Wasting time at the seaside (1966)

From the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is very considerate of the Labour, Liberal and Conservative Parties to hold their annual conferences in the autumn.

At any rate, the seaside hotel keepers must think so, because the conferences bring them some welcome business just as the season is dying; and so must all those seaside landladies, who can keep the secret machines which put lumps into the porridge and burn the toast in profitable operation for another week or so. There is even the sea, which everyone expects to be cold in the autumn, allowing politicians to prove what lovable eccentrics they are by having themselves photographed taking a dip.

It is all good fun, although since the object of it is to win the game of power politics it can hardly be described as clean. But more than other any other reason for feeling grateful for the autumn conferences is that they provide us with something to chuckle over in the long, dark evenings ahead.

There are two types of annual conferences. One sort is run by the parties which are out of power; a certain amount of freedom is allowed here. In most cases—although there have been some famous exceptions, of which more later critics can be treated indulgently, as living proof of ruthless self-criticism, a restless drive for new ideas and a young, zestful heart.

When, for example, Edward Heath was asked on television what he thought about the prospects of receiving a lot of criticism of his leadership at this year’s Tory conference he replied, with a huge grin, that he enjoyed conferences and would be there all the time. Jo Grimond, far from being upset at the noisy activities of the Young Liberals at their conference, went out of his way to praise them and was photographed having an amiable drink with some of them.

There is no such carefree goodwill towards the rebels in a party which is in power. At their conferences the leaders on the platform, are trying to justify broken promises, to explain away diametrical changes in policy and, above all, to convince everyone that, although the present times are hard, with patience and support and unity all will be well. In this situation, critics are not welcomed as a stimulus; they are condemned—sometimes outlawed—as traitors to their party and to what politicians like to call the country.

There are many weary hours to be spent in the conference hall, and it is common for the newspaper men to try to brighten these up a little by fastening their attention upon some so-called personality of the conference. This usually means a lot of publicity for someone who, although he does no more than repeat the same weary platitudes and misconceptions which have been heard so many times before, wakes everybody up by sounding as if he actually believed what he says.

So it was this year with the Young Liberals, who came storming down to Brighton to demand all sorts of reckless things like “workers control” in industry (the inverted commas are intended, and necessary). These young people laid about them and one of them went so far as to shatter the peace of the conference by swearing—or at any rate he said “bloody” and “damn”, which in this age of Kenneth Tynan probably no longer rate as swear words.

The newspapers loved it and decided that no title would be appropriate for the Young Liberals short of Jo Grimond’s Red Guards. It is interesting to wonder what the fanatical young hooligans in Peking would think about being compared with a few hysterical students daring to say “bloody” to an assembly of Liberals on an autumn afternoon at an English seaside resort.

Such, however, are the ways of the press, which also has a liking for putting the finger on what they consider to be political stars of the future who enter the limelight at a conference. This is what the papers did some years back to Ray Gunter, who has now risen so far and so fast that he has the important job of implementing the very policy on wages which his party once scorned. This year, at the TUC, some reporters decided that Leslie Cannon, President of the Electrical Trade Union, showed by his speech that he is a future MP, perhaps even a Minister.

It is hardly necessary to point out that to win this nomination for future stardom a man has to agree with official policy. No member of the Labour Party has ever been selected as a rising leader after making an attack, no matter how capable, on his party’s line on wages or nuclear armaments; Frank Cousins, the most prominent of the critics on those issues, has always been regarded as something of a joke. Still less would a person be noticed for attacking the fundamentals of the Labour Party—its capitalist policies, its obsession with leadership, its unavoidable failure. The newspapers have their own standards of success and they are sticking by them.

Behind all the ballyhoo and the alleged drama and excitement what are conferences for? Every man in the street knows that they are supposed to lay down their party's policy and to take decisions based on that policy. A simple man in a backward street may even think that, because the capitalist parties profess to be democratic, the decisions taken by their conference delegates are binding.

The first thing to say about this is that some of the delegates’ votes are cast in ways which are anything but an expression of their members’ opinions. At this year’s Labour conference the voting policy of the Amalgamated Engineering Union changed suddenly from support of the government to opposition. This was not because the AEU delegates had received different instructions from their members. It simply happened that their leader, Bank of England director Sir William Carron, who is an unmovable supporter of the government, left Brighton for a meeting of the board of the Fairfield shipyard.

This apparently left the AEU delegation floundering, until a series of other absences gave the leadership to Hugh Scanlon, who is generally critical of the government. The result of this was that the AEU, voting as whoever was their leader at the time wished, was one day for the government and another against it.

Yet even without this sort of maneouvering, the votes of a conference are anything but decisive. Labour this year declared several times in favour of the government—on wage freezing, Rhodesia, foreign policy. But when the conference went the other way on other issues—redundancy, Germany and support for America over Vietnam—Ministers made it plain that they would take no notice. It was all summed up by Harold Wilson himself, in one word, when he asked what he intended to do about the famous Cousins victory over work sharing—“Govern”.

This has of course happened before. In 1959, when Labour was licking its wounds after Macmillan had thrashed them at the polls, they decided at one of their rowdiest conferences not to follow Hugh Gaitskell’s advice to delete Clause Four from their constitution. So in theory, and by conference decision, the Labour. Party stands for the sort of capitalism where all the means of production, distribution and exchange are nationalised. But of course they have not the slightest intention of doing anything about it.

Poor Gaitskell had a knack of infuriating his party’s conferences. Another example of a refusal to accept inconvenient decisions was when, after the 1960 vote in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament, he declared his intention to “fight, fight and fight again” and, because on that occasion some of the big unions had voted against him, questioned the morality of the block vote which had always been accepted as long as it docilely accepted the policy of the platform:

I sometimes think, firmly, that the system we have by which great unions decide their policy before even their conference can consider their executive's recommendation is not really a wise one or a good one.

It is clear that when a conference agrees with its leaders it is the authentic voice of democracy, rich in wisdom. When it disagrees it is irresponsible and treacherous. The peculiar thing is that, although the members of the capitalist parties must know this very well, they are still prepared to be delegates to their conferences, they still work for their party, they still welcome its taking power.

The plain fact is that whatever a conference may decide, a party’s policy is already fixed. No matter how bloodthirstily the Tory hangers and floggers pursued their prey at conference, Conservative Home Secretaries stuck out for penal reform. No matter what support the Rhodesia lobby gathers, the Conservative leadership must agree that the Smith regime should be brought to an end.

Similarly, even if the 1960 vote on nuclear weapons had not been reversed, no Labour government would have surrendered the British Bomb simply because their conference had told them to. Whichever way the vote went on this year’s battle over incomes, the government's mind was made up and the more coercive Part IV of the Prices and Incomes Bill was ready to be brought into operation.

And while we are on the subject, there is something which we should notice about the Prices and Incomes Bill. It is the first openly anti-trade union legislation for something like 40 years—and it is the work of a party which came into existence as a result of a conference decision of February, 1900, to establish

a distinct labour group in Parliament . . . which must embrace a readiness to co-operate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour and . . . with any party in opposing measures having an opposite tendency.

What, we asked, are conferences for? Even if their decisions can be, and are, ignored they are often an opportunity for a party to pronounce on its policy. Perhaps some people may prefer to describe this as warning the working class what to expect, or as making the promises the breaking of which later conferences will have to explain away. In 1963, for example, Labour was hypnotised by the Wilson vision of a technological Britain, with a wise government guiding massive investment into the “science based” industries, with technicians enthusiastically at work in their laboratories and at their drawing boards and with everyone’s wages going up in a nice, steady, organised curve. It was all very good for the headlines, for the electoral image and all the other political public relations man's obsessions.

It usually happens that at such times there is so much concern with a party’s public image that nobody notices the policies which are being expounded from the platform do not amount to much. Consider George Brown’s unoriginal idea of settling the Vietnam war by recalling the Geneva conference—the very conference which first set up the division of the country and so played its part in bringing about the present war there.

At other times the publicity a conference receives can be disastrous for the party, like the 1960 Labour uproar over CND and the public spectacle of Tory leaders savaging each other as they clawed for the place left vacant by Macmillan’s retirement during the 1963 Blackpool conference.

Or a conference can be an outlet for a party's donkey workers. It can give them a break from the hard slog of committee work, canvassing, addressing. They can come to express their doubts and disappointments, to wonder what happened to the visions they once had, Then they can stifle their doubts, admire their leaders and finally submerge themselves in what they call loyalty, but for which there is an unkinder if more accurate name, at a mass rally. Then they can go back to the donkey work with renewed energy.

No conference ever probes, or even discusses the facts. No resolution ever says that the parties of capitalism exist to run the social system which oppresses and degrades millions of human beings, that this system can only be run in the interests of a minority and to the detriment of the majority. Labour’s “left wing” come to their conferences convinced that they are looking for the lost soul of their party—none of them points out, perhaps none of them realises, that a capitalist party is bound to deceive, to override its members’ wishes and to disappoint its followers by pushing through unpleasant and inhuman measures.

Conferences make a lot of noise, exhale a lot of hot air, attract a lot of publicity. But when it is all over, when the delegates have gone home and the hall has been cleared and the seaside has sunk back into its out-of-season doze, one thing is abundantly clear.

It was all a waste of time.

Ivan

So, this is Social Security (1966)

From the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

"During the last 50 years a comprehensive scheme of national insurance has been gradually developed to become the central feature of our system of social security.” These were the words of the then Minister of Pensions and National Insurance Richard Wood, in a forward to a government booklet: Everybody’s Guide To National Insurance, May, 1964. If this statement does anything at all, it underlines capitalism’s continuing, indeed developing, need for all sorts of compulsory insurance provisions for its working population.

We have come a long way since the days of Lloyd George and his five shilling pension proposals, and the very limited dole and "panel” medicine of the inter-war years. To even these comparatively modest measures, there were always the objectors who thought “the country could not afford it,” but it was Lloyd George himself who shoved his opponents contemptuously aside with the observation that paying a pension was cheaper than maintaining old people in work-houses. And this has been the sort of criterion which has guided the reformers ever since; despite the professed humanitarianism of the Labour Party, their spokesman Jim Griffiths was under no illusion about the aims of national insurance when he commended his sweeping post-war proposals to the Commons on February 6, 1946:

The loss to the Nation caused by preventive illness alone is appalling, for it has been estimated at £300 millions a year, equal to 3/5ths of the cost of the scheme in its initial year. To those who fear we cannot afford this scheme, I would advise them to ask themselves if we can afford to go on without it. 

Under this National Insurance Bill, a wide range of “benefits” was enacted based to a large extent on the old Beveridge proposals, and estimated to cost some £452 millions in 1949 and £496 millions in 1955. Contributions were to range from 2/2d. to 4/7d. a week from workers, and their employers were to make weekly contributions ranging from l/9d. to 3/10d. per employee. There was also to be a grant from the Exchequer, and all of this money was to be pooled in the National Insurance Fund, to which would be charged the costs of benefits and administration.

This arrangement has remained largely unaltered over the years, but it is nonsense to suggest, as some Labourites and others were doing then, that the scheme would abolish poverty. Prime Minister Attlee claimed in a Commons speech (February 7, 1946) that “the Bill would help to maintain the high standard of purchasing power among the masses of the people.” But just take a look at some of the benefit rates then, and see if you agree with him: — 

Unemployment or sickness               26/-per week (£2 married couple)

Pension  . . .   . . .                             26/-per week (£2 married couple)

100 per cent Disability Pay                45/-per week 

Nat. Assistance (ordinary) . . .            50/-per week

    for man and wife (begun 1948)      65/- per week

Incidentally, an interesting and pertinent comment is made on the scheme by M. Penelope Hall in her book The Social Services of Modern England. She says:

One drastic modification in the Beveridge Plan was made at the start. Benefits have never been paid at subsistence level. Beveridge regarded this modification to his scheme as disastrous. 

In the 20 years since 1946, government cost estimates have been sadly put out by continuously rising prices and increases in the cost of living, so that various amending Acts have had to be passed, stepping up the benefits and the contribution rates. By 1959, for example, unemployment, sickness and pension rates all stood at 50/- per week single, while National Assistance was at 76/- (normal) and 96/- (special) for a man and wife. This was the year, you may recall, that the Tories were pointing with pride to their achievements in this field, ignoring such uncomfortable facts as 1¾ million people having to apply for National Assistance—about 1.4 millions of them old age pensioners.

But even the Conservatives, jubilant at their 1959 election victory, could not pretend that provisions were adequate, even by the miserable standards that capitalist politicians set, and not long after that their graduated pensions scheme was introduced, which meant larger contributions from those earning over £9 a week, to secure proportional payment in addition to a flat-rate pension. Under such an arrangement, you would get an extra sixpence a week added to your flat-rate pension for every £7 10s. paid in, and when you consider the piffling extent of these changes, you might wonder what all the song and dance was about. Certainly there was nothing from the workers’ point of view, although from the Government’s angle the new scheme gave the pension system some flexibility, and so no doubt was intended to keep down the extra cost.

The whole question of National Insurance was tossed about by the main parties at the 1964 election, and it was becoming apparent anyway that an overhaul was due in the system of payments and contributions. For example, while there was not the heavy and persistent unemployment of the twenties and thirties, there was the question of “labour mobility” and the tiding over of unemployed workers when retraining for new jobs, following the decline of some of the older industries. So the Labour Government’s measures now include compulsory compensation payments to any worker made redundant after a minimum of two years at the same job.

In the government’s social security arrangements, it is interesting that they have retained essentially unchanged the graduated pension scheme of which they had been so scornful when the Tories introduced it. In addition, there is the “Earnings-Related Short-Term Benefits Scheme” which just means that there will be a flat-rate sickness and unemployment benefit of £4 a week minimum, plus further payments, depending on your average weekly earnings between £9 and £30 a week. Here again we see the pressure of present-day conditions in the government’s attempts to offload at least some of the burden of the rising cost of benefits from the central Exchequer. Quite clearly also, the 1946 scales and payment methods no longer suffice to keep workers ticking over in sickness or between jobs, and once more the modern emphasis is on “flexibility”. It could be that this is something we shall see more of in the future, what with the growth of new industries and the decline of the old, to say nothing of plain old-fashioned unemployment because of trade crises.

And what other changes have there been recently? Oh yes, the old Ministry of Pensions and Njational Insurance has been replaced by the brand new “Ministry of Social Security” (surely a contradiction in terms) with responsibility for all the schemes which were formerly administered separately, such as National Assistance. These particular payments will be known as “supplementary benefits” and are a fitting reminder of the way in which reformers' plans can misfire. In 1953, Lord Beveridge admitted that he and the experts had originally expected National Assistance payments to be on a small scale only and to gradually diminish. But, in fact, the very opposite has' happened, and the government has resigned itself to the fact by allowing for increased rates of benefit when the new arrangements start in the autumn.

What all these measures add up to is merely the organisation of 1966 poverty by 1966 methods, and the usual attempts to maintain the workforce at the appropriate standards of health and efficiency to keep capitalism’s production and profits going. It has been the irritating habit of Labourites to claim that these Acts bring dignity to workers’ lives, but their very existence is an indication of the essential indignity of working class life. And despite the increasing intricacy of state insurance and widening of its scope, there are many who stay stubbornly poor even by “Supplementary Benefits” standards. Like the 15,000 families admitted by Assistance Board Chairman Lord Runcorn to be “living on assistance at the moment, at an income well below their needs, because allowances are based on the best estimate that can be made of a man’s future earnings.” Or like “those whose take-home pay is less than they need by assistance standards, although in full employment.”

Eddie Critchfield

The Health Services (1966)

From the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

The school medical service was the first national health scheme to be established in Britain. In the earliest days of compulsory education a constant source of anxiety for the capitalist state was the suspicion that it was wasting money on many of the underfed and underclad children in its elementary schools, simply because their physical condition prevented them from really applying themselves to their books. But what finally shook the reformers into action were the press reports of widespread physical defects found in the young workers recruited into the army at the time of the Boer War. It was feared that the bulk of Britain’s. “C3 population” was not even fit enough to die defending the imperialist interests of the ruling class. Hence in 1904 the Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration emphasised the need for a system of medical inspection of school children. This led to the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, 1907. It is, of course, no coincidence that the other principal improvements to the school medical service are linked with the First and Second World Wars. The drafting of hundreds of thousands of working men and women on both these occasions again showed to what extent social conditions had undermined health. It is against this background that the Education Acts of 1921 and 1944 can be understood. These made it a duty for all education authorities to provide routine health inspections to be conducted on school premises.

However, the Education Act of 1944 was largely overshadowed by the discussion which raged around the Beveridge Plan and eventually materialised as the National Health Service Act, 1946. If ever there was a case of a government feeling it could simply plan away the problems of ill-health arising from the capitalist system, this was it. What was envisaged was a unified scheme available for the whole population, except for those who had the money and inclination to pay for private treatment. As can be seen from the diagram following, in theory every form of illness was adequately covered.

Under the Act the vast majority of hospitals were transferred to the Minister of Health (i.e. formal ownership of the State) on July 5, 1948. The Minister was charged with the responsibility for providing adequate hospital accommodation together with the required medical, nursing and other facilities—including the services of specialists. Eighteen years later accommodation, in terms of the number of hospitals and the number of beds, still remains inadequate. As one government publication put it: “Scarcity of capital resources seriously limited hospital building in the early years of the service.” But, it proudly goes on, “. . . the annual expenditure on hospital building rose from £12.5 million in 1956-57 . . . to an estimated £54.6 million in 1963-64 . . .” To put such figures in perspective they must be measured against the “defence” expenditure for comparable years (£1,483 million in 1957-58 and £1,837 million in 1965-66—see the Socialist Standard, August, 1966).

But the problem is not just one of too few beds, even though the Guardian mentioned on June 9, 1966, that there are now about 10,000 patients waiting to enter a hospital. Low wages have resulted in a chronic shortage of nurses and doctors. Earlier this year the general secretary of the Confederation of Health Service Employees reported to his union that 13 per cent of the beds in the hospital service could not be used anyway at present—because of the lack of staff. Most doctors are continually overworked and reports of individuals putting in well over 100 hours a week are commonplace. However, despite all the statistics that could be quoted, perhaps the best appraisal of the hospital service can be made by referring to the comment of a Manchester consultant, reported in the Daily Mail, August 22, 1966:

“When I was doing my house training I’d do a stitching job in casualty after being up all night, and I’d know it wasn’t my best work.

"Today I should hate to be knocked down and become a patient. The odds are I’d get a young doctor who had been on duty for 48 hours. How could 1 expect his best work?”

Unless you can afford the fees of a private surgeon or those of the London Clinic, this is what the hospital service means for you.

The general medical and dental services are under the supervision of the local executive councils. There is one of these to each county and county borough and it is their function to organise the doctors, dentists, pharmacists and opticians in their areas so that a comprehensive medical service exists. Supplementing these are the local health authorities who are responsible for the ambulance and midwife services as well as employing health visitors, home nurses and so on. The fact is that everywhere in this supposedly “comprehensive medical service” there are gaps and inadequacies resulting from lack of staff and facilities. A few details should make this clear.

Ten years ago the report of a working party on health visitors (Min. of Health—1956) suggested that a total force of 11,500 would be required “for the Health Visitor to effectively discharge all the duties required of her.” Years later, when this estimate is outdated anyway, there are still only the equivalent of 8,000 whole-time health visitors employed in Great Britain. Similarly, there is still throughout the country an unsatisfied demand for home helps—especially among old people. At present the average for England and Wales is that for every 10,000 people only 68 are receiving some form of assistance in this way. Section 25 of the National Health Service Act places on local health authorities the duty of providing home nursing for invalids who require such attention. As one writer euphemistically put it: "The limiting factor for some time to come will probably be the number of nurses available.” (The New Public Health —F. Grundy, London, 1965). Again, under Section 21 of the same Act, the local health authorities were ordered to equip and maintain health centres in their areas. “(This) duty on local health authorities has not been enforced, largely because of the restrictions until recent years on capital investment in health and welfare projects . . . By the end of 1963 only 18 health centres had been opened . . .” (Health Services in Britain, HMSO, 1964).

One service not mentioned so far is that of health inspection. Every council, other than county councils, is required to appoint one or more public health inspectors who supervise slum clearance, inspect houses and factories, check food supplies and so on. In the same year that the National Health Service Act was passed, a report of the Central Housing Advisory Committee outlined a 16-point standard for a “satisfactory” dwelling. It should be stressed that these were minimum requirements and merely included such stipulations as that the house should be dry, equipped with a proper drainage system and have adequate heating facilities for each room. It was pointed out back in 1946 that it was not then practicable to put this standard on a statutory basis and immediately have the public health inspectors enforce it. Twenty years later this is still the case. Millions of workers continue to live in damp, insanitary, squalid buildings which the authorities label with the bureaucratic understatement of “unsatisfactory”.

The health services, just as much as the mines and factories, are organised and run by members of the working class. There can be no doubt that many of the overworked doctors and underpaid nurses stick at their jobs simply because of their conviction that they are doing worthwhile work. But, like all workers under capitalism, they find that their efforts are hemmed in and frustrated by a social system where health comes very low down on the list of priorities.

John Crump

Finance and Industry: Who goes bust? (1966)

The Finance and Industry Column from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who goes bust?

Many workers refuse to accept the hard fact that they have been condemned for life to work for a wage or salary for those who own the means of wealth production. Spurred on by stories of how ordinary workers have risen to be wealthy capitalists, they imagine that they, too, can do this. Such people long for their own shop or snack-bar or garage to escape from wage-slavery, Unfortunately for them they often find they have to work harder for themselves (or their creditors) than they had to when working for wages. For some it’s even worse—they go under and are cast back into the working class, less their savings.

The latest annual report of the Board of Trade on bankruptcy gives as the top lines among the 3,404 who went bust in 1965:

The list continues with hardware and electrical goods retailers, confectioners, tobacconists and newsagents, meat retailers, plumbers, fruit and vegetable retailers, general stores, electrical contractors, commercial travellers and so on. In other words the small shopkeepers and businessmen that workers often wish to be.

Next time you hear the story about how good capitalism must be because so-and-so rose to be a capitalist, remember the other side of the story: for every one who succeeds hundreds fail completely and thousands more are condemned to a life of drudgery and worry not unlike the rest of us. Besides capitalism can’t work without a working class, which means that most of us don't even get a chance of becoming a petty capitalist.

World Capitalism

Socialism can only be world-wide because capitalism, the system it will replace, is already so. Modern industry has a world-wide character which ignores frontiers. But although millions co-operate to produce wealth this wealth does not belong to society as a whole; it belongs to just a part of society. Today wealth is produced socially but owned privately. This is the basic contradiction of capitalism. Private ownership of the means of wealth production in fact conflicts with modern technology. One aspect of this is the division of the world into competing, and often warring, states.

Many people don’t realise that the typical firm today is not the small builder or motor repair man mentioned in the previous section. Production, in many lines, is dominated by a few giant, international firms such as Shell, ICI, Unilever and Philips. Sir Paul Chambers, head of ICI, made an interesting speech at the International Management Congress in Rotterdam on September 20. He doubted whether the creation of a Western European economic bloc could be more than a short-term solution to the problems created by the vast size and international character of some modern industries. Modern technology, he said, could be a source of “strife" if its international character were not taken into account. Chambers went on:

I have pointed to the aircraft industry and the inevitability of the growing integration of aircraft firms on an international basis. Almost every emergent country wants its own airline, but it has to rely upon the major makers—mainly British and American—for its needs. A similar trend can be seen in computers and in photographic materials and equipment. In car manufacture the integration of firms is beginning to take on a similar international character. The complete sovereign independence of small states is becoming inconsistent with the growing economic dependence upon large international industrial groups domiciled elsewhere. (Financial Times Sept. 21, 1966).

Men like Sir Paul Chambers do not think in national terms. They know that capitalism is international and act on it. The workers, those who run these industries from top to bottom , in all countries, might well learn from this.

The right to be lazy

Are you tired even before you start work? Do you dislike having to work hard for eight or more hours a day?

Peter Lennon, in the Guardian of September 22, wrote up some of the views put forward on these and other questions at a recent international conference on psychosomatic medicine in Paris:

Many citizens manage to reach a condition of distressed exhaustion before doing anything at all. They wake up tired, grouse through the day, and at night mourn departed sleep. A scrabble and tangle of humanity, they stew in bad air and petty psychological turmoil, buffeted by noise and needled by a multiplicity of unrewarding duties. In eternal competition with shadowy colleagues and goaded by social obligations beyond their capabilities they experience a feeling of impotence and inadaptability. Neurotic fatigue is the result.

Professor Chombart de Lauwe claims that fatigue, other than muscular fatigue, has its origins in the discrepancy between our means and our needs: between aspirations and social pressures—the eternal discrepancy between a possible life and the life we are forced to live.

At least one concrete conclusion to rejoice the civilised emerged from the conference: laziness, far from being the shameful attribute of the social renegade is the man of sensibility’s criticism of an unnatural activity: hard work. It is also his defence against a barbaric way of life.

A hard look at the conclusions of these eminent specialists leaves us with these convictions: the prestige attached to daily strenuous toil is a myth and a shabby modern one, and it is seriously probable that, in spite of generations of domesticity, intense, sustained daily work is incompatible with the realities of human physiology.

Lennon writes in an amusing way. But, when you come to think of it, it is a serious matter that most of us should be condemned to a lifetime of boring, toil. The least we should do is ask: Does this have to be?

Work, of course, is necessary in any human society. But it does not have to take the form of “intensive, sustained daily work”. If such boring, unsatisfying toil is “incompatible with the realities of human physiology” (as most of us must suspect anyway) then socialist society can abolish it. Indeed it should abolish it. Work itself cannot be abolished. However it is up to the defenders of capitalism to show that wealth can only be produced by people, working under unhealthy conditions, doing jobs they find dull and uninteresting.

Adam Buick

The Passing Show: A sad, sad story (1966)

The Passing Show Column from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sad, sad story

A week or two ago a four-page leaflet fell out of a laundry parcel. I read it later the same day in snatches, between mouthfuls of food at lunch time. It was a lament — in black, white and brown printing—by a group of launderers and dry cleaners, over the new taxes and other hardships they are having to bear under the present government. Did you know, for example, that the Selective Employment Tax will add another £7 million a year to the launderers' labour costs?

But the amusing note is struck in a paragraph on the prices “standstill”. The launderers have found a loophole (one of many) which allows them ‘‘some latitude" because their costs are affected by government action. "So you can see," they wail, ‘‘that our dilemma lies in balancing co-operation against financial suicide." A neat turn of phrase, coined to sugar the pill, because the local laundry has now slapped on a surcharge of a penny in the shilling.

Can you imagine yourself approaching your employer right now for a wage increase, and using the same sort of talk? Try moaning to him about balancing this against that, and see how far you get. He'll probably look at you as if you’ve gone mad, murmur something about the pay freeze, and bring the interview very effectively to a close. No good telling him you’re going to make a surcharge. He just won’t pay it to you. and that’s that. Your position is radically different from that of the launderers or any other capitalists. You have only your labour power to sell, and the government is determined that you are not going to get a pay rise for at least six months, but as far as price control in general is concerned the whole thing is just a very bad joke.

We have dealt with this situation elsewhere, so perhaps just one last thought is all that is necessary here. Were you one of those simple folk who believed what this and other governments have told you about being much better off if only you’d curb your wage demands? By that logic, then, you should be a lot better off by next spring. Perhaps you don’t believe it any more? No, and neither does the government.

Korea—some of the story

General MacArthur was sacked from his command because, among other things, he was pressing for the Korean war to be carried into China and for atom bombs to be used there. There was a sigh of relief from left-wingers when he went, and perhaps a murmur or two of applause for President Truman’s action.

Not long after that, Eisenhower became U.S. President and from his recent television talk (September 18) it seems that pressures to extend the “police action” did not all originate from MacArthur. In fact Eisenhower wielded the atom bomb as a strong diplomatic weapon in his armistice talks with the North Koreans and let them and the Chinese know that America was ready to use it if negotiations were protracted much longer.

It is only now, when the truth begins to trickle out in very small quantities, that people can begin to guess how perilously close to the brink of another big shooting war the capitalist world was drifting in the early .1950s. War is not fought to Queensbury rules; practically anything goes if one side or the other thinks it can get away with it. And nuclear weapons must have been a sore temptation to the U.S. authorities, whatever President Truman may have thought. 

The television interview was in the first of a series of programmes called The Struggle For Peace—surely a gigantic misnomer. Accordingly Eisenhower, the American forces alone sustained 135,000 casualties. Some “police action”; some “peace”.

The naked truth

You can be alternately bored and amused for an hour or two if you go and see one of the rather corny nudist films on in London's West End just now. 1 saw one called World Without Shame, and its plot, if such it can be called, is heavily laden with the delightfully naive message that if only we’d all take our clothes off, spend most of the day sunning ourselves and generally “get back to nature,” the problems of the world would be solved.

The story starts with a young man winning about £26,000 on the pools. He and his wife chuck up their jobs in London and go to live with a few chosen friends on a quiet Mediterranean island. “We’ll get away for good from the rat race. We’ll be completely self-supporting,” enthuses our young man, fingering the pools cheque in his pocket. So off they go. There is even the political hint in another of his reasons when he talks of “some maniac pressing the H Bomb button and blowing us all to hell.” Someone ought to have reminded the producers that the Mediterranean would hardly go unscathed in such an event.

Never mind. They settle on the island in their birthday suits, dividing their time between sleeping, eating, some work and a great deal of sunbathing. The sun always shines—someone seems to have forgotten that the weather can often be cold and wet even in those parts—and presumably we are to believe they all live happily ever after. The scenery is .beautiful, the direction and acting embarrassingly poor (you often find yourself laughing in the wrong places), and the pathetic naivete of the whole proposition glaringly apparent.

We have never thought much of the idea that you can buy yourself out of the rat race, although a few thousand pounds can of course make things a lot easier for you. But the effects of the scramble are all around you, and the notion of an oasis of self-sufficiency in a desert of capitalism is a non-starter. Even the film has to concede this in part when one of the characters, a painter, runs out of canvas, and gets fresh supplies by sailing to the mainland and selling some of his pictures.

Gaspers

“The new strategy demands a great increase in fertilizer production, which can only be achieved if foreign capital can be induced to invest heavily and quickly." (The Times correspondent on Indian food production, 19.9.66).

Dr. Seretse Khama, who was exiled from his homeland by the last Labour government after his marriage to a white woman, was yesterday created a Knight Commander of the British Empire.” (Guardian, 21.9.66).

“This is our socialism: assertion of social responsibility for our economic welfare and for the welfare of the individual family." (Harold Wilson Purpose in Power, quoted in Nova magazine interview, Sept., 1966).

“The Prime Minister, I understand, has no intention of involving himself in doctrinal arguments about the true meaning of socialism which he believes has done enough harm to the party already. (Nora Beloff in The Observer, 2.10.66).

“Sir Isaac Wolfson reports that because of the freeze, dividends which could have been 36½ per cent will be held at 32½ per cent, the same as last year.” (Daily Express, 11.10.66).

There is nothing in Mr. Wilson’s present policy which a Tory Prime Minister, faced by a comparable crisis, would necessarily reject. (Peregrine Worsthorne—Conservatism Today).

Eddie Critchfield

Party News (1966)

Party News from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism V the Rest

About 40 people attended a lively meeting at our Head Office on September 19. The meeting, to which our political opponents were invited, was part of our Seven Days for Socialism campaign. On the platform were George Kiloh, national chairman of the Young Liberals, Chris Parkinson, Tory councillor for Streatham South, and our comrade Baldwin. The Labour Party speaker failed to attend and the Communist Party, which had also been invited, did not send anybody.

The meeting opened with each speaker briefly outlining his party's case. Comrade Baldwin explained that all his opponents (including the absent Labourite) were “tarred with the same brush” because they all stood for capitalism. Only the Socialist Party stood for Socialism. Councillor Parkinson admitted that his party was an avowedly capitalist party but declared that Tory policy was to move everyone up the social ladder by a general improvement in living standards The Young Liberal declared that capitalism was “unjust and immoral” and that Socialism was state capitalism. He went on, however, to outline YL plans, such as “joint-management” and “worker’ control in the nationalised concerns,” which, he claimed, would be a first step in producing industrial efficiency.

Southend

Southend Group maintained vigorous and lively activity through the summer with regular group meetings and canvassing. Members of London and Mid-Herts branches helped to run outdoor meetings on the seafront from time to time. It is intended to make these meetings weekly next year.

Sales of the Socialist Standard locally, through canvassing, have been good — 22 dozen of the August issue were sold. Further canvassing and other literature sales are planned for the autumn. Sympathisers should get on our mailing lists for details of indoor meetings and the like. Details from Secretary, Southend Group (write or call), 19 Kingswood Chase, Leigh-on-Sea.

Brighton

A brief report on the work of the Literature Sales Committee’s work at the Labour Party Conference. Five members covered the conference throughout the week. Three hundred and seventy-eight copies of the October Socialise Standard were sold, in addition to pamphlets. An excellent effort. It is hoped that even more comrades will be available for such sales in future, as the more sellers, the more sales.

Black Muslims

On September 7 Michael X, a leader of the Black Muslims in Britain, spoke “In Favour of the Separation of the Races” at our Paddington branch. He claimed that “the black man’s greatest problem was the white man”. White men had shipped black men to the West Indies; they had deprived them of their names, their language, their religion and their culture. Christianity was a slave religion. That was why people like him returned to Islam, the religion of their forefathers. He was president of an organisation that admitted no whites. This was because if they did the whites would help the organisation to death; the “white liberals” would do all the work so that black people would never learn to act for themselves. Black people from the West Indies were basically agricultural; they were unused to the disciplines of industrial society. They had to learn these “to catch up with the whites". But they could only do this, Michael X said, through “separate development”; by keeping away from, and not trusting, white people and by learning on their own.

In discussion it was pointed out that Socialists did not see themselves as white people or black people or as British or any other nationality, they knew they were members of a world-wide working class without any country. They knew that the only solutions to our troubles as workers was, whatever our skin pigmentation or what not, through the establishment of a world Socialist community. Members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain had come from all kinds of religious backgrounds—Christian, Jewish, even Muslim, had seen through all this mumbo-jumbo. When the Black Muslims had "caught up", what then? They would only be ordinary wage slaves like the rest of us. Was this all they wanted? 

In reply Michael X said that Socialism was a "white man's theory".

New pamphlet on Racism (1966)

Party News from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

A new Socialist Party pamphlet, entitled The Problem of Racism, is available. The previous pamphlet on this subject, The Racial Problem, published in 1947 has been out of print for some time. The Problem of Racism is not just a revision; it is a completely new pamphlet. In 1947 it was the Jewish Question that was prominent. Today it is the Colour Question. This change is taken into account in the new pamphlet which examines the colour question in Britain, America, South Africa and Rhodesia. There are chapters too on the scientific theory of race, the historical origins of racist theories and on African nationalism.

There is one unfortunate error. The reference on page 41 to Guyana should, of course, be to Guinea.

Pamphlet obtainable from Socialist Party, (Dept. SR), 52 Clapham High St, London. SW4. Price 1/6.

50 Years Ago: The War Office and the Socialist Standard (1966)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

When those in authority over us determined that no newspaper or books should be sent out of the country without the permission of the War Office, we made application to mail this journal to the Colonies and neutral countries. We have now been favoured with a reply the tenor of which b that the War Office has been compelled to stop our organ on some occasions in the past for the reason that a portion of its contents might be used by the enemy powers for “their propaganda". And we are further informed that, in consequence of this, instructions have been issued to stop in future all copies of the Socialist Standard addressed to places outside the United Kingdom.

Nothing that we publish can be used by our masters' enemies without being stripped from its context, for the simple reason that our criticism applies with just as much force to the German and Austrian capitalists as to British.  Our internationalism is so real a thing that we refuse to set national bounds even to our enemies. Not British capitalists or German capitalists are the foe, but capitalism and the capitalist class of the world.

[From the Socialist Standard, November, 1916].

SPGB Meetings (1966)

Party News from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

British capital in Malaysia - Part 2 (1966)

From the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

The situation in the rubber industry is somewhat different from the others because the small capitalists and peasant producers have not yet been eliminated. Of the 3½ million acres under rubber in Malaya, only about two million are controlled by the large estates (which are nearly all over the 1,000 acre mark). The other 1½ million acres are comprised of small plots whose owners have been in a relatively strong competitive position because of their much lower costs of production. This was especially so after the Japanese occupation in World War II when, because of the inexpensive methods of manufacture on the smallholdings, they were able to resume production at once—unlike the plantations, many of which were damaged. Where the large estates have the advantage is that they have had the resources to embark on costly replanting schemes with high-yielding trees. As these trees mature the systematised production on the plantations is likely to pay off and it is thought that the present trend against the smallholdings will strengthen.

Despite this, the nagging problems thrown up by the capitalist system remain to haunt the shareholders. In addition to the political uncertainty enveloping the whole of South-East Asia and the growing threat from synthetic rubber, the market has proved even more temperamental than that for tin. The rubber industry, too, can boast of a long list of futile attempts to maintain price levels. These started in 1922 when it was decided that the forced restriction of exports would keep prices hovering around the 30 cents per pound mark. After this step had been taken the price rose to $M1/b. in 1925, stood at 20 cents/lb. in 1928 and finally, between 1931-33, it sunk to 6 cents/lb. and less. Following this outstandingly successful first attempt many other schemes, including an International Rubber Regulation Committee, have been implemented; each was guaranteed in turn to be the elusive “ideal formula”. The table below makes any comment superfluous

The British capitalist class has other vital interests at stake in this part of the world. The Singapore military base provides the only major dockyard east of Suez and is the heart of a network of 300 military aircraft, including V-bombers. This base also contains major stockpile facilities and its strategic value in the defence of British capital is thus obvious. To take another example, the tiny state of Brunei measures only 2,000 square miles in area but it is graced the title “British protected state” because of the important Shell oilfield at Seria. Malaysia also represents an important market for British manufacturers, although there is sharp competition with other capitalist rivals. 

Again it is interesting to note that each of these capitalist countries listed above has resorted to war, to protect its interests in South-East Asia, during the past few decades. It is against this sort of background that Harold Wilson's statement—“If we had only ourselves to think of, we would be glad to leave there as quickly as possible”—has to be measured. .

That section of the British capitalist class with investments in Malaysia senses that it is in a precarious position. T. H. Silcock (Emeritus Professor of Economics of the University of Malaya) has summed up the outlook for the two major industries: “Even though the tin market recovered in 1961 and 1962, the long-term market prospect is . . . not hopeful, though the threat is probably not as great as for rubber.” Apart from this, the risk of losing capital is high in an area  which has been repeatedly fought over by those countries with conflicting economic interests in the region. As a result there has been a great deal of discussions in the press about “our” defence policy east of Suez and about “maintaining stability” in this part of the world. Some of the rising capitalist powers, like China and Indonesia, have called upon the working class in South-East Asia to support them in their attempts to extend their spheres of influence at the expense of their rivals. But, clearly, in these struggles among different sections of the capitalist class, working men and women have nothing at stake; whichever side wins, for the workers victory means continued poverty under the renewed threat of war.

John Crump

Monopoly (1966)

Book Review from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Capitalism is the system under which profit-seeking is the main purpose of men's undertakings; self-interest is the motivating force that drives them. Each person seeks his own maximum gain in an unending struggle. Seller is pitted against seller in the eternal rivalry of the marketplace.
  Under this system men would rather see their fellow human beings, women and children, die, rather than forgo any profits. They will, knowingly, sell poison or lethal weapons—provided there is money to be made.
  Self-styled respectable businessmen use known gangsters in the struggle for survival. They throw away food in order to reap gold. They lie, cheat and bully with one end in view: profits.

It is rare that we Socialists can take such an indictment of capitalism from the writings of a politician who actively helped the capitalist world go round upon its bumpy axis; a member of the American House of Representatives for nine years, and after that a U.S. Senator; even, in 1956, the Democrats' candidate for Vice-President.

Yet from a book by the late Estes Kefauver, and with neither unfair quoting out of context nor exaggeration, the indictment of the first three paragraphs above has been taken. His analysis of monopoly power in America, In A Few Hands, has just been published here for the first time as a Pelican Original (price 6s.).

Kefauver, who died in 1963, learned his facts about American Big Business as chairman of the U.S. Senate’s Sub-committee on Antitrust and Monopoly. His book presents the essence of this committee’s extended hearings.

Evidence of the behaviour of the biggest drug firms is especially dramatic, for here we are dealing in human life. For instance, some years ago a drug called Orinase (its trademark) was invented, an oral anti-diabetic drug. Not only is this obviously easier to take than regular injections of insulin; it is also much easier and cheaper to make. But the manufacturer, Dr. E. Gifford Upjohn, kept the price of Orinase at 14 cents per tablet, the same price as insulin. That was his rival, so although the drug cost him 1.18 dollars to produce (for a month’s supply), the patient paid around 12.50 dollars per month. Dr. Upjohn shrugged this price difference off as “just a matter of pennies” before the Senate Sub-committee.

Doctors are constantly bombarded by American drug manufacturers with advertising and inducements to prescribe drugs by trade name, otherwise pharmacists may provide the much cheaper, possibly foreign-produced but equally effective, version. The detail men who visit doctor's surgeries to persuade them to use particular makes of drug were actually told of one drug, whose effects were known to be fatal in certain circumstances: ‘‘Chloromycetin’s toxicity should not be introduced unless the physician brings up the subject or unless you know that he has ceased prescribing the drug.”

It has been widely publicised of late, thanks to the efforts of Ralph Nader, that most American cars are death traps. Kefauver writes witheringly: “The dictates of the styling engineers take precedence over everything else. Even safety of operation—not to speak of fuel economies—is subordinated to the whim of the fashion experts.”

He is referring here to the “non-price” competition that takes place between America’s few giant car firms.

By contrast, in the bread industry what appears to be real price competition is in fact a rigorous campaign by big, nation-wide bakers to oust smaller local firms. The giants, four of whom already control 22 per cent of the market, will undercut wildly, even making a loss in one area, in order to force the small baker out of business. Other techniques include: acquiring detailed knowledge of the small firm while asserting a serious intention to buy it; using the two American unions notoriously run by gangsters, the Teamsters and the Bakery & Confectionery Workers, to give labour trouble; deliberately making piles of loaves, much of which can only be wasted, for if the small baker competes he faces heavy losses on returns of stale bread, and if he does compete his sales may decline anyway—housewives are attracted by big heaps of bread in the supermarkets.

The establishment of a giant in a town whose industry was formerly run by smaller, local capitalists revives the old story of company towns. Although these are less ugly, and perhaps less crudely run for the company's benefit than those of 30 and 50 years ago, they become worse places to live in nonetheless.

Local bankers, insurance companies, suppliers of all kinds, lawyers and accountants find themselves supplanted by the men at head office. The few studies of modem “company towns” that do exist show that areas dominated by a few absentee-owned firms suffer from worse housing, schools, and other civic projects. Councils attempting to raise local taxes are warned that the firm will close down, putting most of a community out of work.

Kefauver believes that the cure for monopoly is adverse publicity, government admonition, and keen competition among all capitalists.

Yet he also states: “Under a system of free enterprise it is basically illogical to expect businessmen to subdue the acquisitive urge of their undertakings. Profit-seeking is the accepted purpose of their undertakings.”

He could not see how it is the very nature of capitalism that brings about monopolies. One firm defeats its rivals, and swallows them. How would he stop this? By abolishing free enterprise capitalism? But that is exactly what he wants to see maintained.

A giant is indeed stalking the world today: the ogre of capitalism. Men like Estes Kefauver, who think they can run it are afraid of it. The majority of mankind. the workers, live in its shadow. Few indeed are even aware of this. But only when the workers of the world understand what lies behind their agonies, the cruelties and the wastefulness of capitalism, when they have determined democratically to establish Socialism, only then will the shadow be removed from all our lives.

A. Pottersman

Why they want more unemployed! (1966)

From the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

No one would deny that the theories of the late Lord Keynes had a big influence on the views of economists, the programmes of political parties and the policies of governments and their financial institutions. For 30 years they were nearly all Keynesians, or so intiminated by the fashion that they would not or could not challenge it—all except those like the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain who remained convinced that the very different approach of Karl Marx was the sound one.

More recently Keynes has been more and more criticised by those who first followed him and the ironical thing is that just as unemployment gave Keynes his opportunity so unemployment, though in an inverted sense, is proving his undoing.

Keynes was studying and writing in a period of heavy and prolonged depression. He, like many other observers of capitalism, thought it absurd that people should be in want while there were idle men and idle machines waiting to be used. He also saw how politically dangerous it was. Through inability to abolish or seriously reduce unemployment governments were thrown out, political parties undermined and reputations ruined and, as he saw it, this situation helped to encourage the rise of dictatorship exploiting discontent and bent on war.

He argued that it was possible for governments to have positive policies for increasing production and maintaining more or less full employment, and under his influence it has become normal for the political parties, Liberal, Labour, Tory and Communist, to proclaim “full employment” as a priority aim.

Keynes was well aware of the way capitalism had, for a century or more, gone through successive phases of boom, crisis, depression and then boom again. What in effect he claimed was that if a government had full information of what was going on in industry and marketing it could always find the appropriate action to take to avoid all but minor fluctuations: in effect it was a claim that boom conditions could be made permanent.

To many admirers of Keynes the course of events, particularly after the Second World War, seemed to be positive proof that Keynes was right in theory and that his theories were politically practicable. They pointed to the generally low level of unemployment in Britain and to the way particular crises were handled, apparently with success.

The “proof’ however, is a hollow one. In the first place low unemployment has not been continuous even in Britain; it reached over 900,000 early in 1963 and no one could say that that was full employment: In many countries very heavy unemployment has gone on for prolonged periods: indeed according to the latest annual report of the International Monetary Fund (Daily Mail, 6 September)

virtually all industrial countries have been enjoying high levels of employment for the first time since the war.

And the I.M.F. is, as the Mail points out, gloomy about the future of world trade.

It is also unproved that the relatively high post-war levels of employment have been due to the Keynesian policies of governments. As Enoch Powell has pointed out (with reference to governments of his own Tory Party) the evidence is that events took their normal course irrespective of government policy: the setbacks endured for a while and disappeared just as they would have done anyway.

And a prominent American Keynesian, Professor Hansen, argues in his book, A Guide to Keynes: “full employment was, however, primarily the result of the war and post-war developments, not of conscious policy.” He was referring to the early post-war years, but some of the developments he had in mind have continued and have been added to by the vast industrialisation schemes in the new countries of Africa and Asia.

But in many countries, especially in Britain, doubts about Keynes have sprung not from heavy unemployment but from the problems of full employment and in a way that is proving disastrous for the Labour government.

The Labour Party has always claimed to have a special interest in avoiding unemployment. They believed that it ought not to exist and need not exist. For the 1959 election, when the late Hugh Gaitskell was party leader, they published a glossy pamphlet The Future Labour Offers You, which contained a scathing criticism of the Tories.

   The great ideals of jobs for all first became a peace-time reality under the 1945 Labour Government Under the Tories fear of the sack has returned. Tory ministers have now had to admit publicly that they deliberately caused the sharp increase in unemployment. In the Tory view, unemployment is the remedy for soaring prices.
    Labour totally rejects the repugnant idea that the nation's economic troubles can only be cured by throwing people out of work. The first objective of the Labour Government will be to restore full employment and to preserve full employment. This is the prime purpose of our plan for controlled expansion.

With the newspapers now full of reports of the thousands of men and women being declared redundant or put on short time, as a result of the government’s credit squeeze and other measures, the Selective Employment Tax designed to induce employers to get rid of workers in the service industries and government statements that they expect their policy of “redeployment” to produce not more than 450,000 unemployed it is not necessary to labour the point that Gaitskell’s attack on the Tories has been a boomerang.

But a wider question is involved. The Keynesians (and the Prime Minister) had habitually scoffed at the Marxian view of the way capitalism works, especially Marx’s view that capitalism needs unemployment, “an industrial reserve army.”

In the past, when some Tories and spokesmen for the employers declared that capitalism needed more unemployed, the Labour Party called it a natural exhibition of contempt for the workers. Now, when Sir Gordon Newton, Editor of the Financial Times, writing in the Director (August, 1966) declares, “I doubt myself whether anything which does not produce a level of unemployment of two per cent—will be adequate,” he is but echoing the Labour Prime Minister.

Marx wrote about unemployment in Capital, Volume I (chapter XXV) and argued that unemployment is, “a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production." It helps of course to keep down wages and to make the workers in employment work harder than they would if not threatened with unemployment. Also, as Marx put it, the capitalist, in order to take advantage of the sudden opening up of new markets, must have “the possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres.”

Observing the agitated “policies” of the Labour Government to “redeploy” labour so that exporters shall be able to get the men they need to take advantage of foreign markets it is obvious that they are trying to grapple with exactly the kind of situation Marx described—and the only way they can find to do it is, in the last resort, nothing more than the traditional, capitalist way. Those who believed they could run capitalism without unemployment end up by trying to create some.

Marx was right after all, and the moral for the workers is not more delving into Keynes (who did not even claim to have the answer to this particular problem) but to concern themselves with getting rid of capitalism.

Edgar Hardcastle

Editorial: Insult to injury (1966)

Editorial from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Make no mistake about it. The Labour government is out to cut our standard of living. To be sure, they claim this is necessary so that standards can rise in the future. But we need take no notice of this. After all we’ve heard it so many times before from Labour and Tory alike. First it was Cripps, then Gaitskell, then Butler, then Thorneycroft, then Selwyn Lloyd and now Wilson. But the promised prosperous futures with steadily rising living standards have never appeared and, of course, they never will. You don’t have to be a Socialist to be sceptical on this point.

What the government is trying to do is to freeze wages and salaries at July 20 levels and allow prices to rise to offset “tax increases and import price rises”. If this works, our standard of living will have been cut and more of the wealth we produce will be available for profitable investment.

It’s bad enough to have this attack on our living standards and to be intimidated by the “reserve powers” of the Prices and Incomes Act. But we have also to take Minister of Labour Gunter telling us that this is what we deserve as we have been “dishonest and thriftless” and clever Dick Crossman and the New Statesman telling us that this is a step towards Socialism.

It is surprising that there are still people who think that trade unionists and workers generally have something to gain from backing Labour. Perhaps this is because of the skilful way the Labour leaders have exploited their followers’ fears of a return to the mass unemployment of the inter-war years. They have alleged that the Tories deliberately create unemployment and misery for workers while they swear, hand on heart, that they will never allow this to happen again. But it will, they claim, if workers don’t work harder; if employers don’t get “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay”; unless- “each hour worked is filled with sixty minutes’ worth of work well done”.

These Labour appeals for harder work have fallen on stoney ground. Absenteeism thrives and the seamen took a month or so off work just because the shipowners wouldn’t pay them more or improve their working conditions. This failure has produced revealing reactions in some of the Labour Leaders. Now Gunter calls us dishonest. Last year he was shouting about “far too much indiscipline in every part of the nation”. Presumably we can take it that Labour is out to discipline us. As Wilson is fond of saying, the job of a government is to govern. Precisely—and governing involves keeping us in our place as honest, thrifty, hard-working and docile workers.

The Labour Party has always had a brutal streak in it. Since the war Labour governments have shown themselves more ready than the Tories to use the power of the state to discipline us. Remember that it was they who used troops as blacklegs. Remember that it was they who tried the last wage freeze. And remember that it was their Attorney General who prosecuted strikers in 1951.

Labour Party members accepted these events last time. Most will probably accept the same things this time. And this is where the talk of Socialism comes in. At election times Socialism is a dirty word among Labour candidates. But when they have to put over their policies to the party faithful the leaders brush up the speeches of their youth and declaim about Socialism. Generally they take the Tory view of Socialism—that it is whatever the Labour Party does. But surely few, even of the hard-core Labour men, can be taken in by the specious arguments put over by the editor of the New Statesman on September 16. Under the headline “How Labour Blundered into Socialism”, he wrote of the openly anti-union Prices and Incomes Act: “Prices and incomes regulation . . . may be a foundling; but it has true socialist blood in its veins and. properly nurtured, is likely to grow into a powerful champion of social progress.”

If this is Socialism people are right to want none of it. But it is not Socialism or anything like it. Socialism means a democratic world community in which the means of social life are owned in common so that they can be used to satisfy human needs. What the New Statesman editor is talking about is not Socialism but state capitalism which, as the example of Russia shows, has nothing to offer us.

A quiet drink at the local (1966)

A Short Story from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

"I'd emigrate myself if I was a younger man. There's no initiative left in this country." He sipped at his half-pint of bitter, put it back carefully on the bar and stared straight ahead at the row of upside-down spirit bottles.

Maurice always start like this. He pretends he is not speaking to you, really, just in case you don't answer him. And I didn't. There is no point in arguing with him. His mind is as set as one of the pickled eggs in the jar at his elbow.

"After all, let's face it, we're all mollycoddled by the Welfare State." He half turned to the youth with the bad complexion who was standing behind him and beginning to look uncomfortable. "I admit it," Maurice insisted with a magnanimous smile, "I'm just the same. I'm soft! Why should I save for a rainy day? The state will take care of me if I'm ill. If I get myself the sack from work I can get nearly as much from the dole and National Assistance as I can for working. Why should I bother to work?"

"Have you tried it?" The young man had a Glasgow accent which made his question sound curt.

Maurice's eyes widened and he really turned round to look at him now. "Tried what?"

"Getting the 'labour' money and National Assistance instead of working? Two chappies in the paper last week were fined £90 apiece for it. Able-bodied y'see. They should have been in a job." The cigarette in his hand trembled.

"No, well of course most of us don't try it, do we?" Maurice laughed implying that he had only been joking. He turned back to his glass, including me in his laugh. "We are the mugs that keep so-and-so's like them in idle comfort." He switched off his laugh as abruptly as he had switched it on and was beginning to bristle with enough indignation to warn anybody that he did not like being taken up on what he said. "Sixteen and a penny a week you pay, National Health." He glared at me.

"Well," I said, trying to produce a jovial smile like his, "they want to make sure you don't waste it on beer." The sarcasm missed him completely. He never drinks more than three half pints. He almost choked on the last drop in his glass, and his neck went red. "Look here!" he said, "If everybody spent as much as I do on beer, they'd be all right, let me tell you." The barman had a faint smile at the corners of his mouth as he filled Maurice's glass again. "I know how to save my money, which is more than a lot of 'em do these days." He kept pressing down the short bristles of his moustache with his fingertips. "They've got no right to make you pay out—what is it?—about £40 a year just in case you need a doctor. I'll decide whether I need a doctor, thank you very much. When I need my doctor's advice, I pay, privately. I want proper attention and a bit of respect, and that's the only way to get it."

The youth scowled behind him and said, "It's your sort that keeps it one treatment for the rich and one for the poor."

Maurice turned round on him, almost crouching. "That's the way it always will be, my lad, and the sooner you get it into your head the better. If you'd got money, would you queue up with that crowd of coughing bronchitics and snivelling kids just to get a five-minute once-over and a chit for the chemist's shop?"

"You're lucky you can afford it."

"Look! I'm not rich, you know. That's just the trouble—I can't afford it—now. Since this bloody health service came in, it costs the earth to be a private patient. Now it really is lone law for the rich and one for the poor."

"You can't win, can you, Maurice." I think he knew I was digging at him, because he didn't even look at me.

"At least everybody gets some treatment now," the youngster insisted, "even if it's not the best."

"You shouldn't have picked a Sunday to say that," I said. I shook out the newspaper I had been trying to read and showed him the Personal column. "Here you are: 'R.S.V.P. You are invited to help 3,000 children whose only help is the National Children's home . . . ' Here's another: 'The British Heart Foundation . . . urgent research needs your generous support . . .' Look, they are all down this column. Royal London Society for the Blind, the Army Benevolent Fund, British Empire Cancer Campaign For Research, The Royal Association in Aid of the Deaf and Dumb, the British Epilepsy Association, the Arthritis and Rheumatism Council, the Chest and Heart Foundation, Muscular Dystrophy, Multiple Sclerosis. They're all appealing urgently for charity. All this is supposed to have been taken care of by the Welfare State."

"Oh, no! That's not fair! Give them time. They've got to deal with the main things first . . . "

Maurice wouldn't let him finish. "Give 'em time!" he said in a loud sneering voice. "They've been at it for 20 years now, and it's a damned sight worse than when they started. The surgeries got fuller, the hospitals get more out of date and understaffed. The whole thing's running down like an old car."

The young Glaswegian just lowered his heat and waited for it to pass. I don't think he really heard what Maurice said. "Look, you say it's one law for the rich and one for the poor, but what you forget is that poor people never had proper medical treatment before. When they had the 'flu or bronchitis or lumbago they couldn't afford to call in the doctor. They just had to stay in bed and wait for it to get better—if they were lucky."

He asked for another pint of mild, and I said to him, "Staying in bed is about the best sort of treatment for ailments like that. That's all we need sometimes—a few days in bed."

"Maybe, but there's not the time for that these days."

"Worse luck."

He looked at me with a trace of contempt in his expression. "Do you realise how many thousands of man-hours are lost through common ailments like that?"

"Well, I have some idea, yes."

"All right! You can't run a modern country by letting people sleep off their illnesses in bed. You need modern drugs—antibiotics, pain killers, tranquilisers—so that they can be back at work in a couple of days, maybe not have to stop work at all."

"This is what you call dealing with the main things first?"

"Certainly. What you must remember is that this is a country with a steadily increasing number of old people and a high density of population. The only way to increase production is to get more efficiency out of the labour force we've got. Take children, for example. Poverty and slums and lack of medical attention used to produce weak or disabled children. But these days it's being planned. The state can't afford thousands of invalids. So the mothers get free ante-natal treatment, maternity allowance, hospital care. If they produce more than one child they get children's allowances. The children get free milk and subsidised meals."

Maurice looked over his shoulder and said, "It's all done on the cheap. Hospitals, drugs, false teeth, spectacles—all cheap and nasty."

"At least it's something—and that's better than nothing."

"It is if you're useful," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, look here at today's paper again—this advert signed by Margaret Herbison, the Minister of Social Security. They've at last acknowledged that old age pensions are inadequate. So pensioners can now have a supplementary pension—if they apply for it—and if they've not got a part-time job earning more than two pound a week, and so on. They can have their income brought up to a guaranteed level. And look at it! £7 2s. plus rent and rates for a married couple; £4 10s. for a single householder; and £3 18s. plus 10s. rent for a single person. Who can live on that at today;s prices? And it's being brought up to that."

"But it's an improvement, isn't it?"

"Certainly! And it needs to be, because it still isn't keeping pace with rising prices. Look here at this bit in Michael Frayn's column: 'Some 7,500,000 people in this country live below what the National Assistance Board regard as subsistence level . . . ' One in seven of the population, as he says. What state of welfare is that?"

"It's bad, I admit, but you've got to agree that they're a dead weight on the state. Old age pensioners will never produce any more  . . ."

It was my turn to choke on my beer. "What! They've had the energy sucked out of them for 50 years of their lives, with nothing at the end to show for it, and you're complaining that they can't be worked until they drop dead! Whose side are you on?"

"They should save up for their old age, like I do," Maurice said. "There's too much state control, now—too many regulations and forms to fill in, too much interference. There's no freedom left. That's the price we've paid for all this. If you want a Welfare State, you can't complain when the state gives you a credit squeeze and a wage freeze as well. It's all part of the same thing. I mean, your life's not your own these days."

"As far as I can see," the youngster said, "the working man's life never was his own. Now, I think the ideals behind the Welfare State were good. For the first time, the worker had the chance of a new deal, the chance to live a respectable life. It's true enough that conditions—inflation and all that—have made a mockery out of most of it, but that doesn't make it a bad idea.

Bit by bit, we had all edged closer together, and the barman was leaning his chin in his hands, listening to us. Maurice glanced round to see who he had for an audience before he spoke. "Listen, my lad, I'm older than you. You don't remember the thirties. If you think this is a bad time for your Welfare State, just you wait until there's another depression and see how it works then. You're all right now as long as you've got enough stamps on your card, but you wait till you can't get any stamps because you haven't got a job even. I'm telling you this: what they give you they can also take away. And they will when it suits them. I've told you. I'd get out of this country if I was younger."

"Do you really think it's much different anywhere else?" I said. "You'd be in just the same trap."

"You two depress me," said the young man. "Don't they you?" he asked, turning to the barman.

"I haven't heard all of it, of course, but I must say, I think all this Welfare State business is a load of codswallop. You're no better off and no worse off, are you? I mean to say, you've still got to turn up at work tomorrow morning, haven't you? And you've got to take stingy-paid part-time jobs like this at the weekend to keep going. It doesn't alter that, does it?"

"That's the trap."

"Yeah, well, tell me some way to get out of that and I'll be interested."

"You can't alter that," said the Glaswegian contemptuously.

"That's the way it always will be, lad," Maurice said.

S. Stafford