Knock-out drops (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nearly two million people in Britain are addicted to drugs prescribed for them by their doctors. But. unlike the 80,000 heroin addicts who are mostly young and male, most tranquilliser addicts are women and predominantly elderly. Pain, misery, addiction or even death have frequently been associated with legitimately prescribed drugs. In the United States 130,000 deaths occur each year from drugs prescribed by medical practitioners; in Britain nearly one in thirty hospital admissions are due to prescribed drugs and about 2,500 people each year approach the charity Action for Victims of Medical Accidents for help.

With hindsight, some of the mistakes with addictive drugs seem incredible; when heroine was extracted from morphine in 1874 it was hailed as the new "miracle drug" for the safe treatment of morphine and opium addiction because it was considered safe and non-addictive. And it was to take over fifty years before the Rolleston Report identified heroin addiction in 1926. More recently, methadone was used extensively between 1971-1978 to treat morphine addiction and as an analgaesic substitute for morphine but, being itself highly addictive, led to a further spread of addiction.

Psychotropic drugs, prescribed for anxiety and depression, alter the patient's moods or mental processes. These drugs are much more likely to be prescribed for women; and extensive study in Oxfordshire found that psychotropic drugs accounted for one-fifth of all prescriptions and that women received more than twice as many tranquillisers and anti-depressant drugs as men. (Skegg et al British Medical Journal, 1977). The frequency of tranquilliser prescriptions increases with age; women over 75 years of age receive more of these than any other group.

In part, the larger quantities of mood altering drugs prescribed for elderly women can be attributed to the higher incidence of dementia in old age and the fact that most of the more common causes of dementia affect women more than men. But the excessive numbers of prescriptions for tranquillisers are not entirely justified on medical grounds alone. In recent years the closure of substantial numbers of hospital beds has led to increasing numbers of mentally and physically infirm elderly people being "cared for" in the community.

Providing safe care for mentally infirm old people in their own homes causes considerable problems for relatives. All too often tranquillisers have to be used to control the old person's behaviour and. even if the drugs are not addictive, the quality of life for the person is impaired. Caring for a demented person in a family home can prove to be a nightmare. Family life disintegrates due to disturbed nights, incontinence, noisy, aggressive behaviour and the need for somebody to be in attendance at all times. For such families there is no respite: holidays and nights out cannot be taken together and friends are deterred from visiting.

For middle aged women, in particular, caring for an elderly mother causes considerable anxiety because the traditional caring role is reversed and the awareness of the possibility of helplessness and insecurity for themselves in the future becomes all to evident. In such situations the temptation to resort to the use (and often the abuse) of tranquillisers is difficult to resist. Indeed, members of the family providing care may take tranquillisers themselves to cope with the difficult social circumstances forced on them by the lack of provision for care of the elderly. But for both the dependent elderly and their, mainly, female carers, tranquillisers are used as substitutes for social remedies which are not forthcoming under capitalism because workers are viewed as economic units.

The Royal Commission on Population put into perspective the disadvantageous position of the elderly under capitalism:

The burden of maintaining the old does not consist in the money paid out as Old Age Pensions. It consists in the excess of the consumption by the old over their production. It is the fact that (with some exceptions) the old consume without producing which differentiates them from the active population which makes them a factor reducing the average standard of living in the community, (pi 13)

This view of the elderly as redundant economic units has led to inferior standards of accommodation in the majority of hospitals for the long-stay elderly and the mentally ill.

The difficulty of attracting staff-in adequate numbers to work in poor conditions and inadequate facilities can lead to over-reliance on tranquillisers to control the patients as too few staff try to cope with relentlessly increasing numbers of admissions in the drive to make hospitals more "efficient" regardless of the social costs. And in private hospitals and nursing homes there is a greater temptation to resort to the use of tranquillisers to control disturbed elderly residents as trained nursing staff are reduced to a minimum in the drive to make profits.

Capitalist governments operate double standards when confronted with problems of drug abuse. In the past dangerous, addictive drugs have been sold abroad: human misery being an acceptable price to pay as long as profits are made. Drugs of doubtful therapeutic value but which have undesirable or even serious side-effects are produced and, where legislation prevents their use in this country, sold in countries which permit their use. Thus the addiction to tranquillisers and the misery that they cause, like addiction to tobacco and alcohol, only become the concern of the state when the efficiency of the workforce, and consequently profits, is threatened.

In 1987 only £500.000 was allocated to help tranquilliser addicts compared with £24.5 million for the much smaller group of heroin addicts. But. unlike heroin addiction, the use of tranquillisers is legitimate, respectable and widespread, with 14 million prescriptions being dispensed in Britain last year. The enormous profits which the drug industry makes has led to general practitioners being the targets of aggressive advertising campaigns to promote tranquillisers as a panacea for their patients' problems. But for patients who are prescribed benzodiazepine tranquillisers (Lorazepam; Oxazepam; Diazepam. Chlordiazepoxide) for periods of longer than four months physical dependency occurs even at therapeutic dose levels.

Withdrawal symptoms include anxiety, apprehension, tremor, insomnia, nausea and vomiting; in fact, many of the problems for which these drugs were prescribed in the first place.

Sexual dysfunction may be caused by both the phenothiazine group of drugs and the benzodiazepines. The phenothiazines, especially Phenergan, have been associated with cot deaths in infancy. The problems of toxicity and unpleasant side-effects of drugs arise because of the hasty and incomplete research carried out by pharmaceutical companies in their attempts to market their products ahead of their rivals. The continued demand for drugs to relieve anxiety is assured because competitiveness causes fear and insecurity. Capitalism's booms and slumps, wars, alienation at work and impoverishment in old age all generate anxiety for workers. And for women, the problems of isolation within the home for housewives or the stress of the "double shift" for working mothers leads to them consulting their doctors for the relief of tension more often than men.

Women's economic dependence on men (who themselves are economically insecure) has served capitalism's interests by providing future generations of workers within the conventional framework of the family.

Patrick Jenkin when he was Secretary of State for Social Services, stated.

I don't think that mothers have the same right to work as fathers. If the good Lord had intended us to have equal rights to go out to work, he wouldn't have created men and women. (Man Alive, October 1979)

The barriers placed in the way of working mothers by such attitudes; relegation to mostly part-time, unskilled, alienating work; low pay — women earned less than three-quarters of the average wages paid to men in 1982 — have all combined to place a greater emotional strain on women. The operation of factories around the clock to maximise profits leads to shift workers being forced to adopt unnatural life-styles. Insomnia causes some workers to resort to taking sleeping tablets to cope with this. Doctors are helpless to remedy the political causes of all these problems and offer tranquillisers to help patients cope with intolerable social circumstances.

Further abuses of tranquillisers occur in prisons where drugs are used to control prisoners who fail to "adjust" to their environment.

Undeniably, tranquillisers can be of value. Used carefully they can help to relieve distress. But it is the application of drugs under capitalism, which fails to heed the lessons of the past while the present is profitable, which is at fault. Medical advances, in common with all forms of technological advances, will be abused until the workers decide to place human needs before profits.

Carl Pinel

Children in labour (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The traditional view of child labour is summed up in a Low Pay Unit pamphlet:

"Child Labour" conjures up images of the pauper apprentices of Tudor times and the rag and dust sifters and mill children of the early industrial revolution. Its heyday was during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when industrialisation drew upon the labour of children in new and more wholesome ways than had been customary in the family economy of earlier years.

(Working Children 1985)

Newspaper reports in recent years however. suggest that child labour is neither a thing of the past nor confined to delivering newspapers, baby sitting or similar chores normally associated with children's work. "Scandal of pin money Pupils'' was the headline in the Daily Express on 12 December 1977; "Slave Labour ", screamed the Daily Mirror, 20 October 1982. In April 1973 The Times reported that three schoolboys, all aged thirteen, were employed in a factory operating highly dangerous, defective power presses for 17 pence an hour.

Child labour does of course have a long history. In an agrarian economy, where there was no distinction between employment in the home and other labour, men, women and children each had a task to perform tending crops and providing for everyday necessities. Children also played a role in industrial labour. The daughters and sons of artisans frequently helped in the manufacturing process or were apprenticed in the trade of their parents. Children of weavers had a staged career of tasks given to them according to their age and abilities, ranging from fetching and carrying to treading cotton, winding bobbins and spinning. Life for these children was hard and often involved long hours of work.

In the late sixteenth century children orphaned due to the death or poverty of their parents became the responsibility of the parish in which they lived. A system arose of apprenticing orphans to local craftsmen or placing them in special workshops to learn a trade. This was administered by local justices whose main concern was to rid the parish of any unwanted burden. The treatment of orphans varied from employer to employer but cases of cruelty and sadism were not unknown.

With the coming of the industrial revolution the parish workshops evolved into factories and the exploitation of children as slave labour was common. The practice of apprenticing orphans continued as late as the 1840s, when boards of guardians in Staffordshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire were found to be

. . . still getting rid of pauper boys of six. seven and eight by apprenticing them to colliers with a guinea thrown in "for clothes".

(E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class)

Child labour in modern times is seen as one of the unacceptable features of capitalism. Apologists for the system moralise about it but at the same time seek to convince us that a society in which a majority are economically coerced and treated as mere factors in the profit-making machine is the best the human race can hope to achieve. Workers are employed because they produce an economic surplus over and above their wages, which are inevitably very low for a large section of the workforce. According to the Low Pay Unit, figures for April 1986 show that 17 per cent of full-time workers were being paid less than £2.40 an hour, while over a third were receiving less than £3.00. Of the women who work part-time, 50 per cent were earning less than £2.40 an hour and 75 per cent received less than £3.00 an hour. In total, around 2 million women part-time workers and 1.6 million full-time workers. both men and women, received less than £2.40 an hour, including overtime pay. (Low Pay Unit: Britain's False Economy. 1987.)

When confronted by the exploitation of child labour socialists reply that the only answer is to end the system where a majority of men. women and, in many cases, children are treated as economic units. This can only be done by establishing, by democratic political means, a world-wide system where the means of production are owned in common and production takes place solely to meet the people's needs. In such a society the exploitation endemic in employment will be replaced by voluntary co-operation to produce the things people have democratically decided they need. All will have the right to take part in decisions about what is to be produced and how production is organised. Let's take a look at what the alternative — doing "something now" — has achieved in the last 180 years in the area of child labour.

One of the earliest pieces of legislation was the 1802 Health and Morale of Apprentices Act. Its aim was to limit children's working hours and its main concern was with pauper apprentices. It sought to abolish night work and limited the working day of apprentices in cotton mills to twelve hours. There were also provisions made for school on Sunday and proper clothing and sleeping arrangements. [To]  make sure that employers complied with the act, four independent factory inspectors were appointed to enforce the law among the 3,000 textile manufacturing establishments of the time.

Apart from the low standards set by the act, its major flaw was that enforcement depended on magistrates who were in most cases mill owners themselves. Similar problems affected another act passed in 1819 and sponsored by Sir Robert Peel, which outlawed employment in cotton mills for children under the age of nine. As it had no independent inspectorate it was largely ignored by mill owners.

Next came the Factory Act of 1833, which was based on the evidence of the Sadler Committee of 1832 and the Factory Commission of 1833. It outlawed the employment in all textile factories of children under the age of nine; between nine and thirteen no child was allowed to work more than 48 hours a week; for those aged thirteen to eighteen the limit was sixty-nine hours and anyone under twenty one years was prohibited from night work. Such was the concern to [missing text]

In 1840 a further factory commission investigated employment in the mines, discovering even worse conditions than those existing in the mills. Small children were used to operate ventilation traps which involved sitting in the dark, sometimes thirteen to fourteen hours. Other children were used to hurry coal down shafts, pushing great loads for miles with their heads while bent double. Soon after the commission published its report in 1842, the Mines Act was passed which prohibited the employment underground of children under ten and women. It also restricted the number of hours and types of work performed by children.

An important turning point in controlling child employment came with the Elementary Education Act of 1870. This provided elementary education on a national basis and set up an administration system of local school boards to keep track of attendance. The 1880 Education Act made school attendance compulsory for the first time and a child could only leave school at ten if he or she satisfied the attendance requirements. Children with poor attendance records were not allowed to leave until the age of thirteen. Prior to the 1880 act. the Factory and Workshops Act of 1878 had extended the 1833 Act to all factories and raised the minimum age of employment to ten. which also limited the hours children under fourteen could work to half the normal working day.

In 1920 the International Labour Organisation and the League of Nations met in Washington to draw up a convention on the employment of children binding on all ratifying nations. In Britain it was embodied in the Employment of Women. Young Persons and Children Act of 1920, which tied together past legislation and provided a list of types of employment which were prohibited to children under a minimum working age.

Subsequent acts such as the Children and Young Persons Act, 1933, the Factory Act of 1961 and the Infants Children and Young Persons Act. 1963 form the basis of modern child labour law. The most important aspects of these acts are the prohibition of child employment in industrial undertakings, a minimum age of thirteen for part-time employment, restrictions on hour and times of work done by children and the provision for local authority bye-laws which can set higher standards than the minimum requirements. There exists a wide variation between local authorities as to the extent of provisions under these bye-laws and the degree of care that is taken to see that they are enforced.

As with the nineteenth century act the major problem with more recent legislation concerns enforcement, responsibility for which falls mainly on three bodies — the Health and Safety Inspectorate. Local Authority Health Officers and the Education Welfare services. All of these bodies have other tasks apart from discovering the illegal employment of children and all are massively understaffed. It is estimated that the Health and Safety Inspectorate has only 750 general factory inspectors to cover 730,000 manufacturing establishments. Much of the education and welfare surveillance work on child labour is done by educational welfare officers through voluntary overtime, patrolling the streets outside normal hours of work.

Due to this understaffing routine inspections are more frequent in large firms or those where the risk of accident is considered high (for example, chemical plants). Less visible firms may never see a factory inspector. As a result "back street firms" — most likely to employ child labour illegally are least likely to be visited. In addition, educational welfare staff have no specific right of entry. As the Inner London Education Authority states:

The more serious kinds of illegal employment in factories, restaurants and building sites tend not to be detected because educational welfare staff have no specific right of entry.

(Working Children, pp. 12-13)

In 1973 an attempt was made to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the legal protection given to working children. The Employment of Children Act received the Royal Assent on 23 May of that year but as yet it still remains on the statute book and has never been fully implemented.

It is therefore not surprising that child labour is still widespread in modern Britain. A survey carried out by the Low Pay Unit and Open University in 1982-3 estimates its extent. Interviews of 1,700 children in the London, Luton and Bedfordshire areas found that, apart from newspaper delivering, children were employed in a wide range of jobs including retailing, catering and cleaning. Close to one in ten children in the survey had more than one job and half of these had more than two. While newspaper delivery accounted for one third of all children working, shop work accounted for one in five and farm work and cleaning both accounted for 13 per cent. A variety of other work performed by children included hotel and catering. painting and decorating, sewing machining. modelling, clerical work and work in street markets. More than one in five children were employed in manual jobs, cleaning, furniture removals, construction labour and garage work. The findings confirm that a majority of these children were in one way or another working illegally. An analysis of the data for London found that four out of five were illegally employed, either under age, working illegal hours or working in jobs they should not have been doing.

It does not require a degree in economics to appreciate that children are forced to work because of the financial position of their families. The survey indicated that there was a definite relationship between the socio-economic position of the families and child labour. The highest proportion of working children in the survey were from manual working class backgrounds (51 per cent) and the unemployed (52 per cent).

Neither is it any mystery why employers use child labour. It is of course a source of cheap and easily disposable labour power and savings can be made not only directly on wages but also indirectly. Children are invariably paid "cash in hand", do not appear on employers’ records and therefore are not subject to national insurance contributions. They are not members of a trade union even where the company is unionised. Neither have they any of the rights of adult workers, such as the right to claim unfair dismissal, the right to an itemised pay slip and, as they pay no national insurance, they have no right to sick pay. Furthermore they are not classified as employees under the Health and Safety at Work Act. If injured at work children have no right to compensation unless their parents can prove in court that the employer has been negligent in some respect. Since most children are employed illegally, taking such cases to court could result in the parents being deemed parties to such negligence.

Despite the large number of health and safety regulations applying to the employment of children, a large minority of those surveyed reported having accidents while in their current jobs. One third of all boys and 29 per cent of girls reported some accident or injury. The main causes were heavy weights, broken glass, slipping or falling and injuries from materials and machinery. Of all the children at work only 19 per cent of boys and 18 per cent of girls were given uniforms or any kind of protective clothing by their employers.

Apart from accidents, the health of working children suffers in other ways. In 1970 a group of teachers in Tynemouth conducted a survey of pupils to discover why so many were falling asleep in class. They discovered that of the 390 interviewed over one third were working illegally and many of them were being grossly overworked and underpaid. As the Low Pay Unit pamphlet suggests, these findings illustrate the fallacy of the view that employment is good for children's health and education. An official of the National Association of School Masters stated:

Children are late to school, fail to do their homework, fall asleep during lessons and are unable to take part in any out of school activities such as sports because they have to report to work.

(Working Children, p.32)

The exploitative use of child labour is not a thing of the distant past. Reform via legislation has failed. The enactment of new laws may give the illusion that something is being done but this is merely a surface appearance; the problem remains because its root cause has not been treated. Doing something now may sound appealing but the reality is that nothing changes because a system unfit for men. women and children remains firmly in operation.

Ray Carr

Blogger's Note:

Sadly, the original text was garbled in places. It looks like there was a typesetting/proof-reading mishap. I couldn't see any notices of corrections in later Standards.

Funds appeal (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a long time since we made an appeal for funds in these columns and we do so only when the work of the Party shows signs of outstripping its finances.

To sell the Socialist Standard at 40p and to try to keep the price-range of our literature as low as possible involves a subsidy from the General Fund which slowly erodes it. Add to this the routine things like electricity, telephone and rates, and it is not long before we have to look round to see what we can cut back on, when we should be expanding our activities for socialism and going forward.

We are well aware that our fellow workers to whom we address this appeal have their own financial worries. If, however, you think it is worth getting rid of the system which produces them, please send as much or as little as you can. Cheques should be crossed, made payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain and sent to theTreasurer at 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

Beyond trade unionism (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The poor workers whose job is to paint the Forth Bridge: no sooner have they finished putting fresh paint on to one end than the paint is peeling at the other. It is a never-ending exercise in human frustration. Watching Norman Willis plodding and nodding and huffing and bluffing his way through the Trade Union Congress's annual conference evokes vivid images of those painters.

It is not because trade unions are wickedly corrupt that they achieve so very little. Compared with most institutions under capitalism the unions are remarkably democratic. They do their best. They win a wage increase here; they stop some new. intolerable conditions being introduced into the workplace there, they provide lawyers for the persecuted wage slave; they pick up as many crumbs as they can from the cake which the working class has baked. Without such defensive action the workers would be exploited entirely at the bosses' will. Of course, workers need trade unions.

What unions can do is dictated by capitalism. Indeed, trade unions, far from being something to do with socialism, as the ill-informed believe, are features of the capitalist system. Only where there are two classes — the buyers and sellers of labour power — are unions needed to defend the sale of the workers' sole possession: our ability to work. Wages and salaries are the price which workers are paid for being turned into human commodities, there to form the basis of the affluence which the capitalists derive from profit. Where does profit come from? It comes from the legalised robbery of the working class. It comes from the payment of workers less than the value of what we produce. Trade unions are there to negotiate the rate of exploitation; they exist to preside over the act of robbery and ensure that it is not too vicious, to see that the exploiting minority leave the unexploited wealth producers with enough crumbs to nibble on.

Trade unions cannot bring about ''fairness". Capitalism is fair, insofar as it determines what justice is to mean. What would happen to a trade union official who went to the boss and said. "Look, my members are being paid £130 each a week; by 5pm every Wednesday they have each produced goods worth well over £130 for you; they have even covered your costs of machinery and electricity; why should they work Thursdays and Fridays. Be fair and let them work for what they are paid and no more." The boss would look at the trade unionist as if he had just arrived from the kindergarten and would explain that in this world (under this system) workers are not employed to make them happy but to make profits. Profits come from the workers' unpaid labour. The trade unionist is not entitled to question the employer's right to rob the workers, only to haggle over the rate of robbery.

The Left entertain huge illusions about the power of trade unionism. A picket line to a Trotskyist is like a bone to a dog. It's where things are happening. Picketing is a necessary activity by workers who, when on strike, have a class interest in ensuring that other workers do not take over their jobs. The scab provides safety for the boss and undermines what combined strength the workers can muster. For the Left picket lines are where the class struggle takes place. It is where the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil are to be found. It is where the student-vanguards. equipped with the collected works of Trotsky and a few scraps of Gramsci and the odd Sun article by Derek Hatton, can find proletarian recruits for their Bolshevik fantasies. That is why the Left enthuse about strikes. Sadly, many strikes end in dismal failure. The workers go back defeated, or winning victories which are cancelled by the losses incurred while striking. Even when real victories are won — and trade unions do win real victories more often than is usually realised — all that it amounts to is a return to wage slavery on new terms. There is nothing glorious about strikes or pickets. These are the actions of workers driven to fight for survival. Socialism, which the Left falsely claims to stand for, is about rather more than mere survival.

The "workerism" of the Left, which sees workers only where it sees blue collars and struggle only where it sees strikes, misses the crucial point that the working class comprises not only those men and women who work in factories or offices. The working class are all those who are forced to work to live, including millions who are non-unionised and vast numbers who are self-employed. The Leftist caricature of the cloth-capped, machine-operating worker excludes from its vision workers who look after homes, rear children, are children, are retired, are disabled. are unemployed. . . In other words the working class is far more than what Ron Todd contemptuously calls "our people".

Karl Marx, whom the Daily Express no doubt thinks was an adviser to the NUM, expressed the view that workers must not overstate to themselves the importance of trade unions. At best, trade unionism is a struggle to prevent their living standards being pushed down: "They ought, therefore, not be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. "Instead of confining themselves to the futile demand for fair wages, which Marx called a conservative demand, they should advocate the abolition of the wages system. (Marx, Value, Price and Profit) That advice is over a century old but it is as valid now as it was when it was written. What point is there in workers endlessly running breathlessly in order to stand still when, with no greater energy, we could demand not a better price for selling ourselves but the right to be free from selling ourselves?

When workers establish socialism all the means of wealth production and distribution will belong to everyone. Instead of working for a boss we will work for ourselves, for the community. Instead of the coercion of the wages system, we shall have a society in which each will work according to his or her ability and take according to his or her needs. Wages will not exist. And without wages to negotiate or bosses to fight, why would there be any need for trade unions to protect us from ourselves? As the owners and controllers of society the people of a socialist community will require no bodies to defend them against the rival interests of a ruling class. There will be no rulers or ruled. Trade unionism will have no role to play.

The Left are of the view that to speak to workers — "ordinary" workers — about such big ideas as abolishing the wages system and creating a society in which trade unionism will have no function is all too much for our little minds. Instead, run campaigns to replace Union Leader A with Union Leader B; spend endless hours manipulating committees and getting Red Ron put in the chair instead of Pink Pete. Instead of organising to remove the system which causes the workers' misery, the Leftists applaud the windy rhetoric of posers who make vague, rhetorical noises against profiteering and "bad" employers. In other words, the Left perpetuate the illusions of trade unionism. Just as at election time they throw aside their revolutionary outfits in favour of a Labour government to run British capitalism, so on the economic field they cannot see further than a bit of pushing and shoving within the wages system.

When workers' consciousness of the need for socialism grows, the form which trade unions take will change. As millions of workers begin to think beyond the limits of the profit system they will ensure that the unions are there to back up the majority will for socialism when it is expressed. Unions whose members are committed to the revolutionary objective of abolishing the system which created them will be able to make plans for how their particular industry or service will be run (or disbanded in the case of useless areas of work, such as banking or ticket collecting) once production for use is introduced; trade unions can be units of planning for socialist society.

It is up to the socialists in their trade unions to constantly urge their fellow workers to look beyond the narrow horizons of wage or salary slavery. To see that beyond the crumbs there is the whole cake and beyond that there is the bakery itself which we should take into our common possession. In the meantime painters will gloomily set about the ceaseless task of painting the Forth Bridge. Norman Willis will complete his apprenticeship for the House of Lords and many, many workers will wonder why they are struggling so much for so very, very little.

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: I'll take the Whitehouse (1988)

The Between the Lines Column from the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’ll take the Whitehouse

ITV opened its autumn season with a blockbuster (for which read: expensive, short-run soap opera) called I’ll Take Manhattan. It was the usual story of highly suntanned men making love to dollar signs and women who failed the audition for Dynasty or Dan Quayle's past. In between endless bouts of what the Sun calls bonking, these blokes compete over who can be the richest swine and own most of New York.

As unbelievable and tasteless tedium, such soap bubbles fade into insignificance when compared with that bigger-budgeted soap opera which has been dominating the US media in recent times. The great battle for the right to preside over American capitalism, between the Democrat with the permanent grin and the Vice President who has spent the last eight years as the chief assistant to Washington DC s village idiot.

The media dominates the US election. It dominates it in a manner that turns conventions into variety shows, speeches into prolonged smiles peppered with cliches and ideas into temporary interferences in the struggle to say least and win most support. The media campaigns of both parties in the US election are such that no socialist opposition, even if it was numerically big enough to mount a campaign against them (which at the moment the World Socialist Party of the United States is not) would be in a financial position to even begin to compete equally in an attempt to persuade the US workers of the case for the socialist alternative.

Instead of any serious attempt at presenting society as it is or offering solutions to its manifold problems, of which the wage slaves of the USA are far from free, the election advertising which is put out concentrates almost entirely on fascistic leader imagery. As in the implausible soap operas, the audience is urged to suspend disbelief and devote their minds entirely to superficial issues of personality. Thus it was that while Congress voted millions of dollars to arm the Contra terrorists, supported by both Bush and the Republican and Bentsen, Dukakis’s running-mate, the media "news" was about whether Bush's partner, Quayle. had once slept with a Playboy model when she was working as a hired "political lobbyist".

Instead of there being any debate about why one in four US children are now living below the official poverty line, the men with the media agenda were more interested in finding out how it was that Quayle. the super-patriot, managed to do the sensible thing and, like many other rich young kids of his class, dodge the Vietnam war where workers were sent to be mutilated and murdered.

Nobody elects the owners or controllers of NBC. CBS or ABC. Yet it is widely acknowledged in the USA that if they want to destroy a Presidential candidate they can. With them lies the power to tell the millions of American workers what "the real issues" are. Approximately half of the American workers will respond by not voting. It is bad enough having to watch tripe like I'll take Manhattan. without being told that you have to appear as an unpaid extra in it.

I’ll take Downing Street

While Hollywood beefcakes were pretending to take Manhattan and political half-wits were trying to take the Whitehouse. poor old Neil is still trying to storm Ten Downing Street. Panorama (BBC1. 9.30pm, 5 September) was all about the Labour Party’s current policy review exercise. Who ever said that good old tragedy was dead?

The programme exemplified much that is the pathetic tragedy of the reformist Labour Party. There was Tony Benn addressing a small rally of believers who had come to hear the rhetoric of radical change. The noises he made were good ones; some of it sounded like selected paragraphs from the Socialist Standard. It was, of course, the unselected passages which let him down and make him essentially no more than a useful frontman to be used by Kinnock and the rest in order to appropriate the hope of workers who should be using their energies destroying capitalism, not trying to run it. There was John Prescott who believes that Labour Party policy is fine and the world would be a much happier place if only the Labour Party had an extremely opportunist Deputy leader who comes from Hull and has no particular ideas about anything and is called John Prescott. Roy Hattersley. looking more than ever like a sad parody of himself, dribbled on about the importance of developing the Labour Party's ideas, by which he meant that more people should read his extremely dull book about why individuals would be more free under a "mixed economy".

There was even a two-second shot of a couple of Socialist Worker sellers standing outside a Labour Party meeting telling the Labourites how they have betrayed the workers once again. Of course. Socialist Worker urged workers to vote for these Labour betrayers in 1987, as they did in 1983, 1979, 1974 . . . The tragedy of the Panorama programme was that it showed the consequences which the Labour Party has brought on itself by 80 years of promising to reform away the inherent problems of the capitalist system without seeking to abolish the system itself. The simplicity of the socialist alternative — the need for a voice to be heard urging workers to abandon all illusions in reformism was not heard on the programme. The fact is that there are those seeking to change society and there are those seeking to change the seating arrangements in the Palace of Westminster and Kinnock's party has become so absorbed in the latter process that it no longer even occurs to them that whoever wins, the workers will lose under capitalism.

Your chance to be critics?

Right to Reply (C4. 6pm, 3 September) came from the Edinburgh TV Festival where four ’ordinary viewers" were invited to have their say about what's wrong with TV. In a half-hour programme, which included a five-minute introduction and several minutes of media controllers patting the "ordinaries" on the head, this big chance for the workers to have their say amounted to about five minutes each.

Of course, Channel Four chose who was to be invited to come along and criticise them and — surprise surprise — the Socialist Party member from Glasgow, who was told by Right to Reply that they would probably want him to come along, was eventually dropped from the programme. In the event, the four "ordinaries raised some pretty ordinary criticisms which, even if acted on. would not change the fundamentally undemocratic, pro-capitalist. life-distorting. minority-controlled nature of British TV output.

This column will continue to expose TVs crucial role as an agency for capitalist propaganda and manipulation of news, ideas and images. We shall praise them when, as occasionally happens, they tell the truth and offer some enlightening material for the consumption of our class. (In that respect, we can only be pleased to see the repeat showing of the excellent documentary, Fourteen Days in May and the follow-up documentary shown last month.) But we shall not desist from demonstrating that between the lines of most of what is not shown on TV is a poisonous intellectual diet which workers absorb at their peril.

Steve Coleman

SPGB Meetings (1988)

Party News from the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

Interesting to see that the debate with the left-wing Labour MP, Ron Brown, is listed as being on the 2nd of November, and that the SPGB speaker was to be the late Pieter Lawrence. According to this piece in the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard,  which gives the details of a Special Branch report on the meeting, the debate took place on the 7th December, and the SPGB speaker was Steve Coleman. Maybe Ron Brown debated the SPGB twice in the space of a month? I doubt it. Obviously the debate needed to be rearranged, and a new SPGB speaker sought.

SPGB Meetings (1988)

Party News from the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Click on the image to enlarge.

Understanding the British Economy (1988)

Book Review from the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Understanding the British Economy by Peter Donaldson and John Farquhar (Penguin Books £4.95. 318 pages)

The authors, in their preface, explain that while the book is intended for the general reader they hope that it will be of particular use to students of economics at lower and higher levels. As a source of information the book serves that purpose well. It tells what has happened over a number of years to production, prices, wages, imports and exports, investment, unemployment and so on together with an account of government policies, backed up with a large number of tables and diagrams.

The authors decided that supplying this statistical information is not enough: "This would make very little sense . . .  if there were no explanations of the underlying concepts of economics and no consideration of the economic theories in which they appear". So the book describes, for each problem, the different explanations as to its cause and the remedies put forward by different economists and political parties to solve it.

Economists do not often agree with each other about any economic theory. A rare exception was the body of doctrine put forward by J.M. Keynes. Most economists became Keynesian and in 1944 all the three parties in the wartime government — Tory. Labour and Liberal — agreed on operating a policy of "full employment" after the war. It did not last. The Keynesians had two policies, one for creating full employment, the other for preventing inflation. The first policy was to run a budget deficit, that is for the government to spend more than it raised by taxation and meet the rest out of borrowing. The second policy was to run a budget surplus, that is for the government to raise by taxation more than is spent and to use the surplus to pay off national debt. But what was the Callaghan Labour government to do in the years 1974-7 when unemployment and prices were both shooting up at the same time? They threw Keynes overboard and adopted that other spurious doctrine, so-called "monetarism" On this issue and on others where there are conflicting theories, the student has to decide for him or herself which is correct. not forgetting that they may all be incorrect.

Unemployment and inflation are cases in point. There are two opposite theories, both with a long history. One is that it is high prices which cause mass unemployment. In recent years this has been a constant theme in speeches by Thatcher and her ministers. The remedy, she says, is to get prices down or at least stop them going up. The opposite theory, held by many members of the Labour Party, was stated long ago by Pethick Lawrence, a minister in the Labour government in 1931, when they were faced with a huge rise in unemployment.

   I regard it as indisputable that unemployment, as it has existed in the world in recent years, is due to falling prices and that falling prices are the direct outcome of monetary policy and that unemployment is therefore without doubt a strictly monetary phenomenon.

That government's remedy was to get prices up again; they favoured inflation. The truth is that capitalism periodically produces mass unemployment whether prices are stable (as in the Great Depression 1875-1895) or falling (as in the depression of the 1930s) or rising (as in the depression of 1979-81).

What causes inflation? Why is it that for a century before 1914 prices were stable while in the half- century since 1938 prices have gone up each year and are still going up? The authors describe some of the theories (pages 92-5). One is that if wages go up prices are bound to go up also. The experience of the years 1870 to 1914 shows otherwise. On average wages rose by 42 per cent but prices did not rise at all. They went down by 10 per cent. An inflationary rise of prices is caused by an excess issue of currency (notes and coins). Prices were stable in the 19th century because the Gold Standard prevented an excess issue of currency, as was explained by Marx in Capital Volume I (Chapter III. section 2C).

The authors state (page 93) that the 19th century theory that inflation is caused by "too much money" has been revived in the guise of "monetarism". This is not correct. Gold standard theory and practice dealt with "money", meaning only notes and coins. The modem "monetarists" deal in what they call money supply" which includes bank deposits. All of the several "money supply" indicators published by the Bank of England include bank deposits and in all but one of them the bank deposit element predominates.

Modern "monetarist" theory is based on a fallacious doctrine that the price level is wholly or mainly determined by the banks, through their lending operations. This was stated and accepted by the monetarist Milton Friedman in Free to Choose (1979. p.298). Ironically, since the popular view is that Keynesians and monetarists are in conflict, it was stated and accepted by Keynes in his Monetary Reform (1923. p. 178).

The last time the government used Gold Standard practice to halt inflation was in 1920 when the Bank of England was ordered to operate a policy of restricting the amount of currency in circulation. Millions of pounds of notes were burned, and the total of currency was heavily reduced. The result was that prices fell by 36 per cent between 1920 and 1925.

At any time in the past 50 years the government could have halted inflation by the same method. Instead they have chosen to increase the amount of notes and coin in circulation from £442 million in 1938 to over £14,000 million, an increase far in excess of what might have been called for by the growth of production and population. So that the price level is now about 23 times what it was in 1938 and is still rising. Responsibility for inflation rests with successive governments, Labour and Tory, and with no one else. It suits the interests of borrowers, and as the industrial and commercial capitalists are the chief borrowers, they have never put up really serious opposition to it.

Edgar Hardcastle

Editorial: Winners and losers (1988)

Editorial from the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers constantly compete with each other. We are taught to do so from a very early age. At school we run races against each other to prove who is the "fastest''; our school work is graded to see who is "top of the class" (and who is at the bottom); we sit examinations to find out who is the "cleverest"; we compete for the right to continue our education in polytechnics, colleges and universities. In adult life we are also forced to compete against each other - for a job, for promotion. And we also engage in vicarious competition - "our" football team against yours; "our" country against all the rest.

And yet the prizes on offer to the working class are both shoddy and few and far between compared to the glittering rewards that are theirs for the taking by the capitalist class. A very few workers may succeed in being catapulted out of their class by winning a large amount on the football pools or premium bonds. Others - because they won earlier competitions - acquire the kind of education or training which gives them access to employment that is highly regarded and highly paid. They become lawyers, consultants, dentists, accountants, or City whizz-kids. They are still, for the most part, workers but they have access to high salaries and the comfortable life-style that money can buy. And in the unequal race of life, their children will start out streets ahead of those whose parents were not the winners - the unemployed, the badly-paid. the badly housed.

Positions of wealth and prestige can only ever be open to a few. Not all workers can be winners in the capitalist race. For the vast majority the only prizes they will win will be a barely adequate standard of living, a life time of wage slavery constantly hedged around with fear and insecurity.

Some workers seek a different future. They will strive to excel in sports, the arts or entertainment - the only too common dream of playing for England or of being a superstar. In these fields of endeavour the prizes on offer are so glittering that some workers are willing to sacrifice their future well-being for the sake of grabbing a brief moment of glory. The joy of running and jumping, of playing a sport, or of singing, dancing, playing a musical instrument is overtaken by the grim determination of those who will succeed at whatever cost to themselves. They are prepared to torture their bodies - just think about those unnaturally thin female gymnasts who perform such amazing feats at the Olympics, or the emaciated bodies of ballerinas who know that to carry any extra weight will be the end of their dancing careers. Some are ready to use artifice to improve on what nature and hard work have given them - athletes who use anabolic steroids or testosterone to enable them to run faster, jump higher, throw further, no matter what the cost to the health of the very bodies in which they take such pride. Think of the rock stars and entertainers who cope with the heady brew of fame, adulation and punishing tours with an equally heady, but often fatal, cocktail of speed, acid, cocaine and alcohol. There is a cruel irony indeed in those workers who win the glittering prizes but end up destroying themselves in the process.

This personal self-destruction in the cause of standing for a few fleeting seconds on the winners' podium is one aspect of competition. Another is reflected in the waving of flags and the singing of national anthems as the winners receive their medals. "Our" team has won or lost, we are informed by the sports commentators. The focus is always on "our" team. The Olympic commentaries hold up the number of medals for each country to give a league table of sporting prowess. This is another form of competition we learn while we are still young. "My" country, right or wrong; the pernicious sentimentality of nationalism.

The capitalist class, however, has no such allegiance. Unlike workers they are rooted through economic necessity in the country in which they were born or live. In fact the ideal world for the capitalist class is one where national boundaries are only political boundaries posing no serious obstacles to the movement of money. The capitalist class may claim allegiance to the country of his or her birth but will nevertheless move investments from one part of the world to another according to the potential for profit. He or she may espouse a particular set of beliefs or principles - for freedom or democracy; against communism - but this will not stop him or her trading with or investing in South Africa, Russia, Chile or Korea, providing the price is right. In other words the capitalist class, in practice, recognises the world for what it is - a global village. Despite national boundaries, different cultures and languages, we are all part of the world system of capitalism whose lifeblood is competition.

As workers cheered on "their" team in the Olympics, at the football ground or wherever, they might have done well to reflect on their allegiances. The capitalist class recognise the global character of capitalism and despite the competition between individual capitalists or between sections of capital, in the final analysis they act as a class with common interests. Workers would also do well to recognise not only the global character of capitalism but the necessary consequence of that - the common class interest that unites workers wherever they happen to have been born. Perhaps then the destructive nationalist rallying cry of “Come on the Brits" will be replaced by the socialist call of "Workers of the world unite".

South Korea: behind the mask (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Before the first Olympic spectator had arrived in South Korea, the police had swept over sixteen thousand "criminals" — drug addicts, prostitutes, beggars and petty thieves — from the streets of the capital city. No more than a quarter were formally charged, the rest either spirited away by summary courts or detained pending further "investigations". Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of slum dwellers evicted to make way for the Olympic stadium are now living in tents. They received no compensation, but they have been invited to the rehearsals of the opening and closing ceremonies; "We want them to feel it's everybody's Olympics", said Mr Yi Dong, the city's senior planner (Guardian, 30 August).

The South Korean state spared little expense to ensure that the world's media got the "right" impression of their country. In a highly symbolic act, a wall was constructed along the hundred mile Olympic torch route to spare TV viewers the sight of the slums which infest the poorer parts of the Olympic city. This all helps build the myth that the Free Market can deliver social justice and permanently rising living standards for the vast majority. How closely does this tie in with the reality of life in South Korea today?

The South Korean economy was built on the ruthless exploitation of the working class: long hours and low wages were the hallmark of this economic "miracle". South Koreans still work the longest hours in the world, and 12.3 per cent of the population live below the poverty line; the bottom 40 per cent own little more than 17 per cent of the country's wealth . . . (M. Smith et al. Asia's New Industrial World, 1985, p. 52).

The education system is strictly geared towards the needs of the economy. As a recent study concluded, "the rote learning type of education that Korean children receive is conducive to producing an efficient and well qualified labour force" (B. Bridges. Korea and the West. 1986. p.28). In the "company cities", which were built to service key industries, the schools and colleges are actually financed and run by the local employers. School leavers in the "motor city" of Ulsan, for example, will have those skills, and only those skills, which are deemed useful to the local car industry. Even this "education" does not come cheap: all schooling above primary school level must be paid for, and 40 per cent of the average family's income is needed to finance a student up to degree level.

In similar fashion. South Korean culture supports the production of a disciplined labour force. Confusianism, the dominant pre-capitalist ideology, contained a strong work ethic based on a strict duty towards the family. Today's young Koreans are taught that the state and the company are simply extended parts of that family, and are thus owed the same respect, loyalty and self-sacrifice. Just to make the point, all work stops at five pm each day while workers stand for the national anthem.

In spite of these pressures, however, the very speed of South Korea's economic development is undermining the hold of traditional ideas, particularly among the young. An example of this is to be found in the university system. In her study of Korean society, Jane McLoughlin notes that more autonomy has had to be granted to colleges and universities in order to turn out "the sort of personnel capable of achieving technological equality with competitors" (Asia's New Industrial World, p.50). This has fuelled the militancy seen in recent anti-government disturbances. as students use their new-found freedom for purposes not intended by their masters.

On the industrial front, a rising tide of dissatisfaction has expressed itself in the fight against company unions which embody the "one happy family" ethos. At present only one union is allowed in each company, and these must belong to one of sixteen government-controlled national union federations. They are banned from political action and must register any intended strikes. If a strike is deemed illegal, factory owners are empowered to call in the riot police, whose notorious brutality is reflected in in their nickname — "Kusaden" or "bully boys". Notwithstanding legal obstacles, however, workers have fought bitterly to establish their own autonomous unions.

In the course of this struggle, the state has openly supported the employers, dashing the hopes of many Koreans for a new deal following the collapse of the military regime of General Chun in June 1987. In fact, the government which emerged from that upsurge of violent mass protest was still run by the same old gang. President Roh Tae Woo. himself a former military man. retained seven ministers from the previous junta and kept on military personnel who had been implicated in the notorious massacre of unarmed protesters at Gwangju in 1980. As one civil rights activist put it, "for all the talk of democracy, nothing has really changed in this country. Every step to improve workers' rights is a hard struggle" (Guardian, 23 April). Even if the newly-tolerated political opposition came to power, it would not run the state machine much differently. Although its present leader. Kim Dae Jung, has managed single-handedly to wipe 25 points from the Seoul stock exchange by his advocacy of workers "rights", he and his followers are in general agreement with "the broad continuation of the present economic system" (Korea and the West. p.15).

There can be no doubt that the militancy of South Korean workers has brought substantial material gains over the past few years. Last Autumn alone they staged 3,800 strikes, most of them illegal, which virtually shut down South Korean industry. This action brought wage increases of 22 per cent, and the threat of similar action this year has forced employers to concede rises of up to 15 per cent (Economist, 23 July). In reality, however, the strike weapon has very serious limitations as an instrument for making permanent gains for South Korean workers. Most importantly, it has not even begun to tackle the endemic poverty of the low wage sectors of the economy, such as the textile and electronics industries in Asia. South Korean business has been forced to restructure towards more capital and technology intensive industries. This has increased the bargaining power of some groups of skilled workers, enabling them to squeeze more from their bosses. The supply of cheap labour for the sweated industries has been maintained, however, by recruiting women into the workforce. They now form 38 per cent of the labour market, and suffer highly discriminatory wage levels — usually half the rates paid to male workers.

The relative poverty suffered by all workers in South Korea, no matter how "well" paid, has had a disturbing impact on the way they view the world. Protests are taking a more stridently nationalist tone, denouncing the regime for being under the control of "foreigners". Increasing numbers of dissidents have taken to seeing the "communist" North as the more truly "patriotic" of the two Koreas because it is supposedly independent of the world market and has no foreign troops on its soil. This was behind the wave of student-led protest which aimed to get the Olympics co-hosted by the North.

The United States has become the main focus for this opposition, particularly since Congress forced through a package of restrictive measures designed to cut South Korea's $10bn trade surplus. The fact that the US also maintains 40,000 troops on the border with the North has further enraged many "radicals", who see American imperialism as the cause of the division of the peninsula and the economic injustice in the South.

This upsurge in vitriolic patriotism can be linked directly to the present state of economic development in South Korea. Traditional values of family solidarity are coming under sustained pressure from several sources linked to the evolution of the economy: the growth of the alienated, consumerist culture needed to market commodities; the needs of the system for the free movement of workers; the increasing use of women workers in labour intensive industries. At the same time, the company is losing its mystical attraction as the focus for workers' loyalty, as the growing strength and militancy of the Free Trade Union movement shows.

For the South Korean capitalist nationalism is the cement which will hold this imploding structure together. The attempts to present the Olympic Games as a triumph of South Korean solidarity and achievement were not aimed only at foreign tourists and investors. They were also intended to pull workers into line behind the economic and social system of South Korean capitalism—to convince them that further sacrifices would be necessary if “their country" was to survive and prosper in a competitive world.

As this article is written, all the indications are that the shabby appeal to Korean patriotism has been successful in relieving the pressure on employers and the state — nobody wants to rock the boat while the country basks under the lights of the world's TV cameras. Whether this new found solidarity will outlast the end of the Games is a different question altogether. The antagonism between workers and employers cannot be wished away, and a resurgence in union militancy seems inevitable. When the media circus has left town, and there is no longer the need to show a smiling face to the world, the South Korean state is likely to turn against its subjects with the more brutal and trusted methods it has favoured in the past.

Andrew Thomas

Gissa job (1988)

A Short Story from the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

I went for a job interview recently. beforehand I experienced the trepidation that usually accompanies a visit to the dentist. Suitably softened up I was ushered into the Managing Director's office. My razor sharp brain assessed the situation. All my carefully planned stratagems were of no use, designed as they were to suit a one to one confrontation. I was faced not by the interviewer I had been expecting, but with an inquisitorial panel of four.

For a nano-second I imaged the scene as a nineteenth century woodcut. The present: Capital confronts Labour. The worker stands with his head bowed, his hand extended in supplication. Behind him his hungry family huddle together for comfort. Looming before him are four wolves all dressed in frock coats, their fangs bared. The image changes. The future: Socialism confronts Capital. The four capitalists are cowering in a corner surrounded by a multitude of stern workers who have just effected the transformation from production for profit to production for need.

A questioning voice jerks me back to reality. The persons interrogating me are the owning directors of this private medium sized engineering company. Isn't it odd that those who describe themselves as manufacturers are the ones who don't actually make things with their own hands? Family companies like to project an image of caring paternalism. This type of firm works hard at earning itself a reputation for job security rather than high pay.

"We may not pay the highest wages in the area," they say, "but when you work for us you're a name, not just a number." But woe betide you if even a paperclip goes missing from your desk.

The questions emanating from the quartet are designed to ascertain my suitability to contribute to, and increase, the company profits. These buggers may know nothing of Marx's Labour Theory of Value, but they know what they want. With a working life in front of them they question every action and decision of the past twenty years. If the end result is a feeling of humiliation, rejection and failure as a human being because some other wage-slave was preferred, it's because that's the way the system designed us to feel. Capitalism isn't some abstraction that is best left to the politicians and the bosses to run. Those who own the means of production and distribution have power over your life.

What is unusual, as Sherlock Holmes might have remarked, is that the vast majority of the working class, those forced to sell their labour power in order to live, see nothing unusual in the labour/capitalist relationship. However these self-same workers would agree with Marx that,

The exercise of labour power, labour, is the worker's own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life-activity he sells to another person on order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus his life-activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live.
He does not even reckon labour as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity which he has made over to another  . . .  what he produces for himself is not the silk that he weaves, not the gold that he draws from the mine, not the palace that he builds. What he produces for himself is wages, and silk, gold, palace; resolve themselves for him into a definite quantity of the means of subsistence. And the worker who labours for eight hours — does he consider this eight hour labour as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary, life begins for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed. (Wage Labour and Capital).

Apologists of capitalism might argue that the market system offers me as much freedom of choice as it does the employer. After all, selling your labour power is a two way contract, freely entered into between buyer, the employer, and seller, the worker. And if your abilities and skills are market orientated, then you will have no problem in finding a capitalist eager to purchase the commodity on offer — your working abilities.

Members of the working class who think that a company car and the opportunity to work themselves into an early grave constitute happiness are deluding themselves. No matter how attractive the wrapping, BUPA, Luncheon Vouchers and a gold watch after twenty-five years of producing surplus value; the result remains wage-slavery. As was clear when I went for that interview  . . . 

Dave Coggan

Tales from Africa (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once upon a time (in August 1871 to be precise) the German Karl Mauch explored southern Africa and found what he thought were King Solomon's Mines and one of the homes of the Queen of Sheba. Having landed on the east coast in 1865, his original intention was to explore and map the territory. He did indeed produce the first complete map of the Transvaal and in 1866 was one of the first white men to discover gold. However he decided to forego prospecting to continute exploration "to add honour to the name of the German nation".

When, after many dangers and delays he reached the impressive walls and ruins of the ancient fort of Great Zimbabwe he was, based on old chronicles and knowledge at the time, entitled to think he had indeed found them. Later visitors to the site confirmed, admittedly with scant evidence to back them up, that although possibly not King Solomon's Mines or the home of the Queen of Sheba, the ruins had definitely not been been built by black people.

In 1902 R. M. Hall cleared the site of undergrowth and started digging. He found many items which, because, unlike previous explorers, he was a local resident, he recognised to be of African origin and similar to those still in regular use. Nevertheless he put the evidence aside also to claim non-African origins.

Shortly after Hall, David Randall-MacIver, a young archaeologist, one of the first to be properly so called, worked on the site. In the trenches he dug up he found many layers of artifacts of definite African origin and wrote: "It is impossible to resist the conclusion that the people who inhabited the 'Eliptical Temple' when it was being built belonged to tribes whose arts and manufactures were indistinguishable from those of the modern Makalanga (Shona) . . . These dwellings are unquestionably African in every detail". Digging in 1929, Gertrude Caton-Thompson found the layout and remains were so similar to those of still existing villages as to leave no doubt about the African origins of Great Zimbabwe.

These conclusions did not suit white settler politicians who had argued that the "proof" that white people had lived and traded there hundreds of years ago entitled them to their current superior colonial position. The myth continued to be taught as history in Rhodesian schools and Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines was required reading. Tourist posters featured the Queen of Sheba at Great Zimbabwe and films depicted white "superior" beings performing strange ceremonies in front of suitably prostrated blacks.

As late as the 1970s, shortly before a backward capitalist state changed from white to black rulers, broadcasts and television, while admitting that Great Zimbabwe had possibly not been built by whites, would not concede to the evidence that it had been built by indigenous blacks. It would not do to admit that supposedly inferior people had, so long ago, been able to build every bit as skilfully as those in "civilised" parts of the world.

Of course this is not an isolated example of the shading, if not total fabrication of history. Stories of Belgian babies impaled on German bayonets were concocted to encourage men to kill and be killed in the 1914-18 war; misinformation now admitted to have been given out daily in World War II; patriotic claptrap for the Falklands; biased history taught in almost every secondary school throughout Europe. Unemployment figures are massaged before being issued by the government. Those representing the ruling class will always try to bamboozle the rest of us into accepting conditions favourable to the rulers' minority interests. Forewarned is forearmed: it behoves us to regard with utmost scepticism information put about by those whose interest it is to maintain the status quo.

Eva Goodman 

Right to work? (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is sometimes said by socialists—perhaps half jokingly—that campaigns for the "right to work" are part of a conspiracy by the capitalist class to confuse the minds of workers. Certainly, there used to be a campaign in the 1970s called "The Right to Work", which was a front organisation for the Socialist Workers' Party. And you can't get a more confused and confusing bunch of people than they are.

So why do socialists object to the demand for the "right to work"? Because in effect the "right to work" is a demand to be employed and employment is servile, exploitative and a denial of workers' needs according to ability. But to understand these claims we must briefly look at the history and function of employment, of wage labour.

The wages system (including salaries) is the central social relationship of capitalism. All the other features of capitalism — money, commodity production and the state — can be said to facilitate the functioning of wage labour. This is so because it is through wage labour that the capitalist class gets its privileged income and accumulates capital. Because the capitalist class own the means of life (factories, offices, farms, transport and so on) we workers, as a class, are forced to sell our labour power by time in exchange for wages and salaries. During our time in employment we have the capacity to produce a a greater value of goods and services than the value of the wages we receive. This socially produced surplus value is appropriated by the capitalist class. It is because the working class is compelled to sell its labour power that it is possible to speak of wage slavery and workers are exploited in the process. Moreover, the wage labour and capital relationship is a barrier to the fulfillment of human needs. One of the most important human needs is useful and creative work in co-operation with others and this is central to what socialism will be. But within capitalism this vital need is constantly being frustrated by the inherent class antagonism of wage labour and capital.

Of course, wage labour existed before capitalism but it was not the predominant method of exploitation. In Western Europe capitalism was preceded by feudalism, in which exploitation took place through serf labour. Under such a system the peasants had some control of the land they worked, to provide for their own subsistence needs. However, the peasants were compelled to perform surplus labour for the ruling class (for example, working two or three days a week on the lord's land). The surplus wealth was directly and physically appropriated by the landowning aristocracy and the Church. Exploitation was plain to see. The illusion that exploitation ceased when the peasants became "free" wage workers derives from the way that wage labour conceals the extraction of surplus labour. We cannot distinguish between necessary and surplus labour during our time in employment, but both are there nevertheless. It's how the rich get rich.

Nor did the peasants, for the most part, freely and voluntarily take up wage labour. Through the enclosure movement many were forcibly deprived of their land and had to look for employment in the towns and cities. As capitalism took on its industrial form in Britain, in the late 18th century, even the old cottage system of putting out work became transformed in to wage labour. The new working class could see the situation for what it was and they didn't like it. Some demanded the abolition of the wages system. But eventually wage slavery developed a slave mentality and a slave's demand: "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work". And during the inevitable phases of of economic depression and high unemployment could be heard the equally pathetic demand to be exploited, the "right to work".

We are still an exploited class no matter how high a particular wage or salary might be. The demands of profitability and markets sales dictate that there never can be a "right to work" in capitalism. Calls for such a right pose no threat to the capitalist class and their system of employment. On the contrary, such a demand encourages the capitalists to believe that wage labour and capital are here to stay, that they are eternally the masters. Indeed, it would seem that demands for employment are more plausible coming from the capitalists. In the state capitalist countries (like Russia, China, Cuba) employment is an offer the workers cannot refuse. In Britain the new Employment Training Scheme for the long-term unemployed may become compulsory. It seems that our masters are concerned that some of us may be losing our appetite for wage slavery. Just imagine a movement demanding the right not to work — for wages or for capital. Now that really would worry our masters!

But wage slavery is not kept going by any conspiracy. All that is required is a slave mentality by the great majority, unwilling to realise that the fetters which bind them can be broken.

Lew Higgins