Can peace be piecemeal? (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

On January 19 this year Harold Brown — the then American Defence Secretary — told Congress that an all-nuclear weapons exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union would kill as many as 165 million Americans and 100 million Russians. Speaking on Radio 4 in March, on the subject of “Home and Civil Defence” Lord Belstead, Minister of State for Home Affairs, told us that if we suffered the sort of nuclear attack which “we think we can expect” between 25 and 40 million people living in Britain would be slaughtered.

By the tone and terms in which some of these statistics are put to us you might have thought they referred to grains of sand, not human beings. The first atomic bomb weighed two kilogrammes — less than five pounds — and was a little larger than a cricket ball. On 6 August 1945 it killed 140,000 people, and has killed thousands since by the delayed effects of its radioactivity. Now, according to the Home Office Manuals, we must expect an attack with weapons of 10 megatons — 10 million tons of TNT — nearly a thousand times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.

As the recession spreads further into the world economy, a major war is increasingly possible. The relentless grind of the commercial system towards war as the ultimate competition seems to create a horrific sense of inevitability. The Chinese Senior Vice Premier, Deng Xia-o-Ping, has said “a third world war is inevitable but we should adopt measures and policies to postpone its outbreak.” (Guardian, 2/9/80). Apart from channelling colossal resources into equipment for fighting a war the government is busily preparing for an aftermath. A Home Office circular which was only issued to senior local authority officers had this to say under the heading “Disposal of Human Remains”:

When radiological conditions permitted movement, District and London borough controllers should assume that one of the priority tasks for their staff, in areas where survivors were to continue residing, would be to collect and cremate or inter human remains in mass graves . . . the location of the mass graves and the method of disposal would be a local ad hoc decision at the time having regard to the availability of peacetime factories, the location of the bodies . . .

With human society teetering on the brink of unprecedented destruction there is a great clamour of groups opposed to militarism. The groups range from opposition to a particular variety of weapon in a particular district — ‘‘Keep Cruise Missiles out of Middlesex” — to total world disarmament — The World Disarmament Campaign. Prominent among all these groups is the resurrected CND. While many of its members are now born-again Campaigners from the early sixties, the majority in CND are new recruits. Since 1958, when CND was founded, nuclear weapons have become more sophisticated and widespread.

Whether or not the re-born CND suffers from the shortcomings of its predecessor (and most of those are inherent in such a campaign) it will be incapable of achieving its limited aims. It will be Canute defiantly attempting to halt the waves. Weapons are not designed and produced to defend or protect people. They are made to murder and maim. Their production in increasingly destructive designs continues in an organised way irresponsive to mass choruses of indignation and opposition. This is because the weapons of war are an integral part of the way we are currently organising society.

When you examine why it is that the world explodes into war it becomes apparent that until we reorganise the basis of society it will be as necessary to carry on producing armaments as it will be to produce truncheons for policemen and keys for prisons. As society is presently arranged, the means of producing and distributing social wealth (the farms, factories, mills, mines, offices, docks, airlines . . .) are monopolised by a small minority of people. This division, between the small minority who possess most of the wealth but do not contribute to its production and the great majority who possess almost nothing of the social wealth but produce it all, exists as much in state-capitalist nations like Russia and Poland as it does in the West.

Under this arrangement wealth is not produced simply and directly to satisfy human requirements. This creates antagonism between members of the owning class as they compete to capture markets for their commodities, to gain control over sources of raw materials, and to dominate strategic trade routes. The international competition between capitalists is sometimes conducted by negotiations (“business deals”, bribery and threats) at conferences, summits and through diplomatic relations, but periodically such negotiations will break down. At times, although many people may be starving or in need of all sorts of goods, too much will have been produced to be profitably sold and then the competition between the capitalists will intensify as they struggle to dominate fresh markets in order to maintain their level of sales.

The industrial and commercial concerns will expand at the expense of others. The final stage in this sort of competition is war. It is an integral feature of the social process of the profit-system and in trying to gain superiority and bargaining power over one another, sections of the wealth owning class from different countries will have developed for their protection even more barbaric weapons. So long as the working class consent to the privilege and authority of this minority, it will be pointless and rather pathetic for groups (even mass groups) to haggle with governments about which weapons are and are not acceptable for social decimation. CND has taken its place on a long list of morally indignant crusades to ameliorate warfare by opposing each more horrific weapon as it has been invented. Campaigns were waged against making war on civilians, against artillery bombardment of towns, against aerial bombing, against poison gas, the blockade, submarine warfare and napalm bombs. But, of course, warfare is not concerned with welfare and the pleas of the campaigns were ignored by government and military officials.

An appeal to people solely on the basis of opposition to nuclear bombs will yield a membership with a confused mixture of political beliefs, perhaps even a majority of whom have no general opposition to war — like all those from the first CND who went on to support the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. Again, suggestions that nuclear disarmament and world peace can be accomplished if we are all nice to each other are to be expected from a campaign which does not focus on war in general — the pleasant, “conventional” old-fashioned type — and trace its causes to the property basis of society. Lastly it is worth considering what the results would be if CND did receive overwhelming support in the Labour Party, a manifesto pledging total nuclear disarmament and a weighty back-up of trade union support.

How far would a Labour Government be able to implement such disarmament and how would we benefit if it was successful? To start with it should be remembered that the Labour Party has only ever stood for government with a manifesto to run capitalism which has included plans to spend huge resources on “defence” apparatus. The British atomic bomb was quietly developed under the Labour government of Clement Attlee, whose representative was present at the bombing of Nagasaki, and during the last Labour government 1974-79 the Cabinet agreed to replace the out-moded Polaris submarines with a new Chevaline warhead (guaranteed to destroy millions of “foreign” workers) for the Royal Navy. The cost, which was kept secret at the time, was £1,000,000 but they weren't that hard up for cash, what with the cuts they were making in the social services.

There is an episode in the CND recruiting film, All Against the Bomb, where a Labour councillor tells us that CNDers should be crusading alongside people who were protesting against cuts in the education, housing and health services, to emphasise the awful priorities of the destruction industry over welfare services. The only trouble was that the Labour councillor was having to say this in 1975 when the callous government in office was Labour! Even if you can conceive of a day in the near future when a Labour government tells you it has rid British soil of all nuclear weapons and Michael Foot, recalling images of Chamberlain in 1938 appears on television waving a piece of paper which is a promise from his Military Chiefs of Staff verifying the disarmament, could you then slump back in an armchair with relief at the thought that Britain could never again be involved in a war? Would you trust Foot? Would you trust the Military Chiefs of Staff? Would the Kremlin trust them?

The left-wing and fragmentary “radical” organisations are equally bankrupt of proposals; even their plans for nuclear disarmament are caught between bold statements that “only the overthrow of capitalism will create peace” and a myriad of reform measures that need to be immediately supported so that we can be in a better shape for “tomorrow” when we will begin to enact the revolution. In Big Flame no. 97 (July/August 1981) the paper of the Revolutionary Socialist Organisation Big Flame, the Editorial says that “In Big Flame we’ve always argued that capitalism cannot be transformed little by little by parliamentary means . . .". a following article maintains that one of our main tasks at the moment should be to try and persuade a particular local council not to adopt expensive plans for a post nuclear attack Health Service. Similarly, in Missile Madness, a Socialist Workers Party pamphlet, we are told “we cannot stop with simply aiming to get rid of a single sort of weapon” (p. 27), because as long as capitalism lasts wars will be fought with one sort of horrendous weapon or another, including chemical and bacteriological varieties, while a moment later we are urged to give every support to the divergent escapades of CND whose professed aim is simply to get rid of one sort of weapon.

Some CNDers agree that capitalism is the cause of war but state that although a new social organisation is desirable a nuclear holocaust would prevent the establishment of socialism for ever, and therefore the anti-nuclear movement should be given priority over the movement for socialism. But this argument assumes something which has yet to be substantiated: that CND will be able to prevent a nuclear war. For the anti-nuclear movement to succeed it would need a majority of people in all the major countries to be steadfastly opposed to nuclear weapons and ready to act against their governments if necessary. They would have needed to have shed all nationalistic feelings. Even then nuclear warheads could still be fired, but can anyone imagine that such a trans-national movement of solidarity could be moulded from such a disparate membership. At the moment, the means of production and destruction are the property of a minority, worked by us for their benefit. Only a democratic movement to put these things into the hands of the whole community will ensure a world of peace. Then we can carry out production for human enjoyment, not for profit, and melt down the weapons, perhaps keeping some as relics of pre-civilisation.

Gary Jay

The Troubled Air (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like other industries, the airlines have been hit by the world depression. In addition they have had to face the enormous increase of petrol prices, the undercutting of fares by the Laker Company and, in America, the Air Traffic Controllers’ strike. Also, as in other industries, while some companies are on the verge of bankruptcy, others are still making profits. The nationalised British Airways lost £141 million in 1980 and Pan-Am is expected to lose £50 million this year, but British Caledonian and Laker Airways, and several American companies, are holding their own.

Inevitably the workers have suffered. Pan Am staff in America have accepted a ten per cent wage cut and a freeze on wage increases in 1982 and their staff all over the world, including Britain, are facing a similar demand. British Airways have announced a 9,000 cut in staff and the number is likely to be increased. All the American companies are standing workers off.

Financially hard-hit companies, under pressure from the banks anxious about safeguarding their loans, are being forced to sell assets to raise cash. British Airways is to sell its Victoria Air Terminal site, and has sold, for £80m, two Boeing 747 planes before accepting delivery: Pan Am sold its New York Head Office building for £22m; and its chain of profitable hotels for £265m to the British Grand Metropolitan Company.

Laker Airways also has its problems. It owes £130m to banks and the interest charge (payable in dollars) has risen sharply owing to the fall of the pound against the dollar. The Laker invasion of the market of the established airlines was based on the principle of offering “economy-class” travel, pruned of expensive “luxuries”, at an estimated 25 per cent below existing lowest fares, but with each plane carrying a full load, as against the often part empty planes of his rivals. But now Laker is to introduce a new transatlantic “luxury business class” with higher fares — claimed, however, to be comparable to the economy fares of other companies.

Of course the other companies had to cut their fares in competition with Laker or to offer new attractions like Pan Am’s “two seats for the price of one” to anyone who buys a first class return ticket to Miami before 30 September. Now, in face of increased petrol prices and other costs, all air fares are expected to rise. All the companies are waiting hopefully for the passing of the depression to get then out of trouble.

In the meantime the very great number of American internal services and the relatively few flights to and from America were disrupted by the American Air Traffic Controllers’ strike and the Government’s fierce reaction to it.

When a politically stable government, in full control of its armed forces and police, resolutely decides that a vital issue is at stake on which its policy and its own survival depends, it can and will take decisive action without regard to cost. (In 1921 when a combined strike of miners, railwaymen and transport workers was threatened, the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, called the leaders to a meeting and is reputed to have told them that, as the army was disaffected, if the strike took place the Government would resign. Had they considered their next move after that? Their reply is not known, but the miners fought a lockout on their own and were defeated).

In such a situation Trade Unions which contemplate “taking on the Government” can, perhaps, test the matter to find out if the Government really does regard the issue as vital to itself. If not it will quickly make concessions. But the Unions, before they act, have the elementary duty to weigh up very carefully whether the government’s position is such that it is bound to use all its powers to fight the strike. This the American Air Traffic Controllers’ organisation (like the British Civil Service Unions in their recent unsuccessful strike) signally failed to do. They may have been misled by the fact that, in different circumstances, the American post office workers in 1970 did strike with some success against the government, and equally illegally.

The Air 'Traffic Controllers “seriously underestimated the Reagan Administration’s determination to resist its demands”. The Union President, Mr Robert Poli, said in a television interview that his Union “could be accused of miscalculation. I was surprised. I didn’t really believe that they would have taken such harsh action” (The Times, 18 August 1981).

As government employees their strike was illegal and the controllers individually had signed the standard declaration that they would not strike. The government did indeed take harsh action. It gave them a short time to return to work or be sacked and cease to be eligible for re-employment in the government service. It got Court injunctions declaring the strike illegal, freezing Union funds, imposing fines of £55.000 an hour (later reduced on appeal) and putting several officials in jail for contempt of Court.

The government set about keeping the planes flying with Army air traffic controllers and the minority of strikers who returned to work, and started immediately recruiting and training new permanent replacements. The strikers received only expressions of sympathy from other American unions, though some Unions in other countries did, for a time, give help by blacking flights to and from America. Other air line staffs in America, including the pilots, continued at work.

There was chaos and hardship for air passengers for a time, mainly outside America, but by the end of August the Government reckoned that it could hope to maintain some two thirds of its flights until new staffs were trained. There was an obvious danger of air disasters, though the American pilots denied that the risk had been increased.

The American Air Traffic Controllers’ Organisation had last year supported Reagan in the Presidential election, but Presidents (like British Prime Ministers) are not in office to help trade unions but to keep wages down to a level which enables profits to be made. The Traffic Controllers came out on strike to get their average pay increased from the £22,000 a year which was on offer, to £27,000, but also to get their hours reduced from 40 to 32. This latter was probably their main concern because they complain that the excessive strain of work, and the conditions under which it is performed, undermine their health, causing heart disease and premature retirement.

One result of the strike and of the government’s action in planning a cutback of flights to 80 per cent of pre-strike capacity is that the profitability of the airlines inside America will be improved. “At a stroke it will remove the excess capacity which is bedevilling the business”.

This would boost profits because it would mean the airlines would scale back their costs to a level justified by the lower number of flights while the number of passengers and the revenue from ticket sales will stay the same.

(Sunday Times 16/8/81) 

This idiot’s progress of the airlines industry is how capitalism actually operates, as distinct from the smooth efficiency represented in the economic textbooks. For the workers the lesson is that there are no trade union solutions to their problems: at best they deal with effects and place limits on exploitation. Yet the unions everywhere continue their blind support for capitalism in the hopeless belief that they, or their Labour Party allies, can make it operate in the interests of workers.

Edgar Hardcastle

50 Years Ago: The Communists and the Labour Party (1981)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard 

At the 1923 General Election all pretence about ‘conditional support’ was dropped. Now the Communists were not only willing supporters, but were almost lyrical in their enthusiasm for the leaders of the party which they said “was not a Labour Party at all”. MacDonald they had formerly described as a “lackey of the Bourgeoisie”; now they felt so friendly that the Workers’ Weekly (December 7th 1923) affectionately called him ‘Ramsay Mac’. Their local Branch Secretary reported on their activities: 

“We Communists here are doing our best to help Ramsay MacDonald to beat the capitalist candidate”.

The Workers' Weekly described the election campaign as follows:

‘Local organisations of the Communist Party are working for Ramsay MacDonald in Aberavon, Bromley in Barrow, Ernest Hunter of the ILP in Hackney, J.R. Clynes in Manchester and in hundreds of other Constituencies’

(Workers' Weekly. December 7, 1923) 

In Barrow where they were helping J. Bromley, the Labour candidate, their secretary wrote:

“All our illusions and theoretical deductions have been hung out on the clothes line to dry”.

(From an article The Communists and the Labour Party: How Moscow helped MacDonald published in Socialist Standard October 1931.

Aborigines (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Very often large firms engage costly public relations consultants to influence public opinion in a way favourable to what they deem to be their shareholders’ interests. In Western Australia a subsidiary of the giant mining company RTZ—Ashton Joint Venture (AJV)—has engaged the services of one of the most expensive public relations firms in the world, Eric White Associates, to off-set unfavourable publicity on AJV’s snatching of Aboriginal lands in the Kimberly region of Western Australia.

Before it settled its plans to steamroll into Aboriginal settlements, AJV managed to “persuade” four members of the local community, whom it recognised as the traditional owners of its potential main mining site, to sign away their rights to the land. But since that agreement it has been claimed that at least 35 Aboriginals have rights to the land signed away to AJV, and a fierce quarrel has arisen with AJV steadfastly clinging to its ownership by virtue of the signed agreement.

So in this dispute the Aboriginals, who are not yet familiar with the ruthlessness of the profit-system, will largely be left to fend for themselves, while AJV will award their PR company 315,000 Australian Dollars to mount a lobby with state and federal government ministers, MPs and appropriate members of the public service in an effort to ensure that the mining company now have valid, legal ownership of the settlement lands.

Political Notes: They have been warned (1981)

The Political Notes Column from the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

They have been warned

It seems always to escape the attention of most of the people who vote for it, but every period of Labour rule in this country has been notable for a bitter fight with the working class over wages.

To add insult to injury, Labour ministers have the impudence to tell us that they are fighting us for our own good. The late Richard Crossman went so far as to describe a Labour incomes policy (which in plainer language means wage cuts) as “socialism”, on the argument that everyone (every worker, that is) was supposed to suffer equally under it.

Workers who resisted wage restraint have always been dubbed by Labour governments as saboteurs of their plans for abundance and security. Thus Attlee’s lot castigated “communist agitators” in the mines and the docks: Wilson huffed and puffed about “a small minority of politically motivated” seamen fomenting a strike in the merchant navy; Callaghan had his “winter of discontent”.

Well, they are still at it, even though they are out of power. Last month’s TUC spent some time discussing how they thought the issue of wages would be handled under a Labour government. Their clear decision against wage restraint was no comfort to Peter Shore, the man lined up to be Labour’s next Chancellor of the Exchequer and who, like all his predecessors, is hoping the unions will do a deal with him and so save all that unpleasantness about striking.

Shore’s disappointed response to the vote was to offer a euphemism fit to take its place among the countless others uttered by Labour leaders about pay. He talked about a “new economic consensus” in which pay would be an element. These menacing words promise battles to come, if the workers are foolish enough to think that another Labour government would handle the crises of capitalism any better than the Tories.

And that is something which the unions still, in spite of all that experience can teach them, seem determined to fight for. For example Postal Workers’ leader Tom Jackson advised the assembly to “pray for the return of a Labour government”.

Well, they have been warned.

Nothing new

The Social Democrats, as is clear to anyone who can swallow an outworn cliche, are a party with a new outlook; a fresh departure from the weary, discredited old gang who have made such a mess of running Britain. Well anyway that’s what they say.

It is, of course, impertinent for people like Roy Jenkins and David Owen to claim that they stand for anything new — and especially so when they are simply rehashing the elements of the mess they themselves managed when they were in office.

Of a type with this is the squabble which went on over the election of a SDP leader. In the course of this, the bonhomie which bonded the Four into a Gang, in those carefree days of the Limehouse Declaration, was seen to be melting fast in the heat of the battle for the top job in the party.

It is instructive to note the line up in the preliminary clash in this battle, over the method of electing the SDP chairman and their leader in Parliament. Jenkins and William Rodgers forgot all about this desire to get away from the old style and plumped for election of the leader by MPs only (and so did the majority of SDP MPs) which was the very method used by the Labour Party before they changed it at their Wembley Conference last year.

On the other hand Owen and Shirley Williams went for election by the entire membership and this is also interesting because it was when Labour changed their rules for electing their leader to something like this that the Gang of Four decided that they had had enough. Well at least none of them can be blamed for being hidebound by principle.

So even before they have an agreed constitution, or the necessary programme of promises with which to deceive the electors, the SDP is in the sort of mess we have grown accustomed to seeing from the Old Gang parties of capitalism. A mess of cynicism, backtracking and double dealing. And in that there is nothing new.

Long knives

It was not exactly a Night of the Long Knives, more like a month of them because, if the copious leaks to the press were any guide, Thatcher took some weeks in deciding on the reshaping of her government. It is said, for example, that Ian Gilmour wrote his resignation statement a month before he got the chop.

Significant beyond all the chit-chat about how many wives, children, neckties, pieces of toast for breakfast, the new ministers had, is the fact that so drastic a reshuffle indicates a serious crumbling of support among Thatcher’s higher ranks.

Now it would need a very naive person to believe that this is due to any concern for working class suffering. If Thatcher had been lucky enough to be in office during a boom, with belching chimneys blackening the sky and all the Job Centres empty of customers, there is little doubt that people like Gilmour and Prior would not have found much to quarrel with in her policies.

When Gilmour warned that the government is steering “full speed ahead for the rocks” he probably meant the rocks of electoral defeat. It is by that standard that the administrations of capitalism are judged. None of them can master the system; they blunder a while in the dark and how they are remembered by the working class is something largely out of their control.

Perhaps the Tories are beginning to think they are having bad luck with their leader, who can’t be helping their prospects with her pose of stubborn belief in her own rectitude and by her liking for giving the other side some wonderful propaganda chances.

On the buses (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Confronted with some socialist literature and an SPGB candidate at the last GLC election, one local newspaper responded in amazement that, while everyone else was worrying about problems like urban decay, unemployment, rubbish in the streets, high rates, inflation and the lousy bus service, our only solution was the prospect of a classless, moneyless world community. A candidacy like that, said our local rag, was eccentric to say the least.

As long as there are so few socialists then what we do is bound to seem eccentric to the rest; so let’s give the local newspaper their conventional point. But from our side of the fence the policies promised by the other political parties as solutions to the problems of the day are not just eccentric, they are laughable; and when workers keep their wits about them they agree with us. During the GLC campaign some members of the Labour party toured the constituency of Islington in an ancient, open-topped, double-decker bus, all festooned with balloons. Two women were talking on the pavement as it passed. They looked up and one remarked, “that must be the extra bus they promised in their election leaflet!”

Better than the most comprehensive set of facts and figures, heartfelt graffiti on the bus shelters reflect the situation; “They don’t bury people in Finsbury: they just stand them at bus stops”. All of the other political parties had promised to do something about the bus service in London it’s the one truly inexhaustible political concern. Voters can forget the bomb, but never the number nine bus.

A Dose of Capitalism

In the 1930s congestion, lateness and dropped services were blamed upon the trams, which were considered to be noisy, uncomfortable, expensive to run, inflexible and the cause of traffic jams at junctions. So they were phased out. In the 1950s the blame was put upon the trolley buses, which were considered expensive to run, inflexible and the cause of delays when their pantographs slipped off the overhead wires. So they too were phased out. Since the 1930s too we have seen the end of private enterprise when London and General were bought out by the London Passenger Transport Board in a partial nationalisation scheme; followed later by the London Transport Executive. Since those days when big was considered beautiful, London Country Services have been bought out by the omnivorous National Bus Company (which grew big by snapping up corporation bus systems that could not meet their financial deficits out of the rates) and the National Bus Company itself has become as famous as Beeching for cutting services.

The range of this history takes in what the politicians are offering today. With the rise in the price of oil since 1973 all concede that electric trolley buses would now be cheaper to run than diesel buses; but nobody can afford the outlay on a new overhead system. Others favour high subsidies from the rates, while their opponents insist that local industry is being crippled by the existing rate burden and that private enterprise buses are the only answer. So it’s back to trolleys, the London and General and square one perhaps. Meanwhile the buses suffer from a really bad dose of capitalism.

Runners and Chokers

Why does reality so rarely match the promise? What stops public transport from being a public service? The bus industry provides a set of jobs that display perfect symbolic parodies of the capitalist and worker relationship; so that, even without the administrative and technical problems above, it is unreasonable to expect anything except what you get.

The job routine can turn workers into mechanical beings, jack-in-the-boxes who pop up when the alarm clock triggers them off. Who better to observe this than the bus driver on an early turn?

There was I, driving along without a care in the world, I turned a corner and runners came at me from all directions. They seemed to come up out of the very drains, running, shouting and waving their arms. In two stops we were chock-a-block, I got three bells from my clippie and the old RT groaned along on sagging springs, steering like a pregnant camel. Four stops later they all poured off at the factory area and we were empty. Rape must feel like that.

A London Country driver 

This is not an essay in cynicism. To the bus company accountants there is no difference between hauling coal by road and hauling people, except that on the buses the load gets on and off of its own accord at each stop. The attitude of the bus crews to the passenger-commodities is a measure of the dualism that goes with production for sale. Passengers are both mere bundles of exchange value and living characters who kick when they are treated like cattle. What can a poor conductor do? If he takes the passengers’ side that buses should be a public service based upon need, then he would run the bus as the users desire, collect no fares, make detours from the schedule and get sacked when an inspector found out. If he takes the company side then he has to dawdle and pick up the maximum number of passengers, yet keep to the timetable within an accuracy of one minute, collect all fares on his fully loaded bus by every third stop, while helping mothers with push chairs, children and the disabled on and off the bus. Telling all and sundry the time and how long the next bus will be (time you bought a watch and twenty-seven feet).

Them Versus Us

It used to be worse of course. During the blitz in the last war the employers forced the crews to suspend the rule of five only standing downstairs (in the interests of national production) and for a time the throughput of passengers on London Transport approached that delight of first world war infantry, the French cattle truck, with its plate bearing the legend “cheveaux 8, hommes 40”.

Then, after years of austerity, in 1949 the bus crews flexed their trade union muscles and tried a half-day strike to wipe out a long-standing anomaly and achieve time-and-a-half for Saturday afternoon work and double-time for Sundays. The employers promptly invoked an agreement forced through during the war and threatened legal action against the strikers (this in a nationalised concern and under a Labour government). Fortunately the bus crews faced down the employers and got what they wanted.

But, as if to show that trade union action unlinked to a movement for socialism is futile, in 1971, when the crews were desperate for a pay rise, the employers faced them down over a strike and offered them half of what they wanted, on condition that they worked Saturday and Sunday at flat rate. The crews accepted and things got worse again.

There may exist a more tricky bunch of accountants than those employed by London Transport, but you'll never convince the crews that this is so. It is legendary at all garages that just before a pay claim goes in the fleet of cars that are held for the use of the managers at administrative centres like Chiswick, Crawley and Marylebone are all renewed. So, whatever the true trading position, the accountants can demonstrate to any tribunal that the board cannot possibly afford any wage increase.

These board members cannot be got at by the crews, but there are surrogates—the inspectors or jumpers, who jump the buses and have to get the crews to sign their cards so many times a day. An index of industrial friction at any shed is the number of crews who refuse to sign the inspectors’ cards, or do so only “under protest”.

Jumpers and cash

The bus crews and the jumpers are at war with each other, either openly or concealed, and the result is occasionally an absurd farce that can only be appreciated long after the event.

You’d never believe what we used to get up to. There was a rota with a dead journey from Luton back to Hitchin at 3.15 every Wednesday (dead because nobody ever travelled on it). My conductor at the time wanted to build a garden shed, but couldn’t afford new wood. So 1 rushed the bus out to a builder’s scrap yard in Luton at 3.15. In pissing rain we loaded the lower deck with half a ton of old timber and dashed back to his house at Hitchin. Halfway, I came over Offley Hill and there was a bleeding jumper with his arm out at a stop. If I picked him up we’d have both got the bullet. So I sailed past to his pitiful cries and covered the bleeder with spray. But the bastard saw the wood as we passed and there was hell to pay when we finished the rota that night. We stuck to the story that we didn’t see him in the rainstorm and as he couldn’t prove anything got away with it. But they came down on us all like a ton of bricks over the tiniest fault for months afterwards.

A London Country inspector (ex-driver) 

But most of the aggro between jumpers and crews centres on fiddling of fares. A wise conductor will be tardy over collecting upstairs fares on a bus where the passengers alight at a terminus. As they come down the stairs he'll run off a string of tickets at the lowest fare and pocket the difference between them and the real fares handed to him. Cunning ones will not dump the scroll run off this way in the used ticket box, because equally cunning inspectors search the boxes for them as the first pointer to a fiddler. The cash clerks at the shed, who receive and inspect the take at the end of a rota, here link up with the roving jumpers. Every journey has to be logged by the conductor and the take broken down into the number of tickets of each denomination run off; in this way the cash clerks build up the history of all such journeys. So when the take on a regular rota falls below the average and the number of low value tickets rises above the average, the word gets around and the jumpers start hiding behind cars and lurking in doorways at strategic points to catch the culprit.

It puzzles some people why services with a fare-box facility beside the driver are not supposed to provide change. Most drivers will oblige of course as it provides a fiddle that is impossible to trace. You give the driver fifty pence for a twenty pence fare, he gives you thirty pence change and as you move away he drops two coins in the box. They may be pennies, tuppences or fivepences, depending on how far the driver is pushing it. The only answer the company has to this is to police the buses with a large plain-clothed inspectorate.

The Political Terminus

Work on the buses is not unique, but it provides a caricature of the shifts and subterfuges, the collisions and the wrangles that go on wherever workers handle the revenue that keeps an institution going. Over the years the characteristically cynical attitudes of the bus crews to the passengers has been formed by their experience in the “public service vehicle industry” and any politician who fancies the chances of cutting through the omnibus jungle, uniting the employers, crews and passengers in a real public service is indulging in self-deception.

Even the abolition of fares would have little overall effect. To be sure the bus companies would save on fare machinery, the wages of conductors and cash clerks; while the omnibus jungle would be thinned out as each bus journey ceased to be a transaction between the public and the company. But another jungle of political wrangling would spring up around the problem of who pays for the service. Should the burden be equally loaded on the rate bills of shops, offices, factories and householders; or should the money come from central government? Such questions are the perennial concern of governments, whose battles are fought in the capitalist jungles of council meetings and offices, parliaments and civil services. You get ideological glimpses of these battles at elections and ultimately you may be called upon to do a government’s international battling when the fighting becomes real in war time.

There you are, just one industry, just one problem that all politicians promised to reform at the last GLC election. Yet it proved to be as tangled as the whole capitalist world.

Who are the eccentrics now? The socialists, who want production for use and free access—or the politicians who promise the earth for nothing?

B.K. McNeeney

Inflation: twentieth century scandal (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

The cost of living is not rising—it is the value of money which is going down.

To understand this statement it is necessary to be clear about the origins and function of money. The first trading was undoubtedly in the form of barter, that is, an exchange of one kind of desired produce for another. The restrictive nature of this form of trading hardly needs explanation. The finding of someone who has a surplus of what you want and at the same time is in need of what you have to spare would be difficult enough even today. Moreover, the system of barter makes it almost impossible to exchange a large surplus of one commodity for a variety of different items for which the trader has a need.

The invention of the idea of “money” solved both these problems. Bushels of corn, for example, could now be exchanged for coins of a precious metal which could subsequently, and at convenient times, be exchanged for a variety of items such as clothing, tools and jewellery. The important thing to remember is that the metal used for the coins had an intrinsic value every bit as much as the corn, the clothing, the tools or the jewellery.

Gold and silver coins were early adopted as convenient units of value for exchange with other items of value. Gold in particular was suitable because it was durable, unaffected by time or ordinary chemical agents and so precious that large values were easily portable. Silver, of rather lower value per unit of weight, was adopted for the exchange of items of smaller value or in conjunction with gold to arrive at a more exact evaluation. The word “pound” originally meant a pound weight of silver.

Debasing the Coinage

The first requirement of “money” is that the recipient can be assured that the coins he is receiving in exchange for his goods are of a known weight and purity. This soon became the responsibility of the sovereign ruler of the country of origin of the coins—the king or emperor. Our word “sovereign” for gold coins is a reminder that they bore a relief of the monarch’s E head—his “seal of approval”. Coins were produced at the Royal Mint to a controlled weight and purity. A small amount of base (inferior) metal was normally used in the making of coins to produce a more durable alloy but from time to time monarchs abused their control over the money supply by increasing the proportion of base metal to their own advantage or to meet their debts. The most flagrant example of this came to light quite recently when Roman coins minted in the third century AD were discovered in a field in Lincolnshire [1]. Analysis of some of the coins revealed that their silver content varied from 18 per cent to rather less than one per cent. As recently as the reign of James I gold coins were debased from 11/12 pure gold to 8/12 in order to meet debts incurred by the exchequer [2].

For most of the 19th century the gold content of the "sovereign” was fixed by law at just over a quarter of an ounce and it should be noted that from 1815 to the beginning of the First World War prices remained more or less stable [3]. However, by that time there had been a further development: the general substitution of paper money for coins.

Paper Money

The idea of paper money really had its origin in the receipts or “notes of hand” given by goldsmiths as early as the 17th century to those who wished to deposit their gold with them for safe-keeping. These receipts came to be accepted as a means of payment and, when banks were formed, they too issued “notes” against the deposit of gold in their vaults. Such notes also had the advantage of being light compared with gold coins (gold is almost twice as heavy as lead) and for large sums this was a consideration.

The important thing to notice in this context is that these bank notes were readily “convertible” into gold coins on presentation at the bank. This was still the case when the issue of notes became a government monopoly along with coins— in this country by the Bank of England. The first such notes were for £5—the “fivers” which the modern reader may come across in the literature of the period. These bore the words: “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of five pounds”—that is, five gold sovereigns—and the signature of the Governor of the Bank of England. Later, £1 notes were also issued and for a time these also were fully convertible into gold. Then at the outbreak of the First World War convertibility was suspended, resumed in 1925, and abandoned during the depression of 1931 [4].

Released from the obligation to redeem notes for gold coins, the Bank of England could issue bank notes to meet the demands of the exchequer—well beyond the amounts collected in taxes. Printing money became an easy source of finance, not only in wartime but when in peacetime the call for increased public expenditure could not be resisted. This action on the part of successive governments was “currency inflation” and inevitably resulted in increases in prices.

Currency Inflation

By the operation of the market—if, for example, the number of pound notes in circulation is by this means doubled, the price of commodities will also be doubled. The pound notes will be worth only half their previous value so that twice as many will now be required to purchase the same good or services. This increase in prices docs not occur immediately; there is a time lag while the effect of currency inflation works its way through the system.

Other economic factors, such as trade depressions, poor harvests, import controls, monopolies and changes in the technology of production, can cause price fluctuations but these are minor compared with the effect of currency inflation in recent years. This was shown very clearly in a graph produced by the Treasury at the end of 1980 and published in the Daily Telegraph [5]. We reproduce it here. The solid line shows the annual increase in the money supply, that is, currency inflation. The broken line shows the annual percentage increase in prices.

It will be seen that major increases in the money supply in 1968, 1973 and 1978 were followed by increases in prices of the same order in 1971, 1975 and 1980. Below the graph we indicate the governments in office and responsible for currency inflation which was seldom below 5 per cent and topped a staggering 25 per cent in 1973. It should be noted also that the term “inflation” is these days used to describe increase in prices. This is quite incorrect and confuses the issue. In the writer’s dictionary the monetary definition of “inflation” is:

increase in the amount of money, especially paper money, in circulation leading to an increase in prices [6]. 

This mis-use of terms, whether intentional or not, opens the door to the suggestion that there are other causes for the major increase in prices in recent years—the most insidious being that of an increase in wages.

This reason for price increases was favourite with the last Labour government in spite of all evidence to the contrary. It is still being repeated in some quarters, most notably by leaders of the Confederation of British Industries. A recent report in The Times states that:

In informal talks with ministers, CBI leaders have underlined their strong belief that a tight rein on pay increases in the coming round (of pay negotiations) is vital if inflation is to be reduced to the single-figure target the Government has set . . . [7].

Inflation and Wages

It cannot be over-emphasised that increased wages do not cause a general increase in prices. There is no such thing as the “wages-prices spiral”. Nor is it a “chicken and egg situation” in which no-one knows which comes first. The sequence is quite clearly: currency inflation by the government-general increase in prices—demands for increased wages, as prices rise, and final wage settlements.

In an article headed “Prices and Taxes Rising Faster than Earnings” a contributor to The Times reports that:

Prices and tax stoppages are now rising faster than pay. Although the typical worker has seen his average earnings rise by about 14 per cent over the last year, he would have needed an increase of 15.7 per cent in order to maintain the real purchasing power of his pay packet [8].

This is based on the Government’s tax and price index published on May 22 1981. It hardly looks from this as if wages are pushing prices up. Again, the Treasury seems in no doubt about the sequence of events. In a recent study entitled The Role of Money in Determining Prices, the conclusion is:

Generally we could accept the strict monetarist proposition that a 1 per cent change in money would lead to a 1 per cent change in prices in the long run, with the main effect coming after a lag of between six quarters and three year [9].

If the reader still has any doubts as to the truth of the statement at the head of this article he has only to enquire about the present day value of a sovereign, or a quarter of an ounce of gold. He will find it is about £55. If our wages were today paid in sovereigns we would have no need to worry about the cost of living.

Why then Inflation?

The expenditure by governments in the industrially more advanced countries has reached colossal proportions. In the financial year 1979-1980 in this country, total “public spending” was little short of £80,000 million and rising [10]. Such expenditure was on defence, housing, education, health, social security and similar areas of government responsiblity.

When this country was on the gold standard the money had to be collected in the form of taxes of one kind or another—or borrowed. Borrowing normally only postponed the day of reckoning when the money plus interest would have to be found by increased taxation. Taxes are of two kinds; those related to income (direct taxation) and those unrelated to wealth (indirect taxation). Income tax is an example of the former and tax on beer an example of the latter.

Currency inflation opened up another source of finance. In the House of Commons recently Keith Joseph made the .matter quite clear:

The Government had to obtain the money it spends from taxing, borrowing or printing. There is no other source [11].

From a capitalist point of view the problem with increases in income tax is that they reduce profits. Even those taxes apparently paid by wage-workers are actually indirectly paid by their employers. In the last analysis, pay negotiations are based on “take-home pay”.

This is not to say that governments are unaware of the dangers inherent in currency inflation. Their hope has been that by this means the economy could be stimulated by the additional demand created by the increased money supply. The failure of this policy has led to what has become known as the “monetarist” school of thought by which the attempt is made to reduce the increase in the money supply by economies in public spending. But such economies can have no effect on the current trade recession— another dilemma which cannot be resolved within the economic framework of capitalism.

John Moore

REFERENCES

[1] Daily Telegraph 24/6/1980

[2] Harmsworth Encyclopaedia

[3] Socialist Standard Feb. 1979

[4] Socialist Standard Mar. 1980

[5] Daily Telegraph 29/12/1980

[6] Universal Dictionary of the English Language 1932

[7] Times 12/6/1981

[8] Times 23/5/1981

[9] Times 29/6/1981

[10] Times 18/6/1981

[11] Times 27/1/1981

Artificial Scarcity (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Food, like everything else under capitalism, is not produced for use. It is not produced to be eaten but to be sold, with a view to profit, on a market, a local market, a regional market and, increasingly, the world market.

When there is production for the market it is only market demand, not real need, that is satisfied and it is this that, in the context of food production, condemns millions of people in the world to go hungry or be badly fed and others to actually die of starvation. These people are malnourished, or die, not because it is technically impossible to produce enough food to feed the whole world’s population, but because the present world economic and social system capitalism-produces only to satisfy profitable market demand and not human needs. It is as simple as that. These people don’t starve to death; they are starved to death, by capitalism.

All scientists who have studied world food production potential are agreed that the world could, from a technical point of view, produce enough food to feed the present world population of 4,000 million, and more. We could quote pages and pages from scientists to this effect, but will confine ourselves to two who contributed to the September 1976 issue of the Scientific American on ‘Food and Agriculture’:

Considering only such natural factors (biology, soil and climate] one can say that with the present base of arable land, with a largely vegetarian diet based on yields that could be achieved with present knowledge and with a substantial amount of energy and human effort the world could support a human population of 50 billion or more (Robert S. Loomis, “billion” in the US sense, so 12 times the present world population).

The southern half of the Sudan is potentially one of the richest farming regions in the world, with the soil, sunlight and water resources to produce enormous quantities of food-as much, perhaps, as the entire world now produces! . . . If its glacial waters and rainfall were harnessed and its farmers better supported by modern off-farm services, the 40 million hectares of the Indus-Ganges-Brahmaputra plain of Pakistan, Bangladesh and India could be made to yield upward of 20 metric tons of cereal per hectare per year, or about 80 per cent of the world’s present cereal output (W. David Hooper).

So this point is not open to argument. The world can produce enough to feed all its present inhabitants and many more. The fact that at the moment it does not do so is to be placed at the door of the present world economic and social system.

But world capitalism, as a system of production for sale on a market with a view to profit, not only ignores needs that can’t be paid for, but it also distorts the pattern of world food production, as has been well-explained in Susan George’s How the Other Half Dies (Penguin).

The farmers in the so-called Third World have been increasingly drawn into producing for the world market (“cash crops”) at the expense of producing for themselves or for local markets (“food crops”). Everybody has heard of the banana republics of Central America, but scattered throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America are coffee republics, sugar republics, soya republics, cocoa republics states producing essentially a single crop for sale on the world market and who are thereby at the mercy of the purchaser of this crop, generally a multinational company.

Reactionaries denounce “multinational” companies for being multinational rather than national, but in fact they are inevitable under capitalism and a sign that it is already an international system and so ripe for the change-over to world socialism. A multi-national company has the same objective as any “national” company: to make profits and accumulate capital. If they support and encourage the distortion of world food production towards satisfying the market for processed foods in the industrialised parts of the world at the expense of producing food to satisfy the needs of the people of its agricultural parts, this is because the former is more profitable than the latter. In this they are behaving perfectly logically, given that we are living in a capitalist world. As George puts it:

The rub is that agribusiness and private banks cannot be expected to invest in anything that is not profitable—this is simply not the nature of the beast. This is where the question of the individual sincerity of industry leaders is answered: they themselves—even if they are corporations with the best will in the world—are not free agents. They must, under the logic of their system, market produce in countries that can best pay for it; they must get the best possible return on investment, which means either cheap labour and more amortisable machinery; they must control all the facts of food production and distribution for maximum profitability from field to supermarket shelf.

The countries of the Third World are caught in a vicious circle. In order to modernise themselves they must have funds to invest. How do they get these funds? By selling on the world market the crops that they are apparently best qualified to produce. This means forcing their peasants and farmers to stop producing to satisfy their own needs or local markets and turn to producing the cash crop in question. This in turn means that money has to be spent on importing fertilisers and food crops, paid for by the profits from the exports of the cash crops!

And, if the price of the cash crop on the world market falls? Then they do not have enough money to import enough food and the world hears about a “famine” somewhere caused by some “natural” disaster. The disaster, however, is really a social and economic disaster caused by capitalism. We have already seen how two areas which suffer most from famine—Bangladesh and the Sudan (a Sahel country)—could, under appropriate social and technical conditions, easily produce enough food to feed their populations. These famines, we repeat, are not natural but artificial in the sense that they could be avoided if we had a social system geared to satisfying needs rather than profitable sales.

Susan George is right: this is a crazy way to run the world. Her proposed solution, however, is very disappointing. She recommends Third World States to try to cut themselves off from the world market and concentrate on food production for internal consumption (as she imagines China and Vietnam tried to do for a while). But this can’t work precisely because, both from an economic and from a technological point of view, there already exists a world system. No one area of the world can isolate itself.

The only solution is a change of social system at world level, to one where the resources of the Earth, man-made and natural, would become the common heritage and be used purely and simply to satisfy human needs. In other words, the abolition of frontiers and Nation-States, the abolition of markets and production for profits, the abolition of banks and of companies, multi-national and national. Only on this basis can the technical potential to produce enough to adequately feed, clothe and shelter every single man, woman and child in the world realised.

Adam Buick

From the stars to socialism (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the beginning god did not create the earth. What probably happened was that about 5-6,000 million years ago, all the mass and energy of the Universe was concentrated in a single great globe which exploded into a cloud of fundamental particles.

A few hundred million years later the temperature had dropped from hundreds of millions of degrees to below zero and gravity between particles merged them together. The cloud broke up into billions of units that became galaxies, all travelling outwards and becoming independently denser. The increased density resulted in concentrations which raised temperatures as stars formed.

The secondary condensations became planets and satellites which established themselves by gravitational attraction in families or planetary systems about their comparatively massive central stars. We shall concentrate our attention on the galaxy Milky Way, and the star we label the Sun. There, radiation pressure drew the large hydrogen envelopes away from the terrestrial planets, leaving their rocky cores exposed. Hundreds of millions of years later the planet Earth possessed an atmosphere of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulphide, water vapour and carbon dioxide which combined to form hydrocarbons and their simpler formations. Ultra-violet rays from the Sun provided energy for the reactions that formed amino-acids, which themselves combined to form complex proteins which are the building blocks of living matter.

Finally, self-contained and self-reproducing bodies evolved, at first one-celled organisms. From these simple forms developed all plant and animal life. Homo Sapiens (humans), however, did not appear until sometime between 25 million and 1 million years ago, when there existed many forms intermediate between ape and human. By about 500,000 years ago an early species of human, the Heidelberg species, had appeared.

These people were in existence, in either Africa or Asia, at least 250,000 years ago and had reached Europe by about 150,000 years ago. This species was very similar to human beings today. Their brains were the same size as ours, though their bones were considerably heavier. In other words there was little biological evolution between that period and the modern day.

From roughly half-a-million years ago to about twelve thousand years ago, humankind was a food-gatherer, constituting a gathering economy, also termed paleolithic savagery. No class monopoly of the means of living existed then, and the period represented a good 98 per cent of human existence on the planet. Then, sometime between twenty and twelve thousand years ago human beings, most specifically in the Near East, actively and co-operatively increased their food supply by cultivating plants and breeding animals. This was a food-producing economy, also known as neolithic barbarism.

Then—about 8,000 years ago—came an economic revolution, particularly in the alluvial valleys of the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the Indus. Farmers produced a surplus, which supported an urban population of craftsmen, merchants, priests, officials and clerks. Class society was born. The next two thousand years saw the Bronze Age, so called because copper and bronze were the only metals used for tools and weapons. The social surplus, primarily created from subsistence agriculture, was concentrated in the hands of priests and officials.

Then followed the Early Iron Age which, thanks to a cheap method of producing wrought iron, popularised metal equipment at a time when the alphabet popularised writing, previously reserved to a few privileged clerks. Financial transactions w'ere aided by the circulation of coined money (about 800 BC). The social surplus, now derived from specialised farming, mainly supported a class of merchants, financiers and capitalist farmers. The next major economic revolution in history was feudalism, which tied to the soil the previously-nomadic cultivator, now a peasant, yet liberated the latter from chattel slavery. The guild system secured to the artisan, as well as to the merchant, not only freedom but economic status. Agriculture became more intensive and saw the arrival of water power; a population boom resulted. With the discovery of the New World and of seaways to India and the Far East, Atlantic Europe had opened a world market. Capitalism developed, sucking the peasantry from the rural economy into the industrialising cities, turning the wealth-producers into the wage-workers we are today.

From the time the Galaxy was formed to the emergence of life, to the appearance of intelligent life in the form of human beings, change was continuous. Our species crept out of their caves to challenge the threatening world and in a flash came to fly through the clouds in machines, communicate across the world in an instant, and travel to the Moon. Yet as long as we are bound as a majority to slave for a minority’s capital, we shall never realise our potential. We can have a decent, healthy, comfortable world, yet our very social organisation creates endless miseries and poverty and—final worry—a weapon that can destroy the planet.

Levar.

Marx, according to the Telegraph (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Earlier this year the Daily Telegraph carried an article by Robert Miller entitled "The Unacceptable Face of Marx". In this article Karl Marx was depicted as a racist, a sexist, a proto-Nazi and an advocate of revolutionary terror. Although the Socialist Party of Great Britain has no sacred texts and makes heroes of no-one, we do hold that Marx has made a significant contribution to humanity’s understanding of the world and we have always been prepared to defend him when his views have been distorted or unjustifiably belittled.
  We therefore wrote to the editor of the Daily Telegraph asking that, in the interests of fairness and objectivity, he publish a reply to Miller's article from the SPGB. This request was refused, on the grounds that our reply was sent too long after the appearance of the article. This is true; the article was published on April 19 and our reply was sent on July 20 but we wonder, from our experience of the press, whether had we been prompter, we would have been given space. We doubt it.
   At all events, we think it worthwhile to publish a slightly edited version of our letter to the Daily Telegraph so that our readers can judge for themselves how acceptable was Marx’s face.

#    #    #    # 

On April 19 the Daily Telegraph contained a "Personal View" of Karl Marx written by Robin Miller. It portrayed Marx as a racist: a proto-Hitler figure who wished to sec "reactionary peoples" such as the Slavs physically annihilated and who hated Jews to the extent of viewing capitalism and all tyranny as a Jewish conspiracy. It claims that he considered negroes as “degenerate human beings” and advocated the nationalisation of women. It ended by making Marx a supporter of revolutionary violence. We should like to set the record straight.

It is true that in 1848-49 Marx and (in particular) Engels did speak of “reactionary peoples” who were destined to disappear from the face of history. But all their comments and advice on “revolution” at this time refer not to the socialist revolution but to the bourgeois-democratic revolution which was then being attempted in Germany. Marx and Engels thought this should be supported as it would establish capitalism as the dominant European system and would quickly be followed by a workers’ revolution. As their model for this bourgeois revolution they took the French Revolution, especially the Jacobin phase after 1793 with its emphasis on revolutionary wars, terror and a strong centralised state. Their remarks on “reactionary people" applied to the people mainly Slavic speaking - who did not support the bourgeois revolution but who lined up behind, or allowed themselves to be used by, its opponents. Needless to say. they were to “disappear” not by being physically liquidated but by being absorbed and assimilated into the German nation-state.

Taken in its context this is the meaning of the statement about “reactionary' peoples" disappearing “from the face of the earth” which Robin Miller considers worthy of Hitler and which was not in fact made, as Mr Miller confidently asserts, by Marx but by Engels (in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 13 January 1849).

The “national question” is one of the issues on which socialists totally disagree with Marx, but we can understand why he regarded nationalism as a progressive force in nineteenth century Europe. He saw it as helping the development of capitalism at the expense of feudalism. What he failed to see was how powerful a reactionary and anti-socialist force nationalism was to become once it had helped capitalism to become the dominant world system. Looking back now we can see that it was a mistake for socialists to have encouraged it in its early stages.

Marx the anti-Semite is a more common criticism than Marx the Slav-hater but is equally baseless. Marx’s writings on the Jewish Question from which Miller quotes are a philosophical critique of the Jewish religion and in any event support the political emancipation of the Jews — the granting of the same civil rights to Jews as to Christians within capitalism. Modern socialists too are critical of the Jewish religion just as they are of every other religion, but this by no means makes them anti-Semites and supporters of fascism, any more than criticism of the Catholic religion makes us supporters of Ian Paisley.

The passage about “every tyrant backed by a Jew" comes not, as Miller implies, from the Jewish Question but from an unsigned article in the New York Herald Tribune of 4 January 1856, which was not written by Marx but has been wrongly attributed to him.

It is true that in his private letters Marx sometimes used a language quite unacceptable for a socialist and which we can only condemn. To call Lassalle a “Jewish nigger” is quite inexcusable (even if Marx was something of a “Jewish nigger” himself, being descended on both sides from long lines of rabbis and, for his dark skin, being nicknamed “the Moor").

His view of blacks is in fact far different from that portrayed by Miller. Marx did read Pierre Tremaux’s Origin and Transformation of Man and Other Animals (1865) and did say, quite mistakenly, that Trcmaux had taken "a very significant step beyond Darwin”. But this was not in support of Tremaux’s supposed argument that negroes were “degenerate human beings" (what Tremaux actually said was that modern negroes had degenerated from a higher race of negroes) but for his view of the influence of geological elements (especially the soil) on human development which Marx considered interesting for a materialist explanation of evolution.

As to Marx’s attitude to the emancipation of the slaves in America, he was an enthusiastic supporter of this and, from a retrospective socialist point of view, a too enthusiastic supporter of Abraham Lincoln and the North in the American Civil War. (The socialist attitude is that this was a war between two sections of the ruling class in America, in which the working class had no interest in taking sides and certainly not in killing one another.)

Marx’s support of Sir Henry Maine’s quoted statement about “the separation between the Aryan races and races of other stocks” is not particularly significant either. It merely reflects the confusion which existed at that time, in scientific circles, between language and “race”. There is no suggestion that those who speak Aryan languages (who include by the way the majority of the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent black people) were superior to those who speak non-Aryan languages.

Marx was quite opposed to racialism and always insisted that “the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex and race” (1880 preamble drafted by Marx to the programme of a French workers’ party). And if he was opposed to negroes, why did he not object to his daughter marrying Paul Lafargue who, as Mr Miller informs us, “had negro ancestry”.

Marx did indeed have an illegitimate son with his servant. But what has this to do with what Miller terms "extreme male chauvinism”? As to Miller’s claim that Marx advocated the nationalisation of women, the passage he quotes is not Marx’s view but a summary of the view of those Marx himself called “crude communists”, which he roundly condemned (sec the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in Marx’s Early Texts, ed. David McLellan, Oxford, 1971, p. 146).

Finally Marx’s reference to revolutionary terror, which, according to Miller, "makes him still one of the great enemies of civilisation”, is quite definitely not to be taken as the ultimate expression of his views. Indeed it reflects an early immature phase of his thought which, as all serious students of Marx know, is far removed from the attitude he adopted later when he had fully worked out his theory of society. The mature Marx was quite clear, as are socialists today, that where electoral machinery exists a class-conscious majority can use the vote to take over the state preparatory to a changeover from private ownership and commodity production (capitalism) to a system of common (not state) ownership and free access (socialism).

The real “enemies of civilisation” are those forces, from Lenin and the Bolsheviks onwards, who have created their own vulgar forgeries of Marx and in so doing have thickly obscured the important implications for social progress contained in his thought.

Howard Moss

Language, Class and Nation (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the most remarkable things about human beings is their possession and use of language. Within a few shorts years, every person acquires a knowledge of their native language, including a vocabulary of thousands of words, enabling them to express original ideas and communicate to others on all sorts of topics. Language is also one of the most specifically human attributes, for no other animal possesses a communication system anywhere near as flexible and useful as human language. Animals such as bees and sticklebacks can convey a united range of information to each other but cannot, for example, refer to events in the past or future. The languages of the world, with their rich structures and histories, are a fascinating subject of study. But in the class divided society of capitalism, language is a basis for hostility, prejudice and discrimination.

Our impressions of other people are partly formed by the way they speak. Too often people are regarded as ignorant or unintelligent because they pronounce  the r in a word like cart, say they was, or use a double negative (as in I ain’t done nothing): they are condemned for speaking a “sub-standard” dialect. But from a linguistic point of view, there are no such things as sub-dialects, only non-standard ones which is very different. In the course of a language’s development, one particular form of it, usually that spoken in. a particularly powerful or important area, becomes the standard dialect. This means that it is taught in schools, used in literature, and then spread by radio and television. Becoming powerful and “successful” in such a society usually entails becoming proficient in the standard dialect, so that speakers of other dialects are looked down on as backward and uncultured. But prejudices of this kind are social, not linguistic, judgements. Every dialect of a language, standard or otherwise, is linguistically as good as any other; I ain’t done nothing conveys the same meaning as the standard I haven’t done anything. Speaking a non-standard dialect does not make a person stupid, untrustworthy, or whatever.

Prejudice against non-standard speakers is taken even further when it is said that they have no proper language at all. In particular, some psychologists have argued that black children in the United States have no grammar and speak merely by stringing a few words together. This type of misconception arises from a failure to realise that the children in question simply have a different grammar from standard English. For instance, when a black kid says they mine, is not simply putting two words together (in the way that young children may do).  Instead, this is his equivalent of standard they’re mine, both being reduced forms of they are mine (in standard speech, are is “contracted”, in non-standard it is deleted). The claim that black children have practically no language has been put forward as explaining why they do so badly in American schools, justifying a “compensatory education” designed to make the child fit into the school system. Obviously, this avoids the less comforting conclusion that the children do badly because of the appalling conditions they live in!

A slightly more sophisticated version of this verbal deprivation theory is associated with the name of Basil Bernstein. Bernstein draws a distinction between elaborated and restricted codes, the elaborated code being less tied to the specific “here and now” context than the restricted code. It is claimed that “middle-class” children have access to both codes, while manual working-class children have access to the restricted code only. Allegedly (and Bernstein is none too particular about citing actual data) a “middle-class” child will tend to describe the scene in a picture by saying Three boys are playing football and one boy kicks the ball, while a working-class child tends to describe the same picture by saying They’re playing football and he kicks it. From anecdotes like this, he leaps to the conclusion that, as the elaborated code is expected to be used in school, working class children’s lack of access to the elaborated code is the reason for their comparatively poor scholastic performance. Quite apart from the incorrect view of class, this is unacceptable. All children are able, outside the artificial experimental situations referred to by Bernstein, to use a range of styles, from formal to informal. All speakers of a language, whatever their social status, speak a language which is as flexible and creative as that of any other speaker.

It should also be stated that there is no such thing as a primitive language. No language which exists today, or for which past records are available, consists of just a few words and no true rules of grammar. Nor are there a people, however primitive their way of life, which does not possess a language which is perfectly adequate for all the uses to which its speakers put it. Even where a language lacks a particular concept because its speakers do not need it, they are not cognitively unable to handle it. For instance, some Australian aboriginal languages have no words for numbers higher than two (just words for a few and many), but when their speakers learn English they have no difficulty in mastering the English numerical system and counting as high as you like. There are no such things as backward races speaking primitive languages.

But different people do speak different languages. In a rational society, there would be no reason for this to cause problems, but in capitalism it is the cause of much misery. Nearly every country in the world has more than one language spoken within it (even excluding recent immigrants). Great Britain, for example, has English, Welsh and Gaelic, while Spain has Spanish, Catalan and Basque. Where one language is spoken by an overwhelming majority of the population, that is likely to be the country’s official language. Members of a linguistic minority may be discriminated against in various ways: no books or newspapers may be published in their language, it may not be the medium of teaching in schools, and so on. Speakers of a minority language will often need to learn the official language in order to “get on”. Resentment against such treatment may lead to the demand for political autonomy, as a means of converting a linguistic minority into a linguistic majority, for instance the aim of an independent Basque state. Let it be said that discrimination on the grounds of language is as odious as discrimination on grounds of race. Nevertheless, the call for independence as a means of ending linguistic oppression is not one that workers should support.

To start with, people do not live in blocks consisting of speakers of only one language (there is no part of Wales where no English is spoken), so that independence would create new linguistic minorities. The demand that speakers of each language should have their own nation also overlooks the consideration that the distinction between a language and a dialect is by no means clear-cut. The standard definition is that, unlike different languages, dialects of the same language are mutually intelligible, but this raises a number of problems. Intelligibility is a matter of degree, may go in one direction only, and is not transitive (which means. that dialects A and B may be mutually intelligible, and also B and C, but not A and C). Between Paris and Rome there is a chain of dialects, each intelligible with its neighbour, even though the end-points, standard French and Italian, are not mutually intelligible; on purely linguistic grounds, it is not possible to draw a sharp distinction between dialects of Italian and of French, or between those of Dutch and German. In practice, language and dialect are defined in cultural and political terms, and any attempt to define a nation or state in terms of language is circular. As one American linguist aptly put it, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”.

But above all, independence does not solve the economic problems of the speakers of a minority language. A separate Basque state would not free Basque workers from unemployment, insecurity and exploitation. These are caused by the economic set-up of society, not by the wrong placement of political frontiers. Capitalism is a world-wide society, and no part of it can escape from world trends and crises. Separatism, whether motivated on linguistic or other grounds, offers precisely nothing to the working class.

Socialism, too, will be a world society, but one without states or frontiers. The concept of linguistic minority will then have no meaning. A language with comparatively small numbers. of speakers will not be discriminated against, and there will be no problem about arranging education in that language, if its speakers so wish. Publishing material in that language will not be restricted by considerations of profit, but by the needs of its speakers. It is possible that an invented auxiliary language, such as Esperanto or Ido, will be used to facilitate communication between speakers of different languages. We look forward to a world in which learning another language will not be the drudge it so often is today, but an enjoyable adventure. All children could be brought up bilingual, and then travel to other parts of the globe to learn a language in its native environment. Becoming multilingual in this way would be the best way of becoming a true citizen of the world socialist community. Socialist society will mean the liberation of all mankind, without distinction of race, sex or language. We ain’t seen nothing yet.

Paul Bennett

Editorial: Socialism the answer (1981)

Editorial from the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was a a time, not so long ago, when the politicians could talk as if slumps and unemployment, and the power these gave to employers to enforce wage cuts, were all in the past. We now had a new breed of wiser, cleverer leaders who had learned from those days and the unenlightened thirties would never come again.

Well once again the real world of capitalism is upsetting the dreams of its politicians’ speeches and programmes. And the people who are suffering in this are the working class; the screw is being turned on their wages, their working conditions, their sense of security.

It is ironical, that this pressure is especially severe on workers in the aircraft industry, both those making aircraft and those operating them. For this industry was a post war boom spot which, because it was comparatively young and had obvious scope for development, was widely regarded as one where jobs would be safe for a long, long time. Then there was the glamour of big airliners with their uniformed crews roaring off to far away places, which made a job with them seem very desirable.

But much of the glamour is now being rubbed off, by some stern economic realities. The staff of British Caledonian have recently accepted a management suggestion that they forego a pay rise this year, although they have a contract which allows them an annual increase. Pan American has a plan to cut its employees' wages by ten per cent. British Airways has announced its intention of cutting its workforce by 9,000 by June 1982 and imposing a wage freeze until the end of September 1982.

In this grim situation the unions seem almost powerless; at most they can protect some of their members from the worst of the effects. It would be useful, if this were to prompt trade unionists to ask themselves why their organisations can do so little and why it all happens anyway.

In all industries, whether glamorous or not, workers are employed so that their employer can make a profit. If there are no profits, then workers are likely to be sacked; for example, the Chief Executive of British Airways said, when announcing the airline’s economy plans, that BA is losing money at the rate of £200 a minute: “No business can survive losses on this scale”, he added. Part of the process of profit production is the workers selling their ability to work — their labour power — for a wage. Labour power then is a commodity, like everything else which is produced to be sold.

The price of a commodity fluctuates around its value, or what is needed to reproduce it, but at any one time it corresponds to the balance struck between the competing pressures of supply and demand. If there is a shortage of bread, its price will tend to rise; if there is a surplus (in terms of the market) of labour power its price — workers’ wages — will be under pressure to fall.

This is a fact of capitalist life which is often obscured. For example an airline pilot, as he jets across the oceans, will not easily accept the idea that he is doing something as sordid as selling his ability to control the aircraft. But at times it is made compellingly obvious by our very living experience. This is happening now to airline crews, whose wages are under the squeeze along with all the other employees and who are likely to have to face some forcible redundancy.

Just as workers are up against capitalist reality, so are the trade unions which are there to protect them. And this illustrates the important fact that, at best, the unions can only be defensive of workers’ wages and conditions (at other than best they can, and do, operate against their members’ interests); they can only try to ward off the harsher effects of capitalism but they cannot deal with the basic cause of those effects.

This must be the act of the working class on the political field and here we are discussing a social revolution with the object of fundamentally changing society. Such a revolution will end the private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution and make them the property of the entire human race. It will abolish all the relationships typical of capitalism, including the all-pervading one of wage labour to capital, in which labour power is a commodity to be bought and sold—or, when it is not required, thrown onto the nearest scrap heap of social security.

Yet the human ability to work, to conceive, to design, to make, is a vital, precious force in human society. When socialism is established it will be applied to produce wealth which will not be commodities but will be objects produced solely for use. Socialism’s wealth will therefore be freely available to all its people. Socialism will liberate labour power and allow it to realise its full range of ability for the benefit of the human race. The possibilities of this are awesome.

So how do we achieve this? It will be a start, in the growth of working class consciousness which is needed for the establishment of socialism, for frustrated trade unionists to grasp the reason for their lack of power in face of the slump. The next step for them is to stop thinking in terms of defending their position as workers and in terms of abolishing it, by setting up a classless society. This will involve the world working class cooperating to take over the society which they now design, build and operate. In their concern for human welfare and progress, trade unionists need look no farther than the case for socialism.