At Home and Abroad . . . (1972)

The Home and Abroad Column from the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Review September 72

At Home

There are signs that the government is preparing to retreat from its previous entrenched position on wages. If this happens it will need careful handling as far as publicity goes, which may explain the heavy caution with which the recent talks between the unions, employers and the government were treated. When they came into power Heath’s government were quite positive that they had the solution to the economic problems which have plagued British capitalism since the war. The unions, they said, must be brought to heel; in future they would be met head on in any industrial dispute. There would also be a special Act which would in effect weaken the unions’ bargaining powers. At the same time prices would, in some mysterious way which has eluded all other governments, be held in control. The promised result of this would be a steady rise in prosperity for everyone. In fact what the Tories were concerned about, as any capitalist government would be, was basically wages and the level of capital investment in British industry, which were affecting the competitive power of British goods on the world market. Every government since the war has come in with promises to tackle these problems and they have all had apparently simple solutions. Every one has had "new” ideas and policies; Wilson’s government, for example, had the Prices and Incomes Board and the Declaration of Intent from the employers and the unions. Who remembers them now? Every government, faced with the day to day realities of capitalism, has been compelled to change its line and to abandon the programme it put forward at the election, while the problem continued as bad as ever. Heath’s had the brief period of open conflict, as he promised and he has the Industrial Relations Act. Some workers have been gaoled, a union has had a massive fine. But British capitalism could not have carried on for long like that; it makes more sense, economically and politically, for the Tories to change their policy. To repeal the Industrial Relations Act would be too obvious a signal of defeat but there will probably be other signs in the near future of the government’s surrender to the intractability of capitalism’s chaos.

Abroad

Since it has never happened before, the killing of the Israeli Olympic athletes helped foster the idea that we are living in times of special cruelty and disarray, and that guerrilla tactics are something of an innovation. It needs only a little effort to recall many examples of similar tactics, sometimes by small bands of killers and sometimes by larger, more organised groups. If the Arabs showed great courage in their raid, it was not the first time that bravery has been used to murderous ends. Capitalist states are always organising the courage of their peoples in a massive effort of destruction. At such times they use any weapon they can, including that of the ultimatum. The famous demand for unconditional surrender in the last war was no more than a threat to murder and destroy on a savage scale, if the other side did not give way — and it was a threat which the Allies carried out. The men who plan and implement such ultimata are not called terrorists and murderers but there is nothing to choose between them and the men who did the killing at Munich, or indeed those Israeli nationalists who waged so ruthless a guerrilla campaign against British occupation in the years after the war. Capitalism is a mass of conflict, springing from the competing economic interests of many rival groups both national and international. In one way or another, force is always applied in these conflicts and capitalism continually conditions its people to accept the use of force, often of a terrifying scale and intensity. The Arabs at Munich acted as they have been conditioned to. The outcome of violence is never pleasant, whether it is eleven dead bodies at Munich or a hundred thousand at Hiroshima. But if the working class are not clear on the issue, if their ideas on it are confused by the illogicalities and the violence of nationalism, they can have no hope of ending a victory of which bloodshed is so integral a part.

Politics

When the Monday Club meet to protest against the Ugandan Asians, they thunder that the immigrants are being allowed in against the wishes of the people of this country. When Wedgewood Bonn talks about British capitalism’s entry of the Common Market, he whines that the voice of the people should be heard on the issue, in a referendum. We do not need to be too perceptive to realise that concern for a democratic society emerges only when policies are being pushed through which the speaker opposes. Tory M.P. Soref supports a government which, like the one of which Benn was a member, has imposed plenty of measures without asking what the majority of people thought or wanted. Democracy is a word for capitalist politicians to play with and to use if they see advantage in doing so. In fact capitalism cannot be a democratic society; it cannot take its people into its confidence, cannot make all its information freely available, cannot run itself as the majority wants, cannot involve everyone in the decision taking from top to bottom. Soref is no more interested in making available full information about race, about housing, population, social services and so on than Benn is in telling us everything about the economy of capitalism. Democracy needs knowledge and when the working class have that there will be no more capitalism with its irrelevant issues and politicians to exploit them.

Labour's programme for capitalism (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many Labour activists were thoroughly disillusioned by the record of the 1964-70 Wilson government. Some became inactive, others even resigned from the Labour Party, and fewer newcomers were recruited to take their place. This loss of activist support has disturbed the parliamentary leaders of the Party because these are the people they rely on to gather in the votes at election times. Without them the Labour Party is in trouble, but the activists are not going to work hard for the parliamentary leaders unless they are reasonably satisfied with the policy and practice of those leaders. Of this the leaders are fully aware. Which is why soon after their defeat in the June 1970 General Election they took steps to “involve” the Party’s activists in policy-making. What reforms would you like to see Labour make? the activists were asked. Their answers, carefully edited by the Labour leaders, are published in the document Labour's Programme for Britain presented to this year’s Party Conference.

The document begins with the ridiculous claim, “We are a democratic Socialist Party and proud of it,” and goes on to give a familiar list of reforms long-promised by Labour: planning, price controls, pro-union laws, a wealth tax, no health charges, abolition of public schools, more houses, cheap food, etc., etc. Nevertheless it is probably an accurate guide to what the activist wants to see done. Indeed it was the last Labour government’s failure to do many of these things that disillusioned them in the first place.

Accumulation

The leaders are careful not to commit themselves to implementing everything in the document. Some of the reforms, they say, could not be implemented in a five-year term of office, while there may not be enough resources to implement others. The document, they repeatedly emphasise, is merely a list of desirable social reforms; in time for the next general election the leaders will choose which of these reforms are to go into the Party’s manifesto; and a future Labour government will decide, in the light of existing economic circumstances, when (and if) those in the manifesto should be implemented. In other words, as in the past, the Labour leaders are to be given a free hand by their members to run capitalism in the way economic circumstances may dictate.

For, both in theory and practice, the Labour Party has always been fully committed to capitalism. What it stands for is not Socialism, but State control of capitalism. At one time the aim of this State control was said to be the improvement of the conditions of the working class. There are still echoes of this in the document. But actual experience of running capitalism has led to a revision of this aim: it is now the steady and uninterrupted accumulation of capital. This change is nicely illustrated by the complaints in the document about the wasteful consumption of the rich. At one time the suggestion would have been that this would have been better consumed by the workers; now it is that it should have been invested productively.

But both these aims are unrealistic. Capitalism cannot be reformed so as to work in the interest of the workers. Nor can it be planned so as to avoid booms and slumps or stops and gos as they are now called.

Labour v. Workers

Capitalism is an anarchic system subject to its own uncontrollable economic laws. Based on the ownership and control of the means of production by a minority class (the top ten per cent own three-quarters of the wealth of Britain despite four Labour governments, the document admits), the purpose of production is profit and the accumulation of capital out of profit. In order to keep going its products must be continually sold at a profit, in Britain’s case largely on the world market. For capitalism is an international system. The governments of all the various States into which the world is divided find their policies dictated by the workings of international capitalism, not by their own desires to improve living standards or plan growth.

This is what the last Labour government discovered. Elected in October 1964 they had to give immediate priority to a balance of payments crisis caused ultimately by the failure of British exports to sell well enough on the world market. In a bid to restore profitability to British capitalist industry, Labour Ministers were soon calling for wage restraint, seeing Communist agitators behind strikes and denouncing workers for not doing a full day’s work. In 1967 the pound had to be devalued and a legal wage freeze imposed. Anti-union laws were planned.

Re-investment

Reading between the lines of this document, the Labour leaders have learned the lesson of this last Labour government. This time they are not going to try to give priority to desirable social reforms or to increasing working class consumption. Priority is definitely to be given to creating what they themselves describe as an “internationally competitive economy” in Britain.

“The share of Britain’s resources devoted to investment”, they complain, “has been chronically low by international comparison”. They promise to remedy this. To keep industrial costs in Britain down they will aim to increase the re-investment of profits in new, more efficient productive equipment. For this they are prepared to allow British capitalist firms to make sufficient profits and to restrain (voluntarily of course) workers from gaining too large a share of these profits in the form of wage increases. Their policy is to be that the maximum amount of profit should be re-invested productively and not wasted in property speculation or in consumption by the idle rich—or by the workers. And, thanks to planning, a conflict between wages and profits is supposedly to be avoided:

Labour believes that there is scope in an expanding economy for rising money wages and, too, that rising wages and expanding profits for re-investment can co-exist.

Maybe in an expanding economy, but only for a while. For sooner or later the expansion phase of the business cycle will inevitably give way to the contraction phase, and what then? Wage restraint? Cuts in working-class consumption in order to restore profitability? This possibility is provided for too, for those who read the document carefully. Says an important reservation:

There will be times when any Government will need to take interim measures to regulate the purchasing power of consumers.

Which suggests that the Labour leaders themselves are not too confident about their ability to plan “sustained economic expansion”, “steady economic development”, “uninterrupted industrial expansion”, balanced economic development”, to record a few of the phrases they use to describe their utopia of permanent capitalist prosperity.

Prices & Profits

The second aspect of their policy for making Britain an “internationally competitive economy” (which, we repeat, must be their priority, not that after their experience between 1964 and 1970 they now bother to deny this) is yet another “attack” on “the scourge of inflation” because, the document explains, “if inflation is higher in Britain than elsewhere, our exports lose their ability to compete in foreign markets”. Labour is going to “attack” inflation not at its source—but one of its effects, rising prices. There will be, they promise, severe and legally enforced price restraint. Maybe, but not for long. For the effect of this, if rigidly enforced (which it won’t be of course, and for this very reason), would be to reduce profits. Since with the oversupply of money continuing so would the inflationary pressures. In these circumstances legal price restraint will be a miserable failure and, we predict, soon abandoned. Actually, here again the Labour leaders recognise that price restraint would threaten profits and so conflict with their other aim of encouraging productive investment:

In those cases where key prices have to be held down to a level which does not provide a level of profit adequate for re-investment, we shall consider the possibility of government investment to meet a firm’s capital needs.

Food prices are to be subsidised, as they were in the first post-war Labour government, in order to keep wages down.

Cartoon by Barltrop.

Futile Reform

Housing is one field in which the futility of legal price controls as a means of improving working class living standards has been demonstrated. For the effect of years of rent control was to make investment in private housing for letting relatively unprofitable. Investors tended to avoid this field and landlords to let their houses decay. The result was a worsening of housing conditions for many workers. Eventually Labour recognised this and allowed landlords to make bigger profits under their so-called fair rents legislation (Labour now gives the impression that this is a Tory scheme, but all the Tories have done is to extend it from private to council houses). At the same time they provided for landlords to be given grants to “improve” their property, the intention being to overcome the deterioration in housing conditions caused by rent control.

Landlords have certainly been taking up these grants, but not with a view to improving the housing of the poor. What many of them have been doing is to buy up this kind of housing, “improve” it and then or sell or let it to the better-off. The document complains about this:

There is evidence, however, that although the take-up rate for such grants is increasing, they are being used to a disquieting extent by property companies, converting and improving houses to sell at an unreasonable profit. They are also greatly used by people who are already well housed, but wish to improve a weekend cottage.

So capitalism has made a mockery of yet another of Labour’s reforms! As we have always said, reforming capitalism is ultimately futile as no sooner is one reform made than another is needed, as often as not as a result of the previous one.

Disillusioned Optimists

But trying to reform capitalism so as to benefit the working class is at best all Labour’s policy has ever amounted to. And it’s a futile policy since it seeks to do the impossible: make capitalism work against its own economic logic of production for profit and the profit-makers. Capitalism is a class system and can only function as a class system in the interest of the minority that owns and controls the means of production. Any Party that takes on the administration of capitalism, as Labour has done on four occasions so far and seeks to again, must sooner or later come into conflict with the interest of the working class whose consumption it must restrict in the interests of profitability. This has happened to every previous Labour government and will happen to any future ones.

Labour’s present activists must be a gullible lot if they believe their leaders’ promise that the next Labour government will somehow be different. But then it’s because they think there is some hope in the Labour Party that they are members. Which means they are due to be disillusioned yet again.

Adam Buick

The ABC of Inflation (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party and the Tory Party accuse each other of being responsible for the continuing rise of prices, but there is absolutely nothing to choose between the records of the two parties. Measured by the government’s own Retail Price Indexes, the Labour government 1945-51 scored a 28 per cent rise and the Labour government 1964-70 another 30 per cent (of the 1964 level); while the Tories marked up 50 per cent between 1951 and 1964 and another 17 per cent (of the 1970 level) between 1970 and June 1972. Added to the 32 per cent rise recorded between 1939 and 1945 under the National government (admitted to be an understatement), the present price level is at least four times what it was before the war.

In 1944 the three parties—Tory, Labour and Liberal—in the National government committed themselves to do what they could after the war “to stabilise prices”, and at each of the eight general elections Labour and Tories both repeated the promise —and it hasn’t meant a thing.

Individual prices can rise (or fall) for several different reasons. Good harvests will reduce prices and bad harvests will raise them. Booming trade increases demand and sends prices up, bad trade will send them down again. Even against the present trend of rising prices metal prices fell heavily last year as demand slackened off—the price of copper fell by 40 per cent. Improved methods of production, by reducing the amount of labour required, will operate to lower prices, while the exhaustion of easily accessible seams of mineral ores (coal and metals) will operate the other way because mining at greater depths or in less rich seams requires more labour to produce each ton.

During the nineteenth century when all of these price factors operated the general price levels in Britain went up in some periods and down in others, or remained nearly stationary, but the extent of the movement up and down was always within a range of about 25 per cent either way—nothing like the 300 per cent added since September 1939. Wages also rose and fell during the nineteenth century; sometimes in line with the movement of prices, sometimes by more or less, and occasionally wages moved in the opposite direction to prices.

Fallacies         

All sorts of explanations have been offered for the abnormal rise of prices since 1939 as compared with the up-and-down movements of prices in the nineteenth century. Most of the so-called explanations take the form of blaming some group or other for being “greedy”; bankers, or manufacturers, or retailers or trade unionists. It is an explanation that a glance at certain facts will show to be nonsense. Did the copper companies reduce their prices by 40 per cent in 1971 because they had suddenly become less greedy? Between 1948 and 1968 prices rose by 100 per cent in Britain, but only by half that amount in America and Switzerland: are the British twice as greedy? In the nineteenth century did the whole population go through alternating phases of being more greedy and less greedy? Between the end of 1920 and the middle of 1933 prices fell by over 50 per cent. The fall was continuous for thirteen years. What had happened to greed?

The fact is that sellers always try to get as big a price as they can, “as much as the market will bear”, and if they can get more or are forced to take less it is because external circumstances over which they have little or no control determine that it shall be so.

Two popular beliefs are that prices go up because wages go up, or vice versa. It does not occur to those who hold one or the other view that wages are prices—the price the worker gets for the sale of his labour-power, his mental and physical energies, to the employer. So, properly stated, their two propositions become the single useless assertion that prices go up because prices go up.

If they re-stated it in the form that one group of prices (wages) go up because the other group of prices go up—or vice versa—they overlook the truth that both groups of prices go up because of common external factors which affect both of them, more or less to the same extent. To illustrate this we can note that in summers when more Londoners visit the country the harvests are good. Nobody asks whether it is the London visitors who make the corn ripen, or whether it is the ripened corn which attracts the visitors. It just happens that a long hot summer both produces the good harvest and attracts visitors to the country — the sun is the common cause of both.

Paper & Prices

The new factor which has operated to push up prices abnormally since the war—the “sun” in relation to prices and wages—has been the continuous and accelerating “depreciation of the currency”. In the nineteenth century the amount of notes and coin in circulation was controlled by the device, enforced by law, that the pound sterling was a fixed weight (about a quarter of an ounce) of gold, and Bank of England notes were always convertible on demand into the corresponding weight of gold. Nowadays the pound is an inconvertible paper currency and enormous additional amounts have been printed and put into circulation. In 1939 the total of notes and coin in the hands of the public was £454 million. It is now over £3,500 million and rising steadily, an amount far in excess of whatever increase would have been necessary in line with the actual increase in production and sales of goods.

Karl Marx, whose study of the subject has never been rivalled, enunciated the economic law in the form that if the amount of inconvertible paper currency exceeds the amount of gold that would be needed if gold coins circulated, the excess simply operates to push up prices. Before Keynesian doctrines were swallowed by most of the modern economists and politicians, this relationship between excess issues of inconvertible notes and the price level was generally accepted by economists (including Keynes). In 1919 the government deliberately put a stop to the issue of additional notes and this played a large part in the subsequent fall of prices. Now the political parties and the trade unions have deceived themselves, against all past experience, into the belief that what they call increasing “money supply” leads to greater production and the maintenance of “full employment”.

Facing Facts

Not quite all of the economists and financial authorities have swallowed the “new economics”. One exception is the First National City Bank of New York which, in its Monthly Bulletin for January 1970, ridiculed the notion that rising prices are due to greed or to the wage demands of trade unions :

“Most of the blame for inflation is misplaced. For although inflation has a hundred faces, it has but one essential cause : overly expansive and erratic monetary policy that has pushed up the quantity of money more swiftly than the quantity of goods and services.”        

Governments, even if they perceived the truth of this, are afraid to repeat the restrictive policy applied in 1919 because they think it might lead to a big depression and much heavier unemployment. The economist Lord Robbins, speaking in the House of Lords on 5th July, said:

“I know of no case in history where inflation of the order of magnitude of that from which we are now suffering has been stopped by measures of this sort without that sort of effect.”

The government’s view, according to Patrick Jenkin, Chief Secretary of the Treasury, is that while curbing the money supply would affect prices it would do so only after a considerable time lag: –  “The immediate effect would be increased unemployment and reduced output. As a solution, it was politically, wholly unacceptable”. (Financial Times 17 July)

They, Lord Robbins and Jenkin, are equally afraid that continued and accelerating depreciation of the currency may end with the kind of monetary collapse that Germany experienced between the wars.

Most workers believe that if only prices came down or were at least stabilised their chief troubles would be over. They should remember that while it is true that at present hundreds of thousands of workers cannot afford to buy a house on mortgage, exactly the same was true between the wars when prices of houses and prices in general (and wages) were only a fraction of what they are now. For the workers capitalism means hardship whether prices are high or low or falling or rising.

Edgar Hardcastle

Does class still count? (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the years following the second world war it was widely said that “the old class barriers'’ were being broken down. England, characterised as the most class-ridden country in the world, had at last given up its forelock-touching, its obsession with accents, its one-law-for-the-rich-and-one-for-the-poor, thank you kindly ma’am, and the rest. Marghanita Laski’s novel The Village, published in 1951, showed the breakdown of tradition-based assumptions of social superiority in a small community: gentility and “background” gagging on the discovery of their small weight in the modern world. The class assumptions were those of pre-war Punch and West-End stage jokes, in which low incomes meant male illiteracy and female idiocy, and a servile manner was de rigueur from both.

In those terms, it was commonplace also that relatively few people admitted to being working-class. The usual term was “lower middle class”. What strata lay above this mass has always been indistinct—whether there existed a central middle class to which this was the aspiring lower fringe and another the cake-icing, as it were, or whether the middle class was a two-layer affair of uppers and lowers only. But whatever the boundaries, the array of qualifications was formidable: the school one went to, one’s dress and speech, family connections, tastes and, of course, income. And these things, we were told, were fast losing their significance in the nineteen-fifties. Social progress and humane legislation had equalised us all, making Jack as good as his master and privilege an archaism.

Superior & Inferior

Talking of “class” like that does not mean class at all. What is meant is social groupings imbued with the idea of places in a hierarchy. Viewed from the top, they are simply a question of degrees of extravagance. Veblin in his Theory of the Leisure Class dwelt on fox-hunting as the acme of “conspicuous wasteful consumption”, an incredibly expensive and incompetent—but ostentatious—way of doing what a chicken-farmer achieves better with a shotgun: and the ability to afford it makes its own social demarcation. The same applies to the public schooling and the domestic splendour, down to the details of personal appearance and manner. Nobody who has read Daphne Du Maurier’s snob-romance Rebecca is likely to forget the description of the cad: the kind of man who did not wear a hat and who would appeal only to “girls who gave one programmes in a cinema”.

From below, the groupings are stages in presumed rising-above the familiar deprivations and humiliations of working-class life. The person who has escaped from run-down housing to a suburb with trees, become a car-owner and seen his children “doing well”, is strongly persuaded to think of it as superiority. Those left behind in seedy surroundings and dismal jobs, condemned to having their noses rubbed in the worst of capitalism’s dirt, are all in a boat he has got out of: and what he now has, he’ll hold. On the other side there are people with more advantages — better houses, bigger cars, ampler displays of status — who look down on him. Called “class distinction”, these are the views from different rungs of the ladder.

Welfare Culture

What was implied, then, in the claim to break down class barriers was the ending of inequalities between social groups. The biggest factor ironing-out the differences was held to be the Welfare State. Not only need no-one be thrown into destitution by sickness or unemployment; medical attention was available to all according to need, and such stigmas as the pauper funeral were abolished. The extension of the school-leaving age and the accessibility of grants for further education were parts of the same process. “Equality of opportunity” was the watchword.

But besides these legislative steamrollers, equality was claimed to be spreading through society from the sheer diffusion of commodities. In money terms the television set in working-class homes was less of a luxury than what it replaced, the family piano; but in cultural terms, the same programmes went into the houses of rich and poor alike. Newspapers, car travel, labour-saving domestic appliances were all seen as having the same equalising tendency. Even holidays abroad, once the exclusive prerogative of the very well-to-do, were now available to working people. “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate” had vanished as social symbols. Instead, both were believed to be seated in front of television sets, reading the same continental holiday brochures through National Health spectacles.

New Labels

If any of this had been true, a silent social revolution should have taken place in the past twenty years. What has happened? In fact, the crude semi-feudal tokens of privilege whose disappearance was being celebrated have been replaced by a complex of social groupings and distinctions. “Class” is as pervasive as ever.

The redevelopment of towns has, if anything, intensified their stratification. Any large city is, socially, a series of islands on which people live among their acknowledged kinds — white-collars, labouring population, art-and-craft, high prosperity, etc.: the next island may be only up the road, but it is a foreign land whose children may not play with one’s own. The growth of council-house estates and owner-occupation, to say nothing of immigrant districts, has multiplied the islands. Likewise in rural areas the two layers of village life, gentry and farmworkers, have given way to the varied social self-valuations of commuters, directors and retired shopkeepers. It is commonly complained in the country that these new populations from town ‘‘don’t mix”; that is, they bring with them their own social-group palisades.

The idea of amenities as an equalitarian force is part of the old Fabian nonsense. In the early nineteen- twenties H. G. Wells informed Lenin and Trotsky that electric power would achieve more than the class struggle (“What a little bourgeois”, Lenin is supposed to have said afterwards). However, the divisive effects of piped and purchased amenities have grown as fast as they have spread. Every car carries its social label, the make and age connoting the owner’s income and status. The Fabians’ picture of ‘‘gas-and-water socialism” did not include House and Garden showing impossibly opulent kitchens and the Florentine statuary in Sir Wiliam’s loo. As for holidays abroad, "package” has become almost a contemptuous term implying bone-pared schedules of cheap hotels and sweaty droves pressed between famous buildings and souvenir shops. If a modern Robin Hood took that from the rich to give to the poor, he died laughing.

Dole, School, Colour

The Welfare State has, notoriously, gone sour on those who idealised it —not least in its promise to dissolve have-and-have-not differences. In general, what is provided by the State is the barest and most minimal; better has to be paid for, by those who can. The inevitable outcome has been the growth of private insurance schemes catering for the sizeable section who can’t quite afford to be cash patients but may, on an actuarial basis, keep their feet out of the water in which the poorest swim. In the everyday administration of “welfare”, the rise of the Claimants’ Unions owes directly to social-group attitudes to the Social Security system. So far from seeing themselves as part of the will of the community, officials have taken their task as a defensive action against undeserving layabouts and would-be tricksters. Indeed, the Welfare State has produced a saloon-bar mythology nearly as profuse as that of race. Its favourite character, heard-of everywhere, is the man who chooses unemployment because it pays him better: no-one seems to ask what appalling wage he gets in work, then.

The hope of educational equality has gone the same way. The replacement of selective separate schools by comprehensive ones was hailed as a great levelling movement: few people can have noticed that comprehensive education was called “true selection” in the 1958 Labour Party document on the subject. Apart from the grading principle on which comprehensive education is based, the schools themselves have quickly acquired their own status to be sought-after or not: the case of Holland Park as the “superior” comp is now being reproduced again and again. Nor does the admission of working-class boys and girls to universities go far to diminish the differences. Last month E. R. Braithwaite, the black West Indian writer, described on television his days at an English university where all students were equal before the subject at study — and his discovery later that this did not make them equal before the world.

Race has been one other field round which social groups have formed themselves. It is curious how the issue is always made that of colour when it is patently class. Anyone who doubts that should try fitting everything now said about coloured immigrants over what used to be said about the so-called lumpenproletariat — the poorest, most deprived sections of the working class — any time up to 1939. The fit is exact. Of inferior intelligence; lazy (of course); dirty; and disposed to violent crime. Moreover, they have huge families (living like animals), have rowdy parties every night, eat smelly food, and would ruin a decent neighbourhood if they were allowed in it. Enoch Powell might be interested to know that his story of excrement pushed through the letter-box was first heard by the writer from an industrial housing estate, all white, over twenty years ago.

Class and Capitalism

What is class, then, that will not be eradicated? The numerous groupings and divisions which persist and re-form continually in our society are, as has been said, not classes though they call themselves so. Classes are categories deriving from the basic organisation of society. If one looks at capitalism for its organic structure, there are two classes only: those who live by owning the means of production and distribution, and those who don’t. The position of the former is obvious enough. For the latter, the position would be also easy to see if it were not obscured — for many — by semantics and humbug. It is one of dependence on being employed and paid a wage. Regardless of accent, colour, education and high or low income, nine-tenths of the population everywhere are in this situation.

The supposed other classes are not sub-sections within that division. They are reflections of it, demonstrations of the way capitalism sets man against man. The fact that people are always hoping to get rid of these “class barriers”, and short-lived successes in doing so are claimed, shows their fluidity while the single great division remains. They are fluid because no-one is secure who depends on a wage. Last year publicity was given to the troubles of out-of-work executives. One, in a television programme, spoke angrily of the treatment at the Social Security office: if the clerk had not been a woman, he said, he would have smashed her face in. On the scrap-heap, the pretences of class are exchanged for the realities.

What is Classless Society?

One thing which is clear about “class” is that nobody likes it. Many people take it to be inevitable, but live in hopes of some lucky break which will take them to another rung of the ladder where, it is thought, things would be different. Everyone talks of “getting out of the rat race”.

When the phrase “classless society” is used, it usually means the absence of unfairness and inequality among social groups. What must be seen is that these problems derive from and exist because of capitalism’s division into owners and non-owners. The classless society is one in which the means of living have become common property. Given that, the basis for any assumption of social superiority from race, sex or possessions disappears. The first step to making such a society, however, is for all those dependent on wages to recognise this as the only true factor of their class position now. "Class-consciousness” is commonly a term for snobbery. Correctly, it means understanding of the fact that everyone who has to work is — working-class.

Robert Barltrop

Some Definitions (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

CAPITALISM is the sort of society you live in now. It is a system of wage-slavery in which a small minority owns most of the world, and (sometimes) employ the rest of us. In capitalism, most things are sold for a price—production is for profit rather than for use. The world is divided up by frontiers into warring factions known as “nations.” Symptoms of capitalism include war, hunger, boom-slump cycles, strikes, widespread loneliness and despair. 

Countries like Russia or China, whose governments claim to be “Socialist”, are of course capitalist like their western rivals.

COMMUNES (kibbutzim etc.) are attempts by a few to get some shelter from the capitalist rat race. Whilst they may benefit their members, from the standpoint of abolishing capitalism they are a waste of time. Socialism in one country is not possible, let alone Socialism in one farm. Socialism could, however, be described as a world-wide commune.

HUMAN NATURE is a most frequent objection to the idea of a Socialist society. It is supposed that human beings have some fixed patterns of social behaviour which are especially conducive to capitalism. In fact, what is normally termed “human nature” is the result of social conditioning. Private property, leadership, aggressiveness, monogamy, etc. are no more congenial to human beings than alternative forms. A knowledge of different societies, historically and geographically, is sufficient to knock the human nature myth on the head.

LABOUR PARTY is often called “Socialist” but in fact never has been. The Labour Party was formed to improve the conditions of workers by reforms within capitalism. It sought gradually to change capitalism; instead capitalism has gradually changed it. The Labour Party is now no more than an alternative team for the management of British capitalism.

PATRIOTISM is unscientific and runs counter to the interests of working-people. It is therefore opposed by Socialists, who do not offer “policies for Britain” etc, but demand a world community without frontiers.

POPULATION EXPLOSION is certainly a reality, but it is a myth that it is responsible for hunger, pollution or overcrowded living. The world can easily support many times its present population in comfort and plenty of room. Hysterical Malthusianism diverts attention from the real problem: production is geared to the market, rather than to the satisfaction of human needs.

REFORMS are basically attempts to solve problems within capitalism rather than by doing away with it. Capitalism never runs out of reforms. Socialists are not opposed to all reforms, but we don’t think it is our job to propose them or campaign for them. Reforms are usually of negligible value to the working-class, and often create new problems which require further reforms. Fundamental social problems are always untouched because these are rooted in capitalism.

RELIGION is opposed by all rational people, but especially by Socialists who see it as compensation for social misery, and a diversion from the urgent problems of the real world. Happily, religion is steadily ebbing away in the most advanced areas of capitalism.

REVOLUTION is the process of changing from one social system to another. It is not necessarily a matter of barricades and bloodbaths, but in the case of the Socialist revolution, requires mainly mass understanding and democratic organisation. It is part of the job of Socialists to hasten this revolution by spreading Socialist understanding.

SOCIALISM is the next stage in human social evolution—unless capitalism destroys us first by means of nuclear/chemical-biological war. or ecological collapse. Socialism will mean the abolition of private property, money and the wages system; the introduction of voluntary work and free access to necessary goods and services. Socialism is a world-wide society of voluntary co-operation. It will put an end to wars, poverty and unemployment, enabling our species to concentrate on less serious problems.

The Cynicism of Capitalism: 1. Come and exploit our Africans (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has always made clear that nationalism, whether in Africa, Israel, Ireland or wherever, is a snare and a delusion for the working class of the country concerned. National independence may well be a good thing for the native capitalist class who are naturally concerned at seeing the fruits of the exploitation of the local working class going into the pockets of the British Imperialists or whoever the alien ruling class might be. But for workers to risk imprisonment or even death in a struggle for independence which will ensure for them nothing more than the joy of being exploited by their very own capitalists instead of foreign ones is clearly the height of folly.

A rather lurid light on this subject has recently been displayed in an advertisement in The Guardian by the Nigerian Government:

People are earning

HUGE PROFITS

in Nigeria


Huge domestic market of 55 millions


Abundant manpower is available at a rate
as low as 7 U.S. cents an hour.

You can get your investment back in
less than 3 years.

It should be pointed out that the words Huge Profits are printed in gigantic capitals in the advert, and are repeated at the end — People are earning huge profits in Nigeria: why don’t YOU ! The word “people” is itself a misleading term beloved of capitalist propagandists. It made nice capital, for example, when Nigeria was part of the British Empire, for the national capitalists to appeal to the Nigerian workers: People of Nigeria, fight to throw out the British Imperialist Exploiters. But nobody can be deceived by the present rallying-cry in the advert. The “people” who are “earning” these huge profits are not the African workers. They are earning something less. 7 cents an hour, in fact.

So the Nigerian government is setting out to get British capitalists to come and exploit African workers. Which means, of course, that a lot of these workers are going to find themselves in the ironical position of once again being exploited by the same white capitalists from whom they had fought and won their alleged independence. It is not sure, what with devaluations of the pound and revaluations of the dollar, exactly what 7 cents is worth these days but a tanner (two-and-a-half new pence to younger readers) would be somewhere near it. “In less than three years” gives an effective rate of exploitation to show a net return on capital of between 30 and 40 per cent, per annum. That’s really mouth-watering exploitation — far better than you would find in England or America. Or far worse, of course. Depending on whether you are a worker or a capitalist. That makes all the difference. Black or white clearly makes none.

Naked and unashamed, the Nigerian capitalists are boasting to Guardian readers (those poor devils who are fed each day on a diet of anti-racialism as though that were the only cause that mattered and anti-South-Africanism as though the natives of that unhappy land were living on even less than a tanner an hour) about what shockingly low wages they are getting away with. These are the people that the other people, the Nigerian workers, have put in power. “Come and exploit our blacks. They are the cheapest wage-slaves you can get.” We are not saying that the wage-slaves were better off under British rule. It is clear that they could hardly have been worse off. Even the worst capitalists must pay wages sufficient to live on. And they could hardly live on less than 7 miserable U.S. cents. And it is doubtful if such brutally cynical advertising would have happened. British capitalists are a bit too sophisticated to advertise “Our workers are paid less than other wage-slaves”. It certainly adds insult to injury to know that your exploiters are actually boasting about your slavery in the columns of the world’s leading do-gooder paper, god help us.

One wonders what that old do-gooder, the Labour peer Lord Fenner Brockway, thinks of the result of his efforts on behalf of African nationalism. No-one was more scathing in days gone by about the Socialist Party’s contention that nationalism was nothing to do with Socialism and was a trap for the working class. Brockway and the other leading Labourites of those days were all great friends of people like Nkrumah, Banda and Kenyatta. All of whom, when in power, have treated the African workers to an adaptation of the Biblical phrase: the British rules you with whips, we will rule you with scorpions. Which of course did not stop Brockway and other lefties from supporting people like Nkrumah who could fairly be described as Black Hitlers in the making (and the last little phrase would be omitted by the victims of the Nkrumah dictatorship which Brockway upheld).

Only a couple of years ago, the Nigerian government which had achieved independence had a spot of bother. It seems that some of their fellow black capitalists who lived in a part of the country they called Biafra wanted independence from their own black capitalist brothers. There was a lot of oil in the Port Harcourt area where they came from and they didn’t see why they should share the swag with the other black capitalists in Lagos. So there was another little fracas which resulted in hundreds of thousands of Africans, Nigerians and Biafran workers and their wives and children, being caught in a most murderous bloodbath or starved to death. But it seems that this was independence that the Labourites didn’t approve of. You see, these were the days of the Wilson government, and the fake socialists who were then managing British capitalism preferred to pay ball with the Nigerian government because this was in the interests of British Business (as a searing article in, of all places, The Guardian made clear when it was all over). And now that Nigerian independence has been finally won and defended against black and white alike, the net result of all the suffering and carnage is that African workers get a tanner an hour.

L. E. Weidberg

The Cynicism of Capitalism: 2: Partners Wanted (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The company’s prospectus is a colourful document of orange, red, yellow and gold paper. Pages are perforated by cut-outs of hearts. If all this seems a bit unusual, the prospectus offering is more so, as The Guardian (17th January) revealed. It is an invitation to the West German public by Kohle Liengeschaften to purchase limited partnership in an operation currently consisting of brothels in Konstanz, a town on Germany’s Swiss border, and Kaiserslautern which is near Mannheim and a NATO base.

“The oldest profession in the world is also the solidest,” the Company says on the cover of the prospectus. And an accompanying letter to potential investors suggests that purchasing a partnership in the enterprise “is an investment worth while because Irma La Douce never has a recession.”

The profession may have been around for a long time but it is believed that the Kohle venture is the first time capital has been publicly — and legally — raised in West Germany for an enterprise of this kind. And the financial enticements are substantial since the company is guaranteeing a minimum annual return of 9 per cent. “This is a better investment than stock,” asserts Herr Kohle, founder and managing director.

In Germany prostitution is considered a social necessity. The administration generally approves the existence of bordellos on the ground that they keep prostitutes off the streets (brothel bedrooms are officially referred to as places of work). So accepted is the profession in fact that there is even a slickly-written travel guide to West German brothels and red-light districts that lists each house and its location on a city-by-city basis and rates the house according to parking facilities, prices, service and amenities.

Prostitution is not a new venture for Kohle Liengeschaften. The real estate operation currently derives its income from renting small apartments to prostitutes and from concessionaires such as the night-club operators at the Kaiserslautern facility. The company, Herr Kohle emphasises, receives no direct part of any prostitutes earnings. Herr Kohle says that there are currently forty-seven “lady tenants” at Kaiserslautern and thirty-five at Konstanz. Generally, he says, a girl stays for three or four years. How long she stays usually depends upon whether she is making money and whether she feels secure.

The brothels are advantageously situated. The Kaiserslautern operation is the only one of its kind near the NATO base, while the Konstanz operation is near a casino and just across the border from Switzerland, where prostitution is illegal. The brothels’ “lady tenants” are checked by the management for police records, among other things. "We don’t take all the girls who apply,” Herr Kohle says. “For example, we don’t want wild women.” The girls, he adds, come from all over Europe. In return, the girls sign rental contracts for an indefinite period. In addition to protection, Herr Kohle says the company also provides apartments at Kaiserslautern where the girls’ relatives can stay when they visit. He adds that the company is also considering construction of a separate facility next year at Kaiserslautern for children of the prostitutes. These features, Herr Kohle says, offer the girls some security and "take some of the harshness out of the profession”.

Herr Kohle’s “new style” operations have borne financial fruit. So far nearly £600,000 in limited partnerships has been purchased by 120 to 130 investors. The limited partnerships are sold in £5,500 units. However, to attract the small investor and to provide anonymity, several investors may each put up £550 and pool their investments to make the minimum for a partnership unit. According to its prospectus, Kohle Liengeschaften is currently offering equity capital equivalent to £1 million or about £150,000 less than the estimated market value of the two properties. By the end of 1973 the company hopes to have eight brothels in Germany and Austria. To reach this goal he says about £4.5 million will have to be raised.

The company is advertising in newspapers and is selling partnerships through investment consultants and through its own sales office, which includes some former IOS Mutual Fund salesmen. Herr Kohle is a 43-year- old entrepreneur who is also in the construction and investment business and says that he put together Kohle Liengeschaften because "there was still room for adventure” in his life. He says he is optimistic about the future of the venture. “Prostitution has weathered all the storms over the past 2,000 years without a crisis and I don’t see one now unless the human race changes,” he says.

Here we have an example of the mentality that views all things as commodities, including the female sexual capacity. The brothel in this case is the market place, the buyers desirous males. Herr Kohle need fear no change in the human race, but he has left out of his calculation the fact that a section of the human race — the working-class section — will change conditions and, as a consequence, will change the behaviour of the human race. This is a change that will remove the commodity status from society and thus eliminate all forms of prostitution — and prevent the likes of him from exploiting women.

R. Ambridge

50 Years Ago: The Way of Peace (1972)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

It may be useful to remember that during the great war of 1914-1918, the workers who were drawn into that bloody orgie wanted nothing more than to be allowed to remain in their native land, and to be provided with a constant means of obtaining a living by the sale of their labour power to the master-class. That is the high watermark of their intelligence, which socialists so much deplore; but to say nations are torn with suspicions of each other, or secretly preparing war-like plans of self-aggrandisement, etc., is a travesty of facts, or the result of lamentable ignorance. It is not the nations, but the greedy capitalist class whose sectional interests compel them to regard each other suspiciously and who are secretly preparing to commit another terrible crime against humanity. The great mass of the world’s workers know nothing of these plans, and instead of suspicion there is an ever-growing sympathy springing up between them : a sympathy born of the knowledge that there is only one enemy they have to face the wide world over :—the capitalist class who alone are responsible for the present economic chaos, and the sum of human misery and suffering entailed thereby.

(From an article "The Way of Peace" by W. W. F. in the Socialist Standard October 1922).

SPGB Meetings (1972)

Party News from the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The I.L.P. as the 'Open' Party (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

It would be impossible to describe within a single article of reasonable length the policies of the Independent Labour Party. They stand for just about everything. No cause is too small to merit their attention: Black Militancy; Irish Nationalism; Military Strategy; Liberation of Vietnam; and now, Workers’ Control. These are in addition to their almost unlimited stock of reforms in Housing, Education, Health. You name it, they’ve got it — that is, with the notable exception of a Socialist policy.

With such a universal platform the ILP continues to decay and is, in fact, a political joke. The reasons are that the big battalions of social reform, the Labour and Tory parties, have monopolised the field leaving the ILP and its associates in the position of the small shopkeepers opposing the supermarkets. Another reason is that the policies of the ILP have become so discredited over the years that it appears to them nothing less than a new approach based on new policies will stop the rot. 

At its 81st annual conference held at Scarborough earlier this year the new face-lift (third in its history) was performed. The conference made the discovery that they had been wrong all the time, and had a sectarian approach to politics. Sweeping changes in the constitution were made. By a large majority the delegates agreed that there was no value in participating in parliamentary or local elections at the present stage of the class struggle, and voted that no branch or division of the Party should put up candidates in the future, unless in exceptional circumstances. Coupled with this decision was support for “workers’ control” to subvert the organisation of the capitalist class (Socialist Leader, 8 April 1972), and also that members of the ILP would be free to join other political parties and work within them. (This ancient policy was advocated by the Communist Party forty-five years ago, and described as “boring from within”. It proved to be useless as well as dishonest, but this is lost on the ILP).

Confusion

Their position on Parliament, despite the conference decision, is confused. On page 3 of their pamphlet Towards Socialism they state:

There is little to be gained by relying on the procedures of Parliamentary Democracy. The ILP must therefore recruit members in local communities, in colleges and universities, and at the point of production, for organised subversion.

But on page 4:

Meanwhile the ILP advocates policies and initiates activity, including direct action and Parliamentary activity, designed to strengthen the institutions of the working class and subvert the organisations of the capitalist class.

This contradictory position is all things to all men, and is nothing more than political opportunism. The curious logic which impels the ILP to partly repudiate Parliament arises purely from the fact that they cannot get in there. Political power, which they have courted dearly and cannot have, now they regard as useless. The Parliamentary system is blamed for the failure of their policies. Forgotten is the fact that the first Labour government in 1924 largely consisted of ILP members, including 45 MPs. The second Labour government contained 111 members.

So we return to direct action and workers’ control — theories which are at least 150 years old. This is the “modern” ILP! These emotive policies, borrowed from other antiquated organisations (anarchists, Trotskyists, etc.) are dear to politically immature workers and students. They have that romantic ring, and are removed from a clear and objective appreciation of what makes capitalism work. Incidentally, they have never satisfactorily explained, and none of the organisations which support workers’ control has explained, how you get the capitalists to relinquish their control. 

Cartoon by Jack Gold.

Whose Power ?

The claim by the ILP “that real power exists outside Parliament and the Courts” (page 3, The Way to Workers' Control) is rubbish. This is based on the assumption that the workers have economic power and can use the strike weapon to enforce political reforms as well as wage demands. They are wrong on both counts. It is the capitalists who have economic power, it is they who can and do dictate the conditions under which they will produce, hire or fire. The economic power of the workers is restricted to fighting a series of rearguard actions through trade unions against the unending encroachments of capital. In the field of political reform, no strike action by unions over the past 150 years has produced any reform even in trade-union legislation. Political power and economic power is the prerogative of the capitalists. They dominate society, and the workers support them. Direct action could only be carried on by isolated minorities, and is doomed to failure as long as the majority of workers give their political support to capitalism.

The most recent example of the workers’ “economic power’’ and “control” was at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. This was inspired and led by Communists, supported by the ILP, Trotskyists, SLL, and IS. Viewed as the revolution they thought would be, it proved to be an utter fiasco. Based on the absurd principle that the workers work for nothing, being paid by other workers’ donations, they produced things for the capitalists to sell. No wonder the capitalists did not bring in the forces of law and order, having reaped the benefits of unpaid labour! It eventually deteriorated into a position where the militants led by Jimmy Reid, a prominent CP member, agreed to sit down with the new owners Marathon, a group of American capitalists, to discuss redundancies. Home-grown capitalists were evidently not good enough.

There are numerous instances which show that sporadic gestures of workers’ control are worse than useless. The ILP, SLL, CP, Trotskyists, etc. — the “militants” — are really the running dogs of capitalism. At election times they will come to heel and urge the workers to vote for the pro-capitalist Labour Party. The strange philosophy which impels these people is one which regards trade-union militancy and reform movements as permanent conditions of the workers’ existence. They see no way out.

None of these organisations understands Socialism, and they do their damnedest to make sure that the working class will not understand it either. They are fighting a losing battle, however. The policy and principles of the Socialist Party of Great Britain are easily understood, and we offer them to workers who are prepared to learn something new. Without the understanding of the Socialist Party’s policy and principles the workers cannot achieve Socialism. The Socialist Party of Great Britain will not repudiate Parliament — on the contrary, we aim at political power for the sole purpose of establishing Socialism.

Jim D'Arcy

Massacre of fruit (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Next time you pay 3p. (at least) for a peach, remember that the sight of a tractor crushing huge mounds of these plump, juicy fruits prior to their mass burial is boringly familiar to those who live in the "California of Europe", Italy's main fruit-growing area in the Romagna. 

We all know, of course, from those regular newspaper reports and prompt television documentaries that the practice is not confined to this area of Italy, or even of Europe. But this year's slaughter of unmarketable fruit threaten to assume vaster, even more unimaginable proportions than in the past. Last year's figures of several hundred thousand tons of peaches, pears and apples destroyed may well look small when this season's wastage is revealed. 

Even more dramatically, figures of "slaughtered" fruit only represent a small proportion of all the fruit actually "withdrawn from sale". The rest of it is used mainly for fruit juices, wine-making and animal feed (although the animals obstinately refuse to understand that peach stones are for spitting out not swallowing and that they are not supposed to turn their noses up at regular feed when the seasonal supply of succulent pears runs out). 

EEC Policy 

When membership of the Common Market guaranteed Italian farmers markets and high fixed prices for all the fruit they could produce, fruit growing underwent an Eldoradan boom from one end of the peninsula to the other. As was to be expected however, the mad scramble for sales and profits quickly subordinated quality to quantity with the result that Italian fruit soon developed a reputation for being second best to more tasty varieties produced in other parts of the world. So when unpalatability plus inefficient and over-bureaucratic distribution methods caused sales to drop, the EEC authority was forced to step in and in accordance with their price-fixing agreement to buy up the 'surplus' and put it to the 'uses' described above. 

They could not (and cannot) allow it to be released for sale at rock-bottom prices, as the immediate effect, of this would be to competitively force down the price of other fruit on the market and hit the farming profits they are in business to support. 

Don't Give it Away 

But why, instead of destroying the surplus fruit, don't they distribute it free to the wide areas of the world which have food shortages and malnutrition as a permanent problem? Low quality food, after all, is better than no food at all and such a practice could scarcely have a direct effect on market prices in the countries where the fruit is actually sold. They don't, quite simply because the expense involved in such a procedure would exceed the cost of allowing the unsaleable fruit to be grown and then destroying it. Besides a solution like this would be entirely unacceptable to the governments of "shortage" countries, as free goods would constitute the most dangerous kind of competition to goods being sold on the market there. And who knows, apart from the damage to these countries' economies (i.e. the profit prospects of those owning and controlling the means by which commodities are produced), a taste of free access, even on such a limited scale, might cause highly inconvenient social unrest? 

So with production and distribution tied to the need to maximise profit, such a method of disposing of "surplus" goods is right out. In our present worldwide system of buying and selling human need is a poor match for market demand, that is, need backed up by ready cash. 

Italian fruit, French vegetables, Common Market milk and butter, British eggs and potatoes, Canadian wheat and Japanese rice. It's the same depressing and wasteful story the earth over (including no doubt, if information were released, Russia with its so-called "planned" economy). And nothing on earth can be more anarchical and anti-social than a system which dumps and destroys all it cannot sell at a profit. What but working-class ignorance and inertia stand in the way of a society which would plan its resources rationally for the satisfaction of worldwide human needs? 

Howard Moss

A Great Exaggeration (1972)

Book Review from the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control by Maurice Brinton. Solidarity. 25p.

Built-in to capitalism is a conflict between the capitalists who own the means of production and the wage-earning or working class who operate them. This conflict goes on without its participants being necessarily or fully aware of its nature and its most obvious signs are strikes over wages and working conditions. However, this is not just a wages struggle; it is a struggle between the two classes for control over the means of production. In its highest form the workers consciously organise to win political power with the aim of transferring the ownership of the means of production from the capitalist class to the community as a while.

This stage has yet to be reached, but incidents in working class history already show that the class struggle is more than mere wage bargaining. When, under exceptional circumstances such as occur after wars, the capitalists' control over their factories has broken down the workers have themselves on a number of occasions taken over the means of production and through trade unions or factory committees tried to keep production going. Such "workers' control" was not Socialism nor could it have led to Socialism because most of the workers involved had never been convinced socialists. The State has always been able to re-assert capitalist control.

The classic example of this was the occupation of the factories in Northern Italy in 1921, but before that in Russia in 1917 something similar had happened. Engineering workers in Petrograd in particular took over control of the factories where they worked. Brinton's book is an account of how between 1917 and 1921 the Bolshevik government suppressed this "workers' control" and instituted instead their own state (capitalist) control.

This process of suppression began soon after the Bolsheviks had seized power in November 1917 which clearly showed up right from the start (rather than from the death of Lenin) their anti-working class character. These facts have long been known to Socialists but will probably be new to Trotskyists and their ilk.

The book suffers from a number of defects, not least that when he conies to theorise Brinton shares the illusions of the anarchists, syndicalists and dissident Bolsheviks he quotes. He does not bring forward any evidence to show that "workers' control" enjoyed the general support of the workers he seems to suggest it did. He ignores the problems the partisans of "workers' control" would have faced had they triumphed, in view of the economic backwardness of Russia as a whole where four-fifths of the population were peasants who had never been near a factory.

To see, as Brinton does, the Russian Revolution as essentially an unsuccessful attempt to establish "workers' control" is a great exaggeration. The occupation of the factories was only incidental to the seizure of political power by the Bolsheviks and their use of it to sweep away out-dated obstacles to the development of capitalism in Russia — and was only made possible by the same breakdown of law and order which allowed the Bolsheviks to seize power.

The attempt to maintain "workers' control" was doomed to fail not only because of Russia's economic backwardness but also because of the lack of understanding of the Russian workers. Oddly enough at one point Brinton comes very near to expressing our view — and almost in our own words — of events in Russia in 1917:

"The year 1917 certainly saw a tremendous social upheaval. But it was a utopian dream to assume that socialism could be achieved without a large proportion of the population both understanding and wanting it. The building of socialism . . . can only be the self conscious and collective act of the immense majority."

We do not mind people making the analysis we pioneered but we would prefer this to be openly acknowledged rather than disguised by the kind of inaccurate account of our position given by Brinton in his introduction.

Adam Buick