Victory for what? (1985)

From the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

  It is now fairly commonplace to read that the First World War was a useless massacre in which millions died for nothing. This is much less commonly admitted in the case of the Second World War, perhaps because the war time propaganda which billed it as a "war to defend democracy" has not yet worn off. Yet the Second World War was just as much a business war as the First World War. in that its primary cause too is to be sought in a clash of economic interest over markets, raw materials, trade routes and investment outlets between two rival blocs of imperialist powers.

  This was well brought out in a carefully-researched book written in France during the war, but not published until 1945. by Henri Claude entitled De la crise économique à la guerre mondiale (From the Economic Crisis to the World War) After showing how the 1930s crisis had led to the division of capitalist countries into two groups pursuing different economic and trading policies ("liberalism" and "autarky") depending on whether or not they had access to gold (as a means of international payment) and raw materials. Claude goes on:

The economic crisis thus led to an opposition between two antagonistic forms of capitalism: liberal capitalism and authoritarian capitalism. This antagonism has been too often seen as "ideological" for us not to show that in reality it was solely a conflict of material interests.

What, in fact, was the real meaning of this world liberalism?

It had a very precise meaning at the beginning of the industrial era when England began to export its manufactured products. As England was at this time the only industrial nation all that was required for it to find external outlets was that no customs barrier should "artificially" stop at frontiers its products whose costs of production were lower than those of the rest of the world. Originally liberalism meant, crudely: "The world for English products". "Economic liberalism" thus expressed perfectly the interest of British industry. Later, when England was forced to struggle against the industries which came into being nearly everywhere, it partly gave up this "liberalism", but did not however cease to demand its application by the others; for the fate of its industry, trade and banks depended on the freedom which the other nations granted it. The wealth of the City remained linked to the free play of supply and demand, to the open market, to world trade. Everything that restricted the freedom of exports and the commercial and financial operations of the City caused it a serious prejudice. The policy of autarky which banned its commercial and financial expansion into certain zones and which fixed prices without paying attention to “world” prices was thus its most redoubtable enemy.

What would become of the London market if the appetite for autarky was to gobble up the major part of the planet? Thus one of the members of the Stock Exchange. Mr Maguire, rightly insisted, in a speech at the Bankers’ Institute, on the necessity, for England's interests, of maintaining as far as possible the freedom of the market in other countries. "The whole history of the Stock Exchange", he declared, “is tied to the principle of the maintenance of the free and open market where the law of supply and demand operates without hindrance".

The United States also felt the same need for liberalism amongst others. The mass production of manufactured goods and the extremely developed industrialisation of its agriculture allowed it to beat all its competitors on the world market, provided that this market was free. It therefore considered all measures of economic nationalism taken by the other nations, and in particular autarkic measures, as an obstacle which hindered it from selling to the extent of its productive capacity and of its low production costs. "Freedom of trade", President Roosevelt was to say. "is essential to our economic life. With the victory of totalitarian conceptions the system on which American society is based would be compromised" (speech of 28 May 1941, Le Temps, 29 May 1941). This did not prevent it practising a rigorous protectionist policy to defend its own market, but “this contradiction" in no way goes against the logic of imperialism which seeks to push aside all that obstructs it externally, without ever making any self-criticism.

Neither could the US accept the system of bi-lateral agreements for, unlike Germany, it was an exporter of both raw materials and manufactured products, which ruled out it concluding compensation agreements with the agricultural countries. It had to be able to sell manufactured goods to the agricultural countries and agricultural products to the industrial countries. It is thus that is to be explained the policy of Cordell Hull (US Secretary of State) in favour of commercial treaties signed on the basis of "economic liberalism" and of what is called "the most favoured nation clause", a policy which was the exact opposite of Germany’s and which openly worked against it. In fact the American leaders did not fail to underline the opposition and permanent conflict between their commercial methods and interests and those of Germany. In January 1939 Mr Landon. former Republican presidential candidate, noted that an intense struggle "to the death" was going on between the democracies and the totalitarian countries. "It is", he said, "an economic war based on new methods of economic penetration" (Information, 24 January 1939). On 10 April 1939 a Havas News agency wire from Washington was even more explicit:

  The disastrous economic and social consequences of the extension of the zone of influence of autarkic commercial methods are insisted upon here. According to the White House and the State Department, the whole world is rapidly heading towards a conflict between two irreconcilable economic systems. In presenting the problem from its economic angle, the White House spokesmen wish to make American public opinion aware that the menace, pointed out many times by Mr Roosevelt and again on Saturday evening by Mr Cordell Hull, is ceasing to be remote and that the time could rapidly come when the whole economic and social system of the United States would be endangered

England and the United States thus temporarily had the same industrial, commercial and financial interest to fight autarkic imperialism.

All the other countries whose financial power was based on gold necessarily found themselves on the same side of the barricade. Common financial interests were the real cement that bound the democracies together and not. as some would have us believe, the fact that they had the same political regimes.

Statements by statesmen and economists on the "war aims" of the Allies afterwards provided a brilliant proof of this. The British Prime Minister, Chamberlain, declared at the beginning of the hostilities in a speech on the economic reconstruction of the world after the war that full freedom of trade must be restored and that autarky and the methods arising from it must disappear from old Europe. A few hours after this speech. Mr Cordell Hull declared on behalf of America that he was in full agreement with Mr Chamberlain (L'Oeuvre, 2 February 1940). Commenting on this speech the Tribune de Lausanne wrote: "One can thus reasonably hope that autarky, which is an instrument of combat, will be cast aside along with the canons, the tanks and the machine-guns when the war economy gives way to the peace economy” (quoted in Le Temps, 4 February 1940). At the same moment, Paul Reynaud (French Prime Minister) declared at the opening session of the Société d'Economie Politique that the ultimate war aim of France and Great Britain was a return to liberalism, particularly economic liberalism (Le Temps, 7 February 1940).

The great financial expert. Mr T. Jenny, wrote a few days later:

   In practice only one thing could threaten — temporarily — the value of gold. That would be a development leading all countries to retreat behind insurmountable barriers, reducing exchanges between nations to the rudimentary system of barter, where there would no longer be any need for an international means of payment because there would no longer be international payments properly so-called. But are not the Allies fighting precisely to spare the world this return to barbarism, to allow peaceful exchanges between the various countries to resume their growth tomorrow? (Le Temps, 12 February 1940).

  If France and England were thus making war to maintain their financial power, it is quite obvious that the United States, whose stock of gold had been increasing unceasingly since the outbreak of the war, would be led to line up beside them. Commenting on the growth of this stock of gold in May 1940 the New York Times wrote: "Many American bankers and economists have already announced that this enormous metal holding will become useless if the totalitarian dictators are victorious" (quoted in Le Petit Purisien, 24 May 1940).

During the war the financial and price stabilisation methods, similar to the totalitarian ones, proposed by the economist Keynes and Major Attlee were rejected as "contrary to the very principles for which the Allies are fighting" (statement by Sir Robert Kinderley. Governor of the Bank of England, Le Temps, 15 January 1940) and as "not only alienating from the war those who were supporting His Majesty's Government by their loyal effort" but also as "tending to exclude any possibility of US intervention" (statement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sir J. Simon. 25 August 1940).

The nature of the links which united the Western democracies against the totalitarian States can thus be clearly seen.

On the other hand, Germany, Italy and Japan were in the same camp because these countries found themselves facing the same economic obstacles. The creation of the Asiatic Bloc and of the European Autarkic Bloc had the same irreductable opponents: England and the United States.

Also, Germany, Japan and Italy were linked by common methods. The mark, the yen and the lira had the same common enemy in currencies based on gold and not subject to exchange control. Germany, Italy and Japan had the same commercial and financial interest to reduce, by extending the autarkic areas, the zones where the pound and the dollar reigned; for the capital which had accumulated in the hands of German. Italian and Japanese industrialists from public works, rearmament and the production of substitutes had no value and could only be invested within the limits of the autarkic areas. Hence the necessity for capital called "national" to extend the space where it kept its value to the detriment, evidently, of capital called "international", i.e.. foreign capital based on currencies and gold.

The capitalist world thus found itself divided into two blocs whose commercial and financial interests and whose methods of expansion were constantly coming into opposition on the world's markets. As a report by the Economic Committee of the League of Nations noted in 1938:

  Efforts to penetrate export markets have contributed to accentuating the contrast between the commercial system based on a free currency and the commercial system based on a controlled currency By the former is to be understood the system in which the money received in payment for exports can be freely employed and in particular can be used for purchases in third countries. By the second, on the other hand, is to be understood the system in which the foreign currencies received by traders are blocked and can only be employed for purchases in the countries to which the exports went. The Committee is of the view that everything should be done to reduce the clashes between the countries with a free currency and those with a managed economy.

It is this split in the capitalist world, this antagonism between forms of expansion, methods of financing and monetary conceptions which, superimposed on the classic struggle for markets, distinguishes the Second from the First World War.

In 1914 German capitalism and English capitalism were not only of the same rank and nature; they wore the same clothes. Mr Bethman-Holweg dressed the same way as Lord Grey.

But while in 1938 Mr Eden's elegance was still very 1900ish, German imperialism wore a brown shirt and boots. This difference in dress revealed the break in the unity of the capitalist world brought about by the economic crisis of 1929. While the Second World War was, like the First, a consequence of the necessity for capitalism in general to find "external" markets and for each imperialism in particular to expand at the expense of its competitors, this fundamental struggle was doubled this time by secondary conflicts which gave to this war a particular face and features: struggles of gold against barter, of secured currencies against controlled currencies, of the free market against autarky, of "international" finance capital against "national" capital, the antagonism was everywhere, in the expansionism as well as in the forms of expansion.

The essence of the conflict was thus economic, and nothing but economic. It did not result at all from the difference of political institutions, any more than the alliances resulted from the similarity of regimes.

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  It only remains to add that, although the Allies' original "war aim" of restoring economic liberalism on the world market ceased to be so frankly proclaimed as the war dragged on as it had been by the British and French Prime Ministers in 1940 (after all, restoring world economic arrangements which benefited the capitalists of the Allied powers was hardly an issue on which to appeal to people to kill and get killed), it nevertheless remained the Allies' over-riding reason for wishing to see the defeat of Germany and Japan. Plans for the post-war reconstruction of liberal capitalist trading and financial arrangements were discussed from as early as 1941, even if out of the limelight. These discussions culminated in a Conference held in Bretton Woods, in New Hampshire. in July 1944 at which the IMF and the World Bank were set up as the main institutions of a post-war liberal international payments system to be based on currencies tied to gold at a fixed rate. The outlawing of the "autarkic" trading practices of pre-war German and Japanese imperialisms was confirmed in 1947 with the drawing up of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

  Thus was ensured the continued domination of the world by the capitalist powers which benefited from liberal world economic arrangements, and in particular American imperialism. However, in allying themselves with a power which practised the same economic and political methods as the German and Japanese enemy, American, British and French imperialism conjured up another challenger to their domination of the world: state capitalist Russia, which obtained as its war prize an Empire in Eastern Europe. So the struggle for world domination between "the old and fatter bandits". and their younger and more vigorous rivals continued as it will for as long as capitalism is allowed to last.

The cost of lives (1985)

From the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The relentless pursuit of profit under capitalism produces a wealth of contradictions: coal mines are closed while old people die of cold, food production is curtailed despite widespread starvation, hospitals are closed and ill health in the general population increases in spite of advances in high technology medicine. The provision of health care is distorted by the competing forces within capitalism as social needs are, if catered for at all, secondary and coincidental to the overriding requirement of profitability.

The interests within the health care system are: the workers trying to obtain improved medical services "free at the point of use"; the government trying to "privatise" medicine and reduce state provision of health care, the insurance companies who are gaining increasing numbers of subscribers to private insurance schemes as the National Health Service deteriorates; the companies who supply drugs, equipment, provisions. construction and services and are parasitical on the health service; private medicine with fees for consultation and surgery.

Although bringing health care under state provision with the development of the National Health Service appeared to represent a gain for the working class it is, in fact, a victory for ruling class expediency and has developed, and continues to be shaped, according to the needs of capital. There is no doubt that new discoveries, technological improvements and modern drugs have eased the misery of many serious diseases. However, it would be wrong to assume that the use of sophisticated techniques automatically confers benefits on patients. Illich (Limits to Medicine, 1976) claims that coronary care units are no more effective than normal medical wards but require three times as much equipment and five times the number of staff to run them. Garner (The NHS: Your Money or Your Life, 1979) cites research which supports this claim and points out that patients nursed in coronary care units have a higher mortality rate than those nursed at home.

Ineffective or even harmful treatments may continue to be used because they are profitable or allow control, prestige and power by vested professional interests. The misleading publicity (or advertising) which accompanies technological medicine and discouragement of information and knowledge outside professional circles may lead to a "demand" for dubious medical treatments by the general public who mistakenly believe that miracle cures have been found without being aware of potentially dangerous complications or side-effects. The damage that commercialised medicine can cause has been pointed out by Eyer:

  . . . when doctors went on strike in Los Angeles County in 1976. limiting elective surgery for the most part, the death rate fell by about 15 per cent and rose well above its previous level when the doctors resumed practice. before returning to normal. This means at least one out of every six deaths in Los Angeles is due to the overdevelopment of medicine.

(J. B. McKinlay (Ed.): Issues in the Political Economy of Health Care, 1984.) 

Although excessive medical and surgical intervention is a feature of private health care, under-provision of facilities is common when its supply is less profitable. Professor Stewart Cameron of Guy's Hospital. London claims that 2,000 sufferers from renal failure may be dying unnecessarily each year in Britain because of insufficient renal dialysis machines (Medicine in Society, 1984).

The considerable variation in the provision of health care facilities has been summed up by Julian Tudor Hart (Lancet, 1, 405. 1971) as the Inverse Care Law. in which he states: ". . . the availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need of the population served. This operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces and less so where it is reduced." Wales typifies the Inverse Care Law with some 10.000 deaths from coronary artery disease each year and 25,000 men of working age suffering from angina, but with a dearth of cardiologists compared with regions in England (Medicine in Society, 1982). This contrasts markedly with private medicine as the fashionable London clinics accepted patients from the continent for coronary by-pass surgery until it was realised that patients receiving drug treatments made similar progress. It is true that a minority of people with coronary heart disease benefit from by-pass surgery providing they are properly assessed and identified. Also the much simpler and safer procedure of supplying cardiac pacemakers could save lives in Wales if they had the resources.

Heart transplants make dramatic news but there is little evidence that, on average, they prolong life expectancy. The deaths of heart transplant patients get very little reporting by the media, distorting the benefits, or lack of them, of technological changes. Nevertheless, in spite of all the evidence that technological advances need to be approached much more cautiously and with considerably more evaluation, there seems to be more specialisation and technological expansion than ever before. Garner has pointed out that doctors in the United States carried out twice as many operations on a group of Federal employees when paid a fee-for-service than doctors paid a flat salary by another insurance scheme. Similarly, the number of hysterectomies performed in Saskatchewan increased by 72 per cent after the introduction of national health insurance which reimbursed the doctor. Apart from the obvious profit motive, the restriction of skills to a professional elite concentrates power, prestige and more money into fewer hands. Mitchell (What is to be Done About Illness and Health?, 1984) claims: "We tend to assume that historically paid physicians opposed the herbalists and lay healers because their methods were ineffective or dangerous. Yet there is considerable evidence that it was because these methods did work that they were threatened".

Widgery (Health in Danger, 1979) has questioned the "medical prestige mongering" of advanced medicine: "In Buenos Aires doctors are playing about with cardiac surgical units costing tens of thousands of dollars while new-born babies die in the precincts of the hospital for lack of decent milk". He also questioned some of the cardiac resuscitation procedures:

 . . . while every effort can and should be devoted to monitoring and reviving patients in units equipped for intensive care, the kind of indiscriminate, ineffective invasion we carried out, which we wholeheartedly conceived as solely for the patient's good, was in fact depriving the dying of the last shred of dignity in order to give us a little practice and a little false prestige. None of this is to argue that we should abandon or relent our development of medical science, but we need to sharpen its focus, take more seriously its implications and applications. We need to ask honestly, every time whether its net result enhances the doctor's prestige or the patient's well-being, for these are by no means the same thing.

Under capitalism medical care assumes its most profitable form and there is usually more money to be made from curing a complaint than preventing it. In under-developed countries the resources consumed by curative medicine in the prestige hospitals of the major cities have been at the expense of preventive services in the rural areas. ("The Politics of Health in Tanzania", Development and Change 4 (1) 39. 1972) has put the contradiction of high technology medicine co-existing with poor primary services in Tanzania in perspective:

  . . . a man has hookworm anaemia (common in Tanzania). He has been ill for years; eventually he has to stop work altogether. He is admitted to hospital. He needs laboratory tests, skilled medical and nursing attention, drug treatment and a blood transfusion. After a time he improves, and he eventually goes back to work. At home, he catches hookworm again; the whole process is repeated. If his village had used pit latrines none of this would have happened.

Poverty remains the main cause of a considerable amount of ill health. Millions of children die each year from malnutrition and infection in the Third World. Even in the more affluent countries workers have higher mortality rates than the rich as a result of working in stressful, polluted, alienating environments and living in poor housing conditions. And within countries such as Britain relative poverty is still quite widespread. Thus a socially deprived area such as Rochdale has an infant mortality rate 2½ times greater than the national average.

In advanced, industrialised countries preventive services also have a low priority because they are less profitable. Yet governments are anxious to shift the burden of costs away from the state and back to the consumer. As Crawford states:

  The emphasis on individual responsibility for health mystifies the social production of disease and undermines demands for rights and entitlements to medical care. Beneath the rhetoric about the costs of medical care and the obligation of the individual to remain healthy lies a political programme to shift the burden of costs back to labour and consumers and to paralyse regulatory efforts undertaken to control environmental and occupational hazards. (J. B. McKinlay. op. cit.)

As it is uneconomical to safeguard workers' health during unemployment because a reserve army of labour is available, drastic cuts have been made in the health and social services. But substantial increases in military expenditure, aid to private industry, the police force, and tax advantages for the wealthy reflect capitalism's priorities.

Carl Pinel

Running Commentary: Sporting life (1985)

The Running Commentary column from the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Sporting life

Now that she has single-handedly seen off General Galtieri and Arthur Scargill, the President of Grantham Town Football Club has turned her attention to that section of British football followers whose activities are famous. at grounds in this country and abroad, for so artistically blurring the distinction between sport and war.

The Labour Party are uneasy at this development, for there may be some solid votes in this, if Thatcher can convince the workers that she is the Iron Lady who not only made the Falklands safe for British Coalite and the coal fields safe for the NCB but the football terraces safe for the family outing.

So Labour's response had to be that she was getting it wrong. Football hooligans, they claimed, do not emerge through any inherent wickedness but because Tory Britain offers youth nothing better than the dole queue, slums, disease . . . Frustrations build up and have to be released somewhere; the excitement of a big football game is as likely a place as any for this to happen.

This line might be more convincing if Britain under the Labour Party had not been a place of poverty, unemployment, slums and despair — if there had been no such thing as aimless, neurotic youth when Wilson and Callaghan were at Number Ten and if those had been halcyon days of impeccable behaviour on the football terraces.

But of course it was not like that. Capitalism is always an ugly, depressing, restrictive system whichever party tries to manage it. It must always condemn the majority to lives of exploitation and poverty, a frustrating contrast to those of the workers' economic and social superiors.

Football is more than a sport, more even than big business. For workers who need relief from the drab monotony of poverty it is a hallucinogen, an exciting dream which seduces millions into the delusion that there is an easy, glorious escape from working-class repression. You too, they tell themselves, can be an adored football star, feted and lauded wherever you go.

The so-called football hooligan is at the very centre of this clash between dreams and reality. Like all conflict, this is a painful experience — and the only relief must be through radical change.

Power drive

Ian MacGregor was bought by the Thatcher government to manage the steel and coal industries so that the workers and the unions would be forced up against reality. In each case, reality meant that world capitalism is in a slump, that the markets for commodities like coal and steel are shrinking, that international competition is hotting up and that the immediate response to it all must be closures of plants and redundancies.

Now, perhaps, there will be a job for MacGregor in the British electricity generating industry, which is about to be hit by a determined sales drive from its French counterpart. Over the past decade French capitalism has invested an enormous amount in the construction of nuclear power stations, to provide cheap and plentiful electricity to what was assumed would be expanding French industry. But the market for power is no less anarchic than that for any other commodity; the recession of the 1980s meant that French industry has not come up to the assumptions, which in turn means that there is now a surplus of generating capacity.

At present, this surplus promises to be about equal to the power demands of the whole of Southern England, including London. The French have tried to off-load as much of this as possible onto home industry, offering cut-price deals, and they have also turned their attention to possible markets abroad. Agreements have been signed to feed some power through cables to Spain and Italy and a similar arrangement is being suggested to British industry.

At a time when profits are under such pressure, British capitalists may find the cheap electricity from France an offer they can't refuse, even if it were to expose all that patriotic encouragement they give to British workers as the cynical nonsense it really is. The outcome may be a surplus of British electricity and pressure for the closure of some power stations as "uneconomic", with production concentrated at those plants where worker exploitation is at its most intense.

People who froze during last winter because they could not afford to heat their homes may be puzzled to hear about a "surplus" of electricity and wonder why it can't simply be given away to the needy. There is a simple explanation. Electricity, like all wealth under capitalism, is produced to be sold in a market at a profit. "Surpluses" are not judged on human needs but on what the market can profitably absorb. That was the message which MacGregor drove home to the steel workers and the miners and which is now likely to be driven home to the power industry workers — and, of course, to the people who need the produce but can't afford to buy it.

Neil down

Will Neil Kinnock ever become Prime Minister? There are strategists in the Labour Party who regard his present troublous times as a holding period for him. They assess the electoral advance Labour needs to unseat the Tories as too great to be realistically attainable by the next election. So Kinnock is marking time, building up support and gaining experience for the big effort in the election after next which, say these strategists, will bring a lifetime of Labour government.

Well this might be an explanation of Kinnock's inability to convince the voters that he should be in charge of British capitalism. None of the guises which politicians are required to adopt has fitted him in any way convincingly. There is the guise of the subtle diplomat, or the consensus-builder, or the iron-willed leader. (We all know which one Thatcher has adopted and with what success). Workers demand that their leaders come before them in some such guise, or in several at once.

Then there is the matter of Kinnock's own party, which continues to display all the symptoms of chronic disarray and schism. In a series of re-selection disputes, sitting MPs are under pressure from left-wing activists; one notable example is in Ealing Southall, where there seems to have been a certain amount of juggling with membership lists and in Brent East, where uncharismatic Reg Freeson has been beset by Ken Livingstone, whose parliamentary ambitions were saved by his U-turn over GLC rate capping. We can expect to hear more of these disputes and of others no less odious.

Kinnock's predicament is that he can give only part of his attention to the shrill demands of his party's theorists and activists; his first concern must be to win power, to placate the political ignorance of the working class so that they change capitalism under Thatcher for the same society under Kinnock.

The lessons of experience are too clear and too recent; they affirm that there is no reason, from the point of view of workers' interests, to make such a change. It does not matter one whit, which guise Kinnock adopts nor whether he wears it to Number Ten. It is time the workers turned against these insulting political games and thought about taking over society for themselves, in their own human interests.

Avoiding World War 3 (1985)

From the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live in an epoch which will either be looked back on as a nightmare from which the human race had to escape, or will not be looked back on at all. Since the Second World War. not a single day has passed without there being a major war taking place somewhere in the world. Over twenty-five million people have died in these wars and each conflict has had its own individual history of human tragedy and suffering: Kenya, Vietnam, El Salvador, Sudan, Chad, Pakistan, Lebanon, Algeria, Nigeria, Ireland, the Falklands . . . the list seems endless. Most recently, in the Gulf War between Iraq and Iran, over a quarter of a million people have been slaughtered in four years.

We have witnessed the greatest increase in the forces of destruction ever: a single nuclear bomb can now release more explosive power in seconds than was released during the entire Second World War. World military spending has increased by twenty-seven per cent in real terms since 1972, to reach 620 billion dollars a year. This means that about one million dollars is being spent on the killing industry every minute. The amount spent on cancer research is less than one per cent of the 52 billion dollars spent annually on military research, while the British military research budget of £1.8 billion is sixteen times the budget of the Medical Research Council. The British government spends about £2 million an hour (£17 billion a year) on "defence" — in other words, the powers of destruction.

The mass suicide for which these weapons are designed has reared its ugly head several times in recent years. Take, for example, this report from the Observer (7 September 1980):

  Three times in less than a year NORAD (North American Air Defence Command) computers have detected a nuclear attack which was not actually taking place. On each occasion the crews of B52 nuclear bombers raced to their aircraft for take-off and the crews of intercontinental missiles began preliminary launch procedures.

For all of its talk about security through "deterrence", the government clearly does not trust its own propaganda; they have developed detailed plans about what will happen when, rather than if, war breaks out, Home Office Circular ES 1/81. quoted in Civil Defence Review 35/2.85/3. states that "for planning purposes, it should be assumed that there may be as little as seven days' warning of an attack and the basic essentials of plans should be capable of implementation in 48 hours". The East Anglia Regional Health Authority, meanwhile, have drawn up a plan for health services in time of war, including an 18-page appendix on herbal remedies for use in the absence of conventional drugs — juniper for cystitis, mistletoe for hypertension. The same report advises that for protection from fall-out we should wear home-made thick overalls or "heavy rubberised clothing" with "a plastic bag over the head with a hole for a medical or improvised gauze" to provide head protection (Guardian, 17 August 1981). This insulting rubbish is intended to give us some kind of reassurance about a future catastrophe which is on the cards.

On a less farcical note, we have the ominous tones of the government booklet, Protect and Survive:

 If a death occurs while you are confined in the fall-out room, place the body in another room and confine it as securely as possible. Attach an identification . . .

And, with the advice to end all advice, the Home Office Circular ES 8/1976. which was sent to the chief executives of Councils, but merits study by us all:

 When radiological conditions permitted movement, district and borough London controllers should assume that one of the priority tasks for their staff in areas where survivors were to continue residing, would be to collect and cremate or inter human remains in mass graves . . . once the initial clearance of corpses has been completed, there would be still a problem of several weeks, and perhaps months, of an above average rate of dying from disease and radiation effects. Nevertheless, a return to the pre-attack formalities should be the objective in the longer term.

(Quoted in E. P. Thompson, Protest and Survive, 1980)

The government, then, is anxious that, as soon as possible after an orgy of nuclear devastation. we should get back to the very formalities which would have led to such a tragedy in the first place. If we are going to avoid a Third World War, we must start by looking at the nature of those formalities. How is it that present-day society generates war as sure as night follows day?

There are many dubious theories held about what wars are fought for. Politicians of various kinds will tell us that wars are fought for freedom, justice, democracy and so on. For most of us. however, our conditions of life have to be defended in a struggle which is far from the battlefields or weapons silos. Wars are not fought over the level of our wages, rents or mortgages. They are not fought over high political or theological principles. Wars in the modern world have a basically economic cause, which relates to the power of a minority in each of the states of the world. Much window-dressing is used to convince the cannon-fodder that our lives are being laid down for something more noble than the commercial interests of our bosses, or the sordid privileges of the Kremlin bureaucrats. But there are occasional moments in which we hear, from the horse's mouth, just how the interests of the small, property-owning class drag us all into the nightmare of modem warfare.

We live in a society in which we are bombarded from an early age with the idea of the nation. We are said to be "British". And yet, for most people in Britain, this just happens to be the place in which we sell our ability to work in order to survive. The amount most of us truly own could be fitted into the barrel of one gun. A newspaper advert for army officers states that "Your part will be to prepare for a war everyone prays will never happen . . .  it will be difficult to remember that you are still protecting your country and all you love most". It will indeed be difficult to remember that it is "your" country: according to government figures, the richest 3.2 per cent of people in Britain today possess 84 per cent of listed shares, 91 per cent of private companies, and 88 per cent of land. So much for the property- owning democracy.

The flag-waving of nationalism is not just childish pomp and pride. The countries for which we are asked to kill are not ours. Those who do have a stake in the nation are those who own it: the class of employers, landlords and investors referred to politely as "the business community". And what are they in conflict over? They are quarreling — at the conference table where possible, over the battlefield and our dead bodies where necessary — about the dividing of the spoils which are derived from the productive work of the majority. There are four main bones of contention between the various national groupings of capitalists.

Markets

Employers only receive profit if they sell the goods we have produced for them. In trying to sell goods, they are in competition with one another. States look after their local capitalists in this respect, by organising import controls and other ways of turning trade to the advantage of some capitalists at the expense of others. These moves are always backed up by force. In March 1939, the Conservative Minister of Overseas Trade, speaking not about opposing dictatorship or defending democracy, said: "We are not going to give up any markets to anyone. Great Britain is strong enough to fight for markets abroad". Similarly, the United Nations US Ambassador Andrew Young was quoted in 1977 as saying:

  My approach to Africa is in some ways like the Japanese approach to Asia, and my approach is not necessarily humanitarian. It is in the long range interest of access to resources and the creation of markets for American goods and services.

Raw Materials

Just as important to capitalists, in their pursuit of profit, is the need to gain and defend sources of minerals and other raw materials. This applied in the nineteenth-century Franco-Prussian wars over the coal and steel of Alsace-Lorraine, and inspired the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1897 as well as the Russian repeat performance of this some eighty-three years later. It is also a factor in the war between Iran and Iraq: the Majnoon Islands contain about seven billion barrels of oil. Speaking on ITV's Weekend World on 8 March 1981 in defence of the Rapid Deployment Force, the then Minister of Defence, John Nott, stated: "we have crucial minerals and in fact our oil supplies to defend". Needless to say, the majority of viewers had no mineral wealth at all to defend. Even more revealing was the following admission, made in 1963 by Kennedy’s Undersecretary of State. U. Alexis Johnson:

  What is the attraction that South-East Asia has exerted for centuries on the great powers flanking it on all sides? Why is it desirable, and why is it important? First, it provides a lush climate. fertile soil, rich natural resources, a relatively sparse population in most areas, and room to expand. The countries of South-East Asia produce rich exportable surpluses such as rice, rubber, tea, corn, tin, spices, oil and many others . . .

Territory

Thirdly, there is the constant struggle between the various states of the world, whether private- or state-capitalist, over the control of the earth itself, divided as it is into artificial fragments by national boundaries. Since the Second World War, for example, there has been an almost constant series of border disputes between India, China and Russia. This aspect of how the capitalist world system generates war was let slip in a speech made by Lady Olga Maitland of Women and Families for Defence when she was debating against the Socialist Party at Islington Central Library on 19 January 1984:

  Britain is a country which must show that we have the resolution to defend ourselves because we are a vital piece of real estate in Europe.

Trade Routes

Finally, in order to sell their goods and realise their profit, the capitalist class of the world have to be able to transport goods and materials freely. The Suez Canal crisis of 1956 in which Egypt was in conflict with Britain, France and Israel, was a conflict over a vital trade route. Similarly, in 1981 when the US Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, was seeking to stress to the Japanese section of the ruling class the military obligations they owed to their American counterparts. he pointed out that "the USA helps to protect the vital sea lanes upon which Japan depends for its global trade" (Guardian, 29 April 1981).

What must we conclude from all of this evidence? These conflicts over the sources which yield profit are of no real concern to the working-class majority in society, to people who have to live on wages, salaries or the dole rather than on rent, interest or profit. It is the capitalist system of society, which exists throughout the world today, which causes war through its relentless and competitive drive for profit.

Of course, these economic factors leading to warfare have to operate through the agency of human consciousness, with all its complications. The many popular rationalisations of war suggest that religion or culture are leading us to the battlefield. These are often the concepts employed by governments to persuade individual workers to flock to a mass suicide, but they are not the root cause of the conflict. Having recognised that it is the system of production for profit which causes war. we have no option but to seek to replace it with a system of production for use. The capitalist class do not, in general, profit from war, but their system is beyond even their control. When the market dictates they invest in weapons to protect their investments, they have no choice but to follow where their share prices lead.

For this reason, movements like CND which hope to persuade governments of capitalism to operate this murderous system in a more gentle way, are doomed to failure. Indeed, the policy of gradual reduction of armaments has already degenerated into total compromise, as shown by the CND leaflet, Questions and Answers About Non-nuclear Defence. This advises a "non-provocative" conventional defence policy using "troops with interceptor aircraft and anti-aircraft missiles rather than long-range bombers" and giving "anti-tank missiles priority over tanks". So much for the "Peace" Movement. The Labour Defence Spokesman, Denzil Davies, has recently echoed this "peaceful" militarism, stating that the Labour Party is "totally committed to the defence of Britain" (Guardian, 7 August 1984).

Let those who have a material stake in British capital rise to its defence. For the rest of us — about ninety-five per cent of the population here — our interest lies in defending ourselves against the daily onslaught of capital, as represented by our bosses. The global time bomb we are sitting on can only be defused if it is put under the democratic control of the world community. The only true Peace Movement is one which stands for the abolition of all weapons, through the abolition of the social system which has made them necessary. We can talk seriously about the prospect of permanent world peace only on the basis of transforming social relationships. This is a practical proposition; to hope for the competition in the market place between rival gangs of robbers to be carried out without murder is an idle dream. At the moment we are human commodities, watching our lives being bought and sold on the labour market. But we can use the power of conscious co-operation to reverse the current trend towards a collective suicide. The only way to avoid war is to create a socialist society. Think about it. But not for too long.

Clifford Slapper

Vocational exploitation (1985)

From the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nurses often cherish an illusion of "professionalism" despite the fact that they are subordinate to medical staff, are poorly paid, work shifts, weekends and public holidays (for which they receive lower rates of enhanced pay than most other workers), have poor working conditions in the majority of cases, and engage in stressful, demanding work within the rigid discipline of a status-conscious, hierarchical organisation.

Nursing qualifications are protected by law and it is a punishable offence to make a false claim to be a trained nurse. But there are two levels of qualified nurses. Registered nurses have qualifications which enable them to aspire to higher positions while enrolled nurses are unable to gain promotion beyond senior enrolled nurse grade. Doyal has pointed out that overseas nurses coming to Britain to train are encouraged to qualify as enrolled nurses only to find that their qualifications are not recognised in their own countries. She states:

  Nurses born overseas are over-represented in hospitals dealing with mental illness, mental handicap and geriatrics, and very few indeed are to be found in the "prestige" teaching hospitals. Overseas nurses are, therefore, clearly used to compensate for the shortage of British recruits into notoriously underpaid and often unpleasant work. Their role as a “reserve army" has recently been demonstrated with particular clarity by the fact that because of high levels of unemployment among British nurses, overseas nurses are increasingly being refused a renewal of their work permits.

Nursing auxiliaries, although forming a substantial part of the work force, are untrained and unable to call themselves nurses.

The nurses' professional organisation, the Royal College of Nursing, tends to be dominated by senior nurses and excludes nursing auxiliaries from membership. Indeed, prior to 1960 male nurses and enrolled nurses were also excluded. The RCN, in an attempt to maintain professional exclusiveness, has asked for nursing auxiliaries to be omitted from pay negotiations. The conservatism, elitism, avowal not to strike under any circumstances and tendency to concentrate on pay campaigns in favour of nursing administrators, have helped successive governments to divide the workforce and made their task of keeping wages low that much easier. Although in recent years the RCN has adopted a slightly more radical stance (possibly to avoid losing members to the trade unions representing nurses — NUPE. COHSE and NALGO) it remains a reactionary, divisive force.

A profession can be defined as an occupation requiring advanced education and nursing can reasonably be considered as such. However, the subordinate role of nursing has been demonstrated by the case of Derek Owen, a former staff nurse at Walsgrave Hospital. Coventry, who refused to participate in administering electroconvulsive treatment to a 76 year-old woman and was sacked. At the employment tribunal hearing Justice Popple well stated: “. . . it's not the nurse who decides what treatment a patient would benefit from, but the doctor" (Nursing Times, 1984). Iliffe deals bluntly with the much vaunted professionalism in nursing:

  When nursing is restricted to mopping-up vomit, emptying bedpans and washing the bed-bound, it is only a special example of the caring role allotted to women, and nurses are therefore allotted the same autonomy as women generally. Nursing "professionalism", therefore, aims at acquiring trade secrets (more politely called professional skills and knowledge) to give some nurses more autonomy, status and money. The evolution of special skills and knowledge necessitates a special education, with access to it restricted to ensure that the market is not overloaded with tradesmen.

The appeal to professionalism is also used as an unsubtle form of blackmail to coerce nurses into docile conformism. The fact that trained nurses risk losing their qualifications through taking effective industrial action assists considerably in maintaining a compliant labour force.

When carrying out dirty work some form of protective clothing needs to be worn, but nurses insist on calling their overalls "uniforms" and wear useless frilly hats, perpetuating their domestic servant/hand maiden image. When their uniforms were compared with ". . . a plumber who insists on wearing a puce boiler suit, a purple beret, and his City and Guilds Certificate pinned to his chest!" (Pinel) there were horrified letters of protest in the nursing press. It is easy to dismiss the different coloured "uniforms" as a harmless, outdated tradition, but its perpetuation is designed to reinforce the rigid hierarchical structure and promote status consciousness. Servile, unquestioning workers accustomed to knowing their place within the organisation, dressed in a "uniform" designed for Victorian domestic servants, are easier to control.

Unlike other shift workers, nurses talk of their "duties"—a euphemism which disguises public holiday, weekend and night work often far in excess of shift workers in factories. It is only in the last twenty years that nurses have been able to receive extra pay for working unsocial hours and even now, in spite of being gradually increased over the years, nurses receive only time and one-third for Saturday, "unsocial hours' and night work and time and two-thirds for Sunday and public holiday work. These rates lag well behind those paid in industry or. indeed, the rates paid to hospital ancillary staff.

With 10.000 nurses and midwives without jobs, a large pool of unemployed labour to fill nursing auxiliary vacancies, reduced demand for labour as hospitals are closed as a result of cutting resources to the health service and the weakness of trade unions during a recession have emboldened the government to try to abolish enhanced rates of pay for unsocial hours. Such a move, if successful, would cut the nurses' standard of living and reverse twenty years of struggle to achieve pay conditions comparable with industrial workers.

Many hospitals were built in the Victorian era and are still in use today. Poor Law infirmaries, former workhouses and prison-like asylums still serve as district general hospitals, geriatric hospitals and psychiatric hospitals. With the cut-back in health service expenditure those hospitals that have survived closure have been patched up in a haphazard and piecemeal manner. The old buildings were never intended for modern nursing and condemn nurses and patients alike to substandard conditions. Very few buildings have been constructed to replace old hospitals. In the first seventeen years of the National Health Service only one new hospital was built. But as Widgery points out;

  . . . the size and location of the finished new hospitals often worsens rather than improves the national distribution of medical resources. The Royal Free in Hampstead is situated in the most affluent and healthy part of North London, while hospital facilities in the Northwest London industrial belt and in East London are being closed.

Such closures oblige nurses to move or travel long distances to work.

Residential accommodation for nurses has been the subject of several campaigns to secure improvements. However, the government intends to sell off two thirds of the nurses' homes (presumably that which is most profitable to speculators) and retain only a minimum stock of housing. Nurses, at the mercy of private landlords, would find their living standards declining further:

  Resident nurses are frequently subjected to a number of petty restrictions which would not be tolerated by private tenants elsewhere, and must represent one of the most pernicious forms of "tied cottage" arrangements in existence today (Pinel).

The lodging charges for resident nurses were due to increase by 5 per cent from 1 April 1985 although the government has announced that nurses' wages must not rise by more than 3 per cent.

Nurse managers have opted out of nursing practice to "police" other nurses. They accept extra remuneration (or bribes) to enforce discipline, increase exploitation and punish their fellow workers, although as workers themselves they are dependent on the posts they hold for their livelihood. Male nurses, although making up less than 10 per cent of the nursing labour force, occupy one-third of the senior administrative posts, reflecting the sexist divisions of the broader society while the dearth of immigrants in senior posts is part of a deliberate policy for, as a Lanarkshire Health Board Memorandum stated: "No alien (Mauritian. Filipino. Chinese) person is to be promoted without the sanction of the Home Office" (Nursing Mirror, 1980).

During an industrial recession there is a surplus of labour and it is not so profitable to spend money conserving the workers' health. Cuts in the health services and hospital closures have, therefore, weakened the bargaining power of nurses. But the divisive "professional" stance of nurses, their failure to recognise their class interests and to understand the exploitative role of capitalism have depressed the conditions of Britain's 350.000 nurses and assisted successive governments in under-funding the health service.

Carl Pinel

References

Doyal, L. with Pennell. I. The Political Economy of Health. Pluto Press. 1979. p.206.

Iliffe. S. The NHS: a Picture of Health? Lawrence and Wishart, 1983. p. 147. 

Nursing Mirror. News item. 151 (20) 4. 

Nursing Times. News item. 80 (43) 5.

Pinel. C. "Are uniforms necessary?" Nursing Mirror. 14 November 1974, p.41.

Pinel. C. "'Us' and 'them' at work". Nursing Mirror. 158 (10) 9.

Widgery. D. Health in Danger. Macmillan Press. 1979. pp. 52-53.

50 Years Ago: Old Fake Cure for Unemployment (1985)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every time unemployment rises to high levels some feather-brained political genius is sure to rush into print and speech with a brand-new proposal for solving the problem by setting the unemployed at work constructing public works, roads and bridges, and so on. The funny thing is that they all believe they are the first ever to have thought of such schemes. Mr. Lloyd George's “New Deal” plan is at bottom nothing more than this, and his predecessors are legion. The ILP and Labour Party have been trotting it out for forty years. Sir Oswald Mosley, when he propounds it for the British Union of Fascists, has doubtless forgotten that Mr. John Strachey borrowed it for him from Bishop Berkeley, who recommended it 200 years ago, coupled with what was, in effect, slave-labour for the unemployed.

Earlier still, when Henry VIII was first contemplating the seizure of the lands and property of the monasteries, a plan was put forward for using some of the plunder “for aiding the poor and unfortunate, building up new towns, restoring decayed manors, reclaiming unprofitable parks, and constructing new roads throughout the kingdom”. (Economic Causes of the Reformation in England, Oscar Marti. Macmillan & Co. 1929. Page 195.)

(From the Socialist Standard, May 1935.)

Commodity production (1985)

From the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wealth, as the etymology of the word suggests, is what contributes to human welfare; it consists of material objects, or goods, which serve to satisfy some human need. The basic source of all wealth is nature since goods are either found in nature or fashioned from materials that originally came from nature. Nearly all goods come into the latter category of being products of labour, in the sense that human beings have to exercise their mental and physical energies in order to create or produce them.

Producing a good does not involve creating new matter, but changing the form of existing materials. In the process of production human beings employ their own energies. and other natural forces and processes, to change nature-given materials into articles that can be used to satisfy some human need. Materials found in nature are given a new form, new physical characteristics. It is these newly-created characteristics capable of satisfying some human need that constitute goods and wealth. Wealth production is thus essentially a process of transformation of nature to make it useful to human life and happiness. Those goods which are products of labour are parts of nature that have been so transformed.

A good, then, is a part of nature which has, or has been given, particular physical characteristics which can be used to satisfy some human want. These useful characteristics of a good are its use-value. As in the end the good is its useful characteristics — it is these that make it a good for humans — the word use-value can be used as a substitute for good.

An item of wealth is always, by definition. a use-value but under certain circumstances can also acquire another characteristic which has also been called value. But how can an item of wealth have a value for humans other than its use-value? Surely the value of a good can only be its ability to satisfy some particular human need? These common-sense, and basically correct, observations caused the early political economists no end of trouble when they came to study the prices which goods acquired in an exchange economy. For they noticed that the proportions in which goods exchanged for each other bore no relation whatsoever to their relative utilities, or use-values; goods which were very useful, even vital, to human beings had a relatively low price while goods which had a limited use-value, such as gold and precious stones, had a relatively high one. The answer found to this paradox was that prices did not in fact measure use-value but some other kind of value: exchange-value.

A good produced for the purpose of being exchanged has traditionally been called a commodity in English. From an etymological point of view this is unfortunate since "commodity'' ought to be an alternative way of saying "good" or "use-value". but the usage is too long-established to be changed. It still remains true that the German and French equivalents — Ware and Marchandise — are much more expressive since they immediately indicate that what is being talked about are not goods as physical objects but goods as articles of commerce, as "wares and merchandise". But just as we can call goods use-values so we can call commodities exchange-values.

Strictly speaking, exchange-value and value are not the same. The exchange-value of a commodity is the expression in exchange of its underlying "value”, of the economic value which it has in an exchange economy even when it is not being exchanged. The disagreement between Marx and orthodox economics was not so much over what determined value (for Marx, and some others, it was the amount of socially necessary labour incorporated in a commodity in the course of its production from start to finish) as over its nature. For Marx value was not a feature which goods possessed by virtue of being goods but a social relation, a feature goods only acquired in commodity-producing societies; in other societies the only value goods had (or would have) was their use-value.

The other expression of value in an exchange economy is money as a unit of account. Money originated from barter, the simplest form of exchange, as the one commodity in which the exchange-value of all other commodities could be expressed and measured. Money still performs this role today so that exchange-value normally appears as a price expressed in monetary units.

This distinction between use-value and exchange-value, between wealth and value is a key concept for understanding capitalism, which is essentially a system in which wealth is produced as value rather than exclusively as use-value. This is because capitalism is an exchange economy in which most wealth, from ordinary consumer goods to vast industrial plants and other producer goods, takes the form of commodities, items of wealth that have been produced with a view to sale on a market.

Commodity production existed before capitalism but in previous societies was marginal to the predominant form of the production of wealth. In previous societies such as feudalism wealth was principally produced for direct use and not for sale on a market. Wealth was used by those who produced it or else by the privileged classes who lived off the producers and acquired wealth from them by the actual or threatened use of force. In capitalism the roles of production for sale and production for use are reversed; it is now production for use that is marginal, while the great bulk of wealth is produced for sale. In particular, the elements needed for producing wealth (raw materials, machines, and human mental and physical energy) become commodities.

Adam Buick

Socialism explained (1985)

From the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

  The following brief statement was presented to a recent meeting held at the University of London, entitled What Would a Socialist Economy Be Like? The Leftist speakers offered no clear idea of what they meant by "socialist economy"; indeed, the first (an economist) concluded his speech by saying that nobody on earth could define socialism! Members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain were left to answer the question which the appointed speakers lamentably failed to deal with. Incidentally, the term "socialist economy" is itself a contradiction in terms, as there will be no economics in a socialist society.

For too many years there has been widespread confusion about what socialism really means. Workers cannot be blamed for rejecting the so-called case for a socialist economy when it is identified with nationalisation (nearly forty years ago the coal miners of Britain were told that the industry now belonged to the public), state tyranny (as in the so-called Communist countries where wage slaves are beaten up and imprisoned for organising in unions to defend wages and conditions) and wage freezes, union-bashing and austerity measures (as carried out by all previous Labour governments and by the bogus socialist governments in France, Spain and Greece now). To millions of workers socialism is regarded as having been tried and failed. Such ideas are reinforced by the popular Leftist conception of socialism, which amounts to a sterile vision of state capitalism — a centralised, bureaucratically-controlled market economy is the best that the Left is able to offer as an "alternative" to the so-called free market.

The objective of socialists is to abolish the market, not to regulate or humanise it. In a socialist society the production of goods and services for sale on the market with a view to profit will not exist. Commodity production. which is a feature of capitalism, will give way to production solely for use. There will be no buying and selling, but free access by all people to the goods and services which can be made available. Wealth in a socialist society will be produced according to people's abilities — with each person contributing voluntarily to the social effort without the need to work for a wage or salary — and will be available to all on the basis of their self-defined needs.

Socialism will be a wageless, moneyless world society. It will be a social system in which the means of wealth production and distribution will belong to the people of society as a whole (there will be no property) and be controlled democratically, utilising to the full the modern means of mass communication. Freed from the inefficient and wasteful structure of the property-money-wages system of production for sale and profit, socialist society will be able to set about the task of satisfying human needs. The countless problems caused by capitalism, such as mass starvation alongside food mountains and cuts in health services while thousands of doctors and nurses are on the dole, will be solved in a short time once society has eradicated the market and its priorities and is organised to produce for use.

Those seeking a real alternative to both private and state capitalism should not be afraid to state boldly the case for a completely new way of organising social affairs. Yes, we will be labelled as Utopians by conservatives of the Right and Left wings of capitalism for daring to propose a solution to the problems of present-day society which goes beyond the outdated barriers of the buying and selling system. But socialism, as defined by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, is the only alternative which offers a revolutionary challenge to the status quo. Not only is it the sole alternative to the futile attempt to reform capitalism, but it is an attractive and exciting option. Instead of the old Leftist demands for lower bus fares or cheap spectacles on the NHS or more slums to be built by councils, we argue for a social transformation which is really worth getting enthusiastic about: a society where there will be no fares, no rents, no prices; decent homes, food, clothing and amenities for everyone; free access to the wealth which money has always prevented us from having; the abolition of the wages system and its replacement by unalienated, cooperative and useful production.

If you think that such an alternative is practical, desirable and urgent you should investigate further by contacting your nearest branch of the Socialist Party or writing to our Head Office for introductory literature.

Campaign for Real Socialism (1985)

Advert from the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard  

SPGB Meetings (1985)

 Party News from the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Audio recordings of some of the meetings listed:

SPGB Islington Branch

ABOLISH THE WAGES SYSTEM

Panel: Alf Atkinson, Brian Rubin & Clifford Slapper

Venue: Duke of York, Kings Cross, Islington

Date: 6th May 1985

SPGB Guildford Branch

AFTER THE MINERS STRIKE – WHICH WAY FORWARD FOR SOCIALISTS?

Debate between Colin Tipton, (Socialist Workers Party), and Steve Coleman (SPGB)

Venue: The Star, Quarry Street, Guildford

Date: 10th May 1985

Fools' Gold Mine (1985)

From the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The nature of socialism cannot be separated from the means to achieve it — the conscious. political action of a majority of the working class. By working class we mean the vast majority of the population (perhaps 90 per cent in Britain) who do not own the means of production — land, industries, transport. communications and so on — and therefore need to sell their mental and physical energies (labour power) to an employer. Without wages or salaries they do not have access to the fruits of their work. The capitalist class, on the other hand, through its class ownership (or monopoly) of the means of production, has access to wealth without the need to work. It employs the majority class to do every kind of work and. after wages and all of the other costs of running a complex system have been paid, there remains for the capitalist class a privileged and luxurious life style. "Every kind of work" means just that. If we look a little closer at this "complex system", it becomes obvious that rather more is involved than what takes place at the factory bench.

When explaining the role of the working class (the basis of exploitation) it is easier to start with the example of people in a factory making goods, and being paid less in wages than the value realised on the sale of those goods, with the difference being appropriated by the employer. If we add to this simplification the work involved with a fuel supply, raw materials, research, in the office, management and so on. it is still only part of the picture. We must also include marketing, finance, transport — and law. education, medicine . . . In other words, the production of surplus value is better understood as a social process. It is as a class that workers are exploited, and it is as a class that capitalists reap the benefit. Some questions may arise for those accustomed to the popular notion of several different class divisions in society. The ultimate explanation for wide variations in income within the working class is that the labour power of some workers is more expensive to produce and reproduce than that of others.

If we use the criterion of relationship to the means of production it is apparent that most people, including those on salaries well above the average and non-employed wives and pensioners, belong to the class which needs to work. Members of the capitalist class do not need to work, and do not become dependent on state pensions and social security. Their income, derived from their investments, is sufficient on its own. That some individuals do not appear to fit exactly into either category need not concern us. (In some cases the appearance is deceptive, as with holders of nominal directorships whose "employment" is only for tax purposes.)

But other questions remain. If the working class is dependent on employment does it mean that all employers are capitalists? Bearing in mind the previous paragraph, we can see that the answer is no. A few employees (the chairmen of nationalised industries?) have salaries which enable them to closely identify with both the life style and outlook of the capitalist class. But there are employers who themselves need to work long hours in their businesses and may have incomes which compare more closely to those of the working class. If an individual employer works in his own firm together with his employees, who are paid overall the value of their labour power, but cannot live off the surplus value produced by them, then that employer is a member of the same class. A "small" enterprise may be successful and grow to the point where the owner having accumulated sufficient capital, no longer needs to work in it; what Marx called "a special kind of wage worker" will be employed to manage the business — to do the work formerly done by the owner. Then the owner is indeed a member of the capitalist class. The class position is not altered for capitalists who choose to take part in their ventures.

Marx was referring to the general development from individual manufacturers to large scale Modern Industry, and the point where capitalist production "really begins". Individual employers and the self-employed are a group largely out of time. Having lost out to large scale enterprise in the competition for profit, the group now plays only a minor role in production and distribution. The percentage income of this group declined by about 3 per cent between 1938 and 1971. and the decline in numbers continued until the 1980s when the figures show an increase. By 1983 the number of self-employed, with or without employees, had increased by around a quarter of a million to 2,260,000. This is only about 9 per cent of a total working population of 26,776,000. (Pears 1977/78 and Annual Abstract of Statistics 1985.)

Over the years self-employment has provided one answer to the difficulty of finding work for a proportion of succeeding groups of immigrants but this does not account for the increase in current figures. There has been no recent increase in immigration and the majority of, for example, Asian shop keepers have taken over from other self-employed owners. The increase can probably be accounted for by the recession: a number of the unemployed "setting up" on their own, in enterprises ranging from consultancy firms to standing in the High Street with a suitcase of socks and hankies (although the latter are only likely to appear in the estimated statistics of the Black Economy). The government claims that the way out of recession is to be found with individual employers, small businesses, the entrepreneurs. Part of the theory (which includes the role of less capital-intensive firms) seems to be that the unemployed who have qualified for "generous" redundancy payments will set up in business and then take other workers off the dole queue. (New businesses of that size can probably only afford part-time employees.) In areas where the main employer has gone, or the mine has shut down, the competition between redundant workers to sell goods and services to their unemployed neighbours can be imagined! Though there are individual success stories, government claims of record numbers of new businesses always meet with counter claims of the rate of bankruptcies. The owners of the ventures which fail in the competitive struggle, the erstwhile employers, have themselves to seek employment.

From the successful to the failures, the self-employed category includes a wide range of occupations and incomes. Small businesses do the work that large companies are not interested in, though sometimes as sub-contractors to the large firms. House building is done by the Barratts and Wimpeys. but house repairs and alterations are the province of the individual, the small builder. Self-employment has been used in the building industry as a technicality, to avoid tax and insurance payments once called the lump.

Despite the continuing threat from changes in retailing methods (from supermarkets to hypermarkets) and shopping habits, a single outlet section still survives in the retail trade. Small shopkeepers are perhaps the best known example of the self-employed. They have to give some kind of service to customers not found elsewhere, perhaps in some specialised trade, by being local, or open when larger shops are shut. Some retailing companies are granting franchises, commercial concessions, for the running of their retail outlets, instead of employing managers. In the fast food trade particularly, the company provides identical fittings and decoration to each outlet and then sells (identical) supplies to the franchise owners, who have the responsibility of running "their" shops and only nominal independence. The advantage to the companies is in cutting out losses from fiddling which might arise if they employed managers.

Small businesses, including shopkeepers. will need the services of accountants and sometimes solicitors; there are accountants and solicitors to consult who may also run their own firms. Some of the self-employed struggling to compete with larger organisations in the same industry take on additional "self-employed" burdens. A Country Diary piece in the Observer (24 February 1985) told of farmers' wives who have turned to a "grockle" crop as an alternative source of income, taking in paying guests during the summer months. Any lingering doubts about the class status of these farming families (and indeed of their guests) are dispelled when we read that this entails letting all of the farmhouse bedrooms (there may only be two) as family rooms, while the hosts sleep in the garage or even the "suitcase cupboard".

As for those earning their living as artists or writers . . . Self-employed or not it makes no difference. Along with Marx we point out that "The bourgeoisie . . . has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers" (Communist Manifesto)

We can safely say that the vast majority of the self-employed are members of the working class. Like the rest of our class, some enjoy their work, some have comfortable life styles and others just manage. And there are those who are trapped in their small businesses, and their poverty. It is not working independently in your own business that counts, but the need to work the need for employment. We in the working class do all of the work of society; why not change society, so that we can really work for ourselves.

Pat Deutz

No alternative (1985)

Editorial from the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Margaret Thatcher acquired the unlikely nickname of Tina not because of any fairylike quality but because it is an acronym of one of her earliest catch-phrases - There Is No Alternative. The message of TINA was clear: the government were aware that under their policies a lot of people were in acute suffering but there really was nothing else for it. Their policies may be tough but they were the only ideas which promised to eliminate problems which had been plaguing Britain for a very long time, which no other government had been resolute enough to deal with. If the people in the dole queues and the hospital waiting lists and the like would be patient, toughness would bring its reward in a prosperous, secure nation. Of course the government might try to curry favour by policies such as massive state investment in industry and public works; that might make things better for a while but would only postpone the inevitable. The Day of Reckoning, when it came, would be much more terrible for the delay. So the Thatcher government claimed that they were following the only possible way

One problem about this, for the government, was that it forced them to insist that their policies could be seen to be working. They have, after all, been in power for six years and it is time now for at least some of their pledges to be fulfilled, in the shape of better lives for the people. To argue in this way the government have had either to ignore little matters like the level of unemployment or to suggest that it had something to do with personal failings on the part of the unemployed. Thus Norman Tebbitt's incautious admonition to the workless, not to riot but to bike it around the country to search for non-existent jobs. Thus Nigel Lawson's lament that this year's Budget would have been an historic bonanza of state generosity except that the government had been forced to spend so much on the coal strike. Thus Thatcher's declaration last year, when interest rates began to rise and the pound/dollar exchange rate to fall, that this crisis could easily and quickly be ended if the miners went back to work. They did and it wasn't. Thus the Tories' claim that it is not their policy to reduce spending on things like hospitals, education and social services but only to re-arrange them so that they are better than ever.

TINA must mean that there is no poverty in Britain — nobody struggling to make ends meet on a wage or a paltry state benefit, nobody living in dank slums, nobody dying of the cold because they can't afford to heat their homes in the winter. TINA means ignoring reality because to face it — and this is a familiar story — to face reality would involve the government in an act of self exposure. showing them up as impotent or ignorant or deceitful.

These problems do not afflict socialists; we have no difficulty in facing reality — indeed it is our work constantly to illuminate it and to point to its lessons. The reality of TINA is that the Thatcher policies have failed. Six years of Tory rule have not built a country which is happy, secure and abundant. The social and bodily ills which disfigured Britain when Thatcher came to power are still here, in many cases even worse than they were in 1979. Socialists also point to the reality that the so-called opposition parties — Labour and the Liberal/ SDP Alliance — offer no hope of improving on the Tories' showing. In many ways the term of office of the last Labour government opened the way for the policies of Thatcher; the evidence is that if Labour had kept in power in 1979 they would have been forced to operate much as the Tories have done since then. There is no more optimism in the Alliance. Although they claim to be breaking the mould of the more established capitalist parties they are actually no more than a reconstitution, personally and politically, of the others' failures.

The opposition's fondness for blaming our current problems onto something called Thatcherism implies that the level of unemployment and of poverty in this country have been erected, piece by piece and person by person, by the will of the Prime Minister alone. On what is called the far left — that strange world of self-deception where reality is always barred from entry the priority is to smash the Tories (a policy which is never defined or described in any detail; meanwhile the workers continue to elect Tories to offices of various sorts). But there is never any encouragement from the loony left to consider what should follow, if the Tories were to be "smashed". In the past the working class have thrown out many a Tory government but, such has been their confusion, they have replaced them with other governments just as strongly committed to running capitalism. There is no point in changing one style of capitalism for another; if the world's problems are to be eliminated the radical, enduring solution of a new social order must be applied.

And here, it must be noted, we are not discussing just "Britain's problems", as would the Tories or the Labour Party or any of the other capitalist parties. The problems which matter are those of the working class world wide and there is no solution to them other than a world solution. Socialism will be a society different from capitalism in all ways, from its basis upwards and outwards. The means which human beings apply to produce wealth and distribute it will be in the ownership of the world's people. This will mean an end to production for sale and a beginning to production for human use, to meet human needs. Satisfying human needs must mean that wealth is communally available for all people to consume on equal rights of free access. It is hardly necessary to add. that such a society will not be divided into classes for the basis of class division — the private ownership of the means of life — will have been abolished. As class society is ended social relationships will change so that people will come into contact. and deal, with each other on the basis of a free and equal standing in society.

In such a world the problems which are the stuff of life for capitalism — war. poverty, famine, slums, avoidable deaths and disease — will have their cause removed and will, therefore, cease to trouble the human race. To establish socialism is the only way we can bring that about. The innumerable, agonisingly prolonged, attempts to reform capitalism have failed; it is now an historic monster which has the power to wipe most of us off the face of the earth. Socialism will work. It will be efficient. It will meet human needs. It will bring a world of peace, freedom and plenty. There is no alternative.