Sting in the Tail: The common factor (1994)

The Sting in the Tail column from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The common factor

Following the Estonia tragedy:

"Swedish and Finnish ferry lines admitted hushing-up six serious incidents which preceded the Estonia’s sinking ” (Teletext 30 September).

These roll-on roll-off ferries are liable to capsize when even a relatively small amount of water enters the vehicle decks, yet Alan Clark, ex-Tory MP, said on Question Time (29 September) that marine architects can quite easily design ships which prevent this, but, with touching concern for human life asked “would this really be worth all the expense and inconvenience?”

And this is what it is all about:

“The economic reason why vehicle decks are not subdivided to prevent rapid capsize is that this would obstruct bailing, increase turnaround times and reduce the number of cars or lorries a ship should carry. That would mean higher fares, lower profits, or both — and at a time, so far as British operators are concerned, when ferries are facing fresh competition from the Channel tunnel” (Guardian 24 September).

Every disaster which comes along, be it Piper Alpha, the King's Cross Underground fire, the train crash at Clapham Junction or the Herald of Free Enterprise, provides evidence aplenty that capitalism’s remorseless drive to cut costs at the expense of safety is the prime cause of them all.

Healthy profits

Today’s economic climate has seen many employers cut the wages and conditions and increase the workload of their employees.

This often leads to the deterioration of the physical and mental health of the workers involved, but some other employers recognise that this approach is counter-productive and are concerned to protect and even improve the health and well-being of their employees.

Companies such as Grand Met, Glaxo. Sainsbury, Marks and Spencer, IBM and Nestle are participating in the Wellness Forum which promotes preventative health care by health screening along with weight control, anti-smoking and anti-alcohol abuse programmes.

There are sound commercial reasons behind this. A spokesman for the Institute of Personnel and Development told the Independent:

“Employers in their own interests have got to maximise the use of people at work as far as they can. Absenteeism is very expensive ” (9 September).

This absenteeism is estimated by the CBI to cost £13 billion a year, and the Independent adds that the Forum has “a belief in the correlation between a healthy workforce and healthy profits”.

Looking after the goose that lays the golden eggs always made more sense than killing it.

YC’s get KO’d

A new book True Blues, claims that Tory Party membership has slumped from 2.8 million in 1952 to below 500,000 now and is still falling.

Feeling better? Well, there’s more good news, because the Young Conservatives are set for the chop. And no wonder. Having been taken over by the “radical right” in much the same way as Labour's youth wing was by Trotskyists, the YC’s have long been a thorn in the side of the parent party.

There were well-publicised links with the BNP and other racists groups, support for apartheid, jokes about the Holocaust, vicious faction fighting and lots of hooliganism From a peak of 100,000 membership has plunged to around 5,000, so Tory Central Office probably reckons that what’s left isn’t worth the hassle.

A Tory' youth organisation may well continue to exist in one form or another, but the heady days when the YC’s seemed to consist of youngsters all desperately trying to outdo one another in sounding more reactionary and bloodthirsty, are probably over for good.

Heller’s history

Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, published in 1962, was a brilliant and hilarious account of the corruption and insanity of capitalism set against the background of World War Two.

The long-awaited sequel is now ready, so Sally Vincent travelled to interview Heller, and her account of their meeting appeared in Weekend Guardian (24 September).

Heller’s perception of capitalism has not dimmed. According to Sally Vincent he thinks:

“We can produce enough food to feed the world, hut simultaneously can V because there's no profit producing enough food. ”

And he apparently thinks that “Marx was right”, although about what he didn't say, but his perception leaves him when it comes to interpreting history which he thinks is “autonomous and proceeds independently of the people who make it.”

Marx took a very different view: 

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. ” 

As a novelist, Heller takes some beating, but when it comes to explaining history then it has to be Marx.

Doubting Thomas

The sacking of the Sussex vicar Anthony Freeman for revealing that he doesn’t believe in God highlights the problem facing many of these sky pilots.

Take the example of an anonymous Church of Scotland minister, whose dilemma was reported in Scotland on Sunday (14 August):

“Thomas does not believe in God. There was no virgin birth, no resurrection, Jesus was a mere inspirational mortal like Ghandi and there is, most sadly, no life after death. The last bit gets tricky, for he must pretend to believe in some kind of afterlife to soothe many of the pensioners he talks to each Sunday from the pulpit. "

All workers must sell their ability to work for a wage or salary, and these professional holy men are no different. Here is what our reverend gentleman has to say about it:

“To be honest, I've got a family to feed and a career and a pension to think about. I don't think I should put my job on the line just for the sake of discussion of some arcane beliefs and ideas that probably don't really matter anyway. ”

Blogger's Notes: 

• Joseph Heller's Catch-22 was reviewed in the November 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard.
• The King's Cross Underground fire was covered in the March 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard.
• The Piper Alpha disaster was covered in the August 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Capitalist agriculture . . . the profits of doom (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since Malthus, population growth has been the subject of heated controversy. By and large, disputants in the debate have tended to polarise into two camps.

For the Neo-Malthusian pessimists there is no prospect of an end to world hunger while population growth continues, indeed it could well increase as the latter begins to exceed — and thereby undermine — the carrying capacity of the land.

Then there are the Technological Optimists. For them, the concept of a “carrying capacity” is problematic; it is not something that is fixed but can be enlarged by human effort and ingenuity. Indeed, Ester Boserup has argued in her book The Conditions of Agricultural Growth that population pressure, far from being a harbinger of doom, is a prime stimulus to technological change. Thus, extensive farming practices, which become subject to diminishing returns, are abandoned and more intensive forms of land use are introduced, resulting in an increased “carrying capacity”. In fact, some of the wealthiest parts of the world — like Western Europe — are also amongst the most densely populated.

Where do Socialists stand in this debate? At first glance, we appear to side with the technological optimists in asserting that the world is not overpopulated. We base this claim on an empirical analysis of the relationship between global food demand and the global capacity to satisfy that demand. This suggests that the world could adequately feed its population. According to the World Bank in its 1986 Report Poverty and Hunger: Issues and Options for Food Security in Developing Countries, enough grain is already produced to provide everyone with 3,600 calorics per day, well above the recommended 2,400 calories for an adequate diet — though, much of this, it should be said, is (inefficiently) used to feed livestock.

The prevalence in hunger does not arise from any shortfall in agricultural potential but from the operation of economic factors which impede full realisation of this potential for the benefit of all. The objective of capitalist production is not primarily to meet human needs. Instead, human needs are only met to the extent that these are backed up by purchasing power. That is why vast quantities of food are destroyed and why farmers are paid not to produce, while millions starve because they lack the means to buy or grow food. In short, the much-vaunted productivity of capitalism has now reached the point of open and irreconcilable conflict with its social relations of production, its mode of distribution.

There is a further point on which we part company with many technological optimists. This concerns the nature of technology itself. This is not independent of, but is profoundly conditioned by, the social relations of production. In this regard we share the concern of many environmentalists about the impact of modem capitalist agriculture on the environment. It is conceivable that this, rather then pressure of population, may ultimately precipitate the doomsday scenario. Unless, that is, a socialist transformation of society — and thus of its productive methods — can intervene first.

Not neutral

Technological innovation does not occur in a vacuum; it has socioeconomic consequences in a capitalist economy which benefit some but often at the expense of others. An example is the Green Revolution initiated in the 1950s 

This represented a major incursion of an industrialised mode of fanning into Third World countries. Based on the introduction of new high yielding varieties (HYVs) of cereal crops, it sought to increase the productivity of local agriculture. However, this required the application of a whole package of inputs, around which HYVs were specifically designed having in mind, the interests of multinational conglomerates supplying such inputs. This absence of any one of these inputs meant that the expected gains in productivity would not be realised, and HYVs would tend to perform poorly compared with traditional crops. Thus, without irrigation, nutrient uptake would be much reduced, without pesticides, the very inputs, such as chemical fertilisers, that promote crop growth, will encourage a proliferation of weeds, and so on.

It is this in-built complementarity of inputs, not just the costs of individual inputs, which explains why it is mainly richer farmers, particularly in Asia and Latin America, who have benefited from “Green Revolution” technology, accentuating the process of land concentration in these countries at the expense of poorer farmers. It raises the critical threshold at which farmers are able to afford, and make effective use, of such technology.

But what of the long-term productivity of an industrial mode of fanning promoted by capitalism, i.e. its sustainability? To increase output, more land could be cultivated. However, much of this uncultivated land is ecologically marginal and would be highly vulnerable under capitalist industrial farming. Alternatively, cultivated land could be made more productive. Since the 1950s, rapid increases in output — faster than population growth except in Africa — have been based upon increasing applications of four major non-land inputs: artificial fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation and mechanisation. However, there are now growing doubts about the wisdom of such an approach. Since the 1970s, there has been a levelling-off of per capita output.

According to J. Harris in World Agriculture and the Environment, these earlier increases were made possible because they occurred in a world not yet heavily damaged by soil erosion. But today, the current annual rate of topsoil loss — 25 billion tonnes — is such that the world can expect to lose 50 percent of its topsoil by 2050. Since there is a strong correlation between topsoil depth and crop yields, this is an alarming development for the future of fanning.

Soil erosion

Applying yet more fertilisers to compensate for the loss of soil fertility will not solve the problem in long run. Indeed, US agriculture today uses five times more fertiliser than in 1947 to produce the same amount of crop, but it is not clear whether this growing demand for fertilisers — particular phosphates — can be indefinitely met. There are also many minor nutrients and trace elements, lost through harvesting, which are not being replaced by industrial fanning, but which may be essential to long-term maintenance of yields. Furthermore, excessive applications of fertilisers actually exacerbate the problem of erosion by facilitating a breakdown in soil structure — both directly, through its effect on soil chemistry and, indirectly, by allowing farmers to dispense with organic recycling, leading to a decline in humus content which binds the soil together and helps it to hold water and oxygen essential for plant growth.

A similarly worry emerges in the case of other major agricultural inputs. The narrowing down of the genetic basis of farming, typified by HYVs, and the simplification of the agro-ecological landscape associated with market-oriented monocultures, has created ideal conditions for the spread of pests. To counter this threat, chemical pesticides have been applied on an increasing scale. However, it is often the natural predators of pests which are more severely affected by this than the pests themselves which, because of their larger populations, are more easily able to develop mutations giving them resistance to pesticides. This in turn, tempts farmers to apply more frequent, and stronger, doses, but the evidence suggests that, as with artificial fertilisers, this too may be subject to diminishing returns. As a result, farmers find themselves trapped in what is aptly called a “pesticide treadmill” while a significant proportion of output — some 45 percent overall — continues to be lost through pests.

Increased mechanisation and tractorisation too contributed to soil erosion through deep ploughing, a practice that is particularly damaging when applied to the fragile soils of many tropical countries.

Sustainable

Technology, as pointed out, is not neutral; it is conditioned by the economic system in which it is applied. Capitalist agriculture is constrained by the profit system and the need to maximise output in the short-term without regard to wider consequences for the environment and society. The type of technology this entails cans only be modified with extreme difficulty. Farmers must, afterall, seek a financial return on any investment they make.

The trend towards environmental deterioration and social dislocation associated with capitalist agriculture, is likely to gather pace as recent developments in the world economy unfold. An example is the new GATT agreement which covers 90 percent of the world’s agricultural trade which will further strengthen the hand of agribusiness at the expense of many small farmers and undermine much existing environmental legislation. Similarly, structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF on many debtor countries to reduce their debts will increase pressure on them to expand cash crop production and to that end employ industrial methods of farming, despite the fact that the cost of these have risen far more steeply in recent years in comparison with the price of agricultural commodities.

In short, agriculture today stands at a critical crossroad; where we go from here will have profound repercussions for both urban consumers of the products of farming as well as farmers themselves who, lest we forget, still constitute a majority of humankind. We can choose to retain the status quo and risk going down the road of possible, if not probable, ruin. Or we can decide to take Earth, and all that is in and on it, into common ownership and democratic control. By fundamentally changing our relationship to one another, we shall fundamentally change our relationship to nature. You cannot do one without the other.

Freed from the constraints of market competition, we could begin to adapt our technology to suit our needs within limits imposed by nature We cannot predict precisely what this entails but we can tentatively sketch the broad outlines of a new agriculture:

• A scaling-down in the overall use of industrial inputs with some redistribution towards those parts of the world where marginal productivity of such inputs is still relatively high.
• The adoption of a more labour-intensive approach to farming, particularly in the more developed areas, where today the proportion of socially unproductive labour is highest, i.e. occupations essential to the functioning of capitalism which will disappear in socialism.
• Greater emphasis to be placed on small-scale mass-produced “appropriate technology” which would rapidly transform the situation that currently exists in the less-developed areas of the world.
• Selective reversion to traditional farming practices, such as intercropping and agro-forestry, combined with a careful "holistically-oriented” application of useful innovations in the field of biotechnology, e.g. self-fertilising crops.
• Blurring of the distinction between town and country; a huge expansion of small-scale horticulture in and around existing conurbations with the aim of ensuring a substantial and diverse supply of locally-grown food, thus incidentally reducing the costs of transportation.
• Related to the above, a massive phased programme to systematically overhaul existing urban infrastructure to facilitate the return of off-farm wastes to the land.
• Finally, to conserve ecologically marginal land by restricting the use of it to rotational/extensive farming.

To those who dismiss this, our response is quite simple: never has the need for a clear and practical alternative to the chaos of capitalism been more pressing, more vital. Only on this basis can we ensure a fruitful and sustainable future for ourselves and our children’s children. The seeds of that future lie within us; it is up to us to nurture and cultivate them.

Robin Cox

Labour, Tory . . . Same Old Story (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Can you spot the difference? Which is the party of Law and Order, Family Values, Prudent Public Spending, the Market Economy: Labour or the Tories? Such is the public confusion over this that even the Tories have thought of exploiting it:

“Kenneth Clarke, the Chancellor, and other key members of the Cabinet favoured attacking Mr Blair as a pale copy of the Tory party. This is called ‘the Coke option’ by researchers who say the Tories represent ‘the real thing'” (Independent, 26 July).

Since Blair became Leader in July Labour’s strategy has been to criticise the Tories on their terms –as incompetent managers of the economy and unable to implement tough policies against criminals, single mothers and other scroungers. Guided by their marketing advisers, Labour politicians don’t attack the Tories’ policies but only the incompetent and ineffective way in which they are carried out. Vote for us, Blair is saying, and we’ll carry out these policies better than the Tories. The aim is to attract enough ex-Tory voters for him to be able to enter Number Ten as Britain’s next prime minister.

Labour being the vote-catching party it always has been, it had to come to this sooner or later: the end of Labour as a party of radical reform of capitalism. Labour never was a socialist party but it did once see its role as trying to shift the balance of power and wealth under capitalism in favour of working people. They never did do this of course nor, given the nature of capitalism, could they have done so. But this was what they said and this at least showed that they thought capitalism was far from being the acceptable economic system they now think it is.

Incredible as it might seem today, Denis (now Lord, of course) Healey told a cheering Labour Conference in 1973 that he was going to squeeze the rich till the pips squeaked:

“Our job is to get power, and we join battle armed with the most radical and comprehensive programme we have had since 1945. Its aim is honestly stated, to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families . . . We are going to introduce a tax on wealth. We are going to turn the estate duty into a real tax… I warn you, there are going to be howls of anguish from the 80,000 rich people. “

Labour got to power, but it was working people who ended up getting squeezed till the pips squeaked. The result was a massive wave of strikes in the public sector over the winter of 1978/9 – and the election of the Tories under Thatcher pledged, as she openly boasted, to undo everything Labour claimed to champion. Which, as demanded by capitalism’s worsened economic conditions, she did and, spiteful woman that she was, with glee. State industries were privatised, council houses sold off, local services axed, welfare payments slashed and the health service subjected to market forces.

Power for what?

Today all that Labour has retained of Healey’s rhetoric are the first six words: “our job is to get power”. Since radical phrases, indeed any definite policies, are now perceived to be a drag on this drive to get power they have been ruthlessly abandoned. Just attack the Tories as incompetent and clapped out, the marketing team advise, and, anxious for power, the Labour politicians oblige.

But power for what? In the end, since they are only projecting themselves as better and more competent managers of the status quo, it amounts to power for its own sake. The Labour leaders want power because they are professional politicians and the ambition of every professional politician is to become a government minister.

Is this being too cynical? Can they be that bad? Perhaps not, but it doesn’t really matter since even if they were sincere (and, on the law of averages, some of them must be) they still wouldn’t be able to make the capitalist market economy work other than as a system that puts profits first and so as a problem-ridden system incapable of meeting human needs properly.

In so far as they might have a theory of what they would do if they get power it will be no different from that behind the failed policies of ail previous Labour governments : trying to redistribute profits towards socially desirable projects such as a better health service, better education and better housing.

This involves accepting the profit system – not a problem of course for Blair and company – and allowing firms to make the maximum profits, justified on the grounds that this also supposedly maximises the resources available for social spending.

The trouble is this makes what a reformist government can do depend on the profitability of capitalist industry. As Richard Crossman, a Labour politician who was to become a senior Cabinet Minister in the 1964 Wilson Labour government, wrote following Labour’s defeat in the 1959 election on such a classic reformist programme:

“A Socialist Government, it is often argued, would be able to finance the huge extension of welfare, education and other pubic services by encouraging a much faster rate of development in the private sector of industry and then taxing away a sufficient amount of the profits. This was the policy put forward by the Labour Party at the last election and in the short run any Labour Government would to attempt it. But experience should have taught us that the run might be very short indeed. In the Affluent Society no Government is able to give orders to Big Business. After one budget a Labour Chancellor who tried to squeeze private industry too hard would soon discover that he was not master in his own house and that there is a relatively low level above which taxation rates, whether on the individual or the company, are only raised at the cost of provoking tax evasion and avoidance so widespread that revenue is actually reduced. If the motive of your economy is the profit-making of large-scale modem private enterprise, a Labour Government must be prepared to allow very large profits indeed and to admit that the number of golden eggs he can remove is extremely limited. ” (Labour in the Affluent Society, 1960)

His answer was that Labour should therefore seek to establish an enlarged state sector so as to give a Labour government more room to manoeuvre. The present Labour leaders would recoil in horror at such as suggestion, not that anyway it would have worked to protect a Labour government from the economic pressures of capitalism to keep costs down and profits up. Nor that the Labour governments of which Crossman was subsequently a member made any real attempt to do it.

Profits first

In fact Labour ministers ended up making speeches accepting that profits should be encouraged. Here is how one of them (Harold Lever who, like Healey was later ennobled) put it:

“Labour’s economic plans are not in any way geared to more nationalisation; they are directed towards increased production on the basis of the continued existence of a large private sector. Within the terms of the profit system it is not possible, in the long run, to achieve sustained increases in output without an adequate flow of profit to promote and finance them. The Labour leadership know as well as any businessman that an engine which runs on profit cannot be made to move faster without extra fuel.” (Observer, 3 April 1966).

This could be Blair or Gordon Brown or any of the other Labour leaders speaking and well sums up what will be the only economic policy that a future Labour government will be able to pursue. Profits First, that’s the economic law of the capitalist system, which all governments of capitalism have to accept and apply.

If you accept the profit system, then you have to accept that profits have to be made and all that this implies, including opposing strikes, restraining wages and keeping taxes on Big Business low. Labour does accept the profit system, much more openly than they have done in the past, to the extent that today they are even prepared to advocate these things while still in opposition.

Nobody who is against the profit system has any place in Tony Blair’s bland new Labour Party. If you want more Law and Order, more Family Values, more blurred nothingness you might as well join Labour as the Tories or Liberals. But if you are a Socialist and want to get rid of the profit system you should be in a democratically-organised socialist party campaigning for socialism and nothing else.

Adam Buick

The Rise and Fall of Clause Four (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1918 the Labour Party transformed itself into a national organisation. At the same time it adopted a list of Party Objects, the fourth of which read: ‘To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service.”

This was the nearest the Labour Party ever came to committing itself on paper to Socialism, since this could be interpreted as a somewhat wordy definition of real Socialism not all that different from the Object we in the Socialist Party adopted when we were founded in 1904: ‘The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.”

However, since it was drawn up by the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and since the Fabians stood for a state capitalism run by an educated elite, it was meant to be understood as a reference to state ownership, or nationalisation, i.e. state capitalism.

This was confirmed when in 1929, as a result of left-wing pressure to commit the Labour Party to the nationalisation of the banks, the words “distribution and exchange” were added after “the common ownership of the means of production”. This made it absolutely clear that what was envisaged was not real socialism but state capitalism.

To talk of the common ownership of the means of exchange is a contradiction in terms. Where there is common ownership there can be no exchange since exchange can only take place between separate owners, i.e. where private ownership not common ownership exists. In a socialist society based on common ownership goods are simply distributed not exchanged, so there is no need for money, banks and the rest of the financial system.

After Labour lost the 1959 election the then leader Gaitskill tried to get rid of Clause 4 on the grounds that it was an electoral liability, but had to back down in face of the opposition. Now Tony Blair is going to try again, with more chance of success it appears.

In a sense he his right: Labour does not stand for state capitalism – it stands for working within the present profit-driven market system dominated privately-owned companies. It stands for capitalism pure and simple. The dropping of Clause 4 will merely make this absolutely clear.

Pressures in the Ivory Towers . . . (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

As ever when the A-level results appear in the middle of August, there was a mad scramble by would-be students to get onto the university course of their choice, or at least the best compromise between what they wanted to do and what their exam results would enable them to do. But this year it wasn’t just a matter of students fighting to find a university and department that would accept them. Universities, too, were desperate to attract enough students to get the maximum income from their paymasters. From newspaper and TV adverts to teletext announcements, universities vied to publicise themselves and those of their courses that still had vacancies.

The government boasts about the expansion of university education, but as usual what lies behind such assertions is more revealing than the claim itself. In part the “expansion” has been achieved by simply renaming polytechnics and some colleges as universities. The growth in numbers of students to over a million (double the figure 15 years ago) has not been matched by increases in university funding, meaning accommodation shortages, larger classes and overcrowded libraries. Most significant of all, student grants, which were never exactly generous, have been replaced by a mixed system of grants and loans. With the recession meaning that vacation jobs have all but dried up, and with restrictions on the claiming of benefit, students are now in a really precarious financial situation. Half finish their courses with a debt of £4,000, while one-in-five have considered giving up their courses because of financial problems. One-in-four take part-time jobs during terms, which is bound to affect their academic performance

About one student in eight now fails their course or drops out “voluntarily”. This is due in part to financial pressures, and in part to the increased staff-student ratio, which means less individual attention. Also many students end up in the rush for a degree place by taking courses in which they have little interest but which still have vacancies. In the recession a degree is no guarantee of a job ( not that it ever was) but it is still a qualification that many employers demand. One simple sign of the extent to which job requirements have invaded the university system is the number of courses with “Applied” in their titles: everything from Biology to French or Social Sciences can now be “applied” (to the real world of profit-making, of course).

The government decision to expand higher education was intended to provide a supply of trained graduates for a technological society demanding a high level of scientific and managerial skills. As we just said, this was to be done on the cheap, with the cost per student being drastically reduced. The teaching year is gradually being increased, and the pressure for two-year degrees is mounting. Universities were instructed to pile-’em-high, with financial penalties for not reaching their quota of students. The high drop-out rate is a complete waste as far as the government is concerned. The recession put paid to the need to carry on increasing the supply of graduates, but student demand for university places continued to rise. This seems now to have reached its peak at 400,000 applications for 270,000 places.

Since they ceased to be privileged enclaves where the sons of the ruling class could study Classics, universities have never been ivory towers. Rather they have come more and more to resemble factories with production lines and quotas. Money and the demands of capitalism are the vital criteria, while educational considerations take a back seat. 

Paul Bennett

Democracy or leadership? — the difference (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Regular readers of the Socialist Standard will probably be aware that the Socialist Party doesn’t have leaders. They will also hopefully be aware that the Socialist Party claims to be completely democratic, with each member having one vote.

The reason for this is that we realise that democracy and leadership are mutually exclusive. We argue that a democratic socialist society will not have leaders because if it did then it could never be fully democratic. The same applies to the organisation of a Socialist Party. 

So what’s wrong with leaders? Leaders are only necessary in a society where a minority own the means of living and the majority of the population arc exploited for profit. In a society based on free access to the means of living via common ownership, all there will be is democratic organisation. There wouldn’t be a propertied owning class or state — in other words no people with more rights than others, or leaders.

Some people confuse organisation with leadership. The Socialist Party may not have leaders, but it does have strong democratic organisation, in which the members have full control over Party office-holders. Democratic organisation is therefore completely different from leadership. If anything, a democratic party requires more organisation than a semi-democratic leadership party, because it relies more on the initiative of the membership.

This being said, the next area of confusion is the concept of “dominant personalities”. The argument here is that even if you don’t have leaders, and the organisation is democratically controlled by the membership, you will always have those people who are: more knowledgeable than others, better at arguing than others, and generally more influential and active than others. Of course, this is true, and again there isn't a problem here. The point is everyone has the same “legal” weight, so no matter how well known you are or how good you are at writing articles for the Socialist Standard, at the end of the day you only have the same “legal” power as the least able or active member of the Party.

A third point which is often raised is the assertion that any party whose aim is to change people’s ideas is de facto a leadership party. This is pure semantic quibbling. The point is, we don't propose to lead the revolution and we don't propose to exist as a party after the revolution.

Compare this with the SWP. They are an unrepentant leadership group that aims to lead the working class to a “workers’ state” that they will inevitably control. Their concept of democracy is “democratic centralism”. The basic idea here is that the membership democratically vote for their all-powerful leaders on the Central Committee. This is obviously open to abuse, but the main point is that having leaders of any kind can never be fully democratic. Having the right to vote for your superiors doesn’t make for a democratic organisation. Democratic leadership is a contradiction in terms. Leaders and leadership are therefore incompatible with democracy.

The Socialist Party is broadly organised along the lines of how socialist society will be organised. There will be those who seem more dominant and capable than others. A democracy of class-conscious workers will ensure that any leadership pretensions that any of these “strong" people might have will come to nothing. The nature of the “power structure” simply will not allow it.

When it has been proved that leaders are, have been, and always will be our enemy, do you really think a democratic socialist society will ever feel the need to reintroduce them? 

Dave Flynn

Leaders Get Lost! (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism is on the agenda — and right now. But it will not come by people putting their trust in leaders. It will be established when the vast majority of workers understand it, want it and democratically organise for it in a party which is not out to mend capitalism but to end it.

Socialism means the total abolition of capitalism. An end to private and state ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution. Production will be solely for use, with all people having free access to the common store of goods and services, instead of production for sale with a view to profit.

To win workers to organise for socialism is no small task and it is easy to be demoralised or to deceive yourself that there is an easier way to initiate the new system. But there is no alternative to the hard work being carried out by the Socialist Party — whose sole aim is socialism — and the sooner those who want socialism join us, the sooner it will be achieved.

Letter: Jesus Christ! — monetary justice? (1994)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jesus Christ! — monetary justice?

Dear Editors,

Scorpion claims, in your August issue, that the Bishop of Birmingham "should be coming out against the market in its entirety and not just its application to one of the necessities of life”. But one has to start somewhere; and the NHS. which we use in times of great need, is as good as anywhere.

You yourself, re Tony Blair, suggest that he is "Christian maybe, but socialist never. He openly supports the market economy and all that goes with it". I point out that Christians worship Jesus who said "Lend expecting no return" (Luke 6.35), in accordance with Old Testament precepts against usury (Exodus 22.25, Leviticus 25.36. Deuteronomy 23.19, Nehemioh 5.7-12, Psalm 15.5, Ezekiel 18.8-17 and 22.12).

Now there are markets and markets; and there may be room for one conducted justly. Some local "LETS" schemes aim at this. It is clear to us in the Christian Council for Monetary Justice (CCMJ) that the capitalist system which has evolved over recent centuries is at variance with Christian ethics; but the churches have largely lost sight of this since the last "top-level" denunciation of usury was made in an encyclical of Pope Benedict XIV in 1745.

The traditional teachings about commerce were endorsed by public opinion until self-assertiveness increased at the Reformation, and Calvin offered a limited acceptance of lending money at interest. This put Europe on a slippery slope, with profound consequences. Moneylending became attractive, and the banks gradually developed the practice of lending more money than had been deposited with them, thus acquiring a private monopoly of credit (or money) creation. Rich men who invested in industries based on the new technologies of coal, textiles, steel and steam-power extorted similar unearned incomes whilst they kept wages at semi-starvation level. Now money and shares have lost their physical meaning as tokens of value; but public acquiescence, fostered by the "haves", lets the rich use them to stay rich in a hungry world. Their "riches are corrupted", their "gold and silver” is "cankered” (Epistle of James 5.2-

3) 

(Coun) Frank McManus, 

Todmorden.

Reply:

We can't argue at this level since we don’t regard the bible as holy writ and so don't regard what it says (even when it doesn't say contradictory things) on any particular issue as authoritative.

We are aware that at one time Christianity did condemn the taking of interest on loans but abandoned this with the coming of capitalism, as is well documented in R.H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. For us, this is a striking confirmation of the materialist conception of history which sees ideologies, such as ethics, religion and philosophy, as reflecting the economic basis of society — and of course capitalism could not function without banks acting as financial intermediaries between those with idle money and those needing funds to invest in production and the exploitation of wage-labour for surplus value. So Christianity had to adapt or perish. This is what the Protestant Reformation was all about, and eventually — a century or so late, as ever — the Catholic Church too followed suit and adapted to the new economic and social reality. To want to impose the old Christian anathema against usury on capitalism today is. in the literal sense of the term, reactionary.

Incidentally, acting as financial intermediaries is all banks can do. They re-lend money that has been deposited with them and make their profits out of the difference between the rate of interest they charge borrowers and what they pay depositors.

The illusion that banks can lend more money than has been deposited with them arose from the fact that they had to hold as cash only a small proportion of the money deposited with them, since experience had shown that on average over a given period depositors were only liable to want to withdraw a small proportion of the total amount deposited. The rest was available for re-lending as short- or long-term loans.

A "cash ratio" of 10 percent does not mean that a bank can lend nine times the amount deposited; it means that it has to hold only 10 percent of the amount deposited as non-interest bearing, ready cash. If banks really could lend more than has been deposited with them as Councillor McManus asserts, and so create wealth out of nothing, then this would be a miracle to rival turning water into wine or feeding the five thousand. 

Editors.

Letter: Marx & Socialism — or . . . educating the educators (1994)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx & Socialism — or . . . educating the educators

We publish below part of an exchange of correspondence, which is self-explanatory, between one of our members and Collins English Dictionaries.

Dear Sirs,

I recently bought a copy of The Collins Dictionary & Thesaurus in One Volume as a reference work for my studies. I would like to advise you of a significant factual and historical error it contains.

This concerns the entry under "socialism". There are three definitions given: I refer to the third which states, "(in Marxist theory) a transitional stage in the development of a society from capitalism to communism". This is incorrect. Nowhere in the writings of Marx, nor indeed in those of Engels, are the terms “socialism" or/ and "communism" used to describe either a transitional stage or different stages of social development. In this sense Marx used the terms interchangeably to mean a society of common ownership and production for use, and therefore without buying and selling, an exchange economy, classes or the state.

As a matter of historical interest, this separation was first made by Lenin in an attempt to give credibility to the post-1917 situation in Russia, by frequently referring to that society, now generally acknowledged to be state capitalist, by the term "socialism". As a student of Marx's work for nearly fifty years, I assure you that the definition you give is derived from Leninist theory not Marx's as you state.

Bill Robertson

Reply:

Dear Mr Robertson,

Thank you for your letter of 15 August. In it you state that the definition of SOCIALISM (sense 3) refers to Leninist and not Marxist theory. I agree with your assertion as Marx did not describe any intermediate "socialist" stage between the collapse of capitalism and the establishment of communism. He used the terms "communism" and "socialism” interchangeably. It was. as you rightly point out, Lenin who created this distinction to describe the situation in the Soviet Union after the Bolsheviks seized power. Subsequent Soviet leaders, as you are no doubt well aware, also used this distinction, most notably Khrushchev who in the early 1960s described the USSR as a "socialist state" that would "achieve Communism by 1980".

Thank you for taking the trouble to point out this mistake.

Yours sincerely.

Andrew Holmes, 

Assistant Lexicographer, Collins English Dictionaries.

A touch of Blaired vision (1994)

TV Review from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Watching last month’s Labour Party Conference on BBC was a heady experience. The splendour of the Winter Gardens ballroom. Blackpool, the green-blue space-age set, the forward looking slogan “New Labour, New Britain" boldly outlined for all to see. the pinstripe suits, the floral ties and the presence of that nice young man Mr Blair, all combined to give the effect that was intended by the media men and spin doctors — Labour is back, but this time with a difference. Today it is a Labour Party that you could take home to meet your mother without the worry of it doing anything to embarrass you. This time round father can safely talk to it about how the plants in the greenhouse are coming along. Gone are the bad old days when it wore a donkey-jacket and was the political party from hell spitting on the pavement and farting in public. Labour is back, they say. and it has brought a bunch of chrysanths round and a box of Terry's Old Gold.

Not that Labour hasn’t tried to impress before. In 1992 it tried to sneak its way in the backdoor with claims that it had presents for granny and the young children, but father said he didn't trust it being in same room as his wallet. And father should know — he bitterly remembers being mugged by Labour back in the 1970s. It may all have happened on a dark night but he vividly recalls the bushy eyebrows. Father is not fooled by the new image and won't have Labour in the house again, let alone near his precious greenhouse.

But mother and the kids are not so sure. After all, Labour looks so attractive these days, and says some awfully nice things. It really is a charmer. And it's so boring having the same people round time and again — the bloke from number ten is always popping in with tales of woe. Nobody likes him and even the woman who did the catering for him doesn’t want to see him any more. The chap in the hush puppies from number eleven is no better and father suspects him of siphoning petrol out of the car. Compared to them, Labour seems like a breath of fresh air, but you can never tell can you?

Telling it like it isn’t

Labour is now busy convincing everyone that it is a bad egg that has reformed. Its conference was, in reality, not a conference at all, but an extended Party Political Broadcast aimed at Mr and Mrs Viewer with this end in mind. Its only discernible message was "you have nothing to fear from us — we are on your side”. Capitalists and workers, bosses and unions. Labour loves you all. Co-ordinated by the image-men for the benefit of TV, it was a stream of tepid speeches and meaningless assertions designed to connect with the hopes and, to some extent, prejudices of its potential voting fodder, generally workers whose views are moulded by the self-same media and advertising gurus.

And how the politicians tried to please. TV loves the soundbite, and there were plenty of them to be going on with "Tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime", “traditional values in a modern setting", “a strong economy and a just society" rang out like a mantra, and all to demonstrate that Labour has a new user-friendly identity. Pity the poor TV interviewers, bombarded by a stream of verbal diarrhoea for five days. Sheena MacDonald, the anchor presenter, gritted her teeth every time she was forced to interview one of the front-bench robots, while on other occasions, such as when she had to interview John Prescott, she had to visibly stifle laughter at what are now vainglorious attempts at sobriety.

Tony Blair = I’m Tory Plan B

The Chief Robot’s speech was the ultimate triumph of form over content. Expertly delivered with the help of idiot boards, it was 62 minutes of a vision of a capitalist utopia that has never existed and which, with all certainty, will never exist. He even had the cheek to call it socialism, claiming that socialism was based on the understanding that “the individual does best in a strong and decent community of people with principles and standards. and common aims and values". How many in capitalist politics are going to disagree with that? Answer that question and you are well on the way to understanding what Blair and "new Labour" are all about.

But despite the hours of prolonged tedium, the TV coverage of the Conference did provide a few minutes of welcome relief just before Blair's speech. It is then that the Labour Party “Merit Awards" are handed out to long-serving Party members. The first up was an 86-year-old gent who had worked to help the strikers in the General Strike of 1926. To the palpable embarrassment of those around him, he delivered a speech which denounced the market economy and the world capitalist system and then singled out the drug religion as one of the greatest evils in modern society. Quite what he had been doing in the Labour Party for seventy years wasn’t clear, but it certainly took the cheesy grin off Blair’s face. If only Sheena MacDonald had done us all a favour and interviewed the old guy afterwards she would have found herself confronted by a critical intelligence for the first time all week. 

Dave Perrin

Oh, What a lovely chicken (1994)

Book Review from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ha Bloody Ha — Comedians Talking 
by William Cook. (Fourth Estate 1994. £8.99)

This book is largely a transcript of interviews with thirty or so of Britain’s top "alternative" stand-up comedians and is a welcome insight into the lives of these highly unusual workers. Stand-up comedy is one of the most stressful and cut-throat of professions and few do it successfully. Jack Dee claims that stand-up is the natural profession for those with a personality defect, and by that reckoning capitalism should produce plenty willing to risk humiliation in front of a live audience. Indeed, this book suggests that the numbers seeking success in this arena appears to be on the increase — perhaps that’s telling us something.

Several "political" comedians feature, including Jeremy Hardy who has regularly done spots for the SWP and Mark Thomas, a vociferous lefty who has appeared on TV with Jonathan Ross and who is a former member of the Socialist League. But the best insights often come from those who less ostensibly have an axe to grind. Lee Evans, manic impressionist, comic and working-class-lad-made-good, who does no overtly political material, is a fine example of this, commenting on his most memorable gig:

"I did a big ball at Trinity College at Cambridge University. It was seventy pounds a ticket and I was performing to them. They had it all set up for me, and they treated me like a lord. I couldn’t believe it. It was very classy. They had spotlights across the river, they were punting, the girls looked beautiful in their ball gowns, and the guys were very smart — and they were eating shit-hot food. I nearly cried. As I was walking out, with my bag over my shoulder, I thought 'Fucking hell, man! This is it! This is brilliant! This is how it should be for everybody.”

Compared to Lee Evans's wide-eyed innocence there is a certain self-righteousness about overtly "political" comedians that can be grating — as anyone who has ever seen Ben Elton will testify — and the trend in recent years has moved away from them. The best alternative comics are invariably those whose comments on capitalist society and its manifold absurdities go deeper than taking the piss out of Thatcher's mad glare or Major tucking his shirt into his underpants, which has only ever been one step up from making fun of teacher — and is where most comedians, it has to be said, appear to have started without ever having moved on much.

"Alternative" comedy, by definition, aims to take an alternative approach to comedy to that taken by the mainstream, which has long been a repository for scapegoaters of all kinds. It has not been an unqualified advance, however, and when the racism and sexism of the mainstream is not replaced by schoolboy classroom posturing, it is often replaced by tokenism and inverse snobbery instead. One of the best lines on this comes from Eddie Izzard: "Being white, male and middle-class is useless if you're a comedian — so thank God I’m a transvestite."

Budding socialist comedians — or indeed performers of any kind — would do well to read this book, personality disorders permitting. The chapter on heckling is to be particularly recommended and for whimsical leaps of logic. Harry Hill’s favourite put-down still can’t be beaten: "You may heckle me now, but I'm safe in the knowledge that when I get home, I've got a lovely chicken in the oven." Nice one, Harry. 

Dave Perrin

50 Years Ago: What should Women do to be Free? (1994)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

An organisation called “Women for Westminster” has recently been born. It has a self-explanatory name and object. What a waste of time and energy such an organisation causes, and what future disillusionment must there be among its adherents ! Supposing they were to have a measure of success according to their aims, and get a predominance of women in the House of Commons. They would find that women, merely as women, can run capitalism no better than can the Labour or Tory Parties.

The Suffragettes have been appalled by the lack of enthusiasm for the vote, following their desperate efforts to gain it. Their lack of knowledge of the make-up of society is the reason for their indignation. Despite the constant propaganda of the press, screen and radio, woman as well as man is sceptical, often unconsciously so, regarding electioneering programmes, which cater for all tastes. Speaking generally, members of the working class are apathetic and not politically conscious. Many, unfortunately, are led away by reform parties, by idolaters of Russia, or by mushroom growths such as Commonwealth. (. . . )

Whilst capitalism lasts, women will remain, like men, in a subject position, no matter how far progress is made towards equality with men. The interests of women are therefore identical with men in struggling for the overthrow of the present system, as it is only under Socialism that both will find real emancipation.

[From and article by W. P. in the Socialist Standard, November 1944]

SPGB Meetings (1994)

Party News from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why you should be a socialist (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some years ago, a Guardian writer wrote a succinct sentence: "Who stands for nothing falls for anything." This statement rings true for all socialists aware that their fellow workers, voting, for instance, for mainstream parties come election time, are in fact acquiescing in their own exploitation.

Labour, Tory and Liberal candidates are fond of telling workers, and indeed of convincing them, that a vote for them (the candidate) is a vote for themselves (the workers). By electing such-and-such candidate, we are told our taxes will come down, our hospitals will improve, our schools will churn out brighter pupils, that homelessness will disappear, that there will be less unemployment and more jobs and streets free of criminals. In short, we are offered a vision of utopia. The optimistic worker falls for all of this, only to have their expectations dashed on the rocks of capitalist reality.

In the absence of any coherent ideology, the worker will invariably fall for anything. This is not to insult members of the working class by casting aspersions on their intellect. It says more about the skill of politicians when it comes to regurgitating the same old cant. These administrators of capitalism, the politicians, have been plying their trade since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. They have, therefore, become adept, highly skilled in the rhetoric of bullshitting workers. So successful are they, in fact, that a lot of what they have been saying have become the prevalent ideas in society; racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalism, hostility to the unemployed, the disabled, trades unions and criminals — all these prejudices have their roots more or less in the advent of capitalism.

Workers in this country are constantly reminded they are British, that they have a queen and a culture and a heritage, that they live on an island "the envy of less happy lands". Workers are raised to be nationalistic, patriotic and to stand when the national anthem is played at closing time in the British Legion. And then when wars break out, workers are encouraged to fight workers from other countries, under the delusion that freedom and democracy is at stake. But wars only break out when the interests of the dominant class of one nation clash with those of another, whether it be over trade routes, areas of domination or mineral resources. One US worker-cum-soldier, being interviewed en route to the Gulf, said he had never even heard of Kuwait until the order came through to mobilize. If he had not heard of Kuwait, you can bet he had no idea why he was being told to kill workers in Iraq.

Some workers actually believe their interests are served by killing workers they have never met before in far-away lands, workers who are similarly hoodwinked by their masters to protect their profits and potential markets. They fall for all the jingoism circulated by politicians.

When the Tories came to power in 1979, they had made great use of the slogan "Labour isn’t working", pointing out that unemployment stood at 1,000,000 and that this would fall under Conservatism. Workers fell for this, but within a few years unemployment figures had tripled, in spite of the Tories having made 17 adjustments to the way the original statistics were calculated. Statisticians put the real figure at 4.5 million.

When Mrs Thatcher resigned from office, workers were told she was the "greatest peace-time prime minister". Workers applauded her, some gave her a standing ovation, forgetting she had sent troops to the Falklands and the Gulf, sanctioned the US bombing raid on Libya, increased the troop presence in Northern Ireland and sent battalions of shield-thumping police to confront striking workers at Wapping and Orgreave.

The Labour candidate tells the worker how the coal industry would be safe under Labour, pointing to the number of pits closed since 1979. The worker tuts and pledges support, unaware that a Labour government closed 223 pits between 1965 and 1970.

Lies

The Tories conned workers into investing their hard-earned savings into the newly-privatized nationalized industries. The Labour governments who introduced nationalization (or rather state capitalism) had already told workers these industries belonged to the people. This did not, however, deter workers from buying shares in what theoretically already belonged to them. The Tories did not tell the workers that the returns on their investments would be minimal, nothing compared to the returns big business could expect, and that privatization was only meant to benefit the capitalist class in the first place.

The Tories had another idea — to encourage workers to set up their own businesses. Hundreds of thousands of workers were hoodwinked into believing they could compete with the big boys. Hundreds of thousands were to realize that in a climate where even some of the big boys could not survive, what chance had they. Politicians are always keen to assure workers that a country under their administration will be crime-free, but in the past 15 years there has been a sevenfold increase in reported crime and Britain's prison population is the largest in Europe. Inner-city riots have become so commonplace that they no longer make the headlines, and crimes such as joyriding and ram-raiding are so widespread they have become hackneyed in the plots of television serials.

Over the years, workers have been told there will be "peace in our time", that they’ve "never had it so good". Workers are urged to "watch" the lips of politicians while they repeat "no more taxes". The promises are as endless as they are futile, but still the worker falls for them.

In March this year, William Waldegrave reaffirmed what socialists already knew: "In exceptional circumstances, it is necessary to say something untrue in the House of Commons" (Guardian, 9 March). It doesn’t take much imagination to envisage which "circumstances" — those hidden truths about the nature of capitalist society that would cause a furore amongst workers were they revealed, but which remain a hidden truth because to reveal them would upset the capitalist minority whose system the politicians administer.

Leaders

Again, the administrators of capitalism have convinced workers that they need leaders. So prevalent is this idea that workers perpetuate the illusion themselves on behalf of the leaders, for instance, conditioning their children to take heed of everyone from the local vicar to the village bobby — all of whom see to it that the child never thinks for itself and will never challenge the status quo. The leaders, the politicians, however, are themselves only following the dictates of the profit system, which is itself governed by uncontrollable economic laws.

Workers have been led so long they have forgotten their potential collective strength. We seem unaware that everything in the world is produced by workers, from a pin to an oil rig, not thanks to politicians, but in spite of them.

Think of the artificial brakes that are put on production, the inventions that could benefit humanity, but which are suppressed because their introduction would cause the influx of a product which would in turn diminish somebody’s profits from a similar more expensive product. Most workers are aware of this, but fail to challenge the contradictions of capitalist society because leaders have convinced them there is no alternative society. Workers are told that socialism has already been tried and has failed miserably. But socialism has never been put into practice in any country, and those nations that called themselves communist were in reality only state capitalist, which politicians knew all along.

Workers will continue to be led and to believe what leaders tell them so long as they do not believe in themselves, in their own capabilities. A worker who does not understand how society is really organized, whose conditioning has alienated them from their consciousness will fall for anything.

There is nothing special about a socialist. They do not assume the airs and graces and the arrogance of Leninist vanguard parties, who believe the workers can only achieve a trade union consciousness and who wish to lead the workers into oblivion. Socialists are simply workers who have made a conscious effort to understand society from their own objective position and who have realized that is their position in the relations of production and who can apply this relationship to every aspect of life in present-day society.

The capitalist system is only as strong as the socialist cause is weak. The contradictions of capitalist society will only continue as long as workers are oblivious of them. If you’re reading the Socialist Standard for the first time, then you’ve already made the conscious decision to think for yourself and to reject what you had hitherto been told about socialism. If you stand for socialism you’ll fall for nothing.

John Bissett

Where’s the money going to come from? (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who watches the political programmes at Sunday lunchtime will he familiar with the question "Where’s the money going to come from?" On 1 May, for instance, Brian Walden pressed Labour MP Ann Taylor on this question as a rejoinder to her suggestion of increased nursery provision. And Robin Cook, who insisted on the European Social Chapter (On The Record, 29 May), was similarly rebuked by the money question. Labour MPs of course have no real response they can hold against this shibboleth of received wisdom; they believe in the basic precepts which necessitate the asking of the question.

It seems obvious to socialists that an analysis of the nature of money is required here. It can't be simply assumed that money is a type of innocuous representation of actual wealth. On the contrary it must be asked if its overall arithmetical form imposes certain ideological categories and casts its own ethical (or unethical) shadow over our existence.

Nowadays the analysis of money has disappeared, in Orwellian fashion, from economic discourse. But critiques of money extend back over 2000 years. One of the best discussions of money, and one that greatly influenced Marx, is still that of the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

Aristotle

Aristotle attributed two natures to money, that of a means and that of an end. This distinction reflects an ethical critique of the effects of money and how it is used. Some uses of money were acceptable and even laudable, argued Aristotle, as when money is used simply as a convenient means of getting useful things. But other uses, he said, were unacceptable or perverted, as where the exchange of goods was simply a mask for the accumulation of money or spurious wealth. So trading directed towards the use of goods with money merely as a common medium of transaction was seen as good, and trading directed at the exchange of commodities for profit, with commodities used merely as a means of securing this profit, was seen as bad. The distinction corresponds closely, but problematically as we shall see, to the one between use value and exchange value.

Aristotle used the example of the Delphian knife to illustrate the perverting effect of money. The Delphian knife was a tool that was made to be exchanged for money rather than to be used to perform a task. It could be used as a knife, a file, and a hammer, but in none of these functions was it very adequate, its only advantage was that it was cheaper in money than the three separate tools together. Hence a compromise is made between the tool-like properties of the knife and its exchange properties, and insofar as it was made to serve the latter function, it is not really a tool, except, as it were, a tool for making money rather than things.

Even philosophy itself is compromised by its association with exchange value. According to Aristotle, the Sophists let themselves be tainted by the profit motive, for the Sophist "is one who makes money from an apparent but unreal wisdom". The medical profession too becomes confused when its ends are mixed between money-getting and health. Contemporary examples inevitably spring to mind: "health" businesses selling liposculpture, far from providing perfect information on the effects of the operation, as the market sophistry maintains, on the contrary deliberately deceive patients about the risks involved, in order to secure the sale. And it could be argued that in every consumer product, a compromise must be made when the purposes involved in its creation are divided between exchange and use value; between the requirements of the seller and those of the customer.

Aristotle’s distinctions of exchange and use, means and ends, ethics and purely economic factors apply to the modern orthodoxy. The relatively trivial question "Where’s the money going to come from?" becomes the penetrating question "What is money?" The latter question challenges the received categories of exchange relations and demands an investigation into the barbaric practices out of which exchange arose. It is a question that asks is money realistic — or atavistic?

It is clear that ideas as much as facts are central to the workings of money. For example, the principle that whatever projects are envisaged must come out of existing funds. Fiscal spending, so it is said, represents a real practical limit which it is impossible to surpass. Behind this is the idea of a finite cache of wealth, a fund or a larder, in which things have been stored, and out of which things can be withdrawn at a later date. Is this really a practical matter, as no doubt Brian Walden would believe, or is it the promulgation of an ideological programme?

Admittedly the roots of this "larderism" lie deep in the facts of prehistory, when the store of food for the winter exemplified the model of a limited physical source determined by the real quantity and the real fertility of the land. This model still provides a basic formula for the operation of banks and nations, the only difference being that food has been replaced by an abstract symbolism of money, taking the form of bank reserves or national currency reserves representing all forms of production, not just agricultural.

This larderism has a powerful hold on the level of folk economics. On this level, the constraints of fixed budgets emerge in populist style as slogans such as "you can't just print money", "there is no bottomless pit", "you can't have your cake and eat it", "you don’t get ought for nought", "money isn’t made in heaven it's earned here on Earth", "there's no such thing as a free lunch", etc. Ah, the stuff tabloids are made of. And on the academic level, the principle seems to be simply elevated by nobler terms of expression rather than critically evaluated. Lord Robbins urged us to accept economics as the eternal problem of matching infinite wants against finite resources; the fundamentals of Mercantilism insist that "no man profiteth but by another's loss". All these aphorisms, ranging from crudity to casuistry, suggest a store of goods gained by toil in the summer as protection from the oncoming winter.

Despite creditable origins, this economic picture is logically flawed by its attempt to project the properties of a primitive domestic situation upon the complexities of the modern macroeconomic world. Some systems do follow the model of a fixed fund of goods, but the patterns of complex interaction between humankind and the biological and physical world, are, or can be, either synergistic or mutually exclusive. In the case of synergy, the more you take out of them, the more you have left; in the case of exclusivity, activity in one area has no effect on activity in another. The universal form of money makes all activities mutually burdensome, and insists, for instance, that the growth in education must be paid for by cuts in health, or investment in transport must be paid for by defence. Thus a kind of universal parasitism is established. One must question the nature of a formula of mutual burden which happens to have the very useful effect, for the Establishment, of dividing factions of society as competitors for limited resources.

The concepts of synergy and mutually exclusivity seem to violate the plausible, but examples are easy to find. The human body is synergistic in that the more you expend its energy as in exercise, the more energy you have as in fitness. If the linear economic model was applied to the body, you would get fit by sitting still and eating, thereby accumulating capital as fat. Mutual independence is clearly a fact of the natural and human worlds; there is no logical or physical connection between distant objects and activities. A bee taking honey in Glasgow is not constrained by one doing the same in London, yet Strathclyde is constrained by public spending in the Home Counties. Why do we impede ourselves in this way? Well, the popular wisdom is that there is only one pot of honey (money), for which we vie for attention. We should learn something from the symbiotic ecology of insects.

Free lunch

An even more serious error of money symbolism concerns the frontier of possible growth. The pseudo-physical arithmetic limit on economic development seems to be rooted in the Physiocratic principle that all wealth comes from the Earth, or the similarly-arbitrary Mercantilist precept that all wealth comes from the trade, or for that matter from the Marxist view that value is added by labour. But not only are the Earth’s resources, in contradistinction to the money model, symbiotic; they are also supplemented, as is the human body, from an external source. The human body is an organism in the world and receives its energy through food, and the Earth is a planet in the solar system, that likewise receives, free of charge, an inexhaustible input of fuel from the star in the middle of the solar system: the sun.

The sun is the free lunch that orthodox economics can’t come to terms with. The money system operates on a closed world assumption, on the much-stated monetarist principle that money is made here on Earth, it doesn’t come down from the sky. In fact all the wealth-making processes on the Earth are driven by extraneous energy that does come down, as it happens, from the sky. If money fails to reflect this reality and its function becomes not to reflect actual resources but to impose an ideological limit on their development and distribution. And if those limits demand that the homeless cannot be housed and that the hungry cannot eat (because where’s the money going to come from?) then that ideology isn't innocuous but a necessarily ethical, and unethical, force.

So Aristotle’s point is proved: the effect of money does poison the transactions and distributions it enforces its rule over. But not just directly because of the profit motive or exchange, but indirectly because of the general nature of the abstract form of exchange which embodies false assumptions about the nature of the world: the assumption that the fiscal frontier is the final frontier.

But to make Aristotle’s analysis fully consistent we ought to abandon the means/ends distinction which had a confused relation to the use/exchange distinction, and say not that there are two types of money (use money and exchange money) but that money necessarily is exchange value, that exchange value is necessarily perverse, and that true usefulness is necessarily contrary to the abstract value which money imposes on the physical world.

If Aristotle had accepted this analysis it would have solved a number of problems for him. Instead of having a tension between the two natures of money, one related to use, and one related to exchange, he could have rejected exchange completely and have said that the evaluation of goods should be dependent solely on their quality as defined in use. In a socialist system it is indeed use value that is the criterion of true wealth, and the spurious abstraction which exchange relations arbitrarily, and harmfully, apply to useful things would be simply removed.

If the premise of inherent scarcity is abandoned, as it can be when the qualitative, generous and realistic physical frontier is substituted for the miserly quantitative economic frontier, then it is no longer necessary to measure all goods by one universal standard as a means of rationing them. Is money the measure of all these things or are humans? Let us say the latter and thus advocate, along with an Aristotle-made-consistent, the abolition of exchange and the abolition of money. And if money is abolished, the question, where is the money to come from, is obviously redundant.

Norman Armstrong

Women, work and wages (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 28 April, a large number of schoolgirls spent the day in various workplaces up and down the land. Not because of a wish on the part of our capitalist exploiters to reintroduce child labour to the UK (although it could be argued that child labour never disappeared) but because a would-be charity called "Taking Our Daughters To Work" wished to "develop a forum whereby negative stereotypes about girls and their abilities are challenged and ultimately destroyed".

In a pamphlet entitled Taking our Daughters to Work: Exploring Tomorrow’s Choices, circulated to schools, employers and trades unions, the organisation argued that, due to social conventions instilled into them from birth, girls regard their career options as more circumscribed than boys do their own. Its aim is to encourage parents, teachers and employers to take schoolgirls aged 11 to 15 into a whole range of workplaces for the day, in order to widen the girls’ employment horizons.

In support of their case, the organisation cited statistics compiled by the Equal Opportunities Commission to the effect that, although women represent 45 percent of the current workforce, they account for less than one-third of managerial and administrative positions; and under 40 percent of professionally-qualified jobs. Over 40 percent of working women have no male colleagues, being employed in female employment ghettos, in what have come to be seen as women's jobs — such as typing and secretarial work, cleaning and catering.

Although this is the first time such a scheme has been attempted in Britain, Taking Our Daughters to Work ran a similar exercise in the USA in 1993, when nearly one million American girls took part. The project was greeted, according to their own literature, with enthusiasm by parents and employers, the media and politicians.

Economic imperative

It is the enthusiasm of employers that is of the greatest significance. No doubt many individual employers, as people, genuinely believe that women should be afforded the same opportunities as their male colleagues. But as managers of profit-making enterprises, they cannot treat the employment of women — or any aspect of Equal Opportunities — in a philanthropic manner. The concept of equal opportunities for women, and any initiative taken to further the concept, must be, and is, examined from the point of view of the gains, or likely costs, for the business in question. This is an economic imperative.

Anyone who doubts that this is so need only consider the question of childcare as an equal opportunities issue. During the mid-1980s — boom years for at least some British industry — considerable gains were made by women’s groups and trades unions campaigning for employer-sponsored childcare facilities. Nurseries sprang up in many areas, subsidised by employers, including those run by government departments and local councils. Employers banded together to run holiday playgroups; or issued childcare vouchers, supplied by a subsidiary company of Luncheon Vouchers Ltd. But in the recessionary 1990s, where the demand for an expanded labour force has gone away in most sectors, many schemes have foundered. Certainly, it is a lot more difficult now for a union to persuade an employer to start any new scheme or to increase its investment in an existing one. Labour is in plentiful supply; there is no longer a pressing business need to attract women, in general, into the workplace, so any benefits to a particular company has very often been outstripped by outlay.

The organisers of Taking Our Daughters to Work have recognised the economic imperative. Knowing that they had to get employer support if their scheme was to get off the ground they argued that "the organisations which recognise the skills potential of women will be the ones that benefit". In fact, they were so anxious to press the economic case for their idea, they fell quickly into the trap of making new stereotypes, to replace the ones that they are try ing to overcome, when they went so far as to say that "research has shown that women . . . are more flexible and adaptable and better at team-working, managing change and networking (than men)".

And it seems that quite a number of organisations have bought the line. Participants in the British scheme in 1994 included the BBC, Body Shop, ICI, the Industrial Society, London Underground and Sainsbury.

Of course, they could easily afford to take part. Although any potential benefits will take a long time to come through, the PR may well be valuable. And the cost of hosting a one-day seminar for a few schoolgirls is minimal. At the same time, a sop is thrown to women’s rights activists; and to those trades unions with a record of campaigning for equal opportunities, usually the white-collar unions and the general unions representing unskilled workers. And it enables businesses to do this without committing them to any further action, such as implementing the terms of the Equal Pay Act.

In 1992, the Equal Opportunities Commission found that women in full-time employment earned 75-79 percent of the average hourly earnings of their male counterparts. Groups like Taking Our Daughters to Work and many others, tend to regard that difference as a matter of discrimination. But it is also helpful, and accurate, to view it as a symptom of the exploitation of working people as a whole.

In any event, attempts to improve the lot of women — as with any attempt to reform capitalism — will meet with no success unless there are sound economic reasons for employers to agree to the particular measure being proposed. To use the childcare example again, a Treasury circular to government departments thinking of making such provision instructs Permanent Secretaries and Chief Executives to "ensure that a childcare arrangement returns value for money to (their) organisation". Ways of doing this include "balancing the savings in recruitment and training that result from retention of staff against the cost of providing the childcare arrangement" (Making a Case for Childcare).

Rate of failure

There are those who argue that the pursuit of Equal Opportunities within capitalism is not reformism per se, but will in fact lead to a real and radical shift in attitudes. This view ignores the rate of failure in the pursuit of Equal Opportunities.

The 1970 Equal Pay Act, as amended, makes different treatment of women over remuneration illegal. Yet the Equal Opportunities Commission figures quoted above make it quite clear that this very direct form of discrimination is still prevalent. And of course the campaign for equal pay did not begin in 1970. The Women’s Trade Union League was campaigning for fair treatment on pay, as on other matters, in the early 1900s.

Similarly, in spite of various employment acts, the 1976 Sex Discrimination Act, and the EC Equal Treatment and Equal Pay Directives, a 1994 report of the Office of Science and Technology states that girls accounted for just 22 percent of Physics A-level passes in England and Wales in 1991, 36 percent in Maths and 41 percent in Chemistry. Where women do opt for scientific subjects in Higher Education, the bulk read medicine or a biological science. Those going for other sciences or engineering are still heavily outnumbered by men. And in the engineering industry in 1990, 75 percent of clerical positions were occupied by women, against only 20 percent of administrative and professional posts, and a mere five percent of scientists and technologists jobs (The Rising Tide: A Report on Women in Science, Engineering and Technology, Office of Science and Technology, 1994).

The prime aims of the women’s liberation movement can be identified as a redivision of domestic labour and childcare, an end to the idea of "women’s work", an end to women’s dependence on men, and changes to the ideas relating to gender, sexuality and the family. No socialist can possibly argue with the need to achieve these aims. But — given all that has been said above — it has to be concluded that attempts to reform capitalism so as to achieve them are doomed to failure.

In our Declaration of Principles we state that "the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex". If the Declaration had been written in 1994, instead of 1904, we would have substituted "humanity" for "mankind" but the point remains the same. Men and women are not enemies. The exploiting men and women are the enemies of the exploited men and women. Only in a non-parasitical society, where the profit motive has been abolished, can women and men truly be free — and equal.

Paul Burroughs