News in Review: What do they stand for? (1963)

The News in Review column from the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

What do they stand for?

It is obviously time for somebody to remind the nuclear disarmament movement what they are supposed to stand for.

Remember the days when, they only inscribed upon their banners slogans about banning the bomb? When they appealed that everyone, regardless of their political views, could co-operate in the appeal to save us from nuclear destruction? When they trotted out tame Tories (in much the same way as the Tories trot out tame trade unionists) to try to prove this point?

You do remember? Well, forget it.

The recent demonstrations organised by the Committee of 100 against bad housing, and against the Greek government, show that the unilateralists are going the same way as the other reformist organisations which have sprung up full of fire, have had their day and have vanished.

This process has followed a familiar, wearisome pattern. As unilateralism has failed to have any impact upon that great mass of working class votes which so faithfully support capitalism, the movement has found itself confronted with a choice.

It could have stuck to its original purpose and declined quickly into the ranks of the organisations whose objects may sound very desirable, but have no relevance to the needs of capitalism. Or like any other reformist group, it could have looked out for fresh fields to exploit.

This is what the unilateralists have done, which is not to say that their new preoccupation with issues like democracy in Greece will win them any more support than they gained from advocating banning the bomb. Here, once again, is evidence that, even on their own terms, reformist organisations are seldom logical.

It was not from any notion of superiority, nor any wish to detach ourselves from the problems of capitalism (if that were possible) that we said from the beginning that the nuclear disarmament movement would go the same way as the rest. We have seen so much of this in the past. There is no satisfaction now in seeing our forecast proved correct.

Because as each reformist movement rises and dies, it absorbs the energies and the enthusiasm of the very people who should be working for the new social order which will settle the things they fear and dislike once and for all.

Rachman, a scapegoat

As a scapegoat, Peter Rachman had just about everything. Fat. Balding. Property speculator. Keeping women. Just the man, in fact, to vent a little spleen on if you have been kicked out of your house or if you envy somebody else’s ability to buy feminine favours.

And a scapegoat Rachman has been made, not least by the Labour Party in their transparently clever attempt to win votes by using what they know of Rachman's affairs to attack the Rent Act.

So perhaps a word or two to put Rachman in his place will not come amiss.

First of all, it is nonsense to suggest that it was the Rent Act which gave Rachman his chance. As the papers have pointed out, the heavy glove boys operated against precisely the people who were still protected under the Act.

What Rachman did was to exploit the loopholes in the housing laws and to hide his transactions in a maze of legal complications. This is something which will happen, provided it is profitable, whether there is a Rent Act or not.

Capitalism has always been interested in the cost of housing, because working class rents can have an explosive effect upon wages and upon an election. The shady operator knows that it can often be very remunerative to probe for the weak spots in the law and when he has found them to exploit them to the full.

If Rachman had not cast his shadow in the field of properly speculation he may well have made his pile in some other way. Or indeed, if Rachman had never lived there would have been somebody else to do exactly the same sort of unsavoury deal.

In any case, was not Rachman, in a way, one of capitalism’s heroes? A penniless refugee who became a self-made man of riches? Who is to say that, if his gamble on the oilfields in the North had come off, he may not have become a nationally respected man, his racketeering days forgotten, and ended his life with a title?

Why not? It has happened before.

If the Rachman story is sordid, if it shows up a sort of human behaviour which is unpleasant, if it evokes some of the most regrettable of human reactions—it is only typical of capitalist society itself.

Criminal waste

The trains which, packed to suffocation, are pulling out of the big cities, and the roads to the coast wedged tight with traffic, tell us that holiday time is here and with it one of capitalism’s silly seasons.

High summer is the time when all sorts of fruit and salad is liable to be produced in such abundance that the price falls to the point when it becomes economical for the farmers to plough the stuff back into the ground or leave it rotting on the trees.

But now here is another, even sillier, example of the waste which the profit motive brings with it—one which need not happen only at the height of summer.

The Times of July 31st last reported that Cerebos Ltd., of Hartlepool, plans to dump a hundred tons of meat and fish paste into the sea because they are changing the shapes of their jars.

Hartlepool is in the stricken North-East; perhaps some of the unemployed up there would not say no to a few free jars of fish paste. Or perhaps the stuff might help out with some of the underfed children of the world.

Never mind. Presumably some accountant somewhere has worked out that it will be cheaper for Cerebos to sink the pastes. Just like any other company, they have to keep a close eye on their balance sheet.

Silly is too mild a word to describe the social system which not only allows the criminal waste of the world’s resources but actually, at times, requires and encourages it.

Mail Train robbery

The two-and-a-half million pound mail train robbery was audacious and glamorous enough to have come from the pen of the most imaginative crime fiction writer.

In that, it was typical of a recent strengthening trend in crime. The big, well planned robbery is becoming increasingly profitable for the crooks and so more and more of a headache for the police.

This is hardly surprising. The existence of private property elevates money into the key to a secure life. The moneyed man is always the privileged man and he does his best to make sure that he keeps both the money and the privileges.

There are plenty of such privileged— and honoured—men whose wealth has been amassed from the exploitation of the other class in society. Or perhaps they inherited it from their ancestors’ historical equivalent of the Cheddington hold-up.

This sort of wealth is respectable—it has come from what has been well called legal robbery, which conforms to capitalism's needs and so its moralities.

Robbery, forgery, embezzlement, and so on, do not conform and the men who try to get rich by practising them are anything but honoured.

Be that as it may, crime is inevitable as long as capitalism lasts; offences against property make up die overwhelming majority of crimes today. Capitalism without crime, in fact, is simply impossible.

Ironically, it is capitalism itself which asks for some of its crime. Do not the armed forces, so essential to capitalism, encourage just the sort of knowledge and the mental attitudes which are useful in a desperate, quick-fire robbery?

The driver of the Cheddington train said that one of the gang advised him to keep quiet because there were some “right bastards” there. Well, it is the “right bastard” who makes an excellent Commando or bomber pilot.

All of this is not to justify nor to condone the criminal. Indeed, any one who tried to take away from the Cheddington gang any of the money they have stolen would soon find that, in their own unmistakeable way, they are as firm in their support of property rights as any bank boardroom.

Capitalism is an unpleasant social system and crime is only one of its many excrescences.

Yugoslavia today: “Socialist Federal Republic” (1963)

From the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

In April this year Yugoslavia declared itself a ‘'Socialist Federal Republic" under a new constitution. The constitution proclaimed the “abolition of wage-labour relations” and declared that the economic system was “based on relations between people acting as free and equal producers and creators, whose work serves exclusively to satisfy their personal and common needs." The constitution contains the usual Stalinist distortions of Marxism, namely, the allegedly Socialist slogan “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work " as the principle of distribution, the false division between Socialism and Communism, the continued existence of buying and selling under “Socialism” and finally, the League of Communists, the name of the Yugoslav Communist Party since 1957, as the “prime mover” in the construction of Socialism. Marxists, however, do not judge a country by its formal constitution. On the contrary they examine the actual social relations obtaining in that country. Such an examination of Yugoslav society exposes the hollowness of its Socialist pretensions and reveals that capitalism continues to flourish there.

Yugoslavia is a totalitarian state. Most of the people are in the mass organisations typical of such states—in Yugoslavia the Socialist Alliance and the People’s Youth. Marshal Tito appears as a very important person. Youth brigades sing songs to Tito i Partija and his picture adorns the wall of every shop and public place. Still it would be going too' far to label him as a personal dictator. Power in Yugoslavia is in the hands of a small clique (which performs the functions of a capitalist class) of which Tito is just one member.

Nor would it be fair to say that there is widespread opposition to the regime. Certainly in peasant areas people can be found who are against the government. This is hardly surprising since the expressed intention of the government is to modernise the country and to sweep aside out-dated institutions and ideas.

Yugoslavia is a popular dictatorship, that is, a dictatorship enjoying the support of most of the people. In recent years, however, the Yugoslav rulers have learned the lesson which the ruling classes of the developed countries learned long ago: that in order to run the State efficiently so that exploitation can continue in peace the procedure of government must be such that the opinions of the people can be heard and taken into account. Accordingly we find talk about developing "Socialist democracy” and “social self-management.” This is not all talk. People really are being allowed to take part in the running of the administration. But there’s nothing Socialist about it. Yugoslavia’s “Socialist” democracy is something less than the non-party local government which exists in the less industrialised parts of this country. Circumstances are compelling the Yugoslav rulers to democratise their government. But the emergence of the limited political democracy that prevails in the more developed countries of Europe is still a long way off.

What has happened in Yugoslavia is a world-wide phenomenon. Throughout the world totalitarian state capitalism is the form under which many of the backward areas are developing. This is because in these countries the native bourgeoisie is so weak that the state has to take over their traditional role, which is the accumulation of capital. This type of state is in fact more capitalist than the capitalists themselves. Those in charge know where they wish to go and use the state machine consciously to destroy the old society and its ideas and to spread capitalist relations as rapidly as possible throughout the area under their control. Needless to say they do not put it in this way and so we have a varied collection of “Socialisms” throughout the world ranging from “royal” Socialism to allegedly Marxist Socialism. Yugoslavia is one of these countries.

Socialists have never denied the role which capitalism plays in economic development. We have always said that the role of capitalism is to develop the means of production to the point when Socialism and production for use become possible. On a world scale capitalism has long since done this; from this point of view it is now a reactionary social system standing in the way of social progress. Nevertheless, in backward countries it continues to play this role. It removes thousands from the limitations of rural life, educating them and preparing them for life in industrial society. All this must be accepted by Socialists. However, when we say that the spread of education and the elimination of regional differences have been made in Yugoslavia we do not attribute these to Socialism, but to Capitalism.

Yugoslavia is still largely an agricultural country as about 50 per cent. of the population work on the land. Capitalist development, however, continues to break up the old village economy. This is not without its problems. As capitalism develops, the young from the countryside move to the towns seeking jobs. But the jobs are not always there. Hence unemployment, which is currently a problem in Yugoslavia despite the fact that the new constitution guarantees “the right to work and the freedom to work.” In 1962 the unemployed numbered 236,000 (7 per cent.); others seeks work in West Germany. (See Table.)

Yugoslavia has the same percentage of the population at work in agriculture as Russia, but in some ways is ahead, particularly in the development of the free market. Up till 1950 the Yugoslav economy was run on the same lines as is the Russian today. The state fixed the quantity and quality of the goods of each enterprise, who should supply the raw materials and at what prices, the prices of the products and their buyers, etc. This type of state capitalism is resorted to in times of extreme shortage or of national effort as for war or of rapid industrialisation. However, if too prolonged, it tends to become inefficient. This is being discovered in Russia today.

Yugoslavia began decentralisation in 1950. This took the form of developing a free market. Not completely free, but with the state only intervening to set general targets—the system which exists in some developed countries of West Europe in fact.

“Workers’ control” was introduced at the same time as the ending of the state-directed economy. Indeed, it was part of the same process. The importance of “workers' control” in Yugoslavia lies not in its formal arrangements but in its economic role. It was introduced as part of a plan to make Yugoslav capitalist industry more efficient. Its function was and still is to provide an incentive for workers to work harder. The workers’ councils play a similar role to co-partnership schemes in this and other countries. Many students of the Yugoslav system overlook this efficiency aspect and talk enthusiastically about economic democracy. This is a serious mistake as it misses the very reason why the workers’ councils were set up.

Capitalist industries if they are to survive must become more and more efficient. Time-work and equal wages do not provide a sufficient incentive to work hard. Hence piecework, profit-sharing, bonuses, co-partnership and various other incentive schemes. In Yugoslavia the equivalent is the rigid implementation of the principle of distribution according to work. This principle is adhered to strictly and any departure from it is condemned as “non-Socialist.” The workers councils have some say in deciding how the income of the enterprise in which they work should be distributed—but they must share it in accordance with the principle of distribution according to work done. The harder a worker works the more he gets. Herein lies the incentive. Tito has specifically said that this principle is the best way “of thwarting tendencies towards a levelling out of earnings, and other negative manifestations.” The plain fact of the matter is that equal wages would be bad for productivity.

Of course, the rulers deny that the workers’ councils are only a method of increasing productivity. They talk about "the liberation of human labour” and the like. All this is so much nonsense and it is surprising that many of those who are not taken in when supporters of co-partnership in this country refer to their plan as “a possible advance in civilisation” are deceived when the Yugoslav rulers do the same.

Under capitalism the workers must strive to obtain as high standard of living as possible. The experience of the workers’ councils in Yugoslavia shows that these councils are no substitute for free trade unions. Certainly their formal institution is unobjectionable. The workers in an enterprise elect a Council which is ultimately responsible for the general running of the enterprise. The Council in its turn elects a Managing Board. The Director who is responsible for the day-to-day running of the enterprise is appointed by a joint commission of the Workers’ Council and the local administration concerned. In this light the workers’ councils must be seen as the counterparts of joint production councils and such other frauds in the West.

The working class in Yugoslavia has no free trade unions and the workers’ councils are no substitute. For should the workers decide to use the councils to increase their incomes without a corresponding increase in productivity the government trade unions step in denouncing, in the words of one of their leaders, the “small-owner mentality" and other ”backward” influences which make the workers think of exerting "a stronger pressure on the increase of personal incomes." The principle of no pay rise unless there is an increase in productivity, which our own rulers are trying to impose on us. is rigidly implemented in Yugoslavia.

In time the working class in Yugoslavia must come to realise its class position and will take steps to end it. Unfortunately this seems a long way off yet. What is important at the moment is that workers outside Yugoslavia should not be deceived by its Socialist pretensions. Yugoslavia is not a Socialist country. The working class there are still exploited for the purpose of capital accumulation. Those in charge of this accumulation are the ruling class. Let this be understood.

Adam Buick

Branch News (1963)

Party News from the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

In London, for the first time in the Party’s history, a Rally is being arranged in Trafalgar Square on Sunday, 15th September at 3.30 pm. Permission from the authorities has been granted and therefore all that remains to ensure success is the greatest support from every comrade who can possibly get to the Square on that day. The Propaganda Committee is holding a meeting of Committees and Branch Organisers and special arrangements for literature sales are being made. This occasion can be made really worthwhile, and one hundred per cent support from every member will help it to be so.

The Delegate Meeting is being held at Head Office on Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday, October 5th and 6th—a weekend to note in diaries. Paddington Branch have booked Hampstead Town Hall for a propaganda meeting on October 21st. Full details in the October Standard.

Our comrade Joe McGuinness is working hard for Socialism whilst at the same time working for his living. He is hoping to start a group in East Essex. Details under Groups on page 134.

West London Branch (ex-Ealing) have settled down well in their new meeting place and are looking forward to a very busy winter season of lectures, discussions, and film shows. We hope to publish details of the first meetings in next month’s Standard.

Glasgow Branch are enjoying their most successful outdoor season for may years. They are holding four meetings a week in Glasgow and two in Edinburgh. A feature of this summer's outdoor activity has been the success of the Sunday afternoon meetings at the new stance at Kent Street. This stance is in the middle of Glasgow's Sunday Market Place—the Barrowlands. The audience is usually between 100 and 200 and literature sales have been especially encouraging. The branch are also preparing for the forthcoming General Election in the Woodside Constituency and preparing a series of posters dealing with various aspects of the Party’s case to be displayed in Woodside prior to the election.

The event which has engendered the most enthusiasm from Glasgow members, however, is the recent acquisition of rented premises in Berkeley Street. This was made possible by the donation of £50 from a Canadian comrade who recently visited Glasgow. The premises are a three apartment basement flat which the Glasgow comrades are transforming from a slum into very attractive headquarters for Socialist activity. The Monday evening branch meetings are now held in the new branch rooms and education classes are due to start there at the beginning of October. It is also hoped to run a weekly discussion group very shortly. It is felt in Glasgow that branch rooms are essential for organisational and propaganda work and their lack until recently has held back our drive for better propagation of the Party’s case. News of Glasgow branch activity in regard to indoor meetings, classes, etc., will appear in next month’s Standard.

Phyllis Howard

Finance and Industry: The end of the publican (1963)

The Finance and Industry Column from the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The end of the publican

Reference was made in these columns recently to the concentration of the brewing industry in a smaller number of large firms. According lo the Evening Standard (6/8/63) the process is continuing and taking new forms. One of these is that as the big firms find they can make more profit by having the public- houses run by their own paid managers, they are more and more getting rid of the houses run by tenants, as leases fall in. Some experts are forecasting a big fall in the number of publicans who run their own business, and those who remain are finding their freedom of action more restricted. Having been tied in respect of the brands of beer they could sell, they are now finding themselves limited in their choice of wines and spirits, and even cigarettes and mineral waters. The Evening Standard City Editor thinks that the big brewers, who launched their own brand of gin in opposition to the existing brands, will follow this up by producing their own brand of whisky.

He thinks the disappearance of the “free” publican a matter for regret and a positive danger, but does not explain how the all-round powerful drive concentration in industry and trade is to be halted. Governments may promise to turn back the clock by legislation, but capitalism has a habit of largely ignoring it. It was not only the Conservatives who said they were opposed to any form of monopoly, but there was a time when the Labour Party, too, wanted a large number of small capitalists in preference to a small number of large ones.

In any event it seems that the British worker to whom the Conservatives promised “full personal freedom and power of initiative” isn't going to be allowed to exercise it in his choice of pubs, beers, whisky, etc., quite apart from the limiting factor of his ability to pay.

Down with money

As a small by-product of the £2½ million train robbery the Daily Mail in its issue of August 10 had a full-length leader with the caption “Down with Money.” How bold and refreshing? Nothing of the kind: just the usual inanities of the newspaper editorial mind. The theme was that the robbers of the mail train would find it very exhausting trying to spend so much money and would soon discover that “ money is a nuisance and a bother.” So why not abolish it altogether!

After that daring promise of an idea came the flat triviality of the actual scheme: “Why do we not become a credit card nation, and free everyone from the necessity of carrying bulky pockets full of paper? ”

This, according to the leader writer, would save us all a lot of trouble. No money changing hands and being transported about or locked up in safes. Just Bank of England Computers giving everyone a statement each week of what they had spent and what they had left. All accounts would be settled by cheque. The writer conceded that we might still need a few metal discs for slot machines. “But for the rest let us just sign our names and give our numbers for everything from bus tickets to bingo games. ’ 

We may pause for a moment to contemplate the spectacle of millions of busy shoppers, and travellers signing their names and giving their numbers at shop counters, in buses, ticket offices, etc., and may well wonder whether they would consider it any less tedious than handing out notes and coin.

But there is a catch that the writer overlooked. His brain child all began with the £2½ million train haul and he closed on the note that “there would never again be another train robbery.” But if he thinks that as credit cards come in the opportunity for theft goes out he has overlooked not only the possibility of signing someone else's name and number but also of stealing or forging credit cards.

But let us invite the writer in the Mail to give his mind to a really bold and constructive idea. Let him ask himself why bullion, coins, notes, cheques and credit cards are in use at all; whose interest they serve; and whether they are really necessary?

The theoretical justification for the continuance of a monetary system is that it enables those who lawfully possess goods to sell them, and use the money to buy whatever they choose, when and where they choose. Seemingly a very admirable and convenient arrangement (even if it does get upset much and often by robberies). But it serves to mask the realities of production and distribution which from the point of view of the majority of the population are far from admirable. How do the lawful possessors of (the products of the factories, workshops, farms, and so on, come to be in that position? Because they have laboured to produce what they own and sell? Not at all. Just the opposite in fact. The one undeniable feature of the world we live in is that wage and salary earners who are employed to produce the goods are never the owners of them after production. The owners and the non-producers, simply by virtue of the fact that they are already the owners of the factories, either directly or as shareholders.

So the money arrangements are merely the cover for the legalised exploitation of the mass of the. population, serving primarily the interests of the owning class.

Of course, it needs boldness of thought to consider the fruitful possibility of all the people of the world simply producing what all need, and distributing it directly, without any monetary arrangements (and newspaper leader writers are notoriously timid, and fearful of thought) but having made a small start could not the leader writer of the Mail be induced persevere?

Wage restraint

Mr. Harold Wilson has shown candour in saying again, as he has said before, that any future Labour Government will count on the trade unions accepting wage restraint as part of a policy of restraint of profits, rents, etc. Amid some mild expressions of approval or disapproval, Mr. Hill, general secretary of the Boilermakers Society, got into the headlines by declaring his emphatic opposition to any form of wage restraint. So the battle commences: Hill versus Wilson. And how will the issue be settled? Shall we end with wage restraint or without wage restraint? The answer is that, so long as we have wages, the efforts by workers to push them up and by employers (backed by governments) to push them down will continue: nothing will be settled.

The trouble is that those who argue for and those who argue against wage restraint are not really arguing about whether it should exist or not, but only whether its existence should be admitted in words.

Take Mr. Hill, for example. If, correctly reported, he does not want any form of wage restraint and presumably thinks that if a declaration of “ no restraint” is made, the situation will be different. But, of course, it will be altered hardly at all. For years, indeed for generations, and long before a Labour Government invented the term “wage restraint” to describe its policy, there have been workers and trade unions which have demanded higher wages, and fought bitterly by strikes to get them: and have never got the wages they demanded and thought they ought to have. They have not been restrained by the words “ wage restraint,” but by the resistance of the employers and the power of the government—in the last resort, military power.

What has Mr. Hill to say about his own Union. He has never accepted wage restraint, but he has repeatedly had to accept the fact that his Union members could not get the wages they were asking for. What has Mr. Hill done about it? He has done what he could, but that did not include getting rid of the fact of wage restraint.

As remarked earlier, this is bound to last as long as the wages system lasts, and most people, including apparently Mr. Hill, unfortunately will not get round to recognising that the wages system could and should be got rid of along with the rest of capitalism.

The role of gold

In an address to the Transvaal and Orange Free State Chamber of Mines in Johannesburg recently, the President, Mr. P. H. Anderson, reviewed the prospects of gold mining in South Africa. He stated that in the last 15 years output has more than doubled. It reached a record of 25 million ounces in 1962, and the first five months of 1963 showed a further 10 per cent. increase, but with the exhaustion of mines and in spite of the development of new areas it may now have reached its peak. Employment in the mines has begun to fail from the 1961 peak of 40,000 Europeans and 400,000 Bantu.

The working profit from the gold mines in 1962 was £123 million with a further £21 million from uranium, and dividends of £55 million.

One of the factors stimulating gold production and profits was the devaluation of the pound sterling in 1949, and the South African gold interests have for years kept up incessant propaganda for a general devaluation of world currencies, including, above all, the American dollar. In spite of repeated assurances by the American government that they have no intention of doing this, Mr. Anderson states that a number of South African mines are continuing in operation, though making losses, in the hope that devaluation will sooner or later come to their aid.

As is the way with all vested interests looking for means to increase their own profits, the South African gold interests, backed by a number of economists, argue that it is in the interest of world trade in general, and in particular that it would help the “West” against “Communism,” meaning by the latter the Russian government.

One of the counter arguments from the United States has always been that revaluing the dollar from its present rate of 35 dollars to an ounce of gold to some higher figure (50 dollars is often mentioned in the propaganda) would help the Russian Government since Russian gold stocks would automatically be worth more dollars in the world market.

It has often been claimed that Russian gold production is only second to that of South Africa and rising rapidly (a figure of over 17 million ounces was claimed in 1958). But some of the gold experts outside Russia have been sceptical about Russian output and the size of its gold reserves.

“Lombard” in the Financial Times has recently mentioned various estimates of Russian output, but dismisses them all as no more than “ intelligent guesswork.” But, he claims, if total output and stocks of gold in Russia are not known, what is known is that since the early nineteen fifties Russian gold has been coming into the world market at the rate of something under 7 million ounces a year.

His conclusion is that this figure probably represents something approaching total output and that the supposed enormous gold reserves of the Russian government are mythical—unless the Russian government, like the South Africans, is also waiting for the day when the American government devalues the dollar in terms of gold.

For Socialists it has its own lessons. In spite of the nonsensical forecasts of some alleged experts that the devaluation of the Pound in 1932 would be the end of gold, it still plays its old role in capitalist international transactions, just as much for capitalist Russia as for the rest of the capitalist world.

Edgar Hardcastle

Homes for wage slaves (1963)

From the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Working class housing is a sore that has festered on the body of capitalism right from the beginning. Workers all over the world live in squalid and inferior conditions.

Following the lines of class division, every city and town has its contrasts. Spacious, comfortable houses for those who can afford them, and cramped and shoddy ones for those who cannot. Let’s take one example to show the poverty and insecurity that lies behind the so-called housing problem. When the L.C.C. announced recently that the sum of £3 million had been set aside for loans of up to £5,000 with no deposits, they were swamped with thousands of enquiries. This paltry sum might house something like a thousand working class families. On the other hand, one building, the new Hilton Hotel, cost £8 million; there were no workers enquiring for rooms at up to £40r per day.

While massive blocks of office buildings are appearing everywhere, people walk the streets of London looking for shelter or join those staying in rest centres. Such is the order of priorities under capitalism.

Labour-Liberal and Conservative governments in succession have promised to deal with the problem, but have left it much the same as when they first took office. Workers have been fed on such promises as “ homes for heroes,” only to find they need to be heroes to live in some of the homes. Because of the low standards of working class dwellings, made necessary by the need to keep them within rents workers can afford, their new homes soon begin to look drab and to blend with the old eyesores around them. The best that capitalism’s parties can do is to try to outbid one another in promising to build more cheap and nasty dwellings for workers. But, even then, the rate at which old property deteriorates and needs to be pulled down, is higher than the rate of building.

When the Tories came back in 1951, there was a lot of talk about a “ property owning democracy,” but housing, like the rest of wealth under capitalism, is produced for profit. Six years of Labour Government and nearly 30 years of Labour control on the L.C.C., have done nothing to solve the problem. In 1934, the housing problem and slum clearing was the major issue at County Hall. It still is today; as in all other fields, the reformists are ignorant of the true nature of the forces against which they pit their puny efforts. How many more years of capitalism run by the Labour Party must we endure before workers realise that reformism has no answer?

In an article in the old Sunday Pictorial last October there was a lot of factual information about the squalor and decay that millions of workers live in. We were told of a family of four living in an old car parked m a London street. We were given the contrast of London’s most luxurious penthouse at a rent of £12,500 a year, and of places in Earls Court for £9,500. There are plenty of flats at £60 a week, but few at 60s. The article goes on to enlighten us with the fact that in Manchester there are 68,000 slums and 13,677 people on the waiting list. In Leeds, where the Housing Minister is an M.P., there are 11,000 slums and 18,071 on the waiting list, while in Glasgow a thousand homes are closed each year by the city medical officer; 600 more are so rotten, they fall down unaided. There are 77,000 people on the Glasgow waiting list. This sort of article is fairly common in newspapers, but the press is just as helpless as the politicians when it comes to effective answers. This is what Mr. Michael Stewart, a Labour Party housing spokesman, wants, “Restore rent control; keep a check, or if necessary ban, new office building, and build more homes for rent—at least 300,000 a year.” Rent control did nothing to alleviate the present slum conditions and acted as a weight to keep wages down. Surely the Labour Party knows that office building is more profitable than building homes for workers who can only afford low rents. The Sunday Pictorial should know all about the benefits of new office buildings, the newspaper is printed in one of them. As for 300,000 houses a year, this is the exact figure the Tories promised in 1951. To carry on building places cheaply for workers only perpetuates the problem.

The housing problem is merely one symptom of a sickness that runs right through capitalism, the sickness of riches and poverty. None of the politicians who come vote-catching to the workers ever promise to build them mansions with expensive chandeliers and swimming pools. The life of yachts and sun-following is deemed to be unfit for the class that produces it all. When we arc told that 15 million people have no baths in their homes, swimming pools sound as though they belong to another world and in a way they do—the world of the capitalist.

When wars come along and workers are invited to fight for “their” country, they would do well to look at some of the places they live in and ask themselves what country they own. The Church of England, which always blesses workers in uniform, is one of Britain’s biggest landowners and has £69,000,000 invested in property, not to mention £132,000,000 in stocks and shares.

What can be said for a social system that cannot even provide adequate shelter for the overwhelming majority of its citizens? While capitalism remains, the squalor that it breeds will be with us. Frederick Engels nearly a hundred years ago pointed out that all oppressed classes in history have been poorly housed and that the solution is to abolish the present form of society.

Socialism will lay the foundation for the final removal of the housing problem. Although there will be an ugly aftermath left over from capitalism, when the means of production are held in common and the madness of profit-motivation swept away, we can then set about the task of gearing production to human needs, which means housing of the finest possible standard will be produced, in abundance, to be freely used and enjoyed.

Harry Baldwin

The crusade for gold (1963)

Book Reviews from the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Conquest of New Spain. Bernel Diaz. Translated by J. M. Cohen. Penguin Books, 6s.

Chronicles of the Crusades. Villehardouin and Joinville. Translated by M. R. B. Shaw. Penguin Books, 5s.

Many books have been written about Hernando Cortes and the conquest of Mexico. Many more still have been written about the Crusades. But very few books on either event came from those who were there at the time, and even of these only a handful have survived.

Penguin Books have recently had the happy idea of publishing translations of three of these personal histories. In the first, The Conquest of New Spain, Bernal Diaz, a humble soldier in the Cortes expedition, gives his account of how several hundred Spanish adventurers with a few dozen horses invaded the powerful Aztec empire, overthrew its ruler Montezuma, and conquered his capital of Mexico. The second book, Chronicles of the Crusades, combines two stories: of the Fourth Crusade seen through the eyes of a French feudal lord, Villehardouin, and of the Seventh by a later compatriot Joinville.

Roughly three hundred years separate these two periods, three hundred years which saw the final crumbling of feudalism before the forces of expansion in which the discovery of the New World played such an overwhelming part. The books reflect the deep gulf between the two societies, but even more interesting and striking is the way they reveal the factor common to both of them—the drive of economic interest.

All three histories purport to be written by religious men. Both the chroniclers of the Crusades tell us frequently of their Christian mission, of their joy at the “taking of the Cross" against the Saracen and the infidel. And throughout his story Diaz tells us again and again of the way he and his companions shattered the Mexicans’ “heathen idols” and of how they tried to get them to see the “true faith.” All their disasters (and they were many) were sent by God to punish them for their misdeeds, and their escapes and triumphs were due solely to his intervention.

But through all three stories comes the asides, the complaints, the intrigues, the reproaches, the admissions, that make it clear that whatever the ostensible reason for their campaigns, the real motive was wealth, land, booty, and loot.

Gold is the word that weaves its way into every thread of Diaz’s story. Gold was what he and his companions were after, the fabulous mines in the west which would make them rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Every settlement through which they passed on their long road to Mexico was assessed in terms of the gold it possessed; every present given by Montezuma in an effort to buy them off was meticulously valued in pesos. Gold was the prize for which they went through innumerable and fantastic hardships and for which so many of them died—to have their hearts torn from their still living bodies and their limbs thrown to their opponents to feast upon. And, supreme irony of all, and as so often happens, it was the leaders and rulers who got most of the spoil and Diaz and his fellows nothing.

Our two Crusaders tell the same story. It was the Venetian merchants who supplied the ships and provisions for the Fourth Crusade—at a good price, plus one-half “of everything we win." And whatever may have been the depth of religious conviction of the two authors, it is certain that most of their companions embarked on their adventure for the booty to be won and the lands to be conquered. The Fourth Crusade, in fact, never got further than Constantinople and ended in a bloody struggle between the French and Germans against the Greeks who were, incidentally, also Christians and whose lands bad been seized by the Crusaders. As for the Seventh Crusade, the feudal barons who left so eagerly in search of loot and land were soon tempted to leave their “saintly king Louis'’ in the lurch when they found the opposition keener than they had expected. Louis himself was captured and had to buy himself back to France at the cost of a heavy ransom. The whole campaign was in fact a fiasco, ruined by the greed of the big feudal lords and their primary concern for their own economic interests.

It should be remembered that the wealth to permit these feudal aristocrats to go out on their jaunts, either for religious or just for mercenary gain, was extracted from the vast inert, mass of Western European serfdom. Then, as now, a small minority of privileged lived on the backs of a majority who did all the useful work of society, pawns who were passed from one feudal lord to another as the tide of battle fluctuated between the various warring actions.

By Diaz's time this system had virtually broken up and a new one was evolving. He was only one of many who thought to get rich quick by volunteering for expeditions to open up new lands. The old order was disappearing and the world becoming bigger, but much of it was illusion. Most of them died, or came back crippled or broken with disease. Their leaders, true, often shared the same hardships but did have somewhat of a better chance of looking back and considering them worthwhile. But the real winners, as always, were the big men behind the scenes who financed the expeditions—and, of course, the rulers of the time who couldn't lose anyway because they were automatically entitled to a fifth of everything that was going.

Courage, adventure, cruelty, and privation—these two books recount such things on a scale to make us marvel. But, underlying everything, they confirm once more that then, as now, history was shaped by economic interest. The holy cross might have stood out brightly on the banners, but it was the urge for gold, land, booty, and profit, that burned in the breasts of most of those who fell in behind.

Stan Hampson

50 Years Ago: Vice - 1913 Version (1963)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

In February of this year—within three months of the White Slave Bill being passed—Hull was excited about the arrest of “a leading citizen,” named Edward Buckton Cargill. He was the Chairman of the Hull Steam Trawlers Owners Company, of the Humber Conservancy Board, was chosen by the shipowners of Hull as a representative of the fishing trade of the port, and was appointed by the Board of Trade on the North Sea Fisheries Committee, besides holding many other leading positions in the property owning world.

He was charged with offences against several girls under 16 years of age. He obtained the services of several noted K.C.S and other lawyers and detectives to help him, and they scoured the cities to try and get matter whereby the girls could be seen in the worst light—morally. Needless to state, the girls belonged to the working class.

When the judge ordered him nine months hard labour the poor dupes of Liberalism and Toryism thought it showed the sincerity, and wisdom of our governors—But—wait and see!

He was sentenced at the end of February. At the beginning of May, or shortly after two months had elapsed, the Hull Press announced the release of Cargill on the ground of indisposition. He was removed to his home, prison life not agreeing with this tender plant. And a member of the town council ventured the opinion that if he had been a poor man he would have been in prison yet.

They were going to deal with “the great traffickers in human beings.” They were going to strike at “the international ring of procurers.” Ah, yes! a story of going to do. When, owing to an oversight, no doubt, a sumptuous flat in Piccadilly was raided, the flat keeper, calling herself Queenie Gerald, was charged with procuring girls. In the course of the evidence at Marlboro' Street, however, it transpired that prominent men were associated with the business—and the usual thing took place.

The case came on at the sessions watered down to one of "exercising influence over the movements of prostitutes for the purpose of gain.” At the police court she had pleaded not guilty, but now she answered: "Guilty!” the result being that no evidence was taken against her on the charges made, the jury were not sworn, all in spite of the fact that Mr. Travers Humphrey, the prosecuting counsel had at the Police Court stated that (vide "Daily Telegraph,” June 21st) “There were a large number of letters which made it quite clear that, apart from the prisoner's earnings herself, and apart from what she received from the girls, she was carrying on the trade of a procuress.”

The public were excluded from the Court and the Press representatives were told they were only there as a privilege, and were to report no names and be careful not to let much leak out. They were ordered not to divulge the real name of Queenie Gerald—and all for what reason!

BECAUSE LEADING MEMBERS OF MODERN SOCIETY WERE PATRONS OF THIS PICCADILLY FLAT.

Conclusive evidence of procuring was given earlier at the Police Court proceedings, but that didn't stop the charge being dropped at the Quarter Sessions. One of the letters written to “a gentleman at the Ritz Hotel” ran as follows:

“Your friend wishing to meet a few society ladies. I can arrange for three on Sunday. They are the real thing and frightfully expensive. Will you ask the Prince what he is prepared to give.”

From the Socialist Standard, September, 1913.

The high wage myth (1963)

From the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

For many years the Ministry of Labour has published figures showing the average earnings of industrial workers in a selection of industries. These have been supplemented recently by similar figures for salaried workers. The consequence is that we now have two images instead of one, the image of white collar workers’ pay added to that of the manual workers.

It is not that the Ministry of Labour figures are wrong or misleading but only that, in course of transmission to the columns of the newspapers and the speeches of politicians, the careful definitions and explanations are forgotten.

The latest figure for the industrial workers shows that the average wage is over £16 a week. Its brother turns up in the Daily Mail on July 3rd like this: “ £21: The average White Collar workers’ pay.”

The Industrial workers’ £16 12s. 4d. is average earnings, including an average of over five hours overtime pay, plus all extras for output bonuses, profit sharing, etc., and before any deductions have been made for income tax, National Insurance contributions, and the like.

The figure applies only to men of 21 and over (the average for women, youths and girls ranges from £8 3s. 8d. down to £5 4s. 6d.), and applies only to the manufacturing industries, which are relatively highly paid.

The inclusion of some non-manufacturing industries lowers the average by about 10s. a week, and although some other "high wage” as well as “low wage " industries are outside the figures it is well-nigh certain that the inclusion of shop assistants, catering workers, agricultural workers, etc., would bring it down much more. On this basis it could well be less than £14 for an average of 48 hours a week or more, and before deductions.

The same and some additional qualifications apply to the myth of the £21 a week “white collar worker.” As defined by the Ministry of Labour for its enquiry this group includes all administrative, technical and clerical staff ”from managerial and administrative grades to junior clerks and typists” as well as technical and “professional" employees.

But as it happens the Ministry also publishes figures which exclude the more highly paid sections, the managers and administrators, and apply only to "clerical and analogous employees." The contrast is a striking one. We drop from the Daily Mail’s £21 to a figure only two-thirds as large, actually £14 2s. 5d. a week for male workers and £10 14s. 11d. for women and girls: and like all the other figures these include overtime and other extras and arc before deduction of tax and insurance contributions.

So much for the newspapers’ fairy tales about wages.

Edgar Hardcastle

Demonstration For Socialism (1963)

Party News from the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Natural Disasters (1963)

From the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Man’s creation of the wonderful technical marvels that dominate our modern world tend to make us forget the latent destructive forces of nature. It is only when a catastrophe such as the recent earthquake at Skopje smashes through our complacency that we realise with a start that here is a force, terrible in its might, that twentieth century man is as powerless to control as any painted savage.

Apart from the feelings of horror, grief and the real human desire to render succour and comfort, which people share irrespective of their political ideas, we Socialists have some comments to make on the social aspect of natural disaster that most others do not make.

After the giant earthquake at Tokyo in 1923, it was often asserted by those who had knowledge and interest in the then new steel or concrete buildings that serious earthquakes would not cause such devastation if rebuilding followed the new methods. Such an idea, vague and stemming from many sources, became as usual partially accepted on its face value by most people. Agadir and Skopje have shown that the brand new buildings collapsed like cards and had no more resilience than the old bricks and mortar.

Capitalist society has produced buildings that can take a heavy pounding from the machines of war. Our rulers even have hide-holes against the Big Bombs (for themselves, naturally) so the possibility of designing structures that can give greater safety for human life in the earthquake zones is possibly not so far-fetched. Earthquakes are spasmodic and can occur over a large area of the globe. The cost of repairing and rebuilding devastated cities, especially when the expense is spread over a wide field, is obviously cheaper than reconstructing thousands of towns in a new and revolutionary way. Capitalism as usual therefore takes a chance, with human life taking second place to the need to balance the books.

Powerful states can shoot men into space because such action is tied up with war preparation and the need to protect or grab property. The cost of the space race is crippling even to healthy states, but it continues unabated. Do we ever hear of any research being encouraged or even carried out on methods that will enable men to plot the location and build-up of earthquakes in the earth's crust? Capitalism scares the pants off us with its “four minutes” H.-Bomb warning. How about a four-minute warning to help thousands escape from death and injury in an earthquake?

Yet another point has confronted us over this event. A well known radio and television commentator launched an appeal for funds in order to send prefab homes to Skopje. He stated that we have the men to make the units, planes to carry them to their destination, but we must have money to set the operation in motion. No money, no homes, however great the need or the desire to help!

Even in so great a need private property must not run at a loss!

Jack Law

Obituary: Michael Evers (1963)

Obituary from the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ealing Branch report with regret the death of Michael Evers, who died on July 25th, 1963, at the age of 38.

Comrade Evers joined the Party and Ealing Branch in 1951 and was for several years Branch Secretary. Members knew him as a most efficient comrade, always to be depended on to carry out any Party work requested of him by the Branch, be it his secretarial duties, canvassing or arranging and organizing meetings, film shows, etc.

Mick was determined and stubborn in whatever he did, in his football refereeing, his golfing, his enjoyment of branch social activities in which he wholeheartedly participated and the hard routine of Party work which is the essence of the Socialist movement.

Ealing members—and the writer, who knew him from the day he joined the Party—wish to record this last appreciation of Mick Evers’ ready co-operation in every activity relating to the Branch and the Party and of all the work he contributed on their behalf.

Eddie Warnecke

Poverty in the USA (1963)

From the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

From time to time the London Times draws attention to admissions of poverty in America. One such article from their correspondent in Washington appeared in the issue of April 19.

It starts off with the statement: ‘‘Every fifth American lives in poverty, and many more in deprivation, according to official statistics. Altogether 77 million are either poor or are denied an adequate standard of living.”

Criticising Professor Galbraith for his over optimistic assumptions about iminishing inequality, the Times article goes on:--

  The starting point could well be the figures of the United States Bureau of Labour Statistics which draw the line between poverty and deprivation at $4,000 a year (£1,428) for a family of four and $2,000 (£714) for an individual living alone. These figures do not necessarily mean cash income, but include the price of food grown by small farmers, and in 1960 nearly 10,500,000 families received less.
  The line drawn between deprivation and a modest but adequate standard of living was drawn at a family income level of about $6,000 a year (£2,142). Again according to the Labour Department, in 1960 an urban family of four required between $5.036 and $7,678 a year to live adequately. More than two-fifths of the population do not earn $6000 a year.
  The areas of poverty and deprivation are easily defined. Studies of the Conference of Economic Progress showed that 37.2 per cent. lived in the south; 18.3 were unemployed; 16.2 per cent. were elderly; 16.2 per cent, were non-white; and 12.1 per cent. lived on farms.
    Circumstances have changed little since 1959 when two-thirds of all farm workers earned less than $1,000 (£357) and some migratory workers earned less than $500. Nearly 80 per cent. of all non-white families lived in poverty or deprivation, and about 32 per cent, earned less than $2.000. Retired couples received social security pensions of $1.500 a year but many poor people do not contribute to the scheme.

Among other interesting details it is stated that in the years since 1929 inequality of income has in one respect increased: “If the poor did not become poorer the rich became richer.”

It is hardly necessary to remind readers that Socialists do not think that poverty is a peculiarity of any one part of the world. All countries are good to live in for the rich and all countries have the poor for the rich to shed tears over.

Edgar Hardcastle

Behind the Test Ban Treaty (1963)

From the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

One swallow, said Lord Home, does not make a summer, but without any swallows there will be no summer (or words to that effect). He was talking, of course, about the Test Ban Treaty which was signed last month amid so much flourish and back-slapping in Moscow.

Lord Home was not the only statesman to offer a somewhat muted welcome for the Treaty. On the other side, there were plenty of commentators to assure us that this was something to sing about, and that the agreement was a step towards a better, safer, more peaceful world.

Now we have heard this song before and we have come to accept it for what it is worth. So it is fair to ask one or two questions about this latest venture into the field of agreements which are supposed to be going to make the world a fit place for humans to live in.

The first thing about the Treaty to give us a qualm is the suspicious ease with which it was discussed and signed. Talks on banning bomb tests have been going on for years, each one getting bogged down in apparently futile arguments over the details of administering a ban. Only a simple soul, of course, could have believed that these were genuine difficulties. The reason for the succession of breakdowns was that the talks were not serious. No nuclear power has ever really intended to give up the right to test its weapons.

Then suddenly, in contrast to the years of shilly-shallying, the new talks opened and the diplomats went willingly to Moscow (no bargaining, for a change, over where the talks were to be held) all in the assumption that this time they would bring it off. And they did. The experts at dipping their pens in the ink without signing, as Moscow radio called them, all at once made their marks on the paper and the deed was done. Why the sudden change of heart?

We can gorge ourselves on any amount of speculation. A popular theory was that the great powers gave themselves an awful fright over Cuba and that, stricken by a ruinous vision of the consequences of what might have been last October, they will now go to any lengths rather than to the brink again. This theory fits in with the widespread conception of international politicians as men who can apply everyday, humane standards of judgment to their work.

But the obvious question here is, why did they not apply these standards before Cuba? That affair was, after all, something of a calculated gamble by the Soviet Union. Is it possible that last year's belligerent Mr. Khrushchev, the man who only a few months ago secreted nuclear rockets onto the United State's doorstep, can change into this year's paragon of peace and virtue? This is the sort of unanswerable question which the theory about the influence of peaceful or bellicose leaders has to satisfy.

Another explanation for the Treaty was that the nuclear powers are finding the cost of their weapons too high and now think it sensible to call a halt. There is some evidence to support this point of view. Hydrogen bombs are expensive and so is the associated hardware—the rockets and the guiding systems and the race for space—which is so essential a part of them. Probably even more expensive—and this is something which the last series of big American and Russian tests may have uncovered — is the chain of anti-missile defences which must be almost the next step in the nuclear arms race.

Perhaps, then, the nuclear powers need a breathing space to sort out the delivery problems, so that they can develop a production method for missiles as smooth and as cheap as that for conventional bombers. The big fault with this argument is that it ignores the fact that, if the interests of a capitalist power demand it, that power will produce its weapons regardless of the cost. In the last war, this country was spending £14 million each day on the war effort. For a long time the British capitalist class have had their doubts about the economy of keeping up their own nuclear weaponry. Yet they have kept it up. Armaments do not provide the best ground for a logical, orderly assessment of priorities.

And when we have considered all these arguments—and perhaps given them their due—we are still left with our original question.

Why the sudden change of heart?

One of the most striking—and potentially the most frightening-aspects of the Treaty is that it divides the world into those countries which have the Bomb and those which, with the exception of France, have not got it. (There will now probably be pressure upon de Gaulle—perhaps an American promise of nuclear know-how—to get him into the new alliance.)

What is more, the nuclear powers are now sworn to try to prevent the spread of the weapons; in other words, to maintain their own supremacy. This is what de Gaulle meant when he referred to the " . . . terrible threat which the nuclear armaments of the two rivals hold over the world and, above all, over the peoples that have not got them.” And it is what the chairman of the China Peace Committee meant when he promised a Chinese nuclear bomb in these words:

It will not be long now before the attempt to control the destiny of peoples made by a small number of countries with their monopoly of nuclear weapons will be thwarted.

It is when we consider that the breach between Moscow and Peking, which has been opening up for the past few years, has now burst wide open that the Test Ban Treaty takes on what could be its true significance. The breakdown of the recent talks between the Russian and the Chinese leaders could indicate that recent Russian policy towards China is openly a failure and that henceforth the clashing economic and strategic interests of these two countries can no longer be papered over by a mutual hostility towards the USA. This in turn would mean that the Russian government will be as anxious as any other to stop the Chinese having the Bomb— or that, if they have got it, to deter them from flaunting it by a massive display of nuclear counter-strength.

If this is so, we may be sure that the effect of the Treaty will be to make the nuclear have-nots intensify their efforts to get the Bomb. From this it may follow that the nuclear haves will try to do a deal, as we have seen they may try with France, to restrict or to control the spread of nuclear knowledge. Or, perhaps, on this issue, they will find themselves fighting a war.

Are we, then, witnessing a new alignment in the disputes and the opposing forces of world capitalism? Do we stand now at the threshold of another great division? Said The Economist on August 3rd:

Moscow’s split with Peking . . .  may perhaps stand out bold and clear as an event that forced us to . . .  think up a fresh set of rules of action to face a new outlook in world politics.

Which would be nothing new. It is the basic nature of capitalism which causes modern war and so gives rise to the weapons with which wars are fought. This same basic nature throws up a mass of complex interests and counter interests which at one time coincide and at another clash. Capitalism's allies are never, can never, be permanent. Its treaties and agreements can never be worth more than the paper they are written on.

The Moscow agreement is not excluded from this. It has the customary gaping loophole through which, on a plea of “national interests,” any of its signatories can forget that they ever signed it. It excludes the currently awkward powers—China and France—and this is no coincidence because the present interests of these countries put them outside the Treaty. No pact, after all, has ever been able to get over the conflicting interests of capitalism’s disputing nations.

None of this, as we might have guessed, prevented the politicians from taking credit for the Treaty. With the ink on the signatures hardly dry, they were anxiously identifying themselves with the Test Ban and pointing out what clever, humane men they are to stop doing something which, by any humane reasoning, they should never have started. They told us how good it is for us, now that the tests have stopped. When Lord Home could take time off from musing on the swallows he said:

Don’t let us run away with the idea that this test ban, if it is signed by the United States, Russia, and ourselves, is of no value. It stops fall-out, which greatly concerns the medical profession and every parent in every western country.

We may be sure that Lord Home has not forgotten that he is a member of a government which, as long as they wanted to test their bomb, blandly assured us that the danger from fall-out was negligible. A government which told us that the best medical brains were on their side in this matter and that only a morbid, hypochondriacal parent would worry about fall-out. Do the facts change, now that a treaty has been signed? Is Strontium-90 dangerous, after all? Did all those children really die of leukaemia?

The cynicism of capitalism is one of its worst features. Yet cynicism is the quality—if that is the right word—which the politicians and the diplomats must develop if they are to run the system. They must all learn to sign on the dotted line with their tongues in their cheeks and a ready smile for the cameramen. And how much, do you think, does that make their signature worth?

And will the Test Ban Treaty, do you think, really work? 

The fact is that it is very much on the cards that the nuclear powers will one day start their tests again. And if the Moscow Treaty does go into the waste paper basket it will find itself nestling alongside any number of equally ballyhooed predecessors.

Ivan

The Test Ban Treaty (1963)

Editorial from the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Over the recently signed Test Ban Treaty there hangs a massive, inevitable question. Elsewhere in this issue of the Socialist Standard we discuss some of the implications of the Treaty and the possible reasons for it. Briefly, the big nuclear powers have come to an agreement to stop atmospheric testing because of a recent shift in the balance of power in the world.

The Soviet Union, which has tried for so long to control the potential might of China, has now apparently given up and in some ways has thrown in its lot with the Western bloc. China must now step up its efforts to master the secrets of nuclear weapons which the Soviet Union has refused to give them.

If the present situation develops much further we may see a massively powerful, nuclear armed China on the one hand, gathering as many allies among the new Eastern and African states as it can, and on the other—almost the whole of the rest of the world. By no means is this an attractive prospect.

The result of the Test Ban Treaty can only be, then, another big power line-up in the world and a continuation of the old, ruthless struggle. The only difference will be that the sides will have changed and perhaps the areas of dispute. The basic conflict of capitalist interest will remain unaltered. For the majority of people in the world—for the working class—this will bring further insecurity, further tension, perhaps in the end the unimaginable terror of a mighty conflagration.

And the question is: What will they do about it? The Test Bun Treaty is typical of all the pacts and agreements which capitalist powers make between themselves. All these pacts, at best, only shuffle the cards into different, no less menacing combinations. This does not, of course, prevent the politicians presenting each treaty as a step towards peace, as a cause for rejoicing among the working class.

And the big question is: Will the working class believe them? Will they reflect upon the history of all the treaties 'which have been solemnly and ceremoniously signed only to be broken when the very time came for them to be kept? Upon the many pacts of non-aggression which have preceded the signatories making war upon each other? Upon the fruitless discussions which have taken place with none of the participants seriously intending to settle anything?

Will the working class take the trouble to think into the facts about the big power divisions in the world? Will they ask themselves why the powers' interests are opposed, so often and so frighteningly? Why, indeed, there are powers, separate nations big and small? These are the sort of questions which the Test Ban Treaty should bring to mind, once again.

Capitalism is now a futile social system. It cannot unite the human race — it can only divide it catastrophically. It cannot serve human interests; it can only deny and damage them. It cannot solve its problems, such as war, but only continue to produce them in one form or another.

The only way out of this insane maze is to get rid of capitalism and replace it with Socialism. Will the working class realise this? Before the desperate conflicts of capitalism make it, for many of them, too late?

Man's degradation (1963)

From the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Degradation! What degradation?"

The neatly-dressed grey-haired woman at the edge of the lunch-time crowd at Tower Hill had seemed genuinely surprised at the use of such a word by our speaker to describe her  condition and that of the other office workers listening to him. Engrossed in his topic, he had not heard her interjection; she had not pressed her point; and so it had been lost.

The scene came back to my mind some weeks later, when I found myself with time to kill in a suburb of Nottingham. I had called in the morning at the house of a comrade—only to find that he was out. As it was a lengthy bus-ride back to the centre of the city and I had no other commitments, I had decided to await his return. The local branch of the Public Library was in a pleasant, spacious building, furnished with some imagination, and it was well stocked. An hour or two passed in browsing.

I had already had a cup of coffee and a sandwich at the only cafe in the district, and did not in any case feel like a hot meal on this warm summer day. I decided to buy some fruit and sit outside somewhere in the sunshine to eat it. I was soon looking for a small park or road side seat with perhaps a patch of grass around it. Half an hour later I was still looking, having walked up and down almost every street I could see.

I began to realise that I had been brought face to face with a fact which the everyday familiarity of the suburban scene normally causes one to overlook: that with rare exceptions, suburbs have nowhere for the passing stranger to sit. They have parks, commons, recreation grounds, yes—but these are usually some distance from the centre of the district, and are provided for specifically recreational purposes. The neighbourhood as such makes no provision for the stranger. If he is lucky he may find a Public Library in which to pass his time; otherwise he must pay for the space he occupies, by buying something to eat or drink.

That this is a fact I was able to confirm several times over in other parts of the country; and anyone can see it in most of the suburbs he knows. But it is more than a curious fact; and it is certainly no coincidence. We have all around us, the first kind of human community in history which makes no collective provision for the traveller. The village has its green, with a seat or two; the most primitive and the most transient of past human settlements considered it a general duty to greet a stranger (unless he were believed to be hostile) and offer him hospitality. How it is that this small but age-old community function has been able to disappear almost unnoticed from the typical dwelling-area of the affluent society?

The answer can only be that these areas are not communities at all, in any but a shadowy and nominal sense. The local-authority housing estate or the collection of private "desirable residences" is not built for human beings to live together in; it is an aggregation of living-boxes for the purveyors of labour-power—places to and from which they can be shuttled before or after making their energies available to the owners of capital.

So conditioned are workers to capitalism that they have come to accept this state of affairs as normal and natural, and can usually think of improvement in their mode of living only in terms of getting a bigger box with a bigger bit of land around it. The house-builders, concerned only with the profit to be obtained from their operations, find this all to their advantage: far more money is to be made from putting up mazes of indistinguishable dwelling-units for the Council, or from selling the featureless semi-detached to the socially isolated white-collar worker, than could possibly accrue from creating a well-planned community with adequate amenities. The social expense, in loneliness, neurosis and the sense of leading a meaningless, frustrating existence, does not hit the builder's pocket or affect the Councillor's political security.

The woman in the Tower Hill crowd probably lived in just such an area; yet she did not see that it involved her in a degradation of human existence. It is just possible that she had an enjoyable, useful, meaningful job; but if she did she was fortunate. The degradation of having to devote our talents and our powers of concentration to boring or ultimately futile activities was presumably no more to her than the inevitable daily round of everyone's life.

This is, perhaps, the ultimate degradation itself of the working class; that they are induced to believe that the kinds of lives they lead, the houses they live in, the clothes they wear, the work they do and the way they travel to and from it, represent the best that any reasonable person could hope for. Yet it is at best a pitiful, and at worst an insulting mockery of the potential of human nature and wealth and society, this life that we are condemned to live; we could sweep it all away if only we could see that it has ceased to be in any sense necessary.

So I mused, trudging up and down the streets with my bag of apples and oranges. Eventually I did find somewhere I could sit and eat them—on a stone in a graveyard. The moral was all too plain: only the dead occupy space they don't pay for. Only for them is there no degradation.

P. R. Collins