Beating Thatcherism (1985)

From the September 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

How do the Labour Party propose to unseat Thatcher and her abominable crew? They tell us that this is a priority, that life in Britain will not be worth living again until this thing called Thatcherism is dead. By Thatcherism they mean a mixture of hard-faced indifference to the people's suffering and a mission to intensify that suffering — and all at the whim, or to solidify the dogmatism, of that woman in Number Ten. The existence of Thatcherism, say members of the Labour Party, is to be seen in the unprecedented dole queues, depressed wages and living standards, ruthless cuts in government spending on housing, hospitals, social services. education . . . The conclusion which we are invited to draw, before we go to the polling stations, is that when the Labour Party have slain Thatcherism and have got themselves installed into power things will be very much better.

But is it true that political parties behave as the Labour Party says the Tories are? Capitalist parties are, after all, concerned to get power and they can hardly hope to do that by upsetting too many of the voters. At times — in fact for much of the time — they carry out policies which should not be popular. like sending workers to die in the wars of their ruling class or imposing cuts in workers' living standards. But they can manage to do this without incurring too much electoral damage if they seem to be in control of the situation and provided they can persuade the voters that all the suffering and restrictions are a necessary preliminary to a bounteous future. So the Tories can get away with a Falklands war and with a Nigel Lawson and a Norman Tebbit.

It is, then, nonsense to say that a government deliberately creates unemployment; indeed if they had the power to do this, perhaps at the whim of a Thatcher, on any significant scale, they would also be able at whim to stop creating it — to abolish unemployment. But so far that trick has evaded every government faced with the problem. The same facts apply to workers' pay. No doubt, if British capitalism could run profitably and competitively while allowing free rein to pay claims the government would not be inclined to intervene. Wages would rise on demand, while the government looked benevolently on, waiting to reap the electoral harvest. It is not any politician's evil intentions which are responsible for expenditure cuts or for wage restraint; these things are part of a government's desperate. futile efforts to manage the uncontrollable capitalist system.

The Labour case against the Tories, with which they hope to destroy Thatcherism, now rests on a promise to organise the British economy to such effect that unemployment falls, production expands, medical and social services and education blossom and wages rise smoothly and predictably. They make it sound all so easy that it is fair to ask why their predecessors, many of whose memories are honoured in the Party, found such triumphs so far beyond their ability. Implicit in these promises is the assumption that capitalism can be controlled and that Labour will succeed in that, while the Tories fail, because their motivation is more humane. This claim, however, does not line up with historical fact. One thing which was abundantly clear whenever Labour has been in government before, in 1929. 1945. 1964 and 1974, was that they were not in control, whatever their motivation. In fact they continually whined that their good intentions were being undermined by events outside their influence — economic storms, currency crises and the like.

There is no evidence that things will be any different if there is another Labour government. They have learned nothing from their experiences, they still aim at running British capitalism, which means that their programme is simply a rehash of the plans and policies which were exposed as failures when they were tried before. To begin with, the Labour Party are again feeling out the prospects for some sort of pact with the unions which will provide for voluntary wage restraint. Labour now say that they have rejected the concept of statutory restraint, just as they did in the past before they went ahead and tried to impose it. This sort of voluntary policy used to be called the National Plan or the Social Contract; the latest version is called the National Economic Summit. Just as George Brown in 1964 called the union leaders and the employers' representatives round the table to sign a Declaration of Intent to ignore the realities of capitalism, so a future Labour Chancellor will get the same people into something called the New Economic Assessment. Whatever comes out of it will sound very grand and make some good copy for the reporters but it will completely avoid the basic cause of our economic problems — the essential anarchy of commodity production, the essential class rivalry between employers and employed.

In the past such arrangements may have succeeded in holding back wages for a while but in the end a government have been forced to intervene — unless, as is happening now, a slump is in operation helping to do this for them. The Labour Party's latest policy statement A New Partnership — A New Britain promises ". . . an immediate and substantial programme of public investment and repair. It is true that expenditure cuts have affected workers badly; for example in the case of hospitals the Observer of 4 August 1985 reported that many urgent operations are being postponed through a lack of hospital beds (‘nothing short of mental cruelty" said one eminent cancer specialist); that patients are sometimes being left to recover from operations in corridors; that wards are closing despite a long waiting list for beds. We are all familiar with these disgraceful situations but no one should be under the impression that all of this is happening at the malevolent design of wicked Tories. In the past Labour governments have acted in the same way. Richard Crossman, who was a Cabinet minister in the Wilson government of 1964/70, recorded in his diaries that the Labour Chancellor. James Callaghan, was in 1964 "committed to a huge cut back not only of consumption but also of public expenditure, on the social services in particular" and that in January 1967 Callaghan "proposed a cut of £500 million during this period, concentrating on housing and health".

It suits the Labour Party now to try to gloss over the memories of the times when they were "concentrating" on attacking at the most sensitive points of working-class poverty. Now, apart from their more specific promises, Labour is busily putting it about that they will build a better Britain because they are simply more humane, cleverer and calmer than the Tories. When Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson recently made his desperate effort to rally Tory morale with assurances that brighter times are in the offing. Labour's Shadow Chancellor Roy Hattersley warned that this was a case when "panic is accompanied by predictable and increasing ineptitude". Well Hattersley may be right; perhaps the government are in a panic but, if Crossman is anything to go by, the Wilson government was not free of the same problems. Crossman recorded the paralysing effect the financial and economic crises of the 1960s had on James Callaghan: “As Chancellor Jim was for some months psychologically out, clearly exhausted, nearly physically broken . . . " (which was. perhaps, why the Labour Party went on to elect him leader and so made him Prime Minister). Callaghan. of course, resigned as Chancellor when, in spite of their repeated assurances that they would not devalue the pound because of the depressing effect this would have on our living standards, the Labour government found themselves compelled to do so — which again shows how out of control the situation was. Crossman was also scathing about some of the other people who, when he stood up to sing The Red Flag with them at Labour conferences, were supposed to be his comrades in the struggle to introduce "socialism" to Britain. Michael Stewart was ". . . a bit of a nightmare . . . bureaucratic, vain and enormously sensitive about his own status”; Roy Jenkins was "conspiratorial"; Tony Benn "a complete flop". A lot of the other ministers were "a terrible collection of old lags who should be got rid of'.

So what this all means is that, by any standards, the Labour Party offer no real alternative to the Tories. Perhaps, through a mixture of plausibility, an apparent confidence in their own talents and a desperate hope that the voters have short memories, they will indeed unseat Thatcher and her crew. It will make no difference, to the capitalist system or to the problems endured by the working class. So who cares? Only those who are aware of the pressing need for a real alternative and for a genuine, permanent, fundamental change in society.

Ivan

Letter: Paying for the NHS (1976)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Paying for the NHS

I had understood that the SPGB argued that taxes are ultimately paid by the capitalist class out of surplus-value and that net wages received by workers represent the value of their labour-power (assuming that commodities exchange at their value). However in the August Socialist Standard we are told (Leigh Burr-Parti) that with the coming of the National Health Service workers should expect that in the long run their wages would adjust by being lower than if there were no NHS. This implies that the NHS (and the rest of the welfare state) is “financed” by the workers out of wages, i.e. that it is paid for out of variable capital not out of surplus-value.

Of course all value is produced by the working class and in this sense the working class “pays” for the welfare state. But this is not just a theoretical issue. If the welfare state is financed out of surplus value then presumably it is in workers’ interests to increase welfare provisions, as this would represent a clear increase in their material wellbeing, i.e. in addition to receiving the value of their labour-power they would also manage to get back some of the surplus-value appropriated by the capitalist class. However, if as Leigh Burr-Parti suggests it is financed out of variable capital the working class as a whole is no better off whether health, education etc. is provided by the state or through the market.

This of course is not to deny that whichever way one looks at it the real issue facing workers is the establishment of Socialism where there will be no exploitation of one class by another, and not that of trying to patch up capitalism via the welfare state.

(Ms.) V. M. Brown

London NW6

Reply:

As you say, taxation is a burden on the capitalist class not the working class; and wages are what is received, not a hypothetical gross payment. Though the amounts put down as insurance contributions are not received by workers these amounts are, over-all, returned to them as benefits. Their nature therefore is a portion of wages held back as a special fund. If this regulated reduction were not made, workers’ subsistence would have to include their purchase of medical services and the other needs covered by benefits.

But see how this would work out. Three workers A, B and C receive a total of £6 a week in benefits over a period. A and B are both married; A has children, B has none; and C is unmarried. Obviously A’s are the biggest needs. Conjecturally his share of the £6 may be £4, B’s share £1.50, and C’s 50p. If these needs had to be met by additions to wages instead of a planned deduction, the strength of the wage demand would be A’s requirements: that is, another £4 a week for all three. Instead, all three are dealt with at £2 each week. It may appear that A gains, at least, but of course each is in the others’ position at other times. However, at any given time only a minority of workers are in the full “breadwinner” position on which wages are based, and the contributions scheme is therefore greatly advantageous to the capitalist class.

We may add that this is not an interpretation of our own but was part of the argument of the Beveridge national insurance scheme when it was put forward in 1942. The same can be said of welfare benefits as a whole—income supplements, family allowances, rent rebates etc.: that they select recipients and avoid giving more wages to workers generally. A statement about the effectiveness of the scheme was made by the former Labour minister R. H. S. Crossman in the Daily Mirror on 15th November 1955:

The fact is that since 1945 the British trade unionists could have enjoyed a far higher wage packet . . . Instead of doing so, however, they exercised extreme wage restraint. This they justified by pointing out to the worker the benefits he enjoyed under the Welfare State—food prices kept artificially low by food subsidies; rents kept artificially low by housing subsidies; rent restriction, and. in addition, the Health Service.

You suggest that workers could increase their share of the social product by demanding and getting more benefits. If these come from the insurance fund, the result would only be an increase in “contributions”. If they were medical and educational services provided out of general taxation, it would mean an increase in government expenditure which has other consequences; and the demand would then commit workers who made it to supporting the party which promised the biggest slice of cake—a familiar position.

Editors.

TUC: Wages and planning (1963)

From the October 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the delegates at the TUC last month discussed wages and planning they managed to get into quite a deal of confusion.

They voted by a huge majority for a General Council report Economic Development & Planning though it contains references to wage restraint, but also voted (by a small majority) against “any form of wage restraint,” after the mover Mr. Ted Hill had indicated that it did not really mean what it said but only meant under a Tory government.

The confusion of some of the speeches is in fact even greater than the Press reports indicate. There was Mr. Hill who declared that his organisation, having had experience, ”cannot trust any Tory government with our wage packets”. Linked up with his declaration about not accepting any form of wage restraint, it presents the picture of Mr. Hill believing in two absurdities: firstly the absurdity of some non-Tory government which has as its aim supporting the workers against the employers on any wage claim they choose to make, and secondly, the equally absurd belief that provided a union rejects wage restraint it can get what it wants without restraint.

The truth is that all governments everywhere resist general upward ‘pressures for higher real wage levels, and when Mr. Hill makes an exception of a Labour Government he has it quite wrong. It just happens that in the post-war years under Labour Government, wage rates were falling behind the cost of living but since then they have moved ahead, a change in which increased willingness to strike has obviously played some part.

Mr. Richard Crossman, Labour M.P, frankly admitted, after the Labour Government had gone from office, that British workers could probably have got more if they had been as ready to strike as workers in America, and when Mr. Hill talks about no wage restraint what he really means is that trade unions must not give up the strike weapon. To that extent he is of course on sound ground, and it explains his reluctance and that of many other TUC delegates to accept the belief that planning by the National Economic Development Council can be a substitute for the strike weapon. But to put this in terms of being for or against “restraint” is quite beside the point, for if the Council’s plans in fact worked as they hope wage levels would be far less “restrained” than they have ever been.

The Council’s plan for expansion envisaged a rise of real wages of somewhere in the region of 3½ per cent a year. The Prime Minister speaking at Cardiff on April 5th put it in definite terms: “If we combine growth policy with incomes policy, the nation as a whole can have a 3½ per cent. growth in real income per head”.

No union, not Mr. Hill’s or any other, has been able to get a 3½ per cent, rise of real wages. (3½ per cent. a year above whatever is needed to cover increased prices), either under Tory or Labour Government: not 3½ per cent or anything like it. In the period since January 1956 average wage rates have gone up by 33 per cent but the retail price index has risen by 25 per cent, so that the rise in real terms has been about 6 per cent in seven and a half years, less than 1 per cent a year.

What then is really at issue for the workers is not whether the National Economic Development Council, or the Prime Minister, or the leader of the Labour Party holds out prospects of an annual 3½ per cent. rise of real wages they are all prepared to promise this—but whether they or anyone else are in a position to plan such a development into certain existence, and whether working class interest is served in that direction at all.

For, taking the last point first, there should be no doubt or ambiguity about what the TUC is accepting, whether with planning or without. They are accepting the world of capitalism and looking at the problem of the ability of British capitalism to survive and expand in a capitalist world.

The TUC report recognises for example the “frightening prospects of potential overproduction” in world markets, and of “competitive expenditure on armaments in the industrial countries where a quarter of the human race lives, and increasing misery for the other three quarter’s of the world’s population”. The Socialist’s reaction to this is to urge the replacement of world capitalism by world Socialism, ending both capitalism and class society; the TUC’s reaction is to consider how to regulate the trade and aid relationships between the countries of the capitalist world and at the same time secure a working arrangement for planning between the classes at home.

This latter idea is not new: always there have been people urging co-operation for increased production between employers and employed. But always the harsh realities of capitalism keep breaking in: markets getting overstocked and the employers who wanted more production now wanting to stop production; and passivity on the part of the workers being taken advantage of to increase exploitation and profits. No one—and this includes governments as well as employers can regulate world markets so that the normal expansions and contractions of capitalist industry and trade do not take place.

One last point that should be considered is the hope held out of a possible 4 per cent annual increase of production. By past standards this is a big increase, but in relation to the potentialities of Socialism it is insignificant.

Capitalism, irrespective of the political hue of the government, cannot seriously tackle the job of increasing the production of useful things sufficiently to meet all human needs. It cannot escape the consequences of its own class and competitive nature, shewing themselves in armaments, wars, class conflict, strikes and so on.

Yet workers who have tried to weigh up the arguments at the TUC about wages and planning should consider the Socialist proposition. What really stands in the way of a classless, warless world in which production is directly and solely for the use of all, except the reluctance of most workers to think it out? Certainly no-one who looks back over a century and a half of looking for wages policies can argue that Socialism is unnecessary because things are in a very good shape as they are. All the evidence points the other way.

Edgar Hardcastle

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

A word of advice to Labour Party supporters (1952)

From the October 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party is searching for a policy. The nationalisation of the basic industries and the extension of the social services have been brought about and still the position of the working class remains unchanged, the workers must sell their ability to work for a wage that scarcely buys the necessities of life. At the last general election a large number of workers showed their discontent with the Labour Party’s administration by placing the Tories in power. To rally the support of the workers next time, a host of publications have been issued recently by the Labour Party and groups within it. All attempt to find some new solution to the problems of Capitalism, since nationalisation and the welfare state have failed to solve them.

One of these publications, the “New Fabian Essays,” was reviewed in the Economist (May 25th, 1952). The reviewer wrote:—

“Mr. Crosland presents a skilful analysis of the mixed economy, neither Capitalism nor Socialism, that war and six years of Labour rule have created. Mr. Strachey thinks rather well of the result and Mr. Crossman, naturally, dismisses it contemptuously as ‘welfare capitalism.' Neither manages to define the Socialism which he wants to evolve from it. Mr. Crosland himself effectively challenges the stock Left-wing assumption that the mixed economy is naturally transitory and must pass quickly into some sort of Socialism; and he dismisses several of the orthodox lines of advance—more social services, more nationalisation, more controls, more direct taxation—without making the alternatives at all clear . . . 

“. . . . The gross result is certainly not even the beginnings of a new philosophy either of socialist change or of consolidation in the welfare state."

The Glasgow Forward (23rd August, 1952) commented upon another of these publications:—

“The Labour Party's latest policy statement—ironically titled 'Facing the Facts'—has met with all-round criticism. It tries to please everybody in the party and ends of pleasing nobody. At the moment the Labour Party is suffering from too many personalities, too many platitudes—and too few policies."

Another pamphlet published by the Socialist Union, “Socialism—A Restatement of Principles,” is called by the Tribune (11th July, 1952) “ Sunday School Socialism.” According to the Economist (June 28th, 1952), the pamphlet argues that “The Labour movement is not . . . concerned with overthrowing Capitalism and replacing it by something called Socialism . . . All the social and economic changes from the Capitalism of the nineteenth century cannot be seen as part of the transition to some definite socialist system . . .” 

From this the pamphlet goes on to protest against the class war as an instrument of socialist advance: it declares roundly that the programmes and thoughts of socialists “have all grown out of the discontents of the past, and were designed to meet the injustices of a past age it not only objects to the identification of nationalisation with Socialism, but asks whether anyone knows what “socialisation” means. . . .

“All this is, of course, destructive,” wrote the Economist. “Positively, socialist union offers as yet ethical, not political, principles; and the best of ethics can lead men to almost any practical conclusion.”

Over 70 years ago. Frederick Engels had something to say about the relation of ethics to Socialism which was later published as “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.” Here Engels traced the origin and development of Socialism, its historical conditions and philosophical ideas. He called those who sought to bring about a better society by appealing to ethical principles. Utopians. He wrote:

"The ‘Utopians” mode of thought has for a long time governed the Socialist ideas of the nineteenth century. and still governs some of them. Until very recently all French and English socialists did homage to it. The earlier German Communism, including that of Weitling was of the same school. To all these Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each different school. And as each one’s special kind of absolute truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding. his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be mutually exclusive one of the other. Hence from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion, a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of the different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition, a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed, the more the definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.

“To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis.” (“Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” Vol. II, pp. 117-8, Marx Engels' Sel. Works, published by Lawrence & Wishart, Ltd.)

As the foregoing comments on the Labour publications show, Engels’ words also describe the Labourites of the 20th century.

Engels pointed to the working class struggles in the early 19th century and argued that these ’’facts more and more strenuously gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois economy as to the identity of the interests of capital and labour. As to the universal harmony and universal prosperity that would be the consequence of unbridled competition . . .”

"The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange—in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as the religious, philosophical and other ideas of a given historical period. . . .”

"The Socialism of earlier days certainly criticised the existing capitalist mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain them, and therefore, could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad. The more strongly this earlier Socialism denounced the exploitation of the working class, inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this exploitation consisted and how it arose. But for this it was necessary—(1) to present the capitalistic mode of production in its historical connection and its inevitableness during a particular historical period, and therefore, also, to present its inevitable downfall; and (2) lo lay bare its essential character, which was still a secret. This was done by the discovery of surplus value. It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labour power of his labourer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis this surplus value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up the constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of possessing classes. The genesis of capitalist production and production of capital were both explained.” (“Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” Vol. II, M.E.S.W., pp. 123-5.)

After tracing the development of modern social production from small handicraft, Engels wrote:

“The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialised. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, everyone owns his own product and brings it to the market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests.

“This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonism of to-day.” (M.E.S.W.. Vol. II. pp. 128-9.)

Engels explained in detail the social antagonisms that follow from this fundamental contradiction and pointed out how it would be eliminated ”with the seizing of the means of production by society.” (P. 140.)

By this Engels didn’t mean nationalisation. He claimed that

"the transformation . . . into state ownership does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces . . . the modern State . . . is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as the individual capitalists. The modem State, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers—proletarians.” (P. 136.) 

Members and sympathisers of the Labour Party seeking a policy to which they can give their support should lay hold of ”Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” and read it carefully. They can find it included in “Marx, Engels, Selected Works,” Vol. II. The language may reflect the conditions under which it was written, but as an exposition of the rise and development of capitalist society and the solution to its problems. Socialism, it is right up to date.

We hope that many of them would then realise that the object of their policy should be the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of production and that to ” thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism.”

J. T.

Letter: Truth & Politics (1974)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Truth & Politics

Just to conclude the matter of the labour-time vouchers, I don’t see that Horatio’s remark in the May issue gets us any further. We are still stuck at the point that you can’t time a Shakespeare as you can a miner and you can’t get a Schubert to clock on when he jots down an inspired tune in the middle of the night. We must just leave it that now the Socialist position holds good — to each according to his need. Without measuring.

May I express a little surprise that in his otherwise most percipient article on Logic, Truth and Politics, R. Barltrop lapses into naivety when he says there are such things as honest politicians and he immediately proves the opposite by reference to some “thoroughly decent” C.P. leader — who nevertheless “told . . . whopping . . . lies”. But the example of another “honest liar”, Stafford Cripps, is even more odd. The suggestion that he really believed in ’49 that the pound would not be devalued when he swore this right until the day it happened is untenable. To say that the “government” did the devaluing is meaningless. As Chancellor, in this matter, for practical purposes he was the government and he lied because he had to (otherwise speculators would have reduced the pound to waste paper).

I am afraid your writer has rather misunderstood Churchill’s reference to Cripps (“There but for the grace of God goes God”). He did not mean that he thought Cripps was honest — merely a puritanical humbug. The proof is almost contained in the article which refers to the lies about the regime in Russia when Stalin became our glorious ally. Churchill needed as an ambassador someone who would be able to go there and see the atrocities which Stalin was committing against the Russian workers — and send enormous lies home which would be swallowed by the British workers. So the old cynic sent the most plausible leftist liar he could find. Cripps. I agree with Barltrop that the psalmist’s “All men are liars” is wrong. The correct position was stated by the late Crossman (who knew!) when he once wrote in The Guardian “all politicians tell lies” (my emphasis). Lying is one of the evils of capitalism which Socialism will render unnecessary along with greed, envy, etc.

S. Gamzu

Other letters and replies held over to next month through pressure on space.

Letter: Intellectuals (1975)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Intellectuals

As socialism like death is inevitable, can we not sit back and wait for it? If it is determined by the materialist conception of history then surely it will take its course and arrive when capitalism reaches its zenith or utmost point of development. Under these circumstances, how can we hurry it? Can we hurry the rise of the sun before the laws of the universe are obeyed?

I am of course open to correction, as you so kindly did when I stated that Hitler gained power by coercion and bully-boys. You proved by figures that a majority voted for him. Will you do the same service for your member who wrote “Why I joined the SPGB”, wherein he says Hitler held fake elections and polled 99% of the votes.

I shall be grateful if you will define “intellectual”. “Ivan” describes Crossman as a glamorous one. Does it mean one of high intellect; good education; deep knowledge of politics, economics, so enabled to discern one system from another? If such a person then fosters or preaches that which is not compatible with his learning, can he qualify as intellectual? Is he as with MPs who, too modest to call themselves honourable, allow others to append the distinction? Or are they covered by the words of Tom Paine — “When a man has so corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.”

The point is: What is an intellectual?

R. Rellenck

London S.E.

Reply:

On your first point, perhaps you have seen the letter and reply headed “An evolutionary view” in the August Socialist Standard. The materialist conception of history does not hold that society unfolds inexorably in perpetual motion. This was not the attitude stated in “Is Socialism Inevitable?” It emphasized on the contrary that men make history.

Your question about Hitler involves a misunderstanding of the two items you put together. The first, which we are glad to learn was illuminating to you, concerned how Hitler and his party gained political power in Germany. The statement in “Why I joined the SPGB”, that Hitler held fake elections in which he got nearly all the votes, referred to when he was established in power.

Last, what is an “intellectual”? We might have used the inverted commas, or said “self-styled”, to make our attitude clear. Your remarks are to the point. The intellectual posture is of having higher knowledge and being altogether superior to the common herd. The article on Crossman was intended to show what a sham this is.

Editors.

Tories Again Steal Labour’s Clothes (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam Buick

Democracy (2001)

Book Review from the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Retreat of Social Democracy. By John Callaghan, Manchester University Press, 2000.

Many of the social reforms implemented by the Labour government after the Second World War were repeated elsewhere in Europe, including Christian Democratic Germany and Italy. Many of these regimes did not claim to be socialist or social democratic, yet by the late 1950s they were spending more on social security than Britain. The economist J.M. Keynes had expressed the ruling class point of view when he called the Beveridge proposals for the British welfare state “the cheapest alternative open to us”. There were other benefits for the ruling class too, including higher profits by maintaining a downward pressure on wages. As Labour MP Richard Crossman explained to his readers in the Daily Mirror (15 November 1955):

“The fact is that ever since 1945 the British trade unionist would have enjoyed a far higher wage packet if his leaders had followed the American example and extorted the highest possible price for labour on a free market. Instead of doing so, however, they exercised extreme wage restraint. This they justified by pointing out to the worker the benefits he enjoyed under the welfare state—prices kept artificially low by food subsidies; rents kept artificially low by housing subsidies, rent restriction; and in addition the Health Service.”

But these reforms were always liable to be reversed if the economy ran into trouble and capitalists sought to reduce the costs of the state. This is precisely what happened in the 1970s when economic stagnation and high inflation (so-called “stagflation”) set in. This set the scene for the rise of Thatcherism and the neo-liberal agenda, hastening the retreat of Social Democracy around the world. Although Professor Callaghan acknowledges the capitalist nature of economic stagnation as a factor in the retreat of social democracy, it is clear that he attributes most of the blame to Social Democrat leaders for capitulating to the Thatcherite onslaught. This may well be the case, but Thatcher was the bastard child of capitalist crisis.

Callaghan also claims that wages increases contributed to inflation. But wage increases cannot cause inflation. Unless market conditions change in their favour, or they are a monopoly or in receipt of a government subsidy, businesses cannot raise prices simply because they have had to pay higher wages. If businesses could recover wage increases by increasing their prices, there would be no point in their resisting wage claims. The fact that they do resist wage increases is because they increase costs and reduce profits. This is quite separate from inflation—a persistent increase in the general price level—which is the sole responsibility of governments when they issue more currency than is needed for the economy at that time.

Callaghan’s qualified support for Labour and Social Democratic parties in Europe rests on the bizarre claim that “self-avowed socialists” exist in all of them. But it is unlikely that the leftist Callaghan would acknowledge Stalin as a socialist because Stalin said he was one. Even Tony Blair very occasionally uses the “s” word, but does anyone still take him seriously?

Lew Higgins

The Economics of Rent Control (1957)

From the April 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist’s task is to preach Socialism and work to bring a Socialist society into being. This involves understanding and explaining the nature of the present social system; that it is a class-divided system in which the workers, in their own interest, need to struggle on the wages field and to take any favourable opportunity to press for higher wages.

Social reformers, including the members of the Labour Party disregard (or explicitly reject) the class- struggle. They see instead a world in which, as they suppose, it is possible bit by bit to gain benefits for the workers and thus progress towards a new social system. It is a deceptively plausible argument; but it rests all the time on a great illusion. The argument runs like this, "Would it not be a good thing if on top of his wages the worker with children received children's allowances? And if his wages remained the same and food prices were reduced by Government subsidies? And if his wages remained the same and his rent were reduced by rent restriction and housing subsidies?" It looks good, too good. It is too good to be true. The catch in it is the assumption that these “benefits" are added to wages and that wages can look after themselves. In truth the reforms mentioned, along with others of the same kind, have had the effect of undermining and weakening the working-class struggle for higher wages—and they were designs for that purpose.

Advocates of children’s allowances urged their adoption to avoid a general raising of wages; incidentally setting the married against the single workers. Food subsidies under the war time Coalition and under the 1945 Labour Government were used to manipulate the cost of living index in order to mask the real rise in the cost of living and fob off wage claims. And rent control was devised for for purpose of discouraging foe workers from fighting for higher wages at a time when low unemployment gave them a favourable opportunity to do so. It, too, has divided the workers paying restricted rents from the others, in high rented houses.

The final answer to the whole argument of the reformists is the fact that it was the Labour Government (following foe example of Tories and Liberals before them) that pursued the policy of the “wage-freeze," thus knocking the bottom out of their own case. They demanded of the workers that, in face of a rising cost of living, they should be content with “social services" in place of wage increases: and asked employers not to give higher wages.

The late Sir Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchequer in foe Labour Government, defined this policy in a speech in the House of Commons on 27 September. 1949, when dealing with the White Paper on "wage restraint" issued foe previous year:—

"The White Paper must . . . be observed strictly, and it is only in the exceptional and genuine cases where some wage survives which, together with all the subsidies and social services, is insufficient to provide a family a minimum standard of living, that there can be any possible excuse for going forward for an increase" (our italics).

The occasion of the speech was the devaluation of the pound, which Sir Stafford had denied for months that he intended to enact but which he had just announced. He knew that this would raise the cost of living still further but again he warned the workers that they must not expect wages to rise:—

“Especially and specifically there can, in our view, be no justification for any section of the workers trying to recoup themselves for any rise in the cost of living due to the altered exchange rate."

So the reformists who promised social reforms and low rents and prices to be a form of wage increase, ended up by asking the workers to put up with higher prices and a wage freeze!

The Curious History of Rent Control

Anyone who judges the present dispute over rents merely by what Labour Party leaders say about the Tory bill to free large numbers of houses from control and to raise the rents of those still under control will gain the impression that it is a clear issue between Tories, who are against low rents, and Labourites, who favour them. Yet the history of rent restriction shows that this does not fit the facts. It was a Tory Government that reimposed rent restriction when the war broke out in 1939 and a Tory Minister of Health, Mr. W. H. Long, in a Coalition Government, who started it all in 1915. What has to be explained therefore is why the Tories who began it, later on wanted to wipe it out. The explanation is really quite a simple one. The Tories (and Liberals) introduced it in 1915 and again in 1939 to deal with a particular problem arising out of war and when that emergency was over and new conditions arose they saw no point in keeping it in existence. What the MacMillan Government is doing now, through its new legislation, is, though on a restricted scale, what the Tory Government wanted to do in 1923. In that year the Onslow Committee, set up by the Government, recommended that rent control be entirely abolished and rents left to the free play of supply and demand. It was to be carried out in three stages so that by June, 1925, the last vestige of the war-time legislation would have been removed and landlords would be legally entitled to get what rents they could, as had been the situation before 1915. But this was so unpopular that the Government got cold feet and decided to make minor relaxations only so a large proportion of working class houses still had controlled rents when, in 1939 (again because of war) rents were pegged at their existing level.

Parallel with legally restricted rents was the policy of Government subsidies to enable new houses to be built and let at rents below the amount required to cover the full cost. This, too, was not a Labour Party invention but was started in 1919 by the Liberal-Tory Coalition Government. Recently the Tories sharply reduced the amount of subsidies and Mr. Butler, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced that the intention was to abolish these Government subsidies entirely (House of Commons, 26 October, 1955).

Why the war-time Governments Restricted Rents

As soon as the war broke out in 1914 the building of new houses was curtailed, and later on brought almost to a standstill, because men and materials were wanted for the armies and munition making. The result was that rents began to rise along with the rise in toe prices of food and clothing and other necessities. As there was little unemployment and a great shortage of skilled workers, the members of trade unions began to press for higher wages. The Government (and the employers) wanted to prevent the workers, especially the skilled men who were very favourably placed, from taking advantage of the labour shortage by striking. The Government appealed to their patriotism, with the help of Labour leaders; promised to keep the cost of living down; and took the drastic step of making it illegal for landlords to raise rents above the 1914 level. At the same time they fixed maximum wages for many workers. This policy of “wage restraint” succeeded almost beyond expectation and throughout the war wage rates, particularly those of engineering craftsmen, were kept far behind the steady rise of the cost of living. The following comment was published in the Labour Year Book, 1919 (published by the T.U.C., Labour Party and Labour Research Department):—

“By the spring of 1915 the skilled engineers would have been able, if they had acted without consideration for the national position, to demand a monopoly price for their labour—a situation which had not occurred in this century since the Black Death of 1381. And just as the government of that day had met the situation by a statute fixing the maximum price that must be paid for labour, so in 191$ the government passed the Munitions Act, which had substantially the same effect. Compulsory arbitration and the Leaving Certificate clauses combined to prevent the engineer from getting better terms for his labour by withdrawing that labour, either collectively or individually” (p. 235).

The article in the Labour Year Book went on to point out that at the end of 1916 engineers wage rates were only 20% above the 1914 level. By the same date the cost of living had risen by 65%. And just after the end of toe war (in January. 1919), while all industrial wage-rates had, on average, risen to about 100% above the level of 1914, the cost of living had gone up by 120% in spite of the freezing of rents at the 1914 level.

This policy was followed again in the second world war though the true picture was obscured by the falsity of the Govemment's cost of living index. On a real estimate of the rise of the cost of living during the war large numbers of skilled craftsmen (as well as most clerical workers) had increases of wage rates below the increase of prices. “Wage restraint” was continued after the war by the Labour Government and Mr. Richard Crossman, Labour M.P. and member of the Executive of the Labour Party, afterwards admitted how restricted rents and other factors were used by the Labour Government to keep wages down.

“The fact is that, ever since 194$, the British trade unionist could have enjoyed a far higher wage packet if his leaders had followed the American example and extorted the highest possible price for labour on a free market.

“ Instead of doing so, however, they exercised extreme wage restraint. This they justified by pointing out to the worker the benefits he enjoyed under the Welfare State—food prices kept artificially low by food subsidies: rents kent artificially low by housing subsidies; rent restriction; and, in addition, the Health Service “ (Daily Mirror, 15/11/55).

Rent Control not a Working Class Issue

In 1915 the Labour Party supported toe Govemmenfs decision to peg rents at the 1914 level and the Labour Executive in its report to their annual conference in 1916. claimed that “assuredly this Bill was a very big step against certain class interests.” The implication was— and every Labour Party supporter firmly believes it still— that a victory had been gained by the working class against, the Capitalist class. It was nothing of the kind. It was a measure for the safeguarding of capitalism taken at the expense of one section of the propertied class, the landlords. It was not a victory for the working class though then, and since, it may seem to have been in the interests of those individuals who happen to live in a house with controlled rent. It was intended as a means of dissuading the workers as a whole from pressing for the higher wages they could have got, and in this it succeeded.

Not only is this shown by what happened to wages and the cost of living in Britain during the two world wars and under the 1945 Labour Government, but it was demonstrated also by experience in continental countries, including Austria and Germany.

Low Rents, Low Wages, High Profits

The effect of rent restriction on workers' wages was inquired into more than once between the wars by the International Labour Office. One of their reports was The Workers Standard of Life in countries with Depreciated Currencies. (ILO, Geneva, 1925). Dealing with Vienna it showed that, because the Government had prevented rents from rising,

“the item of expenditure on rent in working class budgets was reduced to practically nothing in July, 1923, it was barely 1 per cent, of the total expenditure of a working-class family, whereas before the war it might be estimated at about 20 per cent. The change, however, directly benefited certain classes of workers only. But this applied only to unskilled wage earners in a few industries. Most of the workers were in the same position as those of Germany; they had practically no liabilities under the heading of rent, but the corresponding amount was not included in their wages. The actual gain was thus nil."(p. 97).

The Report went on to say that the real gainers were the employers, because they were able to reduce wages to the full extent of the missing item, expenditure on rent. 

Of course the losers were the landlord section of the propertied class.

Tory and Labour both now favour Higher Rents

Though the landlords had to put up with the sacrifice of their interests during the two wars they naturally used all the influence they had to set rid of rent restriction and thus restore the value of their investments when war ended. A number of factors helped them, including the remorseless economic law of capitalism that if there is no profit there is no production. If investors cannot get something like the normal rate of profit on house property they don't invest money in house-building or in repairs. So both the Tories and the Labour Party are agreed that the mere perpetuation of rent restriction is not wanted and must go. In 1923 the Labour Party members on the Onslow Committee recommended that rents should be reduced below the level then permitted under the Acts but no Labour Party spokesman advocates this now. Their main new proposal is that all rent-controlled houses occupied by a tenant be taken over by local authorities, repaired and improved and, as the Labour Party frankly admits, “there will inevitably be some increase in rent." (Labour Party “Talking Points,” No. 15, 1956).

The Tories on the other hand intend to free a large number of houses and raise the permitted rent in others, with the certainty that many rents will go up and the promise that some of the existing very high decontrolled rents will come down. In their view the private landlords, sure of a higher return, will look after the condition of the houses. Both parties agree that the present situation, with a great number of slums, and other hundreds of thousands of houses deteriorating fast into a slumdom, cannot go on.

The Wages Front in 1923 and 1957

The Tories wanted to get rid of rent control in 1923 because it had served its war-time purpose of discouraging wage increases and because by 1923 there were so many unemployed that the trade unions were not in a position to win wage-claims by strikes. They dropped the plan then because it was unpopular and they needed workers votes in elections.

In the past few years the situation has been different from that of 1923. There has been little unemployment and the Tories tried to carry on after 1951 the Labour Government's policy of wage restraint, but with increasing lack of success.

Whereas under the Labour Government from 1945 to 1951 wage-rates lagged behind the rising cost of living, since the Tories came in in 1951 a more aggressive attitude on the part of the workers has played its part in causing wage-rates to rise faster than the cost of living index.

In these changed circumstances the policy of “wage-restraint” by persuasion from above is on its way out, and with it goes any remaining belief by the Government and the employers that it is worth their while keeping widespread rent control in being as a means of discouraging wage claims. Far too many workers are already in decontrolled houses (including the high rented Council houses) or furnished apartments, for the workers as a whole to be as much influenced in that direction as they used to be.

It may be asked what, in face of this situation, is the Socialist Party's policy for the rent and housing problem. ( The answer can be brief. The workers' housing problem will not be solved while Capitalism remains. It is as old as capitalism—the first legislation to solve it was over 100 years ago—and it will last as long as Capitalism, whether the Government be Tory or Labour. It is just a part of the problem of working class poverty, for which neither of those parties has any solution whatever.

Edgar Hardcastle

Letter: Bevan and the Bomb (1984)

Letter to the Editors from the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

In the November issue (of the Socialist Standard) I discovered a comment uncharacteristically shallow and pithy. The aforementioned comment was superimposed on a picture of Labour's new leader Neil Kinnock. I quote:

  Now how did Nye ditch the nut-cutlet brigade? Oh yes. “We cannot send a British foreign secretary- naked into the conference chamber . . ."

No one can deny that Bevan actually uttered those words but if you are to condemn him, you must first understand his reasoning. I hope the quotation below from a letter he sent to a close friend after the Brighton speech enlightens you:
  . . . I am afraid that my Brighton speech has been misunderstood but I suppose I must accept most of the responsibility.

   I do not regard the possession of the hydrogen bomb by Great Britain as making the slightest contribution to peace or to our security, so the argument is not for, or against, Britain possessing the hydrogen bomb. My case is a little different. It rests upon the argument that if we unilaterally reject the bomb, then we are at the same time rejecting all the alliances and obligations in which this country has become involved, either rightly or wrongly. We could not keep an alliance with countries possessing the bomb and yet repudiate it ourselves. When I spoke of Britain going naked into the conference chamber, I was not thinking of the bomb at all. I had in mind the fact that without substituting anything for them in the meantime we should have made a shambles of all our treaties, commitments, obligations and rejected our friends, and this without consulting them. . .

He later goes on to say:

  I am convinced that we must so conduct our affairs as to bring about the abolition, not only of the British bomb, but the American and the Russian as well. . .

Clearly Bevan's opinion is a reasoned analysis not simply an attempt to "ditch the nut-cutlet brigade".
Interestingly in your picture Kinnock was holding a copy of In Place of Fear, which is a book which clearly expresses Bevan's socialism—a socialism of Marxist and Syndicalist origins. As a socialist I hope Mr Kinnock remains a Bevanite for if he does there is hope for all socialists in Britain. Perhaps it would be wiser if the SPGB was not so far removed from the organised labour movement, and was to recognise the common interests that it has with that movement? To claim to represent the working class and to then reject organised labour is untenable.

A. J. Walker 

Warwick University 

Coventry

Reply:
Aneurin Bevan was probably the subject of more myths than most politicians in recent times. One of these concerned his attitude to nuclear weapons and he himself exploded the myth in his speech at the 1957 Labour Party conference in Brighton, when he opposed a resolution calling on the party to renounce the testing or manufacture of nuclear weapons in any form whatsoever. This shocked some of his supporters (the "nut-cutlet brigade”), because they saw it as a great betrayal. In fact it was nothing of the kind.

At the time Bevan, with his history of "left- wing" dissent, was linked with the growing alarm at the results of nuclear tests and at the prospects of a nuclear war:

  More and more it did appear—due chiefly no doubt to the Christmas Island explosions earlier in the year—that the strange numbness which seemed to afflict the national consciousness on the subject was being removed, and Bevan himself had played a principal part in the achievement (Aneurin Bevan, Michael Foot, p.566).

It is true that some of Bevan's actions and speeches could have been interpreted in that way; they certainly had an appeal to the disarmers’ lobby. In March 1955 he had demanded of Attlee that the British forces would not be the first to drop an H-bomb (Hugh Gaitskell, Philip Williams, p.494). During the 1955 election he had declared himself “profoundly opposed" to the bomb's manufacture (The British General Election 1955, D.E. Butler). In April 1957 he still pursued the same line: “I can see no good purpose at all in Britain also arming herself with that useless weapon” (Foot, op. cit. p.552). At the miners' gala in Cardiff in June 1957 he urged that street demonstrations might be necessary if the government failed to act. Inevitably, in that year before the formation of CND, there developed an assumption in some circles that Bevan would be in the leadership of any movement aimed at the abolition of nuclear weapons.

But anyone who thought like that was overlooking some other, very important, facts in Bevan's record. To begin with, he was in the Labour Cabinet which had given the go-ahead for the manufacture of a British atomic bomb and he gave the project his active support (Williams. op. cit. p.454). According to the inveterate disarmer, Peggy Duff (Left, Left, Left, p.70) a few days before his demand to Attlee about first use of the H-bomb he had actually encouraged Richard Crossman to support the making of the bomb. Crossman agrees with this interpretation. recording that for Bevan ". . . not the H-bomb, but our strategy and foreign policy were the real issues ... I was extremely impressed by his argument that public opinion was not ripe for (opposition to manufacture of the bomb)" (Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, 4 March 1955).

The best that could be said for Bevan's record on nuclear weapons, then, was that it was inconsistent and opportunistic. When it came to his speech at Brighton, he was in the position of a future Labour Foreign Secretary (with high hopes of soon becoming the real thing, for the Conservatives were still in disarray after Suez and before Macmillan's careful reconstruction of their electoral support). Bevan’s inconsistency, in a more critical gathering, might have been embarrassing for him. He dealt with the problem by arguing the case he had put to Crossman—and to many others for some time— that nuclear weapons were inseparable from capitalism at large with its world-wide conflicts and its diplomacy. To abolish British weapons, immediately and unilaterally, was not reconcilable with the role of the British ruling class in those conflicts. Disarmament, although desirable. would therefore have to be postponed—which was. of course, the sort of argument any Conservative would have accepted.

At the pre-conference Labour Party NEC on 30 September 1957 Bevan attacked the unilateralists' resolution:

  . . . the full implication of accepting this resolution would mean the dismantling of international alliances and commitments, dismaying the Commonwealth and reducing Britain to complete negation in the councils of the world (Foot. op. cit. p.570).

It would, he said, be a mistake “. . .to take all the cards out of the hand of Labour's next Foreign Secretary" (Williams, op. cit. p.456), a metaphor which was transformed, a few days later into the plea not to send him:

. . . naked into the conference chamber. Able to preach sermons, of course; he could make good sermons. But action of that sort is not necessarily the way in which you take the menace of this bomb from the world (Conference Report, p. 181).

So it is clear that the argument quoted by Mr. Walker represents Bevan’s attitude at the time of that conference. One effect of it. of course, was to publicly cement the alliance between Bevan and Gaitskell. his sworn enemy of recent times; it also assured him his place as the next Labour Foreign Secretary and even, had he lived, perhaps Prime Minister. It was the unilateralists, angry and bewildered, who had got it wrong; they had fallen for the myth and ignored the reality. Peggy Duff (p.71) saw it more clearly: ". . . he was not reneging on the left. He merely stayed where he was, and maintained what had always been his position". A couple of years before, Crossman also had got it right: ". . . he had no moral scruples about the H- bomb . . .” (Diaries, 7 March 1955).

That leaves us with the more important question: does it matter? The Bevan myth is that he was a special, unusual sort of politician, a man of principle who could have made our lives immeasurably better. The reality, as his record on nuclear weapons shows, is that there was nothing exceptional about him as a political leader, trying to run British capitalism in the interests of the ruling class and at the same time keeping his support among the working class. Of course this caused Bevan, with his background as an impoverished miner and his following of starry-eyed labour fanatics, a few problems, which he could usually obscure by application of his agile brain and swift tongue. So he made countless fluent speeches to persuade workers that it is possible to run capitalism without its essential problems like poverty and class conflict, war and weapons of war. In this he was no more consistent (or honest?) than the rest.

These characteristics are also evident in Bevan’s book In Place of Fear, where he describes his ideas on "socialism” in typical confusion and irrelevance:

  The philosophy of democratic Socialism is essentially cool in temper . . . Because it knows that all political action must be a choice between a number of possible alternatives it eschews all absolute prescriptions and final, decisions . . . It struggles against the evils that flow from private property, yet realises that all forms of private property are not necessarily evil (p.169).

For Bevan. the way to "socialism" was through pettyfogging reforms and readjustments in taxes and wages policy. He favoured the "mixed economy" — some concerns being owned by the state and others remaining in private hands (Foot. op. cit. p.37l), so even his support for the capitalist reform of nationalisation was not consistent. What he did not stand for was the socialist, Marxist, alternative to capitalism — a democratic revolution in which the world’s workers will overthrow the capitalist system, dispossess the minority owning class and transform the basis of society from private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution to communal ownership.

Socialism will be a classless, moneyless society and to that Bevan was opposed. He was no more than a typical politician, seeking power from non-socialists on a programme of reforms, then trying to wriggle out of the backtracking and intellectual confusion which this inevitably causes. He wriggled, with a combination of an overbearing personality and telling oratory, rather more effectively than most, which does a lot to explain the myths that still surround him and which entrance Mr. Walker for one.

When Bevan died capitalism was as strife-torn and insecure as ever; two years after his death we were almost plunged into a nuclear war by the Cuban missile crisis. There was no more to hope for in that particular Welsh wizard than in any other political trickster.

Finally: the Socialist Party of Great Britain does not claim to "represent" the working class, who at present overwhelmingly support capitalism. We stand for working class interests — the establishment of socialism — which is a very different matter. As the socialist movement grows so it will come to represent the working class. Mr. Walker does not say what he means by “organised labour" but if the term means the Labour Party and, where they are in combination with the Labour party, the trade union movement, then socialists are opposed to them. Their policies and actions are opposed to working class interests and are aimed at the maintenance of capitalism. Socialists — and indeed anyone who is concerned for workers’ interests — must be hostile to them.

Editors