Letter: "Mother-right" (1980)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Mother-right"

Dear Editors,

The article “Battered Wives” in the July Socialist Standard follows Engels’ view in “The Origins of the Family” that mother-right was the general position before male-dominated, property, class institutions became established. Agreed: the position of women relative to men drastically deteriorated with the advent of private property, but it is open to question whether primitive societies were essentially matrilinear. Some were, others were definitely not. Why? is the subject of much controversy in anthropology. While the 19th century founding fathers of anthropology had precise, straightforward answers on how primitive humanity’s life was structured and functioned, present day anthropologists seem less certain of the meaning of the mass of data that has accumulated. I will quote just one of them—Leslie A. White a cultural evolutionist in the grand, system-building tradition of L. H. Morgan. His is by no means the last word, but at least he puts order into the question, and writes clearly.

As a general proposition we may say that prominence or predominance of men in the mode of life of the (primitive) society will tend to produce patrilinear lineages; prominence or predominance of women will tend to form matrilinear lineages. Thus a culture in which warfare, hunting or herding is an activity of paramount importance will tend toward patrilineal lineages because these occupations tend to be masculine pursuits. In systems where woman’s role in subsistence, house building and ownership, or in some handicraft, puts her in a position of considerable importance as compared with men in the mode of life, there will be a tendency toward matrilineal lineages. (The Evolution of Culture)

White adds that although this statement is sound enough, it could easily mislead because of the complexity of numerous, diverse factors at work in specific situations making for small to great variations.

S Lion

London, SE24

50 Years Ago: The Profit-Sharing Snare (1980)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Great Britain is losing her hold over the world market. That means producing firms are finding it harder to compete successfully against producers abroad. Every scheme is being tried to regain lost trade and to increase the quantity of goods sold . . .  The most effective way to capture markets is to sell cheaper than your rivals.

* * * * *

Copartnership or shareholding by employees is the stale device which is being revived. One of the great examples of this scheme is the South Metropolitan Gas Works, who smashed their employees’ strike on the profit-sharing issue, and afterwards raised hours from 8 to 12 per day. That firm boasts that since "allowing employees to own shares, efficiency has increased, the price of gas has fallen, and — better still — profits have risen considerably. In this firm the profit-sharing scheme was made compulsory, so that all workers would take "a greater interest in their work”. It worked out in practice that fewer men were required to do the same amount of work.

From an article by Adolf Kohn, Socialist Standard, October 1930

Political Notes: "Communist" duplicity (1980)

The Political Notes Column from the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Communist” duplicity

The bare-faced lies of the Communist Parties of the world have been with us ever since the state-capitalist coup by Lenin in 1917. It is well-known that, apart from anything else, they falsify history by turning Trotsky, who so ably played the role of Lenin’s right hand (with a knife in it) man at places like Kronstadt, into an unperson, even wiping him off group photos of the Bolshevik gang. It was fairly easy for them because they were (still are) able to see to it that the Russian workers were insulated from foreign sources where the truth might emerge.

The French Communist Party had no such luck. One would think, therefore, that they would be somewhat careful. Not a bit of it. Their leader, Marchais, who for a couple of years was one of the so-called Eurocommunists who were prepared to criticise the Russian dictatorship (just a little) has now reverted to his more congenial role of hard-liner. So at the Olympic Games, where he was given the red-carpet treatment like a head of state, he made bootlicking speeches praising the Games and lauding the “intervention” in Afghanistan (somehow one thinks that if the Yanks had done it, the word would have been “invasion” — which it certainly was).

These bootlickings duly appeared on French television and in the press where Marchais got plenty of deserved stick for such things as his references to the freedom which he found existed in Moscow. But when the speeches appeared in L'Humanite (the Paris Pravda) it was too much for the comrades and such things as the references to freedom were censored out. Which in turn was gleefully seized on by the rest of the rags in Fleet Street, Paris. The sad question remains. How on earth can so many millions of French workers still be taken in by these clumsy crooks who turn the name of socialism/communism into a sick joke?

St. Kilda memory

We are familiar with the work of anthropologists who have studied the life-styles of pre-capitalist societies and shown that human beings have not always been competitive, money conscious owners and non-owners; but their examples have usually been regarded as rather exotic—Amazonian Indians, Polynesians and the like. It was all the more interesting, therefore, to see in the Guardian (July 25) an article written in commemoration of the evacuation a mere 50 years ago of the last inhabitants of the island of St Kilda in the Hebrides.

It is fascinating to read remarks about these people (some of whom are still alive in England) that recall very similar observations about savage tribes. We read, for example, that for hundreds of years the islanders existed without the use of money, something that seems to baffle those workers who imagine that apes made money their first priority as soon as they got down from the trees. “There was virtually no crime and no policeman ever landed on their shores.” The island was owned by the McLeods of Skye. “All work to pay the rent (in kind) was done communally as was the sharing out of the sea-bird harvest which was divided according to need.” “Every member of the community relied on the others for survival and notions of individual payment were strange to them. Sheep, a secondary source of wealth, were owned individually but if one man lost some, the others would make up his losses.”

The island was bleak and windswept (still is) but there is no evidence from 17th and 18th century accounts that “the islanders were wretched or dissatisfied. On the contrary, authors wrote of “the relish and gaiety with which they went about their work and of their great love for poetry, music, dancing and other jollity”. But the outside world of capitalism could not leave St. Kilda alone. “The ministers and missionaries proved a decisive influence, mostly for the bad . . .  their poetry and music, banned by the ministers, died out . . . A community, which had been a weather-beaten anachronism for a millenium and flourished with it — declined and died.”

Miscellany

Can he really mean it?

“We should not abandon some time-honoured Labour principles namely our commitment to a mixed economy, international socialism. These principles are not incompatible with a successful economic policy” (our italics). As all the governments that have run one of these “socialist-capitalist” economies (Callaghan, Schmidt) have presided over massive unemployment (among other delights), one wonders what the idiot who wrote the above can mean by “successful”? The words of wisdom appeared in a letter to the Guardian on August 18. The writer was someone called John Horam who is apparently the Labour MP for Gateshead West.

How capitalists love “communists”

At the time of writing the present wave of strikes in Poland may be in their last throes. The friendly noises being made by Callaghan and Thatcher could mean one point being overlooked. One would think that the Western capitalists would hope that their “communist” enemies would be overthrown by their own workers. But it’s not so simple. The news at the beginning of August from Hella Pick of the Guardian (and other sources) was that the west is worried. Their banks have made huge loans to the Polish government. If it is overthrown, they are very nervous about losing their money. Capitalists—of whatever variety—are in the end sisters under their skins. Workers of the world, beware!

Dead clever

The Chinese legislature meets this weekend . . .  to remove the remnants of opposition . . . To the chagrin of foreigners here in Peking, the agenda includes corporate and individual income tax legislation with rates reportedly based on the US tax code.

(From the Guardian August 30)

How to run a “workers’ state”

Mr. Szydlak, who is a member of the Polish Politbureau, is reported to have told the workers: “The authorities do not intend to give up their power or to share it with anyone else”.

(Guardian August 21)

Even professors can learn

"If one were to ask who is the biggest capitalist on earth, one would have to say: the government of the USSR. It owns and controls practically the whole of Russian industry and agriculture . . .  The capital power of the USSR, backed as it is by armed might, is enormously bigger than General Motors or any American capitalist; and it makes ICI here look like a corner drug store.

Other communist governments would follow in that list. It now seems clear that the biggest capitalists in the present age are the socialist states themselves. And the biggest in the Western world are great public corporations like British Steel-state monopolies or nationalised industries. It now seems very hard to argue that more socialism means less capitalism. On the contrary, the state is the biggest capitalist that there is. And nationalisation, or public ownership, makes it bigger still."

(Professor George Watson, Encounter, June 1980)

L E Weidberg

SOUNDS FAMILIAR!

“It has been the iron principle of the National Socialist leadership not to permit any rise in the hourly wage rates; but to raise income solely by an increase in performance”.

Adolf Hitler at the Nazi Congress of Hanover (quoted by Franz Neumann in his book Behemoth).

Letter to the Editors: CND defended (1980)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

CND defended

Dear Editors

As a member of CND since it began, an ex-Aldermaston marcher, and one of the “100” who supported Russell, I must protest at the facile “hindsight” of S. Coleman. In the sixties it looked as though the world might indeed be destroyed and we felt we had to do something. It wasn’t, we know now. But it’s so easy for the S. Colemans of this world to pour scorn on the effort of great men like Russell, who had more brains in his little toe than apparently Mr. Coleman has in his head.

David Fraser

Rugby, Warwk.

Reply:

It is not only with hindsight that socialists can demonstrate the futility of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; in September 1960 the Socialist Standard was able to predict that CND would not succeed:

Some “Campaigners”, while agreeing that capitalism is the cause of war in the modern world, maintain that although a new social organisation may be necessary, a nuclear war would prevent the establishment of this, perhaps for all time, and therefore the anti-nuclear movement should be given priority over socialism. This argument is logically unsound; it assumes that which has yet to be demonstrated. It presupposes that the Campaign will be able to prevent a nuclear war occurring. For the Campaign to “succeed" it must have a majority of people who are opposed unconditionally to nuclear weapons, in the major countries of the world. These majorities must be prepared to oppose their own governments, to put aside all nationalistic feeling or racial prejudice and be immune to all attempts of their rulers to influence them during periods of international crisis and tension. Is it possible that such internationalist solidarity could be achieved by a movement which is composed of so many fundamentally diverse elements and which lacks any clear conception of an alternative to our inhuman social system? Only a revolutionary Socialist consciousness could ensure such a united unshakeable attitude and in that event the question of opposition to nuclear weapons alone would be redundant. (The Weakness of CND, Sept. 1960)

The article, “Has CND Learnt Nothing?” in the August 1980 Socialist Standard was intended to deter workers from wasting their energies on another dose of CND when our criticism of it in 1960 has been seen to be clearly correct. Today in 1980 the number of nuclear weapons in existence is many times the number that existed when the first Aldermaston march took place. We are not against workers “doing something”, but we are against them doing the wrong thing.

As for Bertrand Russell’s brain, we must say that we arc less concerned with its size and location than its use. While Russell may have been a great mathematician and was certainly an eloquent atheist orator, as a political activist he was nothing but a pious moraliser with about as much understanding of social reality as his latter-day echo, E. P. Thompson.

Editors.

Deflation disaster (1980)

From the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who hasn’t heard (and seen) Maggie rabbiting on about “suitcase money”? Or dolorous Geoff drooling mournfully on “getting inflation down”? If only they did they wouldn’t talk so much about it. But what would actually happen if ever they did'! Answer: Very little—or nothing much!

In other words, we’ve all been here before. Most modern politicians and “economists” seem utterly unaware of recent history. World War I started it all. In 1917, the British Army was dropping over four tons of shells on every yard of German front line. This, and everything else, had to be paid for, which meant that Britain accumulated massive debts to the United States. It was then—in 1915—that the government issued ten- shilling notes. Here is an account of the situation in 1924 by James Joll:

With unemployment mounting and confidence in the currency and the financial institutions ebbing fast, the orthodox response of Governments was to adopt a policy of deflation, and to attempt to restore confidence by balancing budgets, exercising economy, cutting expenditure, reducing the wages of State employees and dismissing redundant workers. This had the effect of diminishing purchasing power still further, and increasing unemployment still more.

(Europe Since 1870: an International History) 

This view is echoed by the economic historian, David Landes: “Deflation may have been a triumph of ideology and virtue; but it was an economic failure” (The Unbound Prometheus: Technology from 1750 to the Present).

Britain’s return to the Gold Standard in 1924 sparked off the miners' strike, the General Strike, three million unemployed, and the collapse of the Labour government in 1929. The Sixth Congress of the Communist International announced that capitalism was once again heading for its collapse, and the by-ways of Britain echoed to the thud of the Hunger-Marchers’ tatty army boots.

In 1931, appalled by the apparent frightful havoc of deflation, “experts”, publicists and politicians turned to inflation for a change. Witch-doctor John Maynard Keynes wrote in his boring General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money:

The world will not much longer tolerate the unemployment associated with capitalist individualism . . . But it may be possible to cure the disease . . .  whilst preserving efficiency and freedom.

And what was the cure? Obviously, if “lack of purchasing power” was the cause, then the remedy was more paper money—inflation.

The chief self-appointed guru of the Labour Party in those days, G D H Cole, was not the only “expert” to nip smartly on the band-waggon; Sidney Pollard and all the other Lefties joined in the Hallelujah Chorus. “When resources are idle, additional purchasing power will bring them into play” pontificated Cole (What Everybody Wants to Know about Money), and the TUC General Council, understanding slightly less about it (as now) than they did about Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, submitted Memoranda to the Government with the same refrain. Ever ready to oblige, Stanley Baldwin’s Government confirmed the protection duties started during the War, and went off the Gold Standard.

This gave some, who did not understand the cause of slumps in capitalism, the mistaken notion that inflation really was doing the trick. The Locarno Conference cancelled the Allied and German war debts; re-investment from America followed; world trade picked up; and Germany experienced a boom under Hitler. The Second World War duly arrived and the whole ridiculous business started all over again: inflation-deflation-reflation. Currency manipulation is not the cause of capitalist crises, but its effect. Inflation is like the froth on a glass of Guinness—increased by pouring fast but always dependent on the liquid (world trade) which holds, or  releases, the gas (paper money).

Slumps are caused by the anarchic nature of capitalist production. A slump in cars, say, spreads like the plague—to steel, rubber, glass and components. In housing, to bricks, timber, plaster, cement, paints and equipment. Inflation only affects the working class to the extent that it devalues (lowers) real wages, thus restricting the goods that the watered-down money will buy (or, more likely, not buy). Deflation brings demands from the employers for wage reductions because “deflated” money buys more. When prices are falling, as they did on the Gold Standard in the twenties, the mine owners demanded wage reductions, and got them, on the grounds of the workers’ “increased purchasing power”.

A knowledge of the economics of capitalism gives the only satisfactory explanation of inflation; but merely a slight acquaintance with the facts of recent history is needed to realise that deflation under Thatcher would be about as much use to the workers as it was to their grandfathers under Stanley Baldwin in 1925.

Horatio.

CND: an exercise in double-think (1980)

From the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lazarus-like, CND is groping its way out of its grave. Having already demonstrated, over a number of years, the utter futility of its activities, it seems determined to point up all over again the lessons we—and it—should have learnt from its earlier failures and disappointments. And in consequence, time seems to be standing still. There is a strong whiff of what the French term “deja-vu” in the air: it has happened before and—or so it seems—we are about to go through it all again. But before CND starts yet another of its barren exercises let us recall some other human experiences from which we should have learnt a vital lesson, however bitter.

It has been estimated that more than 10,000,000 military personnel alone died during the First World War. A further 50,000,000 people, military and civilian, perished in the Second. More millions have died in South-East Asia, Africa, South America and in many other smaller theatres of war. In addition to these, many millions may be reckoned to have died from starvation, malnutrition and disease in the so-called “third world” countries. All these catastrophies are so vast as to defy comprehension. And anyway, converted as they have been into an arid statistical exercise, they seem devoid of meaning. Perhaps we need to turn, for understanding, to the vignettes of human tragedy rather than the great traumas of world war and mass starvation. To take an example or two:

A file of blinded British infantrymen, each with his hands on the shoulders of the man in front of him, and silhouetted against the sky, crocodile their way back to some Flanders field dressing station.

A press photographer pulls off the coup of a lifetime: he photographs a soldier of the Spanish Civil War at the precise moment of his death from a sniper’s bullet.

In some German concentration camp lethal gases wreathe around the walls of a sealed chamber packed with naked men, women and children.

A skinless and screaming child, unfortunate enough to have been in the path of an American napalm attack, rushes imploringly toward a news-cameraman.

In Cambodia the calculated genocide of a million or so anonymous peasants and their dependants has been exploited in an international diplomatic chess-game played out by would-be rival alliances.

It will be noticed that in none of these events have nuclear weapons played the remotest part. Yet the human suffering involved is no less poignant.

But what, it has to be asked, do these and numberless other terrible events inspire in the minds of the vast majority of people today? Shocking though it is, and difficult though it may be to reconcile oneself to it, the answer is: relative indifference. Workers whose political consciousness has been hampered by their “educators” and by the mass-media are unwilling to identify with, and therefore do not care deeply about, such matters. We seem to be inured to the sufferings of others, however graphically they may be illustrated. But then, as is implicit in the above, perhaps that very presentation is, in part at least, responsible for this indifference. The bloody images flickering away in the corners of our living-rooms are taken as being ail of a piece with the tomato-ketchup dished out to us by the “entertainment” moguls.

Perhaps we can no longer discriminate between fact and fiction. Indeed, it is probably intended that some such confusion should exist. After all, the “suspension of disbelief” can all too easily slide into a suspension of belief. Certainly much of the gory drivel which passes for “entertainment” these days breeds a callousness and insensitivity which must blunt any attempt to understand the true plight of those millions of our fellow-workers who possess nothing at all, leave alone a television set.

“But surely”, we hear you say, “most people cannot avoid caring about such things?” Not so. Most of us are unable to care because we have never been encouraged to understand the true reasons why otherwise normal men and women have this “inexplicable" capacity to behave so cruelly toward their fellow human beings—of whatever nationality, including their own. In the absence of any such understanding it is all too often put down to “human nature”; or “God’s will”; or “Fate”; or some other metaphysical characterisation.

Socialists are often scornfully asked: “What, then, are these reasons you keep harping on about?” We reply: The true—and only—reason is the existence, in our times, of the capitalist system, and the implacable determination of its principal beneficiaries, a tiny handful of greedy and power-hungry wealth-owners and their acolytes, to preserve and enhance their class status. These latter are cynically indifferent to the anguish of those who happen to be standing in the way of their miserable ambitions.

It has been observed that our masters would rather wade up to their necks in our blood than concede an inch of real power in their determination to cling to their privileges. Looking back over recent history alone, who can deny the truth of this observation? From Passchendaele to Stalingrad; from Belsen to Hiroshima: from Vietnam to Chile; from Dresden to Cambodia: nothing has been allowed to stand in the path of capitalism’s ruling classes; most certainly not the agony of the innocent millions who, possessing only their capacity to work and reproduce, have died like cattle in their wars, in ignorance of the true reasons for their pointless martyrdom.

However, in speaking of our apparent indifference to our fate under capitalism, it would be wrong to oversimplify. As the opening paragraph of this article has indicated, some of us care, however ineffectually. The streets of the world's cities frequently bear witness to this. Banner-carrying processions made up of earnest individuals from all walks of life and of all manner of opinions and beliefs may be seen parading this or that “cause”, or deploring this or that outrage. All credit to them (one might observe) that they have the guts to get out and do what must surely stick in the throats of so many of their numbers unused as they are to making such “public spectacles” of themselves.

Unfortunately, willingness to put up with blistered feet and the jeers of bystanders isn’t nearly enough. Unaccompanied by political understanding, such uninformed “witness” must inevitably dissolve; at best, into an emotional and platitudinous wallow in a tepid and vaguely unsatisfactory bath of self-righteousness: at worst, into the vicious, not to say ridiculous, punch-ups of Grosvenor and Red Lion Squares. But whichever way it goes one thing is certain: our economic and political masters will have lost no sleep. For once again they will have had demonstrated to them that the true responsibility for the human misery which leads to such demonstrations—capitalism itself—has once more gone unidentified and, therefore, unexamined and unthreatened. Demonstrators and their critics alike will have been restored to their television sets and what passes for “news”-papers and, with varying degrees of scepticism (or, more likely, none at all!) will already be harvesting yet another crop of lies and half-truths. As for our masters: they, no doubt, will shortly increase the pay of the police “for services rendered”. A handful of sycophantic press humbugs can confidently expect to be remembered in the next Honours List. And for the rest of us, life, with its attendant miseries, frustrations and risks, will proceed as “normal”.

So demonstrators, including those of CND. are certainly successful in one major respect at least: they deflect even the more politically-conscious from a true recognition of our existence—and therefore of our condition—as a class. They undermine a proper understanding of the capitalist system in a way which can only bring relief to, for example, the manufacturers of the very weapons they march to abolish. But—worst of all—they drain workers of energy we can ill afford to waste in what should properly be our common struggle to achieve an enlightenment without which socialism, our only remaining hope and goal, is not possible.

Richard Cooper

Running Commentary: Through the looking glass (1980)

The Running Commentary Column from the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Through the looking glass

One achievement the Polish strikers could not have expected was to bring about an apparent reversal in English political attitudes, almost as if events were being looked at through a looking glass.

The strikes broke out against a background of serious crisis for the Polish economy—massive foreign debts, shortages, falling production and so on. Even so, the strikers pressed home their campaign and, at least as far as the written agreement goes, won their point. A side effect of the strike was to topple the Polish leader Edward Gierek, who suffered a fate similar to that of Wladyslaw Gomulka in 1970 who also resigned after a “heart attack”.

Now a naive observer of the strike, remembering what happened in England in 1973 and during Callaghan's infamous “winter of discontent”, might have expected Tory and Labour leaders to denounce the strikers. After all, were they not, like the British miners in 1973, said to be striking for a political object? Were they not responsible for the downfall of a political leader—as the miners were supposed to be over Heath in 1974? And, like the engineers and the hospital workers in this country in 1978, were the Polish miners and shipyard workers not striking in disregard of the country’s ailing economy and careless of the welfare of the old, the sick, the needy?

But of such denunciation we have heard not a word; indeed the Polish workers have been elevated to the status of heroes and their leader, Lech Walesa, is almost as popular as any football star. With one exception, no headlines have shrieked abuse at the reckless strikers of Gdansk and Sczezcin. The exception, on the other side of the looking glass, was the weary Stalinist line spewed up by the tedious hacks of the New Communist Party, who in their paper New Worker denounced the strikers as wreckers.

Neither of these sides was concerned with the truth of the matter—that the Polish workers were on strike in resistance to an attempted cut in their living standards. The demand for independent trade unions came from the bitter experience of previous struggles, which showed up the treachery of the Communist Party dominated “unions”.

Both sides were concerned with plugging a line favourable to the particular ruling class whose interests they try to represent. This meant that the Polish strikers, who were showing considerable courage in their struggle, were treated with a cynicism which, had it not become so familiar, would have been sickening. But too much was at stake for it to be otherwise and the workers, here and in Poland and all over the world, would do well to take the point; the interests of capitalism demand an obedience to something more urgent than the truth.

Dirty washing

How is British industry to survive the slump? Will anything be left of it, after the bankruptcies and the sackings and the cutbacks? As the news comes in of lay-offs, short time and redundancies, we are also told about the markets in Britain being flooded by fiercely competitive foreign products, like Japanese cars, Russian watches and French apples. One “remedy” for this, popular with both management and workers, is to restrict imports so that everyone is forced to buy British, eat British, wear British, sleep British . . . 

One industry which has been hard hit in the slump is the one producing washing machines and other domestic appliances. Hoover, once the market leader and an energetic exporter, has had to cut its work force by a thousand over the past two years, now has 8,000 on short time and, it is rumoured, is considering closing down the place where it all started—its factory in Perivale in Middlesex.

Hoover blames its decline partly upon foreign imports and is particularly worried about cheap washing machines from Italy, where there is a veritable slag heap of the things at the moment, worth some £60 million. If this slag heap ever descended on the British market it might well kill off firms like Hoover. So the industry’s trade organisation has been busily campaigning for government action to stop the “dumping” of these machines on the UK markets.

This might pass unnoticed were it not for the fact that Hoover, who once prided themselves on their briskly competitive export trade (which was not described as “dumping”), have themselves been importers of Italian washing machines which they have sold under their own name. Even more, Hoover have done the same for, among other products, refrigerators from Italy, electric toasters from Canada, electric shavers from Germany.

Even now, in the depths of their troubles, they have been negotiating with their big Italian rival, Indesit, to get the right price for a washing machine to be imported and sold on the UK market. Presumably, the Hoover people who went to Italy did not take any idea other than bargaining for the lowest possible price—for, in other words, the cheapest possible imports.

This is more than a simple case of double dealing. The Hoover management are acting in a perfectly sensible manner: they are running their business in conformity with the demands of capitalist production and commerce. If this illustrates the absurdity of trying to solve capitalism’s problems with makeshift patching here and there it is only because it is a typical example of the essential stupidity and anarchy of producing wealth for sale instead of for use.

Playing with fire

When the Labour government used troops to break the firemen’s strike during the winter of 1977/8 they did so with the support of the Tories, on the argument that an efficient fire fighting service is necessary to protect property and lives—which, they asserted, must be their major concern as the government.

Well the firemen lost and now we have a Tory government and we are being shown what all that concern for life and limb amounts to. Fire brigades are not immune from the cuts of the government’s free-swinging axe on public spending and in some areas they are being cut to, and beyond, the bone of safety.

This process began under the Callaghan government; since March 1979 nearly 700 firemen have been cut (by “natural wastage”) and almost 100 appliances have been removed from emergency work. The London brigade is applying to cut out another 42 appliances.

In Staffordshire the situation is, quite literally, threatening with the brigade, which is only just meeting the Home Office requirements, subject to even more reductions. It needs only one big fire, like the recent destruction of Alexander Palace in London, to stretch resources beyond their capacity and perhaps cause an avoidable loss of life.

All of this is quite acceptable to the government, whose recent Green Paper on fire policy talks airily about lowering standards without bringing about an “unacceptable rise in casualties”. (Is there such a thing in Whitehall as an ‘acceptable” rise?) and which insists that the measures needed to bring about an actual reduction in fire casualties are too expensive to contemplate.

This exercise in capitalist priorities—in which, let it be made clear, both Labour and Tory join—might not be expected to impress anyone waiting to be rescued from the fifth floor of a blazing building and who receives instead the equivalent of a note from Milo Minderbinder, that the fire services have been cut in the greater interests of the British ruling class, in whose prosperity we are all allegedly invited to join

As the flames lick higher, the luckless sufferer might reflect on the cynicism of politicians whose attitudes are formed with such a callous disregard for human safety and welfare. And if they ever do get rescued, let us hope that they do not forget the insights born amid the rising flames.

Ivan

Poland's workers take a step . . . (1980)

From the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Polish strikers, in forcing the government there to allow them to organise into independent trade unions with the right to strike, have once again exploded the myth that class and class conflict have been abolished in countries like Poland and Russia. They have completely undermined the ideological justification given for their dictatorship by the ruling “communist” parties in these countries. For, if such parties represent and govern on behalf of the working class, as they claim, why have the Polish workers had to set up a separate organisation to defend their interests? And who do they have to defend themselves against, if not some other class on whose behalf the so-called communist and workers’ parties of East Europe really govern?

That Poland is a class-divided society there can be no doubt. One of these classes is easy enough to identify: the working class itself, those obliged to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary in order to live. There is also a class of small peasants and traders, some of whom have in recent years evolved into “zloty millionaires”. But these private capitalists do not own the most important means of production—the factories, the steelworks, the shipyards, the mines and the other places where the bulk of the wealth is produced.

These are monopolised by a group which is more difficult to identify, since, unlike the private capitalists of the West, its members have no legal titles to say that they are the owners. Their monopoly of the means of production is nevertheless just as effective and, as in the West too, rests on control of political power.

Jacek Kuroń, one of today’s prominent Polish dissidents (who was arrested for the umpteenth time during the recent events and only released as part of the strike settlement) called this group, in an open letter he wrote to the Polish Party in 1965 with Karol Modzelewski, “the central political Bureaucracy”. Milovan Djilas, who had himself been a member of this class in Yugoslavia, had previously called it the “new class”. We ourselves would prefer some such term as “state capitalist class”, but the definition given by Kuron and Modzelewski is clear enough:

In our system, the party elite is, at one and the same time, also the power elite; all decisions relating to state power are made by it and, in many cases, at the top of the Party and state hierarchies there exists, as a rule, a fusion of responsible posts. By exercising state power, the Party elite has at its disposal all the nationalised means of production; it decides on the extent of accumulation and consumption; on the direction of investment, on the share of various social groups in consumption and in the national income; in other words, it decides on the distribution and utilisation of the entire social product.

(An open letter to the Party, p. 7) 

It is to this class that the workers sell their labour power (not labour, as the translation below says) and which exploits them:

To whom does the worker in our country sell his labour? To those who have at their disposal the means of production, in other words to the central political bureaucracy. On account of this, the central political bureaucracy is the ruling class; it has at its exclusive command the basic means of production; it buys the labour of the working class; it takes away from the working class by force and economic coercion the surplus product and uses it for purposes that are alien and hostile to the worker in order to strengthen and expand its rule over production and society. (P. 15)

The same state capitalist system which exists in Poland also exists in Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Albania and other such countries. There too the means of production are monopolised collectively by a “Party-state power elite” which exploits the working class.

The striking workers of Poland have achieved an important victory. For the first time the rulers of a state capitalist country have been forced to recognise an independent workers’ organisation and to negotiate wages and conditions with it. There have of course been strikes and riots in state capitalist countries before, including in Russia itself, which have compelled the authorities to make concessions over wages and conditions. This is what happened in Poland in 1956, in 1970 and in 1976, but at the price of the deaths of a number of workers shot down by a government supposedly ruling in their interests. The formation and recognition of a permanent workers’ body to negotiate with the ruling class represented by the authorities, however, represents a new advance in trade union consciousness.

The joint strike committee which coordinated the general strike in the Gdansk area (where at least fifty workers were shot when the unrest of 1970 was suppressed) was an embryo trade union and demonstrated a fairly high degree of trade union consciousness. Learning the lesson of the strikes and riots of 1956, 1970 and 1976 which achieved wage increases and other concessions, but left the workers without any means to defend them, the committee put the recognition of a permanent workers’ economic defence organisation before the demand for a wage increase. And, by their determination and with the support and solidarity of workers in other parts of the country, they achieved this aim. The strike committee also seems to have realised that the “workers councils” set up in Poland after 1956 and still existing in Yugoslavia were no substitute for an independent trade union. In fact such councils are only a trap to get workers to participate in their own exploitation and the ruling class of Yugoslavia must be just as worried by the Polish developments as those in the other state capitalist countries of Eastern Europe.

Poland already has organisations called “trade unions” but these are not formed to defend wages and working conditions, but state institutions, along the lines of Hitler’s Labour Front, for controlling and disciplining workers. Their leaders are full members of the “Party-state power elite”, enjoying the same bloated salaries, special shops, housing, prizes and the likes as other members of the privileged class in Poland. Let it be said in passing that the attitude of the General Council of the TUC in Britain in maintaining relations with these so-called “unions” (as indeed with other similar organisations in other state capitalist countries) was quite disgraceful, and perhaps revealing of the aspiration of the TUC leaders to win the same sort of privileged state positions as enjoyed by those they evidently feel to be their opposite numbers in Poland.

What has happened in Poland was predictable—and will happen sooner or later in other state capitalist countries too—since, as we have always held, no dictatorship, however totalitarian or brutal, can permanently suppress working class consciousness. Trade unionism is an inevitable product of capitalism, arising out of the very social situation of the workers under it, as wage and salary earners forced to sell their mental and physical energies in order to live. They are also forced by the same economic necessity to try to sell their labour powers at as high a price as possible—and sooner or later come to realise that “unity is strength”, that it is better to band together and collectively negotiate a price with the employers than to let them fix it unilaterally, as happened in most industries in Britain in the last century and as still happens in all state capitalist countries today—except, now, in Poland.

But trade union consciousness, necessary though it is, is far from being the same as socialist consciousness. It is no more than a recognition that the workers need an organisation to try to ensure the sale of their labour powers on the best terms that market conditions permit. To be a good trade unionist you don’t need to be a socialist and in fact, by all-accounts, the Gdansk strikers were Polish patriots and devout Catholics. This did not prevent them adopting the right tactics to win an important concession from their state capitalist masters, but it almost certainly means that they will make mistakes in the future. It remains to be seen, for instance, whether the Catholic Church will try to take over the new independent unions through some organisation like “Catholic Action” in this country.

Trade unions are no threat to the continuance of capitalism, not even to the state capitalist regimes in countries like Poland and Russia. Trade unions are in a sense useful, even to capitalist employers, as a means of channelling workers’ discontent in an orderly and peaceful way, as some of the more intelligent members of the Polish ruling class have come to realise (or have been forced to realise). Their counterparts in Russia seem to be more shortsighted but then no ruling class has conceded the right to organise and strike except under pressure from its workers. And until the workers in Russia react the ruling class there can be expected to maintain its repressive attitude.

Congratulations, then, to our fellow workers in Poland on winning the right to organise independently. But they must realise that trade union action, though necessary, Is essentially only defensive and that if they don’t want to keep running fast just to stand still (which, we fully appreciate, is not so bad as falling back because you are not allowed to run fast) then they must think in terms of acting in conjunction with their fellow workers in other countries to abolish the wages system.

Adam Buick

Don't (1980)

From the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

If I won the pools or was in charge of the country I would soon sort out the unions, lazy, unemployed, students, immigration, housing, slums, wages, pollution, oil prices, vandalism, prison population, food scarcity . . . The proper solutions vary from the extreme of forced labour by conscription of vandals, lazy and unemployed, to the liberal idea of employing more social workers, sociologists. do-gooders and turning the Isle of Wight into a rest home for the workers who cannot cope with the stresses of the wages system.

Were it possible for both of these to realise their far off dreams it would be not long before they found out the reality of the capitalist system. The beast consistently refuses to take advice, and it controls you, regardless of all the information you might pump into the computers concerning world hunger, poverty, homelessness and lack of medical facilities.

The question remains—how do you bring the beast under control? In truth capitalism cannot be brought under control and it only exists because the majority of the working class support it and they continue to support capitalism when they repeatedly seek solutions from a system that only benefits the few who live off the exploited labour of the many.

Brian Johnson

The Money System (1980)

From the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

To one who accepts the economics of the capitalist system, money has quite magical qualities. It is cheque books, representing large money deposits in banks, that build houses; it is pieces of paper with pictures of the Queen on them that dig the coal from the ground; it is silver coins fed into the engine that drives the bus. Money — man-made, inanimate paper currency and coins — is, according to the economists, the means of producing and distributing wealth. Without money we could not survive.

The average weekly take-home wage in Britain is between £60 and £70. Let us suppose that a generous employer was to offer a worker twice or even three times as much money for doing half the work of any other employee, so that for a week’s labour he gets £230. But there’s only one snag: after he has been paid, the worker will be locked in an empty room with his two hundred and thirty paper notes. If they can produce things, then let them obtain food, clothing, heating and entertainment for him. If they have intrinsic value, let him eat the notes, ten at a time —for we all know that ten pounds can provide anyone with a good dinner.

But let us suppose that the employer is foolish. He offers a worker £70 for a week’s work. Like all capitalists he only offers a wage when he is confident that his employee will produce for him commodities which will sell for more than the value represented by the wage. The difference between the two is surplus value and when the employer offers the worker £70 they both enter into the contract on the assumption that more than £70 worth of real wealth will be produced. But what if the worker tells the employer that he is unable to work on a particular week, but will leave seventy pound notes to do the work for him instead? After all, money produces wealth, doesn’t it? The foolish employer accepts the idea, but discovers that the money is able to produce no wealth. As an incentive he offers a £30 bonus and in are brought six true-blue five pound notes which turn out to be just as lazy as the seventy green wealth producers.

But the capitalist economist is not satisfied with such absurd illustrations of the fact that money does not produce wealth. “Of course men cannot eat money”, he informs us, “it is only money in circulation in the market place that enables us to eat”. And of course it is true that money cannot independently produce wealth, but requires the collaboration of human labour and raw materials”.

Money, they say, is necessary for production and consumption. So, if one uses one’s labour to put a pencil to a piece of paper and produce a drawing, one has to have money in order to have access to the pencil and the paper. The same applies to mass production. If a capitalist manufacturer wishes to produce clocks he must first buy his factory, his clock components and the other inanimate things he needs to make clocks. He then buys the mental and physical energies of the clock-makers. If he had no money to buy these things, there would be no production. So is not the case fully proved that things cannot be produced without money? But why must the capitalist pay money for the things needed to make clocks in the first place? He needs to do so because the present economy is based upon private property which means that certain people have legal access to wealth which others are denied. Ten per cent of the population own and control approximately ninety per cent of all wealth. It is the people in the majority class who between them own so little wealth that they have no alternative but to sell the one property they possess: their ability to work by hand or brain, their labour power.

Money has not always existed. Men and women were producing wealth long before it came on the scene. With the advent of private property, money emerged as a means of exchange. It was better than barter because it was a universally accepted equivalent enabling values to be fairly exchanged. With the birth of commodity production wealth was produced not for use, but to sell for money. Capitalism has turned human labour power into a commodity to be bought and sold. The free labourer of capitalism is one who is compelled to sell his economic freedom.

So under the present system money is used to buy and sell commodities. All wealth has a price once it has become a commodity, and people cannot live without wealth. Our access to wealth is determined by our access to money. There are three was of obtaining money under capitalism:

1. Criminal Theft. This embraces illegal acts like robbing banks, mugging, begging on the streets and defrauding the Department of Social Security. The risk involved is that the state is there to ensure that property is defended against suckers like working class criminals and those who defy the defence of capitalist social relations can be locked up, beaten or killed.
2. Legalised Theft. You will run into no trouble with the state here. The theft that is essential to the continuation of capitalism is exploitation (paying the worker less than the value of what he produces) which in polite circles is known as “running a business profitably”. Large fortunes can be made in this way, but before the reader becomes too attracted to this option it should be pointed out that entry to the class of legalised robbers is only available to a small minority of the earth’s inhabitants, usually by inheritance.
3. But if prisons or profits are not for you, there is a third way of getting money. All you have to do is to sell yourself to a capitalist in return for just enough money to keep you coming back the following week in need of more money. This is wage slavery and it is the position of the vast majority of men and women today. 

The money we get in return for producing ail of the wealth in society is enough to buy cheap and shoddy goods. Meanwhile, those who own and control the means of producing and distributing wealth —the ones we are producing surplus value to provide for—are able to live in comfort, security and privilege.

The capitalist economists tell us that property and buying and selling are inevitable because of scarcity of resources — because there is not enough wealth to go round, there has to be monetary rationing. This would be a good reason for the existence of money were it true, but as it is evidently false we must dismiss it as yet another example of the confusion of the experts of the economics text-books. We are now surrounded by a capacity to produce an abundance of wealth: the United Nations Food and Health Organisation has stated that it is presently possible to provide food, clothing and shelter for three times the present populations of the world.

It is at this stage in the argument that the economists bow out — and their partners, the theologians and psychologists step in. “Fair enough’’, they admit, “we are prepared to accept that there is no economic reason for money rationing.” The real reason is all to do with that elusive part of the human anatomy, the soul. (The one bit that the worms can’t eat when you die.) Money is needed, they say, because without such rationing we would all naturally take more than we need. (By “all” is meant the working class, not the capitalists who are presently looked up to for taking more than they need.)

“The greedy man”—the last friend of the opponent of a moneyless society—is a product of a system in which private property exists. Imagine if everyone was given unlimited money to spend on what they liked—but for just one day. Of course, the stores would be full of people, the shelves would be emptied, and, like Margaret Thatcher in a food shortage, people would be hoarding provisions in anticipation of the coming day when their wage packets would once again dictate their needs. So poverty, or the expectation of poverty, breeds a desire to not only obtain enough to survive miserably, but to obtain more than your poverty allows you. The will to escape poverty under capitalism is labelled greed.

Now imagine a moneyless society where all goods are freely available according to individuals’ self-determined needs. Will people take more than they need when they know that wealth will be there for the taking whenever they want it? It would be foolish for someone in a society of free access to take twenty loaves of bread when they need only one the others will soon be stale. Who will want to eat all twenty loaves simply because they are free? When did you last see a person filling their lungs with excess air or his mouth with more water than they could drink because these things are free? And if you did encounter such a person, would you resent the greed or laugh at the stupidity? The wretched theologians and psychologists, their minds contaminated by the conditioned behaviour of property society, ignorantly conclude that always men must act as anti-socially as we are forced to now. It is not “human nature” that stands in the way of a moneyless society, but human consent to the continuation of private property.

When the majority class of wage slaves get rid of the institution of property, money will have no more use than tram lines in a tramless city or gas lamps in an age of electricity. Exchange will have no meaning when there are no property rights to pass from one person to another. Just as you cannot sell your coat to yourself, so, when the community commonly owns and democratically controls the means of producing and distributing wealth, there will be no non-owners to buy things from or sell things to, to steal from or to give to. Wages will be replaced by co-operative labour; classes will be replaced by social equality; money will be replaced by free access to all wealth. The richness and beauty of the world is there for the taking; are you ready to claim it?

Steve Coleman

Liberals have no alternative (1980)

From the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the 19th and early part of the 20th century the Liberal Party formed the main political opposition to the Tories. After the 1st World War it collapsed electorally and has been in the doldrums ever since. Now, with increasing support in the opinion polls and widespread cynicism about the other two parties, Liberals again believe, as the mood of their Annual Conference showed, that they can make an electoral comeback.

A Liberal government is needed, according to their new President, Richard Holme, “for the reconstruction and regeneration of the failed British system” (from 1984 — The Real Alternative. The Task for Liberals Now, Liberal Publications Dept, 1979, p. 14). The past failures of the two big parties stem, they argue, from both Labour and Tory putting the interests of certain groups within the community before the interests of the community as a whole. Labour policy, they say, favours the trade unions while the Tories support big business. They, the Liberals, on the other hand owe no allegiance to any particular group and so “are free to reconcile conflicting interests”. A Liberal government would, they contend, be a “government of national harmony” which would revive the British economy and create new prosperity and opportunities for the British people.

Their way of creating economic harmony would be through “industrial democracy”. “Employees would share control with shareholders and participate in decisions through elected Works Councils”, said their 1979 election manifesto, which also talked about “profit-sharing” and encouraging employees to buy shares in the firm they work for. Other economic measures would aim at “an adequate minimum income for all” and “widening the distribution and individual ownership of wealth”.

Is the Liberal analysis of Britain's problems a fair one and would their suggested solutions work? Their suggestion that Labour governments generally give support to workers organised in trade unions is the first point that needs to be considered. A look at Labour’s record is instructive. During their 1945-50 term of office they used troops to break strikes (this happened again in 1977 during the firemen’s strike) and took striking workers (gas employees and dockers) to court. In 1969, before the Tories brought in their Industrial Relations Act, Labour had been close to introducing its own. And during all post-war Labour administrations we have had policies of wage freeze or wage restraint — the use or threat of legislation to keep down wages. Such facts show that, despite their historic association with the trade union movement and their continued financial dependence upon it, the Labour Party’s policies are no more aimed at defending workers’ interests than those practised by the Tories. The Labour Party in power does what any other government committed to administering British capitalism has always done and must always do. It aims to preserve the status quo, a society in which a small minority (the capitalist class) own most of the wealth and the vast majority (the working class) own nothing to speak of and in order to live are compelled to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary.

What follows from this is that any future Liberal government would have to tailor its policies to fit this situation of minority ownership of wealth just as much as past Labour or Tory governments. And this would make the task of reconciling “conflicting interests” far more difficult than they imagine. The conflicts that arose would be no less constant and no more susceptible to harmonious solution than they are now, for they are part of the very nature of a social system in which workers are driven by economic need to take action on pay and working conditions and employers arc driven by the pressures of competition to produce cheaply yet profitably. This causes that continuous head-on clash between employee and employer known as the class struggle.

No amount of “industrial democracy” could make any difference to this. It might sometimes take the edge off workers’ pay demands, but even were it possible to enforce it by legislation it could have little practical effect in the long term. It would soon become obvious to workers that any say they had in the decisions taken by their firm was wholly conditioned by its vital need to produce for a profit. They would also quickly realise that their ownership of a small number of shares in their employer’s business made no difference to their need to sell their labour power for a living and therefore offered no real incentive to them to work harder, produce more or refrain from pressing wage claims.

As for the other economic reforms on the Liberal agenda, (“adequate minimum income for all” and “widening the distribution and individual ownership of wealth”) such proposals have frequently been on other parties’ manifestos and are no more workable now than they were then. An income adequate for one person may be quite inadequate for another whose needs are different, and exactly how do you legislate to significantly increase the ownership of wealth of those dependent on a wage or salary for their living?

“Community Politics”

Another thing any future Liberal government would discover is that the extent to which they can impose and enforce their measures depends far less on their determination to do so than on the conditions prevailing at the time. One of their present ‘ideals’ is to halt the building of nuclear power stations to protect the environment. The decision whether to carry through such a policy once they were in power however would be based not on ideals but on whether other more economical ways of producing energy were available. Another of their stated aims is to involve the mass of people in decision-making by setting up local district and neighbourhood councils, so-called “community politics”. But once again this measure would only be pursued if its usefulness to the smooth functioning of the system outweighed other contrary factors, including the cost.

In other words the Liberals’ room for manoeuvre would be very small. Rather than their imposing their measures on the system, the system would impose measures upon them. And this is the reason why, despite apparently wide divergences of views between political parties, when in power they all pursue strikingly similar policies. It is also why the Liberal administrations of the 19th century, despite their commitment to reform legislation, presided over some of the blackest years in British working-class history. So when in 1970 the Report of the Liberal Commission said: “Recent governments have shown themselves unable to escape from a long series of ad hoc decisions; taking decisions on a day-to-day basis, reacting to the pressures of immediate events, rather than attempting to follow any consistent direction or design” (p. 11), it was involuntarily drawing attention to the way a Liberal government itself would be forced to behave if elected to power.

Starry-eyed

Nor does it end there. The tangle of problems facing any party seriously competing to administer capitalism inevitably breeds within that party frustration and conflicting opinions as to how best to tackle those problems. This leads to internal splits and intrigues of the type so well known in the Labour and Tory parties and it is worth pointing out to starry-eyed Liberals that in the Liberal heyday bitter internal strife characterised their party too, contributing greatly to its decline.

So despite the apparent unity of purpose with which the Liberals face the future after their Blackpool conference, such unity would be unlikely to survive a term in office, especially if that office were shared with another party as recently proposed by Liberal leader David Steel with his suggestion for a “radical coalition” with sections of the Labour Party as a “credible alternative government in 1983 or 1984” (Guardian, 8 August 1980). As an observer has pointed out: “When the Liberals have seemed to be on the verge of breaking through to become once again a majority party, their behaviour has begun to resemble the two large rivals” (Stanley Henig, European Political Parties, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1969, p. 435). Even a faint sniff of power in 1977-78 (Lib- Lab pact) was enough to cause loud disunity among Liberal MPs and supporters.

To be fair, however, many of the delegates at Blackpool were not just interested in putting a political party in power. Many were people who are genuinely concerned by today’s massive social problems and support the Liberal Party because it seems to offer help in solving them. For apart from their programme of economic reforms, the Liberals, by their attention to such issues as housing, environment, racism and civil liberties have carefully cultivated the image of a “caring party”, one of principles not pragmatism, one that caters for the needs of the individual and the underdog in society. The same kind of image in fact as projected by the Labour Party in 1964 after 13 years of Tory rule and one that has been repeatedly punctured since. The pity is that those who really do care about the kind of world we live in should seek fulfilment in working for political parties which can only let them down.

Howard Moss

Labour Party pains (1980)

From the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party meets in conference this year in a condition of customary agony. To begin with, they are displaying serious symptoms of frustration caused by their being in a position which they find acutely unenjoyable—in opposition. This position is guaranteed to cause them to experience extremely painful bouts of dispute and self-questioning—not, of course about anything other than finding the quickest way back into power. Their political backsides do not rest easily on the opposition benches and too long spent there is liable to give them the Parliamentary equivalent of bedsores.

One symptom the Labour Party are, again, suffering is the constitutional crisis which has been simmering for so long. The standing of their leader James Callaghan is in jeopardy—he, after all, committed the cardinal sin of leading his party to defeat in a general election and an energetic group inspired by Tony Benn is pushing for organisational reforms aimed at persuading the working class in this country that a future Labour government will do something other than administer the capitalist system of society.

Whatever decisions the Labour leadership and the delegates take, they will have their thoughts fixed firmly on the next general election and their hopes about deceiving the working class into voting for a Labour administration of capitalism rather than a Conservative one. But working class problems, which those parties are elected on promises to solve, are caused not by which party is in office but by the capitalist system of society. Labour administration of capitalism is no better for workers than the Tory variety. Capitalism has its own priority profit which it imposes on any government, as experience of Labour governments has proved time and time again.

There must be very few members of the Labour Party who think it stands for socialism, even as a very, very “ultimate object”. The only people to take this view seem to be the Tories! Let us assure them: they have nothing to fear from Labour. The Labour Party is openly and obviously committed to capitalism, both in theory and in practice.

Those who say that workers should support the Labour Party come up with two basic arguments: that the Labour Party is the political organisation of the working class, the political arm of the Trade Union Movement, and that the Labour Party has a better reform programme on such subjects as health and education than the Tory party.

It is true that Labour (like the Tories) has the support of millions of workers but that does not make it a working class party. The standard for judging this should rather be: does Labour further the interests of the working class—and to this question the answer is, they do not. As long as capitalism lasts it is our interest as workers to exert what pressure we can to get the most out of it, to increase our share of the wealth we alone have produced. But in this class struggle Labour governments have always been definitely on the other side: trying to reduce what goes to the workers in the interests of the capitalists of Britain.

Perhaps the strongest argument in favour of the Labour Party was that it was the political arm of the Trade Union Movement, that it was an instrument workers could use to protect their interests within capitalism. But who dares to put forward this argument now? It is true that many unions are still affiliated to the Labour Party—but much of the money Labour gets from the unions is gathered under false pretences through the contracting-out swindle. Indeed, instead of the union link with Labour being of use to the unions, it has been the other way round: Labour governments have ruthlessly and cynically exploited the link in order to get union leaders to betray their members by supporting a policy of wage restraint.

So, Labour is not a socialist party, nor a working class party, nor a trade union party. Is it, then, at least a social reform party? In the sense that the need for reforms is built into capitalism and any pro-capitalist party must be a reform party—even the Tories—then Labour is, yes, a social reform party. Labour governments have brought in various reform measures, but capitalism has later forced them to attack their own previous reforms. For example, in 1965 they abolished prescription charges. In 1968 they brought them back at a higher rate. They also ended free milk in secondary schools, which was a long-standing Labour reform demand dating from the 1900s. These are just some examples of how those who seek to govern capitalism have to do so on its terms—thus confirming that human priorities cannot be imposed on capitalism, since capitalism is motivated by production for profit.

Before there can be a solution of the many problems of capitalism, the framework for those solutions must exist — and that means the common ownership of the means of production and distribution. But that will not be an issue at Labour’s conference, in 1980 or in any other year. The delegates will spend — will waste — their time discussing footling and ineffective adjustments to a social system which must result in the exploitation and degradation of the majority of its people. They will give their support, as Labour has done consistently during all its history, to the society which cannot work in the interests of its people. They will go home satisfied, perhaps even inspired to continue their work for the continuation of capitalism

And capitalism, with its massive burden of human misery, will go on.

Rising Cost of Surpluses (1980)

From the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

From Financial Times (5.9.80)  

Malthus, for those who don’t remember, was an 18th century cleric who forecast that within a few years world populations would grow to the extent that the possibilities of food production would have been exhausted, and mankind would perish from hunger and consequent disease. Over the last two centuries Malthus has been proved several hundred per cent wrong. The producers of food have suffered and are still suffering the pangs of hunger, are the victims of inefficiency or war, neither of which have the least bit to do with food production. In European markets meat is showing nasty signs of surplus too . . . In view of this trend the Commission in Brussels must be hoping for some really disastrous crop news from the US and elsewhere.

Conservative Party at prey (1980)

From the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Beneath all of the pomp and ceremony of the Conservative Party Conference at Brighton this month, there are likely to be a few doubts and differences. As the brainless, small-minded crowds wave their Daily Telegraphs at their smiling idol, the number of unemployed has passed the 2 million mark for the first time since 1935, and the employed are finding it increasingly hard to make ends meet. The number of advertised job vacancies is also the lowest since the war, at about 400,000. Prices are still rising, while the high unemployment produces weighty downward pressure on wages. As a government cabinet composed almost entirely of very substantial members of the capitalist class poses proudly before press photographers, education, health and other welfare services are being drastically cut back.

Forty-six patients at Dulwich hospital are expected to be dead before Christmas for want of sufficient finance to provide them with kidney-machines and after-care treatment. As they wait in their second-rate National Health beds, they can read in the newspapers that this government is spending more than £10,000,000,000 a year on armaments. And if any of those patients actually owned any substantial part of the property which those weapons of destruction are supposed to be protecting, then they wouldn’t have to wait to die, while the machinery necessary for their survival can be made but cannot be bought. The deaths of these kidney patients would pass by almost unnoticed, just another direct result of the system of society which the Conservatives are currently trying to run.

Margaret Thatcher will receive tumultuous applause, a standing ovation. Anyone who is party to such applause must have a disturbingly distorted view of what is in their interest. She and her colleagues represent a system which can only be run in the interests of the small group of people who own most of the wealth of society. Labour’s way of doing this involves the deceitful hypocrisy of those who claim (albeit occasionally) that capitalism can be run in the interests of those who work to provide wealth to which they do not enjoy access. But this government has approached the problems of the profit system in a particularly callous and brazen-faced way.

When Keith Joseph told the working class that we shouldn’t “price ourselves out of our jobs”, for example, did he say anything about the fact that he doesn’t have to worry about a job himself, because he inherited a stake in the building firm Bovis? When Margaret Thatcher advised unemployed workers to “move to where the work is”, did she offer to put them up at Ten Downing Street when they arrive without money or jobs in London? And when Geoffrey Howe told us in a recent Party Political Broadcast that “We’re paying ourselves too much for making too little” and that “Pay rises must be well below the level of price rises”, did he mention the fact that his shareholdings mean that he receives dividend cheques without “making” anything? He was a director of six major capitalist enterprises, and one of his first budget measures on taking office was to remove all restrictions on the proportion of profits that companies can pay out as dividends to shareholders. (Dividends paid by Woodrow Wyatt Holdings for example, subsequently increased by 2,400 per cent.)

During their first fifteen months in office this government have managed to get as many as sixty Acts of Parliament on to the statute book, including much of the 1979 election manifesto. But statements in that manifesto such as “It is not our intention to reduce spending on the Health Service” have been ignored as Local Authorities are forced to close more and more hospitals. For although spending in such areas has been slightly increased on paper, the very high rate of inflation means that in real terms, spending is cut. Benefit for families of strikers has actually been cut by £12 a week, but last month the police received a pay rise of 21.3 per cent. Thatcher recently said that the right to buy council houses will “bring joy to many, many people. It will give them the chance to buy their own homes, small estates” (Guardian, 8.8.80). In her patronising contempt for the working class she forgot to mention that the right to buy is not the same as the means to buy. Most of those who manage to buy council houses will be saddled with mortgage repayments to replace their rents and will be no better off at all.

From the early Budget measures to the anti-Trade Union provisions of the Employment Act, this government has done much to increase the wealth of the capitalist class (who already own the essential means of life in society) at the expense of the impoverished majority. Significant cuts in real terms have now hit housing, hospitals, transport, roads, environmental and social services, education, arts, science and libraries. At the same time there is a commitment to an annual increase in military expenditure of 3 per cent, again in real terms. Organised poverty is defended in the name of the “good of the nation”.

All this means is that reductions in government expenditure relieve the capitalist enterprises of some of the corporation tax they have to pay to fund government spending. A recent report from the Inland Revenue discloses that more than a quarter of income tax is received from the top 5 per cent of income earners; and income tax itself is small compared with taxes levied on companies’ profits. Tax is a burden on the propertied capitalist class, and tax cuts are designed ultimately to benefit them. Under the Labour government, from 1974 to 1977, there was an increase in the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and by 1979 a Royal Commission was able to show that the richest 1 per cent owned more wealth than the whole of the bottom 80 per cent. Only 7 per cent of the adult population own any shares at all in capitalist enterprises, and less than one thousandth of the population possess 80 per cent of privately-owned shares (CIS Report: The Wealthy). This represents the real wealth in society; the means of wealth production. It is possible, however, that this government will have presided over an even greater concentration still, as inflation and unemployment hit all but the very wealthiest in society.

The ideological screen to all this has been the monetarist theory of Hayek and Friedman, as espoused in particular by Industry Secretary Keith Joseph, Chancellor Geoffrey Howe and the Prime Minister herself, who said in a recent television interview that “the economic strategy is absolutely right”. At the Conference, the cabinet will defend these “free market” policies against any cries for “moderation” or even “U-turn” reversals involving government expenditure or intervention. The press and the Labour opposition will be eagle-eyed, fearing to blink lest they should miss any give-away signs of U-turn to match Ted Heath’s baling out Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, Mersey Docks, Rolls Royce and BSC after he, too, had proposed tight monetary control. “U-turn” accusations have already been made when, after selling shares in British Aerospace and the British Transport Docks Board, and planning the same for other nationalised industries, the government announced the shelving of plans to sell warship yards to private investors.

Monetarism claims that decreased expenditure will allow the government to borrow less money from the banks, that is to sell them less Treasury bills; and that the banks will then create less credit through deposits and inflation will fall as the money supply will not be increasing so quickly. But banks cannot in fact “create” credit out of thin air without borrowing money themselves, and anyway it is not a rise in this mystical monetarist money supply which produces inflation, but an overissue of actual currency—the printing of bank notes by the billion in excess of what is required. Hardline Tories like Joseph also claim that lower expenditure will allow tax cuts to give people more money to spend, to “stimulate the economy”. But Tory policy is not directed at “giving people more money to spend”, and even if it was, it would not prevent unemployment, which is an inevitable part of one of capitalism's recurrent international recessions. Even more, their one futile offer, to “control the money supply” has fallen flat on its face; when the Financial Times reported on August 6, more than a year after they had taken office, that “The government's monetary policy has been knocked off balance following a 5 per cent rise in the money supply last month”. Unemployment cannot be blamed on a government, whether Labour or Tory. If they happen to take office at the inception of one of capitalism’s cyclical economic crises, then the mass unemployment of a depression will follow. Of course, cutbacks in government expenditure can aggravate unemployment, particularly in the public sector; but the trends of unemployment regularly produced by the restrictions of the profit system can in no way be averted.

The reverse of low government spending is high government spending, and it is hardly surprising that this latter alternative has also been claimed as the solution to all of the ills of capitalism. It has been tried, moreover, and has failed time and again under the label of Keynesian policy. The resultant depreciation of the currency was something Keynes had to pass over, for it is where his theory falls down. So we have the absurd spectacle of one group of politicians saying “spend more, make jobs and never mind the inflation”, while the others say “spend less, control inflation and never mind the jobs”. Both policies have been tried and have proved equally futile in dealing with either unemployment or inflation. The economic laws of capitalism belittle the petty wrangling of these helpless, squirming politicians.

The fact that the Conservatives are currently in the embarrassing position of actually running capitalism, will probably make for a slightly more tense tone than that prevailing at the Labour Party Conference this year. Any dissent at the Tory Conference will come from the legendary, infamous “Wets” who, on humanitarian grounds it is claimed, are opposed to the Thatcher policies in the face of mass unemployment and deprivation. They hint at the need for import controls, incomes policies, and even state subsidies. A brief look at these patrons of the Tory Reform Group will show that opportunism is more likely to be their motive for cashing in on popular opposition to Thatcher’s policies than is humanitarianism, or concern for the interests of the working class.

First there is William Whitelaw, who owns much of Cumbria, with his “short, sharp shock” for young offenders. As Home Secretary he promised recently in the Commons that as part of a civil defence programme over the next few years the government would “publicise the best buy family nuclear raid shelters” and “improve wartime broadcasting”. He insisted that these measures were “positive and cost effective” (Guardian, 13.8.80). That is his answer to the imminent threat of nuclear devastation. Then there is James Prior, the Employment Secretary, who on hearing of the latest unemployment figures, returned from a holiday on his Norfolk farm to blame the workers for “the recent high level of wage increases” (Guardian, 13.8.80). Lord Carrington, who inherited about half of Buckinghamshire and is on the boards of Barclays Bank, Cadbury Schweppes, Hambros Bank and Rio Tinto Zinc amongst others, has an ambitious streak which his class position generally allows him to satisfy. It was particularly apt that in a party political broadcast last year it should have been he who announced that “We have our interests in farming, fishing and oil to protect”. They are his interests, not ours. Others, like Ian Gilmour, whose father-in-law the Duke of Buccleuch owns 268,000 acres of land (Labour Research April 1979), and Michael Heseltine, the Environment Secretary, also number among the ranks of the “Wets”. It is significant that they are mostly in non- financial ministries. Those who are loyal to Thatcher include John Biffen, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Howe, Joseph, John Nott and David Howell.

There is a fairly stable coalition between these groups, though, and it is quite likely that their differences will be settled by some compromise. But the question is: now that Keynes and Friedman have both been irremediably discredited in the face of the problems thrown up by the profit system, will the working class have the sense to scorn the gibbering and posturing of these frantic opportunists? As they quibble and crow, and then pat each other or\ the back and smile for the cameras; as they stomp and clap and respectfully sing the praises of the Iron Lady in glorious unison, are we not going to reject them and their meaningless promises? The answer does not lie in seeking yet another leader, yet another proposed policy or confused economic ideological scheme for trying to run capitalism smoothly. Let us leave them to their dream world of sherry and boaters at Brighton, and undertake the production of wealth on the democratic foundation of common ownership.

Clifford Slapper