At Home and Abroad . . . (1971)

The Home and Abroad Column from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Review December 1971

At Home

It is impossible to sympathise with the howls of frustrated rage over the cynical semantics of the Compton report on the interrogation methods of the British in Northern Ireland. The military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph pointed out that the methods employed were also used on some British shock troops, with the idea of training them to resist pressure if they were ever captured. This was of course a poor attempt at justifying the methods used by the British but it did underline the fact that brutal interrogation is widely used, on all sides, in war. And anyone who really expected the inquiry to come up with anything other than a whitewash themselves need some sort of interrogation but on a psychiatrist’s couch.

Cynical semantics have also been used by government spokesmen about two of their most pressing problems. When he addressed the well-fed Institute of Directors at their annual conference, Chancellor of the Exchequer Barber forgot all about the mounting unemployment and claimed that we are about to experience the biggest boom for years, that the economy is expanding and that price restraint is working. Perhaps he was drunk—the directors always enjoy a good lunch, with a small bottle of wine. Shortly afterwards Barber’s colleague Peter Walker, not to be outdone, was burbling out the same stale old promises about housing which we have been hearing for so long. His new Housing Bill, he said, is the most important reform in the field this century and then, like housing ministers before him, he made the ritual promise about slums. Walker, who lives in a posh house himself, reckons that he will have cleared the slums up in ten years. There is no mitigating evidence, that he was drunk.

Abroad

Never before have the protests about Bomb tests been taken as high as those about America’s latest one underneath the island of Amchitka. If this indicates a heightening of the energy of the protesters, it also hints that their unrealistic hysteria is becoming acute. Surely they didn’t expect the Supreme Court to rule that human interests should come before those of the American ruling class? To overturn every priority, every assumption, upon which capitalism everywhere works? Perhaps in future they will realise the order of things under capitalism and then begin working against the system instead of against one of its effects.

Meanwhile, another of the world’s nuclear powers—and one where there is no opportunity to protest against its Bomb tests—was finally allowed to join the club. China’s entry into the United Nations, although a big diplomatic defeat for Nixon, showed the contempt with which the UN (which, we may remember, was once going to be the means to a securely peaceful world) is treated by the world powers. In the old days America would never have allowed such a defeat. For after all the fine words and the lies about it, the United Nations is little more than an international gangsters’ club. It is fitting that the latest recruit to the top league of international capitalism should at last be welcomed into it—bombs and all.

Politics

Despite the recent upheaval in the Labour Party over the Common Market, it was a fairly safe bet that Jenkins would beat Foot for the Deputy Leadership. Most of the press applauded the vote, as a sign that Labour is still interested in men of principle and honesty. In its present depression, Labour could do with a new hope; even the problems which the Tories are finding in trying to run British capitalism have not yet erased the memories of those six gloomy years of Labour rule. So once again we have a rising star, who is going to lead us to yet another promised land. In this one incident we have all the history of capitalist politics; promise and disillusionment, confidence and panic, hope and despair. This wearying process goes on year in and year out, with each successive leader being hailed as the answer to our problems then quickly exposed for a futile trickster. And none of them, yet, has been honest enough to admit it.

Honesty is a word very foreign to the Communist Party, whose recent national congress came well up to the expectations of those who always look to the Communists to provide some hilarious political double acts. This year, of course, they had to talk about Northern Ireland, and to hammer out a typical reformist line. They showed a touching concern for the catholic minority, then took the line that the best thing to happen was for the British troops, whose methods have been under such fire, to stay there. This was typical of the confusion and the trickery of the Communist Party, who as usual are dabbling their hands in the blood of the workers in the hope of fishing up a few miserable scraps of ignorant support.

Blogger's Note:

See the article, 'Northern Ireland: The Gentle Art of Interrogation ', from the same issue of the Socialist Standard.

Doing the Splits (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

How seriously should we take the splits in the Labour and Conservative parties over the Common Market ? Is there likely to be some massive realignment of capitalist politics, with Roy Jenkins leading a coalition of Liberals and pro-Market Labourites in a new party ? Will the great machine of capitalist politics suffer irreparable damage, or can we still sleep of nights secure in the knowledge that it will continue to deceive, coerce and exploit us ?

To begin with, nobody should allow themselves to think that the splits have anything to do with principles. Of course all members of the capitalist parties say their political allegiance is based on principle, but issues like the Common Market, which they say are also matters of fundamental principle, cross the party lines so that George Brown agrees with Heath, Wilson with Enoch Powell and so on. This shows how flexible are the “principles” of our parties and it tells us something about their splits.

One notable, but not unusual, feature of the splits over the Common Market is that both the big parties are suffering at the same time. This makes it difficult for either of them to adopt the attitude of pious shock which they affect when only the other side is split. Then they can say that such disputes are evidence of their opponents’ irresponsibility. When they themselves are divided on some issue they claim that this goes to show what a lively lot they are, vibrant with debate yet tolerant and united enough to contain the argument and apply it for the benefit of all those voters outside. This is all part of the jolly game of politics.

In this country, it is the Labour Party who have become famous for their splits, very often splashing them into the public eye. This has tended to promote the idea that the Tories are more stable and united but there is some evidence that this is not true. Since the 1929 Labour government, the Labour Party have had only four leaders—Lansbury, Attlee, Gaitskell and now Wilson—and of these Lansbury was never more than a caretaker after the defection of MacDonald. During the same period the Tories have had seven leaders —Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Home and Heath—and in almost every case they have changed to the accompaniment of a public dispute.

At the same time, behind those gentlemanly Tory facades, there have been fierce splits over matters of policy. For example, Macmillan was much occupied with persuading his party to move out of the Edwardian era (which he was said to personify) and to accept the decline of the British Commonwealth. This seemed to be no more than accepting the obvious and the inevitable, but Macmillan was bitterly fought by a strong section of the Tories headed by Lord Salisbury, who always looked and spoke and thought like an archetypal Tory backwoodsman. For Salisbury, the final blow was the surrender of independence to Cyprus and he resigned to snipe at the Tories for their policies on the old Empire and to mumble about the shocking treatment being handed out to our kith and kin in Rhodesia.

Life was no more placid for the Tories before the war. They were split on the best method of dealing with the rebirth of German capitalism; when that matter was settled in the forties they found scapegoats for their own doubts and disunity in Baldwin and Chamberlain. Of these two, Chamberlain always kept a pretty firm grip on his party, at least until the end, but Baldwin’s career at the top was almost continual turmoil, as he was under constant attack.

The Labour Party do not have the Tories’ reputation of the party of gentlemen and usually conduct their rows like public house brawls. Perhaps that is why they are so famous for their splits, which have very often blinded the voters to the fact that Labour is always solidly united on the basic issue of trying for power to run British capitalism. Their most damaging split, in 1931, was not on any fundamental issue; they were united in the opinion that the working class had to suffer in some way during that time of crisis for British capitalism. None of them ever suggested Socialism as a way out of the whole sorry mess.

Having survived the debacle in 1931, Labour had a comparatively tranquil time until they came to power after the war, when the group which eventually became known as the Bevanites were constantly rocking the boat, which was in any case leaky and unstable. Here again the splits were never on fundamentals but were always over the best—often, quite openly, the most vote catching — methods of running British capitalism. In the end, at the Brighton conference of 1957, Bevan shocked many of the followers to whom he was a new Messiah by publicly making his peace with Gaitskell. The conference was debating nuclear armaments and Bevan, who was supposed to be the man who would guide us all to Socialism, argued that British capitalism needed these arms to protect its position against the other capitalist powers and that failure to recognise this would be electorally disastrous.

At that time the Labour Party, in the aftermath of Suez, were smelling the approach of power. In the event the Tories hung on and when the election came in 1959 Labour’s defeat threw them into another uproar of dispute, with the Gaitskellites arguing that the party’s traditional policies (or rather their traditional propaganda, because the policies were so easily ignored by governments) should be abandoned. This was to be, not because the policies were not socialist, not even that they went against working class interests under capitalism. It was simply that they lost the party votes. The next couple of years saw another row, this time over nuclear weapons, until Wilson came along and settled the whole matter by running British capitalism with a single-minded concern for the interests of the ruling class, while assuring everybody that he was doing something entirely different.

It very often happens, that a split reveals a future leader—sometimes in the role of peacemaker, like Wilson, sometimes as a man of honesty. In this Common Market split in the Labour Party, Roy Jenkins has come into prominence; he has been a consistent supporter of British capitalism joining Europe and perhaps one explanation of all the coverage he has had recently is the publicity boys’ surprise at finding a politician who says the same thing on more than one occasion.

It is distinctly pathetic, to see the Labour Party putting so much faith in Jenkins, perhaps as an overreaction to the exposure of Wilson as a tawdry trickster. They were once similarly hopeful about Wilson, as they were about all the many leaders who disappointed them before. Once again they are ignoring facts; the records show that Jenkins is no less cynical, no less a vote-grabbing politician, than the rest. For example, in a book he wrote in 1959 — The Labour Case — he avowed that Labour’s policies could be carried out “. . . without any question of an increase in the tax burden. On the contrary, they should leave room for substantial reductions.”

Apart from the fact that Jenkins was here descending in his anxiety to grab votes for his party, to pandering to the ignorance of workers who think the level of taxation affects their material interests, it is clear now that he was making another of those empty politicians’ promises. The Wilson government based a lot of their policies on steeply increased taxation—and Jenkins, as Chancellor of the Exchequer for about two years, was directly responsible for a lot of it. He was the inspiration for a lot of the Wilson government’s attacks on workers’ living standards, frequently lecturing us from the television screen on our spendthrift ways which were causing such terrible poverty among the grouse moors and the slums of Park Lane and Eaton Square. In a recent debate in the Commons (see The Guardian, 10 November 1971) he denounced unemployment just as if his government was not in power when it first became a serious problem and attacked the Tories for their ". . . silly little argument . . . that unemployment was an inevitable result of wage claims, and that those responsible must just take the consequences.” Yet this is what he said when he was Chancellor, at a union conference which was debating a motion condemning an incomes policy backed by legal sanctions:

An uncontrolled wages situation could undermine the Government’s central purpose, by putting back into people’s hands the purchasing power that the Budget had siphoned off . . . (The Times 25/4/69).

Jenkins is said to be a “liberal”, yet he did not resign over the racist laws passed by the Wilson government, which outdid the Tories in pandering to working class colour prejudice. He supported the reintroduction of prescription charges — much higher than the Tory charges which Labour had stopped; the raising of the school leaving age, the end of free school milk, the cuts in the housing programme. He was prominent in a government which kept the British nuclear weaponry. And that is only part of the list of anti-working class acts for which honest Roy, martyr to his conscience, must take his full share of responsibility.

So if the Labour Party decide to put their faith in Jenkins as yet another new saviour, they will be as bitterly disappointed as they were with Wilson, MacDonald and the rest. Jenkins may look and speak like a stern, unbending schoolmaster but what he actually is, is an ambitious capitalist politician. His function is to get power to run the affairs of the British capitalist class and to carry this out he is quite ready to join in the deception and the trickery which make an essential part of capitalist politics.

When the uproar over the Common Market has died down and workers who have been so fascinated by it, and who have been deceived into taking sides, have settled back into their proper, lowly place in capitalist society another incident will have been written into the history of politics. Then the whole futile business can start all over again.

Ivan

Tories Again Steal Labour’s Clothes (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1957 the Labour Party Conference adopted a new pensions policy to which they gave the grandiose title of “National Superannuation”. Under their proposals, said their policy statement.

“there would be two elements in the State pension, a flat-rate element and a graded element. Every insured worker, including those in approved private schemes, would be entitled to receive the flat-rate element, as they do now, whereas only those covered by National Superannuation would receive the new graded element. Thus everyone in the country, when they reach the approved age, would draw (1) a flat-rate pension and (2) a graded pension, due to him either from an occupational scheme or from National Superannuation.”

Employers were to contribute more towards the cost of National Superannuation than the workers and some of the money was to be invested in stocks and shares.

At that time, neither pensions nor contributions were related to earnings (or “graded”): everybody paid the same National Insurance stamp and got the same pension, while those who had no income apart from this pittance had to resort to National Assistance.

Labour had hoped that this vague but superficially attractive promise of “Half Pay on Retirement” (as Richard Crossman once unwisely put it) would win them the next election. Imagine their dismay when the Tories announced in the election year of 1959 that they were to introduce earnings-related pensions themselves. This State Graduated Pension Scheme was denounced by the Labour Party, with some justice, as the “Tory swindle”. It is still going and pays a man the princely pension of 2½p a week for every £7.50 he pays in! Even the Tories recognise that it has been an utter failure and now propose to abolish it (and swindle its victims even more by not protecting them against inflation).

Elected to power in 1964, Labour set to work on their National Superannuation Scheme. They didn’t exactly give this matter any priority as it was not until 1969 that the details—to apply from April 1972—were announced. Even then, what emerged was somewhat different from the original 1957 policy. Instead of two State pensions, one flat-rate and one earnings-related, there was to be only one earnings-related State pension; employers and workers were to pay the same; the money was not to be invested in stocks and shares; and only the lowest paid were to get half-pay on retirement (a big deal that would have been, seeing they could hardly live on full pay).

Grossman’s National Superannuation and Social Insurance Bill was still going through Parliament in June last year when the Labour government was kicked out. The Tories had criticised the Bill as too complicated, but had promised their own reform of pensions. Their alternative plan was published in September in the White Paper Strategy for Pensions. What is interesting about these proposals is their amazing similarity to Labour’s 1957 plan. The passage quoted earlier could well have been Sir Keith Joseph explaining the new Tory proposals.

The Tories propose a basic flat-rate pension from the State (like the present below-the-poverty-line £6 a week) which everybody will get and an earnings-related pension either from a private scheme or from the “State Reserve Scheme”. It is this Reserve Scheme that bears the resemblance to Labour’s original National Superannuation. For not only will employers pay more towards it than workers but its funds will be invested in stocks and shares. When Labour had proposed this in 1957 it was greeted by howls of “back-door nationalisation” by the Tories. Now, apparently, they have changed their minds and done what not even Crossman dared to do.

The Tory plan also involves another measure which might have been expected to come from a Labour government: there will be earnings-related contributions for the basic flat-rate pension. In other words, the higher paid will pay more than the lower paid but will only get the same pension.

Labour would have claimed that this was part of some plan to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. It is nothing of the sort since the fortunes of the wealthy are to be left untouched. It is really only redistributing income from the not-so-poor to the poor, a redistribution of poverty amongst the working class. Labour’s bill would have had a similar effect and this in fact is all most social reforms can amount to under capitalism.

That the Tories can introduce reforms originally proposed by Labour is a further proof that the two parties are basically the same. They are both committed to capitalism and are both trying to solve its problems without upsetting the profit motive. So it is hardly surprising that they both come up with similar reforms.

The present need to reform State pensions is the result of the failure of the previous Labour/Tory pensions policy. Nearly thirty years ago now, they were both agreed on another plan to “abolish want in old age” —the Beveridge Report. The recommendations of this Report were embodied in the National Insurance Scheme set up in 1948 and still extant. Today this Scheme provides on retirement a miserable pittance which, even the government’s own White Paper admits, is about £2 below the poverty line so that one in three pensioners are forced to apply for means-tested National Assistance or “supplementary benefit” as it is now cynically called.

Anyway, earnings-related pensions are only supposed to abolish—some time next century, according to the government’s own figures — destitution in old age. Poverty, in the sense of being deprived of control over the means of production and its products, is the normal condition of the class of wage and salary earners, during their working lives just as much as during retirement. It is only because they are poor that workers need doles to protect them from destitution in old age.

We doubt, however, if the new reforms will ensure that no old worker falls below the poverty line, especially since the Tory proposals, like Labour’s Bill, envisage the continuation of the modern Poor Law known as the Supplementary Benefits Commission. Poverty, and in some cases destitution, in old age will be the lot of the working class as long as capitalism lasts no matter how many social reforms are made.

Adam Buick

Warning — this system is dangerous (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Peter Simple, the columnist who plugs a consistently comfortable, almost invulnerable, reactionary line in the Daily Telegraph, has often turned his acid pen against the people who sought to prove with their statistics and experiments and surveys that cigarette smoking is a factor in causing death by lung cancer. It was not simply a matter of an individual’s right to puff his way into an early grave if he wanted; to Simple, smoking was part of the slow, feudalistic way of life which he imagines (and it is only imagination) was once lived by the people of this country.

So any fan of the column must have turned to it with trembling hands, after the most recent anti-smoking report from the Royal College of Physicians. Sure enough, there was a passage on the report. But at the end of an unusually mild attack, Peter Simple had to confess himself baffled by it all; why did they attack smoking? Why? Why? It was all rather disappointing, especially as it showed that the columnist had not read even the press reports of the document, some of which quoted the vital reason for it all: 

Government and Parliament must decide between an easy source of revenue and the preservation of the lives, health and productive capacity of the people they serve. 

Now what this quotation from the report indicates is that we have here a case just like many which have gone before. “Productive capacity” is vital to industry, to employers; since it depends upon the lives and health of the producers then any employer who keeps the most casual eye on his profits must start to worry if he has reason to think that the lives and health of his employees are being threatened.

The only chance of a large, official campaign against smoking was that there would be enough evidence that it was damaging the profits of the employers. The evidence about the possible effects of it on health has been there for a long time; the crucial point is when it is likely that there are also effects on productive capacity, or profits, or some other aspect of the worker/employee relationship. It was the same with the Clean Air Acts and with the measures aimed against noise, pollution and the like. It is the same, still, with the countless combined eyesores and threats to safety such as the coal tips in South Wales, where the “economic” case for removal is not officially considered to have been made out four years after Aberfan.

We can approach this point from another direction, by looking at one of the report’s ideas to persuade people to stop smoking. This was to print on all packets a warning of the possible effect of smoking. This has already been put into practice and nobody can now draw out a cigarette without being confronted with the awful words "Warning — smoking can damage your health”. This may or may not be an effective idea; there is a case that the words of warning might only go to make the smoke more enjoyable, spicing it with thrills of guilt and danger.

But the main point is that it is surprising that this technique should be confined to cigarettes. An average of something like twenty people are killed on the roads every day, but nobody has yet suggested daubing the doors of all road vehicles with the words “Caution — this machine is potentially lethal.” And while we are on the subject of death, what are they doing, allowing all those advertisements for the armed forces and none of them with a warning that the forces’ job is to train killers to protect the interests of their master class?

And what about the other, innumerable, ways in which capitalism, in the name of profit and the rights of a privileged society, simply murders people? We are thinking here not so much of the quick, easily identifiable death like the road accident and the battle but the slow erosion of life — the coal miner with his lungs gradually filling up with dust; the asbestos worker with a horrible death in prospect; and all of us, whoever we are and wherever we live or work, who are subject to the atmosphere which is foully polluted because at present capitalism thinks it is cheaper to pump its muck into the air than to find other ways of dealing with it.

Every factory, then, every mine, every aircraft, almost everything which capitalism uses in the march of its profit-based activity, should have some sort of warning on it, shouting out the damage which it does to us — and the reason it happens. Food which is devitalised and adulterated to make it more easily marketable should carry a label telling us what has happened to it and what is likely to happen to us if we consume it. The homes we live in should have a notice on their door, telling us that they are inferior buildings which are uncomfortable and cramped and are full of dangers to health and life (the home is at present the biggest killer of all — it is all done, they say, by “accident”.)

Then there are the health hazards which are even less identifiable, which are insidious but none the less deadly. These are often matters of pressure upon us, matters of the sheer struggle to live, to survive, to get to and from work, to keep out of debt, to raise children, to hold a job. Sometimes it is even a matter of finding somewhere to live. Not so long ago, there was a case in the Appeal Court in which nine homeless families who were squatting in some houses owned by the Southwark Borough Council were ordered to move out. There was no doubt about the desperate plight of these people; the council’s man in court said their conditions were “heart rending”. But the judges did their job; one of them summed it up with the words:

It must be in the interests of law and order to protect the title of property such as these.

Yet at the same time the judges were also saying how sorry they were for the squatters. They were using words like “deepest sympathy” and “deep depression and oppression”. Unusual perhaps for words like that to come down from the bench; but if that was how the judges felt, how did the situation affect the squatters? How much of their health, their life, was simply worn away by a desperate plight which had to stay like that to protect the title of property?

But of course such situations can only be known to a certain social type. The inferior standards of living, the life without privilege, without security, without comfort, is the life of the worker. He is the person who has to struggle and who is never far from the razor edge, if not actually balanced on it or indeed toppled off it. He is the person whose health and life suffer because he is simply not permitted, by his social station, to live free. He must be suppressed and degraded; he must accept second, third, fourth best. And it makes no difference, that he is in the majority and that he makes up all the socially useful people in society.

What it amounts to is that capitalism should wear one great big label, warning everyone of what it is doing to them. It should tell them that it is a system in which only a few have the opportunity to live like human beings and they do this on the backs of the many. It should tell them that it is a society where everything we need is made so that a minority can profit by it, which means that all our welfares and lives are under continual assault and in constant danger. It should tell us that all the health hazards and all the tensions can be ascribed to the basic inhumanity and craziness of capitalism.

All members of the working class should have these labels, and they should have them from the day they are born because it is from then that the assault of capitalism upon them begins in earnest. And it carries on until they are in their graves.

Ivan

50 Years Ago: Russia’s New Economic Policy (1971)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why this new change of policy? Larin’s explanation is worth noting. A decree had been issued in November 1918 under which —

Trading in the products of domestic craft and small private industry remained free both for individuals and for the co-operative societies . . . But here we met with political reasons which paralysed our policy in practice — and these reasons must be sought for, not amongst the peasantry, and not amongst the workers. The town bourgeoisie itself simply refused to trade and refused to carry on its small undertakings. The laws remained, but the stores and workshops became empty, as the owners would not any longer risk their capital under the Bolsheviks. (Labour Monthly, November 1921.)

Larin’s explanation, however, is to some extent contradicted by Lenin. In the weekly edition of the Manchester Guardian, for 11 November, is a report of a speech by Lenin, taken from two communist papers—the Berlin Novy Pont and the Riga Novy Mir. According to this report Lenin stated that

their economic policy during the first period assumed the possibility of passing directly from the old economic system to the State control of production and to distribution on a communist basis.

It will be seen that this statement contradicts Larin’s claims, while further on Lenin, after referring to their being compelled to wage civil war, continues :- 

Under the influence of this state of things and of the desperate situation in which the Republic then was, under the influence of other circumstances of which this is not the time to speak, we made a blunder; we decided to pass immediately to communist production and distribution.

Despite the contradictions between Larin and Lenin, they are both agreed upon the fundamental fact—namely, that it was impossible to establish Socialism in Russia to-day, and that, therefore they must allow capitalism to operate, beginning with small industry and trading. Surely a striking tribute to Marx. 

[From an article The Force of Conditions, by Jack Fitzgerald, Socialist Standard, December 1921].

SPGB Lectures and Special Meetings (1971)

Party News from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard 

At Home and Abroad . . . (1971)

The Home and Abroad Column from the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Review November 1971

At Home

Emperor Hirohito of Japan has been in and out of favour with the British ruling class so much that his life has resembled that of the man and woman in the barometer. Before the last war he was awarded the Order of the Garter, which is supposed to be a recognition of a person’s “chivalry” but which is actually one of the gaudy medals our rulers exchange like little boys with cigarette cards. Then in 1941, as his country was fighting against the British ruling class, he was stripped of the order. In April he got it back—and the whole episode serves to underline the true purpose of these decorations and ceremonies which are thrown around and which the popular press make such a fuss about. Hirohito is now, of course, a friend of British capitalism, at any rate for the time being and his visit to this country was designed to ram the fact down the throats of the British workers. Some of them were unwise enough to protest, in memory of the atrocities which parts of the Japanese army were responsible for in the last war. Apart from the fact that these protests were not aimed at atrocities as such but only those committed by the enemy, there was also the fact that the protesters were acting in the customarily naive fashion of supporters of capitalism. The alliances of international capitalism change as the pattern of opposing interests change, so that yesterday’s enemy is the friend of today. It is not stretching matters too far to say that, had Hitler in some way survived the war and the trials which followed, he may have been paraded through the streets of London to display the new solidarity between the two capitalisms. For capitalism does not know principles other than its own sordid motives, which erect no obstacles in the way of one set of murdering bandits embracing another.

Abroad

A recent United Nations report has told us that unless a “mammoth” relief operation is mounted, there will be some 40 million starving in East Pakistan by Christmas. We have grown so familiar to this kind of warning that the report passed by almost unnoticed, as another example of the world’s inadequate resources or its inability to organise such an operation smoothly and in time. That has always been the official excuse, for tragedies such as in East Pakistan, or in natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, typhoons. Yet at the same time as the U.N. report came out, a comparatively short distance away from East Pakistan the evidence was accumulating, that the excuses for inaction are nothing more than lies. In the middle of a desert, among the ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis, the Shah of Persia briefly held court to a gathering of the representatives of world capitalism in conditions of unprecedented luxury. The assembled dignitaries camped out in tents as sumptuous as a palace. They ate food exotic into the realms of fantasy. The whole show, which lasted only a couple of days, cost some £40 million. To get all that stuff out to the ruins in the desert, convoys of lorries rolled out from the Continent every day for months. And the object of it all was simply to show the world that, among the minor powers of international capitalism, Persia has a place. Whether or not that point was made, what was clear was that it is possible to move vast amounts of supplies into difficult places—but that capitalism does not care to do so. When the deaths are counted up in East Pakistan, or in any other similarly needy place, nobody who remembers the junketings at Persepolis should be content with the excuse that it is all an unavoidable accident.

Politics

That strange, light headed feeling we always get at this time of year is relief at the end of the boredom of the party conferences. This year’s were splendid examples of the art of conference trickery. Labour desperately tried to paper over its splits, revealed briefly the flash of knives in the shadows and ended with a marvellously unrealistic list of industries to be nationalised by a future Labour government. Sometimes they mentioned the word Socialism but for all they understood it, or mentioned it in correct context, they might as well have said rhubarb.

The Tories were also in excellent form. This year, remember, they are in power, so the speeches have to be rather different in tone if not in basic content. When they were in opposition we were all being threatened with imminent disasters; now we are all being threatened with imminent prosperity. Barber and Heath both told us all about the golden future which is about to be served up to us and the Chancellor dug up an explanation for unemployment which has been out of use for long enough to sound really fresh. It was all, he said, due to wage demands. The Tories also had their customary hunt for the blood of the criminal, and of course the hats made a wonderful showing.

When capitalism is no more, there will be a good case for keeping these conferences going, for how else will we know what cynicism meant to the people it now deceives and suppresses?

Aspect: Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (1971)

From the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

After the failure of the European democratic revolutions of 1848 Marx, in exile in England, decided to improve his knowledge of economics or “political economy” as it was called at that time. The first result of this research, mainly at the British Museum was the publication in 1859 of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy*. Marx had intended, as he said in the Preface, to examine various aspects of the capitalist economic system and he listed capital, landed property, wage-labour, the State, foreign trade and the world market. In fact before he died in 1883 he had only got as far as capital with the publication of the first volume of his main book in 1867.

The Critique itself only covered the commodity and money, and is much the same as the first three chapters of Capital (though “exchange value” in the one becomes “value” in the other). In fact it too begins, “The wealth of bourgeois society, at first sight, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities . . .”, but is a good introduction to the labour-time theory of value, especially as applied to money.

Marx emphasises that money is not just a convenient device for facilitating the buying and selling of goods but is also, as he puts it, “an expression of a social relation of production”. Money, in other words, is a sign that the people who use it have a particular form of society; at the very least it tells us that the means for producing wealth are not owned in common and that production is not carried on according to some definite social plan. The regulation of production by money and the market disguises the domination of the means of production by a minority class.

Marx’s theory of money is that where wealth is exchanged one commodity (or, product of labour produced for sale) will eventually emerge as the one which can be exchanged for all other commodities. This commodity, which acts as a measure of the amount of socially necessary labour-time spent on producing all other commodities, is money. Being the measure of value is the money-commodity’s primary function, but it is a role which can only be played by something which itself has a labour-time value by virtue of being the product of socially-necessary labour. Say it takes the same amount of social labour-time to produce an overcoat as an ounce of gold, then we can say that the overcoat (or 4 chairs or 10 books, etc, etc) is worth 1 oz. of gold. This is its price, the expression of its exchange-value in units of the money-commodity. Being a standard of price and a unit of account like this is money’s second role. The units in which prices are expressed are purely conventional. In our example they are units of weight (which is what they originally were, a £ having once been a lb. of silver) but are now special money-units like cents and dollars or roubles and kopecks fixed by governments. These units can still be related, however indirectly, to weights of gold; the American dollar for instance was for a long time defined as l/35th oz. of gold. Finally, money serves as a means of settling debts, what Marx calls a means of payment.

Originally, the money-commodity itself, usually gold or silver, circulated as the currency in the form of coins. Where this is the case, said Marx, the amount of money that is needed depends on the total prices of all the goods and services to be bought and sold (and the total amount of debts to be settled) and, since coins can be used more than once, on how quickly the coins circulate. Marx rejected the Quantity Theory of Money, at least in the form put forward by Hume and Ricardo which made the price level depend on the quantity of the money-commodity rather than vice-versa.

But, Marx went on, “where paper notes are the sole medium of circulation”, i.e. where the currency is composed of paper notes circulating as tokens for the money-commodity, then the situation is reversed: the price level does depend on the quantity of (paper) money. This does not contradict the theory that the amount of real money is determined in the end by the price level. For the basis of the Quantity Theory of paper-money is that only a definite amount of real money is needed so that, if the amount of paper money issued exceeds this, then currency depreciation—and inflation—will result. This is because paper money is worthless in itself and only has value insofar as it represents gold or silver. If the amount of gold or silver to be represented is given, then obviously the more tokens are issued the less amount of gold or silver each will come to represent. Prices rise because in effect the whole standard of price has been altered.

As Marx put it:

Let us assume that £14 million is the amount of gold required for the circulation of commodities and that the State throws 210 million notes each called £1 into circulation: these 210 million would then stand for a total gold worth £14 million. The effect would be the same as if the notes issued by the State were to represent a metal whose value was one-fifteenth that of gold or that each note was intended to represent one-fifteenth of the previous weight of gold. This would have changed nothing but the nomenclature of the standard of prices, which is of course purely conventional, quite irrespective of whether it was brought about directly by a change in the monetary standard or indirectly by an increase in the number of paper notes issued in accordance with a new lower standard. As the name pound-sterling would now indicate one-fifteenth of the previous quantity of gold, all commodity-prices would be fifteen times higher and 210 million pound notes would now be indeed just as necessary as 14 million had previously been. The decrease in the quantity of gold which each individual token of value represented would be proportional to the increased aggregate value of these tokens. The rise of prices would be merely a reaction of the process of circulation, which forcibly placed the tokens of value on a par with the quantity of gold which they are supposed to replace in the sphere of circulation.

That inflation will be the inevitable result of issuing more paper currency that the amount of the money- commodity which would have to circulate if there were no (inconvertible) paper currency was once recognised even by bourgeois economists. It was forgotten under the influence of Keynesian economics and is only now, after over thirty years of non-stop currency depreciation and rising prices, being rediscovered.

The Preface to the Critique contains Marx’s well-known account of his historical method—the materialist conception of history. The structure of a particular society, including the ideas predominant amongst its members, said Marx, was conditioned by how its members were organised with regard to the production of wealth. This, in its turn, was mainly dependent on technology and the level of productivity. As technology changed and productivity increased so social forces were set in motion which eventually led to a change of society. Marx mentioned four main stages through which human society has passed — later known as Asiatic society, chattel-slavery, feudalism and capitalism—and went on to say that the coming social revolution would end in the establishment of Socialism.

Also published with the Critique as with the original 1904 translation is a document called An Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy which is an unfinished and rough draft dealing mainly with the relationship between production, distribution (defined as a person’s share in what has been produced) and consumption. Though translated on its own into English in 1904 it is really the first part of a set of manuscripts known as “Marx’s Grundrisse," which are only now being translated. The Introduction is interesting in that it shows that Marx would have rejected the orthodox Trotskyist description of Russia as a “contradictory combination of a non-capitalist mode of production and a still basically bourgeois mode of distribution” (Mandel).

Actually, “non-capitalist” is too weak a term to convey what the Trotskyists really have in mind. For they consider that as far as the production of wealth is concerned Russia is a classless society. They do not deny that there is a privileged group in Russia but claim that this group is privileged only with regard to the distribution of wealth. To make this point Trotsky called it a “caste” to distinguish it from a class.

True, classes are defined by how groups are related to the use of the means of production rather than by how they stand in relation to the distribution of the products, but the real question is: Could a class-type mode of distribution exist alongside a classless mode of production?

Marx’s answer can be clearly inferred from the following:

The structure of distribution is entirely determined by the structure of production. Distribution itself is a product of production, not only with regard to the content, but also with regard to the form, since the particular mode of men’s participation in production determines the specific form of distribution, the form in which they share in distribution.

And how in fact could a group be privileged with regard to the distribution of the products without being at the same time privileged with regard to their production? For having the power to distribute products to your advantage amounts to being able to decide what should be produced and so to deciding how the means of production should be used — which is precisely what being privileged in relation to production means. The orthodox Trotskyist analysis of Russia is an absurdity and, as the Introduction shows, quite at variance with Marx’s theory of society.

An introduction by Maurice Dobb and two reviews of the work by Engels complete this edition. Dobb, by the way, seems to imply that commodity-production and money were not central to Marx’s conception of capitalism, but this is what you would expect from someone who mistakenly believes that, although money and commodities still exist there, Russia has abolished capitalism and established Socialism. As Marx always made clear, capitalism is the highest form of commodity-production and money-economy while Socialism by establishing democratic social control over production necessarily means the abolition of production for sale and of money.

Adam Buick

* Just republished by Lawrence and Wishart — £1.50.

The End of “Full Employment”? (1971)

From the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unemployment has been increasing continuously for five years. It was increasing under the Wilson Labour government and the rate of increase has accelerated under the Tories. At first it was noticed that the monthly figures were higher than they had been a year earlier; then they had reached levels which were a record for seven, eight, nine and ten years; and when unemployment passed the 900,000 mark in August, this represented the highest total for thirty years—back  to the beginning of the war.

Normally unemployment is expected to rise in winter and fall in summer. This summer the fall did not take place. The September figure was 280,000 more than in January and about 560,000 above September 1966. It may well reach the million mark this winter.

Every industry has been affected—private and nationalised, old and new. No section of the workers has escaped and some of the most heavily hit have been the clerical, technical and managerial. Many who have lost their jobs have little prospect of ever getting work again at their old rates of pay.

This is not the first time since the war that unemployment has reached peak levels, but the peaks go higher. In the four years 1947, 1958, 1959 and 1962 the average for the whole year just exceeded 500,000. In 1963 and 1967-9 it was about 600,000. In 1970 640,000 and for 1971 it is likely to come out at 850,000.

Of course it will drop back again sometime as markets and production pick up but there are signs that it will run in future years at levels considerably higher than it was in the nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, when the annual average was usually below 400,000 and often below 300,000.

One new factor is that employers’ expectations about quick recovery have been undermined by the long duration of the present recession. In earlier setbacks employers expected a quick recovery with a return of labour shortage, and were often prepared to keep surplus staff on in slack times; now it has become the practice to get rid of “redundant” workers immediately.

Why was unemployment relatively low in the early post-war years? Why is it rising now? and what will happen in the future?

Many politicians and economists have had a ready answer. They believed that governments have almost complete control of the situation and can make unemployment as high or low as they choose. This assumed control was not claimed to be total—it would not eliminate small up and down fluctuations and it might take a few months to be effective. In 1957 Professor A. C. L. Day in his The Economics of Money, discussing the pre-1914 ten year cycle of boom and depression, wrote:

“It may now have been mastered as a result of the insight into economic processes which has been acquired in the last generation.”

Even more confidence in what the government can do was expressed in the Sunday Times (24/5/70) when their contributor Malcolm Crawford wrote that American bankers “know that the government can stop a recession of any magnitude, nowadays, at about six months notice”, and that the steps already taken by the American government were “enough to stop the recession”. (Since then Nixon has had two or three more goes “to stop the recession”, but it still persists). The economic backwoodsmen of the TUC still firmly believe in this assumed power of governments.

Naturally, therefore, those economists and politicians regarded the low level of unemployment which lasted for about fifteen years after the war as proof positive that they were right in believing that Keynesian methods had changed the nature of capitalism and that serious unemployment need never be feared again.

The explanation was too simple. From the start it had one major flaw, for the same Keynesian methods were also supposed to keep prices more or less stable and not even the most zealous believer can regard the rise of prices since 1938 to a level four and a half times what it was as price stability. And now they have to explain why the Labour government before 1970 and the Tory government since 1970 could not prevent unemployment rising to levels both say are too high.

The odd thing is that though they claimed to be Keynesians they hadn’t even got Keynes on their side for he didn’t believe it possible to keep unemployment down to two per cent or less, which it was in those years. When Lord Beveridge hoped that, taking the good and bad years together, they could keep unemployment to an average of three per cent, Keynes dissented on the ground that Beveridge was too optimistic. Keynes did not state how much above three per cent he thought it should be but if we assume only three and a half per cent as an average, this would mean a range of, say, two and a half per cent to four and a half per cent. This would mean unemployment ranging from about 600,000 to 1,100,000. So present unemployment is Keynes’ “Full Employment”.

It is interesting to note that in America, where Democratic Presidents have from time to time been said to be operating on Keynesian lines (and Nixon suddenly announced in January that he too had been converted) unemployment in May was at a nine year record level of 6.2 per cent, and Nixon’s Chief Economic spokesman John Connally admitted in a moment of candour that, except in war-time, it has never been below four per cent (Financial Times, 8/7/71). In Britain four per cent would be about a million.

An examination of the causes of low post-war unemployment in Britain was made by Professor R. C. O. Matthews, himself broadly a supporter of Keynes, and published in the Economic Journal (September 1968). His conclusion was that, starting with the stimulus given by making good war damage of all kinds, a major cause was a prolonged investment boom and that “the decline of unemployment as compared with 1914 is to a large extent not a Keynesian phenomenon at all”.

On a comparative basis he estimated pre-1914 unemployment at 4.5 per cent and that from 1945 to 1967 at 1.8 per cent. He expected this situation to continue, but the doubling of unemployment since 1967 has already destroyed the basis for that optimism. On one point in particular Matthews has been proved wrong. He thought that the greater job-security of the post-war years, due to employers retaining surplus workers in slack periods, would continue, but this is no longer true as the hundreds of thousands of redundancies show.

The fact is that some British industries have been losing ground and failing to keep up with the expansion of world markets. Better equipped, more efficient rivals in Japan, Germany and elsewhere have been undercutting British (and latterly also American) companies. The two devaluations of 1949 and 1967 delayed, but did not stop, this drift.

Belief in the ability of any government to secure “full employment” at will soon came up against a complication. The 1945 Attlee government (followed by Tory governments) discovered, as Marx or even Keynes could have told them, that when unemployment is very low the workers are in a better position to push up wages and this combines with other boom developments to cut into profit margins; which in turn discourages capitalist plans to expand industry. So the governments applied their “incomes policies” to keep wages down. It never succeeded for long. The Heath government came in with its alternative, of encouraging employers to show tougher resistance to wage claims, and warning them that if they could not pay their way they must no longer count on the government bailing out “lame ducks”—which also adds to unemployment.

If we disregard the possibility of another world depression like that of the nineteen thirties, present indications are that the years ahead will see more unemployment in Britain, coming nearer to the pre-1914 average of four and a half per cent. But the myth of “full employment” will die hard. The Labour Party and trade unions will go on pursuing it, for—not being Socialist—what else have they to offer?

Edgar Hardcastle

Malicious Damage (1971)

From the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every working day, Bob drives down the long, straight arterial road to the big factory where he peels away from the rest of the swarming cars. He parks his new Escort in the car park which he is allowed to use by virtue of the small circular sticker on his windscreen which the firm give only to the staff. Sometimes the uniformed security man says “Good morning” or even salutes him, which makes Bob feel more like a member of the staff than ever. Through the side door of the huge building he climbs quickly up the stairs to the office which runs the entire length of the building and, although his desk and chair and filing cabinet are exactly identical to the hundreds of others, he finds his way unerringly to his place. He always arrives about ten minutes early so that by the official starting time his desk is perfectly prepared and he has actually started work.

From the filing cabinet he takes out a large bundle of invoices from other firms. Each invoice has an allocation tag stuck to its lower edge and Bob’s job is to sort them out into their various allocations. Some invoices are for production material; others for services like transport, maintenance and so on; some for customs duty or agency. Bob carefully sorts each invoice into its separate tray and every so often a girl comes up to his desk to clear out one of the trays and take away her share of the invoices for processing. And every so often another girl comes, from the mailing department, with another bundle of invoices to be sorted and labelled. The flow never stops and Bob often says, at lunch in the staff canteen which is separate from the works cafeteria where the factory workers and the lower office employees eat, that no matter how hard he goes at it he never goes home with an empty tray.

Sometimes there is a break in the routine; perhaps a question from another department about a missing invoice or a telephone call from a supplier about one which is unpaid. Bob is always meticulous in his investigations of such matters and if he finds that one of the girls has made a mistake he lets her know all about the trouble and extra work she has caused him.

At the end of the day he clears his desk into the filing cabinet and rejoins the swarm weaving down the big road. He is often very tired but usually finds the energy to do any gardening or decorating which is needed. He is an attentive husband and a caring father; a decent, dependable man who wastes the vast part of his waking life in thoroughly useless, monotonous, unproductive, degrading drudgery.

There are millions of others like him. They work in banks, insurance offices, merchant houses; they are salesmen, advertising men, accountants. Their job is to organise the commercial affairs of capitalism — its buying and selling, collecting and paying out money, processing its vast financial machine. To the capitalist system, which produces its wealth for sale, such jobs are very necessary but they contribute nothing to society’s wealth.

For capitalism, which claims to be the most rational social system known to man, wastes most of its productive resources in the field of human labour. Sometimes this takes the form of the slow, grinding waste, like Bob with his invoices. Sometimes it is more spectacular, even bizarre, as food is ploughed into the ground or burnt. For some time, governments have realised that, in the age of Oxfam, the open destruction of food can be politically unwise. From this realisation has sprung the better, more stealthy but equally wasteful, method of simply not producing the stuff.

From this it was only a small step for governments actually to pay food producers for not producing food. Of course this requires a certain amount of administration and somewhere there must be people like Bob who process paper showing how much each farmer who is in the great non-production scheme has not produced and how much he is to be paid for keeping his land idle. Then there must be some check on the few dishonest people (for this, remember, is capitalism) who are sufficiently mean and ungrateful to claim for not growing food when all the time they are growing it.

This is exactly what has happened in the case of the potato growers, who are proving so dishonest that a number of quite advanced checking methods have had to be applied against them. Now potatoes are a popular, nutritious food which might do something towards feeding people, even these like old age pensioners who can’t afford to spend too much on the tiresome business of keeping alive. But when potatoes are produced in plenty they come pouring onto the market, which causes their price to fall and, instead of making things easier for the pensioner, this only makes them harder for the farmer because his produce can’t be sold profitably. The government at present try to protect the farmers from too catastrophic a loss by guaranteeing a price of about £15 a ton but this does not prevent the kind of situation we had in August, when something like half a million tons were destroyed because the market could not absorb them profitably.

This guarantee comes into operation if another scheme, run by the Potato Marketing Board, fails. Under this scheme, growers are supposed to register with the Board the land they want to use for growing potatoes and the Board then decides how much acreage they can each be allowed for this production. In deciding on the land quotas, of course, human needs are not an influence; the size of the market and the expectations of profit are what count. A grower who exceeds his quota can be fined by the Board, who now have a light aircraft equipped with long range cameras spying out the countryside for pirate potato growers. Presumably, if the spying succeeds the price of potatoes will be kept stable — and profitable.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, people are dying of starvation and declining through malnutrition. The effects of the restriction of food production upon them are all too obvious; but what about the effect upon those, better fed, who do the restricting? In the case of the potatoes, for example, the aircraft brings back its photographs which are then marked with potato growing areas and compared with maps showing the areas covered by growing quotas. If the two don’t coincide, a pirate has been caught. What is the effect upon the people who process the photographs and compare them with the maps, who are doing a good job when they catch out a farmer who is producing food, who write up the reports for his prosecution?

Human behaviour is a matter of learning; we take in experiences and sensations which, provided we are capable of absorbing and processing them, modify and fashion our attitudes and our behaviour. This can, and ideally should, be a maturing process in which we acquire knowledge and skills but it can also be inhibiting, for example in the case of the battered baby who as a result of the cruelty it has experienced is withdrawn and mistrustful.

Extending this reasoning, we can ask what effect their work has upon people like Bob and those who work for organisations like the Potato Marketing Board. Is it maturing or inhibiting? Do they flourish or wither, under the burden of their socially useless drudgery? In many cases they respond with a fervent support for the capitalist society which condemns them to their drudgery. In the dormitory area where Bob lives the poor old Labour Party is regarded as dangerously revolutionary. These intelligent people take this unreasoned attitude not entirely in the conviction that in their semi, their insurance policy and their Escort they have something worth defending. Like the beaten child, Bob reacts with a defence mechanism; he denies his problems, denies that his job is useless and boring. He has to believe that he contributes something significant to the social wellbeing because the alternative is too horrible to face.

The erection of this defence may serve its immediate purpose but, again like the child, this is achieved only at some cost. Bob is a damaged person who can be absorbed, even obsessed, with trivia — the hunt for a missing invoice, the tidiness of his desk, the gleaming newness of his car. He is not fulfilling his potential as a person; indeed he would even deny that he had any and adapts himself to wasting his abilities and his very life seated between the in tray and the out tray. A decent man, rather than lower his defences he will accept and defend the obscenities which capitalism perpetrates in the name of profit — starvation, poverty, murder, repression, deceit.

The depressing fact about Bob is that he is representative of his kind; in one way or another capitalism damages all its people and one of the great advances which will come when the system is swept away will be their release. This will not be only a matter of them realising their potential to produce wealth, to design and to beautify. It is also a matter of their development as human personalities, as people. Under capitalism we can hardly guess at what a human being is really like and the world has yet to experience what we are capable of, in terms of co-operation and caring, when we are free.

Ivan

Moneyless or not (1971)

From the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

“While there is money, there is scarcity”. “. . . Work itself becomes voluntary. The new incentives will be pleasure, pride and social responsibility”

These are among the ideas expressed in the final chapter of the book Play-power by Richard Neville, one of the editors of OZ convicted of producing what the Law regards as an obscene publication.

Quite true; men could use modern technology to design and construct machines to do the boring and repetitive jobs involved in the production of wealth, thus freeing human beings to engage in interesting, creative work of their choice. Employment could be abolished and work become voluntary.

But before this could be done the machines and the other means of production must have ceased to be the property of a privileged minority and have come instead under the democratic control of all the people. Only then could they be used to turn out an abundance of good-quality consumer goods and services which people could use to satisfy their needs. Money would become redundant.

There is no doubt at all that in writing about “a moneyless society” Neville was directly influenced by the ideas of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. For he was quoting with approval from one of a number of articles that have appeared in OZ written by a Socialist (‘The Food Explosion” OZ 19 and 26. See also “Smash Cash” OZ 17).

The only trouble is that Neville isn’t consistent and so gives the impression of having used our arguments merely to justify shoplifting and fare-dodging. People who do this, he says “are training themselves for a moneyless society”. There is of course nothing “immoral” in these practices but they have nothing to do with a moneyless, socialist society, and are practised by many others besides Socialists and those Neville calls “drop-outs”.

Neville’s inconsistency comes out on the very next page where he uses a quite different argument to justify the practice of non-employment (what is sometimes called “refusing to work”). He conjures up the vision of a society where, in order to maintain consumer demand in the face of growing unemployment caused by automation, the State pays everybody a guaranteed income. This would presumably be paid in money, so what became of the moneyless society Neville was supposed to be training for?

We can only say that, if Neville really does believe in a State guaranteed income, he is way behind the times. In this age of potential abundance nothing short of free access to wealth will do. He was right the first time: future society will have no need for money. Today’s notes and coins—dollars and cents, pounds and pence, roubles and kopecks—can be relegated to the museums alongside the Romans’ coins and the South Sea Islanders' cowrie shells.

Socialism and Work (1971)

Book Review from the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Future of Work and Leisure, by Stanley Parker. MacGibbon and Kee. £2.25.

This short and (with the exception of chapter 7) readable book is a good discussion of the question of work and leisure. Many of Parker’s points have long been made by us: that work and employment must be distinguished; that working for wages is of comparatively recent origin; that in the sense of engaging in some socially useful activity men need to work; that work can be made pleasant and interesting; that the so-called problem of leisure cannot be solved in isolation from the problem of boring work (and that this cannot be solved within “our outmoded economic system”); that it is wrong to regard work and leisure as opposites since leisure as freely chosen activity can—and indeed should—overlap with work. As Parker says:

The weight of historical, anthropological and contemporary evidence is that, whatever their expressed desires, men in all societies need to have work as well as leisure. Further, in cases where their work embodied many of the values normally associated with leisure, a separate period of time labelled leisure appears to be necessary neither to their happiness nor to their creative function in society.

Actually, all this is no co-incidence. Parker learned most of these arguments while he was a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. He himself has chosen not to acknowledge this, though it should be clear to those who know us who are the descendants of the “Marxist socialists” of a century ago who envisage a time “when production is carried on solely for use and not for profit”. So should the origins of the “Marxist phrase” about there being “two classes in society” and of the definition of capitalists as “those persons who possess capital the return on which enables them to live without the necessity of being employed”.

We would not want to pretend, however, that Parker here agrees with us entirely. He left the Socialist Party because he came to imagine that it was possible to transform capitalism gradually into Socialism, and this too comes out in the text.

Parker’s omission of any reference, even in a footnote, to William Morris is also peculiar since Morris’ criticism of those who regarded work even in Socialism as a necessary evil to be reduced to a minimum rather than as an important human activity is the basis of our views on the subject, and so also of those of Parker himself.

Adam Buick

Suez Intrigue (1971)

Book Review from the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Suez Affair, by Hugh Thomas. Pelican. 30p.

Early in the morning of November 6, 1956, a combined Anglo-French expeditionary force landed at Port Said. It was preceded the previous day by the capture of various strategic points by British and French paratroops. The Suez war had begun.

The immediate background was about six months of intrigue and collusion between Britain, France and Israel, with the most elaborate attempts at deception which would have done justice to a comic opera, were it not so serious. The aftermath has been fifteen years long, so far, with the Israelis firmly ensconced in the Sinai Peninsula and talks dragging on endlessly about cease fire, future boundaries, etc.

Hugh Thomas in this book recently republished as a paper-back, deals in some detail with the British, French and Israeli invasion of Egypt, but it really doesn’t add much more to our knowledge of the incident than was supplied by the Bromberger Brothers in their Secrets of Suez (Pan Books 1957)—incidentally a much more readable work. It is just that Thomas has the advantage of a great deal more hindsight than was available to the Brombergers. Nobody now denies that there was collusion between the Israeli and allied Governments; in fact Moshe Dayan has openly admitted it.

Nevertheless, Thomas has managed to unearth some interesting information on the rifts and dissensions among the various members of Anthony Eden’s cabinet, not to mention the double-talk and double-crossing between America and others. There is the rather surprising revelation however, that the American government were caught unawares by the allied action.

The story of the “police action”—as it was euphemistically styled at the time —is distressingly familiar. When the Egyptian rulers seized the Suez Canal, this was seen as a direct threat to British and French capitalist interests in the area. Indeed, so seriously did they view it, that they were prepared to go to war. As Eden said at the time: “Suez is a question of life or death for us”.

Additionally, the French were pre-occupied with their problems of rebellion in Algeria and suspected Nasser of sending help to the rebels. Those who recall the period, will remember the 24-nation conference and proposals for the international control of the canal, but all to no avail.

The Egyptian ruling class saw the canal as a rich and easy source of revenue and were not prepared to relinquish their hold. Perhaps their action in seizing the area was precipitated by the refusal of all the great powers at the time to help with the Aswan Dam project. The greater probability is that they would have nationalised the canal sooner or later anyway. This is a method of grabbing foreign capitalist assets, common enough among the newly formed states in recent years.

Incidentally, in the period that followed, it was Harold Wilson’s habit to refer contemptuously to the Tories as “Men of Suez”; this book is a timely reminder of the Labour Party stand over the whole Suez action. The parliamentary party, at least, was just as nationalistic as the Conservatives, and was certainly not opposed to the use of force in principle. As the author points out, what they wanted was “legalised” force. —prior United Nations sanction for any military action.

Hugh Thomas tells us of speeches in favour of this by Gaitskell, Bevan and other Labour leaders of the time. It was a pathetic and ineffective gesture and did nothing to halt the affair. In the event also, it seems they underrated the amount of popular support for the government’s action when it came to the crunch.

The establishment of Israel over twenty years ago was supposed to be an answer to the chronic problems of Middle East conflict, but the problems are there today as harrowing as ever, as the various capitalist powers jostle for elbow-room in the area. Ernest Bevin staked his political reputation on the post-war attempts at settlement. Perhaps it is a pity he is not with us today to read this book, and to see the bitter mockery capitalism has made of his efforts.

Eddie Critchfield

Communal Housing (1971)

Book Review from the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Communal Housing, from M. Braido, 34 Ennismore Gdns., S.W.7. (Duplicated 25p).

The report has been published by a small group of people who have formed a Housing Association to facilitate the provision of communal housing accommodation in the London area. It is well researched and written with plenty of references for those who want to study the matter in more detail. Part of the report contains useful information on the practical problems of finance, building conversion and legalities, but it is that part which argues the case for communal housing that is more interesting to read.

The report clearly shows just how restrictive, in comparison, is the typical family unit housed in a flat or semidetached, and puts forward very convincing evidence for the view that communal housing groups would provide a much more diverse and stimulating atmosphere for adults and children alike. The demoralising effect of most institutional housing for old people, those suffering from mental ill-health, and others is dealt with, and the superiority of mixed communal groups for such people illustrated. It is suggested that voluntary groups of this kind could re-create many of the benefits of the “extended family” whilst avoiding the problems that arose from its compulsory nature.

Communal housing groups are no cure-all. Their members still have to work for wages to secure the rent, and relationships within the group generally are most strongly affected by external factors, but the growth of interest in ventures of this kind indicates just how much the existing social relationships are being recognised as restrictive of further human advancement. We can only hope that those who read this report will apply some of the same thinking outside of the housing field to society as a whole.

M. B.

SPGB Lectures and Special Meetings (1971)

Party News from the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

• The first two issue of the Swedish Socialist journal can be read at the following link.
• Mention of Harry Baldwin doing a meeting on the Oz magazine reminds me that David Ramsay Steele's article, 'Smash Cash', appeared in issue number 17 of Oz magazine in 1968.

Where to buy the Socialist Standard (1971)

From the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

ABERDEEN: J. G. Bisset’s, 99 High St.. Old Aberdeen (also pamphlets sold). Bisset’s, 12-14 Upper Kirkgate. Bisset’s, College of Education, Hilton Place. Watt & Grant's, 247 Union Street. College Bookshop, 191 Holbom Street. M. Vallance, Room 21, Johnston Hall, College Bounds. Old Aberdeen. (Also pamphlets sold). 

BELFAST: The Paperback-Shop, Gresham Street.

BIRMINGHAM: Reference Library, every weekday, evenings only. The Ramp, New Street Station, every Saturday.

BRIGHTON: The News-stand, London Road Unicorn Bookshop, Gloucester Road. 

DUNDEE: James Finnie, 10 Kinnaird Street. 

EDINBURGH: David Balfour, West Nicholson St. Better Books, Forest Road. Moondan, 18 Stephen St., Stockbridge Cross, Westport Row. Cross Market. Every Saturday 11 a.m. -5 p.m. in Princes St., at the East End beside the Duke of Wellington Statue, at the West End in front of Binns, and halfway along Princes St. at the Mound. At the Mound every Sunday. 

GLASGOW: Bryson’s, Byres Road, W.l. Clyde Book Shop, High Street. Macdonalds, Maryhill Road at Cromwell Street.

HULL: Robinsons, 80 Cottingham Road. Robinsons, Newstall University Union. Browns Bookshop University.

LEHAM-BY-FORFAR: Roger Wilkie, 8 Blairs Road.

LIVERPOOL: Wilson’s Bookshop, Church Alley, off Church Street, Liverpool. Bob's Newsbox, Brown-low Hill, Liverpool 3. 

LONDON: News-stand outside Midland Bank, High Holbom, WC1. The Compendium, 240 Camden High Street. NW1. News Stores, 10 Coptic Street, WC1 (near British Museum). Collet’s, Charing Cross Road, WC2. Housman’s, 5 Caledonian Road, Nl. News-stand, Notting Hill Gate Tube Station (near Burtons). Until II pm SPGB, 52 Clapham High Street. SW4 (all literature). And at Hyde Park every Sunday. 

MANCHESTER: Percival, Oxford Road; also Percival’s at St. Peter's Square and Wilmslow Road, Didsbury

SWANSEA: Dylan’s Bookshop, 75 High St. (near High St. Station). Tel. 59664. Central Library 10.30-12.00.

WOOLWICH: W. Tyler, 30 Woolwich High Street. SE18.

Books Received (1971)

From the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

• For Marx. L. Althusser. Allen Lane.
• The Rise of Fascism. F. L. Carsten. Methuen. 80p.
• Marx in His Own Words. Ernst Fischer. Allen Lane. £1.50.
• New Fabian Essays. Dent. £1.75.
• Mao Papers. Edited by Jerome Ch’en. OUP. £2.75.
• Europe versus America. E. Mandel. NLB. £2.00.
• Sexuality and Class Struggle. Reimut Reiche. NLB. £2.00.
• Social Consequences of Conviction. J. P. Martin and D. Webster. Heinemann Educational. £4.50.
• Suspended Sentence. Marc Ansel. Heinemann Educational. £1.50.
• The Enthusiasts. L. Thompson. Gollancz. £3.00.
• Ted Heath: A Latterday Charlemagne. Donald Johnson. Johnson Publications. 50p.