Vietnam-again? (1972)

From the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

If one war can be more depraved and dehumanising than another, then only in these terms is there a winner in Vietnam. For more than thirty years, virtually non-stop, Vietnam has been ravaged by the modern military hardware of rival armies. Back in 1941 the Japanese; then the British, then the French, the Vietnamese themselves, and finally the Americans. The wholesale slaughter and destruction, and the indifference to human suffering has been common to them all. The lying and hypocrisy of the politicians on all sides has been outstripped only by their gory deeds.

In the name of peace, the war steadily escalated for eight years. In the name of freedom, brutal dictators were installed and people whose “freedom” was denied burned themselves alive in protest. In the name of democracy, elections were suspended. In the name of liberation, many hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children have been blown to pieces or burned alive with napalm. On the ideological pretence of stemming “communism” every conceivable horror and outrage has been practised. Regardless of how many Vietnamese were killed in the process, they had to be “saved”. The utter ruthlessness of governments purporting to be champions of the “free” world could hardly be surpassed by those of police-state dictatorships.

Humiliation & Protest

America has suffered the humiliation of having to bring members of her armed forces to trial, accused of atrocities against the people they were supposed to be defending, while those atrocities were condoned by the then deputy leader of British Labour government. We have witnessed the spectacle of returning military personnel denouncing the war and their own brutal conduct. The American Army has had to face the desertion of tens of thousands of its men, while the scale of drug-taking was so vast among those who remained in the war, it had to be virtually ignored.

There have been massive demonstrations against the war, throughout America’s largest cities, with the added irony that the same coercive State apparatus which carried on the war was frequently used against the demonstrators. In Britain, as in other parts of the world, there were also demonstrations. The British “left” which organised the protests here were not opposed to the war as such, but were anti-America, and favoured a Northern victory. They dragged out all the anti-working-class arguments about national independence and home-rule to justify their support for the bloody butchers on the other side. As with CND before them, the protest reached fever pitch and then fizzled out. Since October 1968 there has been hardly a peep out of them. Such movements inevitably dissipate the enthusiasm of the workers who support them. Capitalism mocks all such limited objectives when its vital interests are at stake. The tragedy is that this same enthusiasm coupled with Socialist ideas could rid the world of the scourge of capitalism itself.

Amazing Gracey

As the misery and the bombing drag on towards the end of another year, it is worth remembering that it was the post-war British Labour government who restarted the war after taking over from the Japanese in 1945. In September of that year 20,000 British troops arrived, and General Gracey was set up as military dictator.

Despite the fact that the Vietminh (the forerunners of today’s Vietcong) had control of Saigon, the Labour government co-operated with the French ruling class, who wanted their colony back. The Labour government helped ship back French troops. General Gracey closed down the press and used the Japanese army to post a proclamation saying: “I hereby warn all wrongdoers, especially looters and saboteurs of public property and those carrying out similar activities, that they will be summarily shot.”

After arming former French prisoners who immediately started shooting up the Vietminh, Gracey disarmed them, and used Japanese forces to put down the guerrilla war he had sparked off. He ordered British troops: “Always use the maximum force to ensure wiping out any hostiles we may meet”. Like the Americans, the British had no way of knowing “hostiles” from innocent people. A British and Japanese military operation followed before the British left it to the French to continue the slaughter in March 1946. It was thus that “liberation” came to the people of Vietnam. Even the great American butcher General MacArthur (who wanted to use A-bombs in Korea) condemned as “ignoble” the conduct of the British Labour government in Indo-China.

With Friends Like These …

The French government carried on the war for eight years with financial aid from America, and the active support of the French Communist Party, whose deputies consistently voted for increased arms expenditure, in full knowledge that the arms were being used for killing their own “comrades” in Indochina. During 1946 Charles Tillon, a Communist, was in fact Minister for Armaments. These same deputies including Thorez, the C.P. Vice-Premier, voted unanimous congratulations to General Leclere after the bombardment of Haiphong where 6,000 civilians were killed.

On the other side, Ho Chi Minh wasted no time proving himself at least as treacherous and murderous as his adversaries. After running phony elections in January 1946, where 70 seats were promised to non-Communists (provided they did not compete in the election) he spent the next ten months liquidating 202 out of 444 elected representatives. The Vietminh carried out wholesale murder of opponents, in particular Trotskyists. One popular Trotskyist leader Ta Tu Thau, had three trials and three acquittals before he was shot. As a result of Cardinal Spellman’s campaign of propaganda half a million Catholics left North Vietnam in the mid-1950’s. This helped create serious food shortages, which led to peasant uprisings in late 1956. Ho Chi Minn’s army crushed the “rebels” and killed or deported 6,000 farmers.

. . . who needs the Enemy?

The Chinese ruling class whilst pouring military aid into the North and conducting a propaganda war against “American Imperialism” has supplied steel for American army and air bases. The Russian bosses have done much the same thing, trading with both sides, and there have been the usual hypocritical accusations and counter-accusations hurled between the Chinese and Rusian rulers.

If Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon have been the wililng tools of American capitalism in prosecuting the war, (backed up by Wilson and Heath on behalf of British capitalism) Mao Tse Tung, Brezhnev and Ho Chi Minh were as soaked in the blood of the working class as their western counterparts.

Wilson’s Labour government supplied some of the napalm which American forces used to burn alive so many thousands of men, women, and children. They also trained South Vietnamese forces and built bases for the U.S. air force.

Workers Have no Country

If anyone doubts that the sordid economic motives of capitalism lie behind the war in Vietnam, the U.S. News and World Report for the 16 April 1954 said: “One of the world’s richest areas is open to the winner in Indo-China — tin, rubber, rice, key strategic raw materials are what the war is really about” (quoted in Solidarity Pamphlet, The Rape of Vietnam, from which other material in this article has been taken).

The fact that the world has absorbed the emotional shock waves of the war in Vietnam, and a generation has lived with the stock-piling of H-bombs, is a measure of the terrifying extent of capitalism’s conditioning. It is also a damning indictment of this system of society.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain and its companion parties including the World Socialist Party of the U.S. have consistently opposed all wars. Taking our stand on the basis of the interests of the world’s working class, we condemned the two world wars as thieves’-quarrels of rival capitalist classes. We declared that no war is worth the shedding of a single drop of workers’ blood. We re-affirm that attitude. Vietnam is likewise a thieves’ war. The workers and peasants own no country on either side. They will find themselves as firmly shackled to the juggernaut of exploitation, whoever emerges as their new masters. Neither can “peace” be long secure, for fresh conflicts and future wars are inseparable from continuing capitalism. Vast air bases and thousands of planes stand in readiness to continue the war, despite the much-trumpeted withdrawal of ground forces. More than three million dead for nothing. And how many more millions will be slaughtered before the working class gets rid of the slaughter-house, remains a very open question.

Harry Baldwin

The Freeze and After (1972)

From the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the myths of our age is that wages are sometimes restricted and sometimes not. Wages are always restricted; it is only the method that changes. Unless wage rates are kept down to levels which leave a margin of profit for the employer he intensifies the search for ways to reduce his total wages bill by getting more output from each worker; failing which he stops production and stands workers off.

The government always plays a part in this. It stands behind the employers, backing them up to deal with strikes and other manifestations of working-class discontent. But the government’s role is not always in the same form. It sometimes includes direct intervention through the imposition of controls on wages and prices. Generally this is when conditions favour the workers in pressing for wage increases. This happened in two world wars when unemployment had practically disappeared. By contrast, nobody talked about a prices and incomes policy between the wars when there were two million unemployed, markets were failing and bankruptcies soaring, prices were tumbling and workers were completely unable to prevent wages falling with them.

Promises, Promises

Since 1945 there have been half a dozen attempts by Labour and Tory governments to impose controls, starting with the “Wage Restraint” of the Attlee Labour Government imposed in September 1948. They have been variously named but all conform to the same general pattern. They were all excused as emergency measures called for by unforeseen circumstances, they were all claimed to be needed to prevent prices from rising and British exports being priced out of world markets with consequent increase of unemployment, and all were in contradiction with the election programmes of the Labour and Tory parties. Mr. Wilson rightly chided Heath with having abandoned his election pledges but seems to have forgotten that the freeze imposed by his own government in July 1966 came only four months after the Labour Party election programme had said “our purpose is not to dictate prices, wages and salaries”.

None of the post-war “freezes” completely prevented some increases of wages and prices. Nearly all were followed by a bigger rate of increase, with wages rising slightly more than prices. From the employers’ point of view the most successful freeze was the first, the Labour Government wage restraint from September 1948 to October 1950 which kept wage increases appreciably below the rise of the cost of living. As a method of preventing prices from rising the freezes, individually and collectively, have been a complete failure, for the rate of price increase in 1971 was higher than at any time since 1945.

Trying to Manage

In 1944 the Tory, Liberal and Labour parties all committed themselves to a three-point policy of stable prices, full employment and steady growth of production. Critics of government policy have often pointed out that at no time has a Labour or Tory government succeeded in getting all three together; it remained for Heath in 1972 to fall down on all three at the same time — a million unemployed, fast-rising prices and near-stagnant production.

The imposition of the present freeze was surrounded with loud recriminations between Heath and Wilson, all of it signifying nothing because this one does not differ from past Labour Government freezes except in minor details and reflects the same erroneous theories which are shared by the Labour and trade-union leaders with most of the Tory leaders. (The Times cynically commented that “it is their business to criticize each other”.) The Labour Party motion of dissent in the House of Commons on November 8 did not condemn capitalism and offer an alternative, but blamed the highest unemployment since the ‘thirties and a massive increase in the cost of living on “mismanagement of the economy” by the Tory government. The chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Mr. Douglas Houghton MP, who in 1967 was boasting of the success of the Wilson government in making “modern capitalism work”, attacked the Tories this time not on the ground that they are running capitalism but on the ground that they are not “managing” it properly: they have, he said, “left capitalism unbridled”.

Guess the Answer

The completely erroneous theories held by the political and trade-union leaders since the three-party declaration in 1944 are that capitalism can be managed in a way to secure permanent full employment, with a more or less stable price level. On full employment, the TUC in 1970 declared:

“Maintenance of full employment is chiefly the responsibility of the government. All political parties, the Confederation of British Industry and the TUC accept that this should be the case. There is agreement that the necessary techniques are available to sustain full employment . . . “ (TUC pamphlet, Automation and Technical Change)

On stable prices, Mr. Wilson in 1957 wrote:

“Ever since the Coalition Government’s White Paper all major parties have been committed on Keynesian lines to using the Budget as a means of avoiding undue inflation or deflation.” (Labour Party pamphlet, Remedies for Inflation)

At the beginning none of them said anything about wage and price freezes, but already in 1957 Mr. Wilson was saying that: “For a Labour government no less than for the Conservatives, success or failure in the battle against inflation would depend on its ability to secure an understanding with the unions which would make wage restraint possible”. For the unions it was either you agree “voluntarily” to restraint or you have it imposed.

Act of Iniquity

Much of the conflict between the Labour Party and the unions on the one side and the Heath government on the other about the failure of the consultations which preceded the present freeze concerned the question of the Industrial Relations Act. The Labour-trade union side argued that if the Government would suspend the Act it would make agreement easier.

It is to the point here to recall the case made against the Act in 1970 by Vic Feather, General Secretary of the TUC. It was not that the Act would depress wages but that it would encourage competitive wage claims between workers and push wages up too much. “This Bill would create a wage drift of a kind the country could not afford, either now or at any time in the future.” (Report of a trade union conference, Sunday Times, 13 December 1970).

What has happened is that the policy held by all of them has proved quite fallacious and they do not know what to do next. What the TUC described as “the necessary techniques … to sustain full employment” meant in practice “pumping more money into the economy”, which they imagined would lead to expanded production and full employment but which is a sure specific for putting up prices. As the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Barber, has complained, he wants to pump more money in the belief that production will then expand but at the same time wants to “curb the money supply” to stop prices going up.

Marx was right. Capitalism goes through its phases of expansion with low unemployment on one hand, depression with heavier unemployment on the other, in spite of government financial and budgetary policies. The only remedy is to replace capitalism with Socialism.

Dreadful Prospect

In the meantime, fearful of the explosion that could occur if inflation is carried on extremes, the view has been gathering support among economists and business men that the government should stop inflation whatever the consequences. The Tory politicians on the other hand recoil from this because one consequence could be that they lose the next election. So they put their trust in the hope that British capitalism now, after several false starts, is on the way to recovery from the depression.

They have another fear. There is one Tory politician who never accepted the Keynesian nonsense and who wants to go back to the old-style policy of letting capitalism take its course, with the unions “free” to make which wage claims they choose and businesses “free” to go bankrupt if they can’t survive. Some commentators have begun to speculate on the possibility that if Heath’s hopes of industrial recovery are not speedily fulfilled, Enoch Powell will get the leadership of the Tory Party.

Edgar Hardcastle

An Open Letter to Dave Douglass (1972)

From the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Dave,

I see from the News of the World for November 15th that you are the editor of the Trotskyist magazine ‘Mineworkers Internationale’, and that you have published articles addressing the miners on union policy.

You appear to have upset the editor of the News of the World, and the officials of the Communist Party, who say that you are getting the “sane militants” (the C.P.) a bad name.

You wrote (apparently) in one issue of your magazine

“The only long-term justice for the workers will be under a system which they themselves control—a Socialist system.”

and

“Launch the General Strike immediately and occupy the factories, docks, railways without charging, capture the supermarkets and food wholesalers and distribute the food free.”

Hard Enough

And you claim to work for the overthrow of Capitalism.

One can sympathise with your indignation with your exploitation and the fact, as you say, “that Capitalists are making a fortune out of my sweat, discomfort and forfeiture of human dignity”. Fair enough!

But, Dave boy, indignation is not enough! In this business (the class struggle) brains are more important than heart, because our enemy, the Capitalist, is immensely powerful, and helped by a large staff of cunning labour leaders and T.U. Officials.

And I’m going to tell you straight out, that your stuff is doing more harm than good.

First “seize the pits” or “the Supermarkets”, or “the railways”, is rubbish. The workers have a difficult enough job trying seize half-a-pound of steak on a Friday night, without you try to feed them this baloney.

You must begin to learn that the control of the public apparatus of production and distribution is political, not industrial. It is maintained by the Government of the day, if necessary by armed force, although the workers don’t show much evidence of doing any “seizing”, do they? Could it be they’ve too much sense?

The Wrong Interests

Neither are you doing any good trying to cod the miners into taking action for “workers’ control”. The workers will never control Capitalism. What determines class control is ownership, and that ownership is legalised and maintained through Parliament, by the Government of the day, backed by an electoral majority.

It is no business of trade unions to try to usurp the job of a political party. Control of the whole of industry is a political matter concerning the whole capitalist class. The strongest, most militant trade union in the world can do nothing about it and won’t want to, anyway, because people join unions to look after the trade interests, not class interests.

Dave, I’m sorry, but your other stuff urging the miners on strike last year to do as much damage as possible is nonsense too. This is a hang-over from early Russian days when the isolated Bolsheviks sought to create as much dissension abroad as possible, for political propaganda materials.

Strike What For?

I now come to what, for me, is the most stupid and ridiculous nonsense of all. “Launch the General Strike and occupy the factories”. Are you really in your right mind, mate? Don’t you know that whenever the workers have occupied factories, after a few weeks with the wives bringing meals and drinks, they have unoccupied them again?

The capitalists will always beat you at this game; they own everything; they can retire to the Hilton or the country, and starve you out. In fact, the French authorities have said they approve of the strikers occupying the factory because “It keeps the place clean”.

And lastly, the General Strike! What stupid bloody rubbish. First of all, General Strikes for industrial ends are difficult enough, because workers’ action on such a scale concerns the whole capitalist class who have shown repeatedly, all over the world, that they will not hesitate if necessary, to crush strikes by armed force.

But even worse, you are urging a General Strike for “Workers’ Control”, which because you are not clear about it, you call a “Socialist system”.

A Socialist system will and must abolish classes! What are you on about? Will there be wage-workers under Trotskyist “Socialism” then ?

But, worst of all, you are trying to control trade unionists in General Strikes for political purposes — and this is disastrous.

If you claim that all the workers (or a lot of them) are militants, anxious to overthrow Capitalism, why have they got to lose their wages (and some of them, their personal freedom) in General Strikes?

Consciousness Wanted

If they want a General Strike why do they vote for Tory and Labour parties?

If the workers are Socialists, they have a perfectly safe and sane method of abolishing Capitalism, which also happens (as time will show) to be the only possible method — the ballot box.

It is for this reason that the Socialist Party of Great Britain will never support calls for General Strikes for political purposes. People like you, Dave, may feel very strongly, but you haven’t thought very much.

Socialists, in their capacity as trade unionists, because we are exploited like you, and have to join them, say to their fellow workers : Political action is for political parties! Trade union political independence at all costs!

Socialism will be established by a class political party, not the T.U.C., or any trade union.

It Can be Done

Let trade unions mind their own business, the interests of their members.

Let the affairs of the union be run democratically, by the rank-and-file vote, make strikes short and sharp. Procrastination is the death of strikes.

And, lastly, some advice to you, by one who has been right through the Leninist mill himself.

Forget all your Trotskyist dreamworld; it never was right. Look where the Leninist “boring from within” the trade unions has landed the C.P. The very nominees the Communist factions have got “elected” as officials have at times been the first to kick out Communists.

Study Socialism! Get clear on the necessity of conscious political actions by the workers, organised in a political party to take political power, to abolish capitalist control; and replace it by “democratic control”.

This is the road of Success, to Victory.

What you are doing now will only spread apathy as a result of bitter disappointment.

Forget Trotsky, and remember Marx!

Yours for Socialism,

Horatio

11 November 1972.

Letter: More about Rents (1972)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Editorial Committee is slipping. The reason why Glasgow people won their rent strike had nothing to do with house building having ceased. There had been housing shortage before the war, as indeed there still is, but the tenants did not and do not effectively challenge the landlords as they did in 1915 when the landlords tried to put up the rents; it seemed to them quite a natural thing to do since the butchers, grocers, etc. were all putting up their prices. People had to have food but, as they discovered, they did not have to pay the landlords; indeed, there was a decided advantage in not doing so, they had more money to spend in the shops. That is what forced the Government to step in and save the rent system.

If tenants could not be forced to pay rent in 1915 it is obvious they could not be forced to pay rent today if they stood together and refused to do so.

The Editorial Committee also assume that if tenants refuse to pay rent it will enable the non-landlord members of the capitalist class to reduce wages by that amount. Why? If, by combined action, the workers free themselves against the burden of rents they will find themselves strong enough to refuse to accept reduced wages; in fact, they would rapidly, having realised their strength, demand increased wages, finally making profit taking impossible and so ending the capitalist system. This is the reply to the last paragraph in the Committee’s reply to me; it shows them what the working class would achieve by first of all destroying the landlord class. Certainly, every household would be better off by spending money for themselves instead of giving it to the rent collector.

It is quite likely that I am about the oldest reader of “Socialist Standard” still alive. I started in 1907, I used buy it off “Hutch” ‘a member of the Tooting S.P.G.B., after that I got it in Charing Cross Road and now that I am a refugee on the South Coast I get it by post direct from Clapham. I have always read it to the great advantage of my faith in Socialism. It is only on this matter of rents that I have found the S.P.G.B. not agreeing to any working class struggle. I am well aware that, at the same time, they warn the struggle can’t succeed until all the workers of the World become Socialists which, of course, is absurd. For instance, in Bulgaria today the workers pay no rent or rates or suffer any deduction from their pay for pensions. Why? Because the Bulgarian State owns 80 per cent of all productive work, the present remaining 20 per cent is covered by a very small income tax.

Tom Braddock,

East Preston.

Reply:

The questions referred to here arise from the article Why Must the Rent Go Up ? in the Socialist Standard for January this year. Tom Braddock’s first letter disputing the Socialist Party’s attitude to rent control appeared, with our reply, in the July issue.

On the question of what happened in Glasgow in 1915 having “nothing to do with house building having ceased”, we quote from Housing Finance and Development by A. J. Merrett and Allen Sykes (Longmans, 1965). In the opening chapter they say:

“House building virtually ceased with the advent of war and rents began to rise, particularly in munitions-producing areas. This provoked an outcry such that in 1915 the government passed the first rent restriction Act — the Increase of Rent and Mortgage Interest (War Restrictions) Act, 1915. It froze the rents of all unfurnished tenancies (approximately 85 per cent of the total) below certain limits at the August 1914 level, and landlords were virtually forbidden to evict protected tenants save for obvious defaults such as non-payment of rent.”

This passage also makes clear that Braddock’s assertion in his second paragraph is untrue. It is correct only in the technical sense that — of course — tenants could not be forced to pay rent raised above the level permitted by their wages, i.e. to produce money they had not got. The alternative to the 1915 Act would have been for the government to let wages go up to meet increasing rents; instead, the Act restrained wage demands by keeping rents low — and provided also that workers, in Glasgow or anywhere else, were forced to pay them. Braddock appears not to realize that this “blow against landlords”, as he called it in his previous letter, was struck not by the workers but by the government in the wider interests of capitalism.

Second, our reply did not say that the non-payment of rent would enable employers “to reduce wages by that amount”. Wage cuts have not operated for a number of years. What happens nowadays is that pay increases endeavour to keep up with the cost of living, and where part of the cost of living is artificially held down by subsidies or controls the effect is to check the pressure for pay increases. Braddock must have read, of late, that the Labour Party wants the new rent rises postponed for just this reason: that the keeping down of rents is essential to make “an incomes policy” — that is, wage restraint — work.

Last — leaving aside the remarks about Bulgaria, which show more confusion than is possible to deal with in a short reply — Tom Braddock says the contention that the majority of workers in the developed countries must become Socialists or “the struggle can’t succeed” is absurd. It is nothing like as absurd as the urging that what workers should continue with is rent strikes and attempts to reform capitalism. This sort of “struggle” has been going on for more than a century without the workers’ position in society changing; and we are asked to support more of the same thing!

Editorial Committee.

Blogger's Note:

Not sure what happened with the fact checking for the Editorial Committee's reply to Tom Braddock's letter but the article Why Must the Rent Go Up ? actually appeared in the February 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard, not the January issue and Tom Braddock's first reply to that article appeared in the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard, not the July issue.

Letter: The Belgian “Socialist” Party (1972)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received the following from a correspondent in Belgium and reproduce it without necessarily subscribing to viewpoints conveyed in parts of it.

The Belgian Social-Democrats are going through a crisis at the moment. Every election they lose votes to the nationalist parties (Flemish nationalists and Walloon nationalists). The most important reason for the decline of the party is the ideological turn to the right of their leaders. They want to reform the party into a pragmatic “centre-party”, after the example of the “Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands” (SPD).

The Social-Democrat Ministers in the present government are nearly avowedly capitalist. Henri Simonet, theoretician of the right-wing and Minister of Economic Affairs, is a supporter of free trade. He only wants a few reforms, so that the capitalist system works “at its best”. In opposition to his policy are the left-wingers (mainly “Young Socialists”) and the Trade Unions. They want a turn to the left; that means, in their opinions, nationalisation of the basic industries under workers’ control. So in fact they want state capitalism.

The majority of the left wing is in favour of the so-called “revolutionary-reformism”, an idea of the French “Marxist” Andre Gorz. They believe that by struggling for reforms the workers will become socialists. In their opinion the B.S.P., reformed into a new vanguard party, will lead the masses gradually to the “inevitable” socialist revolution.

But among the left-wingers there are a few who are in practice in favour of world socialism. They want to give the workers a socialist consciousness, so that the workers can make their own revolution in future. Of course, those who are in practice for world socialism constitute a very small minority in the left wing. But, most important: there are socialists in Belgium.

In March 1973, an Ideological Congress will be held. There are only two possibilities: either the Congress will be in favour of a “centre-party” which can win the votes of the middle class, or the Congress will be in favour of the nationalisation of basic industry. It’s almost sure the right-wingers will be in the majority. For real socialists it doesn’t make any difference: in practice the party will always support capitalism.

There is only one alternative: to unite all socialists in a new real socialist party; only then the establishment of Socialism will become possible in future.

Dirk Wouters, 

Mechelen, Belgium.

SPGB Meetings (1972)

Party News from the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russia’s Rich Men (1972)

Book Review from the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The End of Inequality? by David Lane.

This is an interesting discussion of “social stratification” in Russia even though Lane dismisses the various theories which say Russia is a class society in the Marxian sense — which for some reason he calls theories of state capitalism even though only one of those he mentions used this term. This does not mean that Lane thinks Russia is a classless society. Far from it. He just thinks Marxian definitions do not apply.

Even so, the first two chapters where Lane points out that Socialism in Marx’s sense could not have been established in Russia after 1917 because of the low level of productivity then prevailing rely heavily on Marxist ideas. Indeed Lane seems to recognise that Socialism is not possible till the means of production can produce abundance, but he does persist in using the misleading phrase “state socialism” to describe Russian society.

The other three chapters are based on the evidence of social research carried out in Russia, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia which reveals that the pattern of status and style-of-life groups (which some sociologists use to define class) in these countries is much the same as in the West.

The one difference, claims Lane, “is the absence of a private propertied class possessing great concentrations of wealth”. Later he speaks of “the elimination of inheritance of substantial wealth”. Now, while it is true that the predominant form of class monopoly in Russia is the ruling class’s collective control over the means of production, it is not true that there are no individually wealthy persons there. Members of the Russian ruling class do have the chance to accumulate — out of high salaries, bonuses, prizes and even fiddles — considerable private fortunes. Lane himself says that the salary of a government Minister is nine times the average wage, and this is not counting various fringe benefits like cars, big houses, holidays and special shops. In Britain this would be an income of about £250 a week (which would be worth more in Russia because of the low rates of income tax there). Some of this is bound to be saved and over the years a large sum, which can be inherited, built up.

In fact this whole field of individual wealth in countries like Russia — its sources, its distribution, where it is invested — is wide open for original research. It is even fair to speculate whether, with the spread of enterprise freedom and the possible success of the Russian civil rights movement, private ownership of wealth rather than political power may not become the predominant form of class privilege in Russia.

Adam Buick

50 Years Ago: Christmas Shopping (1972)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

When November was scarcely half spent, the shops began to make their special displays. Now, as I write, the wares of the world are heaped behind the shining windows. Like so many Aladdin’s caves they will yield their store to him who has the golden key; to all other the frail glass pane is a barrier impassable.

And who are they that can command the best and largest share? Those who took no part in producing it … Alaskan furs, Chinese silks, ivories of Japan, Sheffield cutlery, Spanish, Arabian and Tasmanian fruits, do not create and convey themselves, even at Christmas time. That which shaped, transported and arranged them was your work, and that of your fellows in all corners of the earth.

These goods, and the posters that advertise them, the factories where they were made and the machines within the factories, the engines and ships that carried them here—you made them all. Yet your part in the season’s celebrations is to watch more fortunate folks enjoy them, and feel your own needs more bitterly. You who have distant friends and families—why cannot you visit them? You fathers and mothers of children, do not even their small delights mean the sacrifice of something necessary to yourselves?

There are young men and girls among you who dreamed homes of your own; and this winter finds you further off than ever from your desires.

* * *

If a crowning absurdity was lacking, it is supplied by the presence of multitudes who are not even allowed to work.

(From an article in the Socialist Standard, December 1922, signed “A”)

At Home and Abroad . . . (1972)

The Home and Abroad Column from the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Review September 72

At Home

There are signs that the government is preparing to retreat from its previous entrenched position on wages. If this happens it will need careful handling as far as publicity goes, which may explain the heavy caution with which the recent talks between the unions, employers and the government were treated. When they came into power Heath’s government were quite positive that they had the solution to the economic problems which have plagued British capitalism since the war. The unions, they said, must be brought to heel; in future they would be met head on in any industrial dispute. There would also be a special Act which would in effect weaken the unions’ bargaining powers. At the same time prices would, in some mysterious way which has eluded all other governments, be held in control. The promised result of this would be a steady rise in prosperity for everyone. In fact what the Tories were concerned about, as any capitalist government would be, was basically wages and the level of capital investment in British industry, which were affecting the competitive power of British goods on the world market. Every government since the war has come in with promises to tackle these problems and they have all had apparently simple solutions. Every one has had "new” ideas and policies; Wilson’s government, for example, had the Prices and Incomes Board and the Declaration of Intent from the employers and the unions. Who remembers them now? Every government, faced with the day to day realities of capitalism, has been compelled to change its line and to abandon the programme it put forward at the election, while the problem continued as bad as ever. Heath’s had the brief period of open conflict, as he promised and he has the Industrial Relations Act. Some workers have been gaoled, a union has had a massive fine. But British capitalism could not have carried on for long like that; it makes more sense, economically and politically, for the Tories to change their policy. To repeal the Industrial Relations Act would be too obvious a signal of defeat but there will probably be other signs in the near future of the government’s surrender to the intractability of capitalism’s chaos.

Abroad

Since it has never happened before, the killing of the Israeli Olympic athletes helped foster the idea that we are living in times of special cruelty and disarray, and that guerrilla tactics are something of an innovation. It needs only a little effort to recall many examples of similar tactics, sometimes by small bands of killers and sometimes by larger, more organised groups. If the Arabs showed great courage in their raid, it was not the first time that bravery has been used to murderous ends. Capitalist states are always organising the courage of their peoples in a massive effort of destruction. At such times they use any weapon they can, including that of the ultimatum. The famous demand for unconditional surrender in the last war was no more than a threat to murder and destroy on a savage scale, if the other side did not give way — and it was a threat which the Allies carried out. The men who plan and implement such ultimata are not called terrorists and murderers but there is nothing to choose between them and the men who did the killing at Munich, or indeed those Israeli nationalists who waged so ruthless a guerrilla campaign against British occupation in the years after the war. Capitalism is a mass of conflict, springing from the competing economic interests of many rival groups both national and international. In one way or another, force is always applied in these conflicts and capitalism continually conditions its people to accept the use of force, often of a terrifying scale and intensity. The Arabs at Munich acted as they have been conditioned to. The outcome of violence is never pleasant, whether it is eleven dead bodies at Munich or a hundred thousand at Hiroshima. But if the working class are not clear on the issue, if their ideas on it are confused by the illogicalities and the violence of nationalism, they can have no hope of ending a victory of which bloodshed is so integral a part.

Politics

When the Monday Club meet to protest against the Ugandan Asians, they thunder that the immigrants are being allowed in against the wishes of the people of this country. When Wedgewood Bonn talks about British capitalism’s entry of the Common Market, he whines that the voice of the people should be heard on the issue, in a referendum. We do not need to be too perceptive to realise that concern for a democratic society emerges only when policies are being pushed through which the speaker opposes. Tory M.P. Soref supports a government which, like the one of which Benn was a member, has imposed plenty of measures without asking what the majority of people thought or wanted. Democracy is a word for capitalist politicians to play with and to use if they see advantage in doing so. In fact capitalism cannot be a democratic society; it cannot take its people into its confidence, cannot make all its information freely available, cannot run itself as the majority wants, cannot involve everyone in the decision taking from top to bottom. Soref is no more interested in making available full information about race, about housing, population, social services and so on than Benn is in telling us everything about the economy of capitalism. Democracy needs knowledge and when the working class have that there will be no more capitalism with its irrelevant issues and politicians to exploit them.

Labour's programme for capitalism (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many Labour activists were thoroughly disillusioned by the record of the 1964-70 Wilson government. Some became inactive, others even resigned from the Labour Party, and fewer newcomers were recruited to take their place. This loss of activist support has disturbed the parliamentary leaders of the Party because these are the people they rely on to gather in the votes at election times. Without them the Labour Party is in trouble, but the activists are not going to work hard for the parliamentary leaders unless they are reasonably satisfied with the policy and practice of those leaders. Of this the leaders are fully aware. Which is why soon after their defeat in the June 1970 General Election they took steps to “involve” the Party’s activists in policy-making. What reforms would you like to see Labour make? the activists were asked. Their answers, carefully edited by the Labour leaders, are published in the document Labour's Programme for Britain presented to this year’s Party Conference.

The document begins with the ridiculous claim, “We are a democratic Socialist Party and proud of it,” and goes on to give a familiar list of reforms long-promised by Labour: planning, price controls, pro-union laws, a wealth tax, no health charges, abolition of public schools, more houses, cheap food, etc., etc. Nevertheless it is probably an accurate guide to what the activist wants to see done. Indeed it was the last Labour government’s failure to do many of these things that disillusioned them in the first place.

Accumulation

The leaders are careful not to commit themselves to implementing everything in the document. Some of the reforms, they say, could not be implemented in a five-year term of office, while there may not be enough resources to implement others. The document, they repeatedly emphasise, is merely a list of desirable social reforms; in time for the next general election the leaders will choose which of these reforms are to go into the Party’s manifesto; and a future Labour government will decide, in the light of existing economic circumstances, when (and if) those in the manifesto should be implemented. In other words, as in the past, the Labour leaders are to be given a free hand by their members to run capitalism in the way economic circumstances may dictate.

For, both in theory and practice, the Labour Party has always been fully committed to capitalism. What it stands for is not Socialism, but State control of capitalism. At one time the aim of this State control was said to be the improvement of the conditions of the working class. There are still echoes of this in the document. But actual experience of running capitalism has led to a revision of this aim: it is now the steady and uninterrupted accumulation of capital. This change is nicely illustrated by the complaints in the document about the wasteful consumption of the rich. At one time the suggestion would have been that this would have been better consumed by the workers; now it is that it should have been invested productively.

But both these aims are unrealistic. Capitalism cannot be reformed so as to work in the interest of the workers. Nor can it be planned so as to avoid booms and slumps or stops and gos as they are now called.

Labour v. Workers

Capitalism is an anarchic system subject to its own uncontrollable economic laws. Based on the ownership and control of the means of production by a minority class (the top ten per cent own three-quarters of the wealth of Britain despite four Labour governments, the document admits), the purpose of production is profit and the accumulation of capital out of profit. In order to keep going its products must be continually sold at a profit, in Britain’s case largely on the world market. For capitalism is an international system. The governments of all the various States into which the world is divided find their policies dictated by the workings of international capitalism, not by their own desires to improve living standards or plan growth.

This is what the last Labour government discovered. Elected in October 1964 they had to give immediate priority to a balance of payments crisis caused ultimately by the failure of British exports to sell well enough on the world market. In a bid to restore profitability to British capitalist industry, Labour Ministers were soon calling for wage restraint, seeing Communist agitators behind strikes and denouncing workers for not doing a full day’s work. In 1967 the pound had to be devalued and a legal wage freeze imposed. Anti-union laws were planned.

Re-investment

Reading between the lines of this document, the Labour leaders have learned the lesson of this last Labour government. This time they are not going to try to give priority to desirable social reforms or to increasing working class consumption. Priority is definitely to be given to creating what they themselves describe as an “internationally competitive economy” in Britain.

“The share of Britain’s resources devoted to investment”, they complain, “has been chronically low by international comparison”. They promise to remedy this. To keep industrial costs in Britain down they will aim to increase the re-investment of profits in new, more efficient productive equipment. For this they are prepared to allow British capitalist firms to make sufficient profits and to restrain (voluntarily of course) workers from gaining too large a share of these profits in the form of wage increases. Their policy is to be that the maximum amount of profit should be re-invested productively and not wasted in property speculation or in consumption by the idle rich—or by the workers. And, thanks to planning, a conflict between wages and profits is supposedly to be avoided:

Labour believes that there is scope in an expanding economy for rising money wages and, too, that rising wages and expanding profits for re-investment can co-exist.

Maybe in an expanding economy, but only for a while. For sooner or later the expansion phase of the business cycle will inevitably give way to the contraction phase, and what then? Wage restraint? Cuts in working-class consumption in order to restore profitability? This possibility is provided for too, for those who read the document carefully. Says an important reservation:

There will be times when any Government will need to take interim measures to regulate the purchasing power of consumers.

Which suggests that the Labour leaders themselves are not too confident about their ability to plan “sustained economic expansion”, “steady economic development”, “uninterrupted industrial expansion”, balanced economic development”, to record a few of the phrases they use to describe their utopia of permanent capitalist prosperity.

Prices & Profits

The second aspect of their policy for making Britain an “internationally competitive economy” (which, we repeat, must be their priority, not that after their experience between 1964 and 1970 they now bother to deny this) is yet another “attack” on “the scourge of inflation” because, the document explains, “if inflation is higher in Britain than elsewhere, our exports lose their ability to compete in foreign markets”. Labour is going to “attack” inflation not at its source—but one of its effects, rising prices. There will be, they promise, severe and legally enforced price restraint. Maybe, but not for long. For the effect of this, if rigidly enforced (which it won’t be of course, and for this very reason), would be to reduce profits. Since with the oversupply of money continuing so would the inflationary pressures. In these circumstances legal price restraint will be a miserable failure and, we predict, soon abandoned. Actually, here again the Labour leaders recognise that price restraint would threaten profits and so conflict with their other aim of encouraging productive investment:

In those cases where key prices have to be held down to a level which does not provide a level of profit adequate for re-investment, we shall consider the possibility of government investment to meet a firm’s capital needs.

Food prices are to be subsidised, as they were in the first post-war Labour government, in order to keep wages down.

Cartoon by Barltrop.

Futile Reform

Housing is one field in which the futility of legal price controls as a means of improving working class living standards has been demonstrated. For the effect of years of rent control was to make investment in private housing for letting relatively unprofitable. Investors tended to avoid this field and landlords to let their houses decay. The result was a worsening of housing conditions for many workers. Eventually Labour recognised this and allowed landlords to make bigger profits under their so-called fair rents legislation (Labour now gives the impression that this is a Tory scheme, but all the Tories have done is to extend it from private to council houses). At the same time they provided for landlords to be given grants to “improve” their property, the intention being to overcome the deterioration in housing conditions caused by rent control.

Landlords have certainly been taking up these grants, but not with a view to improving the housing of the poor. What many of them have been doing is to buy up this kind of housing, “improve” it and then or sell or let it to the better-off. The document complains about this:

There is evidence, however, that although the take-up rate for such grants is increasing, they are being used to a disquieting extent by property companies, converting and improving houses to sell at an unreasonable profit. They are also greatly used by people who are already well housed, but wish to improve a weekend cottage.

So capitalism has made a mockery of yet another of Labour’s reforms! As we have always said, reforming capitalism is ultimately futile as no sooner is one reform made than another is needed, as often as not as a result of the previous one.

Disillusioned Optimists

But trying to reform capitalism so as to benefit the working class is at best all Labour’s policy has ever amounted to. And it’s a futile policy since it seeks to do the impossible: make capitalism work against its own economic logic of production for profit and the profit-makers. Capitalism is a class system and can only function as a class system in the interest of the minority that owns and controls the means of production. Any Party that takes on the administration of capitalism, as Labour has done on four occasions so far and seeks to again, must sooner or later come into conflict with the interest of the working class whose consumption it must restrict in the interests of profitability. This has happened to every previous Labour government and will happen to any future ones.

Labour’s present activists must be a gullible lot if they believe their leaders’ promise that the next Labour government will somehow be different. But then it’s because they think there is some hope in the Labour Party that they are members. Which means they are due to be disillusioned yet again.

Adam Buick

The ABC of Inflation (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party and the Tory Party accuse each other of being responsible for the continuing rise of prices, but there is absolutely nothing to choose between the records of the two parties. Measured by the government’s own Retail Price Indexes, the Labour government 1945-51 scored a 28 per cent rise and the Labour government 1964-70 another 30 per cent (of the 1964 level); while the Tories marked up 50 per cent between 1951 and 1964 and another 17 per cent (of the 1970 level) between 1970 and June 1972. Added to the 32 per cent rise recorded between 1939 and 1945 under the National government (admitted to be an understatement), the present price level is at least four times what it was before the war.

In 1944 the three parties—Tory, Labour and Liberal—in the National government committed themselves to do what they could after the war “to stabilise prices”, and at each of the eight general elections Labour and Tories both repeated the promise —and it hasn’t meant a thing.

Individual prices can rise (or fall) for several different reasons. Good harvests will reduce prices and bad harvests will raise them. Booming trade increases demand and sends prices up, bad trade will send them down again. Even against the present trend of rising prices metal prices fell heavily last year as demand slackened off—the price of copper fell by 40 per cent. Improved methods of production, by reducing the amount of labour required, will operate to lower prices, while the exhaustion of easily accessible seams of mineral ores (coal and metals) will operate the other way because mining at greater depths or in less rich seams requires more labour to produce each ton.

During the nineteenth century when all of these price factors operated the general price levels in Britain went up in some periods and down in others, or remained nearly stationary, but the extent of the movement up and down was always within a range of about 25 per cent either way—nothing like the 300 per cent added since September 1939. Wages also rose and fell during the nineteenth century; sometimes in line with the movement of prices, sometimes by more or less, and occasionally wages moved in the opposite direction to prices.

Fallacies         

All sorts of explanations have been offered for the abnormal rise of prices since 1939 as compared with the up-and-down movements of prices in the nineteenth century. Most of the so-called explanations take the form of blaming some group or other for being “greedy”; bankers, or manufacturers, or retailers or trade unionists. It is an explanation that a glance at certain facts will show to be nonsense. Did the copper companies reduce their prices by 40 per cent in 1971 because they had suddenly become less greedy? Between 1948 and 1968 prices rose by 100 per cent in Britain, but only by half that amount in America and Switzerland: are the British twice as greedy? In the nineteenth century did the whole population go through alternating phases of being more greedy and less greedy? Between the end of 1920 and the middle of 1933 prices fell by over 50 per cent. The fall was continuous for thirteen years. What had happened to greed?

The fact is that sellers always try to get as big a price as they can, “as much as the market will bear”, and if they can get more or are forced to take less it is because external circumstances over which they have little or no control determine that it shall be so.

Two popular beliefs are that prices go up because wages go up, or vice versa. It does not occur to those who hold one or the other view that wages are prices—the price the worker gets for the sale of his labour-power, his mental and physical energies, to the employer. So, properly stated, their two propositions become the single useless assertion that prices go up because prices go up.

If they re-stated it in the form that one group of prices (wages) go up because the other group of prices go up—or vice versa—they overlook the truth that both groups of prices go up because of common external factors which affect both of them, more or less to the same extent. To illustrate this we can note that in summers when more Londoners visit the country the harvests are good. Nobody asks whether it is the London visitors who make the corn ripen, or whether it is the ripened corn which attracts the visitors. It just happens that a long hot summer both produces the good harvest and attracts visitors to the country — the sun is the common cause of both.

Paper & Prices

The new factor which has operated to push up prices abnormally since the war—the “sun” in relation to prices and wages—has been the continuous and accelerating “depreciation of the currency”. In the nineteenth century the amount of notes and coin in circulation was controlled by the device, enforced by law, that the pound sterling was a fixed weight (about a quarter of an ounce) of gold, and Bank of England notes were always convertible on demand into the corresponding weight of gold. Nowadays the pound is an inconvertible paper currency and enormous additional amounts have been printed and put into circulation. In 1939 the total of notes and coin in the hands of the public was £454 million. It is now over £3,500 million and rising steadily, an amount far in excess of whatever increase would have been necessary in line with the actual increase in production and sales of goods.

Karl Marx, whose study of the subject has never been rivalled, enunciated the economic law in the form that if the amount of inconvertible paper currency exceeds the amount of gold that would be needed if gold coins circulated, the excess simply operates to push up prices. Before Keynesian doctrines were swallowed by most of the modern economists and politicians, this relationship between excess issues of inconvertible notes and the price level was generally accepted by economists (including Keynes). In 1919 the government deliberately put a stop to the issue of additional notes and this played a large part in the subsequent fall of prices. Now the political parties and the trade unions have deceived themselves, against all past experience, into the belief that what they call increasing “money supply” leads to greater production and the maintenance of “full employment”.

Facing Facts

Not quite all of the economists and financial authorities have swallowed the “new economics”. One exception is the First National City Bank of New York which, in its Monthly Bulletin for January 1970, ridiculed the notion that rising prices are due to greed or to the wage demands of trade unions :

“Most of the blame for inflation is misplaced. For although inflation has a hundred faces, it has but one essential cause : overly expansive and erratic monetary policy that has pushed up the quantity of money more swiftly than the quantity of goods and services.”        

Governments, even if they perceived the truth of this, are afraid to repeat the restrictive policy applied in 1919 because they think it might lead to a big depression and much heavier unemployment. The economist Lord Robbins, speaking in the House of Lords on 5th July, said:

“I know of no case in history where inflation of the order of magnitude of that from which we are now suffering has been stopped by measures of this sort without that sort of effect.”

The government’s view, according to Patrick Jenkin, Chief Secretary of the Treasury, is that while curbing the money supply would affect prices it would do so only after a considerable time lag: –  “The immediate effect would be increased unemployment and reduced output. As a solution, it was politically, wholly unacceptable”. (Financial Times 17 July)

They, Lord Robbins and Jenkin, are equally afraid that continued and accelerating depreciation of the currency may end with the kind of monetary collapse that Germany experienced between the wars.

Most workers believe that if only prices came down or were at least stabilised their chief troubles would be over. They should remember that while it is true that at present hundreds of thousands of workers cannot afford to buy a house on mortgage, exactly the same was true between the wars when prices of houses and prices in general (and wages) were only a fraction of what they are now. For the workers capitalism means hardship whether prices are high or low or falling or rising.

Edgar Hardcastle

Does class still count? (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the years following the second world war it was widely said that “the old class barriers'’ were being broken down. England, characterised as the most class-ridden country in the world, had at last given up its forelock-touching, its obsession with accents, its one-law-for-the-rich-and-one-for-the-poor, thank you kindly ma’am, and the rest. Marghanita Laski’s novel The Village, published in 1951, showed the breakdown of tradition-based assumptions of social superiority in a small community: gentility and “background” gagging on the discovery of their small weight in the modern world. The class assumptions were those of pre-war Punch and West-End stage jokes, in which low incomes meant male illiteracy and female idiocy, and a servile manner was de rigueur from both.

In those terms, it was commonplace also that relatively few people admitted to being working-class. The usual term was “lower middle class”. What strata lay above this mass has always been indistinct—whether there existed a central middle class to which this was the aspiring lower fringe and another the cake-icing, as it were, or whether the middle class was a two-layer affair of uppers and lowers only. But whatever the boundaries, the array of qualifications was formidable: the school one went to, one’s dress and speech, family connections, tastes and, of course, income. And these things, we were told, were fast losing their significance in the nineteen-fifties. Social progress and humane legislation had equalised us all, making Jack as good as his master and privilege an archaism.

Superior & Inferior

Talking of “class” like that does not mean class at all. What is meant is social groupings imbued with the idea of places in a hierarchy. Viewed from the top, they are simply a question of degrees of extravagance. Veblin in his Theory of the Leisure Class dwelt on fox-hunting as the acme of “conspicuous wasteful consumption”, an incredibly expensive and incompetent—but ostentatious—way of doing what a chicken-farmer achieves better with a shotgun: and the ability to afford it makes its own social demarcation. The same applies to the public schooling and the domestic splendour, down to the details of personal appearance and manner. Nobody who has read Daphne Du Maurier’s snob-romance Rebecca is likely to forget the description of the cad: the kind of man who did not wear a hat and who would appeal only to “girls who gave one programmes in a cinema”.

From below, the groupings are stages in presumed rising-above the familiar deprivations and humiliations of working-class life. The person who has escaped from run-down housing to a suburb with trees, become a car-owner and seen his children “doing well”, is strongly persuaded to think of it as superiority. Those left behind in seedy surroundings and dismal jobs, condemned to having their noses rubbed in the worst of capitalism’s dirt, are all in a boat he has got out of: and what he now has, he’ll hold. On the other side there are people with more advantages — better houses, bigger cars, ampler displays of status — who look down on him. Called “class distinction”, these are the views from different rungs of the ladder.

Welfare Culture

What was implied, then, in the claim to break down class barriers was the ending of inequalities between social groups. The biggest factor ironing-out the differences was held to be the Welfare State. Not only need no-one be thrown into destitution by sickness or unemployment; medical attention was available to all according to need, and such stigmas as the pauper funeral were abolished. The extension of the school-leaving age and the accessibility of grants for further education were parts of the same process. “Equality of opportunity” was the watchword.

But besides these legislative steamrollers, equality was claimed to be spreading through society from the sheer diffusion of commodities. In money terms the television set in working-class homes was less of a luxury than what it replaced, the family piano; but in cultural terms, the same programmes went into the houses of rich and poor alike. Newspapers, car travel, labour-saving domestic appliances were all seen as having the same equalising tendency. Even holidays abroad, once the exclusive prerogative of the very well-to-do, were now available to working people. “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate” had vanished as social symbols. Instead, both were believed to be seated in front of television sets, reading the same continental holiday brochures through National Health spectacles.

New Labels

If any of this had been true, a silent social revolution should have taken place in the past twenty years. What has happened? In fact, the crude semi-feudal tokens of privilege whose disappearance was being celebrated have been replaced by a complex of social groupings and distinctions. “Class” is as pervasive as ever.

The redevelopment of towns has, if anything, intensified their stratification. Any large city is, socially, a series of islands on which people live among their acknowledged kinds — white-collars, labouring population, art-and-craft, high prosperity, etc.: the next island may be only up the road, but it is a foreign land whose children may not play with one’s own. The growth of council-house estates and owner-occupation, to say nothing of immigrant districts, has multiplied the islands. Likewise in rural areas the two layers of village life, gentry and farmworkers, have given way to the varied social self-valuations of commuters, directors and retired shopkeepers. It is commonly complained in the country that these new populations from town ‘‘don’t mix”; that is, they bring with them their own social-group palisades.

The idea of amenities as an equalitarian force is part of the old Fabian nonsense. In the early nineteen- twenties H. G. Wells informed Lenin and Trotsky that electric power would achieve more than the class struggle (“What a little bourgeois”, Lenin is supposed to have said afterwards). However, the divisive effects of piped and purchased amenities have grown as fast as they have spread. Every car carries its social label, the make and age connoting the owner’s income and status. The Fabians’ picture of ‘‘gas-and-water socialism” did not include House and Garden showing impossibly opulent kitchens and the Florentine statuary in Sir Wiliam’s loo. As for holidays abroad, "package” has become almost a contemptuous term implying bone-pared schedules of cheap hotels and sweaty droves pressed between famous buildings and souvenir shops. If a modern Robin Hood took that from the rich to give to the poor, he died laughing.

Dole, School, Colour

The Welfare State has, notoriously, gone sour on those who idealised it —not least in its promise to dissolve have-and-have-not differences. In general, what is provided by the State is the barest and most minimal; better has to be paid for, by those who can. The inevitable outcome has been the growth of private insurance schemes catering for the sizeable section who can’t quite afford to be cash patients but may, on an actuarial basis, keep their feet out of the water in which the poorest swim. In the everyday administration of “welfare”, the rise of the Claimants’ Unions owes directly to social-group attitudes to the Social Security system. So far from seeing themselves as part of the will of the community, officials have taken their task as a defensive action against undeserving layabouts and would-be tricksters. Indeed, the Welfare State has produced a saloon-bar mythology nearly as profuse as that of race. Its favourite character, heard-of everywhere, is the man who chooses unemployment because it pays him better: no-one seems to ask what appalling wage he gets in work, then.

The hope of educational equality has gone the same way. The replacement of selective separate schools by comprehensive ones was hailed as a great levelling movement: few people can have noticed that comprehensive education was called “true selection” in the 1958 Labour Party document on the subject. Apart from the grading principle on which comprehensive education is based, the schools themselves have quickly acquired their own status to be sought-after or not: the case of Holland Park as the “superior” comp is now being reproduced again and again. Nor does the admission of working-class boys and girls to universities go far to diminish the differences. Last month E. R. Braithwaite, the black West Indian writer, described on television his days at an English university where all students were equal before the subject at study — and his discovery later that this did not make them equal before the world.

Race has been one other field round which social groups have formed themselves. It is curious how the issue is always made that of colour when it is patently class. Anyone who doubts that should try fitting everything now said about coloured immigrants over what used to be said about the so-called lumpenproletariat — the poorest, most deprived sections of the working class — any time up to 1939. The fit is exact. Of inferior intelligence; lazy (of course); dirty; and disposed to violent crime. Moreover, they have huge families (living like animals), have rowdy parties every night, eat smelly food, and would ruin a decent neighbourhood if they were allowed in it. Enoch Powell might be interested to know that his story of excrement pushed through the letter-box was first heard by the writer from an industrial housing estate, all white, over twenty years ago.

Class and Capitalism

What is class, then, that will not be eradicated? The numerous groupings and divisions which persist and re-form continually in our society are, as has been said, not classes though they call themselves so. Classes are categories deriving from the basic organisation of society. If one looks at capitalism for its organic structure, there are two classes only: those who live by owning the means of production and distribution, and those who don’t. The position of the former is obvious enough. For the latter, the position would be also easy to see if it were not obscured — for many — by semantics and humbug. It is one of dependence on being employed and paid a wage. Regardless of accent, colour, education and high or low income, nine-tenths of the population everywhere are in this situation.

The supposed other classes are not sub-sections within that division. They are reflections of it, demonstrations of the way capitalism sets man against man. The fact that people are always hoping to get rid of these “class barriers”, and short-lived successes in doing so are claimed, shows their fluidity while the single great division remains. They are fluid because no-one is secure who depends on a wage. Last year publicity was given to the troubles of out-of-work executives. One, in a television programme, spoke angrily of the treatment at the Social Security office: if the clerk had not been a woman, he said, he would have smashed her face in. On the scrap-heap, the pretences of class are exchanged for the realities.

What is Classless Society?

One thing which is clear about “class” is that nobody likes it. Many people take it to be inevitable, but live in hopes of some lucky break which will take them to another rung of the ladder where, it is thought, things would be different. Everyone talks of “getting out of the rat race”.

When the phrase “classless society” is used, it usually means the absence of unfairness and inequality among social groups. What must be seen is that these problems derive from and exist because of capitalism’s division into owners and non-owners. The classless society is one in which the means of living have become common property. Given that, the basis for any assumption of social superiority from race, sex or possessions disappears. The first step to making such a society, however, is for all those dependent on wages to recognise this as the only true factor of their class position now. "Class-consciousness” is commonly a term for snobbery. Correctly, it means understanding of the fact that everyone who has to work is — working-class.

Robert Barltrop

Some Definitions (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

CAPITALISM is the sort of society you live in now. It is a system of wage-slavery in which a small minority owns most of the world, and (sometimes) employ the rest of us. In capitalism, most things are sold for a price—production is for profit rather than for use. The world is divided up by frontiers into warring factions known as “nations.” Symptoms of capitalism include war, hunger, boom-slump cycles, strikes, widespread loneliness and despair. 

Countries like Russia or China, whose governments claim to be “Socialist”, are of course capitalist like their western rivals.

COMMUNES (kibbutzim etc.) are attempts by a few to get some shelter from the capitalist rat race. Whilst they may benefit their members, from the standpoint of abolishing capitalism they are a waste of time. Socialism in one country is not possible, let alone Socialism in one farm. Socialism could, however, be described as a world-wide commune.

HUMAN NATURE is a most frequent objection to the idea of a Socialist society. It is supposed that human beings have some fixed patterns of social behaviour which are especially conducive to capitalism. In fact, what is normally termed “human nature” is the result of social conditioning. Private property, leadership, aggressiveness, monogamy, etc. are no more congenial to human beings than alternative forms. A knowledge of different societies, historically and geographically, is sufficient to knock the human nature myth on the head.

LABOUR PARTY is often called “Socialist” but in fact never has been. The Labour Party was formed to improve the conditions of workers by reforms within capitalism. It sought gradually to change capitalism; instead capitalism has gradually changed it. The Labour Party is now no more than an alternative team for the management of British capitalism.

PATRIOTISM is unscientific and runs counter to the interests of working-people. It is therefore opposed by Socialists, who do not offer “policies for Britain” etc, but demand a world community without frontiers.

POPULATION EXPLOSION is certainly a reality, but it is a myth that it is responsible for hunger, pollution or overcrowded living. The world can easily support many times its present population in comfort and plenty of room. Hysterical Malthusianism diverts attention from the real problem: production is geared to the market, rather than to the satisfaction of human needs.

REFORMS are basically attempts to solve problems within capitalism rather than by doing away with it. Capitalism never runs out of reforms. Socialists are not opposed to all reforms, but we don’t think it is our job to propose them or campaign for them. Reforms are usually of negligible value to the working-class, and often create new problems which require further reforms. Fundamental social problems are always untouched because these are rooted in capitalism.

RELIGION is opposed by all rational people, but especially by Socialists who see it as compensation for social misery, and a diversion from the urgent problems of the real world. Happily, religion is steadily ebbing away in the most advanced areas of capitalism.

REVOLUTION is the process of changing from one social system to another. It is not necessarily a matter of barricades and bloodbaths, but in the case of the Socialist revolution, requires mainly mass understanding and democratic organisation. It is part of the job of Socialists to hasten this revolution by spreading Socialist understanding.

SOCIALISM is the next stage in human social evolution—unless capitalism destroys us first by means of nuclear/chemical-biological war. or ecological collapse. Socialism will mean the abolition of private property, money and the wages system; the introduction of voluntary work and free access to necessary goods and services. Socialism is a world-wide society of voluntary co-operation. It will put an end to wars, poverty and unemployment, enabling our species to concentrate on less serious problems.

The Cynicism of Capitalism: 1. Come and exploit our Africans (1972)

From the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has always made clear that nationalism, whether in Africa, Israel, Ireland or wherever, is a snare and a delusion for the working class of the country concerned. National independence may well be a good thing for the native capitalist class who are naturally concerned at seeing the fruits of the exploitation of the local working class going into the pockets of the British Imperialists or whoever the alien ruling class might be. But for workers to risk imprisonment or even death in a struggle for independence which will ensure for them nothing more than the joy of being exploited by their very own capitalists instead of foreign ones is clearly the height of folly.

A rather lurid light on this subject has recently been displayed in an advertisement in The Guardian by the Nigerian Government:

People are earning

HUGE PROFITS

in Nigeria


Huge domestic market of 55 millions


Abundant manpower is available at a rate
as low as 7 U.S. cents an hour.

You can get your investment back in
less than 3 years.

It should be pointed out that the words Huge Profits are printed in gigantic capitals in the advert, and are repeated at the end — People are earning huge profits in Nigeria: why don’t YOU ! The word “people” is itself a misleading term beloved of capitalist propagandists. It made nice capital, for example, when Nigeria was part of the British Empire, for the national capitalists to appeal to the Nigerian workers: People of Nigeria, fight to throw out the British Imperialist Exploiters. But nobody can be deceived by the present rallying-cry in the advert. The “people” who are “earning” these huge profits are not the African workers. They are earning something less. 7 cents an hour, in fact.

So the Nigerian government is setting out to get British capitalists to come and exploit African workers. Which means, of course, that a lot of these workers are going to find themselves in the ironical position of once again being exploited by the same white capitalists from whom they had fought and won their alleged independence. It is not sure, what with devaluations of the pound and revaluations of the dollar, exactly what 7 cents is worth these days but a tanner (two-and-a-half new pence to younger readers) would be somewhere near it. “In less than three years” gives an effective rate of exploitation to show a net return on capital of between 30 and 40 per cent, per annum. That’s really mouth-watering exploitation — far better than you would find in England or America. Or far worse, of course. Depending on whether you are a worker or a capitalist. That makes all the difference. Black or white clearly makes none.

Naked and unashamed, the Nigerian capitalists are boasting to Guardian readers (those poor devils who are fed each day on a diet of anti-racialism as though that were the only cause that mattered and anti-South-Africanism as though the natives of that unhappy land were living on even less than a tanner an hour) about what shockingly low wages they are getting away with. These are the people that the other people, the Nigerian workers, have put in power. “Come and exploit our blacks. They are the cheapest wage-slaves you can get.” We are not saying that the wage-slaves were better off under British rule. It is clear that they could hardly have been worse off. Even the worst capitalists must pay wages sufficient to live on. And they could hardly live on less than 7 miserable U.S. cents. And it is doubtful if such brutally cynical advertising would have happened. British capitalists are a bit too sophisticated to advertise “Our workers are paid less than other wage-slaves”. It certainly adds insult to injury to know that your exploiters are actually boasting about your slavery in the columns of the world’s leading do-gooder paper, god help us.

One wonders what that old do-gooder, the Labour peer Lord Fenner Brockway, thinks of the result of his efforts on behalf of African nationalism. No-one was more scathing in days gone by about the Socialist Party’s contention that nationalism was nothing to do with Socialism and was a trap for the working class. Brockway and the other leading Labourites of those days were all great friends of people like Nkrumah, Banda and Kenyatta. All of whom, when in power, have treated the African workers to an adaptation of the Biblical phrase: the British rules you with whips, we will rule you with scorpions. Which of course did not stop Brockway and other lefties from supporting people like Nkrumah who could fairly be described as Black Hitlers in the making (and the last little phrase would be omitted by the victims of the Nkrumah dictatorship which Brockway upheld).

Only a couple of years ago, the Nigerian government which had achieved independence had a spot of bother. It seems that some of their fellow black capitalists who lived in a part of the country they called Biafra wanted independence from their own black capitalist brothers. There was a lot of oil in the Port Harcourt area where they came from and they didn’t see why they should share the swag with the other black capitalists in Lagos. So there was another little fracas which resulted in hundreds of thousands of Africans, Nigerians and Biafran workers and their wives and children, being caught in a most murderous bloodbath or starved to death. But it seems that this was independence that the Labourites didn’t approve of. You see, these were the days of the Wilson government, and the fake socialists who were then managing British capitalism preferred to pay ball with the Nigerian government because this was in the interests of British Business (as a searing article in, of all places, The Guardian made clear when it was all over). And now that Nigerian independence has been finally won and defended against black and white alike, the net result of all the suffering and carnage is that African workers get a tanner an hour.

L. E. Weidberg