So They Say: Labour's guidelines for Capitalism (1975)

The So They Say Column from the March 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour's guidelines for Capitalism

Following his meeting with the Chairman of the Confederation of British Industry in January, the well- known non-Socialist, Mr. Denis Healey, has been increasingly forcing some of the facts about capitalism and how the Labour Party proposes to run it down the throats of the working class. Speaking at the Electrical Contractors’ Association in London on 11th February, he said:

If we price ourselves out of jobs by excessive wage increases, there will also be even greater cut-backs in new plant and machinery. That too means more men and women out of work, both now and in the future. None of this need happen. It will not happen if workers, not just in the union headquarters but on the shop floor too, stick strictly to the guidelines for wage negotiation laid down by their own leaders in the TUC last year.

We recall the uproar in the House of Commons not long ago when Labour MPs were clamouring for remedial action to be taken after British companies were found to be paying black South African workers below “officially recognized” levels. The Labour Party has consistently subscribed to the utopian view that wages can be fixed at some “fair” level which will be mutually beneficial to both capitalist and worker. Such a view has nothing to do with Socialism and we advise members of the working class to examine and reject the concept that a system of exploitation can be run “fairly.”

Closing his eyes and opening his mouth

Before Mr. Heath reluctantly vacated his position as leader of the Conservative Party in February, he put forward as neat a piece of mumbo-jumbo as one might expect. In a desperate attempt to appeal to all men everywhere, he undertook a dazzling rebuttal of the view that capitalist society is divided into two classes. Speaking on his ability to lead the Conservative Party he said:

It is not just a question of looking after the middle class, which of course has very great problems particularly under this Government, and we should do our utmost to help it. But it is not just a question of class at all. I loathe the word class. I do not believe in class. It is a question of ensuring the prosperity of the nation in which everyone can share.

(Financial Times, 31st Jan. 75)

Well, Mr. Heath may not believe in it, although after almost ten years as leader of the Conservative Party he has had as good an opportunity as most to realize that the interests of the workers and capitalists are opposed, but his beliefs are neither here nor there. The class position of the individual is not determined by the beliefs of anyone, but by the relationship between that individual and the means of production. Whatever aspirations some individuals may hold to the contrary, those members of society who do not own any of the means of production or distribution form the working class. This is the vast majority of the population and it is through their efforts alone that the “prosperity” Mr. Heath refers to is created, not for the benefit of “everyone” as he would have it, but for the benefit of those individuals who do own the means of production and distribution, the capitalist class.

A Goodly Wizard

One of the inevitable reactions to the continuing barrage of propaganda from the capitalists that Britain is going bankrupt, that this crisis must be surmounted, that we must all make sacrifices — ad nauseam, is that the heavenly thoughts of the Christian sorcerers get another outing. They are always at hand to tell us that “God moves in mysterious ways”, but the reality is that whichever way he moves, it always seems to serve the need of the capitalist class. This is no accident, there being a clear link between the scriptural injunction “Servants obey your masters” and its application to the working class.

The Very Rev. Horace Dammers, the Dean of Bristol, has recently launched a movement entitled “Life Style” which apparently already has several hundred members. The Dean underlined the Christian ethic of frugality (for the workers) so much beloved by the ruling class through the ages:

I think we have found a realistic way for ordinary people to make a positive contribution to the good of mankind.

Apart from monthly meetings where the members get together in order to “analyze each other’s incomes” or discuss ways of “using their money in ways which they consider to be less socially harmful”, some members are

planning to share cars and lawnmowers, and to cut down on food and insurance, and are thinking twice before buying new clothes, and even pets.

(Sunday Telegraph, 2nd Feb. 75)

If the Dean genuinely wishes to make a “positive contribution to the good of mankind” he should exorcise this bogus brotherhood, and start to study Socialism.

Honest Profit

It is usually advantageous for capitalists and the politicians representing their interests to refer as little as possible (in public) to the mainspring of capitalist production — Profit. Some appear to view its mention with a hurt concern, preferring to talk about the “creation of prosperity,” or “economic growth.” Others are more brazen:

No-one now believes that profit is a dirty word, if profit is honestly earned and put to proper use.

(Mr. Denis Healey speaking at the CBI’s annual dinner at the Hilton Hotel on 14th May 74.)

However, according to a report in the Financial Times on 11th February, ICI is one company which is afflicted with a certain "self-consciousness” in this regard. The fact that the company had produced a profit of £375m. over nine months caused the Public Relations Dept, of ICI to commission a survey from Documentary Research of Bristol, in order to gauge possible public hostility toward profit announcements. The survey team interviewed 1437 people and one of its findings was:

There appeared to be no understanding of the fact that a very high percentage of profit was paid out by companies in tax; only 6 per cent acknowledged that tax was paid at all.

As a result of these findings ICI laid new emphasis on tax in its financial advertising both internally in the company newspapers, and in the National Press.

All good stuff for the Public Relations men to play up at every opportunity. We can imagine the copy now — "Yes the profits may look big, but you want to see the size of our tax demand.” Nevertheless we place no importance on the amount of tax a company pays. The report went on to say:

There is no great antipathy towards profits. ‘We might not have put profits at the top of our advertisements before,’ said ICI. But the survey has shown up some other areas of misunderstanding and mistrust which will take more than simplified advertising campaigns to overcome. There are strong suspicions that results are not presented honestly.

The newspaper report concludes:

One wonders, would the results (of the survey) have been different if the respondents had been less ill- informed about the ultimate destination of profits?

Its ultimate destination is irrelevant to the working class who have created this surplus-value. By the time Profit is counted, the worker has been paid. What workers should usually do is not concern themselves where Profit goes, but to examine where it originated.

Specialist Purposes

An explanatory note on the Times report of 6th February regarding the Ingram 9mm. sub-machine guns recently purchased from the USA by the Ministry of Defence is required:

The Ingram is said to be well suited to undercover operations. But the ministry is emphatic that the guns, bought for “specialist purposes” have not been used in Northern Ireland. The silencer differs from the conventional kind. Instead of slowing the bullet as it leaves the muzzle it allows it to reach full supersonic speed. The enemy would hear a crack as the bullet passed him, but it would be impossible to tell where it came from.

We can reveal that the “specialist purposes” to which the Ministry vaguely refers are that the guns will be issued to those members of the working class within the British armed forces so that they may fire them at other members of the international working class when the interests of two groups of capitalists collide. The report is misleading in suggesting that “the enemy would hear a crack as the bullet passed him”. This defeats the purpose of the bullet — the truth is that the “enemy” would hear nothing as the bullet passed through him.

Alan D'Arcy

Class War (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

What class you are in is defined by the position in which you stand with regard to the means of production. In capitalist society there are two basic classes: those who own and control the means of production and those who own no productive resources apart from their ability to work.

The working class in capitalist society is made up of all those who are obliged through economic necessity to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary. If this is your position then you are a member of the working class. The job you do and the status it might have, the pay you receive and how you chose to spent it, are irrelevant as long as you are dependent on working for a wage or salary in order to live.

In Britain over 90 percent of the population are members of the working class. Of the rest only about 2-3 per cent are members of the exploiting, capitalist class who enjoy a privileged non-work income derived from the surplus value produced by the working class over and above what they are paid as wages and salaries.  The others are the self-employed—small shopkeepers, independent workers, professional people—whose income is derived from selling some service or other directly to the consumer rather than from selling their labour power to an employer. And many of these can be assimilated, in terms of income, to the ordinary worker.

What this means is that essentially we are living in a two-class society of capitalists and workers. But what about the "middle class”? The existence of such a middle class is one of the greatest myths of the twentieth century. In the last century, the term was used by the up-and-coming industrial section of the capitalist class in Britain to describe themselves; they were the class between the landed aristocracy (who at that time dominated political power) and the working class. Eventually, however, the middle class of industrial capitalists replaced the landed aristocracy as the ruling class and the two classes merged into the capitalist class we know today. In other words, the 19th century middle class became part of the upper class and disappeared as a “middle” class.

The term, however, lived on and came to be applied to civil servants, teachers and other such white-collar workers. But there was no justification for this, as such people were clearly workers just as much obliged by economic necessity to sell their ability to work as were factory workers, miners, engine drivers and dockers. The only difference was the type of job they were employed to do—and a certain amount of snobbery attached to it. .

It is not just the Daily Mail persists in believing that there is a middle class. So does the SWP which has come forward with a theory of the “new middle class”. This “class” is said to be composed of higher-grade white collar workers and to make up between 10 and 20 percent of the workforce (The Changing Working Class by SWP leaders Alex Callinicos and Chris Harman, p. 37). The reason given for excluding these people from the working class is that they exercise some degree of control over the use of the means of production and/or authority over other workers; in short, because they perform some managerial role.

To adopt this view is to abandon the relationship-to-the-means-of-production theory of class for one based on occupation. Socialists have always maintained that, as far as the actual production of wealth is concerned, the capitalist class are redundant. They play no part in production, which is run from top to bottom by hired workers of one sort or another. This means that all jobs, including those concerned with managing production and/or disciplining other members of the working class, are performed by members of the working class. To exclude from the working class workers with no productive resources of their own who are paid, among other things, to exercise authority of behalf of the employing class over other workers is to give more importance to the job done (occupation) than to the economic necessity  of having to sell labour power for a wage or salary which for Marxists is the defining feature of the working class.

Of course not everybody who receives an income in the form of a salary is necessarily a member of the working class. Some capitalists chose to manage their own businesses and pay themselves a “salary” for doing this. Although a part of this might correspond to the price of labour power (the part corresponding to what the capitalist would have to pay to hire a professional manager to do the same job), usually most of it is only a disguised way of distributing some of the surplus value at the expense of the other shareholders. What makes a salary-earner a member of the working class is not the mere receipt of a salary but being economically dependent on it for a living.

Having to work for an employer was not only how Marx defined the working class. It is also, and more importantly, the view of many workers who have never heard of Marx. When asked, as in a number of recent radio broadcasts, a surprising –and pleasing –number have replied that anyone who has to work for a living is a worker. Which makes them more sensible than both the Daily Mail and the SWP.

Adam Buick

A confused professor (2026)

From the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vivek Chibber is a well-known figure on the American left. A professor of sociology at New York University, he regards himself as a Marxist and is seen by some as an important social theorist. The April 2023 edition of the Socialist Standard carried a review of a book he had recently published with the ambitious title Confronting Capitalism. How the World Works and How to Change It. The review recognised the author’s clear and accessible explanation of how capitalism works. In particular it endorsed the book’s explanation of capitalism’s relationship with the state and the struggle it inevitably generates between the two classes in society – capitalists and workers – and how it dictates that governments, no matter what their stated ideology, cannot have a mediating role between workers and capitalists but have no choice but to govern on behalf of the capitalist class and in their collective profit-making interest. In the same way, the review approved the book’s further observation that individual capitalists, regardless of their personal character or values, are compelled by the nature of the system they operate in to minimise costs and seek profit, wherever possible and whatever the consequences, the result being that a tiny minority of the population are able to live in luxury while billions struggle to keep their heads above water and experience life as a daily grind.

Chasing reforms

So far, so good, and, as explanations of capitalism go, pretty lucid. But, as the review then went on to point out, Chibber’s prescription for remedying the situation he correctly analyses was not to get rid of the capitalist system and replace it with a different one but rather to chase reforms of various kinds to try and make that system more palatable. And this, puzzingly, after having told us that the imperatives of capitalism make that impossible. Arguably even more puzzling then was his final call to ‘start down the road of social democracy and market socialism’, even though, by any standards, ‘market socialism’ is a contradiction in terms.

Since all book reviews that appear in the Socialist Standard are sent to the book’s author, Chibber should at least be aware of the Socialist Party’s view and criticisms of his ideas. So when an extended interview with him appeared recently in the Jacobin magazine on aspects of his Confronting Capitalism book, it could only be of interest to see whether he seemed to have taken on board any of the points raised in our criticism of his ideas.

Though it’s clear from the start of that conversation both interviewer and interviewee see themselves as Marxists and socialists, there is virtually no reference made to what socialism might mean and nothing at all is said about the kind of socialist society that Marx advocated – one based not on the market and buying and selling but on the abolition of the money and wages system and free access to all goods and services. There is, however, an approving reference to two major 20th century practitioners of authoritarian state capitalism, Lenin and Mao, which seems to echo the line taken in Confronting Capitalism about a Leninist party model with a centralised leadership. So no change here then. But what about his book’s advocacy of reforms of various kinds within capitalism – ‘non-reformist reforms’, as he calls them? Well nothing seems different here either. He refers to struggles for ‘workplace rights, a universal basic income grant, or pensions’ echoing the need expressed in his book for ‘a combination of electoral and mobilizational politics’ and ‘a gradualist approach’.

How many classes?

To be fair, however, the main focus of the Jacobin interview is not how capitalism could be improved or what comes after it but rather its class structure. And here, initially at least, Chibber seems to be living up to the Marxist analysis of class explained in Confronting Capitalism, ie, the existence of two classes in society – capitalists (a tiny minority) and workers (the overwhelming majority) – with irreconcilable interests, and the state being not some kind of mediating body but rather an instrument of support for the capitalist class. But then, in the second part of the interview, what can be described as a variation on this perspective emerges. Here he moves from seeing capitalism as a two-class structure to stating the existence of a third class, a ‘middle class’. This of course is a term commonly used by social analysts seeking to categorise workers in terms of such things as their backgrounds, outlooks, living styles or levels of pay. But should such a ‘third’ category have a place in any claimed Marxist analysis of class? Well, it didn’t in Confronting Capitalism, but now, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it does here. To be precise, Chibber has this to say: ‘So the two “fundamental” classes, workers and capitalists, account probably for around 75 percent of the labor force. What’s the other remaining 25 percent? That’s what we call the middle class.’ But who are this ‘middle class’? According to him, they fall into two groups – the self-employed (‘owner operators, the traditional petty bourgeoisie’, he calls them) and ‘the salariat’.

What to respond to this? Well, we can accept – because it corresponds to observable reality – that in capitalism there has always been a small minority of individuals, who wish ‘to be their own boss’ and to set up their own small businesses of one kind or another. A small proportion of these turn out to be lucrative and may result in their creator becoming rich to the point of not having to work, But the vast majority of them are not particularly successful. Sometimes they procure a precarious living for those who run them, but more often they fail and plunge their owners into the world of seeking to sell their energies to another employer for a wage or salary. Of course, such people, at least for as long as they are in business, can be categorised as wannabe-capitalists, but the vast majority of them (those, for example, that Chibber calls ‘owner-operator shopkeepers’) still have to carry out labour on a daily basis themselves in order to survive and to support their families. So it can’t be meaningfully maintained that the existence of small ‘entrepreneurs’ somehow means that there are three classes in society rather than two.

Still less can it be said that there is, in Chibber’s words, ‘a second group’ helping to make up that ‘middle class’, consisting of those he calls ‘the professional classes and the managerial classes’. An example he gives of this is ‘a mid-level manager’ to whom certain duties are ‘outsourced’. ‘What do they do?’, he goes on. ‘They’re keeping the books, they’re designing the labor process, but they’re also managing and supervising labor. Managers are workers but who carry out the functions of capital and whose own well-being depends on the successful exploitation of labor. So they are caught between the two worlds. That’s why they’re middle class.’ He goes even further, including in this middle class ‘sections of the professoriate and the professional strata’, those with ‘a lot of autonomy’, or ‘salaried people in the professions’, though ‘some are shading into the working class: same occupation, different classes’ (eg, teachers or ‘a professor working at a community college’). To this we would have to respond that all those in Chibber’s ‘second group’, though they may have more autonomy and more pay than other workers, are no less members of the working class for their position of subordination to a system that makes them dependent on the wage or salary they receive. In addition, despite the greater security their role may appear to give them, they can never be sure that the stresses and strains of the capitalist system will not make them just as expendable in the future as workers in other occupations, ie that capitalism’s constant need for cheapness and reorganisation will not make them just as insecure in their jobs or just as surplus to requirements as any other workers.

In short the ‘Marxist’ theorist and professor not only seems not to have taken on board any of the points made in this journal’s review of his book about what replacing capitalism means and about the futility of reformist activity, but to have now rendered his previously ‘clear and accessible explanation of how capitalism works’ distinctly less clear and less accessible.

Howard Moss

50 Years Ago: Who are the working class? (1984)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Within the ranks of the working class itself there are many who suffer from the illusion that they are in a class apart from and above the common worker; in fact that their interests are identical with those of the masters as against the rest of the workers. Amongst these are scientists, managers and salaried workers of various kinds.

These types of workers would be under no delusion if they would apply to their condition the test of a slave. On what do they depend for their living? Are they dependent wholly or mainly on selling their energies for wages or salaries in order to live? If this fits their economic condition then they are members of the working class, slaves, always in fear of losing their jobs and suffering accordingly.

The point always to be borne in mind is the frailty of the hold upon that on which the living depends, and the ease and swiftness of operation of the power of the job-controllers. Many in exalted positions have had this very cruelly impressed upon them, and although they scorn the suggestion that they are enslaved, yet they take good care to placate and dance to the tune of those responsible for the salaries.

There is no escape, therefore, from the conclusion that the fundamental interest of all who depend upon wages or salaries is identical, and is opposed to the interest of those who own the means of production and pay their slaves wages or salaries. It is a slave interest opposed to an ownership interest.

[From an article, "Are You a Slave?" by G. McClatchie, published in Socialist Standard, December 1934.]

Letter: I’ve Been Misinformed (1993)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors.

I read with interest Steve Coleman's article "Farewell to the Middle Class" in the September issue as 1 used to work for IBM as a contractor some years ago. It was pitiful to see how brainwashed its employees were; so much in fact they all believed that the corporation would keep them all employed for life. I remember colleagues almost boastfully stating that union membership was totally unnecessary when employed by such a kind and caring company as IBM.

Now that thousands of its workforce worldwide have been, or still are, facing redundancy, I’ve no doubt that those same, smug people can now be seen with egg slowly dribbling down their faces. This corporation is a past-master at hiding its tyranny behind a smile.

While insecurity and uncertainty dog its workforce (and I’ve no doubt the plight of those sorry characters in Steve's article w'ill be repeated many times over), it is interesting to note that earlier this year, the IBM corporation employed a new chairman. Lou Gerstner Jr., previously of Nabisco has been engaged on a salary of S2 million plus annual performance-related incentives of of $1.5 million. Included in this neat little package was also the offer of 500.000 IBM shares and a further, long-term inducement of $500,000. Oh! I almost forgot. As a "sweetener" for leaving Nabisco, he also received a further $5,000,000 to cover any of the profits he may have lost by leaving Nabisco.

Sounds incredible, eh. Not least of all to the employees I don’t wonder. Perhaps it would be more fitting if IBM stood for I’ve Been Misinformed.

Simon Montfalcon,

Romsey, Hampshire

Answers to Correspondents. (1907)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

A. Porcelli, Baron de St. Andrew (The Cottage, Camberley.)—Your statement that Society cannot be divided into two classes because “there are, for instance, children in arms,” is distinctly refreshing. We are, however, always glad to deal with intelligent opposition. We note also that you profess to belong neither “to the working class nor to the capitalist class, but to a much nobler class, viz, the Sons of God.” Nevertheless, if as we surmise the necessities and comforts of life which you enjoy in your baronial “Cottage” do not descend direct from heaven, but are the products of worldly labour, it would materially assist us in deciding (at least to our own satisfaction) to which economic category you belong if we were informed whether your present income is the result of your own mental and physical labour, or is derived through the ownership of property and is therefore a tax on others’ labour. This is not a personal question, for “we must all toil, or steal, (howsoever we name our stealing).”

The statements regarding your numerous charities to the distressed working class prove only that those who produce the wealth do not enjoy it and that the appropriators, who flourish through the workers’ misery, accompany their alms with misunderstanding and contempt. We would, indeed, in this connection (in return for the text on unclean beasts to which you referred us) commend to you respectfully Matthew VI., 1-4.

You assert that we are “perfectly ignorant of the Bible.” But to this we cannot plead guilty; for we regard and use the Bible as a valuable historical document of the upper status of barbarism in social evolution. As you, however, appear to value the Bible in quite another sense may we suggest that you take as texts for your next epistle Matthew XIX., 21-24 and Isaiah V., 8?

We cannot afford space to deal with all the curious points you raise. Your point of view, moreover, not being that of a wage-worker, and presenting otherwise no common ground of logic and experience as a basis for argument, renders further discussion difficult.

Socialism, as such, is not directly concerned with religion or the supernatural, and is not antagonistic thereto except in so far as religion is used against the working class. It would, however, be idle to deny that the fulcrum toward obtaining a rational conception of life provided by the scientific basis of Socialism can ultimately leave no room in the consistent mind for belief in the supernatural.

The concluding statement in your letter that “Woe betide the man who ignorantly seeks to make God responsible for the warped nature of fellow man, and the evils produced by Satanic devilry” is, as applied to us, entirely gratuitous; and you may be comforted by the assurance that we hold no metaphysical cloud-pusher responsible for the misery of the world.

G.H.L. (Kentish Town).—No. There is no “mental labour” that does not involve physical labour, and no physical or manual labour that does not involve mental labour also. When we speak of labour we do not discriminate between mental and manual, they are complementary.

The distinction you also desire to make between the “producer” of commodities, such as the brick-maker, and the “non-producer” such as the transport worker, will not hold. The transport worker is just as much a producer as the brickmaker, neither really produces in the sense you mean, both however are engaged in producing values. The brickmaker usefully alters the form of the raw material supplied by nature, and the transport worker usefully alters its position ; embodying in the process, quite as much as the brickmaker, a portion of the labour necessary to placing the bricks upon the market and creating values in so doing.

F.D. (Wimbledon).—There are essentially but two classes to-day, as we say. The capitalist class comprises all those whose income is derived from the ownership of property and is contrasted with the working class which comprises all those (with their dependents) who are possessors of only their power to labour which they are forced to sell to those who monopolise the means of wealth production.

All marketable wealth is the product of labour, and the able-bodied man who lives without contributing his quota of the necessary labour is robbing his fellows.

On the border line, between the two classes of exploiter and exploited, (which are, on the whole, vividly distinct), there are a number—with a foot in each camp—called the “middle class.” The members of this group are becoming an almost negligible factor owing to the growing centralisation of industry, but in so far as they express themselves politically they cling tenaciously to the capitalist side of their interests, and all the more desperately since the small property or position that they hold is alone that which distinguishes them from the working class properly so-called ; and this small property or means of exploitation is that by means of which they hope to climb into the select and secure section of the exploiters and so save themselves from the proletarian abyss which ever threatens to engulf them. Hence this section of lower capitalists is not only reactionary in that it fights against industrial advance, but also is most unscrupulous in defending its right to exploit, in sweating, and in conserving its monopoly of education or position against the interests of the workers. A small section, it is true, would “organise” the workers, on condition that it be given (under title of “the expert”) all the well-paid jobs and the right to govern the masses; but in face of a genuine proletarian advance all of these stand by the reaction and bitterly oppose genuine industrial democracy.

It is therefore seen that as economic categories reflecting politically their fundamentally opposing interests, there are, in reality, but two classes: those who live by labour and those who live upon those who labour; so that the workers in their task ot abolishing all privilege and exploitation, stand alone, and must rely only upon themselves.

J.T.T.—Thanks for information. We are always pleased to receive local papers with interesting articles or reports. Your query will be dealt with next month.

A manager gets his cards (1953)

From the June 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Dear Sir,  it is with deep regret! ”

 

A man has written to the newspapers to make a complaint. His complaint is that his employers have given him the sack. A popular week-end paper gave it prominence, with the comment that “its the hidden tragedy that makes it worth the reading.”

As this is something happening to people every day, the reader may wonder what all the fuss is about The answer is that the complainant was not an ordinary man. By this, we do not mean that he had double joints, or second sight He was a works manager.

"If you are earning, as I was £1,500 or so a year, the men in the workshops envy you. They call themselves the under dogs. They think you've got it easy, ordering them about . . . But if the Company gets into difficulties, the first thing that comes under scrutiny is the higher salary list. . . They (the under dogs) have chances of several hundreds to my one of getting another post because there's only one works manager and 200 or more hands.” (News of the World, 5/4/53).

Our well-educated and expensively-trained manager who, of course, is not a mere “hand,” but a highly qualified “brain,” with technical qualifications, two degrees, and thirty years" administrative experience, has made some important discoveries.

“ Nobody wants a man of 53 whose job has collapsed under him,” he says.

And yet his own letter tells us that he knew what the end would be, “I had, in fact, spent the last twelve months in pruning the factory staff to the extent that if the firm ever got busy again it would be very short of skilled operatives.”

But even a common hand, without degrees, would know that “pruning” staff (giving other people the sack) is hardly likely to prove a permanent occupation, even in a large factory.

What would you do ? he asks, and answers, first you apply to your professional institute. No good, too old. Second, you go to the Special Appointments Bureau of the Ministry of Labour. No good, “things are quiet just now."" Meanwhile, your six months' cheque is being exhausted, you will have to live on your savings. Savings! You had to live up to the job, dress Well, run a car, entertain. What savings ?

Next, worry all your business friends. “ I should think 25 per cent. of British industry is bearing my name in mind,” he says sardonically. “Gone by now are the hopes of a job at the kind of salary I used to enjoy. Half the amount—I’d jump at it—go anywhere —do anything. Anyone want a secretary-stooge ? Or a butler-valet cum gardener-handyman, or a chauffeur?”

“The story of a man who climbed the ladder of success only to have it fall under him at the age of 53,” says the Editor’s blurb. A commonplace story, you think.

“I wonder what the remedy is for cases like mine ? Is it just rotten luck or is there something else wrong somewhere ? 1 cannot decide,” says our unhappy ex-staff pruner.

These are the most valuable lines of his long statement.

The first thing is the pathetic folly of imagining that anyone is immune from the hazards and blows of the profit system. There is no escape. There are no special cases. Whether a man is manager at £1,500, or messenger at £200, anybody employed by somebody, or something else, like Public Corporation, Company or Board, or just a “ guv’nor,” can be dis-employed (sacked) by those employers at will. Leering round the shoulder of every employed person, Dustman or Duke of Windsor, War-Lord, or Warehouseman is the malevolent demon called the Threat of the Sack, making the eternal dream of the employee “ security ” (Welfare State and all), a weary nightmare.

Employment is dependence and subservience of members of the property-less class upon the owners of wealth. Whether these workers are well-paid managers or low-paid domestic helots is irrelevant “Improvements” in the conditions of wage-takers, as our manager has now discovered, frequently turn out, in the finish, to be the reverse. The fact that a job carries £1,500 a year allows the employer to pick the youthful and energetic suitably-qualified man and burn him up quickly.

Small consolation for the employee, having gone for the big lot, to find it does not last. This is the simple explanation of the fabulous (?) salaries of actresses, athletic champions and boxers, whose fortunes and life may hang on one blow.

It also explains the basis of so-called “permanent” and “regular” employment, such as that of State employees, Civil Servants, Railwaymen, Teachers and Postmen as opposed to casual labour subject to rapid fluctuation in alternating trade movements (Dockers, Building, Snow-clearers, Canvassers).

So it is that the Postal Authorities, by offering “Establishment” in “permanent” employment, can take their pick of a larger bunch, without high wages. Thus the great “progress” of the workers under Capitalism is to find themselves raised higher up, only to be smashed harder down.

Having got his motor-driver’s or gardener’s job (and he will be by no means the first degree’d man to sweep the streets), our manager must now, at 53, start a stiff course in a new tricky subject, Marxian economics. There he will find the answer to his questions, and stop wondering.

He will read in Volume I of “Capital” these pregnant lines

“Just as little as better clothing, food and treatment, and a larger allowance do away with the exploitation of the slave so little do they set aside that of the wageworker. A rise in the price of labour as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of tension of it.” (“Capital" Page 127. Dawson Edition).

Socialists work to break this chain of gold, replacing even well-paid employment by voluntary cooperative free labour.

Horatio.

Snobbery (1953)

From the June 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do you want a smart and attractive “mother” for the evening ? If so, there is a London model agency which will supply you with “escorts for all occasions”; and this includes “mothers” as chaperons—at two guineas a night! Or would you like to adopt an elephant at the Zoo for a pound a week ? You can’t take the elephant home with you, but you can have your name inscribed on the cage. Perhaps you would like your favourite cigarettes monogramed for 24s. a hundred; or maybe, you’d like to take lessons at a swank dancing salon, in court manners—how to curtsy and open and shut doors in the correct way. Cost? Anything from a guinea upwards. Remember, you might meet a real live duke one day, and if you haven’t learnt to curtsy the right way you will be in the cart. You can also hire a butler for an evening’s booze-up (sorry, cocktail party); and if you are going to have dinner you can hire a cook, a kitchen full of waiters and flunkeys—and all the silver and gold plate. . . .

These are just a few of the things that our “betters ” and aspiring betters get up to, according to The Weekly Overseas Mail (April 23rd-27th, 1953). But it is not only the rich and not-so-rich who are smitten by this disease of snobbery. How many workers are there living in sweet suburbia who spend their lives trying to “keep up with the Joneses”? How many clerks and white-collar workers, earning about eight or nine pounds a week, are there who pretend that they belong to the “middle-class”? How many workers are there with T.V. aerials above “their” houses—and no television sets inside ? How many young fellows kid their girl friends that they have got “good” jobs, and then have to admit, after they are married, that their jobs are not so good, after all ? How many young couples are there who say that they don’t like kids, but are not prepared to admit that they cannot afford to have children ?

The world of to-day is a world of make-believe. Where the cash nexus and “getting on” is the “thing,” both workers and capitalists are forced to put on a show; where the vast majority of mankind live in perpetual poverty, insecurity, worry—yes, and loneliness—people are forced to pretend that things are not so bad as they are. If you are wealthy, but your relations or friends are wealthier, then you have to hire a butler, a cook and flunkeys—and the gold plate, for the evening party; if you are a worker you have to pretend you’ve got a television set or you own a house—even if its mortgaged to a building society.

Whilst this system—which we in the Socialist Party call capitalism—continues, people, both rich and poor, will continue this snobbery, pretence and make-believe. Unfortunately, most people do not yet see that only by getting rid of the existing social system and replacing it by a sane one, based on cooperation, equality and common ownership, will they not only get rid of the evils of poverty and insecurity, but also that of snobbery and pretence.

Peter E. Newell

Civil Servants and Bonus Cuts. (1931)

From the May 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

During and after the recent Great War, Civil Servants found that the wages and salaries paid to them as employees of the State were not, owing to the general rise in prices, sufficient to maintain them and their families in the same comfort they had been accustomed to. After much agitation and negotiations with the authorities, an agreement was entered into in 1920, by which an addition was made to the prewar scales of pay according to the increased cost of living then existing. The bonus was to be increased or reduced as the cost of living should further rise or fall.

At the present time the cost of living is computed to be 52 per cent. over that of 1914.

Under the agreement the full bonus is only given on rates of par not greater than 35s. per week. Rates in excess of that sum carry a bonus which is reduced proportionately as pay advances above 35s., so that, in these cases, the actual addition to pre-war rates varies from 46 per cent. to 16 per cent. on the higher scales of pay.

Civil Servants in receipt of basic pay exceeding 35s. weekly, and consequently diminishing bonus, therefore claim, not unreasonably, that their standard of living has been considerably lowered.

Considerable notice has been given in the daily press to the question and to the efforts of Civil Servants and of W. J. Brown, Labour M.P. for West Wolverhampton, to bring pressure to bear on the Government to suspend the operation of the agreement in reducing pay at the present time, but without success. A saving of three million pounds per annum, in the wages of Civil Servants is indicated.

Civil Servants have been pleased by the quite unusual notice of the press given to their demands, which had not hitherto been so prominently brought before the public. It is probable that this is not so much due to sympathy with the efforts put forth, as to the impression desired to be made on other sections of the workers whose pay is at present the object of attack by the master class, such as school teachers, bank employees, and others.

The facts of the situation should be closely considered by Civil Servants. On the whole, as is also the case with school teachers and similar employees, they are reluctant to identify themselves with the working class, regarding; themselves as superior and holding themselves aloof as forming part of a middle class. The fiction of a middle class is encouraged by the capitalist class in order that this aloofness may keep them politically separate from the working class. The very fact that the current discontent in their ranks is based upon the inadequate remuneration given to them in return for the work performed, is plain proof that they are dependent upon their earnings for their maintenance. This condition of society is essentially one that puts its seal upon the working class who, having no means of living of their own, must sell their labour power to an employer in order to obtain the means of living, the employer in this instance being the State.

The remuneration they receive is based upon the necessary cost of their maintenance as Civil Servants and the rearing of a family in like circumstances. Under the present capitalist system of society there is always a tendency to depress their standard of living to a minimum. This it is from which they are now suffering. As in outside working class ranks they have been compelled to form their unions in order to maintain and forward their interests, as opposed to the attempts of their employer, the State, to lower their status and standard of living.

What is here pointed out should help Civil Servants to realise their position in Society, and also that, in order to reap the full benefit of their labour, they should unite with ail other sections of the working-class to overthrow the capitalism system and to establish the Socialist Commonwealth.

F. J. H.

Who are the ‘Middle Class’? (2025)

"Man the barricades, Jerry."

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Autonomous Voice, a contributor to the Facebook site ‘A Global Group Where We Are Active Against Capitalism’, recently put up a 15-minute YouTube clip, entitled ‘The Middle Class: a Working Class Anarchist Perspective’. The speaker attempts to define and analyse what he refers to as ‘the intermediate position’ in capitalist society’ held by ‘middle-class people, particularly those in professorial, managerial or small business roles’ (youtu.be/AZl55qEWILk). While his illustration points to the same ultimate goal as proposed by the Socialist Party, the analysis of how that can be achieved is very different.

In particular there are indications of a need for ‘violent uprising’ and of this needing to come from the ‘working class’, seen as those who do forms of manual work in society. This concept, outdated as it is, is still clung to by many, but it fails to appreciate that all those who need to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary and so remain dependent on their next wage or salary payment are in the same fundamental economic position. This means not only manual workers, tradespeople, nurses, service workers, etc., but also so-called middle-class workers such as teachers, administrators, engineers, medics, tech workers, and others, all those in fact who are often described as ‘professionals’. All these workers, whether considered working class or middle class, have a common interest that is diametrically opposed to that of the other small class of people in society (we would call them the capitalist class) who own enough wealth not to need to sell their energies in order to survive. And this is the case even if, as things stand, the vast majority of wage and salary earners of all descriptions fail to perceive their subjugation to the system they are tied to.

So while ‘Autonomous Voice’ is quite correct in stating that the role of many ‘professionals’ is ‘to administer the system of exploitation and keep it running smoothly’ and that they have an attitude of complicity towards that system, he is quite wrong to suggest that this somehow takes them out of the game and that they are not themselves exploited and entirely dependent upon the ups and downs of the economic forces of capitalism. True, they – or many of them – may have conventional, indeed docile, attitudes towards capitalist society and the way it works and may seem to be, as the video puts it, ‘a buffer preventing radical change’. But the same also applies to the vast majority of those the video sees as members of the ‘working class’. All in fact are locked into the wages system and have to live with the insecurity of the monthly pay slip.

So while we would agree with the need for the kind of society advocated by this video, it confuses and derails the argument by suggesting that some workers have different interests to others. Whatever their line of work, all workers scramble to sell their energies under conditions of duress, and are usually denied the ability to control how they work and whether that work – and pay – will continue. There is a global division between the vast majority, who need to sell their energies for a wage or salary, and the tiny minority that choose to buy those energies. In the end all members of that vast majority have the same class interest – to establish a wageless, money-free society that the Socialist Party exists to campaign for and that will provide the means for all to live free and autonomous lives.

Currently very few wage and salary earners are contemplating being part of any such movement. Yet, it is the only way to transcend the capitalist system that dominates all our lives, and it can be readily voted into being if enough of us want it. It will provide a means whereby democratic associations of women and men will be able to organise on the basis of voluntary work and have free access to whatever goods and services they need, because the whole society will then collectively own and control all the resources that provide these. People will no longer have to do jobs they do not enjoy – or even hate – just because they need money. They will be able to do work they want to do and enjoy. People will cooperate to do the work that makes society function and they will make decisions democratically – in their workplaces, local communities, regions and, if circumstances require, globally. Above all there will be no more top-down control, no leaders or governments, and no more money controlling people’s lives. Only when this happens will we have a society where the freedom to develop and express our needs and potential is equal for all kinds of workers and where the material needs of all are satisfied.

Howard Moss

Letter: Classes (1978)

Letter to the Editors from the January 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Classes

What is the extent of working class investment in the UK economy and what proportion is it of total investment at a rough estimate?

I was perplexed when I came across the following extract from Marx’s work Theorien Über den Mehrwert II/2 pg. 368. in Bottomore and Rubel’s book Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy p. 198:

  What [Ricardo] forgets to mention is the continual increase in numbers of the middle classes, . . . situated midway between the workers on one side and the capitalists and landowners on the other. These middle classes rest with all their weight upon the working class and at the same time increase the social security and power of the upper class.

I’m afraid I don’t know what context this was written in (perhaps you can tell me?) but it does appear to me to contradict for example what Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto about the "lower strata of the middle class” sinking into the proletariat and also in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right where he talks of the “disintegration of the middle class” (Bottomore and Rubel, p. 190). I had always imagined that by "middle class” Marx meant basically the small businessman. From his analysis of the economics of capitalism Marx predicted the growing concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands —in the sense in which “middle class” is understood as alluding to the small businessmen Marx’s prediction is undoubtedly spot-on. Could it be that in the above quotation from Theorien Über den Mehrwert Marx used the term "middle class” to mean a social grouping embodying a petty-bourgeois mentality? If so when this appears to utterly refute the sort of smug assertions one finds in sociology textbooks that “Marx failed to foresee the growth of a middle class” (even leaving aside the point that to marxists, because someone works in an office or speaks in a posh accent, this does not make him any the less a member of the working class).

Robin Cox 

Haslemere

Reply:

1. There is no conceivable way of identifying what shares are owned by workers. Company shares are owned by individuals and joint owners, and by trustees, investment and unit trusts, banks, pension funds, insurance companies, etc. No owner explains when buying shares that he is or is not a worker.

For an individual company it is possible to find out what amount each shareholder owns, but this tells you little. X may own 1,000 shares in 10 companies, as also each of those named in the previous paragraph. However, nobody could combine this information for all companies, or identify the ultimate owners via a trust or a pension fund.

The First Report of the Royal Commission on Incomes and Wealth (pages 81-82) gives some information on the percentage of shareholding in groups classified according to the estimated total personal wealth of the persons in each group.

2. The 1969 Moscow edition of Theories of Surplus Value has an addition to the second sentence of the passage you quote and reads: "The middle classes maintain themselves to an ever increasing extent directly out of revenue, they are a burden weighing heavily on the working base and increase the social security and power of the upper ten thousand.”

In this section Marx is discussing the transformation of capital into revenue and vice versa, with references to Ricardo and another writer, John Barton. In another part of it he speaks of "the landlords and capitalists, their retainers and hangers-on”, and later: "A larger section of the workers employed in the production of articles of consumption that are consumed by—are exchanged against the revenue of—capitalists, landlords and their retainers (state, church etc.).” This makes clear that he was not talking about small businessmen.

Theories of Surplus Value was Marx’s manuscript for a projected Fourth Volume of Capital. The manuscript was never worked up by Marx for publication, and some passages are little more than notes for further elaboration; we do not know if he would have used the same phrases in a finished work. The view which Marx stated consistently is found in Capital Volume 3 (page 1025, Kerr edn.): “In view of the foregoing analysis it is not necessary to demonstrate again, that the relation between wage labour and capital determines the entire character of the mode of production. The principal agents of this mode of production itself, the capitalist and the wage worker, are to that extent merely personifications of capital and wage labour. They are definite social characters, assigned to individuals by the process of production. They are products of these definite social conditions of production.”

Editors.

Here and There. (1907)

The Here and There column from the August 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Students of Bible-lore can hardly have failed to observe that the steady deterioration in Saul’s character dated from the time that unfortunate monarch was observed by the gossips to be “among the prophets.”

—++—

The Editor of the Review of Reviews should have noted the fact before assuming the role of prophet. Says he: “The men and women of Leyden listened for an hour and a half with rapt attention while I proclaimed the great truth that the coming of the Federation of the World is near at hand.”

—++—

It appears that Lord Milner unkindly postponed “the garnering of the harvest of the Peace Conference of 1899 by his determination to crush the Boers.” These little eventualities are most trying to the modern seer. Then, again, the Organiser of Peace—and incidentally collector of pieces—has omitted from his calculations the somewhat strained relations subsisting between Master and Man all over the world.

—++—

Which reminds one of the bright and beautiful boy who— magnificently heedless of details— ignored the “blooming dots” in a problem involving “decimals,” and so arrived at an alarmingly incorrect, not to say, wildly impossible, solution.

—++—

But our enterprising journalist has, at any rate, learned the supreme merit of vagueness in his valicinations. “Near at hand” cannot be accused of Baxterian definiteness. But Upton Sinclair, of Chicago, where the potted meat et cetera—no negligible quantity either, that “cetera”—comes from, is distressingly definite when he assumes the prophet’s mantle. As thus: “the Social Revolution will take place in America within one year after the Presidential Election of 1912.”

—++—

And who is to be the “Abraham Lincoln of the coming revolution” ? HEARST !

—++—

No comment. Perhaps our American comrades will oblige.

—++—

Really, if one is to judge from the enthusiastic reports which London teachers have brought back as a result of their visit to American schools, the New country must be a veritable El Dorado for the Knights and Dames of the Ferule. One reads of schools where “the entrance hall was decorated with large palms and other shrubs, giving it more the appearance of a conservatory leading into a gentleman’s mansion than the entrance to a schoolroom,” of “lavish expenditure” on equipment, of “delightful atmosphere” in schools. One enthusiastic lady is even led to remark, somewhat oracularly, that “only he who sees takes off his shoes.”

—++—

In spite of all these advantages, in New York, 90 per cent. of the teachers are women, because “men of education usually draft off into pursuits where dollars flow more freely.” Note right here, that “salaries are much higher here than in any other city of the States.” No wonder the pedagogues of Washington “complain bitterly.”

—++—

Of course, the usual snobbery, the internecine feuds among workers which are inseparable from the capitalist system, is to be observed. “I had plenty of opportunities of noting that in the States, as in England, the University graduate and the normal school graduate do not dwell together in unity ; they are inclined to nurse a mutual prejudice; they rarely dream of going to school with each other.”

—++—

The average teacher has need “to go to school” again to learn certain facts. For instance : the “emancipation of the Certificated Class Teacher” can only be accomplished in the general emancipation of the class to which he belongs—the worker. While he may be able to snatch an apparent “victory” here, a doubtful “concession” there, (for which he is always “truly thankful. Amen.”), the economic trend of events must tend to make his wages conform to the general law operating in the present state of Society—they must tend to bare subsistence level. He has only his labour-power to sell in the mart. This he cannot dissociate from himself. He goes along with it. He is a COMMODITY.

—++—

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is open for membership to all workers. Its aim is the emancipation of the worker, its strength the recognition of the futility of “reform,” its inspiration the knowledge that it is but a factor aiding in and accelerating the inevitable Revolution towards which Society is progressing.

A. Reginald

Letter: Eye of a needle (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Eye of a needle

While I believe that the SPGB have a closer understanding of Socialism than most other groups in this country, I completely fail to understand how they can ever visualize a majority of the working class—with such famous members as bankers, debt collectors, hired hooligans of the law enforcement racket etc. all rushing to the polls to vote it in!

When that day comes they must surely be beaten to the post by the "bored with wealth” brigade.

It will be the lower strata of the working class who will finally establish Socialism—not those so-called socialists of the “upper working class", those “middle-class-working-class” intellectuals of Somnambulistic Enterprises Ltd. Socialism will always remain the prerogative of the poor— never of the "managers” of the wealthy!

J. W. Pitt

Worthing

Reply:

If what you say were correct, the most poverty-stricken city areas would be full of Socialists; manifestly, they are not. As an example, at the time of writing there is a by-election in Ladywood, Birmingham, which was described in The Times of 13th August as "one of the worst environments of any big European city”—yet the chief interest in the campaign is the possibility of the Tory candidate being elected. Further, if what you say were correct the Socialist Party would have an interest in obstructing the "lower strata of the working class” from trying to improve their standard of living.

Your point of view is the understandable one that managers, administrative workers and law-enforcers perform anti-working-class functions and therefore cannot act as Socialists. Yet these people are themselves exploited. Marx said of them: “the labour of superintendence, entirely separated from the ownership of capital, walks the streets” (and more about this in Volume 3 of Capital, second half of the chapter headed "Interest and Profit of Enterprise”). Dire poverty is one but certainly not the sole source of Socialist consciousness; many workers become Socialists through other frustrations and perceptions of the hopelessness of capitalism. To whoever does, it means he has acquired class consciousness which over-rides the capitalist-conditioned outlook he previously had (if he is in an anti-working-class job, what he does about it is up to him). Don’t say that certain people are beyond the reach of class consciousness; in a class-divided society, nobody is.

There is another way of looking at this. According to National Income and Expenditure 1965-75, published by the Central Statistical Office, out of 28,123 tax units (i.e. incomes) in Britain in 1973-74, 24,251 were under £2,500 net and 20,496 were under £2,000. So if Socialism were dependent on low incomes the great majority of the working class would qualify anyway. Those who have you worried are a small proportion; the “lower strata" is (most of us.

Editors.

A Middle-Class Utopia. (1907)

Book Review from the July 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Modern Thraldom.—A New Social Gospel, by Dr. W. Hampson, M.A. London: Wells Gardner, Barton & Co. Paper covers, 162 pp., 1s. 6d. Net.

The early portion of this book describes the servitude into which “borrowed” tools, houses, and land are supposed to have thrown the “labouring classes,” the “clean clothes classes,” and also the tradesmen, small manufacturers, and farmers. The evidence in the book, however, really shows that the poverty of the workers and the crushing of the small capitalists are due to the concentration of wealth and industry into fewer hands turning increasing numbers into propertyless hirelings of the possessing few. But to put it thus involves Socialism as the solution, so our author prefers to attribute the situation not to the inevitable march of industrial development, but simply to credit in some form or other. 

The most interesting part of the book is that dealing with agriculture, where many reasons are given for the decrease in number and increase in size of farms, but where the most important reasons such as the development of agricultural machinery which cannot profitably be employed on small farms, the general economies of operations on a large scale, and the development of the machinery of transport which brings other climes into more acute competition, are missed. This, however, is of a piece with the fact that Dr. Hampson nowhere realises the force of the economic trend.

From his point of view of the small property-holder, the author is much troubled by the question of the rates, but his own evidence shows it to be a question that does not concern the workers or even the tenant farmer. He says, p. 46: —

“At the time of the great depression in land values and profits from land, it became impossible for farmers to continue paying their former rents, and a percentage was remitted in most cases, so as to bring the amount payable each half-yearly rent day just within the limits of the possible. If a season were exceptionally bad, so as to involve the farmers in inevitable loss, a larger percentage of rent would be remitted. If times improved in some way, the remission would be less. Thus when the Agricultural Rating Act was passed, to relieve the farmers of a portion of their rates, a smaller percentage of rent was remitted the next half year.”

The middle class of course has its schisms and the author tilts against modern radicalism and against that municipal enterprise which is such a blessing to many middle-class investors, and also against the officialism that provides easy positions for their sons ; but Dr. Hampson’s attitude is nevertheless essentially that of the class between the devil and the deep blue sea. He protests against rings and combines, but is specially vehement against working-class trade organisations, and states that trade union action, by restricting free competition in labour “means a reduction of wages and in the standard of living,” while on p. 28 it is further urged that:—

“All combining, negotiating, organised advising and warning, striking, picketing, and other proceedings intended to restrict the freedom of the labour market, ought to be regarded and treated as criminal, so as to restore complete freedom to the man who wants to sell labour and to the man who wants to buy it.”

There is also on p. 12 a curious defence of the exploitation of labourers—exploitation by the middle class of course. It is stated that the shareholders having the necessary plant and materials or equivalent wealth—

“Lent them to the officials and working men and women of the factory, on condition that the latter, having borrowed them and worked with them, should pay to the lenders a part of the profits earned by their labour, namely, all that was over after they had been paid a subsistence wage depending, among other conditions, on the recognised minimum standard of living in the district at the time. Now this was a perfectly open bargain, well understood by all the parties to it, and the shareholders, who in fact lent the factory and appliances, have a right to claim that they shall not have hard words thrown at them, as capitalists, because they are taking a part of the profit earned by other men’s labour.”

In the description of the Utopia that is expected to follow the adoption of the author’s suggestions there is nothing but glorified middle-class conditions, with the middle class predominant in wealth and power. It is prohibited to live in hired rooms and houses, and all credit is forbidden except the capital of limited liability companies, of which all shareholders are required to be also occupied in connection with their company, while no shareholder may own more than five times the smallest allotment of shares. A kind of Single Tax is instituted (in spite of the author’s ideal of free internal trade) in the nature of a poundage on every cash transaction. This tax (which the author says is not a tax, and which is to be levied without officials) is to enable the one man government to supply such of the citizens as have deposited £250 in the State Bank, with a further £250 on their marriage for the purpose of buying house, furniture and allotment. There are to be no boards, committees, councils or parliament. National government is to be run by an elected president and local administration by a manager ; while no one can vote unless he owns, among other things, a bicycle !

There is still to be wage-slavery in the new Utopia, but the workmen are supposed to be able to get higher wages through the absence of trade organisations, and through being forbidden to hire rooms, so having to buy a room or rooms outright. The labourer is to give six hours industrial labour per day and put in the rest of his time on the land. The thrashing, winnowing and grinding of corn is to be done at home in small hand machines because :

“However little it may cost to grind in a steam driven mill, it costs less to do it at home in the time that used to be spent in the evening at a public house. It costs nothing at all, but actually saves the money that was once spent in drinking to while away the time.”

How typically middle class ! 

Even the great domestic servant question is almost solved in this Utopia. The author says :

“And are mistresses no longer the slaves of their servants ?

In this respect also there is great improvement. We have now no large class of excessively rich, keeping large houses full of ‘pampered menials,’ and so setting before other servants a false standard of lavishness, luxury, ease, pilfering, and ‘perks.’ On the other hand the middle-class ladies, having given up imitating the luxury of the rich, have themselves become as good practical housekeepers as their husbands are practical business men and cultivators. They can, if need he, manage their houses in many cases without outside help, and so, when they have that help they know how to keep, without petty domineering, the position of mistress in their own homes.”

The Doctor’s Utopia illustrates both how completely class interests as they are recognised mould a man’s views, and how narrow is the mental vision of the middle class.

For the realisation of this Utopia an association called the Land and Labour League is to be formed and to be endowed by a few charitably disposed millionaires for the purchase of property, the tenure of which is to be sold to League members who in turn are not allowed to give any of their property as security for a loan. Leaguers will pay “no rates or taxes,” these will be paid by the League out of proceeds of a receipt stamp tax to be levied on all members.

The League, says the author, is to be a co-worker with the garden city schemes at Bourneville, Port Sunlight, York, Letchworth and other places, so it is very small beer after all.

The League will, when funds allow, put £250 to the selected member’s on his marriage for the purchase of house and grounds that are to remain technically the property of the League—a sort of glorified building society in fact that is supposed to grow snowball like, until it absorbs the whole of Society.

But what of the, working man ? How is he to save the necessary £250 in order to participate in this paradise ? The author has told us that to-day “The lowest salary which will supply the bare living must be accepted by each applicant lest another cut in and take the place,” also that “conditions make it practically impossible for an average man to rise out of the labouring ranks in which he was born.”

The odds therefore appear to be rather long against the workers being able to save the requisite £250 each, indeed, they do not stand even an outside chance. But the author of the “New Social Gospel” has a most simple plan. It is to tax immigrants heavily and put an almost prohibitive tax on imports. Then, says the doctor:

“When all the production for the English market is secured for the English producer, there will be for a time an era of prosperity seldom equalled before. Demand will overtake supply for a time. The price of labour will rise higher than ever before; the unemployed and, under such tempting conditions, many even of those who are now unemployable, will be earning money ; and the workers being rich, the prices of common articles will rise also, though not in the same proportion as wages.”

Truly a simple plan—for simpletons. The workman knows that labour-power is the last to participate in a rise in prices, so that the problematic rise in wages will not be proportionate to the rise in general prices. The worker will also see that if prices rise, then the price of house and land rises also, thus the amount to be saved rises proportionately, leaving the possibility to the workman of saving at least as remote as before.

Further, restricted immigration is no new thing, and where instituted has made no appreciable difference to the workers. It is not the alien, but capitalist development that creates the unemployed, and the same process is going on in every country ; new inventions and processes, greater concentration and more efficient organisation decrease daily the proportion of wage workers required by the masters to produce for the market. Large numbers of workers are thus thrown on the streets while the owners of the instruments and materials of labour reap the whole of the benefit.

And with regard to a prohibitive import tax, owing to the very nature of international exchange, the import trade of the country cannot be destroyed without causing havoc in the export trade and the consequent ruin (under capitalist conditions) of those producing for export. We have also object lessons the whole world over of the futility of fiscal juggling as far as the workers are concerned. Capitalist conditions breed working-class poverty everywhere, and must do so long as the workers are the hirelings of the possessing few. But even supposing that by some miracle all wage slaves managed to save £250 and so live rent free ; is it not a fact that capitalism (whether under small or large manufacturers) turns the very thrift and temperance of the workers into weapons of offence against them ? and does not Dr. Hampson himself prove this ? Speaking of allotments he says :

“Suppose the profits from a plot of land to be equal to two shillings a week. Then a man and his family can live in the same moderate degree of comfort as before on a wage of fourteen shillings instead of sixteen if need be.

It is the professed object of the promoters of improvement on these lines that the improvement shall become general. Suppose them to succeed to the full extent of their hopes. Suppose that practically all the labourers increase their wages by such means to the equivalent of eighteen shillings, so that they could, in case of necessity, continue their present style of living on an actual money wage of fourteen shillings. The farmers would not be long in making the discovery that their labourers were able to live on two shillings a week less. And the next week they would require their men to prove their ability.”

Such, indeed, is the mainspring of the welcome that has greeted the present Liberal Small Holdings Bill. And its undeniable truth destroys at one blow Dr. Hampson’s Utopia as far as the workers are concerned. Whatever cheapens the cost of living of the workman, as soon as it becomes general, reduces his wage, competition compelling him to sell himself for a mere subsistence. Yet Dr. Hampson dares to say that if the worker did not have to pay rent he would be enabled to exact a higher wage ! The small capitalist is essentially reactionary, and his only possible ideal is one that runs counter to every economic tendency. And our author, voicing the interests and ideals of this class, has reckoned without his host, the financial magnate, who now rules the capitalist roost, and without, also, the army of the workers, who can only go forward, to industrial democracy,—not backward, to the infancy of capitalist society. Unlike the middle class intellectuals, the scientific Socialist, has outgrown the Utopian stage. Our author, however, evidently imagines that men figure the society they want and then make it to order ; so he thinks that if the public find his Utopia good they will set themselves to make one like it. The scientific Socialist does not erect a fanciful Utopia, but analyses actual Society, its economics and its history, and tracing its laws of development sees whither the basic factor, the development of wealth production, tends, and derives therefrom, not a detailed picture of the future, but the broad direction of economic evolution and the essential principles of the society foreshadowed by the present. And by the study of men’s actions, motives and history, he is enabled to discover the essential principles of the action that must be taken to render the transition speedy and beneficial.

Dr. Hampson has not done this, therefore his reforms are upon all counts a snare and delusion to the middle class in their struggle against the inevitable, while to the working class they offer at best nothing but a shuffling of masters by no means to the better.

F. C. Watts

Letter: Small Fry (1976)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Small Fry

I read with interest your reply to Robin Cox, entitled “Working and Class” (March Socialist Standard), in which you say that a self-employed business man employing a handful of people cannot be classed as a member of the capitalist class proper. With which I agree, but by the same token, if a person retains the full value of his own labour and the surplus value of, say, 5 or 6 other people then he cannot be classed as a member of the working class proper.

I remember reading an article which, if my memory serves me right, made this very point, saying that the labour theory of value was very elastic and that the small business man came into an economic “grey area”, but that these people were such a small minority of the world’s population it was of no importance to the scheme of things. It also rightly pointed out that a self-employed person’s interest lies more with the working class than the capitalist class, as often in an economic crisis many find themselves fighting for their very existence. Indeed, thousands have found themselves relegated to the ranks of the dole queue in competition for the sale of their labour-power.

I would be most interested in your comments.

E. Higdon. 

Auckland, N.Z.

Reply:

In addition to the answer you yourself give, we would say the following. The kind of small enterprise you suggest is seldom independent and would not be capable of competition with larger companies. Instead, it is commonly dependent on one or another of them. It supplies components, or sub-contracts, or plays a part in distribution.

The “business man” running such a firm is theoretically getting his living from the surplus-value produced by those he employs, but in practice he is supervising a segment of the larger enterprise. Usually the use of his own labour-power is as indispensable as that of the employees, and in effect he is himself employed and exploited. When the major company reduces production he is likely to be left with his outlet diminished or gone and his liabilities to meet: hence the many bankruptcies among small companies.

It is convenient to the capitalist class to let small enterprises go on in this way. Many of them produce cheaply because they are in sub-standard premises, employ part-time or casual labour, or believe sacrificial cheapness equals competitiveness and will get them more contracts; and the volume of goods or services supplied to a company in this way is not sufficient to be worth the company’s while to incorporate in its own production. As an example, a few years ago the Esso oil company operated a system of “authorized installers” for central heating. Under it, small businesses installed boilers, pipes and radiators for small returns—so that Esso heating oil could then be sold. Not much doubt who was, and who was not, realizing the surplus-value in that case.

Editorial Committee.