production—then so will the problems. Reforms, in other words, can’t solve these problems; only Socialism can do that.

Henderson’s contribution to this book is in fact a basic exposition of the case against capitalism and the case for socialism, a reminder that before the First World War the argument was not so much about what socialism was but about how to get there. Henderson's definition of socialism is clear enough: "community ownership of the land and of the means of producing and distributing wealth; and the organisation of industry under that common ownership as public service for the benefit of all; directed to social ends and the equipment of the life of the whole people instead of, as now, to the private enrichment of a privileged class of owners".

Adam Buick