Lordly Perplexities (1952)

From the April 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

Their Lordships, Beveridge and Beaverbrook, hereinafter called the two B's, appear to be concerned regarding the future. We shall take Lord Beveridge first

According to the Glasgow Herald (31/12/51) he broadcast “A Letter to posterity," the theme of which was the comments he would like to make on life in Britain in 1951 to the people of Britain in 2052, 100 years hence.

His broadcast commenced with the assertion that the abolition of poverty by levelling up incomes has been part of our social policy for many years. In addition, over the past ten years, there has been tremendous levelling down as well, to pay for wars, their consequences and preparation of fresh wars. He said, “ It is not possible for anyone now to enjoy great wealth or to pass it on to his children.”

We are somewhat perplexed, in view of the real facts, to discover how his Lordship arrived at this conclusion. It would appear that be is unaware of the millions of workers whose gross earnings are £6 per week or less. Also the steep rise in the cost of living since 1945. According to government figures the increase is approximately 29 per cent. Again industrial wage rates have not risen as much, production has been greatly increased, approximately 30 per cent. since 1947. This in conjunction with record profits being made in practically all industries can by no stretch of the imagination be called abolishing poverty. It is in fact the reverse, viz. the intensification of poverty. In this regard perhaps we should recommend that he scan the National Assistance Board figures published in the “Economist” 7th July, ’51. He will find that whereas in 1948 the total number of people in receipt of relief, excluding blind and T.B. cases, was about 785 thousand, by 1950 it had increased to 1272 thousand. Possibly this was only a little extra beer and baccy money for some more of the new “privileged class,” the workers. The same paper (24th Feb. ’51) indicates the absurdity of his claims re levelling down. Figures are given showing that 1 per cent. of the population own 50 per cent. of the wealth. The Economist's comments being—”This is an unimpressive result of forty years of death duties.” Figures given in The Tribune (26th Jan. ’51) show that 16 million people are at the bottom of the social scale with estates of less than £100.

A Lordly nostalgia: —We are informed that he had to leave Fuggal Hall and move into a “middle income group house” in order to make ends meet. He states— “The Baronial Hall with troops of servants laying coal fires in every room was giving place to rows and rows of council houses, each with a radiator and a television aerial.” Shed a tear ye privileged idle and pampered proletarians for the poor, poor rich.

His concern regarding future leadership appears to be considerable. In his opinion the men and women on the stage need leaders. "Just from where in our classless collection of men and women the leadership will come . . . I do not know.” Aristocratic tradition, in his opinion, is a factor of major importance in correct leadership and we are faced with carrying on an aristocratic tradition without the aristocrats. It is of course true your Lordship that people “inherit” traditions; they also dispose of useless traditions. Perhaps your wish is for your tradition to inherit the people. We shall deal with this question further in our conclusion.

His Lordship Beaverbrook is well known for his “modesty and wisdom" through the medium of his newspapers, especially the Daily Express. The opinion column of Scottish Daily Express (31.12.51) while moaning of the loss of Abadan and the rising cost of living states that there is also cause for joy—“The joy that Socialism has been discarded and Mr. Churchill again returned to power.” Further joy—We have escaped war and are still on talking terms with Russia; also, peace in Korea is within grasp and Churchill is on the stage directing and lending the wisdom of his council. In general, the war danger recedes as each hour adds to mounting Western strength. May we remind your Lordship of your very frequently published claims in the Daily Express during 1938 and '39 that there would be no war this year, or next year, or any other year. In fact your last statement, in bold headlines, to this effect was published merely days before the outbreak of war in 1939. How very wrong you were despite your, undoubtedly excellent, facilities for information. Every informed person saw the rapid approach of war from 1935 onwards. Again, since when did an arms race result in anything other than war? You are equally confused regarding Socialism. Capitalism administered by the Labour party or any other parties can never be Socialism. Your judgments in these matters do not at all seem to be reliable. In fact they appear to be parallel with the guesses of Old Moore’s Almanac and should be treated accordingly.

Regarding 1952 and the years beyond, you ask— “Is Britain to have peace without prosperity? Is she to remain for evermore a pinchpenny land in which people live meanly and eat miserably.” When during the existence of capitalism has it been otherwise for the great majority of the people? It will always remain so while capitalism remains, irrespective of the government being an Attlee-Morrison-Bevan, or Churchill-Eden combination. Prosperity, with or without peace, is an almost exclusive enjoyment of the capitalist class. Slums and lack of them, blood and tears, and toil and sweat, whether in times of depression, or prosperity with or without peace has been labour’s reward for honest hard work.

In conclusion a word to the two B’s. Capitalism, the present social system which suits you both eminently shall be abolished eventually. The interest of peace, security, culture and the general welfare of mankind demand it, the sooner the better. A new sane and humane system, Socialism, shall take its place. In this regard you need not worry about leadership, aristocratic or otherwise, as leadership shall also go overboard with other lumber. When one reviews the past and visualises the shabby pretentious collection of bombastic people who have been “our leaders;” whose self-seeking blunders have shamefully abused and squandered wealth and drenched the world in blood, then one realises that the end of leadership cannot be too soon. Intelligent working men and women who organise for the establishment of Socialism have no need for leaders. The end or object, Socialism, means the abolition of the exploitation of man by man, the end of idleness and luxury for your class, the ending of stately baronial mansions, likewise the finish of poverty, misery and slums. The Labour Government have been very good friends to your class. It shall be very very different when, for the first time in history. Socialists take control out of the hands of the capitalist class for the purpose of carrying out the revolutionary task, the establishing of Socialism. The Socialist Party of Great Britain carries on its task of making socialists confident that the future belongs to us. Chums, you’ve almost  " ’ad it.”

John Higgins

Paradise what? (1986)

From the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

". . . having lunch with Bryan Cogwill at Thames Television . . .  he suggested that 1 might write a story covering the period in England since the war . . ." In these resplendency comfortable words John Mortimer describes the genesis of his novel Paradise Postponed. He is — who doesn't know — a barrister, author, playwright and wit. in fact a personality, which is why he can have lunch with important people in television. His fame as the TV adaptor of Brideshead Revisited and as the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey foretold a wide interest in Paradise Postponed. The critics, it seemed certain, would have to take the book very seriously if all the money spent on it were not to be wasted. But need so many of them, perhaps searching for an elusive deeper meaning, have acclaimed it as a perceptive lament for the fine hopes nurtured by successive Labour governments since the war? Fiction, after all. must not lose all touch with reality.

Like any sensible novelist writing for television. Mortimer divides his characters starkly into goodies and baddies. Prominent among the goodies is Simeon Simcox. a stupid, cliche-dependent clergyman who punctiliously chases every possible left wing reformist issue, driving his bishop mad with letters about nuclear disarmament, lower rents for rural proletariats and the like. Prime among the baddies is Leslie Titmuss. who claws a determined way from village odd-job boy down to Thatcherite cabinet minister. These caricatures are surrounded by predictable cardboard characters — the village doctor who kids himself he is all forthright human feeling but who is really a prejudiced and irritating buffoon; the local squire who wearily longs for life to be like one long chivalrous game of pre-1914 cricket with everyone accepting their place in the batting order. There is a supporting cast of drudges who minister to the needs of the local bigwigs.

Of course this isn't Paradise and is not meant to be. Mortimer's village is moving, as the cynics take over from the simpletons and the property developers desecrate the High Street, in the opposite direction. But did Paradise ever exist? Was it ever likely to. or planned to? Was it really postponed to some time in the future? Will we ever get there, with the vicar and the squire and the village drudges?

To be sure, a vision not far short of a sort of Paradise was being offered as the future when the post-war Labour government came to power under Clement Attlee ("and a little mouse shall lead them" disloyally noted Attlee's first Chancellor Hugh Dalton, which was one of his many misjudgements. There were misjudgements on the other side too: "I feel that my entrails have been pulled right out of me" was the effect of the election on Tory Chief Whip James Stuart). What actually happened was far from paradisical. The British working class were told, again and again, that they were in an economic and financial crisis of unusual severity. In truth it was the British capitalist class who were in

that crisis — which had not been accounted for in the Labour government's assumptions about how they would run things:

We all thought that this post-war period was going to be easier than it has. in fact, turned out to be. in the economic sphere: and we have been trying to deal with it ever since by a series of temporary expedients which have led to a series of crises as each expedient became exhausted.

wailed Chancellor Stafford Cripps on the day he imposed another temporary expedient — the devaluation of the pound. "We work", the government informed the working class, "or want", meaning work much harder for less real wages. In any case people whose entire lives were shaped by their awareness that if they couldn't find an employer to buy their labour power they would suffer the harshest poverty hardly needed reminding of their reliance on working for their living. What the Labour government intended was to abate the crisis by imposing more intense exploitation of the workers but the little mouse and his ministers knew better than to put it that way. After all some of them, while this was going on, continued to describe themselves as socialists.

Paradise was also supposed to have a corner reserved for more amicable relations with the Stalinist rulers in Moscow, whose massive atrocities had been temporarily blanketed during the war by official propaganda. "Left can speak to left in comradeship and confidence" was how it was put by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, whose comradeship was not something to be lightly accepted by the nervous. Perhaps that government might have decided, as others have done, on an alliance with the robbers and murderers in Stalin's Kremlin. But there were solid reasons, all to do with protecting and promoting the interests of the British ruling class in world capitalism, for choosing an alliance with the bandits and killers in Washington instead. So they went, wholeheartedly, into the Korean war and into many campaigns against nationalist guerrillas in what were still then British colonies. Or rather we — the working class went in. Labour ministers played their part in those conflicts by signing alliances, lengthening the term of conscription and delivering speeches telling us that the austerity and repression would have to continue — that Paradise had indeed been postponed.

There were many other aspects to that government which Simeon Simcox did not seem to be aware of. He saw nothing inconsistent in marching with CND while supporting the Labour Party, whose consistent policy on nuclear weapons has been far from disarmament. From the beginning the Attlee government gave their blessing to the atomising of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which, let it be remembered, are the only occasions so far when the bomb has been used on living human beings. Anxious that the British capitalist class should hold some sway on the ruthless international scene, they launched the programme to make a hydrogen bomb in this country and to set up a chain of nuclear power stations.

When they were eventually removed from office, having convinced many workers that socialism was a crackpot theory which really meant even more austerity in their lives than usual, society in Britain was still split into two classes who were continually at war with each other. One — the capitalist, ruling, class had kept their position of riches and privilege and power, their sumptuous homes, their secure and parasitical life style. The other — the working, exploited, class — still lived in degradation, still struggled in the mire of disadvantage, in their slum homes, the stresses of their poverty.

It was easy for disgruntled Labourites like Simcox (and Mortimer?) to write all this off as a betrayal of the faith. If only Attlee had not been Prime Minister, or Dalton had been Foreign Secretary, if only Cripps had lived or Morrison had died. . . . None of this, they consoled themselves in cheerless, abandoned committee rooms after their defeat, need have happened. Never mind, it was only a postponement of Paradise; there was that young Harold Wilson who showed such promise and who was a true left-winger. Of course in his time Wilson provoked the same anguish, the same doubts, the same excuses, the same stubborn defence of the party, right or wrong. It was the same with Wilson's successor Callaghan, whose government went down in bitter memories of breaking the firemen's strike, of fighting the workers in hospitals and local authorities. Unemployment had doubled and Denis Healey at the Exchequer had done much of the groundwork for Thatcher's policy of reacting to the gathering slump with cuts in expenditure.

By 1979 the argument that there was something accidental and avoidable about Labour's record in government had been worn out by reality. Labour supporters were suffering a discomfort which they could have eliminated by simply recognising the obvious fact that the crises which all governments face have nothing to do with the personnel of those governments. They are rooted in the very nature of capitalism, in the fact that the system is founded on the class ownership of everything that is used to produce and distribute wealth. From this the rest follows — class conflict, poverty amid plenty, exploitation. war. . . .

It is incorrect to argue that it all went wrong for the Labour governments; in truth it all went right. They administered capitalism just as it demands to be — in the interests of the minority class of social parasites and against the interests of the majority class of workers and producers. If they get power once more it will happen again for them — the exposure, the disillusionment, the despair. This may give someone the idea of writing another blockbusting, silly book which will enrich them but is very bad for the rest of us. And it is all because workers persist in voting for Paradise rather than taking over the Earth.

Ivan

Blogger's Note:

Steve Coleman's also wrote about John Mortimer's Paradise Postponed in the Between the Lines column in the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard.

So, this is Social Security (1966)

From the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

100 per cent Disability Pay                45/-per week 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eddie Critchfield

Tories in search of a policy (1947)

From the November 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

Annual Conferences of the major political parties are convenient and useful affairs. Delegates make speechlets on the ”Platform’s” proposals without really affecting them in any way. Other delegates politely listen. On occasions they even clap or cheer these speechlets. Such a social gathering helps to generate a feeling of amity and good-fellowship suggestive of the atmosphere of the Annual Outing or “Beano.” For the party leaders it is an admirable sounding-board by which to magnify their personal influence over their followers. It also enables them to indulge in those spell-binding speeches which do so much to rekindle the fires of their supporters’ political enthusiasm. Fires, which often tend between one Conference and another to burn dangerously low.

This, of course, really covers the water front of the Brighton Conservative Conference. Nevertheless, incidentals arising from it might paint a moral or adorn a tale.

Bernard Shaw’s “A Black Girl in search of God” has nothing on a Tory Party in search of a Policy. In the past such mundane things as detailed policies have rarely troubled them. Maintenance of Law and Order ; Preservation, of Our Glorious Empire; and an occasional red-herring like Tariff Reform have been considered ample for securing votes. With these and other nebulous promises they successfully moved the Electorate. Neither can they claim that the Electorate have been unduly fickle or faithless. Apart from two short and not highly significant breaks of the 1924 and 1929 Labour Governments the Tories enjoyed political power for eighteen years. Forty-odd years of Labour Party “Nationalisation” propaganda, among other things, provided some useful spade-work for digging a hole round the Conservative castle. It was through this hole that the Tory majority finally disappeared. The working class at length decided to give “Labour” a chance at running things.

The need of finding a rival policy to attract votes from the Labour Party has caused consternation in the Conservative ranks. Last year, at Blackpool, they began their search for one. This year’s Conference has shown it is not to be found in Brighton. To be restored as the “rightful claimants” of political power by the Tories time-honoured expedient of holding a successful General Election Inquest on the Labour Government's failures, appears the only hope.

Unfortunately for the Tories their failure to find some concrete alternative to the Labour Party programme lies deeper than any apparent inability to formulate one. The need of British Monopoly Capitalism compels the State to become more and more an active partner in its affairs, and so unify the diverse elements in accordance with the requirements of capitalism as an economic unit. This leads to that rigorous uniformity of political measures which is so marked a feature of modern capitalist administration. The main task of alternative Government is in essentials to supplement and extend what the last Government began.

Thus it can be said of any real alternative policies for running Capitalism what a geological text book once said of “Snakes in Iceland”—”there are none.” That is why, to use an Irishism, the more the Tories are different from the Labour Party the more do they seem the same thing—only even more so.

The Tories claimed that their Charter was “a bold advance in political and social affairs.” The merest cursory glance shows it to be a retreat into the Cloud-Cuckoo Land of vapid platitudes and cloudy generalisations. Mr. Eden once again took on the role of drummer-boy for the Tory, Brave New World. Although sounding the tocsin valiantly he could produce nothing more than The Need of Real Leadership : a Properly Balanced Budget; More Production, and Streamlined Controls. All of which led the Manchester Guardian (3/10/47) to say: “The seven points of the Charter would have been subscribed with equal fervour by most members of the Labour Party.”

Even the Tory Daily Telegraph could only lamely underscore Mr. Eden’s speech by saying that “in the first essentials of Government the Conservatives could provide better men.” It also significantly commented : “an alternative Government can be found which will either do other and better things—or the same things better.” This suggests that the Conservative Campaign will boil down in essentials to the exhortation: “Play the game you Labour cads. It’s our turn to bat.”

Because political parties exist for the requirements of Capitalism as a whole the Tories could not afford to indulge in sterile controversy about the alleged principles of Nationalisation. The Telegraph simply stated :—”Nationalisation had gone far. enough.” The mines will not, then, be denationalised in the event of a Tory Government. Likewise no indication was given that Railways, Electricity or Gas would be returned to Private Enterprise or, more correctly, Private Monopoly. Neither have they suggested that shareholders in the Bank of England or stockholders in Cables and Wireless should yield up good Government scrip signed by a Treasury official for something signed by a company director. As for the suggestion of denationalising the Steel Industry time will come for that when the Labour Government has finally made up its own mind on the matter of nationalising it.

Such a decision to preserve the already accomplished projects of the’ Labour Party implies, no reversal of the economic traditions of the British Capitalist Class. Whether it bo the Post Office, the B.B.C., Municipal Gas or Electricity, Governments in the past have never hesitated to take them from private control where it has been thought necessary for the interests of the Capitalist Class as a whole. If further evidence was needed there is Mr. MacMillan’s book, “The Next Five Years,” suggesting that Armaments, Transport, some forms of Insurance, and Electricity, were suitable for State Control. Mr. Churchill in the 1918 Election also urged a measure of State Control over all monopolies, especially Transport and Power, a fact which the adroit Mr. Morrison reminded them of in the House of Commons Debate on The Address. (Times, 21/11/46.)

Even the Tory cry of “Give Private Enterprise a chance” merely echoes the Labour Party’s oft repeated claim of leaving, after Nationalisation schemes had been carried through, eighty per cent. of Industry in Private Control. Mr. Morrison informed his own electors at Lewisham that Nationalisation must be carried through where necessary in the interests of efficiency, but most of Industry should remain private and prosperously enterprising. (The Economist, 10/5/47.)

The Tories also propose to retain Controls even, to the point of “streamlining them.” Mr. Wilson, President of the Board of Trade, has also announced : “Controls will be streamlined.” (Evening News, 7/10/47.)

Even that last stronghold of Toryism—Imperial Preferences—has fallen. It has been taken in the rear by that doughty “Empire Free Trade” Crusader, Mr. Bevin. Perhaps the bitterest quarrel that may yet ensue between “Labour” and Tory may be over who are “the true breed” of our great Imperial Traditions. Mr. Eden taunted the Labour Party with the fact that they are mere recruits who have only recently begun to think imperially. (Daily Telegraph, 3/10/47.) The Daily Herald (3/10/17) stung to the quick of its Imperial pride, retorted that “unlike the Tories who have only thought Imperially, the Labour Party acted Imperially.”

The leading article of the same issue told its readers that the Tories had put forward no practical measures beyond those already put in force by the Labour Government. Indeed its general tenor was to the effect that the Conservative proposal really supported what the Labour Government were doing. It is surely a strange logic by which to justify its own policy. How often in the past have Labour Party spokesmen condemned the Tory Party as the Party of Wealth and Privilege?

It now finds that acceptance by the “wealthy” and “privileged” of their main planks is a source of comfort and even congratulation. For the honest and humble “Labour” stalwart the fact that his party shares so much common political ground with ”The Traditional Enemies” of the working-class should be a source of embarrassment and shame.

There is, of course, the vexed problem of rival bidding for working class votes. While the Tories may not want to offer more inducements than their Labour Party rivals they cannot make it seem that they are offering less. In a class system of exploitation based on private property ownership of the means of living they propound the tragic jest of a nation-wide community of property owners. Mr. Eden in his opening speech (Daily Telegraph, 3/10/47) could offer no more than some future vague ownership of largely mythical houses for the working class, and the dangerous expedient of Co-partnership and Profit Sharing.

Ownership by workers of their habitation does not mean ownership of the means of living. It is only ownership of mills, factories, railways, raw materials, etc., which constitute that. These things are the monopoly of a privileged class and provide the sole means which enable them to live on the unpaid labour of the workers. This class privilege will remain as long as Capitalism endures.

Co-partnership is equally a tasteless joke. There can be no partnership between owners of the instruments of wealth production and non-owners. Evidently the Conservatives view it as a means to stimulate greater productive activity from the workers. But, as The Economist (12/10/46) in dealing with the Tory pamphlet on the subject said, “There is nothing to show that such schemes would be more successful in the future or as a means to incentive for greater production.” The Economist even agreed that Co-partnership as it stands “is an empty mockery.” It will, of course, remain an empty mockery under whatever form it appears. They commented that the Tories had much to learn about Industrial Psychology. They even suggested “Sir Stafford Cripps knew a lot more about how to get increased output from the workers.” Recent events might -suggest how right they were.

As befits a great leader, Mr. Churchill repeated his Blackpool performance by absenting himself from the three days’ Conference proceedings. The old gentleman nevertheless turned up as usual on the Saturday afternoon. The delegates then enjoyed a rare display of oratorical fireworks. So a good time was had by all.

Mr. Churchill, as an accomplished political quack of long standing, had no difficulty in showing to the satisfaction of those present, that the famous “Tory blue powders” were superior in every way to the Labour Party’s “pink pills.”

According to an American authority on the subject the rate of output of suckers is one per minute. Undoubtedly if increased production could be applied here it would greatly assist the Tory “Confidence men” to pull off their political “Three Card Trick” once again.

It has been suggested in what may be well informed quarters that an early Conservative election victory might in the long run prove disastrous for them. The return of either a Tory or Labour Government will certainly prove disastrous for the real interests of the working-class; both in the long run—or short run.

Ted Wilmott

A New Capitalist Revolution? (1952)

From the October 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the passing of time and the acceleration of the tempo of events over the last few decades, there seems to be growing among the supporters of Capitalism a desire to see their system as young and virile as it was a century or more ago. In Britain this desire has lately found expression in the concept of a New Elizabethan era, with all its supposed opportunities for giving rein to those doubtful virtues of individualism and enterprise.

In America, however, there is no comparable period of history upon which to found such a mythology of a golden era to return. Instead of feeling that they have something approaching senility which can somehow be rejuvenated, propagandists for American Capitalism appear to be very concerned to create the impression that they have something completely new—an American Revolution, unique, progressive, and above all superior to a "Socialist” Britain or “Communist” Russia.

Let us take a closer look at some of the evidence that is brought forward to substantiate this theory of a new capitalist revolution. One of the most consistent media used to expound it in this country is the monthly "Reader's Digest.” In its August issue there appeared an article on “Humanising Industry—A New Revolution” (from “Time” magazine), and in September “The Unsystematic American System” (from “Harper’s Magazine”). Both are fairly representative of the sort of views that Americans are encouraged to hold about their country’s economic system in historical relation to the rest of the world.

Humanizing Industry

One of the chief effects of the Industrial Revolution upon workers as a class was their reduction to the status of appendages to a vast impersonal machine, caused by the development of mass production for a market. Socialists recognise that the nature of Capitalism is such that within it no basic change can be made in this subservient status of the workers. But, according to “Time” magazine:—

“Now a second Industrial Revolution, quieter but more profound, is sweeping through U.S. industry. Its name: Human Relations in Industry. Its purpose: to give the worker a sense of usefulness and importance. Its goal: to make life more fun by making work more meaningful.”

This, one may think at first glance, sounds just what the doctor ordered. But these otherwise admirable sentiments turn out to be only a build-up for a variant of that bugbear of regimented workers, time and motion studies. Pioneered in the 1880’s by Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose system caused managements to think of workers as little more than machines that had to eat, these studies facilitated speed-up on the factory assembly lines up to the point where greater “efficiency” no longer yielded greater output. Then in 1923 a sociologist, Elton Mayo, made the startling discovery that the men were poor producers (i.e., produced less than was felt could be squeezed out of them) because they were unhappy; so he prescribed four daily rest periods and brought in a nurse to whom workers could complain. Result: production for the first time reached the established quotas of efficiency.

The industrial psychologists were called upon to counteract the ill effects on production of the over-application of time and motion studies. But have these refinements in any way altered the workers' status as sellers of labour power? Obviously, the object of introducing welfare measures is to create more efficient workers, and not “to make life more fun.” It is certainly an adroit move on the part of employers to disguise their profit motive by talking about making workers happy, though this is not to suggest that they prefer unhappy ones. The proof, however, that the workers’ feelings are the by-product of the system and not its chief concern is the obstinate reluctance of employers to spread a little happiness by granting wage increases.

While on the subject of humanising industry it is interesting to note that some American observers dispute the view that any real change has taken place. Thus, in “Hollywood—The Dream Factory,” Hortense Powdermaker writes:—

“The technique of business and many other organizations in trying to personalize their selling relationships, such as by announcing the name of employees to customers, really fools no one. The fact that the name of the post office clerk, the bank teller or the person who handles complaints in the department store, is posted, does not really influence their relationship with customers."

There is no reason to suppose that the selling relationship between worker and capitalist has in fact changed, despite the propaganda to the contrary.

New Role of the Unions

In order to gain the fullest advantage from the introduction of expensive plant and machinery, industrialists in America have been obliged to find ways of overcoming the resistance of workers to intensive exploitation. Recognising the labour unions’ right to bargain collectively, the employers have turned what might have been defeat into victory by inviting them to co-operate in the task of exploiting the workers.

“Management began to learn that the once-feared unions themselves held keys to higher production. In Pittsburg the United Steel Workers challenged one management to name its most productive department. Then the union boosted production there by 210 per cent, in a month.

“In one Detroit metal tubing company, every attempt to boost production by special incentives had failed. The company offered the union a novel proposal: set a certain standard for labour costs and let workers and management share all the savings when increased output drove costs below that figure. Not only did production beat all records, but the workers themselves began prodding slackers.”

Perhaps the author of the above, in his enthusiasm, has not noticed the irony of using the phrase “a certain standard for labour costs” in an article on humanizing industry. It effectively explodes the myth that American capitalists regard their workers as something more than costs of production. A few extra dollars “profit-shared” seems to be a pretty high price to pay for the spectacle of workers prodding each other instead of the boss and his union-leader lackey.

The working class of America (and elsewhere) has yet to see that if its “share” of the profits becomes more than an insignificant fraction of the total profit, then this enables wages to be reduced, which in turn makes it harder to get a cut out of what the boss saves on labour costs. New production records become new standards, which the worker must exceed before he qualifies for his hand-out There is nothing revolutionary about this ingenious device—the carrot is perhaps a little juicier but is still out of reach of the straining donkey.

The Unsystematic System

According to the article in the September “Reader’s Digest” the word Capitalism no longer fits the present American system because "it stands for the primitive economic system of the 19th century.” Let us grant, for the purpose of argument, that another word may be used to denote the economic system of the 20th century to date. Have there been any fundamental changes to justify the assertion that a revolution has taken place comparable to that transforming Feudalism into Capitalism?

“A combination of patchwork revisions of the system—tax laws, minimum-wage laws, subsidies, guarantees and regulations, plus union pressures and new management attitudes—had brought about a redistribution of income, from the well-to-do to the less well-to-do.

”. . . the business system as a whole seemed to run better if some of the national income was ploughed into improvements in the income and status of the lower-income groups, enabling them to buy more goods and thus to expand the market for everybody. Americans had discovered a new frontier to open up: the purchasing power of the poor.”

The claim to have redistributed income must be treated with considerable scepticism. Every capitalist power describes its reform measures in this way; in this country Lord Beveridge may be credited with having reorganised poverty along similar lines. The most significant part of the argument concerns the purchasing power of the poor. Note that no reference is made to abolishing poverty—the poor are still to remain such, but with improved income and status.

To sum up. Capitalism in America, far from having been revolutionised, is still immensely strong and resourceful. It has succeeded in gaining the acquiescence of the majority in ways that are remarkably similar to those used in Soviet Russia—allegedly new management attitudes, democracy in industry, raised purchasing power of the poor. But, even assuming that all these things have all the advantages claimed for them, the system based upon private property and exploitation has not disappeared. Neither the threat of war nor the poverty and insecurity of the majority has been removed.

To workers seeking a way out of their problems without understanding what causes them, the idea of a capitalist revolution may seem to be a kind of second best to a socialist one. To socialists, the word revolution has a precise meaning—a complete change in the structure of society. All imitations must be refused, since they bring inevitable disappointment and delay the coming of the real thing.

Stan Parker

Social Cut-backs or Social Revolution (1996)

From the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the past the big argument in the working class movement was
 “Social Reform or Social Revolution?” At present, as there have
been no beneficial reforms for over twenty years and with none on 
offer, the choice is rather “Social Regression or 
Social Revolution?”

Over the years a running argument has gone on between reformists and revolutionary socialists. Between those, on the one hand, who wanted to concentrate on pursuing improvements within capitalism and, on the other hand, those like ourselves who wanted to concentrate on ending rather than reforming capitalism.

The reformists argued that reforms were worth pursuing because they bring immediate benefits to people. We didn’t deny this could happen but pointed out that reforms could never be anything more than palliatives and that they could never solve the problems they were directed at.

We added—and this was the most important factor for us—that campaigning for reforms was not a sound way to build a socialist party as it would attract the support of reform-minded people who would eventually drag the party in a reformist direction. Campaigning for reforms diverted time and energy away from campaigning for socialism, so postponing the achievement of the only framework within which the problems could be solved and so in fact prolonging the existence of those problems and the suffering they caused.

What was required was an immediate change in the basis of society from class ownership to common ownership; in other words, a social revolution.

We have to admit that, although we won the argument at an intellectual level, we didn’t win in terms of convincing even a large minority of those who wanted to further the interests of the working class or of those who considered themselves socialists. Most of these felt that, if reforms could be had, they should be pursued. To their way of thinking, socialism was a long way off, so what was wrong in trying to get improvements via reforms in the meantime? Some reformists called themselves “possiblists” to emphasise that their policy was to pursue something that was possible as something that was achievable in the immediate future, “something now".

In some ways this was an understandable (though mistaken) attitude but it had consequences. Reforms, as measures introduced by governments, have to be pursued by political means; which implies the need for a reformist political party. In Britain this was the Labour Party and, this century, hundreds of thousands of people put their time and energies into building up Labour as the political vehicle for obtaining reforms within capitalism

Reformists in power

Labour, in power, did introduce some reforms but the main purpose of any government is not to introduce reforms but to run the common affairs of the capitalist class of a country. So, in assuming government power to introduce reforms, Labour also assumed responsibility for running capitalism. As, however, capitalism by its very nature is a system based on the exploitation of wage-labour for profit and can never be made to run in the interest of the exploited majority, anybody taking on responsibility for running the political side of capitalism has to do so on capitalism’s terms.

Capitalism can only run as a profit-making system in the interest of those who live off profits and against the interest of the useful majority of wage and salary earners and their dependants. This is why all Labour governments ended up taking measures against the interests of the majority (such as restraining wages or opposing strikes) and disappointing, by cutting spending in such fields as health, housing, education and pensions, those who saw them as a vehicle for obtaining reforms.

This has always been the limitation of reformism. Capitalism can never be reformed so as to work in the interest of the majority, so the most that reforms are only ever going to be able to do is to alleviate some problem a little but never solve it. Such reforms as capitalism can be pressured into granting are always granted on its terms, basically, as long as they are not too expensive and as long as there is something in them for the capitalist class or some section of it—in terms, for instance, of a better trained or less inclined to be sick workforce.

Any reformist party that becomes the government has to work to capitalism’s agenda not its own of trying to improve working class conditions. If profits and reforms conflict it is profits that must come first.

Profits before reforms

n the first half of the 1970s the background to the reform-revolution argument changed. Since the post-war boom came to a final end with the world economic crisis of 1973-4 there have been no beneficial reforms, there have been no improvements in the fields of housing, education, health, pensions and state benefits generally. Quite the opposite in fact, the reforms that existed at that time have been gradually whittled down.

No government in Britain since the mid-70s has introduced any reform. All of them have cut back on reforms. All of them have been anti-reform governments. The basic reason for this has been the increased competition on world markets that the end of the post-war boom heralded. In order to provide businesses operating from within their frontiers with the means to remain competitive all governments have had to take measures to increase profits.

Profits are the source of funds businesses draw on to invest in the more up-to- date equipment and productive methods needed to keep their productivity and costs in line with those of their competitors. Profits are also the main source of government revenue. Governments produce nothing and so have to be maintained out of the surplus value produced by workers over and above the value of the goods and services they consume.

Apart from what they borrow, governments obtain their income via taxes. Although taxes don’t all fall directly on profits as corporation tax and income tax on dividends do, all taxes fall indirectly on profits. This is because direct taxes on wages and salaries and indirect taxes on the goods and services that workers consume increase the amount of money workers must have to be in a position to maintain their working skills. They increase the cost of the workers’ consumption. To take account of this, employers have to pay higher wages and salaries, which reduces their profits. However, the benefit of these higher nominal wages doesn’t go to the worker; it goes via taxes to the government. The result would be the same if workers paid no direct or indirect taxes and received lower wages and the government taxed profits directly.

Government income and profits come out of the same pot, the surplus value produced by the workers. The more there is for one, the less there is for the other. During the post-war boom this latent conflict did not come to the surface except occasionally during balance of payments crises and the relatively mild recessions of the period. With the world market expanding, sales were relatively easy and profits were rising. Most of the time capitalist firms were able to let go without too much problem a portion of their profits to finance government spending, including on reforms, especially as the result of this reform spending—a relatively healthy, well trained and contented workforce—would benefit them in the long run in terms of a more productive and therefore more profit- producing labour force. Despite this levy they still had enough profits left to accumulate as new machinery and more up-to-date productive methods.

When the post-war boom came to an end, however, and the period of intense world market competition opened up, the situation changed. Capitalist firms needed all the profits they could to stay competitive and the cry went up “cut government spending”, “cut taxes”. Governments had no alternative but to comply. In fact the political and economic history of Britain since the mid-70s is the history of the means adopted to reduce the share of surplus value taken by governments, so as to leave more for profits.

Although this policy is particularly associated with Thatcher it actually began under the 1974-79 Callaghan Labour government, even if reluctantly. Labour had started by trying to spend its way out of the 1973-4 slump, i.e. by increasing government spending, but had been forced by economic circumstances (as relayed via the IMF) to do a U-turn and cut spending on reforms.

When the government sought to cut spending by local councils, both on wages and on the services they provided, the result was the notorious Winter of Discontent—when rubbish piled up uncollected and bodies were left unburied—which the Labour Party has only recently succeeded in living down.

Undoing reformism

Thatcher, however, showed no reluctance. In fact she made it a crusade. When she was elected leader of the Tory Party in 1975 she declared that her aim was to “destroy socialism”. By this she meant not socialism (which of course hadn’t been established to be destroyed) but the house that the post-war Labour government built, and the Tory governments of the 1950s maintained, of a capitalist economy with a large state sector and a Welfare State providing benefits as of right. Destroying “socialism” meant destroying this and, unusual as it is for a politician to honour a promise, she did.

The nationalised industries were sold off to the private sector. Local council spending was capped and services which people had come to take for granted, including help for the elderly, the sick and the handicapped, were axed or charged for. Council housing too was sold off. Market forces were introduced into the NHS and prescription and dental charges increased enormously. The conception of the Welfare State as a state that provided benefits as of right to people in return for the contributions they paid was abandoned and the old National Assistance (previously Poor Law) system where benefits were only paid after a means test to people in dire poverty was reintroduced.

Not only have there been no beneficial reforms since the mid-70s, there are not likely to be any in the foreseeable future either. Such struggles as reformists have engaged in over the past twenty years have been defensive, not struggles to achieve some new reform but struggles to prevent some previously-achieved reform from being taken away.

This, too, changed the terms of the argument between reformists and revolutionary socialists. When reforms are achieved the hope is there, even if illusory, that they may be steps forward towards a better society ; reformists are able to claim, as some used to, that a slow accumulation of reforms was the way to socialism; and ordinary workers will be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. But in a period when reforms are being taken away this argument can’t be used. Who can claim that slowing down things getting worse is a step towards socialism or any sort of better society?

Back to charity

How have reformists reacted to the disappearance of the only thing—the availability of reforms—that gave their mistaken position an air of plausibility? In two ways. One has been to cease to be reformists by coming to accept the present, unreformed capitalist status quo. This is the option the Labour Party has chosen. The other has been to retreat into charity and individual case work, the option taken by those who have gone into charities like Shelter, Child Poverty Action Group, Low Pay Unit, Age Concern and the like. Both options are an admission of the failure of the original reformist project of going into parliament to get legislation passed that would improve the condition of the working class.

The Labour Party is still a “reformist” party in the broad sense of the term, as a party that mistakenly believes it can make capitalism work in the interest of the majority. But in this it doesn’t differ from the Tory and Liberal parties which suffer from the same illusion. In that sense they, too, are reformist parties. But reformism was originally a current within working class opinion which sought to improve working class conditions by means of social reform legislation.

Because it now accepts that it must govern capitalism on its terms and according to its economic laws, the only reforms Labour now offers are not social reforms but constitutional reforms such as the abolition of hereditary members of the I louse of Lords or regional government for Scotland and Wales. Unlike social reforms, these don’t cost anything and so won’t be a burden on profits but, equally because they don’t cost anything, they don’t offer anything tangible to people and leave their conditions—and problems—completely unchanged.

All they amount to is rearranging the furniture, a game the Liberals and Nationalists are into too but with different proposals as to where to put the furniture. Apart from this, politics today is a choice of which gang of professional politicians is to form the government and preside over the capitalist system as it is without trying to extract social reforms from it. That is no longer on the agenda. Reformism has now become a fringe political movement, as represented by Arthur Scargill’s breakaway SLP.

The campaigning charities have come on the scene more or less avowedly as mere stretcher-bearers dealing with the worst casualties of capitalism. Their aim is not even the old reformist one of trying to improve the conditions of the whole working class by social reform legislation; it is only to try to help out the worst cases. They don’t think in terms of solving the problem they have targeted. They act on the assumption that the problem and their charity work will have to continue indefinitely, a never-ending struggle not, as with the reformist struggles of the past, to achieve and maintain social reforms but only to help out a tiny minority of those affected. They do demand legislative changes and they do ask for more money to be spent to help their clients, but the most they have ever got is the removal of some minor anomaly in the treatment of similar cases.

This is what “possibilism” has been reduced to—dealing with individual worst cases—as this is all that is possible under capitalism today in terms of social action.

The argument for reformism was weak enough anyway but, faced with this bleak social prospect, it’s got nothing going for it at all.

Adam Buick

A Different Kind of Life (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism is not a political abstraction but a statement of here and now. Nearly all the questions and arguments thrust at Socialists resolve to a single one “What does it offer to me ?” The idea that offers have to be made is a mental habit acquired from capitalist politics — but one which implies the room for improvement to be, always, enormous.

To all of you: we are offering and promising nothing. Your first understanding must be that the different world so direly needed has to be made by you the multitude, not us the handful. If offers are thought of, of course it is the cut-price bird in the hand that will clutched every time. But don’t you wonder why the offer always turns out a swindle? For the last generation the bird in hand has been rising living standards, made a banquet by the Welfare State’s red wine. Look at them and the society in which they have gone sour, and you see what Socialism is all about.

#

The anticipations of the “never-had-it-so-good” era faded away abruptly. On one hand the Welfare State has failed, except in proliferating bureaucracy; on another there is the endless poverty, the cry all through society that ends can’t be met. People have ceased to point out that an unemployed man with a family can get twenty-five pounds a week in social security payments because it is seen — more and more often — that wages for innumerable workers are below even that figure. The drastic measures taken by the last Wilson government, deliberately creating unemployment and setting back wages, show the extent to which the Labour Party has fallen away from the humanism which. even if only in talk, once characterized it. Previous Labour governments had unemployment and economic crises, but they apologized and tried to excuse themselves; this one calculated the number it should have out of work and how long they should remain so.

The means by which depression and destitution were said to be being overcome in the ’fifties have rebounded. Credit and hire-purchase, the agencies through which working people were “improving their standards”, provide not only private millstones but instruments for the regulation of domestic consumption and the direction of labour. An increase in the statutory deposit for certain classes of good has the automatic effect of making them unpurchasable even on hire-purchase for the time, and so reducing production in — say — furniture factories to make part of their labour-force redundant and available for work elsewhere.

Likewise in the nineteen-fifties it was widely said that social barriers were disappearing. The fact that rich and poor read the same newspapers and watched the same television programmes was held to be the sign of an equalization of culture; working-class access to domestic comforts and leisure-time enjoyments, the beginning of the end of private privilege. What has emerged has been the drawing of new lines. If anything, the social-group divisions are now tighter and more numerous than before. They can be seen at work in the rapid destruction of country-village life, for instance. Today the cottages and houses are taken over by executive and professional townspeople who recognize only their own kind, and the villagers are herded into the rural council-house estates which are virtually their ghettoes.

The apparent social inroads have only set up more divisions. A package holiday abroad may be a pleasurable change, but its social status is on a level with a trip to Brighton. The proletarian stigmata are not permitted to be erased. The phrase “permissive society” for certain phenomena in the last few years is a giveaway as to the sort of society we are really living in. As apparent barriers have broken down, restrictive laws have been steadily extended : permission is given, but under supervision and on the condition of instant withdrawal when thought necessary.

#

That is all workaday and domestic living. What of the great issues and questions for humanity ? The keynote of the nineteen-fifties’ apathy was struck by Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger — “There aren’t any good, brave causes any more”. There was, of course, the hydrogen bomb; it has now receded in people’s consciousness, the Vietnam war perhaps taken as a confirmation that the powers would simply never dare to use it. Vietnam itself was a fertile source of indignation and protest from mixed motives: human compassion, dismay at the cynicism of governments, anti-Americanism and desire for the Communists to win were all present in the rallies and the fights round Grosvenor Square.

The Socialist Standard was the only paper to remark, at the height of anti-nuclear feeling, what was the truly terrifying thing about the hydrogen bomb — that the world could be scourged and devastated by weapons of war without it. Less than twenty years later there is a still more terrifying thought, as evidence has accumulated of the effects of everyday pollution of the environment — the world can be equally scourged without war at all. There is, too, at this moment talk of a world-wide economic crisis on the scale of 1929 against whose onset the political and economic wisdom of capitalism is powerless.

What can be done about any or all of these things? They are not even problems in the sense of housing, or traffic, or the care of the old, where the hope that legislation can mitigate may be mistaken but is understandable; they are part of the condition of humanity now. Of course there are protests and demands. The protests, however, tend to be a matter of affirming self-respect and decent feelings more than anything else I have stood up and testified, runs the sentiment, so what is happening today is not my fault. Some time ago a Labour MP spoke to the writer of having given up the Vietnam crusade: “What can you do about Vietnam ? Nothing!”

It depends on what you want to do. Hopes for social reform are usually fragmentary or one-eyed; they concern themselves with a single outstanding evil, or are limited to a belief (for example) that people must be made better before the world will change much. If it is possible to find an umbrella covering all aspirations for a humane society, the nearest idea is that of choice. It is only in this context that the word “freedom” makes sense : freedom to choose. The objection to authority and coercion is precisely that they deny choice and impose someone else’s. Racialism and war are ultimates in the repudiation of choice — born on the wrong side, one forfeits the right to participation in society or even to live. Poverty denies choice; not only in the sense that if one is poor there is going to be bread-and-margarine, but in reference to work, housing, education, leisure activities and personal relationships.

The inference (as taken up by many “libertarians”) might be that what one has to do, then, is attack social evils and seek to extend areas of choice for everyone as far as possible. Paradoxically, it is impossible to do that in a class-divided — and therefore basically unfree — society. If an estate is built to rehouse people in a pleasant area, everyone who can afford it in the neighbourhood will promptly move away, making the estate automatically a colony of inferiors. Part of the bitterness over the Welfare State is that, though it was hailed as a national effort transcending individual status, it has never been seen as anything but sectional — a tax, more or less, on the comfortable and a bounty to the poor.

Nor is it feasible to try to legislate against a problem like pollution. There are, of course, partial approaches to it. A few rural districts with small populations have built sludge de-watering plants, where sewage effluent is transformed into a dry cake usable as a low-grade organic fertilizer; though the expense for urban areas would be gigantic. Likewise, a different and costlier composition for detergents would stop their contribution to the pollution of rivers. But if alternative techniques for all contaminatory industrial processes were found, the criterion is not going to be human wellbeing but “viability” — how much will it cost ?

What is there to say of such a problem except that it is inseparable from production for profit ? Though popular awareness of it is recent, it is simply the development of what has been going on throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If one adds to it the other chronic problems of the modern world — the crisis-producing imbalances of production which are part of the nature of capitalism, the international rivalries and tensions and the dreadful consequences when tension breaks — these alone press a majestic case for a fundamental alteration in society. When is added the failure of capitalism to house, feed, educate or make happy vast numbers of people, or to give any degree of choice — the case becomes overwhelming.

The argument for Socialism is that the problems will cease to exist and freedom of choice be given, only on the terms of common ownership of all the means of living. Production for use means production unconfined by the market as to either distribution or cost. On one hand there would be free access to the wealth of society; on the other, cost and competition would not oppose themselves to human wellbeing. The material fears of loss of work, housing or status that largely underlie racialism would disappear with every other kind of superiority-distinction. So would the pressures which continually crush the quality of personal life. Indeed, if common ownership is seen as the means and not the end, Socialism appears not simply as the solution but as many thousands of solutions : the facility from which progress, in the true sense, may begin.

Robert Barltrop

Editorial: Lord Keynes – Economist of Capitalism in Decline (1946)

Editorial from the June 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the sickness of its declining years capitalism is being nursed by the Labour Party. Lord Keynes, who died on April 21st, was the doctor who prescribed the treatment. His theories, on which rest the belief in the possibility of “full employment” under capitalism, have come to the widely accepted not because of intrinsic merit or originality, but because capitalists and the Labour politicians alike have dire need of a panacea that will, they hope, make capitalism work or at least persuade workers that it will. Faced with mounting unemployment and the political discontent that it causes, many Tory and Liberal politicians had lost confidence in their ability to save capitalism. Lord Keynes promised them another lease of life. The Labour Party, new to power, never had much confidence in its own ability, and the “economic blizzard” of 1931 that wrecked the  Labour Government destroyed even what it had; so Keynes was their hope, too.

He believed that investment and price trends could be made subject to governmental control and thereby booms and slumps could be ironed out and approximately full employment secured. His views found expression in the National Government’s “White Paper on Unemployment Policy” (1944), in which the Government accepted “as one of their primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment after the war”. The Labour Government has endorsed this White Paper. Keynes directly influenced the Liberal and Labour programmes.

“It was mainly through his personal influence”, says the Times (April 22nd), “that the Liberal Party adopted as their platform in the election of 1929 the proposal to conquer unemployment by a policy of public works and monetary expansion”. The section of the Labour Party that opposed the MacDonald-Snowden economy cuts in 1931 quoted Keynes in support of their view. The Labour Party’s report on “Full Employment and Financial Policy” (1944) largely rests on Keynes’s theories. It declares that “the best cure for bad trade is to increase purchasing power and to speed up development”. It looks to loans, “compulsory if necessary”, from the Banks to “help the Chancellor to find the purchasing power required for full employment . . .” “If bad trade and general unemployment threaten, this means that total purchasing power is falling too low . . . We should give the people more money, and not less, to spend.”

Socialists have no hesitation is saying that if the Labour Government attempts anything of the kind – it may, of course, get cold feet and scurry to the safety of “orthodox” financial policies, as did Snowden and MacDonald-it will not succeed in avoiding unemployment and crises. Capitalism depends for its relatively smooth functioning on the capitalists’ confidence in their prospect of selling their goods at a profit. By the time that bad trade threatens the capitalists will already be apprehensive and the proposed government policy would sap their confidence still more. It is one thing to propose to increase the workers’ purchasing power but the capitalists (including the Government itself in State industries) are at all times forced by competition to seek to reduce the purchasing power of the working  class in relation to the mass of goods produced for the market. This they do, if not directly, by wage cuts, then indirectly by installing labour-displacing machinery to increase output and lower costs of production.

Always the workers can buy only part of the commodities they produce (but which belong to the owners of the means of production), the part represented by their wages. Keynes and the Labour Party ignored these basic facts of private ownership and the wages system and looked to financial schemes to relieve the disequilibrium when, periodically, it had produced a crisis of bad trade and unemployment. Events will show that unemployment cannot be abolished under capitalism, even though its growth may for a time be masked by war, war preparations and totalitarian controls.

The extent and nature of the dependence of capitalists and the Labour Party on Keynes’s theories was shown by the estimates of his work published by the Herald and the Times on April 22nd. The Herald,  under the heading “The Great Lord Keynes”, by a Labour MP, Mr. Evan Durbin, said that Keynes “more than anyone else .  . . bridged the gap between Liberalism and Socialism”. The Times developed the same idea at length:-

“The Keynesian approach offered a bridge between the academic economists on the side and ‘the brave army of heretics’—Mandeville, Malthus, Marx, Gesell and Hobson (to name only a few)—on the other. This may yet prove to have been Lord Keynes’s most valuable achievement”.

Marx is here put in curious company, but the Times‘ inclusion of him had a reason. The Times thinks that Keynes had found the way to cure unemployment and thus save capitalism from the challenge of Socialists. It quotes him as defending his policy of full employment through State control of investment “both as the only practicable means of avoiding the destruction of existing economic forms in their entirety and as the condition for the successful functioning of individual initiative”.

The Times went on to claim that Keynes had shown how to bring about reconciliation between the orthodox political parties and the “growing army of deeply discontented reformers and revolutionaries”. The claim is certainly true of the Labour Party, but woe betide that Party when Keynes’s full employment policy fails them and the bridge he built collapses. Let it therefore be clearly understood that neither Keynes nor anyone else has reconciled the Socialist demand for the abolition of capitalism with the despairing attempt to make the system tolerable by trying to cure unemployment within its framework.

Full Employment? Another Labour Party Fallacy (1946)

From the January 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is full employment for the working class possible? What exactly does it mean? By whom is it desirable? Or is it a stunt to inspire the workers with hope and trust in our so-called Socialist Government?

 

These are not some of the questions asked in Parliament, or other public places. On the contrary, there seems to be general agreement, especially in the press, to keep up the fiction that full employment is possible, not merely for the repair of war damage, but indefinitely.

According to a leading article in the Daily Telegraph for November 16th, the Government's plan for full employment is much the same as that of the Coalition Government's in 1944. They say :—

“It differs little but in omissions and change of emphasis from the policy for maintaining 'a high and stable level of employment' which the Coalition Government set forth in 1944. That policy commanded general support as a well devised means of smoothing out booms and slumps, the main obstacles to full employment." 

Neither the Coalition Government, nor the present Labour Government, have so far explained how, by smoothing out the booms and slumps, fuller employment is obtained. Neither do they, or the Daily Telegraph, show how, when one dead level of employment has been reached, it is possible to achieve a condition of full employment. The plan is to spend on public works during the slump, leaving the booms to keep the workers busy during the few years—or months—they last. The Daily Telegraph, while hopeful of the results, is dubious of the ability of the Government and its experts to forecast the slumps, and adjust, their spending on public works accordingly.

Having once made the assertion that ''booms and slumps are the main obstacles to full employment," which is false, any deductions they make on that premise will undoubtedly be wrong. If, instead of eating all my cake to-day, I save a portion for to-morrow, obviously, nothing is added to the total.

In the same way, if a capitalist Government postpones its public works schemes to provide work during a slump, it creates no new employment. All it does is to arrange a levelling out, with little or no fluctuations.

If the unemployment figures during a boom are one million, and during a slump three million, cut out spending on public works during the boom and spread it over the slump and you get approximately two millions throughout both periods. The new arrangement is of no benefit to the workers. On the contrary, the advantage is on the side of Big Business, which has a well stocked labour market on which to draw at the very time world markets are expanding.

The Labour Government, in taking over the Capitalist bag of tricks, have taken with it its superstitions. Ever since the "South Sea bubble" there has been profound dread among capitalists of trade crises. "There's a slump on the way," or "a boom is just round the corner" were common expressions, generally spoken with superstitious awe, as though it were some great convulsion of nature. This dread impotence before the economic blizzard is still prevalent. According to the Daily Sketch (Nov. 23rd, 1945)), Mr. Dalton had said:—

"We must also arm ourselves with anti-slump powers, so that never again, as in past years, shall prices and productivity and employment all fall away through the failure of private enterprise."

The Daily Sketch leader commented as follows : —

"Even Mr. Dalton's Fabian audience must have caught their breath at the sheer ineptitude of that pronouncement, for there is no means within the capacity of man which would leave us an exception to the general experience in the event of a world slump. That will prove to be true Whether this country is run under state control or private enterprise."

For the last 30 years the workers have been unable to see much difference in the amount of unemployment during booms and slumps. They certainly do not become more prosperous during the booms. Big business, even when it gets really busy, cannot absorb more than part of the unemployed millions left over from the previous slump, Booms and slumps are no longer a mystery to all capitalists. This fact is made clear in a book by Roy Glenday, "Economic adviser to the Federation of British Industries," and entitled, "The Future of Economic Society" (Macmillan & Co., 1944).

Mr. Glenday gives facts and figures that shed much light on the subject of trade, both internal and international. In the production and marketing of motor cars, for instance, he says: The huge and complex plant necessary for standardisation and cheapness would be uneconomic without assurance of an ever expanding market. When saturation level has been reached with the ready money section, hire purchase methods are resorted to; which only puts off the evil day of partial, or even total collapse. When it is remembered that this is the normal process of big business in the production and sale of such things as radio sets, cycles and electric appliances of many kinds we can readily understand how this mad race for profits leads to crises.

Mr. Glenday has a convincing array of facts and evidence, from which he argues that Capitalism cannot survive its present crisis without some kind of adjustment in its environment. But contrary to what we should expect from an adviser to the Federation of British Industries, he envisages some form of “communism" the next step in human progress being what he calls the service state. Where, in return for security and a retiring pension, the individual will have to give up the right to choose his job, and must be prepared, not only to move from one locality to another, but also to change his job; undergoing a period of training, if necessary, to fit him for his new job. According to the Conservative press, something like this “service state” is contemplated for this country by the present Government, and already exists in Russia. They (the Conservatives) call it the servile state. But capitalism, whether British, Russian or American, means servility for the working-class always and everywhere. The right to choose his own job is of little value to the individual worker, the majority of whom consider themselves fortunate when they can find any sort of job and hold it down. Booms and slumps mean little to them.

Much depends on the point of view. From the capitalist viewpoint, it is eminently desirable that the workers should be kept busy; though not too busy in case they get independent. And not only because they are a source of profit; but also because many unemployed workers are a menace to a smoothly running system, and they have to be fed anyway.

The worker's point of view is different. He knows that the overstocked condition of the world's markets is the result of working-class energy. Of working-class efficiency combined with modern methods and machinery. The machinery itself being the result of working-class effort. In short, all the ingredients that go to make up overstocked markets are included in the phrase "human energy and the nature-given material," capitalists being excluded.

Under a rational system of society the machines would not belong to the capitalist, but to the people, and the people, while participating in the work of production and distribution, would arrange the conditions for themselves. They would do so through a real democracy worked out by themselves. The idea of finding or making work would be illogical and absurd. Under Socialism only the work necessary for the satisfaction of human needs according to an agreed standard of life and culture, would be performed. Booms and slumps would disappear along with the poverty and unemployment that spring from the wild scramble for profits.

F. E.

A call to bolster capitalism: Cripps appeals to the workers (1945)

From the November 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

The problem that affects the working-class is one of poverty. It is not one of trade, good or bad. Poverty presses upon them almost as relentlessly in times of good trade as in times of trade depression. Times of prosperity are never enjoyed by workers although they read of them. What is the cause of poverty ? The private ownership of the means of wealth production. Those who own can compel workers to accept wages so low that they are barely able to restore their energies and rear families. The surplus produced by the workers above their wages is the source of the vast incomes of the capitalist class; this surplus is unpaid labour. The total product of society is divided between the workers who produce it and the capitalists who own it. There is no other participant in the division of wealth. Nothing stands between the workers and the abundance they produce but capitalist ownership. Poverty can be ended when wealth is produced solely for use and freely distributed. That 'means that we have to end production for sale and profit; in short we have to end capitalism.

There are some who give other reasons for working-class poverty and offer other plans for dealing with it. Either they have no understanding of capitalism or they have an interest in maintaining it. Sir Stafford Cripps falls into one of these two camps Before the election he stated, for the Labour Party, "the comfort of the people is the A.1 priority." Now he intends to set up a triple alliance — Trade Unions Employers and Government. — who will plan to bring "British competitive industries to the highest pitch of efficiency."—Daily Herald, September 10th, 1945. For "comfort”? No, the priority is the export trade. In his speech outlining the plan Cripps suggested that it will be difficult for people to realise that by going short now "they are in fact making sure of better and far more stable standards for the future.” What a stale feeble doctrine.' We will paraphrase it, "Put up with your poverty a little longer and shortly. —The Kingdom of Heaven." Really, Sir Stafford ought to be ashamed of himself. Isn’t he able to do better than this? Of course, this ruse has been used very successfully for decades. In 1931 the National Government used it and they obtained 14,000,000 votes. A slight variation in Germany was known as “guns before butter.' How amazing that a famous Labour leader should formulate "markets before butter,” or, what amounts to the same thing.

It is interesting to see how we are to reach this paradise; "there will be an obligation upon the workers to give of their best,” and should some agitating socialist murmur, "oh—big profits,”—that scalawag is already answered, "not for the sake of the owner's profits but for the sake of our national economic survival and prosperity." The thinking worker will realise by now that as he has to go short in the national interest and we have already shown that there are only two classes in the nation, that "national survival or prosperity” is synonymous with capitalist prosperity.

In fact, it is quite easy to see this if we examine another part of this great cali. Cripps says that the Trade Union movement "must also take in the question of markets and consumer interests.” Who is this consumer whose interest is of equal or perhaps of more importance, than the workers' wages and conditions? In the first part of this article we showed that wealth is shared by two classes only. The consumers in society are the working class and the capitalist class. If workers forego their own interests in favour of someone else, that someone else is the capitalist class, however high-sounding the words that mask their sordid interest.

Let us look more closely at the matter. We know from experience that high or low prices matter little to workers in the long run; but what of the capitalist? They are not only private consumers., but as industrialists they buy the means of production. They have to build factories, buy plant, tools and the raw materials necessary to the production of other commodities. The value of the plant and the raw materials is transferred piecemeal into the new products. The only additional value is the new labour that has been put into production. But they cannot obtain this additional value—the source of their profits—until the goods are sold. They are forced therefore to cheapen their products in order to compete in the market. This they achieve by making workers work harder, by using labour-saving machinery and by obtaining cheaper raw materials. We will give an example. Behind the agitation for more efficient coal production lies the hard economic fact that its cost as a raw material is embodied in the cost of the new or finished products. Mr. R. Summers, Chairman of J. Summers, Ltd., stated at their annual general meeting that critics of the steel industry did not fully appreciate that as the price of coal was more than double that of 1939 it had a serious adverse effect on the price of steel. —Economist, June' 9th, 1945. He was aware of the need for lower prices, “to compete in the export markets of the world,” but he emphasised,, “that everything possible must be done to lower the cost of vital raw materials.” The capitalist aim behind the struggle for lower prices is quite clear; it enables a quicker sale of products and a quicker realisation of profits.

But does Cripps' aim differ in any way from this? His aim also is to obtain lower prices and capture markets. He calls upon workers to. “give of their best.” To whom? To those who exploit them. Where will the working-class come in during the process of labour-saving? Some will clock in at the factory gates to work harder than ever before while the displaced and unnecessary workers will show their cards at the Labour Exchange. All will remain in poverty.

Cripps made one or two statements that should be noted. He warned the trade unions that; “the whole reputation of the Trade Union movement will be at stake.” and that the Government will be advised by the three party group (Triple Alliance) as to what, “ compulsions are required to see that the minimum plan is implemented.” The compulsion will be required for, “a few recalcitrant and non-co-operative members.” What does he mean by this? This is funny language from a leader of the party that only seven weeks before (July 26th) was hailing the “dawn of a new day.” This is the language of capitalism in extremity. Does Cripps intend to resemble Dr. Ley? Certainly this plan bears no resemblance to Socialism. Incidentally, it is an indication of the childish imbecility of the I.L.P. that their comment on the plan was “The Stafford Cripps plan to establish committees representing Government, employers and the workmen .... must be judged on how far the Government is really putting through a socialist plan.”—New Leader, September 15th, 1945.

The Daily Herald, described this speech of Cripps as a “great call” to the Unions. True, a cull to bolster capitalism. Three years ago Cripps visited India with proposals which were rejected. Nehru’s comment was biting; “ From our side there are going to be no approaches to the British Government, for we know that whoever comes from there speaks the same accent as of old: and treats us the same way”—Reuter, April 15th, 1942. Quoted in Forward May 2nd, 1942 (our italics).

Consider the truth of those last few words: "treats us. the same way.” . The ideas of Sir Stafford Cripps, by virtue of his position in the Labour Party,, command respect among many workers. They should examine him as critically as Nehru did. It may be claimed that he is sincere, but that is of no avail. In his pose as a Socialist he is hindering the Socialist movement by cluttering up the path of Socialist propaganda with his misconceptions and delusions.

We have always known that he is not a Socialist and now we will give him this advice. Drop your pose as a defender of working-class interests. Your job is to patch up capitalism; stick to your last.

L. J.