Passing Comments: Unsolicited Testimonial to Mr. Gaitskell (1951)

The Passing Comments Column from the October 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unsolicited Testimonial to Mr. Gaitskell

When 1 was reading in a public library, a lady next to me reading the Daily Telegraph approved so much of what she read that she had to unburden herself immediately; and 1 was the nearest person. I haven’t checked on all her facts, but the substance of what she said was this:

“Thank goodness someone’s talking sense at last—Mr. Gaitskell is saying they ought to give the workers bonus shares if the work is going well. Now that’s what I’ve always said—I had some shares in the South Metropolitan Gas Co. during the war and they used to give the workers bonus shares and it always kept them satisfied—they never had a strike all during the war! That’s just what I’ve always said—keep the workers contented and you won’t get any trouble. And I see Mr. Gaitskell has been saying we shouldn’t have any more taxation on the important people—the people with capital and the people who provide work. Because if you tax them they’re not going to stay in this country are they? And if they go how should we get on?—because they provide all the work.”

I feel sure that Mr. Gaitskell will be glad to know that, although he may not be very popular with the trade unions, his proposals have drawn forth the admiration of at least one shareholder.

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State Capitalism

As the nationalised industries continue to publish each year their reports, showing how much interest has been paid to people who are called (for some reason unknown) “ex”-shareholders, it should become obvious to the most fervent nationalises that whatever nationalisation is or is not. it is not Socialism, and that the workers in nationalised industries cannot be said, by any stretch of the imagination, to be either the owners or the controllers of their industries. These facts, which the Socialist Party has been trying to propagate for the last half-century, have at fast reached the edges of that bastion of ignorance, the Labour Party. Among the first to make a public recantation is a Labour M.P., Fred Longden, who has just published a book of essays.

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Lucrative Stockholding

In it he says that nationalisation “does not disturb the present social order.” It “does not dislocate the pyramid-like build of society. Its horizontal classes and perpendicular grades and castes remain intact with greater security than ever. Stockholding is sounder and more lucrative. Management rests in the hands of a Board that is more distant from the worker and consumer than ever. This is ’democracy’ with a very remote control. It is not Socialism.” (“The Proletarian Heritage,” quoted in Reynolds News, 12.8.51.)

With your last sentence, Mr. Longden, we couldn’t agree more. But what a pity it is that you have spent your political life in the Labour movement working to bring about that state of affairs you now so justly criticise. Still, we don’t want to harp too much on your past misdeeds. If you really want to bring about a Socialist society, you can still join with all the other people who want to do so. Apply at your nearest branch of the Socialist Party.

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Never Say Die

Mr. Longden has at least been honest enough to admit that he was wrong, now that it is clear beyond any possibility of doubt that nationalisation is not Socialism. But there are others who are incorrigible —chief among them being the Stalinists. With them the evidence counts for nothing. Theoretical argument, practical demonstration, both leave them cold. Ignoring the experience of the coalminers, the gasworkers, the railwaymen, the Daily Worker continues to cheer on nationalisation projects wherever they appear. In Persia, a nationalisation demonstration evoked the approving comment, “Smallest hint of government weakness in face of imperialist pressure brings the crowds out to show the people’s determination to force oil nationalisation through” (11.7.51). And when the secretary of the “Northern Rhodesian African Congress” demands the nationalisation of the Northern Rhodesian copper mines, the Daily Worker headlines it “Africans want copper mines” (23.7.51). The Africans may want the copper mines. But if they do, they’re certainly going a queer way about it.

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It’s What Yon Wanted

Even when trade unionists see that nationalisation has left them exactly where they were before, any attacks they make on the new state-directors, any claims they bring forward for higher pay, are greeted with a reproachful “well, you wanted nationalisation yourself.” The head of the British Electricity Authority, Lord Citrine, went along to the annual conference of the Amalgamated Engineering Union recently, berated those delegates who had attacked the B.E.A. administration, and ended up by appealing to “the trade unions, which were really responsible for bringing about nationalisation, to ‘give us a little help occasionally, and perhaps a little more charity when public utterances are made’.” (Daily Herald, 22.6.51.) And the trade unions cannot deny the charge that they helped to bring about nationalisation.

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Labour “ Socialism ” in Action

From the Daily Herald (2.8.51): “The fall in share values, following Mr. Gaitskell's announcement a week ago that dividends are to be limited, is only one-third of their rise during the past three and a half months. With that statement the Chancellor of the Exchequer torpedoed a half-hearted Tory attack in the Commons yesterday.” But what an interesting commentary it makes on Mr. Gaitskell’s claim to be a Socialist when he publicly boasts that he isn’t half as hard on the shareholders, on those who live on the labour of others, as his opponents make out. In fact the Stock Exchange, despite the loud cries of anguish which were heard in Lombard Street when the slight dividend restriction was first announced, soon came to see what a mild measure it was. Even the small drop in share values which actually took place was not long-lived. Two and a half weeks after the original announcement the Sunday Express (12.8.51) said: “All but one-tenth of the losses has been regained. And from the way things are going it won’t be long before the remaining tenth is made good.”

Which, in practice, amounts to another vote of confidence by the shareholders in the Labour Government.

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Discovery

Another of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s remarks during the Commons debate on August 1st was this: “Figures of the distribution of property do not bear out any suggestion that ordinary shares are held in large quantities by the poorer section of the community.”

This must rank as the understatement of the month.

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How to Fight Wars—1

From the Daily Graphic (24.7.51): “At Verdun in 1916 Petain flung back the German hordes with a scornful 'Ils ne passeront pas ’ (they shall not pass). Nor did they, although half a million men died round the shell-torn forts in five months.” Half a million men died, but not Petain, who became a General largely on the strength of that battle. (And if it was Petain who “flung back the German hordes,” what were all these other Frenchmen doing there?) Petain survived the men under his command for thirty-five years, dying at the age of ninety-five.

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How to Fight Wars—2

General Kurt Student, formerly supreme commander of Hitler’s airborne troops, wrote an article in the Sunday Express last May 27th. He said: “ For me, as commander of the German airborne troops, the Battle of Crete in 1941 carries bitter memories. I miscalculated when I suggested this attack, which resulted in the loss of so many valuable parachutists that it meant the end of the German airborne landing forces, which I had created.” Many parachutists were lost. But modern war has its compensations. General Student is still with us. And ten years after his miscalculations at Crete, the General is still fit enough to write articles for the papers.

Alwyn Edgar

What Means This Strife? (1942)

From the August 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

How to End the Class Struggle. The Rise of Classes.

During man’s very early history, when society was in the stage of primitive communism, there were no classes and no class struggles. Then—and the period must have lasted for thousands of years—private property was unknown, all members of the tribe joining in the ownership of the hunting grounds and fishing waters. The proceeds of the chase were for the enjoyment of every member of the tribe. Thanks to this ownership in common there was no monopolising of resources and wealth by one section of the community to the detriment of another. No man could live by the exploitation of his fellows.

The domestication of animals and the fashioning of tools suitable for agriculture brought to an end this first stage of man’s history. It is always a revolution in the means of producing wealth which causes social relationships to change. Now tribes conquered others with the express purpose of converting the vanquished into slaves. They were brought home and set to work the land. The conquerors owned the tools, the animals and the land; the conquered were propertyless. Thus did private property arise and with it came classes and man’s exploitation by man.

Since that time the history of all society is the history of class struggles, for private property has severed society into the “haves” and the “have-nots.” For this reason we find antagonism between one section of society and another. “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, baron and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, standing constantly in opposition to each other, carried on an uninterrupted warfare, now open, now concealed . . .” And present-day capitalist society has not abolished the class struggle. “It has but substituted new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of warfare for the old.” (See “Communist Manifesto,” by Marx and Engels.) To-day we have the class-struggle between the capitalist and working classes.

They Won’t Face the Facts

Frequently, especially in war time and during crises, appeals are made to the exploited, the working class, to abandon the class struggle.

Such an appeal was made on May Day by Marshal Petain. According to a Yorkshire Post and Leeds Mercury report, he “appealed to the French workers not to restore the class system (!)” and spoke of “the unhealthy ideologies of the class struggle.”

(The Marshal, in keeping with his shallow thoughts, is guilty of loose phraseology; the “class system”—capitalism—has not been abolished in France, or elsewhere, and so cannot be restored.)

It is strange how the workers are always held responsible for the class struggle. Yet, as we have shown, it owes its origin to private property, the corner-stone of capitalist society. The class struggle exists because of the clash of interests between the workers and their masters. That the interests of these two classes are opposed is quite clear if we take one aspect of it. The worker sells his energies, his labour-power, to the capitalist. Over the price of this and over the length of time it shall belong to the capitalist, there is bound to be disagreement. The worker, living on the starvation line, wants the best price (wage) he can get; the capitalist, seeking to produce his wares cheaply so that he can sell them in the world market, wants to reduce production costs. He, therefore, tries to keep wages down. Strikes and lockouts, both as old as capitalism, are evidences of the class struggle.

We can say with confidence, therefore, that the Marshal made his May Day appeal in vain. The French workers, like any others, are compelled by the very nature of capitalism to wage the class struggle in order to maintain their standard of life. This they are forced to do, even if they do not understand the economics of capitalism, even if they are not politically-minded. To quote Marx again : “The proletariat goes through various evolutionary stages. Its struggle against the bourgeoisie begins with its birth.” Not Petain, nor Hitler, nor anyone else can check the outbreak of the class struggle, either by words, government decrees or brute force. Nothing less than the abolition of that which gives rise to classes will accomplish that—the abolition of private property.

People like the Marshal are to be found the world over, wherever capitalism has (as it inevitably must) brought into existence workers and capitalists.

On the same day as Petain’s broadcast was reported, and in the same paper, a letter appeared entitled “Labour Discipline.” This writer, too, assumes that the class struggle is the workers’ creation. He deplores the fact that 400 factory workers on strike have refused to obey their union leaders’ orders to resume work pending negotiations. The writer does not stop to ponder why negotiations are so frequently necessary between the owners of industry and their workpeople. For this man the class struggle is a matter of will, of inclination, on the part of the working class. He cannot see that it is a sheer necessity inseparable from capitalism.

Another of those perturbed by this everlasting strife between employer and employed is Lord Dudley Gordon. Addressing the Leeds and District branch of the Federation of British Industries, he spoke thus:

“We must do all in our power to get rid of the idea that the community consists of classes who have different interests clashing and competing one with another.” This paraphrased means: “Do your best to shut your eyes to facts. The class struggle is there alright, but ignore it.”

Lord Dudley’s solution for the whole problem is quite simple. “It would,” he said, “be better if we could look for competition in sacrifice.” This advice could, however, only have been meant for the workers—the usual call for more sacrifices. At any rate, his fellow capitalists ignored the message, for so far they have shown no inclination to enter into competition with each other in sacrificing the privileges of private ownership.

The Socialist Solution

Enough has been said to show that the way to a class-free society devoid of strife is not through the Petains and the Dudleys. Indeed, it can safely be maintained that the Socialist alone knows the solution to this problem. In his spoken and written propaganda, he aims at impressing upon the workers that the time has now arrived when classes need not be.

So long as the means of production were at a low stage of development and incapable of producing enough for all, it was inevitable that a few should ensure to themselves the privileges that ownership gives.

But that need not be now. The means of production can to-day pour our abundance. The truth of this is evident when one remembers that though so many millions are under arms and so many more millions engaged m turning out weapons of destruction, the world still carries on.

The Socialist urges that the way to end the class struggle is to make these gigantic productive forces the property of all society. This would immediately remove the cause of classes and conflict. This remedy, the only one, is, of course, opposed by the capitalist class. Their interests and privileges are at stake.

The task, then, of effecting this economic transformation rests with the working class, and sooner or later the workers of all nations will be obliged to undertake it.

The working class will carry the class struggle to its logical conclusion.

Beginning on the economic field over such particular questions as hours of work and wages, the struggle becomes a political struggle. The workers must win political power in order to carry through their revolution.

As time goes on the working class will realise more and more that this is their historical mission. The workers will become ever more critical of capitalist society. Every sphere of present-day society will be carefully scrutinised by them as their class consciousness grows.

When the majority of the workers become aware that class struggles need no longer be, that is, when they have become Socialists, they will use political power to abolish private property. Capitalism will be replaced by a harmonious social system—Socialism.

When we have the common ownership of the means of life, the individual’s interest will coincide with his fellows. Then, at last, strife and turmoil, so characteristic of capitalism, will no longer impede man’s progress.

With a society united and each giving according to his ability, who can say what will be the limits of man’s progress?

Clifford Allen

The Shape of Things to Come—and The Forces That Will Shape Them (1940)

From the August 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those who seek to explain by reference to “ideologies” the swift movement of events in the world, the sudden collapse of impregnable positions, the seemingly inexplicable changes which show the grand old men of yesterday to be the dodderers of to-day, must be bewildered and confused by what is going on before their eyes. In a short period of time they have seen those exponents of supposedly irreconcilable doctrines—Stalin and Hitler—joined in a pact of friendship, while Catholic Italy and Catholic Spain fall more and more under the influence of Nazi Germany, erstwhile enemy of Catholicism. They have seen democratic France turn towards Dictatorship, and Conservatives proclaiming the need to back up “revolutionary” movements. The idealist who tries to discern the pattern in history, past and present, is prevented from doing so because he believes that ideas and beliefs have an independent origin and that one set of ideas will triumph over another if only the men who hold them have leaders of goodwill and integrity. The Socialist who looks to social relations and economic forces is better placed. Not, of course, that the Socialist can predict with certainty just how and when a conflict of forces will work out in the future, but at least he knows what is the nature of the forces on which the issue depends. Knowing, as Marx puts it, that “it is not men’s consciousness which determines their life,” but “their social life which determines their consciousness,” he also allows for the fact that at any given period of history the vital forces at work have to struggle with ideas which resulted from past conditions—”the tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living.”

The Weakness of France

Some of the explanations given of the French collapse are of the most superficial kind : Petain, we are told, was a “pessimist ” even in 1917, and Laval “a defeatist and potential traitor”; there were elements in France who were “vaguely anti-Parliamentarian and anti-democratic and equally vaguely pro-Fascist”; Daladier was “a civilian mediocrity,” and Gamelin “a military mediocrity”—and so on. These “explanations” cry aloud themselves to be explained. A little nearer the mark is the Economist’s French correspondent (July 20th, 1940), who says that he interviewed many French officers and “cannot recall one who was not a pessimist, not about the outcome of the war, but about the social and economic difficulties which would open up for France after the end of hostilities.” “It was not,” he says, “the mental attitude that wins wars.”

Some of the newspaper correspondents have, however, shown a more correct and robust grasp of realities in their judgment of the forces at work in France.

A Special Correspondent in France of the Daily Telegraph (June 25th, 1940) pointed out that Petain and Weygand were scared by reports (proved to be incorrect) that Communists had seized public buildings in Paris. This incident shows that preoccupation with maintaining France’s social tranquillity and repressing subversive movements weighed heavily with the two aged soldiers, and that they did not see the situation in its true perspective.”

Mr. Ward Price (Daily Mail, July 8th) mentions the “rich and influential Frenchmen” (including an unnamed “owner of iron ore mines in Lorraine”) who were behind Laval because they thought that “their personal interests would be benefited by co-operation with Germany, or, conversely, that war between the two countries would ruin them.” As long ago as 1931, in pre-Nazi days, Laval had proposed a Franco-German Committee of Economic Co-operation.

Another Daily Mail correspondent, Mr. Francis Tuohy, classifies the people behind French Fascism as “Catholics, Royalists, Officers, aristocracy, big business, police and functionaries, intellectuals and students, the propertied classes in general” (Daily Mail, July 22nd), and according to a French ex-editor, writing in the Manchester Guardian (July 22nd), one of the members of the Petain Cabinet is a Senator named Mireaux, editor of the Temps. “That paper,” he says, “is the organ of the Comité des Forges, the head of which is M. de Wendel, a great friend of M. Laval.” (The Comité des Forges is the organisation of French heavy industry.)

One last quotation on this aspect is from an editorial in the Manchester Guardian (July 12th) :

“That France needs reform is evident enough. In the last twenty years she has had forty-two Ministries. Only five Governments have kept themselves alive for twelve months. Such rapid changes give a mischievous instability to politics. In the background there lurks the power of what M. Herriot called “the 200 best families,” obstructing all social reform and threatening the Governments that did not obey them. It was, indeed, because the revolt against the sinister rule of the banks and big business was so certain at the end of the war, however the war ended, that many rich men were anxious to compound with Hitler ; they were more afraid of victory than of defeat. When defeat came they spoke like the rich friend of Cicero who wrote to him, ” Since the Republic is lost, let us at least keep our property!””

Forces for Change in Europe

The safeguarding of property interests is the dead hand of the past, but what of the more active forces pushing towards change and reorganisation in Europe? Can the men who appear as leaders hold developments in check, or failing that can they guide them into the channels they desire? Are they the creatures or the masters of the forces behind and below them ? We need to be cautious in forecasting events, but it seems a safe conclusion that the regime of Petain and that of his friend Franco are both doomed to fail. Petain’s Foreign Minister, Baudouin, can say (News Chronicle, July 18th) that “the world existing before May 10th is definitely buried,” and think that he is free to determine the destiny of France so that “new relations will be instituted between Capital and Labour and there will be new conceptions of life based on authority, order and obedience.” So also Franco’s brother-in-law and Foreign Minister, Serano Suner, can say (Daily Express, July 19th) that “freedom has been buried for ever in Spain,” but events will determine otherwise. Franco, only a brief while ago, was talking of a new stable order in Spain based on the peasants and national self-sufficiency just as Petain’s Government at the present time “apparently sees France’s role in the new Europe as primarily a peasant and handicraft country” (Daily Telegraph, July 23rd). But the clock of industrial and capitalist development cannot be turned back to medievalism. Franco and Petain both ignored or forgot that they live in a world which is subject to the intense and inescapable pressure of trade and competition ; on the one hand, and working-class resistance on the other. It is not to be forgotten that “a million Republicans are held in prison camps” in Franco’s Spain (W. Forrest, News Chronicle, July 18th). And it is from a Spanish newspaper correspondent in Vichy that the report came that Petain’s Government had to shift from Clermont-Ferrand to Vichy because of the violent and threatening attitude of the workers at the Michelin tyre factory in the former town (Daily Telegraph, July 19th).

Franco used to talk of being free from the pressure of capitalist forces, determined to build up Spain within her own border and on her own resources, but already he has been forced to change his tune to the more familiar one of Spain’s “duty and mission” to command Gibraltar and go in for a policy of Empire building : “We have shed the blood of our dead, not in order to return to the decadent past but in order to build a nation and create an empire” (The Times, July 19th). “Expansion in Africa” is now the order of the day.

When considering the prospects of such dictatorships as those of Petain and Franco, it is worth noticing that the four dictatorships that succeeded in establishing themselves (Russia, Germany, Italy and Turkey), along with some differences had two things in common. In each case power was obtained by a new group, not a mere reshuffling of representatives of existing parties and interests, and in each case those who seized power contrived to do so by using (or exploiting) the more or less constitutional machinery without waging open civil war against the workers or other large representative section of the population. On one or the other of these counts both Franco and Petain fail to possess the qualities that make for comparative permanence (not, of course, that other dictatorships have real permanence either).

It is relevant at this point to consider the position of Russia, and the urge that drove the Stalin regime to enter into the pact with Hitler. The military consideration of not wanting to be isolated in face of Germany and Japan was one aspect, but observers have recently confirmed that behind that fear was the factor of internal economic difficulties. The Moscow correspondent of the American New Republic (quoted in Forward, July 20th) gives it as his judgment that slackening industrial development compelled the Russian Government to take the view that “in both technical organisation and labour, efficiency was advancing so slowly that it would be generations before these departments would compare with those of the modern industrial States.

“Stalin’s way out was an alliance with some big industrial country, in order (1) to ensure Russia’s position of strength in the coming European war; (2) to supplement consumer’s goods industries until they would be able to stand on their own; (3) to supply the machine tools, optical apparatus, etc., which Russia is still forced to import.”

Mr. Louis Fischer, who was for 14 years a newspaper correspondent in Russia, says much the same in his “Stalin and Hitler” (Penguin Special, 6d., May, 1940). He attributes Russia’s industrial slowing down to several factors: “In part (it is) due to military preparations. But it is more adequately explained by the purges and several inherent Soviet economic weaknesses.” (P. 62.)

Here again, as in every other instance of international trends, it is idle to look wholly or mainly to abstract ideas and motives whether of rulers or ruled.

Before leaving the question of the forces making for change in Europe, it is interesting to view the spectacle of Conservatives being forced against every inclination to support movements that may help to undermine the German-Italian dictatorship systems. It is put most strikingly in the columns of the Daily Express. Below are two quotations from recent issues. The first is from an article by Mr. Geoffrey Cox, showing how Franco should be attacked at home if Spain goes to war on Germany’s side: —

“Seize the Canary Islands and other Spanish island possessions and set up there at once a Republican Government which we recognise.

But we can only do this if our appeal is a genuine Republican revolutionary appeal for straight-out revolution.

We must be prepared to co-operate with all the parties of the last Spanish Popular Front Government—Socialists and Communists and Anarchists, as well as Liberals and Radicals. We must get out of our minds all questions of whether these people are Red, or pink or white.

For no other appeal will rouse Spain now except the cry of the Republic.”—(Daily Express July 19th.)

The second quotation is from an editorial: —

“Our allies are ordinary people, not Fascist dictators. And since the ordinary people of Europe are now ruled by Fascists we must organise revolutions.

If (by some terrible folly) Britain were ever at war with Soviet Russia, we would work for a Right Wing revolution there. Since we are fighting Fascists, we must work for Left Wing revolutions in Europe. That is only common sense.

And so our Foreign Office and Ministry of Information should change their whole mentality.

Respectable ex-public school-boys and English gentlemen were admirably suited for conducting our relations with Right Wing politicians abroad. But they are the wrong people for carrying on underground intrigues, organising strikes, arranging sabotage and fomenting general discontent in Europe.”

— (Daily Express, July 23rd.)

In that quarter, at least, the dead hand of the past has been thrown off in so far as the winning of the war is concerned.

Edgar Hardcastle