Letter: Criminal classes (1976)

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

Criminal classes

The Socialist Party persistently state in their vintage way that there are only two classes in society. I beg to differ. My list of classes would include criminals who were once members of the working class, and the self-employed. Your figures of two classes is petty.

R. West

London W.10

Reply:

Your contention about criminals might be answered by looking at court reports in the newspapers. Do the accused give their occupations as “burglar”, “smash-and-grab raider” or “bag snatcher”? Of course not. They describe themselves as salesmen, labourers, drivers, factory workers, unemployed etc. — in short, as members of the working class.

The definition of a worker is one who has no ownership of the means of living and is therefore forced to sell his labour-power, his only possession, in order to live. There are always numbers trying to escape this life-sentence or to solve the perpetual working-class problem of insufficient money, by crime. Hardly any live by it; it is a sporadic activity, and for the rest of the time the individual is faced with having to find a job because that is his class position.

By “self-employed” presumably you mean small shopkeepers and other one-man businesses. Again, consider definitions. A capitalist, because of his ownership of the means of production, employs people and appropriates the surplus value created by them to turn it into interest and profit. A person using no other labour-power than his own is not in this position. If he is a shopkeeper his profit is from trading, i.e. it is a small portion of what is realized from the surplus value created in manufacture. Generally his position is no different from what it would be if he were an employee, nor is his income. As an example, some “landlords” of public-houses are managers employed by breweries and others are tenants and allegedly “their own masters”; in practice the difference is purely one of business administration and the “landlord” is a member of the working class — as are these self-employed individuals as a whole.

Editors.

Life and Times: Being your own boss (2024)

The Life and Times column from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

There used to be many local shops in my area. Now, as almost everywhere, they are few and far between. Yet this doesn’t stop some people, whether brave or foolhardy, from trying to buck the trend and open a new shop of their own. For example, not too long ago a gentleman knocked on my door and told me he was going round the area asking residents what they thought of his idea of converting the empty shop on the corner of my street into a sandwich bar-cum-delicatessen. Did I think it would work? Would many people use it? Would I use it? I didn’t want to knock his obvious enthusiasm, but I felt obliged to tell him, that, though I might use it occasionally, I didn’t think he would get enough customers for it to work. He carried on knocking on doors but the shop never opened and I’m sure he made the right decision. It was a venture that would have involved time and energy in abundance not to speak of significant financial outlay, so he was obviously right to do his ‘market research’ first.

Doughnut shop vs cafe

But not everyone is equally strategic. Earlier this year a new shop did open just round the corner from me – a doughnut shop. It offers a wide range of doughnuts to take away or to eat with tea or coffee or chocolate at tables. It’s an inviting ambiance and the doughnuts look – and taste – very nice indeed (I’ve tried them myself). I saw the local family who own it spend literally months setting it up with all the work, energy and expense that involved and they’re now running it with the utmost friendliness and obvious efficiency. But my first thought (perhaps I’m a born pessimist) was that it couldn’t survive. It’s offering a non-essential item at a time when, by common consent, there’s a cost-of-living crisis. Yet maybe I was wrong, because initially there were queues down the street. And even when things settled down, there always seemed to be people in there. But now, as I pass by, custom seems increasingly sparse. The many students who live in the area have gone home for the summer and it seems empty most of the time. It has begun advertising ‘special offers’ – eg, 3 doughnuts for the price of 2 – and is advertising itself on the local community Facebook page as a place which groups can use free of charge for their meetings. But that doesn’t seem to be working and, though, at the time of writing, it’s still open, I seriously wonder how long it will last. The return of the students is some way off and it’s obvious that a small business of that kind needs consistent and ongoing trade to be successful. That’s not happening now and will it happen even when the students get back?

Then, to make things worse, down the road, no more than a couple of hundred yards away, another shop is about to open up – a sandwich and cakes café in a premises that’s been derelict for years. It’s bound to constitute competition to the doughnut shop, while at the same time, after perhaps an initial flourish, being itself unlikely, at least in my judgement, to attract enough regular clientele to be commercially successful. And this, just like the doughnut shop, after much time, energy and expense put into it by its hopeful owners.

Domination

So what’s happening here? Well, for those people who own little but their energies and skills as a means of making a living (ie, the vast majority), the only option – if they can find it – is employment by a boss of some kind for a wage or salary. But a small number see an escape route in trying to set up their own business and so becoming self-employed. In this way they will at least escape the domination of a boss. The trouble is that, as many find, this is also a risky and insecure route, since they do actually remain subject to a boss – a different one that dominates the system we all live in – that unfathomable, uncontrollable force called the market. It’s true that a few such businesses – very few – will succeed, provide a living for their owners and even prosper and grow. But the vast majority fail, often fairly quickly and with severe financial and other consequences to their owners and families. So, in the case of my local doughnut shop, no matter how friendly and efficient its owners are, the sad bottom line is likely to be that all their trouble and expense will be in vain and they will end up regretting they decided to try and become their own bosses.

Dead company walking

Of course, this can also be the fate of large and established businesses. A current BBC radio series, ‘Toast’ has delved into the demise of once thriving and well-established companies such as Safeway supermarkets and Little Chef road eateries. Its conclusion was that they went under due to ‘market conditions’ becoming unfavourable, then of course causing their employees to lose their jobs and large swathes of all kinds of resource having to be scrapped. Another recent programme, ‘Dead Company Walking’, attempted to find an explanation for the fact that businesses are currently failing at a higher rate than ever. But its explanation remained at a fairly superficial level, one of symptoms rather than causes. Above all it failed to touch at all on the real reason for failure, whether of small or large companies, which is the built-in instability and unpredictability of capitalism with its market system, from whose potential ravages no business of any kind is safe. Nor, of course, did the programme mention that there is in fact an alternative to the colossal waste of time, energy and resources all this involves, which is for workers of all kinds (ie, the vast majority of the world’s population), to act consciously and collectively to put an end to the market domination they live under and opt for a society of free association and free access.

Howard Moss

The Right to be A Wage Slave (2021)

From the May 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Over the years we have seen a growth in the number of temporary and part-time workers, many of whom are identified as self-employed. The gig economy forms a significant part of this trend, which covers a wide range of occupations from IT consultants to Uber and Deliveroo drivers. One definition offered is ‘it is a labour market characterised by the prevalence of short-term contracts or freelance work, as opposed to permanent jobs’ (‘What is the ‘gig’ economy?’ BBC News, 10 February 2017). What distinguishes the gig economy is that the workers are paid for a particular piece of work, as opposed to those on zero hours contracts who are paid by the hour. The term ‘gig’ was coined by jazz musicians in 1915 who were paid for each live performance. It is a term still used by today’s rock and pop musicians. According to a TUC report, the gig economy has doubled in size since 2016 and with just under 5 million workers (‘Gig economy in Britain doubles, accounting for 4.7 million workers’, Guardian, 28 June 2019).

Insecure, casual working has always been a feature of capitalism. At one time, it was common for building workers to be hired on a day-to-day basis. In the US in the 1930s many farmers had to sell their land because of drought and falling prices and ended up as itinerant workers. After the Great Depression, temp agencies sprang up, which supplied workers to employers on a temporary basis (The History and Future of the Gig Economy, Small Business Trends, 12 November 2019).

Some claim that the gig economy is a product of the new digital technology. It is the case that firms like Uber use smartphone apps to organise jobs for their workers, but there are employers, such as Hermes, who also employ gig workers, but use more traditional methods to run their businesses (‘What is the gig economy and why is it so controversial?’ Wired, 14 September 2018). This explanation of the rise of the gig economy doesn’t give us the full picture. In the last fifty years, Western capitalist countries have experienced a decline in their manufacturing and traditional industries with the concomitant erosion of trade union power and accompanying loss of relatively well-paid jobs. Insecure, casual jobs have, to a large extent, taken their place. In the less developed capitalist countries there is a pool of underemployed workers who are prey to these gig employers. It is probably no coincidence that Uber was founded in San Francisco in 2010 in the aftermath of the 2008-9 financial crash when unemployment was high. Under capitalism, competitive pressures compel businesses to grab a greater share of the market by undercutting their rivals by offering a product or service at a lower cost.

Supporters of the gig economy insist that its workers enjoy the flexibility and independence that come with being one’s own boss. No doubt for some gig workers, such as video producers, working this way can be a relatively lucrative venture. However, for many it is just ruthless capitalist exploitation by another name. Firms like Uber and Deliveroo designate their workers as self-employed so they don’t have to fork out holiday pay and sickness benefits, contribute to their pensions, pay the minimum wage or any redundancy payments, but receive the fruits of their labour like any traditional capitalist. The benefits of flexibility have been illusory as it is their employers that ultimately control the hours they work. Despite the capitalist spin, more and more gig workers are seeing through the con. They know that they are workers, not independent contractors.

They are fighting back. In 2016 two Uber drivers launched legal action to be recognised as workers. The London employment tribunal ruled in their favour, that they should be classed as workers and be entitled to holiday pay, paid rest breaks and the minimum wage. Uber appealed this ruling to the Employment Appeal Tribunal and when they lost in November 2017, they went to the Court of Appeal which also upheld the ruling in December 2018. Uber made their last stand with the Supreme Court, the highest court in the country, which, on 19 February, dismissed their appeal and upheld the ruling that Uber drivers are workers and are entitled to employment benefits. Uber responded by claiming that the verdict only applies to the small number of drivers who brought this case. However, thousands of Uber drivers are filing claims for compensation.

On 7 April, Deliveroo drivers went on strike for higher pay and better work conditions. This followed similar strike action in August and September 2019. Some gig workers are even organised in trade unions, one is the App Drivers and Couriers Union and another is the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain.

Despite all the guff written and spoken about living in a postmodern society where the class struggle is a thing of the past and we are now all aspiring individuals, it is evident that workers, even the more precarious ones, are still collectively organising to defend and, if they can, improve their working conditions. We think it is great that some workers are winning their battles. However, we must go on and win the class war.

Oliver Bond

Finance and Industry: Chancellor's Pay-roll Tax (1961)

The Finance and Industry Column from the August 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chancellor's Pay-roll Tax

In the budget earlier this year the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that he would get power to levy a Pay-roll Tax to be used, when he thought fit, as a means of encouraging employers “to use more labour-saving machinery” and seek ways of cutting down the number of workers they employed. The amount proposed is 4s. a week for each worker, the tax to be paid by the employer.

It had a very hostile reception, not only from the Opposition but from many Conservative M.P.’s and employers. Nobody seems to have remembered that a “Keynesian" scheme very similar to this was agreed by the three political parties in the war-time national government and set out in a document called Employment Policy, which was to be the blue-print for maintaining full employment and for preventing prices from rising. It was to be operated by making workers and employers pay higher national insurance contributions when unemployment fell to a low level, and lower contributions when unemployment increased. The idea was that if demand for consumer goods fell and unemployment increased, reducing the national insurance deduction would encourage more spending: and if demand for consumer goods increased too much, some of the spending would . be halted by levying higher contributions. The suggested range was from a top-rate of 10s a week (workers 5s. 6d., employers 4s. 6d.) to a lower rate of 5s (3s. and 2s.).

Like many other plans it has never been used, so we have no factual evidence to show what result it would have had.

Discussion about the proposed Pay-roll Tax has however produced some interesting information about developments in industry that have been going on and would presumably be stimulated by such a tax. A contributor writing to the Financial Times (8/7/61) states that in the engineering and building trades there is an increasing tendency for work to be done by small contractors without any direct employees themselves:

  There are in the engineering trades today thousands of one-man firms or small companies where the entire labour force consists of directors and which have no pay-roll at all. These firms produce drawings or tools on a free-lance or sub-contract basis for the larger organisations. In the building trade there is a growing tendency for the craftsman, plumber, mason or joiner to employ himself and hire his labour out to the small builder who again may have no pay roll at all.

Impetus has been given to this by the development of small electrically driven machines which can be set up in home workshops and he says that on the Continent the idea has been extended to the point of operating a factory on the basis that the workers come in as self-employed master-men, hire the machines and sell the products to the management without any wages relationship. As the contributor points out, a pay-roll tax levied on the number of workers directly employed would be avoided by these methods.

Notes on Automation

Six years ago in these columns (September, 1955) the opinion was expressed that automation would not develop in this country as quickly and extensively as many people were claiming. It is interesting to look at some of the trends to see what has happened since then and is likely to happen. The prevailing mood of comment today is one of caution, allied with disappointment about the results of automation so far. Often there is contrast with the progress made in other countries, especially America.

Mr. F. Griffiths of the British Motor Corporation writes that in the motor industry “the pattern of automation . . . still remains mainly in the machine shop. Basic processes, such as the foundry and the forge have not yet been given any consideration to enable real automation to be installed.” (Electronics and Automation Supplement to the Financial Times (23/1/61). Mr. Griffiths lists the many technical and organisational problems that need to be solved before automation can become general in the motor factories. A scientific correspondent in the Financial Times (8/1/60) estimated that it might be 1965 before this development was completed.

In the field of electronic computers for commercial purposes, experience has been mixed. According to a correspondent writing in 1959 (Financial Times, 2nd April) many firms that had bought computers for commercial purposes bad found them a failure from the financial point of view. But in the engineering and scientific fields “there have been equally remarkable successes.”

And while automation and electronics manufacture have rapidly grown to “ big business,” employing nearly a quarter of a million people, there aren't enough orders for the home market and according to a report in the Times (29/11/60) almost every firm in the business is losing money on its manufacture of data processing equipment.

As regards the total numbers of workers employed, the process of automation in the past six years has had little effect, either in manufacture or in offices, though clerks in banking and elsewhere are becoming increasingly worried about the future, especially on promotion prospects. In factories and offices shift working and night work will increase.

With government encouragement, designed to prevent industry in this country falling behind its competitors, automation and similar innovations in factories and offices will develop at an increasing pace, but none of those who sweepingly claim that automation brings about enormous economies in labour and materials (productivity up tenfold, costs reduced 25 per cent. to 40 per cent—Financial Times, 8/1 /60) have explained why automation so far has had so little impact here or in any other country.

Why have not these alleged savings of labour shown themselves in falling prices? The answer in most instances is that even when the labour-saving is as high as stated it is effective only in a small part of the total process of production. If labour is reduced by say 40 per cent in processes representing a quarter of the total factory operation, the average for the whole factory operation is 10 per cent, and if production and transport of materials is not affected the overall reduction from start to finish may be less than 5 per cent And this leaves out of account the, sometimes, greatly increased amount of labour needed for production and maintenance of the automation plant.

Living in one room

Workers having a hard time in the country of their birth find it easy to accept travellers’ tales about the summer weather and the “gold paved streets" in some other part of the globe. Governments all try to counter these beliefs because they encourage discontent

Recent observers from both sides of the “curtain" have been commenting on housing conditions in Britain and Russia. First, we have Mr. Yur Fokin, a Russian broadcaster, who wrote in the Daily Express (13/6/61) giving his eye-witness impressions of this country. Mr. Fokin said he was surprised to notice in London “sharp differences in the type of districts where people of different classes live." He said it was very strange to Russian eyes because “in Moscow, for instance, there is no class distinction."

As it happens an Englishwoman. Mrs. Reita Ovsyannikov, married to a Russian, has just returned to this country after thirty years in Russia. In her article in the Sunday Telegraph (9/7/61) she notes the contrast that Mr. Fokin did not see. She writes that "even to this very day, most Russian families have to make do with one room," but because her husband belongs to “the managerial class" and she also had a highly paid job: “We enjoyed a far better standard of living than the great majority of Soviet citizens. For the last ten years of our life in the Soviet Union we had a flat of our own, a car, and all the money we needed. It was not luxury by Western standards, but we were comfortable."

Many visitors to Russia have commented on the large number of families compelled to live in one room and nobody, not even Mr. Fokin, believes that Krushchev and the other V.I.P.’s or the “rouble millionaires" live in one room. Mr. John Cole (Guardian, 7/6/61) also noted “the very limited living space compared with that expected by English families," but he described the comparison “misleading" because “The Russians like the Swedes and French attach less importance to homes than the English." The implication is that “Russians" and Swedes and French don't mind living in overcrowded conditions. If this is so, why doesn't Mr. Krushchev live in one room? And why was the Englishwoman quoted above glad to be able to afford not to?

The truth is quite simple. It is nice to be rich in any country and if you are rich you don't have to put up with the conditions suffered by the poor: which includes the Glasgow home visited by the Queen on 30th June—a man. wife and four year old son living in one room.

Not belonging

The double-talk of politicians, newspaper editors and business men is sometimes so odd as to be hardly comprehensible. as witness an editorial in the Daily Mail on 1st July.

Just about the time that there was an "unofficial" strike at Ford Motor works called by the shop stewards, the firm's chief medical officer was at a conference on automation telling the delegates the secret of “good labour relations." He said that “all employees need to have a feeling of belonging to the company," each one “must feel he counts as a person.

These events inspired the leader writer of the Mail to try to explain to the Ford workers what is the true shape of things:

 The war cry of one of these shop stewards is worth recording. “Nobody here", he shouted, “wants to see the Ford Motor Company win “
  But who and what is the Ford Motor Company if it isn't the 20,000 workers he was talking to? Are they not as much the Ford Motor Company as Mr. Ford himself, or any of his directors or executives?

Of course, legally the Ford Motor Works and all its properties belong to the company, in effect the shareholders, to whom also the £18 million profit in 1959 belonged. And last year when the American Ford company bought out the 45 per cent, of the shares that they did not already hold, for £129 million, they paid the money (£7 5s. 6d. per share) to those shareholders. The English company now therefore belongs wholly to the American Company. The 20,000 Dagenham workers who, according to the Mail are the Ford Company as much as Mr. Ford himself, weren't even asked whether they wanted the sale to go through, much less paid for handing over what the Mail thinks is their own company.

And is it surprising that the strikers wanted to win their wage-claim? They no more wanted to see Fords win than the Ford's management wanted to see them win. The strikers and the management both see plainly that there is a conflict of interests between them.

Which brings us to the firm's medical officer who worries because the workers don’t feel that they belong. Why has it not occurred to him that perhaps that is just what irks the workers at Dagenham and elsewhere? They feel very strongly that they are treated as if they do belong to the firm, as if they were part of the equipment, along with the machines and trucks and typewriters; instruments for making profit.

If the medical officer ever happens to meet one of the Ford family or other owners he should watch them closely to note if they, too, suffer from any feeling of frustration or sense of. “not belonging." Then the secret will be revealed to him. He will find that they “belong" all right, because Fords belongs to them.

Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford might also tell him more about the £100,000 they spent recently on a party for their daughter (reported in the Sunday Telegraph, 25/7/61. Just one daughter, one party, one hundred thousand Pounds.

Edgar Hardcastle

Letters: Self-employed workers (2010)

Letters to the Editors from the July 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Self-employed workers

Dear Editors

I am writing in response to Tony Trafford’s letter (Socialist Standard, May) regarding self-employed status. I agree fully with the Editors’ response and analysis of the matter but wanted to add a couple of points.

As a self-employed skilled labourer in the engineering and construction industries, I do not fit in Marx’s capital-owning definition of the shop keeper and I think there is a clear definition to be made between self-employed small capitalists of the kind described by Marx and those of more modern times, like myself and indeed the subject of Tony Trafford’s letter, who merely supply their labour.

As such a person, I am in a similar if not worse position than an ‘ordinary’ employed person. I am not entitled to sick or holiday pay, my employment is not guaranteed down to a daily basis and all my costs for work (fuel, tools, telephone, etc) are my responsibility. As for exploitation, I neither employ and therefore exploit, any others and am contracted to be employed by others and therefore my labour is exploited by capital in the traditional sense. In reality my so-called ‘self-employed’ status merely refers to how I pay my taxes rather than any social or deeper economic definition.

D. Humphries, 

Sussex.

Pete Seeger

Dear Editors

Concerning Roy Beat’s letter (June Socialist Standard), I (mis)spent the 1960s immersed in the Folk Movement and recall nothing positive vis-à-vis the dissemination of Socialist knowledge. Politically the scene was one Leftist/Nationalist mess. Significantly Roy Beat fails to produce any contrary evidence.

The banjo’s early multi-racial history is common knowledge. However in the wake of the Minstrel Shows its image to many Negroes was tarnished and seeing one in the hands of yet another “condescending white, liberal Yankee” arriving to “emancipate” them was further aggravation.

The significance of the inverted commas around “good causes” appears to have evaded him. Socialists recognise the serious limitations of the Civil (and Woman’s, Gay etc) Rights Movements and how at best they can only aspire to parity with their white, male, heterosexual Working Class counterparts within Capitalism. The solution, of course, is Socialism. Who would need “rights” where common ownership and free access prevailed? Likewise, the anti-Vietnam War Movement dealt only with the specifics of that event; not the underlying causes of war at large. On what possible basis therefore could criticising all of this be deemed “sectarian”?

I have much time for Pete Seeger both personally and musically: politically, I have little.

Andrew Armitage, 

Scotland

Ballots or bullets?

Dear Editors

Your candidate (for Vauxhall) in the election was to my mind only propping up the outdated evil system with money.

It would have been far better to have spent the cash on leaflets informing the people whatever party they vote X for it will not be in their interests.

The state will never give over power to the workers – the mass of the people have to take power. If one wants something in this life, you have to fight to get it.

R. Bloomfield, 

London SE5

Reply: 

It is true that we did have to forfeit our deposit of £500 and that that went to the capitalist state but, as a party contesting the election, our election address was distributed free by the post office to 56,000 households in Vauxhall. Besides arguing the case for socialism, the leaflet did make the point you mention about the other parties.

We agree that if you want anything under capitalism you have to struggle for it, if that’s what you mean by “fight”. If by “fight” you mean take up arms we don’t agree. It’s just not true – for instance, workers can and do get higher wages and better working conditions without taking up arms. We do think that socialism can be established peacefully but getting there will have to involve a determined political and ideological struggle –  Editors.

Letters: Taxes and the self-employed (2010)

Letters to the Editors from the May 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Taxes and the self-employed

Dear Editors,

There’s usually something interesting in your magazine and February was no exception, with the article ‘Who Bailed Out the Bankers?’.  If I understood it, it was suggesting that taxes fall on the employers and not the workers. We never see the money which is deducted from our gross pay and it was never really ours. I was wondering how self-employed people would fit into this. The woman who cuts my hair is self employed and she certainly has to find the money to pay her taxes. Is she exploited? But who by, when she employs herself and no one else employs her. But is she then an exploiter? How could she be when she doesn’t employ anyone? There are quite a lot of self employed people around and I’m not sure how they fit into your ‘them and us’ picture. What do you think?

Tony Trafford (via e-mail)

Reply: 
We take the view that ultimately taxes come out of profits rather than wages and salaries. This is because wages and salaries are the price received by workers for selling our mental and physical capacities and like other commodities the price of our ability to work is determined by the amount needed to produce and reproduce it (for instance, the training received by an engineer helps to explain why an engineer’s salary is invariably higher after qualifying than that of an unskilled worker).

This is not to imply that wage rates are set in stone, but to say as we did in the article that at any point in history they gravitate around a point influenced by such factors and, of course, by trade union action too to ensure they don’t sink below even these levels. In effect, this means that while some taxes are paid by workers (such as VAT) the burden of taxation must ultimately fall on profits,  which is one of the reasons the owning class – and the various factions within it – find it of such interest and importance. This is what we explained in the article, and if you are interested in exploring this particular issue, how the burden of taxation falls on the owning class in practice is also discussed in the relevant chapter of our pamphlet The Market System Must Go – Why Reformism Doesn’t Work.

The ‘self-employed’ are a slightly different case, as you imply, because they do not receive a wage or a salary resulting from a contract of employment. The self-employed (such as the small shopkeepers, etc) were technically part of the capital-owning class but who, as Marx pointed out, were forever being reduced towards the living standards of the working class through competition from the more successful capitalists and conglomerates. As such, their position has historically been one of the most vulnerable in capitalist society. Indeed, over time, the ranks of the self-employed shrank significantly due to this process of the concentration of capital into ever fewer hands, with smaller firms and the self-employed getting taken over or pushed out in the competitive struggle for profits.

In recent years though, there has been something of a turnaround in the numbers of those who call themselves self-employed. Not in the sense that the types of economic activities traditionally carried out by the self-employed have expanded much (in the main they’ve continued to shrink) but because a new layer of workers have had their pay and conditions de-regularised or ‘contracted out’ either by the state sector or by the corporations. This has been done as a way of stimulating efficiency (getting the self-employed to work from home for fees is usually cheaper for businesses than when they were formally employing the same people on salaries, with national insurance and pensions, etc to do the same work ‘in-house’).

So we have a situation whereby in reality, unless the self-employed are also employing others then they cannot be exploiters, and they are usually living on little more (sometimes less) than the average wage themselves, due to the pressures of commercial competition. They typically pay taxes nominally like workers do, and are, despite their ‘self-employed’ status, in an economic situation that is little different in most respects to wage and salary earners with contracts of employment.

Editors 

Cultural diversity

Dear Editors

In my opinion, the obituary written for Vic Brain was well written (Socialist Standard, April). I have always thought that people who are enthusiasts of things like the Welsh language, Scottish Gaelic, the Scots language, Irish Gaelic, Cornish language etc, are doing something which even under the uniforming pressures of capitalism is contributing to “cultural diversity” (as described in Vic’s obituary). Some might argue, I suppose, that our class position as wage slaves should mean that all other enthusiasms and identities should be subordinated or rubbished. I was glad to see your obituary writer was a bit more generous and thoughtful. I see no contradiction, for example, in having a Scottish identity related to your geographic roots, being interested in the Scots language and history etc , and also seeing a logical case for a world based on voluntary cooperation.

What are you thoughts on the subject of “cultural diversity”?

J. Russell, 

Glasgow, Scotland

Reply:
We have no objection to “cultural diversity”. Differences of language, food, music and the like will continue to exist in a united socialist world; indeed would no longer be subjected to “Mcdonaldisation” as today under capitalism. We would add that different cultures can exist in the same geographical area and that individuals can partake of elements of different cultures (you don‘t have to come from Scotland to enjoy the bagpipes or from China to enjoy Chinese food). Our objection is to the exploitation of cultural differences for political ends, as for instance to set up or maintain a state or as the basis for a political party.

Editors

The Shamefaced Middle-Class (1981)

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Britain today, the richest ten per cent of the population own sixty per cent of the wealth. The other nine tenths of the people share between them less than half of the wealth. And yet it is precisely those nine tenths who, not having any substantial property or unearned income, are forced to work for a living, and so to create all that wealth. These figures were quoted in the 1979 report of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth.

The few who own all the factories, offices, plant and property, can therefore accumulate more and more by employing thousands of workers, while the bottom nine tenths have practically nothing but their ability to work. So about ninety per cent of the population are employees, they work for wages or salaries, and accumulate practically nothing. The wages and salaries paid to employees are generally consumed by every-day living expenses. Even high-paid managers are only getting a “living wage” if their salaries are eaten up by paying a mortgage, running a big car and so on, for these expenses are all part of their job. Only seven per cent of adults in Britain own shares, and more than eighty per cent of privately owned shares are held by one thousandth of the population. (See The Wealthy, CIS Report, 85p.) The Supplementary Benefits Commission has found that nearly three in five unemployed people have no money at all after one month out of work.

Who are the working class?
What is class? Some try to define it subjectively, saying that it is “up to the individual" to try to say what class they think they are in, if any. This produces chaos: Gallup polls in 1953 showed half the British people questioned, and nearly nine tenths of Americans questioned, claiming to be “middle class". What are they in the middle of? Class needs to be objectively defined—not by what clothes you wear, where you live, your accent or what job you happen to do, but by your real economic position in society, conditions of life, how you are able to live.

Nine tenths of the population are forced by economic necessity to go and look for a job, to work for a living. Hundreds of years ago peasants were driven from off their strips of land into the growing towns, and forced to hire themselves out as wage-workers. They are the ancestors of the workers of today, of the managers and the professors as much as the miners and dockers. Tools were replaced by machinery, work-rooms by factories, and small shopkeepers and craftsmen were squeezed out by the competition of the early manufacturing capitalists. Class today is still determined by people’s relation to the productive machinery of society: do you own the factory, or do you work in it? Do you organise the production of wealth or do you sit back and receive it as profit dividends? People who are cut off from ownership of the means of production are forced to work for wages and salaries which are worth less than the total wealth they produce. The owners, who do not depend on wages or salaries for their living, depend on getting the surplus which results.

All those who have to work for a living are in the working class, and share a common interest to improve their condition of life. A salary is only a monthly wage; Arthur Scargill’s proposal that all miners should be paid salaries would not actually improve their conditions. Many employees do not directly create wealth, but they administer, mend, teach, distribute and ensure the smooth running of the profit system which benefits their employers. They belong to the class which builds all housing from palaces to pigsties, makes all food from caviar to carry-outs. We are all turned into mere commodities on a shelf: pasted-up pieces of card in the labour agency windows. We have different prices pinned on us, because what has been necessary to make, mould and maintain each of us will itself vary.

The employer may want some of the labour power to be more trained than others. But the principle is always the same: selling our ability to work for a weekly or monthly price. According to the Royal Commission report referred to above, “Average earnings in different occupations have come to differ much less" (page 11). If you didn’t inherit great wealth, then all you can do is create great wealth but it won’t be yours, it will belong to the employers, the shareholders or government-bond holders who own the means of wealth production. According to Class in a Capitalist Society by J. Westergaard and H. Resler. (Penguin, 1975):

  The crucial common component in the life circumstances of the mass of wage earners is their dependence on market sale of the labour. How crucial is evident from the wide range of other terms in life which they share, and which clearly separate them, by a gap incomparably greater than the internal divisions among them, from the minority for whom the wheels of private capital turn.

A social class is a group of people who share a common economic and political interest, because they share the same basic position in human society. The working class is the vast majority in modern society, who between them own practically none of the stocks and shares, land, companies and raw materials. The “middle class” is a myth—as can be seen by looking at the people most commonly described in that way.

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

Is there a middle class?
1. Managers. More than a hundred years ago Karl Marx clearly summed up the position of most managers:

  An industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and NCOs (foremen, overseers), who command during the labour process in the name of capital. The work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function. (Capital, Vol. I, Pelican p. 450.)

In the recent national Census, this type of worker was covered by the category “employee supervising other employees”. A kind of industrial police, managers are given some measure of power over other workers, and are expected to maintain profitability, doing the shareholders’ dirty work for them by getting the most work for the least money out of the other employees. But the main point is that they are still just employees, dependent on their work and their wages for their living. They are also often particularly burdened with debt, through struggling to accumulate wealth after the manner of the chairmen and managing directors they idolise, by saving, borrowing and biting off more than they can chew.

They have not realised that capitalists build up wealth through the work of others; workers are exploited through their own work for companies they do not own. The Royal Report on Income and Wealth shows that people with less than £20,000 are generally in debt for about thirteen percent of what they own; for those with more than £200,000 the average debt is only about five per cent. Managers suffer the insecurity of all workers; they are threatened by redundancy. If profits begin to fall, it can be the more expensive “labour units” at the managerial end which are knocked off the pay-roll first. By the end of last year there were about 120,000 on the Professional and Executive Register of unemployed, and the Sunday Times published an article entitled: “The Redundant Executive”:

  Executive redundancy can be a brutal business. Firms often like the victims to go as quickly as possible, fearing an outburst of anger or resentment. Others shy away from the whole business and call in consultants to do the dirty work. Having built their careers around loyalty to the firm, redundant executives are often deeply wounded . . .The really loyal man with twenty years’ service can be a tragic figure, out of touch with the job market and inexperienced at winning in a job interview. He will be exceptional if he can even type his own job application letters and he will be shocked to learn that at 45. he may be considered too old. (14/12/1980.)

A course for redundant executives run by the Professional and Executive Recruitment section of the Manpower Services Commission, advises that they should “cast loyalty aside”, and suggests. “In panel interviews, remember you are a pawn in their game” and “If offered a job, ask immediately for written confirmation”. This is the kind of humiliating indignity which being in the working class involves.

2. Administrative and “White-collar” workers. The division between manual workers and “brain” workers is generally a false one. Could manual workers build a house without having brains? Could clerks work without manning the increasing bulk of manually operated office machinery? Recent action by workers in the Banking Insurance and Finance Union, the Council of Civil Service Unions, teachers, journalists, French magistrates (Guardian, 23/1/81) and even Finnish ecclesiastical workers (Guardian, 25/3/81) proves the point that all those who have to work for wages and salaries are in basically the same position. They must organise together to improve their conditions, by forming trade unions to maintain wage rates and by joining the political movement for a classless society. People who for years have clung on to the idea that they have a “middle class’ respectability are finally forced through economic pressure to concede that they, too, have to use the strike weapon to defend their living standards.

3. Shopkeepers and the Self-employed.
Most shopkeepers are really distributive workers, who work full hours running their shops, and have to struggle increasingly hard to compete with the ever-growing multinational supermarket chains. Although they are not directly employed by the large companies whose products they sell, they play a vital part in getting the goods from the production line to the consumers, and they are allowed to have a commission, a small cut of the profit involved, which rarely adds up to much more than the average salary of an accountant or an engineer. Few shopkeepers are able to retire at an early age with a financial empire to support them. In fact, they have no substantial property; they are members of the working class, struggling to hold on to a false independence. No lasting security or independence can be achieved without the ownership of substantial capital. Some of those officially described as “self-employed” are in fact capitalists, at the heads of enormous companies, so that the richest fifth of “self-employed” people receive more than half the total self-employed income (Income and Wealth report, page 18). But this does not alter the fact that generally, self-employed people depend for their living on their own daily work, and not on the work of others or the accumulation of capital. So they share the insecurity and poverty of the rest of the working class.

4. University graduates, artists and others. The small proportion of workers who go through university are being trained for particular kinds of jobs: mathematicians to analyse profitability, engineers to design productive machinery, historians to justify the existence of the profit system. They are all necessary to the owning class of employers, although at the moment provisions for universities are being cut back on the grounds that they are not absolutely essential to the production of profit in industry. If graduates cannot find jobs, they are reduced to the dole like any other worker. The Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services recently reported that there were 55,000 graduates looking for jobs. Since only a small fraction of people go to university, this is roughly the same proportion of unemployed as the general level.

According to the Central Services Unit for Careers, fifteen per cent of arts students who graduated in 1979 were still unemployed by the end of the year. One university careers adviser makes it clear what class most students are in:

  It’s this discrepancy between the occupations for which arts graduates feel they are qualified, and the jobs they tend to end in, which causes a lot of unhappiness . . .The more idealistic will sometimes refuse to compromise, and may finish by having to learn the hard way. (Guardian, 6/1/81.)

Who are the capitalist class?
The capitalist class is a minority group which owns and controls the machinery of wealth production and distribution in modern society. It is highly exclusive and generally hereditary. The capitalist has power over the lives of the rest of us, because he or she possesses the land and factories which are needed to make the food and shelter we need if we are to live. They make sure that the transport, the schools, the industrial plant, the seas, are all run to provide them with profit out of the labour of others.

The capitalist class includes people like Rupert Murdoch, whose newspapers. The Times and The Sun are read by millions of workers every day. “Tiny” Rowland, who buys chain stores for millions of pounds, while most of us can’t even afford to go shopping in such places as Harrods and Barkers of Kensington. It includes Sir James Goldsmith, Sir Keith Joseph, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, Peter Cadbury, Lord Sainsbury and anyone else who receives an unearned income of rent, interest or profit from owning land, financial or industrial capital. Wages and salaries may vary from £50 to £400, but each million pounds invested can yield an unearned income of thousands each week.

It is almost as if the capitalist class inhabits a separate world. Not having to spend time working for money, they are able to go shooting, hunting, ski-ing, travelling . . . asked in a recent television interview whether he meets people with much less money than himself, the outspoken millionaire Rupert Dean said “Not if I can help it”. Inside the showrooms of Bonhams, Cartier, Sotheby and Christies, behind the oak doors of the Turf, Boodles, Whites, the Royal Yacht Squadron and in dinner parties at Claridges, the Dorchester and Annabels, the parasite elite eat, drink and spend lavishly. They do not experience our menial cares and worries about money.

The Duke of Westminster, aged 28, recently inherited nearly 200,000 acres of land across the world, including 300 acres of Mayfair and Belgravia valued at £1,000,000,000. To him, it wouldn’t matter whether you are a manager, a poet, a printer or a gardener: you are a worker, to be hired to increase his wealth. At his wedding last year, he was reported as saying: “It’s absolutely true that we won’t have to worry about rents or mortgages or anything like that”. When Lord Brownlow’s four-year-old son inherited £3 million in 1979. he said that “he will remain a very normal little boy”: it is “normal” for children of capitalists to get more for their birthday than a worker on £100 a week would earn in six hundred years.

At Christies on 30 March 1981, Dr. Marino Chiavelli spent £1,364,000 on seven paintings (The Times, 1/4/81). These are to decorate his 48-room Johannesburg villa and his London eighteenth- century mansion. The night he was interviewed he was leaving London to visit Switzerland, The United States and South Africa, but he had time to explain that he owns about a dozen companies in the construction and crude oil businesses.

The way ahead
The capitalist class and the working class live totally different lives. Some workers are just paying NHS contributions, others pay BUFA private contributions; the capitalist's insurance for the future is a lasting hold over the bulk of the earth’s resources. The Duke of Westminster is not employed, but he doesn’t need the dole either. You can't get the sack from the security of property. It is the minerals, companies, share portfolios, lands, properties and industrial plant of the capitalist which provide real security and dominate society. A hundred years ago, clerks could hope sometimes to become partners in the small family firms they worked for. Now, ownership has become concentrated, and divorced from managerial work. Small firms are forced out of business or swallowed up by larger ones.

Units of production grow, and production takes on an increasingly socialised form, with millions working together to produce wealth. There is no room for snobbishness in the expanding class of employees who hold the key to a socialist future. Social mobility is a myth. To save up to buy the Duke of Westminster’s London land at the rate of ten pounds a week, would take two million years. World capitalism causes war, poverty and insecurity; but it is perpetuated by the futile ambitions of some workers who shirk class unity for the sake of their false hopes of becoming capitalists themselves.

Clifford Slapper

Gigs and Umbrellas (2016)

From the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look at some changes that have led to new forms of work, and ask whether these are truly new and better than traditional kinds of employment.

Being your own boss, as a self-employed sole trader, may sound like a good idea. You can to some extent decide on your own hours, and are not subject to a boss or manager who lays down the law about how you do your work. But, like so much under capitalism, the reality does not match the image.

Officially, a self-employed person runs their own business and sells goods or services for a profit. You can hire other workers, you provide your own equipment, and (according to gov.uk) you ‘can decide how, where and when you do your work’. You have to register as self-employed, keep proper records and complete a self-assessment tax return each year. You will have to cope with insurance and business rates and provide for your pension. You have to worry about business plans and cash flow. Moreover, you will not get sick pay or holiday pay, and income can vary and be unpredictable. Self-employment is clearly not all plain sailing, with lots of administrative matters to take care of as well as being sure you actually make enough money from your work.

There are nearly five million self-employed in the UK, an increase of 45 percent since 2002; part-time self-employment has grown much faster than full-time. The self-employed work in many areas, from plumbers and electricians to accountants. As another example, many hairdressers rent the use of a chair in a salon, rather than being employed by the salon. But, while the number of self-employed is going up, their earnings have been going down. One claim is that average wages for such workers are less than they were twenty years ago, at £240 a week. BBC Online (20 October) looked at some examples. One man who has his own cleaning business was earning far less than previously but said he had a much better work–life balance. A session singer said payments had changed very little over the last couple of decades but, with changes in music-buying habits, his income from sales was now virtually non-existent. The rise in numbers is partly the result of workers who have lost their jobs trying to set up in business on their own. But it is also due to people being classified as self-employed when that description is not really applicable to them.

At the end of October, minicab drivers for the firm Uber won a case at an employment tribunal, which ruled that they should be classed as workers employed by the company, rather than as self-employed, and so should receive holiday pay and the ‘national living wage’. Uber put passengers in touch with drivers via a Smartphone app, and claimed to work for the drivers, enabling them to increase their ‘business’. But in fact Uber recruited and controlled the drivers, set their fares and ran a disciplinary procedure. The tribunal judges described the company as using ‘twisted language’ to describe their relationship with its workers. Uber took 20 percent commission from its forty thousand British drivers, and is a massive international company operating in over sixty countries, with income last year of $1.5bn. This was clearly not self-employment at all but a bogus set-up which made the company big profits, intensified the exploitation of the drivers and worsened their working conditions.

It has been estimated that well over 400,000 of the five million mentioned earlier are wrongly classed as self-employed. It is impossible to know the correct figure, but it is clear that Uber are not the only company that gets away with calling employees self-employed. The courier company Hermes has been alleged to be another example, as has Deliveroo. Even the Financial Secretary to the Treasury has stated that ‘Employment status in the UK is determined by the reality of the working relationship and not simply by the terms of any contract’ (theregister.co.uk, 27 October). In fact this is part of a wider phenomenon, sometimes known as the gig economy (based on the idea of musicians performing and getting paid for individual performances, rather than working regular hours). A gig economy is ‘an environment in which temporary positions are common and organizations contract with independent workers for short-term engagements’ (WhatIs.com). Freelance work has been common for years, especially in areas such as journalism and translating, and the majority of freelance workers are women. The Internet has increasingly made it possible for people to work from almost anywhere, so that the worker’s location and that of the company employing them can be miles or even continents apart. Many more people now work from home or from coffee houses, which can be very atomising in terms of having no face-to-face contact with fellow workers.

Another new development in this area is so-called umbrella companies, which operate as intermediaries between temporary workers (often called contractors) and the agencies that provide work. About a third of supply teachers, for instance, have had to join such a company. Supposedly this makes it easier for teachers who work in different schools, and even for different agencies, in the course of a week, as they have only one organisation to deal with from an administrative and payroll point of view. But many workers in such a situation have found themselves worse off financially, since the umbrella company takes a cut from their earnings, and it can take some time to get paid. This is not technically self-employment, and is in reality little different (if at all) from working directly for an agency or school.

The Communist Manifesto noted how fairly prestigious occupations such as doctor, lawyer and scientist had under capitalism been converted into wage labourers. Maybe the nature of employment is currently changing further. Rather than the masses of workers employed for years or decades in mine, mill, factory, shop and office, there is now much more short-term and temporary work with a sequence of employers, where someone can work for one company for a week or a month but then for a quite different company, undertaking different projects for which continued employment with one employer would simply not be appropriate. Many computer programmers and other IT specialists work this way, for instance. It all shows how zero-hours contracts are by no means the only way in which capitalism is making workers even more insecure.

One defence of self-employed status is that it involves workers owning the means of production. But owning a laptop or a van and a few tools does not make anyone independent of the market system or the overarching control of the capitalist class. The gig economy, umbrella companies, ostensible self-employment: none of these alters the subordinate status of the workers they apply to or represent anything other than a merely formal break with wage labour.

Paul Bennett

Dead Economic Man (2018)

Book Review from the January 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

'The Death of Homo Economicus. Work, Debt and the Myth of Endless Accumulation', by Peter Fleming (Pluto Press, 2017)

It’s a good title for a criticism of the view that economics can be explained as people behaving as if they were profit-seeking enterprises. Fleming says that this has now led to a ‘wreckage economy’  where the economists' ‘dollar-hunting animals’ perform meaningless work and lead empty lives; homo economicus is dead and survives only as a zombie.

Today, Fleming argues, the preferred way for capitalist firms to make money is not to create new value but to devise ways of tapping in to pre-existing income streams, to pursue interest rather than profit. There is some truth in this ‘financialization’ of parts of the capitalist economy, but a rip-off economy cannot exist without something to rip off. There still has to be, and of course still is, a sector of the economy creating new value to feed the income streams.

A large part of the book is devoted to discussing work – office work as boring and meaningless and the various employer theories and practices to manage it; the growth of ‘self-employment’ which is really a way for employers to off-load the costs of directly employing workers (holiday pay, pensions, time at work not actually working); and resistance by individuals, sometimes violent, sometimes passive withdrawal, to the meaningless work capitalism imposes on them.

Some of the book is heavy going due to its postmodernist and French pop sociologists’ style but Fleming is basically on the right wave-length. The reduction of all (his emphasis) social life, not just economic, to the logic of profit-seeking, which latter-day capitalism has brought about, has led to all sorts of problems, social and psychological, and needs to be ended for the sake of people and the planet.

Adam Buick

Fools' Gold Mine (1985)

From the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The nature of socialism cannot be separated from the means to achieve it — the conscious. political action of a majority of the working class. By working class we mean the vast majority of the population (perhaps 90 per cent in Britain) who do not own the means of production — land, industries, transport. communications and so on — and therefore need to sell their mental and physical energies (labour power) to an employer. Without wages or salaries they do not have access to the fruits of their work. The capitalist class, on the other hand, through its class ownership (or monopoly) of the means of production, has access to wealth without the need to work. It employs the majority class to do every kind of work and. after wages and all of the other costs of running a complex system have been paid, there remains for the capitalist class a privileged and luxurious life style. "Every kind of work" means just that. If we look a little closer at this "complex system", it becomes obvious that rather more is involved than what takes place at the factory bench.

When explaining the role of the working class (the basis of exploitation) it is easier to start with the example of people in a factory making goods, and being paid less in wages than the value realised on the sale of those goods, with the difference being appropriated by the employer. If we add to this simplification the work involved with a fuel supply, raw materials, research, in the office, management and so on. it is still only part of the picture. We must also include marketing, finance, transport — and law. education, medicine . . . In other words, the production of surplus value is better understood as a social process. It is as a class that workers are exploited, and it is as a class that capitalists reap the benefit. Some questions may arise for those accustomed to the popular notion of several different class divisions in society. The ultimate explanation for wide variations in income within the working class is that the labour power of some workers is more expensive to produce and reproduce than that of others.

If we use the criterion of relationship to the means of production it is apparent that most people, including those on salaries well above the average and non-employed wives and pensioners, belong to the class which needs to work. Members of the capitalist class do not need to work, and do not become dependent on state pensions and social security. Their income, derived from their investments, is sufficient on its own. That some individuals do not appear to fit exactly into either category need not concern us. (In some cases the appearance is deceptive, as with holders of nominal directorships whose "employment" is only for tax purposes.)

But other questions remain. If the working class is dependent on employment does it mean that all employers are capitalists? Bearing in mind the previous paragraph, we can see that the answer is no. A few employees (the chairmen of nationalised industries?) have salaries which enable them to closely identify with both the life style and outlook of the capitalist class. But there are employers who themselves need to work long hours in their businesses and may have incomes which compare more closely to those of the working class. If an individual employer works in his own firm together with his employees, who are paid overall the value of their labour power, but cannot live off the surplus value produced by them, then that employer is a member of the same class. A "small" enterprise may be successful and grow to the point where the owner having accumulated sufficient capital, no longer needs to work in it; what Marx called "a special kind of wage worker" will be employed to manage the business — to do the work formerly done by the owner. Then the owner is indeed a member of the capitalist class. The class position is not altered for capitalists who choose to take part in their ventures.

Marx was referring to the general development from individual manufacturers to large scale Modern Industry, and the point where capitalist production "really begins". Individual employers and the self-employed are a group largely out of time. Having lost out to large scale enterprise in the competition for profit, the group now plays only a minor role in production and distribution. The percentage income of this group declined by about 3 per cent between 1938 and 1971. and the decline in numbers continued until the 1980s when the figures show an increase. By 1983 the number of self-employed, with or without employees, had increased by around a quarter of a million to 2,260,000. This is only about 9 per cent of a total working population of 26,776,000. (Pears 1977/78 and Annual Abstract of Statistics 1985.)

Over the years self-employment has provided one answer to the difficulty of finding work for a proportion of succeeding groups of immigrants but this does not account for the increase in current figures. There has been no recent increase in immigration and the majority of, for example, Asian shop keepers have taken over from other self-employed owners. The increase can probably be accounted for by the recession: a number of the unemployed "setting up" on their own, in enterprises ranging from consultancy firms to standing in the High Street with a suitcase of socks and hankies (although the latter are only likely to appear in the estimated statistics of the Black Economy). The government claims that the way out of recession is to be found with individual employers, small businesses, the entrepreneurs. Part of the theory (which includes the role of less capital-intensive firms) seems to be that the unemployed who have qualified for "generous" redundancy payments will set up in business and then take other workers off the dole queue. (New businesses of that size can probably only afford part-time employees.) In areas where the main employer has gone, or the mine has shut down, the competition between redundant workers to sell goods and services to their unemployed neighbours can be imagined! Though there are individual success stories, government claims of record numbers of new businesses always meet with counter claims of the rate of bankruptcies. The owners of the ventures which fail in the competitive struggle, the erstwhile employers, have themselves to seek employment.

From the successful to the failures, the self-employed category includes a wide range of occupations and incomes. Small businesses do the work that large companies are not interested in, though sometimes as sub-contractors to the large firms. House building is done by the Barratts and Wimpeys. but house repairs and alterations are the province of the individual, the small builder. Self-employment has been used in the building industry as a technicality, to avoid tax and insurance payments once called the lump.

Despite the continuing threat from changes in retailing methods (from supermarkets to hypermarkets) and shopping habits, a single outlet section still survives in the retail trade. Small shopkeepers are perhaps the best known example of the self-employed. They have to give some kind of service to customers not found elsewhere, perhaps in some specialised trade, by being local, or open when larger shops are shut. Some retailing companies are granting franchises, commercial concessions, for the running of their retail outlets, instead of employing managers. In the fast food trade particularly, the company provides identical fittings and decoration to each outlet and then sells (identical) supplies to the franchise owners, who have the responsibility of running "their" shops and only nominal independence. The advantage to the companies is in cutting out losses from fiddling which might arise if they employed managers.

Small businesses, including shopkeepers. will need the services of accountants and sometimes solicitors; there are accountants and solicitors to consult who may also run their own firms. Some of the self-employed struggling to compete with larger organisations in the same industry take on additional "self-employed" burdens. A Country Diary piece in the Observer (24 February 1985) told of farmers' wives who have turned to a "grockle" crop as an alternative source of income, taking in paying guests during the summer months. Any lingering doubts about the class status of these farming families (and indeed of their guests) are dispelled when we read that this entails letting all of the farmhouse bedrooms (there may only be two) as family rooms, while the hosts sleep in the garage or even the "suitcase cupboard".

As for those earning their living as artists or writers . . . Self-employed or not it makes no difference. Along with Marx we point out that "The bourgeoisie . . . has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers" (Communist Manifesto)

We can safely say that the vast majority of the self-employed are members of the working class. Like the rest of our class, some enjoy their work, some have comfortable life styles and others just manage. And there are those who are trapped in their small businesses, and their poverty. It is not working independently in your own business that counts, but the need to work the need for employment. We in the working class do all of the work of society; why not change society, so that we can really work for ourselves.

Pat Deutz

Be your own boss? (1988)

The Running Commentary column from the April 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the nineteenth century Samuel Smiles offered the doctrine of hard work and abstinence to the British working class as a path from the poverty and suffering they experienced during the "golden era" of empire and industry.

Today the government peddles a similar message of self-help to the unemployed through its Enterprise Allowance Scheme with advice on how to become self-employed. The Prime Minister has revealed her vision for the future — a nation of self- employed. This is a bold vision in its denial of economic reality but it does reflect the pressures of party politics.

At the heart of the matter is government concern over unemployment levels and the consequent fear of losing power at the ballot box. This is a problem that has been faced by successive governments, whether Conservative, Labour, or Liberal (and will no doubt prove a source of worry to the new SLDP). Each has offered a variety of "solutions" that have proved useless without exception. Unfortunately for all parties hoping to capture power and administer capitalism the problem remains that unemployment is an inherent part of the capitalist economy and not capitalism gone wrong. As such the "solutions” offered by these parties and their accompanying economic advisers are spurious and, regardless of the promises, unemployment will be relatively high or low depending on the prospects for the capitalist class of realising a profit given prevailing market conditions. If the economy is expanding the capitalist will draw on the reserve of unemployed workers to increase production. When the economy contracts redundancy notices are issued.

The present government is offering the unemployed worker a chance to Be Your Own Boss. This self help booklet is available at Job Centres and offers advice and financial assistance in setting up your own business. It promises that "You won't have a boss breathing down your neck" (not that the target audience has the luxury of this inconvenience) and offers a list of services you could provide as a budding entrepreneur. Among the services listed that could launch you on the road to prosperity are: picture framing, making pottery, sign writing, gardening and child minding. Contact with reality is avoided by ignoring those crucial elements of market economy — competition and profitability. The reader is simply advised to identify a service that cannot be obtained at the "right price" in the area they live. The realities of the market place are left further behind when advice is offered on forming a co-operative. A co-op may suit you if you are ". . . more interested in serving the community than making profits". It would be hard to find a more cynical denial of the priorities of capitalism than to offer hope to unemployed workers by implying that a desire to help others may be enough to earn a living.

Tony Dobson