Editorial: May Day myths (1965)

Editorial from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

The myths of capitalism die hard.

There is, for example, the myth that the processions and demonstrations which take place on May Day have something to do with the unity of the working class.

It is true that the First of May is traditionally the workers’ day, the day on which working people of all countries should express their solidarity with each other. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, and our companion parties abroad, celebrate the day in those terms. But apart from us, the tradition has been debased by modern realities.

The tanks, the missiles, the guns, the soldiers which are paraded through Moscow’s Red Square are expressing, not the international unity, but the national strifes and prejudices, of the working class.

Throughout the so-called Communist bloc the story is the same bellicose speeches spiced with one or two outworn and meaningless cliches, which in reality are a challenge to the Western capitalist powers on behalf of their counterparts fn the East, are applauded as revolutionary statements of working class interests.

In this country, the situation is no better. The Labour movement, which claims May Day for its own, is concerned not with the unity of the working class but with aggravating the issues which divide them.

A part of this movement demonstrates over Vietnam, disappointed that the Wilson government has treated the war there just as any other capitalist administration would.

It demonstrates over rents, losing itself in the impenetrable jungle of capitalist reform. It attacks the Conservatives, mistakenly believing that they are greater enemies of the working class than are the Labour Party.

It demonstrates on many things, none of them of any worth. Hands off this country. Hands on that country. Get this person out of goal. Put that person in.

These are all part of what the Left wing has always loved to call “spontaneous” demonstrations which show the “solidarity” of the workers. They are part of a favourite Left wing myth—that the working class are united.

This is a lie. The workers are split on a multitude of issues. They are split over the race and colour issue. They are split over which side they should take in the international disputes of the world's ruling classes. They are even split over which party they want to run British capitalism.

These splits are the fruits of about sixty years of Labour Party propaganda., The Left wing—the “progressive” politicians—have never done anything to heal them. Rather have they created some of the worst of them.

There is, therefore, an urgent need for someone to state, constantly and consistently, the reasons why the working class should be united.

The working class are those people in capitalist society who get their living by working for a wage. They sell their ability to work to their employers, which means that their interests as sellers of labour power are one, against those of the class who buy their labour power.

In the process of labour the working class are exploited. Here is the source of their problems—their poverty, their degradation, the ceaseless pressures of insecurity which distort their lives.

Here is the source of bad housing, of worry, of much misery and sickness.

Capitalism overshadows all our lives with fear and restrictions. All workers share an international unity of interest to abolish capitalism and replace it with socialism.

None of this is ever whispered at the multitude of Left wing demonstrations which deface May Day. The myths are dying hard, but facts have a force which cannot be denied.

The working class as a whole do not yet realise where their interests lie. If they demonstrate on May Day at all, it is for the wrong motives. Rather than waste their time in this way, they should unite to abolish the system which causes the problems they demonstrate about

News in Review: Unions to heel (1965)

The News in Review column from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unions to heel

The time when the Attlee government were in office was the heyday of the unofficial strike. The reason was that very often an unofficial action was the only method of pushing a wage claim; whatever the official union leaders were compelled to do at the negotiating table, in public many of them championed the wage-restraint policy of the Labour government.

Since then, times have not been so good for the wildcat striker. The official strike has come back into respectability.

The Wilson government did not find the unions so docile. On the very night of Labour’s victory last October, TUC General Secretary George Woodcock made it plain that he still thought the unions’ first job was to stand out for their members’ interests, independent if need be from government policy.

But it was predictable that some union leaders should decide that, simply because Labour is in power, the economic fortunes of the employers should come first.

Last March Mr. John Boyd, who is on the executive of both the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the Labour Party, appealed to the annual women’s conference of his union for “. . . sympathetic understanding, co-operation, discipline and restraint . . ."

The moderates have an even more impressive convert. Mr. Ted Hill of the Boilermakers, who was once the enfant terrible of the unions’ left wing, wrote in his union journal last January that unions should help the TUC to reduce strikes and restrictive practices: "If there is likely to be a demarcation dispute, submit the matter to arbitration . . . if there is likely to be a strike, take the matter through procedure before taking strike action.”

Are the unions, then, tamed? Will they give up the struggle for better wages and conditions? On the contrary, the pressures of capitalism will themselves show up the words of men like Boyd and Hill for the wishful thinking that they are. For example the AEU women, just like the Labour Party women before them, have demanded equal pay. All the time, the more usual type of wage claim is coming in, as inevitable as tomorrow's dawn.

This is not surprising. During Labour's first three months of office the Official Index Retail Prices which, whatever, its deficiencies is some sort of guide in these matters, rose by about one and a half per cent. This means that the buying power of the pound, taken as twenty shillings when Labour came into office, had fallen to 19s. 8d. by last January.

The working class cannot afford to ignore such factors as this. Rising prices mean a decline in living standards, unless they are balanced out by a rise in wages. Apart from that, there are other things which ensure that the working class will carry on the struggle to improve their wages and working conditions.

This is an inevitable by product of the basic employer/employee relationship of capitalism, which as long as it lasts will always produce strikes and other disputes.

This situation will not be abolished, nor even changed, by speeches and resolutions, nor by the breathtaking manoeuvres of union leaders who are left wing firebrands when the Tories are in office and who disappoint their deluded followers by becoming staid right wingers when Labour takes over.

Art, for whose sake?

An essential part of the popular British conception of an American millionaire is that he is a vulgar Philistine who yet likes to flaunt his wealth by buying up famous works of art which mean nothing to him.

It follows from this that, whenever a rich American buys a famous picture, or piece of sculpture, over here, and wants to take it back home, there are protests on all sides.

This is what happened when Mr. Norton Simon bought Rembrandt's picture of his son, Titus, at Christie's. The protests were all the stronger because Mr. Simon appeared to have put in his successful bid after the auctioneer's hammer had come down for the last time.

The press reports of what they called this “dramatic” incident inspired many workers whose usual experience of artistic enjoyment is confined to studying the Maidenform Bra adverts on the Underground to assume a sudden knowledge of the intricacies of top rank auctions.

Everyone seemed to be agreed that it would be a calamity if Titus left this country. In some ways it was reminiscent of the hooha over da Vinci's Madonna and Child; there were attempts to stop the Board of Trade granting an export licence for Titus, appeals to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to provide for repurchasing the picture in his Budget, schemes to raise the £798,000 needed to buy it back. A simple soul would have assumed from this that Titus was a British picture, and that there had been long queues of art-hungry people to view it. In fact Rembrandt was, of course, a Dutchman, which, on the protestors’ own arguments, means that the Dutch are the only people who have a right to be annoyed about the affair.

Then again, the picture had not been open to public viewing but had been part of a rich Englishman’s collection in the Channel Islands. (Were the Dutch annoyed when Titus was originally bought out of Holland?)

Nationalism is never logical, but it is blatantly stupid when it works up its ire over the artistic products of another country.

Most of the people who were indignant over the Rembrandt picture can never have come remotely near to seeing it when it was in the Cooks’ private collection. At any rate, Mr. Simon intended it for wider enjoyment than that; he planned to show it at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Indignation would be better directed against a social system in which works of art can be bought and sold, and bargained for, and be the subject of nationalistic emotions. Rembrandt, who died in neglected squalor, might have been bitterly amused by it all.

Gas in Vietnam

The world has never recovered from the shock of the first gas attacks on the Western Front in 1915, and the sense of shock has been in no way lessened by the knowledge that there were many other horrors borne of that war.

Why the shock should have been so intense and so long-lasting has never been adequately explained. It persists today, although there is no gas which inflicts a worse death than napalm, or the fringes of a nuclear flash, or indeed many other of the ghastly machines which capitalism has invented and developed to a high degree of efficiency to prosecute its wars.

Poison gas is outlawed by what are called the international rules of war something which, although it allows all manner of horrors to flourish uncondemned, seems to convince many people that war is really a comfortable, humane occupation for gentlemen.

It was this combination of fear and hypocrisy which caused the storm over the American gas attacks in Vietnam. The United States government protested that they would not dream of using such barbaric methods of warfare (at the time they were busily dropping napalm bombs) and that the gas was really harmless stuff which any government might use against strikers or demonstrators.

The only comment to make on this is that it may be true. And then again it may not. No government—especially one which has such widespread interests and involvements as Washington—thinks twice about lying when it suits its purpose, and purposes are particularly open to being suited in wartime.

Gas warfare has one great thing to commend it to the designers of capitalism’s war machine. It destroys human beings but it does not damage property. The only snag, from their point of view, is that ways of delivering the stuff have to be found, and that these will he attacked by the other side with all the old methods of destruction—high explosives, incendiaries, nuclear missiles—which means that property is going to suffer after all.

There is no way out of it. War is not going to become a humane business. Even a comparatively small affair like the struggle in Vietnam can call into use some ghastly methods of dealing out death and destruction.

It is futile to expect capitalism to take a step backwards and humanise its wars—futile to expect a great power to throw away powerful, and possibly dominating, weapons. The people who have protested over the use of gas in Vietnam—many of them are the usual weary crowd of “Progressives’’—are once more turning their backs on the facts of capitalist life.

This js a dangerous habit. Capitalism has a way of making us face facts—and plenty of equipment with which to do it.

The Budget

Budget Day is usually the occasion for a certain amount of clowning about on the part of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Some of this is undoubtedly stimulated by the newspapers’ anxiety to unearth what they call a human story behind the impersonally vast amounts of money with which the Chancellor juggles.

Thus there was Mr. Heathcoat Amory feeding the birds on his window sill. There was Mr. Maudling’s comely young daughter suddenly bursting to fame as a film starlet after the press had discovered her. And this year there was Mr. Callaghan’s new dispatch box—symbolising, he promised us, a new era in the Treasury.

After this it came as no surprise when the Chancellor chose the old faithfuls of tobacco and alcohol to bear increased taxes. These are two of the fields where government control has established near-monopoly conditions, which enables prices to be high enough for the State to skim off a nice, creamy dollop of tax.

Many of the Budget's extra imposts were widely forecast by the financial journalists. These “experts” get their living by discussing the effects which the government's financial policies are supposed to have on the British economy. But while they predict in one breath that a certain tax will operate in a certain way, they have to admit in the next that the whole thing is unpredictable.

For example, Alan Day in The Observer:

. . . very large tax increases . . . are needed if the Government wants both to slow down inflation and to keep up a more reasonable pace of expansion of output

And in the same article:

The authors of last week’s Economic Report were clearly bewildered by the task even of explaining what happened last year . . . Any judgement about this year's developments must involve a high degree of uncertainty.

For example, Richard Fry in The Guardian:

. . . the Chancellor must devise his tax claims so that the total effect will have just the right impact on demand, production, and employment over the coming year. That is always a delicate and chancy operation and it will be harder than usual this year.

This confusion persists, even after the Budget is out Mr. Callaghan himself, in a television interview, admitted that he was not sure what the result of his Budget would be and that he could only hope his sums and forecasts would turn out right Nobody pointed out the obvious, that capitalism is a chaotic social system which cannot be planned or budgeted or controlled.

Workers, also, are confused by Budgets. They are convinced that what the Chancellor decides will have a significant effect on their livelihoods. In fact, with or without tax, everyone who has to work for a living gets a wage which is generally enough to reproduce their working energies and abilities.

Taxation is really a concern of the capitalist class. They are the class who need the vast State machine, the armed forces and their costly weapons. It is in their interests that State medical and social services are run. They are the only class who can afford to bear the immense tax burden.

These facts are not generally accepted. Budgets are excellent subjects for the customary political shadow-boxing between the Labour and Conservative parties, and this year’s was no exception. But no Budget has ever had more than a negligible effect upon the lives of the mass of the people. Their poverty and problems have deeper roots.

It is unfortunate, to say the least, that most workers ignore this, preferring to spend their time grumbling about a few pennies on or off beer, fags and the other consolations of their drab existence.

Ku-Klux-Klan

One of the results of the much-publicised Civil Rights activities in Selma, Alabama, and the murder of a white woman civil rights worker, has been to focus attention on that grotesque body the Ku-Klux-Klan.

The excesses of this gang of bigots and racketeers are too well known to need repeating, but they are probably nearing the end of the road. A mere shadow of their former selves, although still a murderous shadow, President Johnson’s violent attack on them, and the Congressional Committee of Investigation, that looks as if it means business, will probably finish them off.

After all, a powerful modern state like the U.S.A. cannot tolerate an Invisible Empire within its boundaries, that defies its laws and holds it up to contempt.

Perhaps just as important, this is a world in which a large number of independent states with predominately coloured populations exist, and are growing in importance. These have economic, political and military value to the United States, particularly as other powerful States are looking for opportunities to muscle in. American Capitalists do not want visiting diplomats or businessmen to be insulted or threatened because of their skin colour.

The Ku-Klux-Klan, with its lunatic mumbo-jumbo, with its Imperial Wizards, Exalted Cyclops, Klokards, Klokams and Nighthawks, to quote just a few, its passwords, bloodoaths and burning crosses, sound like an exaggerated form of such harmless but futile organisations as the Freemasons and the Buffalo’s.

Except that its purpose is terrorism. It is amazing that anyone should take it seriously, but the grim fact is that in its hey-day its membership ran into millions. Its childish costumes and antics make it sound like a schoolboy game or a joke, but it was no joke to the victims of its obscene brutality.

Based on an organisation that arose in the bitter aftermath of the American Civil War, and which flourished for only about three years during the Reconstruction period before being disbanded, the KKK was resurrected in the early years of this century.

Anti; foreigners, Jews. Catholics and Negroes, it appealed to the worst prejudices and the ignorance of the American working class. From time to time it has ridden on waves of hysteria to national importance, but most of the time its power has been more local. In the I930's it added Communists and “labour agitators” to its list of victims.

The progress of the Klan has been marked by a trail of misery. Murder, mutilation, flogging and branding have been amongst its methods, and although its end is probably in sight, as the time-bombs of Alabama show, it looks like making a bloody exit.

The Passing Show: Free blood (1965)

The Passing Show Column from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Free blood

You walk in and sit down. You are called to a table, where a man in a white coat pricks your finger for a test. Then you lie on a bench and hand the bottle you've been given to a nurse. About twenty minutes later they have a pint of your blood in the bottle and you are drinking a cup of tea. Not long after that you're back at work (that's the worst part of it—the rest is not at all a bother).

This is the typical routine at a blood donor session, and such is the demand for blood, that your pint may be used within a matter of hours. This is one of the sobering facts surrounding the National Blood Transfusion Service in England, and probably one which prompts many workers to give their life fluid every few months.

In this country there is no money in it for you. merely a small certificate or badge in recognition of your services. Equally there are no strings attached or compulsion, yet thousands of people donate at regular intervals and give it no more thought than going to bed or any other day-to-day function. No doubt the prospect of an hour off from the monotony of their work and the chance to see other faces are factors, but I think there is something more to it than that.

Here is perhaps just a faint glimpse of human beings doing something for each other without the prospect of "gain" in the sense that it is meant today, but equally without fear of injury to themselves in the process. Under such conditions is it too much to feel that perhaps many of them get a real sense of satisfaction such as they rarely encounter in their workaday lives? The eagerness with which they give their blood suggests maybe a sense of relief at being able to act for a brief spell without the normal restrictions which capitalism imposes, although they are not conscious of its reason.

Peace time war training

It is about as near to a "harmony of interests" that capitalism will ever let you go, because apart from odd moments like these, you are in constant competition with your fellow man. And even in this sphere, capitalism has a degrading effect, for as fast as blood is collected in one place, it is shed even faster on the roads at home and in places farther afield like the trouble spots of Malaysia. Cyprus and Aden.

This is the background against which to view the efforts of the devoted doctors and nurses of the blood bank. It seems you just can't win while capitalism is with us.

Capitalism causes wars, big and small. That is a simple statement of fact, but it has many implications. You should not, for instance, run away with the idea that war is something which bursts like a thunderclap over a largely unprepared and unsuspecting world, for such are the conditions of modern capitalism that there is plenty of suspicion between the powers, even while they are professing undying friendship, and they are never entirely unprepared.

They are constantly training their forces and developing their weapons of death and destruction, and where they get the chance, they will give them a tryout under operating conditions. Thus they gain valuable data for future modifications in time for the bigger showdowns to come. .Such was the case during the Spanish Civil War for example, when some of the major powers sent arms and "volunteers" to one side or the other and noted their effects. Then there was the Korean episode, when the British Centurion tank was in action and later underwent alterations as a result.

Now this is not to say that Spain and Korea were just glorified weapon testing grounds. Obviously there were very real capitalist interests at stake which caused the flareups and put the men and weapons there in the first place. But they are also regarded as useful training grounds, although this is not something that statesmen and politicians will normally care to admit. However, sometimes we may get a glimpse of cynical candour as one or another of them shoots his mouth off, like Lord Mountbatten, thus:

This is war, but is a very small form of war . . . We are being shot at but really it is the most marvellous training that our forces ever had . . . (speaking on the Malaysian situation in New Zealand March 4th.)

Out of the horse’s mouth indeed. Obviously Lord Mountbatten does not think that the “marvellous training" will be wasted. No doubt it will come in handy to protect British capitalism’s interests elsewhere when this little crisis blows over, and for that very reason then as now, workers will get killed or horribly maimed. It’s a man’s life in the Army.

Infernal combustion engines

A friend of mine runs a small shop on the outskirts of Watford. Apart front his shop and a few others, the road is lined with houses on both sides almost for its entire length. Most of the houses and shops have been there for many years, so there has keen little change in the size or appearance of the road in all that time. But there has been one big change in another respect which terrifies the wits out of me every time I walk along that road.

Time was when the shop door could be left open on a warm day in Summer. But that was some years ago, before the road became a feeder to the M.1. Now, the stink and deafening noise of huge lorries and countless cars have made a nightmare of the place, especially in the rush hour. So, Winter and Summer alike, the shop door stays closed and if you walk along the narrow pavement (laid long before the car became the monster it is today), you need eyes in the back of your head to get you home in one piece. Probably all that has saved the road from complete destruction is the construction of M.1 extension into London a few miles away, due for opening in the near future.

The problem of the roads was growing before the second world war, but it is in the post war years that it has threatened to get out of hand and has been such a headache for the capitalist class of Britain and other countries. One gets the impression that some of them would like to see some sort of restrictions imposed, but the car industry has now assumed such importance in modern capitalist economy, that they will not attempt anything to hamper its growth to any great extent. What this holds in store for us in terms of ripping up the countryside and the deterioration of already ugly places remains to be seen.

It is of course very convenient in many ways to have a car nowadays, but more than that—for many workers it is a positive necessity by the very nature of their employment. It is indicative of the demand to move ever faster in the world of capitalist competition, where time is money and every second counts.

So the politician who takes over the administration of modern capitalism will have to make big allowances for the automobile in his electoral calculations, whatever his personal feelings. Greater London Council Member Mrs. Peggy Jay (wife of Douglas) may shout about proposed “box” of motorways for London, and tell of the destruction of living space, and about ten thousand trees, which it may well entail, but she will not get much support from the electorate at large. For the system which she supports has produced the motorised worker of the sixties, dominated by his machine and hating anyone who denies him the right to drive it where he likes, even in some places onto the sea shore to the very edge of the waves.

Crackpot? indeed yes, but just another of those problems that only a private property system can produce.

Gaspers

”. . . The Conservative Party should not be afraid of inequality.” (Mr. Du Cann, Tory Party Chairman, 27.3.65.)

“ This is not an attack on profits.” (Mr. Brown, defending Labour Government's budget 7.4.65.)

“ My first job is to maintain political stability and if 1 have to detain ten or twenty thousand, I will do it.” (Dr. Banda at a Blantyre rally on 4.4.65.)

“The days of nuclear war are gone." (Mao Tse Tung to Arab Leaders in Peking, reported 6.4.65.)

"Businessmen have more hope of making progress and money under a Labour Government than they had before.” (Mr. Brown in an interview with the editor of Director, Institute of Directors Journal, April 1965.)

"We do not care what colour a person's skin is. It is just that we do not want any more coloured people in Marshall Street.” (Mrs. Groves of Smethwick after a deputation meeting with the Housing Minister 8.4.65.)

Eddie Critchfield

Housing in London (1965)

From the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

The root cause of the housing problem in big cities like London is the capitalist system under which housing accommodation is bought and sold. For many years now the housing market has been subject to various controls but neither these, nor council houses, nor subsidies, alter the basic characteristic of housing under capitalism.

Once a city is established as such, the economics of capitalism ensure that the growth of demand for workers assumes a momentum of its own, for the great concentration of people in a city provides a vast market for so-called consumer goods and services. Even in times of depression the drift to the cities continues. But it is in times of full employment that the housing problem becomes acute because in such conditions the rate of growth of employment usually exceeds the rate of growth of housing. Inevitably this creates problems. This basically is what is happening in London today. As the Milner Holland Report puts it:

If the growth of housing does not match the growth o( employment there will be trouble of some kind.

Precisely, and they might have added that, given this basic situation, any measures applied to deal with it can only be palliatives. The Report is in fact a very useful document for exposing the futility of reformism on the housing question, though of course it was not meant to be.

Before going on to look into this, however, it will be useful first to clear up any misunderstanding that the words landlord and rent may create. The source of all Rent, Interest and Profit is the unpaid labour of the working class, using the term Rent to refer to the share of the proceeds of working class exploitation which those who own the land are able to extract from the capitalist class. It does not refer to house-rent which is a different thing altogether. House-rent is not a share of the unpaid labour of the working class but it is a price; in fact the price paid for accommodation.

In the 19th century it was correct to speak of a landlord class distinct and separate from the industrial capitalist class, and indeed between these two classes there was a struggle over taxation and the control of the state. This landlord class was composed of landowners pure and simple. Today the term is also used to refer to those who are engaged in the business of selling accommodation. These two types of landlord should not.be confused; the Labour Party and other demagogues frequently attack “landlords” just as, long ago, John Stuart Mill or Lloyd George tried to dupe the workers into doing the dirty work for the capitalist class in dealing with their enemies, the landowners.

As a matter of fact most of the so-called landlords today are not landowners at all. It is a fact that among the groups which the notorious Rachman swindled were those who owned the land on which his houses stood. The basic point here is this: the worker is exploited at the point of production. He is not exploited anywhere else—and no more by the private landlord from whom he purchases accommodation than by the shopkeeper from whom he purchases the other things he needs. He can be swindled by such people—and the Milner Holland Report does expose some swindles by landlords—but this is a different matter altogether and besides is not confined to working class buyers. The worker is exploited as a producer, not as a buyer.

Further, many members of the working class are themselves technically landlords as the table reproduced from the Report shows.

As can be seen the vast majority of private landlords in London only have up to two or three tenants while sixty per cent have only one tenant. These figures speak for themselves. They suggest that many private landlords are members of the working class letting a room or two to supplement their income from working—a point which should be borne in mind when the demagogues shout about “private landlordism”. It means that measures taken against private landlords in general, while perhaps bettering the position of some members of the working class, hit those others who supplement their wages in this way. This, incidentally, confirms that it is impossible to unite the working class on any reform issue because reform movements are not based on the class interests of the working class as exploited producers. Housing reform movements are no exception.

The Table also shows inequality in the ownership of housing accommodation. This inequality is not as great as might be expected. Another Table in the Report shows that “only about six per cent of all dwellings in Greater London are financed by capital drawn directly from the capital market.” This figure also speaks for itself: investment in private houses for rent is unprofitable. This has various results. The big capitalists stay clear of housing, which is thus left to small capitalists and people like Rachman. The Labour Party went to town over Rachman but they overlooked the fact that he was the product of the policies, such as Rent Control, they had been advocating against private landlords. It was these measures which contributed in no small way to making investment in private housing for rent unprofitable—thus opening the way for the Rachmans!

When the Rent Act of 1957 was being discussed Socialists were invited to oppose it,—in effect to support Rent Control. Besides pointing out that at best Rent Control could only be a palliative, we drew attention to the fact that there was evidence to show that Rent Control gave rise to its own problems, in particular to the neglect and decay of privately owned and rented houses, thus worsening conditions for some workers. In other words it made the situation worse for some in improving it for others. A typical reform. Rent Control is in fact a classic case of the futility of reformism, of running fast to get nowhere. The Milner Holland Report contains many similar examples of much-touted reforms and their miserable results.

On compulsory purchase of sweating landlords by local authorities:

Some authorities expressed the view when giving evidence to us, that compulsory purchase was no way of dealing with this problem. They pointed out that even if a compulsory purchase order was confirmed the owner received the full market value of his house as compensation, inflated in some degree by the very high rents which he was charging. With the proceeds of the compulsory sale he was then able to buy another house and charge the same high rents, thus defeating the whole purpose of the exercise.

Of local authorities refusing to use statutory powers to improve conditions:

. . . statutory powers, though in theory adequate to deal with overcrowding and the worst effects of multiple occupation, are virtually unused in some districts where the problem is most acute. This may be due to the fear that any action taken is likely to result in evictions to relieve overcrowding, to obviate the need for extra facilities, to make room for extra facilities, or simply as a reprisal against tenants whose complaints have prompted action by the local authority. The use of the available powers in a situation of acute shortage therefore tends to improve the situation in terms of dwellings but may shift the people suffering bad conditions into equally unsuitable accommodation elsewhere, or may even make them homeless . . . The choice is between two evils: on the one hand, allowing over-occupation to continue, and on the ether, insisting on improvements which at best cause distress, and at worst result in homelessness.

Of slum clearance making the situation worse:

The progress of slum clearance intensifies the competition for living space, since it must cater for numbers of households substantially larger than the number of dwellings to be demolished, and it may also encourage a further subdivision of existing households into smaller and more numerous units.

Other examples of the futility of reformism which can be gleaned from the Report are: of slum clearance getting nowhere as slums appear faster than they are cleared; of tenants' legal rights as mere scraps of paper for fear of eviction; of concentration on building new houses leading to the neglect of old homes; of tenants refusing improvements because they could not afford the higher rents which would result.

In conditions of shortage it is always the supplier, in this case the private landlord; who has the upper hand. What is happening in London is that in the competition for housing accommodation those who can't pay get the worse. Some don't get anything. At present there are 1,500 homeless families, some 7,000 people, in London and their numbers are growing. These are the lower-paid section of the working class, who have to put up with really bad housing conditions.

It seems likely that the next reform in this field will be a measure to try to improve the position of this section by giving them greater security of tenure or subsidising special housing for them. No doubt this reform too will have its catch: some other section of the working class will find itself worse off. To quote again the passage from the Report: “if the growth of housing docs not match the growth of employment there will be trouble of some kind". The only question is of what kind, and for which section of the working class. The point is, given the basic situation some people must suffer. The politicians are merely arguing about who this should be.

Overcrowding, high rents, homelessness intimidation and the other ills from which many workers suffer are a direct result of fact that demand for accommodation exceeds the supply. In large cities like London this must happen and is likely to be permanent. The Report itself says as much: “the housing problems confronting great cities . . . are of a long term if not permanent character”. The Report also, very appropriately, draws attention to the fact that this problem is not new. They quote from a similar report made by Charles Booth in 1901. Of course since then some housing conditions have improved in many respects but as the Report points out the problem “remains fundamentally the same."

Adam Buick

Tories : No holds barred (1965)

From the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like someone picking at a scab, the Tories seem unable to forget their leadership controversy.

Even the declarations of unity—almost every weekend at least one Conservative M.P. tells a meeting somewhere what a sound fellow Sir Alec Douglas-Home is—only draw attention to the fact that the controversy is still going on. The most ardent of speeches merely succeeds in suggesting that, if Home were not under fire, there would be no need for such a show of loyalty towards him.

It is, in fact, an established tradition—and one with good political reason—in the Conservative Party always to do their best to present a united front against all comers. Sometimes, it is true, we get a glimpse of knives flashing in the background behind this front; but generally the Tories do not treat us to the spectacle of the glorious public rows which the Labour Party have indulged in.

The Tories have always posed as the gentleman’s party, implying that, whatever the difficulties, they know how to behave themselves. This should deceive nobody. Precisely because they are a political party aiming to run capitalism, and especially because they are never far from the seat of power, the Conservatives, collectively and individually, must be as ruthless as anyone else.

They have had their share of leaders who have filled this particular bill for example Stanley Baldwin, who played the political game with a relentless cunning under the guise of a pipe-sucking, ruminative, honest countryman. More recently, too, the gentleman’s party have had their tough infighters. There was a lot of truth in the crack from Harold Wilson (who knows a thing or two about this subject himself) that whenever Macmillan, when he was Prime Minister, came back from abroad, Mr. Butler hurried to the airport to grip him warmly by the throat.

At the moment there is obviously a bitter struggle going on for the leadership of the Conservative Party. From some points of view this may appear as a battle between Maudling, Heath and McLeod for the succession after Home has gone. Whether or not this is true, a battle to succeed Home may of itself be enough to unseat him.

Sir Alec, it seems, wants to stay, although some political correspondents whisper that he is weary of it all and is only waiting for his troublesome underlings to decide who is to take his place and then he will fade away into the substantial shadows of Coldstream. It is possible that Home’s hand was forced into agreeing to the new method of electing future Tory leaders—something unknown in a party which, as befits gentlemen, has always relied upon discreet soundings rather than an open vote.

Home assured us that, although he was very pleased with the new election plan, he did not think highly enough of it to allow it to apply to himself. He, who came to the leadership through the customary processes of consultation, was not going to risk losing it all in a vulgar, demotic election. Perhaps there is some political sense in this. If Home agreed to stand, and was opposed, the split in the Tory ranks would be revealed for all to see. If he stood and lost . . . but that simply does not bear thinking about, in the deep leather armchairs of the Carlton. Better to leave the whole beastly thing alone.

The election plan was conceded only after a long period of agitation. Men like Mr. Humphrey Berkeley were the frontrunners in this, but behind the scenes there must have been more powerful—and more hopeful—voices also pressing for the same thing. Of course, when it was all settled all good Tories made the best of it, claiming that they had found an ultra-democratic method of electing their leader. They forgot that they had always insisted that the method they were abandoning gained a far clearer assessment of opinion in their party, and was therefore more democratic, than any simple election.

They also forgot—or ignored—the fact that leadership has nothing to do with democracy. All capitalist parties agree that it is necessary to have a leader, and that it is his job to lead. But this means that the leader must often go against popular wishes, for what is the point of having a leader to take decisions if he is also supposed to take orders from the people he is leading?

The Tories clear up this point very simply, by making no secret of the fact that they intend to run—and perhaps reform—capitalism from day to day as they think fit, with no reference to their members. The Labour Party used to have a different line. Their members were supposed to have a voice in deciding their policy; some of them may actually have thought that the decisions of a Labour conference would influence a Labour government. There is no room for doubt on this score now. Labour has made it clear that they will govern as British capitalism requires, and not at the dictates of their members, who are liable to get all sorts of woolly and inconvenient notions about keeping out of wars and sticking by election promises. Democracy, in other words has been put firmly in its place.

Home’s sudden elevation to the Premiership was attacked by many people, especially of course the Labour Party, on the grounds that he is an aristocrat. These attacks were based on the argument that aristocrats are bound to govern badly because they are aloof from the great mass of honest, horny handed people. The corollary of this is that political leaders who come from the ordinary people are sure to govern us wisely and equitably.

We do not have to work very hard to dispose of this delusion. Labour governments have always prided themselves in having more than one son of the toiling masses among their ranks. Sometimes these men have held top jobs, yet they have done them in much the same way as any High Tory aristocrat.

There was, for example, Jimmy Thomas, who was so proud of his engine driver background that he went around mislaying and misplacing as many aitches as he possibly could, much to the amusement of the opulent circles in which he moved. (He once complained, at a glittering social gathering, of having “an ’ell of an ’eadache”, whereupon the late Lord Birkenhead advised him to “go home and take an aspirate.”) Then there was Ernie Bevin, who cultivated the same habit, allied to a fondness for blunt speaking which recalled his beginnings as a farm labourer.

Neither of these men, when they were in power, did anything to encourage us to elect their like to office again. The interests of the British capitalist class had no more zealous defenders than they. They walked with kings but made sure that they did not lose the common touch, which was so useful at election times and when addressing the TUC.

All capitalist parties are wedded to the lie that this is the age of the Common Man. It is true that the Common Man sometimes gets to power, but when he does so he runs capitalism as ruthlessly—and often with a sight more cunning —than any landed lord. The Labour Party has always set the pace in propagating the lie, although nowadays their favourite badge is not so much the cloth cap as the scientist’s white coat. The Tories, too, are in on the deception. They produce tame trade unionists, and give them hopeless seats to fight at election time. They announced that their new chairman, Mr. du Cann, is an ex-grammar schoolboy. This was meant to convince us that they had a leader who had battled through the eleven plus to the sort of school which our own kids might go to. In fact, they were stretching the meaning of the term grammar school; the places where Edward Dillon Lott du Cann got his education—Colet Court and Woodbridge—represent something much more expensive than is open to the average working class child.

Thus, in many ways the dice may seem to be loaded against Sir Alec. Any mistakes he might make will be blamed onto his blue-blooded origins. Tory publicists do their best to cover up his faux-pas—his confession to doing his balance of payments sums with the aid of matches, his “little donation" speech, his half-moon glasses. They assure us that although Home may not have a great deal of political cunning, he is possessed of abundant integrity.

Those of us with longer memories, or with a thirst for the facts, will know that Home was one of the supporters of the 1938 Munich agreement, and that he needed something other than integrity when he was defending that agreement in the House. We also know that he was Secretary for Commonwealth Relations from 1955 to 1960, which means that he is firmly identified with the Suez double-cross, the Nyasaland fraud and all the other dirty deals which were pulled off during that period and subsequently, when he held higher office. In fact, one of the first things a capitalist politician must discard is his integrity.

In any case, honesty will not rescue Home. His position is insecure, there are hungry men waiting to pounce, and his party is in confusion. Amid this chaos, it is appropriate to state the facts on the leadership issue.

Leaders, whoever they are and whatever their party, exist because of the ignorance of their followers. But at the same time their actions must be confined within, and must not offend, that ignorance. At the present this does not cause any upsets because the people who are content to be led are also content to keep capitalism going.

But this means that the leaders, who often get power on promises to solve certain problems, are quite unable to keep their word. They must promise to safeguard peace at the same time as they are assiduously organising the production of weapons of war. They must promise to conquer capitalism’s economic upsets when in fact they have not the faintest idea of what to do about them.

It also means that they must cheat and lie; they must wholeheartedly engage in the ruthless game of politics. They must shake hands with their deadliest political enemy while keeping the other hand firmly on the safety catch—and while knowing that their enemy is doing the same. And all this must go on while they are professing, if they are Tories, to being a party of gentlemen, or if they are Labourites, to being the party of common humanity.

Mr. Enoch Powell, an M.P. who has the endearing habit of often blowing inconvenient gaffs which his colleagues find embarrassing in the extreme, once wrote:

. . . political purposes . . . are concerned with public opinion and the persuasion of large numbers. The politician’s business is not investigating and expounding facts for their own sake. Facts become relevant to his job only when people are ready to lake an interest in them, so that they become potential instruments of persuasion and action.

Sometimes the politicians succeed in convincing the working class that they are effective. Then they are canonised as great men. Often they fail. Then one leader is deposed, as Home may be deposed, to be replaced by another. But the essential of the situation—the repressive and degrading capitalist system- remains. The majority of people continue to be exploited and harassed and, peculiarly, to opt to stay like that.

As long as they have their leaders to show them the way into chaos, the workers are content. Home may go but the set-up which bore him and finished him will remain. The roundabout goes on and on, round and round, up and down. Only the man who is in charge of the engine changes occasionally. The sickening motion of the thing goes on, and will continue to do so until the passengers who are suffering from it all decide that they have had enough.

Ivan.

Another Australian ghost town (1965)

From the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Geoffrey Blainey briefly traces out the history till 1959 of the lead, silver and copper mines of Mount Isa in his book, Mines of the Spinifex. These are located in the north west of tropical Queensland. Blainey outlines the incredible number and forms of hazards that had to be faced and subdued before the mines could be opened and operated. Among these were swarms of flies, red choking dust, persistent high temperatures, scurvy, malaria and thirst. Also, hostile Aborigines, apparently fearing for their own tribal future, never hesitated to spear or club to death all surveyors and prospectors they could. Isolation, and therefore transportation, was and still is a large factor in end costs. Westwards from Townsville, its nearest port, Mount Isa lies 600 miles across plains of red dust and prickly spinifex.

Yet so promising were the chances of fortunes to be made from mining in this savage, desolate waste land that investors Australian, English, Russian and now predominately American were persuaded to advance capital to develop the mines and reduce the environment to conditions of European habitation and modern industry. Dams were built large enough to impound tropical rains and supply the needs of both town and mines for years ahead. Even the dread of medical isolation was removed with the advent of the John Flynn Flying Doctor Service. 

Capital, superb as it is in solving these massive problems of nature, must always falter and fail when confronting social problems peculiarly of its own creation. Indeed, as wild nature is tamed, in like proportion there emerges the destructive force of the class war which is an impediment to wealth production just as much as wild nature. That wary London publication. The Economist of July 9th, 1927 (writes Blainey) “prophetically warned investors that (a) metal prices could easily fall and that (b) labour conditions in Australia were onerous and (c) that the cost of equipping the mine could far outstrip the estimates,” (Mount Isa paid outfits first net profits in 1936-37 — after 13 years of sporadic operations). “It admitted that Mount Isa might become great.” Mount Isa became the largest single industry in the State, employing over four thousand workers and each week paying out £100,000 wages and "earning” over one million pounds revenue.

Commodity prices, (rising or falling), and labour problems: how these two factors have repeatedly flawed and fractured the apparently smooth and polished surface of modern society everywhere.

The first Mount Isa strike was in protest over the high price of beer. The next, 1933, closed down the mine for months. Prophetically, the miners would not return to work unless two of their sacked mates were re-employed. The prophesy of the Economist re-appears and rapidly assumes a more substantial form from December, 1963 onwards.

It was then that, theoretically, the present Mount Isa dispute began, when the Australian Workers Union (A.W.U.) representing the Mount Isa miners lodged claims for £4 per week pay rise and improved conditions. In April 1964 these were refused on the legal quibble that the £4 per week was a bonus and not a wage claim. To the mineowners, either way, the claim clearly represented an encroachment on their profit. And this is something the investors seek to avoid, even if straining of legal subtleties and cynical evasions do insult the intelligence of the workers. After another four months of apparent deliberations, in August 1964 the miners decided to ban contract labour and to revert to day wages, and to stay this way until their claims were granted. This continued for four more months, during which time the weekly wage was less than half contract rates and mine production had fallen steeply.

This was a period of fermentation. The employers declared that the contract ban by miners was a strike. Branch unions defied parent bodies. Local labour leaders emerged, more representative and knowledgeable of local affairs and tempers. Then the combustible element of victimisation was cast into this tropical furnace of class war. The popular and able leader of the contract banning miners, Pat Mackie, was sacked by the company for attending union affairs during working hours Mackie’s objection to dismissal was legally over-ruled. A few days later he was expelled by the A.W.U. (This seems to be always the weakness of the One Big Union ideal—the parent body upon formation begins again to disintegrate into hostile local factions, at odds both among themselves and against the central union authority. At Mount Isa this became very much in evidence.)

On December 10th the Queensland Government declared the area to be under Emergency Regulations and moved in extra policemen. The Mount Isa miners were ordered to resume contract work and the penalties for refusing can be One Hundred Pounds fine or six months in jail or both; in addition daily penalties can be imposed. Thus, if refusal continues for 50 days, each miner who holds out could be jailed for 25 years, be fined five thousand pounds, or both.

All this, naturally, resulted in fanning the live coals of class war. There was a quickening of union activities. More meetings, more defiance and still more Emergency Regulations and conferences. Then on December 24th, the original legal quibble of April was suddenly set aside and a £3 increase was granted. By mid-January 1965, improved conditions and contract rates were also agreed upon.

Marx, in Capital Vol. 1, Chapter VI informs us that, as distinct from other commodities, “ . . . there enters into the determination of the value of labour power a historical and moral element." (See footnote) “Moral” considerations, so dear to the hearts of our masters, now proved to be the major hindrance to immediate settlement of the Mount Isa dispute when they revealed a leaning towards working class interests. The original dispute in the material and economic sense has ended. But others took its place. These were over the re-employment of Pat Mackie by the mining company and the company recognition of the Mount Isa T. & L. C. as a future negotiating body for Mount Isa employees. With both of these Union requests the company refused to comply. And so the dispute became a strike, on the issues of victimisation and union representation, with all their implications.

While these issues were still smouldering, the Queensland Government inflamed the entire Labour Movement of Australia by yet another Emergency Proclamation which transformed Queensland into a Police State. Meetings of protest were being organised all over Australia together with pledges of moral and financial support: indeed as noted by an Age leader:

The Queensland Government in its desperate effort to check the disastrous Mount Isa strike, seems to have injected more fuel into a highly inflammable situation, which now threatens to explode into a State-wide and perhaps a Nation-wide industrial upheaval.

Not entirely surprising was the news that all the Emergency Police powers had been suspended. Premier Nicklin contrary to his earlier declared purpose for invoking these powers (“gangsterism strong-arm tactics etc., among the miners") suddenly revoked them. However, these Regulations in practice and intent were still less savage than those put into operation by the Federal Labour Government during the 1949 strike which “ . . . included freezing of union funds to prevent sustenance payments to workers, the forbidding of credit to the strikers and the use of troops to mine coal and transport it." (Herald 10.2.65)

Through February the miners firmly continued the strike, while the mining company and Arbitration Commission issue orders and counter order on the closing or non-closing down of the mine. Meanwhile hundreds of miners and their families, each week, moved outwards from this strike-bound and blighted Central Queensland Township, seeking employment elsewhere. From the other side of the world came this clear comprehending and candid appraisal of Australian affairs:

The strike is more than a local labour dispute. It is contributing to a sharp rise in world copper prices which had been falling this month.

It is infecting the whole of the Australian labour relations. The elements of legal compulsion that once seemed to be such an admirable feature of the Australian arbitration system has not been able to cope with the refactory labour force in a low-wage area like Queensland at a time of generally full employment, (The Times 10.2.65.).

Finally, Prime Minister Menzies, returning from overseas, said “ . . . its terrible that the Mount Isa works could be snuffed out by a curious character, (Pat Mackie, who by the way volunteered to withdraw from Mount Isa once the Miners’ pay and other demands were settled), who is not even an Australian.” Just how irrelevant can a person be? As though the nationality of the victimisation issue is of importance, any more than is the issue as to whether these mines are owned and controlled by Australian or “Foreign’’ capital.

Mr. Calwell, leader of the Aus. L.P., on this point declares: “What is needed above all in this Mount Isa situation is compassion for the people of Mount Isa, compassion for the families of the miners and of the shop-keepers, compassion for the men (i.e. the international investigators), who have planned great schemes of expansion only to see them frustrated . . . The dignity of the Labour movement is expressed when it takes full responsibility for everything it does.” (Age 23.2.65.)

Yet only four days earlier he supported the use of Australian troops in Borneo, indicating thereby a direct denial of compassion for “ the people, the families of peasants and soldiers, shopkeepers etc.,” on both sides who suffer the horrors of S.E. Asia warfare. Both the open class war of Mount Isa and the war in the jungles of Asia are but two warring aspects with a common origin.

Where now is the dignity of the Australian Labour Movement?

Peter Furey.

George Brown in Cloud Cuckoo Land (1965)

From the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. George Brown, Minister of Economic Affairs, is convinced that there are such things as “fair" and prices, and has got the employers’ and employees’ organisations to agree to attempt to regulate prices and incomes. He knows “his people” so well to be sure that when the instructions get to the individual worker and capitalist they will make them work.

Briefly, the Prices and Incomes Policy is to regulate the growth of all incomes at the rate of three and a half per cent per year, whilst keeping prices stable. George Brown hopes that public opinion will influence capitalists to keep prices down when they could put them up, and that it will restrain workers’ wage demands.

This policy will fail for exactly the same reason as “free” enterprise regulated by the price system. Brown seems to forget that capitalism is a competitive class society and that the economic forces acting upon capitalists and workers are stronger than all the moral suasions and judgements. In fact already there are many claims by sections of the working class aiming to get on to a “platform of equality” with other workers, e.g. doctors, teachers, farmers, before the growth rate commences. Further, there are many workers, some recognised by George Brown as being lowly paid, who will have to press for increases considerably greater than three and a half per cent.

The big laugh is that if by some fluke George Brown were to succeed and peg wage growth rates at three and a half per cent, we may all be like Alice—running faster and faster to stay in the same place. There is not much point in having three and a half per cent increase in wages if you have to pay three and a half per cent more for the things that you require to get the health and strength to increase your productivity by at least three and a half per cent.

But then who are we to laugh at George? We can’t solve his problem either. In fact, within capitalism the problem is not soluble. If we widen our terms of reference however, the whole aspect takes a rosy, instead of blue, hue. The world has enough resources to satisfy the needs of man—we have the population capable of exploiting those resources, of producing the goods where man needs them—only capitalism, with its production for profit, stands in the way.

Rachman, Bloom, Ferranti are a natural part of capitalism. George Brown cannot change a society in which the hall mark, and professed route to efficiency, is competition, into one wherein co-operation prevails, without changing the economic basis of society; and we can rest assured that he cannot do that.

Ken Knight

50 Years Ago: Origin of the idea of justice (1965)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Locke, who, like the philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, used the deductive method employed in geometry, came to think that private property engendered the idea of justice. In his “Human Understanding” he expressly says that “Where there is no property there is no injustice, is a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid: for the idea of property being a right to anything, and the idea to which the name injustice is given being the invasion or violation of that right . . .”

If the idea of Justice, as Locke thought, can only appear after and as a consequence of private property, the idea of theft, or rather the tendency to take unthinkingly what one needs or desires, is on the contrary, well developed, before the institution of private property. The communistic savage and barbarian behave in regard to material goods as our savants and writers do in regard to intellectual goods: whenever they find them they take them, to use Molière’s expression. But this natural custom becomes theft, crime, from the time when common property is replaced by private property.

Into the head and heart of savages and barbarians common property put ideas and sentiments which bourgeois Christians, those sad results of private property, will find very strange.

Heckwelder, a Moravian missionary who in the 18th century lived fifteen years among North American savages, not yet corrupted by Christianity and bourgeois civilisation, said:

“The Indians believe that the Great Spirit created the world and all that it contains for the common good of men; when he stocked the earth and filled the woods with game, it was not for the advantage of some, but of all. Everything is given in common to the children of men. Everything that breathes on the earth, everything that grows in the fields, everything that lives in the rivers and waters, belongs jointly to all, and everyone has a right to his share."

[From a lecture by Paul Lafargue on Idealism and Materialism, Socialist Standard, May 1915.]

SPGB Meetings (1965)

Party News from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Notes:

Sam Orner and Len Fenton were both longstanding members of the World Socialist Party of the United States, who were obviously paying a fraternal visit to the comrades in Britain. For more background on them both, their obituaries give some flavour of their contribution to the cause:

• Sam Orner (October 1973 Socialist Standard)
• Len Fenton (World Socialist Review #21)

Manchester (1965)

Party News from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Meeting has been arranged at Chorlton Town Hall  (Committee Room), Cavendish Street, All Saints, Manchester, 15, on Sunday, 9th May, 2 pm.—4.30 p.m. 

Central Branch members and sympathisers are invited to attend. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss ways and means of improving Socialist propaganda in the North West, particularly in and around the Manchester area, and the possibility of holding public meetings with the help of Party speakers and the co-operation of the Party Propaganda Committee.

It is appreciated that the date and time of the meeting will not be convenient to everybody, but the arrangement of the meeting has been rather difficult because of the shortage of suitable halls in Manchester. It is however, hoped that all those interested will do their utmost to attend and make the meeting a success.

Any further enquiries should be made to the Manchester Group Secretary, 4 St. Martins Road, Ashton-on-Mersey, Sale. Cheshire, (Phone: Pyramid 2404).

"Where have all the socialists gone" (1965)

From the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

This was a question headlined by a Daily Mail writer. Mr. Walter Terry, on March 15th. He answered it himself: “They've joined the Government, one by one." As Socialists haven’t gone anywhere, and certainly not into the Government. it had better be explained at once that the people Mr. Terry had in mind are the so-called “Left Wing" leaders of the Labour Party. He names Barbara Castle, Anthony Greenwood and Frank Cousins along with others who, invited by Harold Wilson to take government jobs have done so, and as public critics of government policy their voice is no longer heard. What could be more natural? Having got the government and the policies of their choice what else should they do? But Mr. Terry’s point is that the things the Government is doing and saying are not at .all to the liking of the rank and file admirers of these “left wing" leaders.

He had been reading the letters of protest and dissent in Tribune and the New Statesman and quotes as a typical example: “I, for one, feel utterly disheartened . . . Where have all the socialists gone? What was the election fight all for?”

Mr. Terry tells us how he sees the situation:

  Suddenly the Left Wingers feel cheated. Coddled and encouraged by the Prime Minister, they now have a chill feeling that they have been taken to the cleaners . . . Over Vietnam, defence and foreign affairs generally they discovered belatedly that instead of pursuing what they would call Socialist policy, the Government, in different words, treads a similar road to the Tories. Even on steel nationalisation, the virility symbol of Socialism, there is a nagging doubt (justified too) that, somehow, someone will try to dodge it.

It is plain to see that the Labour voters Mr. Terry wrote about are in a state of extreme confusion. The election was not fought by Tory, Liberal and. Labour parties about the issue whether capitalism should be replaced with Socialism, but about which group of politicians should have the job of looking after the domestic and foreign problems of British capitalism. They have not been “taken to the cleaners." they took themselves. If they had given a little thought to the nature of capitalism and Socialism and to the political outlook of the electorate they would have known beforehand that government policies after the election had to be capitalist policies. The electorate did not and does not want Socialism and was not asked to consider it as a possibility.

And Mr. Terry is just as muddled as they are: steel nationalisation is not a “virility symbol of Socialism.” It has nothing to do with Socialism and even from a vote-catching point of view is about as virile as King Charles’ head.

The talk of nationalisation does however provoke a more important question, that of the sad outcome of the idea some Labour Party forerunners had when they first took it up. They—and this included Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb and Keir Hardie—declared their aim to be “Communism ", meaning by the term what Marx meant and what the S.P.G.B. means,— a social revolution involving the abolition of class ownership of the means of production and distribution, the wages system etc. They did not imagine that nationalisation, which merely puts the government or a government appointed board, in place of the private capitalist or capitalist company, was Socialism. They, or at least some of them, did not even share the illusion that nationalisation has any advantage for the workers inside capitalism. What they did think was that the nationalisation of monopolies and large-scale industries would provide an easier structural framework for a Socialist working class to introduce Socialism.

They then faced the problem that the workers had not been won over to an understanding of Socialism—and their reaction was to run away from it. On the plea of wanting to do something immediately to solve the worst evils afflicting the workers, (including the abolition of war), they rejected the S.P.G.B. case for the paramount need to propagate Socialism and work for Socialism and went in for “practical" politics, by which they meant getting a Labour Government elected.

They had already in effect given up the struggle for Socialism Labour candidates seeking election could not hope to get votes from non-Socialist workers by telling them that nationalisation was of no practical benefit here and now but would be useful later on to get Socialism, so they more and more claimed that nationalisation was an end in itself, something leading to lower prices and better wages and that it would be good for all, including the rest of the capitalists (other than those whose industry was being taken over).

Time, and actual experience of nationalisation at work, have had a savage revenge on the defeatists who propagated the original theory that the way to get Socialism was to organise and fight for something else. The predominant leaders of the Labour Party know that an electoral campaign seeking a mandate to nationalise all industries would bring them certain defeat. Nationalisation is an irrelevance to capitalists and workers alike; it has little bearing on the actual problems facing British capitalism and none at all on the position of the workers. If all that Mr. Terry’s wrongly called “Socialists” have lost is the chance of having some more state capitalism they haven’t lost anything worth having. Why not forget it and start thinking about Socialism?

Edgar Hardcastle

Attitudes About Work (1965)

From the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the April Socialist Standard the question of work was considered especially in relation to the objection frequently voiced at Socialist meetings that in view of man's natural laziness, the demand for a society free from the economic compulsion of wage labour, is impractical. This is a mere prejudice about human behaviour. Even so, it is necessary to see this attitude in perspective and to account for the reasons why in capitalist society, work is brought into disrepute and often held to be repugnant.

Socialists argue that work and attitudes to work must be understood in relation to the social conditions in which it is carried on. Under capitalism work cannot be separated from employment and employment as a word is only a polite substitute for economic exploitation. Wage work inevitably reduces a man to the indignity of subservience and exploitation. As well as this, the kind of functions into which workers are channelled does not spring spontaneously from their requirements as individuals but is prescribed for them by the division of labour in a commercial society, so that the worker's role becomes something imposed on him by forces external to himself. Both these factors assist in forming the view that man by nature finds work distasteful, but as well as these factors, all the attitudes and values of modern propertied society are hostile to work.

Although the government, employers and other interested parties continually exhort the working class to work harder, their interest in the matter is their concern for the employers' material interests. The most immediate effect of workers working harder is that they are exploited more and their employers realise more profit. Beyond the hypocrisy of social parasites finding virtue in hard work so long as it does not refer to them, esteem and respectability in modern propertied society is still accorded to the individual in direct proportion to the amount of property that he or she owns. In our commercial society, it is money that generally speaking still provides the most immediate indication of the individual’s status. Under capitalism, personality, money and status are all interrelated in giving the character of man in a commercial society. In a propertied society, individuality expresses itself through the command of property and the ownership of things and to this end, money fulfils the magical function of enhancing the personality of an individual within the community.

Social aspirations and standards of respectability are towards ownership and consumption. Against this background, the real attitude towards the work involved in the creation of wealth is too often that it is distasteful, socially lowering and militating against the ideal of decent uselessness. The scale of values that is known vulgarly as “keeping up with the Joneses’’ is really a pale proletarian emulation of what the top social élite have taken for granted for centuries. Nevertheless, it does sum up a complex and subtly graduated yardstick against which an individual’s reputability can be swiftly measured.

Shrewd advertisers are able to use these attitudes in order to sell their consumer goods. The tragedy here is that the individual can be seeking some personal fulfillment through the ownership of things, an ambition that can lead to inexhaustible anti-climax.

The dominating drives and motives of life under capitalism are given by profit, property and money values. Human activity is swamped by the activity of society the world over about production for profit and the further accumulation of property. Under capitalism, it is commercialism and the commodity that gives the possibilities and sets the limits to human activities. Commodity production characterises his social values, his aspirations, his morality, his sense of the ideal. Capitalism organises production not primarily about community requirements but about anti-human economic objectives—that is profit. Where property and money form the desirable values of society, these values are bound to be hostile to work since the process of work forms the antithesis of these social ends and is associated with exploitation, social inferiority, poverty and underprivilege.

In his book The Theory of the Leisure Class, the American sociologist Thornstein Veblen, described with cool irony the social mores of the leisure class at about the turn of the century. For example, he writes “ Property now becomes the most easily recognised evidence of a reputable degree of success. It therefore becomes the conventional basis for esteem. Its possession in some amount becomes necessary in order to have any reputable standing in the community.” “The gentleman of leisure consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, idols or divinities. Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific, and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit.” Veblen talks about the honour and esteem that attaches to “industrial exemption,” or in more straightforward talk, the privilege of idleness. It is to Velben that we owe such phrases as “conspicuous consumption” and “pecuniary emulation ”, and although he was writing more than 50 years ago, his book still applies basically as a description of properly values.

Although there is some evidence that these attitudes are weakening or at least are under attack, it is still fairly commonplace for a member of the audience at a Socialist meeting to daydream about the possession of two Rolls Royce motor cars, 500 suits and a life lived lying on the beach at Cannes. Such fantasies can never be taken seriously as an expression of man's “nature” that prevents the establishment of a free society where distribution of goods is by free access. They are prejudices that arise directly from the envy and dissatisfactions of poverty and underpriviledge in a capitalist society. Anybody who is sick and tired of the frustrations of trying to make ends meet and is burdened by obligations to wage employment that consume his entire life may well dream about limitless ownership and endless leisure in the sun .The consequences of these aspirations in a worker only confirm his poverty position and make his continued drudgery inevitable, for in the working class, these become the values of self-denial.

The anti-work attitude generated by property values that glamourises consumption, leisure and social uselessness is an aspect of the ideological grip of capitalism over society; it is part of man’s adulation of property and underlines the difference between the social ends of capitalism and socialism.

Under capitalism the privileges of class ownership of wealth dominate community requirements. In the face of this monopoly of wealth, the needs of the social majority take second place. The class relations of capitalism prevent the whole community from becoming the rational master of production and distribution. Thus under capitalism, the working class serves the capitalist class and society must accept the narrowly limiting economic laws of the system.

With Socialism, wealth becomes stripped of the mystical powers that it now has to confer prestige, approbation and, allegedly, happiness, upon its possessors. Socialism is a propertyless society, and with its establishment man has outgrown the assertion of individuality through the ownership of property, and in line with this, there will take place a reorientation of social values. By holding wealth in common, there can be no struggle taking place within the community over property. Work will not be seen as the hall-mark of social underprivilege, militating against the ideals of ownership and idleness. On the contrary individuality under socialism will be expressed in the creative contribution made by the individual through society by his work effort. The content of individuality under socialism will be extended not by power over property, but by stretching self-development and personal ability. Work under Socialism becomes the means whereby men realise their humanity, individually and socially: it is a dignified, useful and ennobling activity. Under capitalism man denies himself because he is in love with property: under Socialism, man is in love with himself.

Pieter Lawrence