The Common Market Special Survey: 2. The Industrial Power (1962)

From the January 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

An investment of £2,000 million was the figure recently suggested as necessary for the setting up of an international scientific research centre in Berlin. In the same newspaper the British Electricity Council announced its intention to spend £947 million on generating stations in the next four years. The British Motor Corporation spent £10 million in launching one model—the Austin 7/Miniminor.

In themselves, these three examples have no direct connection with the emergence of the “Common Market.” They are, however, pointers to the scale of modern capitalism. Huge investment and massive production plants are the order of the day. A small sheet steel mill would be economically and technically ridiculous in 1962. Modern plastics, too, such as polythene or nylon, must be produced in vast automatic plants. It is the same story with petrol refining, aircraft production, coal mining, chemicals, shipbuilding, rocket research, and so on; and this matter of size is the real force that has brought the European Economic Community into existence.

E.E.C. is a perfect demonstration of Marx’s statement that capitalism is neither a stable nor a permanent social system. It is driven to expand under the compulsion of inexorable economic laws, gearing up science and engineering to the ever-increasing demands of capital, and forcing human and social relationships into new and arbitrary patterns.

In Europe, particularly, the pressure on national boundaries and sovereignties has been intensifying since the first World War, when Europe started to fall behind America in the race for industrial production and exports. The retention of national units seriously weakened the European capitalists in their struggle for a share of the world’s trade; and since the second World War, which can be seen from one point of view as a German attempt to unite Europe under its rule, it has become obvious that, individually, the European nations are puny and backward by comparison with the American and Russian federations.

E.E.C. is, in fact, very far from being a “good idea ” formulated by European politicians; it is a belated and reluctant acknowledgment of the expanding scale of investment, production and trade.

Steel

Significantly, the first step in the industrial unification of Europe was the setting up of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952. Coal is still by far the most important industrial fuel, and steel the overwhelmingly dominant metal. Furthermore, the holdings in both industries were already concentrated in a few large blocks, making negotiations relatively simple.

The occupying Allies had limited German steel output to 11m. tons a year. When the restriction was lifted, W. German production rose rapidly to reach 34m. tons in 1960, bringing the total for the Community to 73m. tons. Their exports are co-ordinated in a cartel known as the Brussels Entente handling two-thirds of the world’s steel exports— formidable competition for the British Steel Federation!

Nevertheless, in these boom years for steel, British exports have doubled in the past ten years, and the industry has gone ahead with large development plans at Corby and Margam and Llanwern. A large fraction of this increased capacity is for sheet steel in anticipation of a continued increase in demand from the motor industry. These “strip” mills are barely an economic proposition at under a capacity of a million tons a year. Building a new one is therefore a big step, but unless it strides at this rate the British industry must fall out of the race. The real testing time will come when the boom is over. Then the weight of the Brussels Entente will be decisive.

Unless the British Iron and Steel Federation can break into the European group it can be out-produced and out-priced. Even if it does, the proposed merger between Phoenix and Thyssen in Germany would dominate the group. Indeed, the British steel industry might even be prepared to submit to re-nationalisation in order to wield sufficient power.

Coal

It is a starker version of the same picture with regard to the older and less efficient coal industry. Already a number of Belgian coal mines have been closed down as being uneconomic in competition with German coal. In this country the average rate of profit from coal mining was so low that there was never any real alternative to nationalisation. The National Coal Board, like the true capitalist concern that it is, is to close 15 Scottish pits, involving 5,000 men, next year as part of the attempt to wipe out its £21 million deficit for 1960. It has closed a large number of pits which are unprofitable by modern standards, and the total deficit for Scottish mines is now estimated to have reached £100 million. Contrary to popular belief, the Coal Board does not exist to produce coal, but to produce profits; and so it must cut its losses.

It must do more than this: until now it has been protected from serious foreign competition (even the Steel Company of Wales was prevented from importing cheap American coal); it must reverse the steady shrinkage of exports if it is to survive. They dropped from £61 million in 1950 to £28 million in 1960, largely through uncompetitive prices. By cutting the labour force (by 20,000 in 1961) and by a costly programme of capital investment (£97 million in 1961-2) productivity has been raised from 3-2 tons per manshift in 1950 to over 4-1 tons last year. The National Coal Board claims that it is introducing automatic machinery faster than is being done anywhere else in the world, and that real automation, in the form of robot coal-cutting machinery which seeks out the coal for itself, will be operating in a British mine before the end of 1962. In a Commons debate on the coal industry on October 24th, 1961, the Minister of Power, Mr. Wood, said that: “It was too early for him to forecast the precise effect of membership of the Iron and Steel Community, but it was felt that it would benefit both the NCB and the consumer. This would automatically confer benefit to those working in the industry.” (The Guardian, 25/10/61.)

The attitude of British coal miners towards this statement is not easily available; but, since their numbers have dropped from over 1,000,000 in the 1920’s to 560,000 in 1961, it is doubtful whether they feel so optimistic about Britain’s entry into the “Common Market,” because, whatever else it involves, it certainly means more ruthless exploitation of every man.

Gas

On November 7th, 1961, the Financial Times published a four-page supplement on the Gas Industry, showing that like the National Coal Board its production and sales had risen while its labour force had been cut by 20,000 in ten years. The Chairman of the Gas Council, Sir Henry Jones, wrote of “gas established again as a growth industry” in spite of the fact that the number of gasworks has been cut from 1,050 in 1949 to 378. During this period gas production has remained fairly constant at about 2,200 million therms per annum, which means that the whole industry has been made considerably more profitable under nationalisation.

The fact is that many new possibilities have opened up for the gas industry in recent years. It has maintained its strong links with the coal industry, especially with the introduction of the Lurgi process of complete gasification of coal without leaving coke. In addition, however, it is becoming more and more tightly wedded to the oil companies. Apart from the gasification of heavy fuel oil, such as is being carried out by the South Eastern Gas Board at the Isle of Grain works, American oil companies are offering shipments of cheap liquified petroleum gas and of naptha. The British Gas industry, however, has at present concentrated on its decision to import shipments of natural methane from the Sahara. This touches the question of E.E.C. very closely because the French are reported to be undertaking the construction of a pipeline from Algeria across the Mediterranean to provide gas for a grid-system throughout the E.E.C.

For the British industry one of the main advantages of being linked to such a system would be the ironing out of fluctuations in demand during the day and, to some extent, during the year. France and Germany already have large underground storage facilities for manufactured gas so that summer production may be saved for heavy winter consumption. In one way or another it looks as though the capital invested in the British gas industry could show considerably greater profit and expansion by being linked with Europe.

Electricity

The British Electricity Authority is the most profitable of all the nationalised industries, having made a gross profit of £18 million in 1960-61; but there is further profit to be made by linking itself with the continent to meet future increased demand.

Apart from its own considerable expansion and storage schemes, the Annual Report of the Electricity Council mentioned the fact that “. . . the cross-channel link with Electricité de France would be coming into commission soon. Because of the difference in the incidence of peak demand in the two countries, 160MW of load could be transferred in either direction with savings to both parties.” This is an arrangement which has been carried through independently of negotiations among politicians about E.E.C. and demonstrates that, however British hearts may feel about loss of national sovereignty and all that, the industrial ties with Europe are strengthening every day.

Ample proof of this last point is given in a report from Turin by Gordon Wilkins in The Observer, November 5th, 1961:

“More British cars may have Italian built bodies as a result of discussions held here this week. One leading British body designer told me it may even prove economical to import Italian-made bodyshells into England, especially if Britain joins the Common Market . . . Pininfarina are making the convertible bodies for the new French Peugeot 404. Bertone are sending coupe bodies to Germany for N.S.U. and B.M.W. Vignale, who have been building a Triumph TR3 body for the Italian market, are planning a TR4 coupe for export. The agreement between Rootes and Carrozzeria Touring for assembly of their cars in Italy may be the forerunner of others. . . . Ghia are doing bodies for the Austin-Healey Sprite, and the latest registration figures show how much the British Motor Corporation have gained by having the A40 built under licence by Innocenti.”

In the same way, Alfa Romeo build the Renault Dauphine under licence, while “Italy’s enormous Fiat interests have car-assembly plants in Belgium and Germany, and expansion plans amounting to hundreds of millions of pounds will put them in all six nations” (Readers’ Digest, July, 1961).

In the metal-using industries motor car manufacture today makes by far the greatest use of mass production and costly automation. It is true that a few small specialist firms still persist among the giants; but million-pound firms like Standard have been shown to be too small to remain independent in the mass market amongst the large federations. Their average rate of profit is too low. Only ruthless standardisation and wider and wider markets can make profitable the immense outlay of constant capital. Now, in Europe national tariffs are preventing the giants from coming properly to grips with one another, as they must, for the dividing up of the market; and so they add their weight to the breaking down of these barriers.

A Crisis

Commentators on the emergence of E.E.C. have said repeatedly that industrial companies will have to “think big” to meet the new situation. Like most of the talk in the press and broadcasting, this masks the real picture. They imply that E.E.C. offers new opportunities for expansion. The truth is much more sombre. Certainly, the Common Market began while Europe was still booming; but if there had been unlimited markets for all there would have been no need for a Common Market.

The truth is that the average rate of profit has been steadily falling, owing to the enormous rate of capital accumulation (these huge investments in production plants that have been mentioned); and the European Common Market is not a fraternal gathering but a battle ground. The survivors in this new phase of European capitalism, therefore, will be the ones who are already big.

In the fields dealt with, however—coal, steel, gas, electricity and motor cars— the majority of small competitors have already been ousted in each European country: they are not available to be sacrificed when the competition becomes merciless. As early as October, 1961, the Daily Express, which has always put out propaganda for Empire and against Britain’s overtures to E.E.C., began to make great play of the fact that the current boom in Europe was falling off, insisting that therefore Britain should not join.

But these are precisely the conditions under which Britain will be forced to join, in order to give its giant capitalist undertakings chance to survive by overpowering weaker giants in Europe. Of course, there is no certainty that British capital will come out of it less bruised than its competitors, and this is the reason for all the uncertainty and haggling. The greatest giants of all, the major oil companies and the largest of the steel and chemical firms, can only gain in the long run. But, of course, they are already international organisations. The emergence of the European Economic Community is the political admission of the economic fact that a sufficiently great change in quantity has become a change in quality.

The icy winds of competition occasionally referred to are spoken of lustily as though they are to be a tonic for our health. Members of the working class hearing such windy talk on television ”reports” may even be persuaded that it will be a ”good thing” if some of the industrial “inefficiency” is to be “weeded out.” They can only be thus tempted into forgetting their own position as workers as long as they persist in believing that all this production is carried on in capitalism for the purpose of supplying people’s needs.

The Socialist knows that it is not so. He also knows that whichever capitalists turn out to be the winners in the growing struggle, workers can only expect to suffer in the upheaval and to be more thoroughly exploited in the future, whether they call themselves Britons or “Europeans.”

S. Stafford

An Open Question (1978)

From the March 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

In February, 21.000 new adult undergraduates began their studies with The Open University. This is the eighth year of its teaching operation, and there are still twice as many applicants as places very year. It uses over a thousand hours of broadcasting each year and despatches more than 30,000 packages of correspondence teaching material every week. Whether people like it or not—and there are some who do not —the OU has radically altered the pattern of adult education in this country.

There are some who see it as a powerful agent for more fundamental social change, and so, ever since it was granted its charter in 1969, it has had its critics. Those on the ‘left’ have hammered it for not catering for ‘the working class’. Those on the ‘right’ have spread alarms about ‘marxist bias’ in its courses. Those who went to ‘real’ universities have asserted that, whatever else it might be, it could never be a university. And those whose experience at school taught them to be suspicious of ail education have ignored it. Harold Wilson, who claims the idea for its establishment as his own, has stated that the formation of The Open University is the achievement for which he would most like to be remembered.

So how should socialists evaluate it? Like every other capitalist institution, the OU embodies a number of contradictions and tensions, and it is worth looking into some of these.

Unlike other universities in Britain, the OU is financed directly by the Treasury on the decisions of the Department of Education and Science, and this puts it into a direct relationship with the government of the day. All its printed courses are available for sale to the public, and all its broadcasts are on open channels so that, quite unlike other universities, anyone can know what is being taught at any time. These are two strong influences towards conservatism. The third main conservative force is exerted by its students who, in the large majority, are looking not for social change at all but social mobility. They want a ‘respectable’ degree which will be accepted by employers, professional institutes and other educational institutions.

Pioneering Venture

In spite of these quite powerful forces, there is, in fact, a tendency for OU courses to be socially critical. The teachers who were attracted to the University when it seemed to be a pioneering venture tended to be those with a desire to change education. There were those who called themselves marxists, some who called themselves christians, and a much larger body who felt only that education should be much more relevant to daily life. What has happened it that the peculiar Open University process has taken them over and produced an amalgam of all their efforts that has been described as ‘pale pink’. It is this “pale pink’’ course material that has been supplied, not only to OU undergraduates and associate students, but also through Open University Educational Enterprises Ltd. to bookshops all over this country and is being marketed in many other countries in the world, especially the USA.

In this and a number of other ways, the OU is a blend of the commercial and the educational — very different from either the commercial correspondence college on the one hand or, say, a polytechnic on the other. In the matter of fees, for example, the OU student is much worse off than the person who can secure a full-time place at an ordinary university. He cannot get the same sort of grant. He pays his own course fees. This year these are £52 for a full credit course. On top of this he may need set books worth about £20, and if there is a summer school in the course this will cost £50 plus travelling expenses. Most Local Education Authorities have been awarding grants for all or part of the summer school fee and expenses, but OU students have been among the first to suffer in the last two years as local council spending has been cut.

Commercial Approach

Although the OU began by setting up as full a programme as it could afford of undergraduate studies, an important part of the original idea was the provision of post experience courses for people who simply wished to up-date their knowledge in a particular field. The number of people taking single courses in this way as associate students has been steadily growing over the last two or three years in spite of the fact that they pay considerably more, often for the same course, than they would if they were undergraduates. There is no government subsidy of associate students, and there has in the past been considerable acrimony within the University about the rather ruthless commercial approach that was adopted towards these students. This argument was typical of hundreds that have gone on in countless committee meetings throughout the last eight years. The same academics who were pledged to delivering “meaningful” higher education to everyone who wanted it, and to using all the aids of modern technology to this end, also found themselves committed, by the structure and financing of the University, to the minimisation of the cost of higher education to the state. Every innovation therefore, like the marking of assignments by computer, teaching by telephone, or the provision of home experiment kits, has to be justified on economic as well as educational grounds.

Failure Rate

One of the confident predictions of the early critics was that the failure rate among students would be enormous, and that this would offset any apparent financial saving. When one looks at the educational background of OU students and the circumstances under which they study, the prediction seems realistic. Anyone over 21 resident in the UK can apply for a place, regardless of previous education, and places are offered on a first-come-first-served basis. For undergraduates there is even a limited amount of financial assistance for those unable to pay the fees. They study at home from correspondence material which arrives by post. They listen to radio and watch TV broadcasts associated with their course, and they can attend a local study centre for help and advice from their tutors and counsellors. If they study at the rate of one full credit a year, which is normal, they will need to spend about fifteen hours a week aside from their job and their home and family for about forty weeks in the year. During this time they will submit about ten written assignments by post to their tutor and about the same number of pencil-marked forms to be assessed by the computer at Milton Keynes. In early November they will sit a three-hour examination, and the marks from this and their assignments are put together to produce a grade for the course. They need six of these credits for an ordinary degree and eight for an honours degree.

It is a hard way to get a degree, and some students are still working their way slowly through the system. Nevertheless, by 1977, 27,102 had graduated, and it is becoming evident that the rate of failure is not nearly as high as was expected. To begin with, there was a very high percentage of teachers taking degrees, and these might be expected to succeed. As the educational preparedness of applicants falls we can expect to see a fall in the success rate. But it is still astonishing to teachers brought up on a selective system of education to see how well ordinary people manage to cope with quite rigorous degree studies.

One of the recurrent criticisms from the ‘left’ is that OU learning, because of the mass production methods, is rigid and prevents questioning. The people who make this sort of criticism have usually got research degrees themselves. They forget how little opportunity there is for undergraduates at any university to question what they are taught. In the OU it is, if anything, the students themselves who avoid questioning. For too many of them the degree is simply a means to an end, and they simply want to know which are the ‘right’ answers so that they can get the degree as quickly as possible. It is the writers of the courses and the tutors in the study centres who try to persuade them to look all round a question. Over a period of six years or more, this is bound to have some effect, but it is a bit like working against the pull of gravity.

Illusion

When they apply to the OU many people have the illusion that a degree is a passport to higher pay, a better job, and increased social prestige, and the University spends a considerable amount of time and money in trying to convince them that this is not necessarily so, especially if, like the majority, they are already over thirty.

The fact is that having a degree of any kind, is no guarantee of a better job—or even of any job at all. It does not change the graduate’s status as one compelled to sell his labour power to earn a living.

The Open University has the following aim written into its charter ". . . to advance the educational well-being of the community generally”. Education — the spread of knowledge and understanding — can only be beneficial to the spread of socialist ideas.

Ron Cook

Blogger's Note:

This article was written under Ron Cook sometime pen-name of 'S. Stafford'. I think in this case that name was used because Ron himself was an Open University tutor.

Do it Yourself": something worth thinking about (1958)

From the September 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Post-War cult of “Do-It-Yourself” gained most of its newspaper publicity through the effect it had upon home decorating and repairs. The process of making up for colossal war-time destruction and continuing to arm for the next war produced a period of unprecedented full employment. This was the immediate economic situation that kept the repair and redecoration of working class houses at their maximum market price—a price too high for working class families to afford—even with full employment..

And so we have seen the growth of scores of journals and newspaper features devoted to papering ceilings, pointing brickwork and unstopping drains. Firms have made fortunes manufacturing and marketing power tool kits for enthusiastic handymen; and the rate of borrowing from public libraries of books on “useful arts” has doubled..

But “Do-It-Yourself” has more interesting origins than even this novel economic situation. Some of its causes are deeper, more obscure, and may not on the surface appear to be economic at all. If you ask the man who tells you he has just tiled his bathroom with the latest plastic tiles and easy-to-fix adhesive why he did the job himself instead of paying a tradesman to do it, his second reason (after the cost) will be the quality of workmanship. He cannot trust the workers in the decorating firms to “make a good job of it.” Now, the standards of professional decorating for working class houses has never been high, as Robert Tressell’s book, “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists,” makes quite clear. Materials and work are pared to a minimum to keep costs as low as possible and produce a job that will pass muster on a casual inspection. It has little to do with conscientious workmanship because, where the contractor’s price can be paid, as in the office suites of growing industrial companies, picture houses, and the most expensive private houses, the “ professional job ” cannot be bettered. But in the cheap trade there does seem to be justification for saying that standards are falling even below the old penny-pinching level.

The High Cost of Repairs

The reasons are not hard to find. Full employment and the growth of mass production have made repairs of all kinds relatively dearer because of the higher proportion of hand labour they consume. The exploitation of the repair man cannot be stepped up to any great degree by mechanisation as it can in manufacture. It is small wonder, then, that firms whose sole business is repairing and refurbishing shoddily built houses should be forced to lower their standards in order to avoid pricing themselves out of business entirely. Nevertheless, the combination of higher prices and lower quality has forced thousands of working men to arrive home after a full day's work in the factory or office and then put in a full evening's work with a bucket of distemper in the kitchen.

Mass production has done something else. Although it can never produce the finest quality of workmanship, it has raised the standards of design and finish of a number of commodities produced for the working class market. And so the ordinary working man and his wife have begun to apply these standards that they have obtained from mass-produced television sets and crockery and clothes to the homes in which they live. In the majority of these homes the mass-production standard of even the cheapest “ telly ” makes the rest of their furniture and decorations look ludicrously squalid. In addition, the furniture and fittings used in the plays and shows on the telly makes them even more aware of what material comfort can be. The workers have had a slight taste of quality and they find that they like it. The struggle to keep up with the Joneses has begun in earnest and “ Do-It-Yourself ” offers about the only chance for the pay packet to stretch to a set of built-in cupboards, even though they must be made mostly of hardboard and rather thickly painted. The working class family has to put up finally with their own rather poor imitation of quality.

The Tedium of Mass Production

But it is economic conditions also that have made many of these home handymen actually enjoy bringing their total working hours up to twelve or fifteen a day. Wage-working has always been drudgery but it has taken modern mass-production and office organisation to reduce factory work and clerical duties to a deadening tedium. The last vestiges of pleasure in making something or performing a personal service—the real pleasures of work—are gone .A man who attends half a dozen autos all day and every day while they churn out screws gets nothing but boredom and weariness from his work. It is therefore small wonder that in his “leisure” time he should get a certain amount of pleasure out of putting in a new kitchen sink, since the job has got to be done anyway. It really means, however, that working hours have not been shortened very much in the last hundred years.

“Do-It-Yourself” has thus helped to prop up a number of the minor weak points in the capitalist social system: but. like many another social trend, this movement has to some extent overshot the mark already. It has more than filled up the immediate economic vacuum which brought it into being and, far from keeping working class attention fixed safely on private household problems, has begun to spread into wider fields. Acute business men have recognised in this craze a deep underlying need in working men to do something constructive in a social system which, when it is not destroying things and people, is forcing such a high degree of organisation and atomisation upon production and living that the ordinary man feels he is no longer in contact with real things or real life. As with every other potential market, capital has striven to exploit this one to the full. Apart from “ Do-It-Yourself ” kits for making furniture and boats and—in America—rockets, it is possible to take up part time study in all sorts of skills and fields of learning. There are correspondence courses for almost everything except a medical degree: and on a less strenuous level there has been a sharp increase in radio and television programmes with a bias on learning and active participation. “Network Three” is the plainest example of the trend, but it is now also possible to be your own archeologist with Sir Mortimer Wheeler, your own big game hunter with Armand Denis and his wife, or even a marine biologist with Hans Haas.

Much of this is of course spurious or at least superficial participation in such affairs for the ordinary working man; but his appetite has been whetted and occasionally he is given a broadcast programme or a newspaper article that is even daring enough to suggest that he should think for himself.

Do your own thinking

This is really the end of the ride, however. This is where the powers that be want to call a halt to the craze for “ Do-It-Yourself.” It may help the worker to put up with the monotony of factory life if he can do a bit of house-painting in his spare time. That is safe. What he does at home does not seriously offer competition to the mass production he does for the major part of his day. When it comes to thinking, however, the mass media of propaganda—television, films, radio, advertising, newspapers, pulpits, classrooms—could be seriously upset if ordinary working men started doing their own thinking. They might pause from accepting the opinions of professionals on the state of the world and start trying to make their own. They might start asking their own questions instead of leaving it to the Questionmaster. They might begin to ask why, in a world with such vast productive resources and capabilities, with mass production in fact, they have to work eight to ten hours a day, five or six days a week, fifty weeks a year, fifty years in a lifetime, just to maintain a barely sufferable standard of living (when there is no slump), and then be pensioned off with a pittance when they are too old to work.

They might start asking why, in a world where nobody wants war. they should be called upon, every generation or so, to leave home and family to go and hurl death and destruction at other working men and women who also don't want any part of it.

They might even ask how on earth it came about and —what is equally fascinating—how it is kept up that a very small group of people in the civilized world own the land and the vast accumulation of property and wealth upon it, while the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of these countries own nothing but a few meagre, personal trifles.

When working men and women start asking their own questions, they will start putting two and two together for themselves and that, to the propagandists and to the class and system they strive to keep in power, would be intolerable. That would be political thinking; and if there is one thing that the working man is expected not to do for himself, it is to trouble his head about politics. All the agencies of propaganda agree upon this that there are plenty of expert politicians and historians and economists who are far better equipped than the ordinary worker at political thinking. All that he needs to do is to put one or other of the reputable types of representative into the Commons every five years and leave it in their capable hands.

The only trouble is that these professionals have an unbroken record of failure. “Do-It-Yourself "—both the practical and theoretical kinds—has begun to show people that many experts are not so different or so infallible as they used to appear. Some of these jobs and some of these ideas are quite easy when you know how, particularly this business of politics, for which no special training or degree is given, and in which a man doesn’t have to be particularly bright, as is plain when some politicians appear on television.

When the ordinary working man has begun to do his own political thinking and has realised that all the business of present day politics, all the mad mass production and competition for profit, the insane wars for economic and strategic advantages, are only important issues for those who really own the world and only arise because of the social system in which he and his fellows own nothing—when he has thought this himself—then he and all those like him in the world will decide that such a social system must be done away with as soon as possible. And, having acquired a healthy distrust of experts and professionals, he will decline all the offers of those who contend to do the job for him. We will have become aware of what this party has been telling him for fifty- four years: if you want a job well done—if you want Socialism—you must “ Do-It-Yourself.”

S. Stafford

Time to be Free (1967)

From the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

An observer from outer space could be forgiven for thinking that human beings enjoyed work more than any other activity, since the vast majority of them spend the best part of their waking lives at it. However, if he hovered in his space ship long enough to hear the bells and whistles and sirens wail round the world as knocking-off time swept round with the evening shadows, he would be able to infer from our behaviour that we regarded work as unpleasant, if not positively hateful. He would see people streaming out of factory gates and office doors with the terrible urgency of creatures suddenly set free.

From that height, however, he would find it utterly impossible to understand why they should return next morning and allow the gates to be shut behind them again. Even if he could land and talk to some of them he would be likely to find that they did not understand either. If there were a Socialist in the group he would find great difficulty in explaining to the visitor that the civilised world was owned—not by these hundreds of millions who laboured all day to produce and distribute everything that came out of the factories and fields and mines and seas—but by a small elite who hardly ever came near them. It would take some time to explain what ‘owned’ meant. It would take far longer to explain why people allowed it to go on for even a minute longer. In fact, when the visitor had been told that people actually supported the system that kept them enslaved, that destroyed much of the wealth they laboured to produce, and that sent them out to kill one another in millions from time to time, he would probably let in the clutch and streak off home to Alpha Centaurus or wherever he came from.

The trouble is that people hardly ever get this space traveller’s view of things. On the whole, they tend not to question the state of society into which they were born. And they tend to accept their place in it. They have either forgotten or have never been told that it is only in the last four or five thousand of their million years on the planet that they have been steadily dispossessed of the world they live in by a few of their own kind. They have come to accept the idea that work is not something that they do because it is a satisfying activity, or even because they see the need to do it, but simply because of the wage without which they could not live. And so they shrug their shoulders or grit their teeth and sell the best part of their days for the best part of their lives to their employers. During all this time they apply themselves to tasks which are exhausting, boring, frustrating, humiliating, exasperating, degrading, dirty or dangerous, and sometimes a mixture of them all. Very often the jobs that they do are as near pointless as makes no difference. Sometimes they are actively harmful or destructive. And always the satisfaction that there might have been in a job is soured because it is done under the threat of the sack, because neither the tools with which they work nor the product when they have made it belongs to them, and because the demands of profit insist that the job must always be done at a speed or for a price that makes quality and satisfaction impossible.

If you ask people why they do it, what keeps them at it, year in and year out, they will tell you—after they have made the accepted declarations of love and duty towards their family—that it is all for the sake of the few hours a day that are free from work. This is their ‘leisure’, meaning the time that they are allowed, or that is lawfully theirs. The word has no meaning except in a society based on compulsory labour. Leisure is the time in which people are allowed to live for themselves. They often say that they only really begin to live when they leave work. This is why they watch the clock. This is why everybody calls the late afternoon ‘the rush hour’. They rush for the bus stop or the car park or the station in order to start a jostled journey home that is almost as wearying as the day’s work itself.

It is now about nine hours since they left the house with sleep in their eyes and an undigested mixture of tea and cornflakes in their insides. They get home again feeling grubby and hungry and irritable. Leisure starts now! They are free to embark upon the riotous pursuit of pleasure. It is the moment they have been waiting for all day. And it is the moment when the dreary daily truth reasserts itself. They flop into a chair. Really, they need a wash and a change of clothes and light nourishing meal, but for the time being all they can manage is to sip yet another cup of refreshing tea and gaze vacantly at the tail-end of the children’s programme on the television.

It is at this point, usually, that the commercials intervene. A lean and bronzed young man races laughing down a sunbaked beach, empty except for the slim vivacious girl who flees before him, also laughing. ‘Cut’ to the foam-flecked water’s edge as he gains upon her. She reaches the sanctuary of the boat only to have him climb triumphantly in above her and take lovingly in his thumb and forefinger a piece of her creamy chocolate bar. Quite apart from its obvious (and perverted) intention, this advertisement, like many others, demonstrates the fact that energy and zest are essential for the active enjoyment of leisure. But these are just what the worker has sold in order to get his daily bread. There is little or nothing left over for leisure. The first call upon his free time is the re-creation of this energy for tomorrow’s work.

The second is the business of running a home and bringing up children who will form the next generation of workers. If he has a quick wash and a meal there will just be time to play with the kids for half an hour before they have to be got to bed. And then there will be jobs waiting: in the winter a couple of hours decorating; in the summer the garden or the car. Always there will be things that need mending or fitting, forms that need filling and bills that need sorting. By now it will be nearly ten o’clock, and many of the jobs will have been put off until the weekend, but by pushing these to the back of his mind and neglecting to tidy his tools away there is just time to put on his coat and slip down to the local for a couple of pints of wild libidinous pleasure before closing time.

What is generally not realised is that workers are almost perpetually tired. Many of them, particularly the younger ones, cut down on their sleeping time so that they can spend a couple more hours at a dance or a night club, and this has a cumulative effect upon both physical and mental health. What makes it possible is that the pattern of tiredness is undergoing a radical change. Year by year, with the introduction of more machinery, fewer and fewer jobs require a large output of physical energy, but more and more produce mental and emotional exhaustion because of the tension and pressure and pace involved. The result is that most workers arrive home feeling tired but edgy, played out but unsatisfied by their work. They have the vague impulse to go somewhere or do something, but fewer and fewer of them are able to do anything positive about it. This is why many of the young ones must have a motor bike or scooter just to ride round upon—to ‘go’—nowhere in particular. This is why all sorts of useless activities have been invented so that workers can actually do something in their spare time which does not remotely resemble work. What they need most of all is mental recreation if they are to achieve a state of mind which will enable them to face the prospect of going to work again the next day.

With leisure time severely restricted, and the frustrations of capitalism always on the increase, excess has become the order of the day with a large section of people. The intensity of work tends to be matched by the intensity of ‘pleasure’, and often frenzied effort to impart some quality and value to life to make up for the dehumanisation of the daily round. The last thing that most workers want to do is think—about what is going on in the modern world—and the leisure industry is geared up specifically to prevent thinking. Leisure is organised on such a scale and in such detail that workers have no need to plan their holiday activities or their evenings out. It is all done for them. All they have to do is accept it. They are prevented from being alone or quiet for a moment. It is all ‘go’, desperate activity, preferably useless and expensive, often destructive or cruel.

Over and over again, the relaxation of moral strictures and the provision of greater and greater leisure facilities are welcomed as increased freedom. And yet they do not give the contentment that freedom gives. Indeed, the feelings of boredom and frustration get worse. Because freedom has not been increased. It has been curtailed. Many of the activities, such as sports, in which workers used to engage for recreation have been taken over by professionals. One by one, their pastimes, such as skittles or cards, are dwarfed and superseded by glossy commercial versions. Television has entered their homes and stifled their conversation, showing them characters and personalities more charming and interesting than their families or friends. Regardless of programme quality, they need to have the set switched on ‘for company’. The more that capital invades their leisure time, the less they have left to live for themselves, and the more control is extended over what was once their private life. The fact that most workers welcome the change does not invalidate what is happening, it simply makes the process more degrading. Through television, the standard leisure diet for most people most of the time, they can indulge in vicarious action and luxury and travel and violence and love and success, without really having any of these things. They can escape from the real world of work and worries and chores—without really escaping. And all the time the programmes relentlessly advertise capitalism’s most important modern product—the idea that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

If the space traveller watched us for long enough he would see that it is not in our work that we give most convincing proof of our status as wage-slaves, but in our ‘free’ time. We run out from work like animals released from a treadmill, only to perform unquestioningly upon the toys in the cage. We are slaves because we have the slave mentality. The bondage is in our minds.

S. Stafford

Blogger's Note:

'S. Stafford' was the sometime pen-name of the late Ron Cook.

What Are Your Wages? (1965)

From the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do you suffer from that common ailment: too much week left at the end of your money? Most of us do. The doctors, the teachers, the shipworkers, the provincial busmen and many others are all struggling, at the moment of writing, for higher wages. In a few weeks’ time other workers in other jobs will be engaged in the same sort of tussle. As a matter of fact, we have become used to this pattern, since the war, of “rounds” of wage increases. The economy of this country has been “booming” fairly steadily, and unemployment keeps fairly low. But it is rather a strange fact that, in spite of all the increases that have been won in that time, our wages are still inadequate. There is plenty of evidence of this. The fact that the hire purchase debt in Britain passed the £1,000 million mark in 1964 shows just how much people can not buy without getting into debt.

Why is it that this struggle for higher wages is always going on, even in countries like the U.S.A. where workers are the highest paid in the world?

If it weren’t for the money, most of us would stop work tomorrow. After all, wages are the common means of getting work out of men and women. You can hear some of them call it “bloody slavery”. They are not trying to be accurate-only to express their feelings. There is very little real slavery in the world today. It is a very old-fashioned and inefficient system of getting work out of people. The big empires of the past were built up on slave labour; and there was a brief flare-up of it again in America when the virgin land of the new continent was being opened up to agriculture. The slave was caught or bought, like a horse or a machine; and he was fed or flogged when necessary in order to get the maximum of work out of him. Slaves were not really regarded as people: they were denied citizenship; and their owners usually had power of life and death over them. But the quality of work they could do was generally very low; and there is a snag to owning slaves: they have to be fed and housed even when there is no work for them to do.

Although there has always been a certain amount of it, getting work out of people for wages is fairly new as a universal system. Almost everywhere in the world the slave empires were overthrown by the much less highly organised system of feudalism. The feudal serf was a “free” man owning his own bit of land; but to protect themselves from attack serfs clustered round the strong-arm men, the lords of the manor; and they paid for their “protection” by working on the land or fighting the battles of their lords. In the time that was left over, they were able to work their own strips of land. A tenth of what they produced was demanded from them by a highly organised church, which operated in league with the lords to prevent serfs from running away. It is debatable, therefore, whether serfs were much better off  than slaves.

With the rise of capitalism, however, the serfs were gradually freed entirely-by having even their strips of land taken from them. They were no longer forced to work for anybody—except by the pressure of starvation. As it was, they offered themselves for work eagerly, even desperately at times, for there was no other way of getting food, clothing and shelter, except by wages. At last, in capitalism, the system of buying and selling became universal. Everything was for sale. Anything could be bought. The problem for the great mass of humanity was that they had nothing left to sell except their ability to work.

Most of us feel we have the right to live. The trouble is that hardly any of us have got “private means”. We can only get the means to live by “selling ourselves”. It is rather like prostitution; but we have no choice. Because of this, a lot of workers talk about the “right to work” almost as though it were the same thing as the right to live. They take part in marches and demonstrations when jobs are scarce, insisting upon their right to work. They feel offended if they are told that they are demanding the right to prostitute themselves. Actually, of course, workers have no legal right to work. Nor will they ever have. All they possess is a commodity—the ability to work. Millions of people throughout the world own nothing else.

This is what distinguishes them as a separate economic class, the working class. They constitute about ninety per cent of the civilized population of the world. Of course, in the more advanced countries they may own their own house and their own car; but economically their class is determined by the fact that they have to prostitute themselves throughout their useful lives in order to keep these things and live from day to day.

Obviously, if workers are sellers of the ability to work, there must also be a class of buyers. Occasionally and briefly, one worker may buy the services of another to do a job; but as he only has his wages with which to pay wages it cannot be general. Only those who possess the wealth which can be worked upon to produce more wealth, can really afford to pay wages. But why should anyone want to hire us—especially if they already have the wealth, and we have none? Why should anyone pay us wages for the use of our mental and physical energy? There can only be one reason: to increase their  wealth further by our work. And not only that: to increase it by more than the cost of our wages.

Wealth used in this way to make more wealth is called capital; and those who use it in this way are called capitalists. So the bulk of humanity is divided into two classes: sellers and buyers of labour power; workers and capitalists.

So wages are really the price paid for our ability to work. The very existence of wages proves the division into classes, wherever it is found. Every week or every month our pay packet or cheque reminds us of the fact that we belong to the class which can only secure the right to live by offering themselves for work by prostituting themselves to those who find it convenient to buy their abilities-the world’s capitalists.

Such a situation inevitably produces conflict. In buying and selling, the seller always tries to raise the price, while the buyer tries to reduce it. There is no let-up. And the very point of conflict is the wage packet itself. The quickest and surest way for the capitalist to increase his profits is by cutting wages. And yet the worker’s wage is his only means of living, so that he has no choice but to struggle-not only to raise his wages, but to prevent them being depressed.

A Fair Day’s Pay

There were times in the nineteenth century when some wages for adult men with families were as low as sixpence a week; and it meant, of course, that the women and children were forced out to work as well to keep alive. All this is gone now—at least, in Britain. Similar things are still found in the newly capitalist countries, and in places like Hong Kong; even, surprisingly enough, in the U.S.A. But here, for the last few years, the talk has all been of “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.”  Harold Wilson has been the most recent public figure to use it, in a demand for greater effort from the working class of Britain. By this, he identifies himself with all other politicians, whether they claim to represent the working class or not, because this is a slogan used purely on behalf of the capitalist class.

There is really nothing “fair” about the wages system at all. It is always loaded overwhelmingly in the capitalists’ favour. Although they often do increase their profit by fighting off wage demands, this is not the main method of making profit. Capital finds it profitable to employ labour even when wages are not depressed. And this is generally the case in Britain today. Wages are inadequate, of course, but they are relatively about the highest that they have ever been.

How, then, does the capitalist make profits? Purely by using the wages system. Actually, the wages swindle is very simple, but very effective. And, what is more, it is perfectly legal. If you can get hold of enough capital, you can start operating it tomorrow-if you can get hold of enough capital.

This is the way it works: the capitalist simply hires a man’s abilities for the day, or the week, or the month; and then he gets as much work out of him as he possibly can during that time. Now, ever since the dawn of civilization it has been possible for a man to produce more than he needed for his own keep. That is what made slavery a possibility in the first place. And, since factory organisation, and then mechanisation, and now even automation, the possibilities have risen. But the capitalist does not pay for the actual value that the man adds to the raw materials by working on them. All that he pays for is the man’s keep. Loosely speaking the worker may have produced enough by Monday or Tuesday, to pay for his keep; but the capitalist keeps him turning out wealth until Friday, simply because he has bought the worker’s labour power for that period.

If the workers complain that this system is not fair at all, it is easy to point out to them that this is a buying and selling arrangement. They have something to sell: their ability to work. And the capitalist is prepared to buy it. Profit is simply the difference between a man’s wages and the value of what he actually produces. All this vague trade union talk about the workers having a right to a share in the profits simply shows a total lack of understanding of what profits are and what wages are. The workers have no right to a share in the profits at all, in the capitalist system.

How Much Are you Worth?

There is no direct connection at all, then, between the amount that a man produces and the size of his wage packet. Neither is there any real connection between his wages and how hard he works. This is often difficult to see because of the piece-work systems, bonus schemes, and high overtime rates, all of which make it look as though the harder you work, the more money you make. If there really was such a connection, it would mean that that Dr. Beeching, with his salary of £25,000 from British Railways, was working about thirty times as hard every day as the average worker – quite impossible.

By the time that most of us get home after a day’s work, we are pretty well exhausted. It takes a real effort to get washed and changed to go out to a cinema or the pub. And now that television has brought the cinema to us, millions of us are content to sit in an armchair for three hours and then go to bed. We have put out, during the day, all the physical, emotional and mental energy we are capable of, without running ourselves down into illness. Even this happens fairly often with many people.

So we have done our fair day’s work; and we have got our fair day’s pay. And there is a direct connection between them. This commodity that we have to sell-our ability to work is used up at the end of the day. We have sold it. And it costs money to renew it-money to keep up a certain standard of food, clothing, shelter and recreation to make us able to face another day, or another Monday morning. What is more, we were reared with a certain amount of care in the first place, educated at a certain cost, and probably trained, too.

All of this makes up the true cost of production of our commodity-the ability to do a certain type of work. This is what our wages pay for-the cost of producing our labour power. This is all that is ever meant by “a fair day’s pay” – enough for us to keep on producing the ability to work for the capitalist class, throughout our lives, until our commodity loses most of its worth through old age. It has also paid for the cost of producing children to provide another army of wage-slaves to take out places when we are gone.

The wages system has proved so successful that it has spread to all the major countries of the world, and is still spreading. And, in between the wars and slumps that it causes, it works like a charm. The surplus that the workers produce is largely used to buy more machinery and plant and materials to extract more surplus from their efforts, and to bring more peasants and primitives in “undeveloped areas” into the system. The new machines produced by workers in one industry serve to step up the amount of profit made out of workers in another. The buildings and plant set up by one generation are there to extract surplus value from the next.

All the time, and all over the world, the workers are building up more and more wealth none of which belongs to them. By their very work they deprive themselves more and more of the wealth which is in the world, and so set the capitalist class higher and higher above them, with greater and greater powers of oppression.

And most workers accept this system of legalised robbery. (It is only legal because capitalists made the laws.) They accept it every time they press for their “right to work”. They accept it when they talk of “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”, and when they think that “co-operation between both sides of industry” is a good thing, they are showing their approval of being robbed.

Of course, they are being brainwashed into accepting it. They don’t realise that they can abolish the wages system. They are usually so relieved and glad to get their pay packet or their cheque, when it finally comes, that they forget they are holding in their hands the proof that they have been taken for suckers once again in the biggest swindle of all time.

S. Stafford

The Catholic Church and the Pill (1969)

From the March 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mussolini’s massacre of the Abbysinians, Hitler's systematic murder of the European Jews, the American slaughter of Vietnamese—none of these atrocities, or others like them, caused more than mild rumblings in the Roman Catholic Church—and yet Catholics were deeply involved in all three. But the use of "the pill” has caused a series of explosions which threaten to blow it apart at its rotten seams. The contrast would be laughable if it were not so tragic. The Pope’s ruling on oral contraceptives has caused more Catholics to question the authority of their church than any other event this century. It has called forth more jokes than the Profumo affair. And the jokes and arguments have arisen because people are struggling to understand and digest a seemingly absurd situation. For thousands of Catholics it was a shock situation, because the pill seemed to offer the answer to all the objections that the church had raised to mechanical or chemical contraceptives. Many of them were already using the pill in expectation that the Pope would bless it, and there was a powerful lobby of bishops and influential lay Catholics urging the Vatican to take this decision. When finally, after long delay, and against the majority advice of his own Commission, Pope Paul’s encyclical forbade its use by Catholics, the reaction by Catholics and non-Catholics alike was close to incredulity.

That was seven months ago. Many non-Catholics have already forgotten it—or at least they would have done if it had not been for the way Catholics are still reacting. For many, particularly in countries like Holland, France and Britain, the resentment and disappointment have led to a continuing series of minor rebellions on other issues such as the celibacy of priests, the virginity of Mary, and the dominance of Rome. It is plain now that the Vatican must prepare for many years of dissent and controversy.

To Protestants who (loudly or quietly) detest the Vatican, it has been a matter for a certain amount of temperate glee. For non-christians and atheists it has given a satisfying sign that religion is losing its vice-like grip upon people's minds. Socialists, however, have found the whole pathetic comedy interesting and in a more complex way than it has been treated in the press and in casual conversation. Socialists oppose religion, including Christianity, not chiefly because it is wrong in its beliefs—this does not matter very much— but because religion is used as a powerful propaganda medium for persuading the working class all over the world to accept and even actively support the capitalist system which cons them out of all the wealth they produce, and uses it often in waste and violent destruction. The Roman Catholic Church, however, has always had a two-faced attitude towards capitalism because the Church’s period of greatest power and influence, over individuals and states, occurred in the feudal era, before the succession of capitalist revolutions swept through Europe. In its organisation and beliefs Catholicism is still largely feudal, but as capitalism triumphed, so the Vatican jettisoned those of its principles and practices which would have interfered with its wealth and political power. By withdrawing its condemnation of usury as a sin, the Vatican has become the world’s largest single shareholder—well over the £2,000,000,000 mark, and it remains the wealthiest owner of land and art treasures. But it fought tenaciously against the liberal elements in rising capitalism which would have cut its revenues, prevented its control of education, or interfered with its grip on the reading, the family life or the political allegiance of millions of Catholics. It is a fact that in all countries where the Vatican has retained major control capitalism has advanced least, living standards have remained low, and government repression has been ruthless.

This does not alter the fact that in Protestant countries the freedom of the individual which capitalism brought, and which the Protestant religions justified with their newer interpretations of Christianity, was chiefly the freedom for capital to exploit labour to the limit. Hard work became one of the greatest virtues (for the working class), and the freedom of the individual in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries included the freedom to starve. In other words, freedom is very valuable for those who have the wealth to enjoy it, but for most members of the working class, even today, talk of freedom is largely academic when it is set against their over-riding unfreedom—the iron necessity of selling themselves to a boss for the best part of their lives. In fact the long list of ’’freedoms” that capitalism has been responsible for all become double-edged when they operate within a capitalist society, because in so far as they make workers more free they also make them more available for exploitation. This applies to birth control just as much as all the other scientific and social developments of capitalism. The freedom to have children or not is an ironical gift when it means that a couple are free to have no children at all because they can never afford to stop or work or settle in one place. In Socialism, on the other hand, where there will be no classes, no exploitation, and no states, an invention like the contraceptive pill will really add to people’s freedom by giving them more control over nature and their own future.

On the surface some of the Catholic attacks on the use of the pill sound like socialist criticisms. For example Socialists can detect a measure of truth in the warning of the African R.C. bishop who asserted that the pill was being used as a weapon against the underdeveloped nations by the large industrial nations. But these are red herrings. Even if there were no such dangers the Catholic Church would still be opposed to anything which led to greater individual freedom and opposed to the pill in particular because it threatens to undermine the Church’s control over its members and its influence over governments. This was the real dilemma which made the Pope hesitate for so long. The pill, as the best contraceptive invented so far, has brought the Church into direct conflict with the march of modern capitalism. And, either way, the Church must lose. The bishops rail against the possibility that control of people’s sex lives may pass into the hands of the State, but this is because, for Catholics up to now, it has been in the hands of the Church. By prohibiting contraception as well as divorce the Church has ensured large families of Catholics—particularly important in the growing countries of South America; it has kept women tied to child bearing and rearing, and so economically dependent upon men and subordinate to them; it keeps fathers hard at work providing for such families or else in and out of the confessional box atoning for a succession of infidelities; and it keeps the sense of sin oppressive and ever-present. This not only reinforces the importances of priests but convinces the priest themselves that in living celibate lives they are not sacrificing a great deal. All of this would be substantially weakened if the Church allowed the dissociation of sex and childbirth by sanctioning the use of contraceptives. In fact the process of weakening has already begun, and it looks as though, by giving an adverse verdict after waiting so long, the Pope has set in motion a more rapid break-up of the Church than if he had approved. But sooner or later it was inevitable. Opposed to the pill, the Catholic Church is likely to be broken by schism; if it accepts it eventually, it will become a changed institution. Any institution which becomes an obstacle to the wages system will suffer in the same way. Catholicism backed the family and capitalism is changing the family. It may even dissolve it altogether. It needs women out at work, free and mobile like men—free to be wage-slaves. And the pill has hastened the process considerably.

Ron Cook

Progress Perverted: The Technology of Abundance (1970)

From the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The technological revolution which has taken place in the last twenty years has great significance for the human race. And yet, because of the way our social and economic system works, most people are not really aware of what has happened.

The basis of all technology, all work, is energy. One pound of uranium will produce as much energy as 3,000,000 lbs of coal; and in breeder reactors an isotope of plutonium is a by-product which is itself a nuclear fuel. The supply is therefore unlimited, and transport to areas of the world without natural fuel supplies is a simple matter since a plane-load could carry a year’s supply of fuel for a moderate-sized country. (The Russian ice-breaker Lenin uses up two ounces of fuel a month). Nuclear reactors will operate for several years without refuelling, making it feasible to set up isolated unattended power units if necessary, even at the bottom of the sea.

In spite of these immense advantages, the installation of nuclear power stations has been slow — and in the wrong places. The richer nations, who can afford to build them, are rich partly because they already have natural deposits of coal, gas and, in some cases, oil, and it is still slightly cheaper to build power stations for these fuels. Add to this the fact that the vested interests in coal, gas and oil add all their weight against nuclear power and it becomes clear why this revolution proceeds at a snail’s pace. Meanwhile, the underdeveloped parts of the world are critically short of fuel while the advanced nations carry on polluting the atmosphere and burning up the world’s irreplaceable wealth of fossil fuels which could be the raw materials of synthetic products for centuries to come. Limitless energy, for taking the hard work out of life for everybody, is possible now, technically — but not within the economics of capitalism. What we have got instead is the most sophisticated range of nuclear weapons that our scientists can devise.

Nuclear fission was not begun in industry. It was a scientists’ laboratory triumph. But one of the most striking trends since the war has been the way in which science and scientists (more and more of them) have been drawn into industry. Research itself has become an organised factory process on mass production lines in a wide range of fields. Although this has meant that certain lines of inquiry have been ignored, it has enormously speeded up the discovery and exploitation of new drugs, chemicals, metals, production processes, and so on. Many of the chemical products are substances not found freely in nature at all — totally new materials created by altering the structure of molecules to achieve specific qualities. Control is now virtually complete. We can synthesise almost anything we can describe. One of the best known fields is that of plastics. We use them in paints, adhesives, clothes, furniture, building materials, bottles, toys, almost everything. Except where we need the electrical properties of metal, everything in a house or a car (including the engine) can be made of one sort of plastic or another. The problem of the availability of raw materials has been solved permanently. The fact that plastics are in danger of becoming a curse rather than a blessing in our capitalist society because they turn up in a spate of shoddy gew-gaws and create a vast disposal problem is no condemnation of the materials, only of the social system. The fact that places like Hong Kong can flood the British market with millions of small plastic objects demonstrates one of the main superiorities of plastics over the materials they have replaced: they are ideally suited for automated mass production. The drudgery of working with wood, stone, fur, hide and a great deal of metal is no longer necessary.

Plastics are only one corner of the huge advance in chemical engineering. We can make anything from detergents to artificial hormones. And this is just the trouble — in capitalism. The mechanism of profit-making knows no morals or aesthetics, and it opposes all interference. So, with no sense of proportion, these quite valuable products are used in the wrong places at the wrong times for the wrong motives and in enormous quantities. The result is that we have an enormous pollution problem, as well as frighteningly large stocks of chemical and biological weapons.

Together, transistors, printed circuits, and magnetic tape have completely altered the scale and scope of electronics. This is only partly apparent in the pocket tape-recorder. The real impact of these developments is to be found in the fields of computers and communications. Compared with valves, transistors and diodes are tiny, cool in working, long-lasting and consume very little current. Similarly, magnetic tape is infinitely more compact and efficient at recording and storing information than film, punched paper, record discs, and so on. And printed circuits, apart from this same ability to be very tiny indeed, can be mass-produced by machine with complete reliability. The equivalent of a complete radio circuit can be put on to a sliver of mica one eighth of an inch square. This phenomenal decrease in size is not particularly valuable for its own sake. Its significance lies in the fact that it allows thousands of such circuits to be put together in a manageable space. The first computers, with valves, were as big as a house and almost as heavy. The latest, far faster, more versatile and more reliable, are as big as a desk. With computers, quantity (of circuits) becomes quality (of ‘brainpower’). Modern computers can be programmed to control and operate complete production systems, transport systems, communication systems.

Linked by communication satellites across the world, they could keep constant check on consumer wants, regulate production to keep pace with them, and dispatch the goods in computerised transport to where they were needed. But not in capitalism. Here and now they are employed in trying to keep pace with the mounting complexities of the money system: wages and deductions, income tax returns, bank statements, mail order accounts, files of bad debtors, and the finger prints of criminals. They have also been employed in working out the prodigious mathematics of flights to the moon and the ballistics of intercontinental missiles. Up to now it is in modern weaponry that computers have risen to their most sophisticated heights.

Fundamentally, automation is no more than an engineering principle. It is when it is used in conjunction with machine tools, mass production techniques, sensing and measuring devices and servo-mechanism that its potentialities are so great. The principle is now called negative feedback (from electronics) and involves using the error in a machine or system to alter whatever is causing the error so that it is corrected. In this way, feeds and speeds of machines can be adjusted, worn cutting tools replaced, faulty pieces rejected, and so on, all automatically. When this is combined with the resources of the computer there is really no job which has to be done by human beings, if we want it otherwise. Simple automation is most suitable for repetitious jobs. The more boredom and drudgery there is in a job, the more suitable it is for immediate automation. And yet the introduction of automated systems has been slow and patchy. This is due to the peculiar economics of capitalism: to be profitable in a highly competitive market, production has to be large in scale; but automated plants of this size are very expensive — and they cannot be sacked like workers. So an assured market for many years ahead is the only justification for a capital outlay of tens or hundreds of millions of pounds. Such assurance is rarely possible in the market anarchy of capitalism.

Automation does not have to be applied to large complexes. Its basic units (relays, solenoids, photo-electric cells, etc.) are small, and it could remove all the danger and drudgery from human work. Capitalism, however, cannot use it to decrease toil and increase freedom. The economics of the profit motive insist that it is used to increase production, decrease unit cost, and increase the mass of profit to compensate for the falling rate. As with computers, the most successful application of automative systems in capitalism is to be found in the development of guided missiles and space shots. The real use of automation awaits the next leap forward in social evolution.

This very brief survey has attempted to show that the power, the materials and the techniques, as well as much of the industry, for producing an abundance of all the things that are needed by the people of the world are now a reality, but that their development is being held back by the economic and social restrictions of our present system of society. The fact is that capitalism is now badly out of date, obsolete. It cannot digest abundance. It cannot work on the basis of plenty for all. Its economy relies upon scarcity, and its social structure relies upon class privilege. These are now in direct conflict with the forces of production. For a while, this vast potential can be throttled, or perverted into the production of weapons of destruction, but not for long. What is already overdue is the scrapping of capitalism and the installation of a society based upon abundance. Only a massive awareness of this necessity by everybody can achieve it. Nothing else in this modern world is big enough to make the change. But the means of communication are ready. Six hundred million people can now watch the same television programme, and the whole complex system is run by workers. As soon as all workers can be made aware of the necessity and the urgency, then it can be done.

Ron Cook

What is Class? (1968)

From the March 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Class’ in the sense with which most people use the word means more than a simple classification for a particular purpose. But there is a great deal of disagreement and uncertainty when it comes to identifying or defining a class in the social sense.

There are a number of demands which must be fulfilled by any satisfactory attempt to outline distinct classes in modern society. In the first place, such an outline must take into account people’s subjective feelings about class. More important, however, is to acknowledge the objective reality underlying such feelings. Also, any satisfactory definition of class in modern society should apply equally well in all modern countries, and so it would have to discount vestigial survivals from earlier forms of society, such as royalty and aristocracy. And it should not accept as a class something which is merely a section in a uniformly graded scale. However fuzzy the boundary lines may be, a class should have at least one characteristic which differs in something other than degree from any other class. Finally, such a definition should take into account, if not all, at least the great majority of people.

Most definitions of class fall short in one or another of these requirements, and so lay themselves open to the charge of giving a partial (in both senses) picture of society. For example, it is common to group people according to their income. Yet the majority of statistics show that income is virtually a uniformly graded scale, and any attempt at grouping is purely arbitrary. This fact, together with the growth of graded income taxing in most countries has led many people who favoured this method of grouping to feel that class has ceased to exist in the last few years.

Closely related is the attempt to group people according to occupation or education. But the degree of fluidity with which people can change their occupations, and the growing rapidity with which economic and technological developments are changing the occupations themselves, has shown this, too, to be inadequate as a basis of class distinction. The post-war rise in the importance and income of the engineer, and the contemporary decline of the clerical worker are cases among many which demonstrate not only the parochialism of people’s subjective feelings about class but also the invalidity of classification by occupation as such.

Neverless, people’s feelings about the class nature of occupation and income cannot be entirely without foundation, but what is the reality which underlies them? In the first place, the occupation of most people is their job, which is to say that they must do it in order to make their living. In the second place, job and income are closely tied together, so that it is fair to say that it is upon his job in all its aspects that a man is judged by his fellows.

But what is a job? A man’s job is the central part of his life, and if he is unemployed for any length of time he deteriorates not only economically but psychologically. This has for a long time been recognised as true for lower paid workers, but even the executive is doing exactly the same as the men he has been responsible for employing—offering his skill, experience and energy for sale—by the hour, day, week, month or year.

The reason for employing a manager or an executive is the same reason for employing anybody—profit; that since these are the people who undertake the employment of the £16-£20 a week workers, and yet are themselves employed, both must be employed by someone else; and that the size of the wage packet makes no difference to the buyer-seller relationship of a job. This is where the jargon of ’management v. workers’ has repeatedly clouded the facts in the last few years. A recent Guardian article draws attention to the importance of a manager’s identifying himself with ’the objectives of the enterprise’. But, as his primary relationship with the firm for which he works is that of buyer and seller, he is being asked to do a piece of double-think since, in any market, the buyer will always try to buy as cheaply as possible and the seller to get as high a price as possible.

Since the majority of people are in the position of having to sell their working ability for roughly fifty years of their lives in order to gain a livelihood, to whom can they sell? The salaried executives who undertake their employment do so in the name of the company they work for, and the company exists for the sole reason of making profits. If it did not, it would go out of business. The company is owned by its shareholders. These are, through their paid executives, the buyers of people’s skill and energy. In this they form the other side of the buyer-seller relationship, and in this they constitute a distinct and opposed class. That some of them may participate in the running of the business in which they have shares, or even that of someone else, is incidental. Their main function from society's point of view is as providers of capital if they have enough of it. With the enormous growth and ramified development of limited liability companies, holding companies, and unit trusts, with the flowering of a sophisticated stock market and the international ebb and flow of capital, any one capitalist may well be only a minority shareholder in a great number of companies. But, together, they own all companies and—through state bonds and government stock, local authority borrowings and building society shares—the great bulk of nationalised industries, houses and land.

Of course, anyone may become a shareholder, and there are thousands of people who, although they have no choice but to work for their living, nevertheless own some shares. In aggregate, however, they own a very small proportion of the total. The class division in modern society is statistical; the dividing line is not as clear-cut as in mediaeval society; the edge is blurred and mobility from one class to another goes on to some extent all the time. But, if the curve is cut at different points, it can be shown that one per cent of the population of Great Britain owns 50 per cent of the wealth, ten per cent own 90 per cent, and so on. As a reasonable approximation, therefore, it may be said that 10 per cent of the population owns the civilised world (as well as large stretches of the underdeveloped countries) and employs the other 90 per cent who must seek, and try to maintain, employment simply because they do not own sufficient wealth to live without working.

In latter years it has become unfashionable to be ostentatiously wealthy. As Mrs. Maitland-Robinson said to William Hickey of the Daily Express recently when interviewed about the selling of £6 million worth of the family’s shares in Radio Rentals, "Although my husband is a millionaire we all lead a simple life really." Paul Getty, with a financial empire of about £300 million has often said the same sort of thing. But since the relationship between the two classes appears as one of buyer and seller (reflecting the basic one of owner and non-owner) however it may be dignified by euphemisms, and since there is no motive for the buyers to buy except in expectation of increasing their wealth, it follows—and is borne out in the perpetual practice of wage and salary negotiations —that their interests are inevitably opposed. They thus form the only two classes of any importance in modern society.

Ron Cook

Who can read Marx? (1972)

Book Reviews from the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Concept of Nature in Marx, by Alfred Schmidt. Published by NLB. £3.25.

Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, by Bertell Oilman. Cambridge University Press. £4.

These two books by professional philosophers are very different in approach, yet both seem to have been chiefly inspired by two manuscripts of Marx: the Grundrisse and the Paris Manuscripts. In these, Marx’s debts to other writers, particularly philosophers, are much more evident than in Das Kapital, and it is much easier for scholars to get to grips with the feelings which motivated him and the principles which governed his thinking. Neither writer believes that Marx altered his attitudes in anything more than detail or emphasis later in life, and they trace the development of certain ideas from the earlier to the later works.

Socialists will approach both books with a measure of caution, because they are tacitly welcoming Marx back into the philosophers’ fold from which he was at pains to escape. Alfred Schmidt, in the doctoral dissertation which forms the main part of his book, sets out to show that, in spite of Marx’s avoidance of philosophical terms in Das Kapital, the work contains a considerable amount of implicit and explicit philosophy which is a natural development of his earlier ideas about the interaction of man and nature and whose origins lie in Hegel and Feuerbach. Schmidt’s scope is more limited than Ollman’s: he is principally concerned to set the record straight as regards Marx’s philosophical respectability and consistency. This involves the painstaking dissection of a number of Marx’s followers as well as his critics. Although Lenin emerges unscathed, the generality of

Soviet philosophising is repeatedly criticised. Kautsky, Plekhanov, and even Engels are shown to be less consistent and rigorously honest than Marx; and the chimera which leads most of them astray is the dialectic. Schmidt examines dialectics in some detail and shows that Marx was judicious in his use of it, whereas Engels, in Dialectics of Nature was led into silliness by his enthusiasm for it, and the Soviet thinkers who have followed him almost up to the present day have made a new metaphysics of it.

The most refreshing thing about Schmidt’s rather turgid book is its scholarly manner, which never gives way to the point-scoring partisan writing on Marx with which socialists are so tiredly familiar. Its most valuable attribute is the documentation of Marx’s scrupulous caution in employing ideas in the effort to understand and describe what exists. Oversimplifications, such as the one some of us slip into when we talk of the development of stages of society, are laid against the considerably more sophisticated explanations used by Marx, and we are reminded that the critics, even to the present day, are in the main [much] less intelligent than the writer they are criticising, and only half aware of what he said.

Bertell Ollman is very much aware of critics, and lays about him with considerable vigour. His is a much more lively book than Schmidt’s, and sets out immediately to challenge the reader with a new approach to Marx’s writing which is to make everything clear. Perhaps it is because he really has an established reputation that he speaks with such scholarly authority and does not think it necessary to substantiate his contentions with many or with very substantial quotations; but it may be simply due to the fact that he is American. When he takes it for granted that the workers in "imperialist” nations have benefitted at the expense of the colonial workers, or suggests that, because the workers of the world have not attempted to bring about a communist revolution, they must therefore have a character defect preventing them from acting in their own best interests—such glib assumptions make one wonder whether the main thesis of his book is any more reliable than these.

Ollman’s contention is that Marx is largely misunderstood because he used language in a special way. He had adopted, says Ollman, the philosophy of internal relations, so that a thing was never regarded as itself pure and simple, but a plexus of relationships viewable from many different angles. Marx could only tackle the enormous job of describing the interrelated and changing elements of capitalist society, without distorting the picture, by using such an approach. The result is that his words have different meanings at different times. This is a degree of subtlety which has led critics like Karl Popper to make fools of themselves, according to Ollman, because they have tried to pin Marx down to a more naive terminology in which things are stationary and mutually exclusive.

Ordinary socialists have never found it difficult to think of capital as money at one moment and a factory full of machines, materials and workers the next, or to regard the process of production as also one of consumption. This may be at the root of their steady contempt over the years for the ‘what-Marx-really-meant’ brigade of writers. Nevertheless, if this erudite explanation of how to read Marx is what is necessary for the avowed experts, then Oilman’s book could have a salutary effect on the level of Marxian criticism.

Ollman’s second thesis is that Marx’s experience of philosophy convinced him that it was impossible to state a fact without incorporating a value judgement in the statement . Accordingly, any such study as Das Kapital was bound to set out from a point of view and to incorporate the relevant value judgements. And the point of view that Marx adopted, says Ollman, was that of alienated man—particularly the alienated worker —whose life and whose self were so much inferior to what they might be in a communist society. This is why Ollman entitles his book ‘Alienation’. He regards it as the most meaningful way to study modern society.

On the whole, Ollman’s approach is very convincing. It illuminates the labour theory of value and the role of religion with equal relevance, but his Critical Evaluation which sums up is very disappointing. It is not his pessimism which disappoints, or even his introduction at this late stage of the notion of “character structure’’ to account for working-class apathy, but the strong impression he gives of making reservations about Marx’s work simply in order to seem impartial. In this it echoes the Introduction to the book, but is quite out of keeping with the enthusiastic eulogism of the main text. Perhaps the fact that the Ford Foundation helped to finance the writing of the book has something to do with it, but it does add further doubts about Ollman’s integrity. It also points up the fact that readers who are not considerable Marxian scholars have very little chance of detecting the flaws in clever cases built up on selected quotations. Only a steady scepticism on our part, and the repeated testing of the ideas against our own experience offer any protection. Occasionally we shall have the added advantage of watching the professionals fall out amongst themselves, as these two do to some extent. In his Preface to the English Edition, Schmidt says

It will help the English reader to understand this book if from the outset he bears in mind its polemical aspect. It was one of the first attempts to draw on the politico-economic writings of middle-period and mature Marx . . .  for a ‘philosophical’ interpretation of Marx’s life-work. In doing this, the book opposed the widespread Western European, often neo-Existentialist, tendency of the 1950s to reduce Marx's thought to an unhistorical ‘anthropology’ centred on the alienation problematic of the early writings . . .

Which is largely what Ollman is doing.

Ron Cook