Bottom class (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Of all subjects which are of any significance when coming to grips with a proper understanding of life under capitalism, education is one of the most vulnerable to confusion and misrepresentation. Even many so-called experts pretend to difficulty when called upon merely to define it. (W.O. Lester-Smith, for example, opens his Penguin book Education with the observation: ‘Defining Education has been likened to a parlour game, an innocent but useless way of passing the time'). And although we have all — in this country, at least — been exposed to a greater or lesser degree of formal schooling we seem to have emerged from the experience blind to its true aims and purposes.

The irony of the situation is absolute. The very process which, if we are to believe the hypocritical rubbish we hear and read on the subject, should have endowed us with the knowledge and the confidence to ask challenging and searching questions, and the automatic right to receive truthful and objective answers, has instead made more or less unquestioning conformists of us; at least over fundamentals.

This is no accident; it is the first duty of those responsible for running popular education systems under capitalism to produce, not independent-minded rational human beings, but docile and potentially exploitable units in a capitalist-owned, wealth-producing machine.

Primary Connection

In an article on education contributed to the 11th (1910) edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica a Professor Welton, formerly of Leeds University, had this to say about the apprenticeship laws of Henry VIII which, he observed, ‘contained the earliest germ of state interference’ in education. (It may here be remarked that this assertion applies, presumably, to the British Isles only: the classical Greek state understood and exercised such interference thousands of years earlier).

 These laws obliged children between five and thirteen years of age who were found begging or idle to be bound apprentice to some handicraft. If the immediate object was the prevention of crime rather than education as such, this early legislation is at least significant of the primary and intimate connection that exists between popular education and industrial and economic needs.

Professor Welton, were he alive today, would have no reason to modify this viewpoint.

Of course, capitalism as we understand it did not exist in Henry VIII’s time; neither did the working class, (at least, not in the form in which it has developed under capitalism). The difference today is that an enormous propertyless working class possessed only of its labour-power in the form of a saleable commodity must be made to serve the interest of the property-owning capitalists. Furthermore, that working class must be conditioned to accept that this state of affairs is both natural and inevitable.

Short shrift

Under capitalism the education system is controlled by the state, which in turn forms the executive arm of the capitalist ruling class. In order to ensure that the needs of this class are met, Acts of Parliament are passed which set out what is expected of educational administrators and educators. The 1944 Education Act, for example, which (and I again quote Lester-Smith) ‘in its very first clause gives us a Minister whose duty it is to direct and control local authorities in carrying out national policy’ also instituted (selective) secondary education for all in place of the elementary/grammar school system, thus hoping to meet the need of the capitalists for a more educated labour force. Other provisions included those having to do with the government of schools; aspects of the curriculum; the compulsory practice and teaching of the Christian religion; registration and hours of attendance and their enforcement (the normal school week relates closely to the working week which children will later experience in adult life); and many other considerations. All of these provisions are subject to the attentions of an inspectorate and an advisory service.

It seems almost superfluous to add that anyone employed as an educator or an administrator who steps out of line can expect short shrift. Those who doubt the validity of this assumption should remember what happened to Michael Duane and Risinghill Comprehensive School, of which he was the unorthodox headmaster. Or they may recall the summary treatment accorded some of the staff of the William Tyndale School who were even more unconventional in their interpretation of their duties. But we have yet to hear of cases where those teachers who enthuse over God, Queen and the capitalist system have been disciplined for expressing their views.

Smoke screen

One of the problems of trying to explain the true nature and purpose of education under capitalism is that of the sheer density of the smoke-screen which surrounds the subject. Even the most ‘progressive’ of observers seem reluctant to face up to the —for them— unpalatable truth. Our education system is no less a matter of massive and universal indoctrination because it happens to be hedged about with half-truths (or, indeed, downright lies!) about ‘child centred learning’, or ‘pastoral care’, or ‘free expression’, or ‘equal opportunity’ or ‘community schooling’ or whatever. And as for the teachers: are they not also indoctrinated products of the very system we attack; ready and willing to ‘correctly’ interpret whatever educational jargon happens to be currently in fashion?

What about the more objectionable procedures? All those vicious devices for separating the sheep from the goats: intelligence tests (based partly on the statistics—now known to be phoney — of Dr. Cyril Burt); eleven-plus examinations; bi-lateralism; Leicestershire Schemes; streaming and setting; internal and external examinations, and so on; all carefully calculated to provide the capitalists with the latest breakdown on society’s winners and losers.

Naturally, it cannot be allowed to stop at the classroom door. The sports field, the gymnasium and the swimming pool have their part to play too. Children must never be allowed to dream of a world in which there is no competition; so the omnipresent struggle to ‘prove’ oneself is as important here as it is in the examination- room. The house-point and the tin trophy reign supreme; with the added bonus, for the capitalist, that their future employees will also be physically fit enough to ensure the maximisation of their profits together with the minimisation of absenteeism through illness.

‘Middle class’ snobbery

A great deal of nonsense has been written and spoken about the so-called comprehensive schools. Many people are still determined to believe, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary, that these institutions provide the key to an egalitarian — or ‘socialist’ — future. Unless these people are also prepared to believe that the capitalists have at last taken leave of their senses, such optimism reveals itself for what it really is: empty clap-trap, unsupported by a shadow of proof. These confused idealists seem undisturbed by the fact that successive governments, of whatever stripe, have pursued the same goal: the more efficient means of selection provided by the comprehensive system.

It is not difficult to sec why these governments have behaved in this manner. A regime which, hitherto, had given a ‘privileged’ 20 per cent or so of the nation's children an anachronistic education in the grammar schools while allowing the remainder to drop through the sieve into the under-equipped secondary moderns was proving no match for the less-exclusive and more efficient systems obtaining in, for example, the USA and the USSR. The snobbery of those workers in the self-styled ‘middle classes’ could no longer be allowed to obstruct the desperately-needed industrial and economic advance which had become imperative if British capitalism was to survive the arctic winds of world competition. Something had to happen. That something proved to be the comprehensive school.

It follows from this that the bone tossed by Thatcher to her own Stray dogs—the repeal of legislation to compel Local Education Authorities to complete re-organisation along comprehensive lines—will not be allowed to interfere with so fundamental a reappraisal of capitalism’s real interests. The large majority of schoolchildren will continue to attend comprehensive schools where they can the more effectively be graded and conditioned for their future role as wage-earners; or, in reserve, as the unemployed.

At the beginning of this article reference was made to the misrepresentation, not to say downright obfuscation, to which education is subject; also to the fact that a definition of it proved too elusive even for many ‘experts’. It should now be possible to conclude with one:

  Education under capitalism is the primary means whereby the ruling class enables itself to obtain the services of a more or less conditioned, unrebellious and conformist working class, willing to sell its labour power in exchange for wages. It is also the means whereby the working class is prepared to fulfil all those functions — military and civil — necessary to maintain the capitalists in their privileged position as sole owners of wealth and the means of wealth-production.

Richard Cooper

Seventy-Five Years Ago: The Right To Work (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The very latest is a ‘Right to Work Committee’ upon which a number of middle-class persons and some who have discovered that labour ‘leadering’ is more easy and profitable than work have elected themselves. The ‘right’ they clamour for is not for themselves but for others. They ‘appeal’ to the working-class to ‘demand’ from the dominant class more work, when already too much is performed. They would perpetuate the capitalist system by shewing the wealthy shirkers how they may stave off the day of reckoning and save their skins for awhile if they will accept their proposals and make work. For our part we say To Hell with the ‘Right’ to Work; we claim our Right to Live and to live right well. Let us scorn these middle-class decoy ducks and organise to bring about the common ownership of the means of life, which alone will enable us to secure the only Right we are concerned about. Then and not till then shall we recognise our obligation to perform our share of the necessary work. In the meantime, our Right to work is the Right of the wealthy idlers to organise our labour as their wage slaves. The ‘demand’ for that Right we will leave to the agents of the capitalist, whether in the guise of middle-class sympathisers or well paid labour ‘leaders’.

From the December 1905 Socialist Standard.

Whalebone of contention (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why all the fuss about whales? Does it matter that the largest living mammal is about to become one of the largest extinct mammals? Well, it is not just ageing pop stars, fading comedians and second rate TV actors who take part in this new protest movement. In July a Friends of the Whale meeting filled Trafalgar Square. The usual media-catching effects were on display; Save the Whale T shirts, placards proclaiming ‘Extinction is forever’, and a 110 ft. balloon whale. It was not intended that way, but a good time was had by all.

The chances of there being any whales left at the end of this century seem remote. The conservation organisation Friends of the Earth estimate that there are now only some six thousand blue whales left and not many of the other species. Of all the whaling countries, Japan is the biggest villain. Friends of the Earth calculate that one blue whale is worth about £100,000—that, in other words, whales are big business.

The main efforts of the protesters are directed towards the so-called International Whaling Commission (established in 1946). This unlikely body has the task of supervising all whaling but as with other international bodies, its effectiveness is slight. And, of course, some of the members of the IWC are the chief whalers, which makes it hardly likely that they will sympathise with the whales. As a result some conservationists are now going in for a little direct action. One New York Group recently hired a boat and rammed a whaler, putting it out of action for a few months.

No one doubts the sincerity of those involved in this campaign. But while they are scouring the high seas for mammals to save, they might set their nautical sights a little higher. If they did, they would notice another mammal with even less chance of survival than the whale. In leaking, overcrowded boats, usually with little water and less food, thousands of Vietnamese refugees are drowning every month — (it is suggested that one is drowned each minute). The prospects of the fortunate few who get to dry land are little better: those who reach Malaysia are callously shoved out to sea again on their rotten rafts; those who reach Hong Kong fare only slightly better, many spend ages in overcrowded, insanitary conditions.

Friends of the Earth calculate that, in the last 100 years, the blue whale population has declined from 195,000 to its present 6,000—solely by the actions of the human hunter. Yet that slaughter is trivial compared to that of the human being. In recent months more than thirty children have been killed and eaten by hyenas in the slums of Lucknow, India (Daily Telegraph, 27 July 1979.) Capitalism subjects its people to intolerable conditions as well as to appalling cruelty.

The real conservation movement is to end a social system that imposes unnecessary suffering on the majority of people—and on its other species—as part of the everyday normal routine. The Friends of the Earth should consider this society, in which mass suffering is as commonplace as the rising of the sun. Their considerable talents and energies could be more usefully employed.

Ronnie Warrington

'This man would make a splendid soldier'. (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Comment by the Military Representative on a Conscientious Objectors’ Appeal Tribunal, 1914/18 War.)

I was conscious, and grateful, that I was a beneficiary of the courage and persistence of others. Having sat for an hour watching earlier applicants before the Conscientious Objectors’ Tribunal being contemptuously, even angrily, rejected that morning, it came as a surprise that my treatment was so much easier. In Joe Lyons afterwards, drinking a relieved cup of coffee, a reporter from Peace News came to our table and told me that after years of doggedly asserting the case against war, socialists had established themselves, even in the minds of those Tribunal members, as authentic opponents of capitalism and all that went with it. When my turn came, after the war, it only needed to be attested that I was an active member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain for the point to be made.

There were four men on the Tribunal that morning, their faces looming down on me from the bench high above where I stood in the well of the council chamber. In the centre chair sat the judge, an old man who looked as fragile as singed paper. On his right sat a tame trade unionist, a man who had been prominent in the General Strike and whose presence was meant to reassure us that the people’s voice was being heard in the process which dragged young workers into the killing machine. He was dressed in thick, alarming sea green Harris tweed; he knew what socialists thought of traitors to their class and his round, mauve face sweated guiltily at me.

To the left of the judge was a local solicitor, prosperous and hearty and, maybe in consequence, friendly. Perhaps in reflex to the expediencies of a lawyer’s day-to-day refashioning of the truth, he was fascinated by the logic and consistency of our case. Was it possible for people to be so concerned about political principle? He was, I suppose, a sympathiser — to him we were a protected species. The other member was very forgettable and I have duly forgotten him. But I heard tell of another member who came down from his job as a Cambridge don to specialise in slicing up religious objectors with their own chop logic. He was reputed to be a formidably slippery debater and. arrogant eighteen year old though I was, I was not unhappy that he was away from the Tribunal that day.

Statement

I had submitted a statement which I was sure was one of the finest pieces of writing in the history of the English language. It had been lovingly polished and embellished with many words dredged up from my Thesaurus and I wanted justice done to it. (I cringe when I read it now.) The judge, however, did not have the same high regard for such great works of revolutionary literature and read it quickly and carelessly, losing all those hard found literary gems in a bored, piping voice which drifted like thin smoke into the brown rafters of the chamber roof. Once, when he misread a phrase I was especially proud of, I wanted to correct him but was restrained by the party member who had come to speak for me. I was, as I said, eighteen and arrogant.

My Tribunal came up a little over a year after I joined the SPGB. The socialist opposition to war had been one of the sticking points on my way to membership; the photographs of the heaped-up skeletons of Belsen and the black ovens of Auschwitz were still fresh in the memory. Shouldn’t workers fight to abolish that, I asked, before thinking about getting rid of capitalism? The man who argued with me, patiently and courteously, himself went to prison for his objection to war just as I joined the SPGB — which effectively impressed upon me that I too had taken a decision to resist.

Two contributions to the brave new post-war world of the 1945 Labour government were the National Service Acts of 1947 and 1948. These Acts made conscription, for the first time during peace, an established part of life in Britain. Perhaps Labour Party members called this socialism; it was in fact a continuation of the policy they followed in 1939 when, almost without debate, Parliament rushed through the measures making men aged between 18 and 41 liable for call-up.

After the war, with the more regular rhythms of capitalism back in operation, the call-up dominated the lives of young men from the day they left school. For a time it provided sociologists with an explanation for the post-war crime wave. It was also a ready source of conversation among socialists; as with the driving test, almost everyone had had a funny experience on their way to or from the Tribunal. There was, for example, the woman (one symptom of capitalism’s progress was that females were also sucked into the conscription machine) who shattered the august judges of her sincerity as an objector by replying, when they asked her ‘What would you do if a German soldier came along and raped you?’with the interested assessment: ‘I expect I’d lie back and enjoy it.’ (There was some evidence that the Tribunals were haunted by the spectre of Germanic virility.)

CBCO

Objectors who were rejected by the Tribunals, or who would not accept its decision, were required to take a medical examination. This was a crucial dividing line between civilian and soldier; once the army doctor got his stethoscope on a man, he was considered to have joined up. Refusal to take the medical was an offence, dealt with by a magistrates’ court. By the end of the war, after some confusion and suffering, the sentence had settled at three months — the minimum to enable the objector’s case to be put again to the Appellate Tribunal. At that point it was conceded that the objector had proved his ‘sincerity’ and he was usually released. So it was that, by the time I was called up, members of the SPGB were liable to disappear from activity for a few weeks, to come back with tales of slopping out, bawling warders and discussions about the nuances of the third volume of Capital with bewildered fellow prisoners who only wanted to be left in peace to do their bird.

The experiences and the advice of Party members varied so widely that I thought it wise, before I went up to my Tribunal, to consult the Central Board of Conscientious Objectors (CBCO) — a body set up by the Society of Friends, the Peace Pledge Union and the like. The CBCO, which published some invaluable material on the processes of conscientious objection, had its offices in the heartland of pacifist dissent, in Endsleigh Square. My reception there, among the dusty files and misshapen wire letter trays, was not encouraging; the CBCO secretary was gentle and helpful, but clearly he did not think much of my chances, until:

“What are the grounds for your objection? You sound religious.”

“Blimey, no. I’m in the SPGB.”

He perked up at once; hope and relief flooded into his face:

“SPGB? That’s different. You should have no difficulty, then.”

I needed that reassurance, preoccupied as I was with fantasies about the ill-treatment which awaited all who stood out against capitalism’s wars. In fact, there was little of this during the 1939/45 war, or after it. Certainly, there was nothing to compare with what happened during World War I. The CBCO were ever watchful. In 1948, when an objector who was officially a deserter was paraded at an army camp dressed only in a towel, they protested, and at once he was discharged from the army. One group of COs in a store in Welwyn Garden City were known locally as ‘the rats’. In 1940 there was a minor scandal when the government were embarrassed by Peace News publishing a ‘confidential’ memo from a Regional Information (sic) Officer which advocated being “. . . free to call ‘artificial’ conscientious objection by its true names, which are Disloyalty, Treachery and Cowardice.” During 1914/18, such events would have passed without notice.

Panic

Nobody knew, in September 1939, what the war would be like. There was a lot of panic propaganda from the government and a widespread expectation that the cities of Britain would soon be in ruins under the bombs; as I stepped onto the evacuation bus I did not expect to see my parents again. Socialists too were unsure of their future; they did not know that they would not get the same harassment as they had received during the previous war. But with the outbreak of war the SPGB again stated its opposition to being persuaded or dragooned into taking arms to protect the interests of our capitalist masters against the interests of our fellow workers. In this opposition they held firm, so that when my turn came there was little left for me to say, no need for defiance to be articulated any more.

My Tribunal, too, seemed to know this and they grew impatient of me. After a few questions they wanted to hear from the other member, who was a well-known speaker for the SPGB. As he came forward they craned towards him from the bench, their faces transformed in eager smiles, anxious to be impressed. The judge obviously wanted his lunch, but the solicitor felt me out with one last question on the socialist opposition to war. By then I thought I knew what they wanted and gave the sort of answer I would have given from the platform. The solicitor and the trade unionist almost applauded; I had, apparently, got it right. They told me I was exempt from military service, provided 1 stayed in my job in the film industry, and they let me go to breathe the sweet air of freedom in Fulham Broadway.

There is much to be said for being a socialist. An understanding of the dynamics of society brings its own satisfactions with the awareness of class interests and how workers should respond to them. That is why we stand out against capitalism's wars. Instead, we immerse ourselves in the class struggle and, defiantly, we do not make splendid soldiers.

Ivan

Seventy-Five Years Ago: Editorial (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

How comes it that the men and women who till the soil, who dig the mine, who manipulate the machine, who build the factory and the home, and, in a word, who create the whole of the wealth, receive only sufficient to maintain themselves and their families on the border line of bare physical efficiency, while those who do not aid in production – the employing class – obtain more than is enough to supply their every necessity, comfort and luxury?

To find a solution to this problem is the task to which the Socialist applies himself. He sees clearly that only by studying the economics of wealth-production and distribution can he understand the anomalies of present-day society. He sees, further, that having gained a knowledge of the economic causes of social inequality, he must apply this knowledge through political action – through the building up of a Socialist organisation for the capture of Parliament and the conquest of the powers of government.

#    #    #    #

We ask you, therefore, to study the principles upon which our party is based, to find out for yourselves what Socialism is and how Socialism and Socialism alone can abolish class society and establish in its stead a society based upon social equality.

From the Editorial in the Socialist Standard, September 1904.

The War, and the Socialist Position. (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following article is reprinted from the September 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Whereas the capitalists of Europe have quarrelled over the question of the control of trade routes and the world's markets, and are endeavouring to exploit the political ignorance and blind passions of the working class of their respective countries in order to induce the said workers to take up arms in what is solely their masters' quarrel, and

Whereas further, the pseudo-socialists and labour 'leaders' of this country, in common with their fellows on the Continent, have again betrayed the working class position, either through their ignorance of it, their cowardice, or worse, and are assisting the master class in utilising this thieves' quarrel to confuse the minds of the workers and turn their attention from the class struggle.

THE SOCIALIST PARTY of Great Britain seizes the opportunity of reaffirming the socialist position which is as follows:

  That society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living by the capitalist or master class and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced.
  That in society therefore there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a CLASS WAR, between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.
  That the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers.

These armed forces therefore will only be set in motion to further the interests of the class who control them—the master class—and as the workers' interests are not bound up in the struggle for markets wherein their masters may dispose of the wealth they have stolen from them (the workers) but in the struggle to end the system under which they are robbed, they are not concerned with the present European struggle, which is already known as the “BUSINESS” war, for it is their masters' interests which are involved, and not their own.

THE SOCIALIST PARTY of Great Britain pledges itself to keep the issue clear by expounding the CLASS STRUGGLE, and whilst placing on record its abhorrence of this latest manifestation of the callous, sordid, and mercenary nature of the international capitalist class, and declaring that no interests are at stake justifying the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood, enters its emphatic protest against the brutal and bloody butchery of our brothers of this and other lands who are being used as food for cannon abroad while suffering and starvation are the lot of their fellows at home.

Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our goodwill and socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism.

THE WORLD FOR THE WORKERS!

THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE.

August 25th 1914

WAGE WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE! You have nothing to lose but your chains, you have a world to win! – Marx

Ethics and the class struggle. (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following article is reprinted from the July 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Among the middle-class “Socialists” who run the so-called labour movement in this country, it is hardly fashionable just now to deny the reality of the class struggle; yet when it is shown how necessary it is to base working-class political action on that reality, these Utopians wriggle like eels to escape such a logical conclusion. When driven by argument from their objections on practical grounds to the class war basis, such sentimentalists often fall back on the assertion that it is immoral, that it stirs up strife and sets one class against another.

Now, with those who profess to base their “Socialism” on the New Testament, such a position is not to be wondered at; for to them the injunction applies, to “Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on they right cheek turn to him the other also. And if any man sue thee at law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.”– Matt. V. Obviously, the only logical attitude for such people is that of absolute non-resistance to the capitalists. And there the working-class may leave them.

As is only to be expected, the capitalist and his satellites strongly deprecate any hostile attitude on the part of the worker. The proper conduct of the working-class should be, according to capitalist ethics, duly sheep-like. According to this code, working men should be thrifty (that they may work cheaply and keep off the rates), they should be industrious (that they may pile up wealth for others), and above all, they should be meek and obedient (that they may duly obey the laws kindly made for them by their masters). The prevailing code of ethics has its foundation in the material interests of the ruling class, and may be summed up in the words, “Whatever injures capitalist interests is immoral.”  The charge that the class struggle is immoral is founded on such a code. For us, then, it is necessary to look at the matter from a higher standpoint, that we may see whether an insistence on the class struggle is immoral or not in the light of humanity’s interests.

What is the basis of the modern class antagonism? It is based on the fact that one section of society owes its income and its superior position to property, to the ownership of the means of producing wealth; whilst another section, so vast as to be practically the nation, owes its inferior position to the fact that it owns no property but is compelled to live by the sale of its labour-power to those who own the means of life. Out of the total product of labour the worker cannot obtain, in general, more than his cost of subsistence. Those who own the instruments of labour appropriate the rest. Thus there is born a class struggle, pursued consistently by the capitalists, but, as yet, ineffectively and spasmodically by the workers. The scientific Socialist urges a more consistent waging of this struggle because (to put it shortly) only by the defeat of the enemy can peace be obtained.

All classes will, as in the past, fight bitterly to retain their superior position to the workers’. The only class that can be relied on for the abolition of privilege and power to exploit, is the unprivileged propertyless working-class. The recognition of the class struggle is consequently the only effective basis of working-class action, for it is childish indeed to expect that the capitalists will of their own accord get off the backs of the workers. Obviously, the immediate interests of all except the working-class are opposed to the abolition of private property in the means of life.

The strife of today is, then, not created by the Socialist, but is the result of economic conditions maintained by the ruling class. The Socialist seeks to enlighten his fellows on the causes of this struggle, and to show how utterly futile it is to expect the owning class to abolish the cause of strife, or abandon in any way its own interests. He wishes to point out above all, that since the interests of all sections of the capitalist-class are fundamentally opposed to the interests of the workers, therefore the sane policy of the working-class must be in consistent opposition to all capitalist political factions however these may name themselves. The struggle is already going on. The Socialist endeavours to give it definite and consistent aim, that the conflict may the more speedily end.

Those who would, on moral grounds, have the workers refuse to recognise the class struggle should, to be logical, refuse to struggle against parasites of any other kind. For in society the class which lives by the ownership of the means of life of the workers is a parasitic class, sucking to itself by its monopoly the fruits of the industry of the people. Not, indeed, that one need hate the individual capitalist, for he is the product of his circumstances; but in the interests of toiling humanity the firmest action must be taken. The power to exploit must be wrested from the parasites. They will, of course, oppose this by cunning and by force and will have to be fought, for non-resistance is the policy of the weak-minded.

Clearly then, the cause of the present struggle (i.e., the private ownership of the machinery of wealth production and distribution), can only be abolished by waging war on the class which defends and maintains private ownership. And since the only class that, by its material interests, is unfettered to the maintenance of private property is the proletariat, on this class must fall the toil and the battle for freedom.

Thus the only means of ridding mankind of conditions which now bind the mass in degradation and slavery, is the active opposition of the workers to the parasitic class as a whole; and what is this but the prosecution of the class war?

The victory of the Socialist working-class is the only possible ending of this great struggle. This, however, does not mean the subjection of the capitalist-class by the workers; it means the abolition of capitalism and an end of classes, for the great unprivileged masses cannot secure equality of opportunity without abolishing class privilege, and privilege is based on private property. The triumph of the great working majority thus involves the emancipation of all from class oppression, for the interests of the toiling masses are fundamentally the interest of humanity.

The workers are now the only necessary class in society, and upon them all tasks are devolving. To the capitalist remains the task of tearing the coupons from his shares, and reaping the reward of his abstinence – from labour.

The democratic ownership of the means of wealth production must necessarily abolish the economic basis of classes and of class antagonisms, and unite all in a bond of labour with identical interests. Under such conditions it must be unnecessary and above all unprofitable for the vast majority to exploit a few. Hence society will have but one aim, to lighten the toil and increase the well-being of all by the greatest possible economy of labour and life. In the society of harmonised material interests that must result from the abolition of class parasitism, the greatest well-being of the individual will only be possible by promoting the well-being of all. Thus will the welfare of all become, for the first time, the immediate interest of each.

Socialism is, then, the ethics of humanity, the necessary economic foundation of a rational code of morality. The interests of the human race are bound up with the aspirations of the oppressed working-class in its struggle with capitalist domination. As it has very truly been said: “Militant, the workers’ cause is identified with class; triumphant, with humanity.”

F.C.Watts

Might is Right. The Philosophy of the Revolutionary. (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following article is reprinted from the February 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Blessed are the Strong

The Duke of Westminster receives from rents alone £3,000,000 per annum.

Shame!

No, no, not a bit of it. Who can blame him?

Thirteen millions of people in this country are living always on the verge of starvation!

Again shame!

But why?

By all the logic of nature the former is entitled to as much as he has power to grasp, while the latter deserve no more than they are willing to fight for, ay, and to conquer for themselves.

Man has a right to live only – if he can. The mightiest beast and the meanest parasite have as much right to live – and as little.

The hungry tiger strikes down the hunter and devours him – if he can, and nobody says shame! or thinks it wrong. The maggots burrow deep into the nostrils of the hartebeaste, and we say simply “Nature is cruel.”

Yet Nature is not cruel: she knows nothing of emotions. She leaves her children to fight things out for themselves, giving them one universal law : Might is Right.

“The race is to the swift,
The battle to the strong.”

Let us be strong, then, for the weak have neither right nor portion in Nature’s economy.

The wolves in sheep’s clothing, the Christian priesthood, commonly profess to hold that man has other right to live than this right of might – this elementary right of the tiger and the maggot. Of such jealous guardians of the Rights of Man this question may be asked :

What becomes of the “Right”  to live if the means by which alone it is possible to live are in the hands of others?

Clearly in this case man cannot live by any heaven bestowed “right,” but only on sufferance, So the logic of their own ethic places the Christians in contradiction to the social system which they uphold, and whole central principle – private property in the means of life – is the very denial and negation of their fundamental belief, that God having created man, man has a “right” to live.

Logic in the Making
Far nearer to the truth of things was that London magistrate who answered the pilferer’s plea that one “must live”, with the sententious announcement: “Not necessarily”. Two words sufficed to reveal the naked truth in all its frank brutality. Capitalist society recognises no “right” to live, and the cynical lawyer gives the lie to the sycophantic priest

If man has a God-given right to live, as Christians commonly hold, then it devolves upon men to secure for themselves the means by which alone they can live, in the first place, and in the second place it sets the mark of Cain upon the brows of those who have taken “the earth and the fullness thereof” from the people.

If, on the other hand, man has but the right of might – the right of tiger and of the maggot – to live, then Westminster, with his vast rent-roll, is justified, in the face of starving millions.

If it appears strange that only the ethic of the revolutionary can justify the lords of capitalism, whilst the logical conclusion of the creed that bolsters them up in their high place on their mountain of spoils, condemns them, this is only because the first is the true ethic, both of capitalism and of the revolution it is producing  – ay, and of all life, for all time – while the second is false, a soporific, the chloroform rag in the hands of the social footpad.

However, under both philosophies we proceed to the same action – to live, by our “right” or our might – and therefore to seize all those things necessary for the fullest enjoyment of life; in the one case because common property is the first essential to living by “right”, in the other case simply because it is expedient.

Down with the Meekling! 
The revolutionary requires no other justification than that of expediency. No revolutionary in history ever really did. True they have paid much lip service to Justice and other figments of the popular the mind, but that has been only because they have required the assistance of those who were to gain nothing from revolution, and who had therefore to be inspired with empty phrases and confused with humbug. But the highest sanction revolutionaries ever have required has been – opportunity.

The Socialist asks no more. Let who will grovel at the feet of Justice, or slobber over the “Natural Rights of Man” – the Socialist has no use for such meaningless vapourings. Expediency is his justification for all things, and opportunity finds him always is the right.

Notwithstanding the prevailing cant, Machiavelism is inherent in every “State”. Wherever a “State” exists wherever, in short, society is founded upon the subjugation of a class, there the suppression of that class follows as a matter of course, and utterly without scruple.

In the Name of Law. and Order, and of Freedom and Justice and Equality, as befits a world of commodities whose freedom of motion and equality, become nature, demands at least a fictitious freedom and equality for their owners. And in the name of Christ, too, as behoves men who must seek some higher sanction than that of commodity owners to suppress commodity owners.

Any Means that are Means
The feudal lord appeared as a different order of being to the serf. They were not commensurable in the flesh, for heaven had made one noble and the other base. But under capitalism all are commodity owners – the man who holds untold stores, and the man who has only his labour-power to that sell. As commodity owners they are stand equal. Hence suppression in the name of Equality – but not on the authority of all commodity owners: oh dear no, that would never do. Nor on the authority of some commodity owners, for that would be contrary to that beautiful capitalist ideal – the equality of all possessors of commodities.

So Christ is their refuge and their salvation; Christ the meek and lowly submissive, who recognised “constituted ” authority in the command :  “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”.

But under all this, Might is Right. A great show of “moral suasion” as exemplified in 40,000 parsons, it is true; but for every parson there is a policeman and three bluejackets and half-a dozen soldiers – for every “man of peace” ten “dogs of war”.

Much talk of loyalty and honesty and honour. Loyalty, indeed, with an army to keep us loyal; honesty, indeed, in the thieves’ kitchen of capitalism; honour where nothing is trusted to honour!

Honour and force are contradictory terms, mutually exclusive. Capitalism has no need for the first (except as a piece of humbug): it relies upon force. Among equals honour is the voluntary observance of the rules of the game; but in present-day society we are not equals, hence honour is replaced by force.

The tradesman, in his thirst for profit, gives credit. Does he trust to honour? No. He makes a calculation based on the fact that he has all the forces of the Law behind him. Can I make him pay? is the only question he is concerned with, and he acts according to his judgment of that problem, and if, leaning upon the force of the Law, he finds it a broken reed, be has made a mistake, that is all.

The rules of the game – who made the rules of the game? Those who say we shall observe them. But if a hooligan or a footpad jumps us in the street are we slavishly careful of Marquis of Queensbury rules? Not if a brick is bandy. No, any means that are means!

The Ethic of Socialism
So with the revolutionary. He takes his stand upon the same code that has served to carry so many exploiters, to power, and which last must help the workers to their emancipation. There is no right but might. We deserve nothing but what we can get with our teeth and our claws.

Against the might of the strong few shall be put the might of the many weak ones. Before that might capitalism and private ownership will go down for ever. Then, when society founded upon common property in the means of life, has become one harmonious whole, the brutal dictum, might is right, will hold good only between the social organism and external nature, while between man and man a new ethic will arise – or rather the old ethic of gentile society under a new form – that only the social good is right.

A. E. Jacomb

Running Commentary: Evening All (1979)

The Running Commentary column from the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Evening All

Old ladies who have been helped across the road by them, lost children who have been restored to their parents by them, black youngsters who have been harassed by them, criminals who have been beaten and stitched up by them, will all be impressed to learn that this month the Metropolitan Police is 150 years old.

The Met, as we are liable to be told by their Commissioner (who is the man to be found sitting uneasily at the apex of this pyramid which contains so much thuggery and corruption) is the finest body of men in the world.

So it is natural that the Post Office, eager to join in the celebrations, should mark the occasion by issuing a set of special stamps. Now special issues can become collectors’ pieces, so they are usually of attractive design, like flowers or nursery tale characters or Christmas scenes.

In line with this gentle tradition, the police stamps will show bobbies talking smilingly to kids, bravely directing traffic at an accident, grandly sitting on a horse, and splashing down the river in a police launch.

Clearly, there is scope here for someone to produce a set of alternative stamps. One showing a red-faced policeman caught out perjuring himself in the witness box; another of the Special Patrol Group wielding their home-made coshes against demonstrators; another of detectives slipping the cooked-up evidence into their suspect’s pocket; another of the boys in blue standing guard over private property during a strike.

The true function of the police is not to be nice to people (in fact, they are actually paid to be suspicious of us all). They exist to protect private property rights — which means to protect the privileged position of the ruling class of capitalism. Which means, further, to perpetuate the inferior, unprivileged position of the working-class.

The fact that policemen are themselves workers makes no difference to this. The capitalist class have to get workers to do their dirty work for them. — workers are not only exploited in the interests of their parasitic masters but are also persuaded to tighten their bonds ever tighter about themselves.

The 150th anniversary of the Metropolitan Police is not an occasion for rejoicing or congratulation. Rather it is symbolic of a century and a half of a particular type of capitalism's coercion — and the event should shame workers into abolishing it all.

Cut Price Hospitals

Something remarkable is going on in darkest South London, where the Area Health Authority for Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham refused to implement the £5.5 million cuts ordered by a body described as the Department of Health and Social Security.

The Authority based its defiance on the grounds that cuts in medical services would mean the deaths of people who would otherwise live. DHSS Secretary Patrick Jenkin was unimpressed; the Authority, he said, was already overspending (and what could be more despicable than that?), so their money would run out anyway, which would mean patients dying — not, be it noted, from a lack of treatment, but from a shortage of cash.

Jenkin wanted to sack the Authority but he could not do this legally. So he declared that an emergency existed in the area and appointed commissioners to run the show as he tells them. This circumventing of the law has been carried out by a government which, it must be remembered, won power partly by standing for a respect for the law.

The sick people of Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham — places which are not famous for their salubrious surroundings, with health blooming from every paving stone may be grateful that the Minister is concerned enough for their welfare to declare that their treatment is a matter of emergency.

They would be deluding themselves. Working-class medical services have always suffered from a lack of money. They have never been freely available. They have always been restricted by the capitalist priority of producing and working within a budget. And people have died in consequence — died, for example, because they could not afford a kidney machine.

This is something which afflicts only the working class; their masters always have access to the best in medical treatment, as in everything. They can go to the most comfortable clinics (like the Wellington, in St. John's Wood, where it can cost about £900 a week), call on an endless supply of the best qualified doctors.

The Authority members sacked by Jenkin are in grave danger of becoming left wing heroes, garlanded in mythology. Said one NUPE official: “Our union will give the Authority full support, because they are demonstrating that they have the interests of patients at heart.’’ In fact, their rebellion began over a year ago, against cuts imposed by the Labour government.

Anyone who wants to reduce their chances of catching or dying from a number of diseases had better get out of the working-class. But this is virtually impossible; a simpler way is to abolish class society altogether.

Indian Summer

Much energy was expended in the struggle to bring what was called independence to many states in Africa and eastwards, once part of the British Empire. As all school children were told at the time, this was the greatest and most beneficial event in the history of the human race.

Left wingers, unimpressed by this propaganda, took the cause of independence to their hearts, and many a bearded thinker ruminated, in the Movement for Colonial Freedom and the like, on the benefits the people of all these states would receive once the perfidious British rule was banished.

It was a simple argument. The British Empire, said the left, was repressive, exploitative, had a blood-soaked history. This was true. Therefore, argued the left, remove British rule and all would be well. This was not true, and there is a mass of evidence to say that the freedom fighters were deceiving themselves along with a few million other people.

Of all the states which have gained their ‘freedom’, few have had a more turbulent history than one of the greatest of them, and one of the first to become independent. Since British rule was ended in 1947, India has had little peace and her people have lived, as before, under the cruellest destitution.

At present the Indian government is devoting a lot of energy to a ruthless drive to suppress the living standards of its workers. Official figures give some idea of the effect of this, with wages under severe pressure from an increasingly inflated currency.

The Indian workers are fighting back. In 1978, 22 million working days were lost in strikes. But an ominous feature of this unrest is the eruption of violence. In their desperation, Indian workers, even killing, industrial managers and owners — people they regard as responsible for their worsening plight.

This is an unwelcome development. Workers will not improve their lot by committing violence on others, no matter who they are. To kill a manager or an owner may remove a personality, but they will be replaced by another, imposing the same repressions. Capitalism is a  society of privilege and its hierarchies express this fact.

But if it is too much to expect Indian workers at present to look beyond the violence to the permanent solution to their problems to a new society — perhaps they will at least draw one lesson from the crisis. Independence did not — could not - benefit them. It only replaced one set of bosses with another, leaving the society of riches and poverty untouched.

Marx in modern times (1979)

Book Review from the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labor and Monopoly Capital, by Harry Braverman. Monthly Review Press, 1974. (£3.25)

Labor and Monopoly Capital is a most remarkable book, providing the answer to the criticisms, alleged refutations and revisions of Marxism.

Carrying on from Marx’s own description of the transformation of the labour process by manufacture in Volume I of Capital (manufacture begins when the tool is driven by a machine) Braverman gives the first detailed historical study of the continuation of the process in its hot bed, the United States of America.

Our author, by the way, is in the best tradition of the worker-writer. Unlike Professors of Sociology, who do nothing but lecture students and conduct “surveys” (ask people their opinions of themselves) Harry Braverman is a skilled coppersmith who spent seven years or so working as a craftsman in the shipyards. While this does not necessarily make him right, it does make him interesting! He knows what he writes about, from books and from life.

He explains that the way to increase relative surplus value is to break down the labour process into the tiniest possible detail, transferring from the productive worker the last vestige of any kind of decision about size, shape, weight, material to the “office”. The worker can now be watched and timed, every moment being closely studied and recorded. This is the famous Taylor system of scientific management. Braverman recounts from Taylor’s own book The Principles of Scientific Management how he raised the handling of pig iron at the Bethlehem Steel Company from 12½ to 47 tons per man per day, with a 60 per cent increase in wages. They studied the men intently before selecting the first victim, “a little Dutchman”. The following dialogue ensued: 

“You see that pile of pig iron?”
“Yes”
“Well, if you are a high priced man you will load that pig iron on that car for $1.85 [the standard rate was $1.15]. “You will do exactly as this man tells you. When he tells you to pick up a pig and walk—you walk; when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. And you do it straight through the day. But no back-talk — understand!”

As Braverman explains, this is the origin of the system of time and motion study now universal in capitalist production. True, now electronic timers, stroboscopic cameras, microphones, television cameras have been added, but the principle is the same (shades of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times).

Increasing Misery

Consequently Braverman is able to show pretty convincingly that Marx’s view regarding the increasing misery, dubbed the “weak point” of his system by so many latter-day critics, is not wrong, but absolutely right in America in 1979. The classic example is the Model T Ford car. With the invention of the now universal conveyor chain assembly line system, Ford was producing by 1925 as many cars in a day as he had in a year.

  But the new technology proved increasingly unpopular. The men walked out in droves; they could pick and choose. So great was labour’s distaste for the new system, that when the company wanted 100 men, it had to hire 963.

The Legend of Henry Ford, page 149.

However, once the conveyor belt system had spread to other plants the workers could not pick and choose: they were shackled to the assembly line.

Perhaps the author’s greatest achievement, in addition to showing the degradation of the craftsman to an automaton, is his shattering debunking of that sacred cow of American sociology, the “white collar worker”. How many gallons of ink, scores of surveys, dozens of graphs, have analysed the status of the so-called Management Sector?

From official sources, Braverman shows how the “white collar” worker in America today is actually paid below the wage rates of “blue collar” workers. The explanation given is that those very same methods of scientific management (Taylorism) have now invaded the office. The process of dividing all mental effort from the craftsman’s work has attacked the managers and their staffs.

  If one ascribes to the millions of present day clerical workers-the “middle class” of a long vanished clerical stratum of early capitalism, the result can only be a drastic misconception of modern society. Yet this is exactly the practice of academic sociology and popular journalism.
  [In the office] the productive processes of society disappear in a stream of paper, moreover, which is processed in a continuous flow line like that of a cannery, the meat packing line or the car assembly conveyor, by workers organised in much the same way.
  Time and motion study reveal just as startling results in the ordinary details of clerical work as they do in the factory . . . since every motion involves consumption of physical energy, why should not analysis result in the discovery of a mass of useful effort in clerical work, just as it does in the factory.
(Lee Galloway, Office Work, its Principles and Practice)

Braverman quotes from the Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards of the Systems and Procedures Association of America such gems as

           

          Chair Activity                   Minutes

Get up from chair                 .033
Sit down in chair                 .033
Turn in chair                         .009
Move in chair to adjoin desk .080

Similar times are given for cut with scissors, rubber stamping, collating, gather, lay aside, handle, punch, staple, and so on.

New Division of Labour

With the invention of the Hollerith punched card system a means of reading and interpreting simple data without direct human participation was available. Information is now stored by electric impulses, with the result that the magnetic disc-pack can store 29 million characters. These can be transferred to or from a computer at the rate of 186,000 characters a second. The computer introduces a new division of labour, the largest single new occupation being that of key punch operator.

  Mrs. Duncan described all key punch girls as nervous wrecks. Mrs. Calvin reported the same kind of tension. “If you tap one of them on the shoulder when she is working, she’ll fly through the ceiling. Although the girls do not quit, they stay home frequently and keep supplies of tranquillisers and aspirins at their desk”; they felt they were doing a factory job, “frozen” to their desk like an assembly line.

(Automation in the Office, Hoos)

The vice president of an insurance company, pointing to a room tilled with key punch operators, remarked “All they need is a chain”. Said one operator: “This job is no different from a factory job, except that I don’t gel paid as much”.

Typists' Pool Eliminated

With the use of the modern word processor the typists pool is eliminated. The other functions of the secretary are taken over by an “administrative support centre”, which handles filing, phone answering and postings. Thus Lewis Corey could write “a typical large office is now nothing but a white collar factory.”

  The problem of the so-called employees, or white collar workers, which so bothered early generations of Marxists, and which was hailed by the anti-Marxists as proof of the falsity of the ‘proletarianisation’ theses, has thus been unambiguously clarified by the polarisation of office employment, and the growth at one pole of an immense mass of wage workers. The apparent trend to a large non-proletarian ‘middle class’ has resolved itself into the creation of a large proletariat in a new form.

This is a book in which the problems of the so-called middle class, ‘‘increased misery", polarisation, automation, are dealt with on strictly Marxian lines . It has the further merit of being written in clear, limpid style of easy flowing English.

Horatio

The New Offices (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following article is reprinted from the December 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard.

"No, Jack! I shall not join just yet. Your Party is right, your position sound, and your arguments conclusive. I admit all that, but I don't think the time is ripe. When that time comes, Jack, 'You may count on me.”

"And when do you think the time will be ripe, as you call it?"

"I haven't a ghost of a notion. But I'd like to see the workers wake up a bit, first. I'd like to see your Party bigger, more active, you know what I mean — more prominent.”

"So would I, friend. But apparently you have not seen our new headquarters, I can hear."

"New headquarters? I -"

"Listen! It is neither a pretentious, nor a massive building. We are not building it for posterity; we shall not need it long. Immediately to the right of the entrance hall, there is a book saloon wherein any work helpful to the furtherance of Socialism may be procured or consulted. Most of the leading periodicals are represented on the reading stands. To the left are the editorial offices, where the three official journals and numbers of pamphlets are produced"

"Three official journals? I –“

"Wait a minute. There is the Socialist Standard, now enlarged to forty pages, still appearing monthly and having all the characteristics of a first-class political review. There is the Socialist Tribune, a weekly summary of a more topical character. It focuses the reader's attention upon events whilst they are still current, and picks out the thread of history whilst it is being made. The Socialist News appears daily, and, I say it without boasting, is unique in the world's journalism. Not an advertisement appears in it. It is thus entirely free from subsidised matter, and is independent of any attempt at a capitalist boycott. It is smaller in size than the usual capitalist rag, but it is all meat. Its editorial and contributory staffs are well grounded in Marxian economics and their historical application. Its daily articles are the despair of the few remaining capitalist sheets, for the latter's long reliance upon reiterated lies and mass suggestion has broken down in face of hard economic facts. You cannot convince a man who is going down for the third time that he is not drowning by bawling through a megaphone fifteen times that all is for the best. And the workers were no longer convinced that capitalism was the only possible system, when they remembered the hard times before the war, the little glimpse of better times during the war's progress, and the return to bad times again afterwards. But I am digressing. There is a dispatch department at the back, and that about completes the ground floor. Upstairs there are writing rooms, studies, classrooms and committee rooms. There is a good-sized hall for lectures and public meetings, and there is even an information bureau, where anyone with a difficulty may seek Socialist 'counsel's opinion'. The most interesting perhaps are the Organiser's room, where information, facts and figures are compiled for the use of our staff of speakers and propagandists. There are other details you would find interesting, and even stimulating, but I think I have said enough to set you wondering."

"You have, Jack! I have been wondering where these premises are situated."

"There now! If you, a convinced Socialist, were only in the movement, you would know as much as I about it."

"Yes! But tell me, Jack, where are these new headquarters?"

"Well! At the moment, they are in my mind's eye. All we are waiting for is for you, and many others like you, to leave off waiting for the time to be ripe, and to come and help ripen it. We shall get our new offices and our new journals, when we get the funds. We shall get the funds when we get the members. We shall get the members when you leave off waiting, as I said just now, and start working. Then will follow, not merely new offices and journals, but, greater than all else, a new social system — Socialism. Join up!"

W.T. Hopley

Inflation and the price of oil (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent increases in oil prices announced by OPEC, the cartel formed by some producer countries, are once again providing Western governments with an excuse for not honouring their oft-repeated promise to keep down the general level of prices. As after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, we are hearing the refrain again, that inflation is caused by the rise in the price of oil.

Obviously we hold no brief for the OPEC cartel, but the fact remains that inflation is not caused, or even aggravated, by rising oil prices. Inflation, as the word’s etymology suggests (inflate = blow up), means, correctly understood, an over-issue or blowing-up of an inconvertible (into a fixed amount of gold, that is) currency. In fact, in the nineteenth century the phrase was often given in full as currency inflation, inflation of the currency.

The inevitable result of over-issuing, or inflating, an inconvertible currency, is a rise in the general price level. All prices rise in the same proportion because, as has often been explained in these columns, issuing more of an inconvertible currency than the economy requires for its transactions is tantamount to reducing its gold content. (All currencies, including inconvertible ones, are in economic reality related to gold, whether or not this relationship is legally recognised in some regulation or Act of Parliament.) If an inconvertible currency is defined as, say, one ounce of gold, and twice as much of it is issued as is required by the economy, then its definition will in economic practice change to being half an ounce of gold. All prices — expressed in units of the currency — will tend to double. This is purely a monetary phenomenon and, since governments have a monopoly in currency issue, one for which governments alone have ultimate responsibility.

Unfortunately, the word inflation has come to be used more and more loosely over the years so that it is now almost a synonym for simply ‘rising prices’. This usage is wrong. Inflation is not rising prices. On the contrary, a rise in the general price level is the result of inflation. The easiest way to grasp this is to remember that the word is short for ‘inflation of the currency’.

Oil Prices
The recent rise in the price of oil is merely a rise in the price of a particular commodity and not a rise in the general price level, which is unaffected by this change. All that has changed is the price of oil relative to other commodities. Those who have been buying oil now have to pay more and, if they want to continue buying the same amount, will have to cut back on their other purchases. No extra purchasing power — no inflation — is created; there is simply a re-direction of the previously existing purchasing power. This re-direction may be a painful process, since it means that demand for some non-oil products is going to fall, with inevitable bankruptcies and sackings in firms which will no longer be profitable enough. But whatever the result, it can’t be inflation, since that depends on the government. (Of course, if governments respond to the recent increase in the price of oil by printing more money to allow non-oil spending to continue at the old level, then the result will be a rise in the general price level, what is popularly called inflation. But the cause will not be the rise in oil prices but the government decision to print more money.)

The economic laws governing the incomes of those involved in oil production are similar to those governing incomes in agriculture as analysed by the classical political economists in the last century. According to their theory of differential rent, the price of an agricultural product like wheat is determined by its cost of production (plus average rate of profit) on the least fertile farmland in use. All wheat, even that produced on more fertile land, sells at this price. This means that tenant farmers of more fertile land make extra profits, which they have to pay over to the landlord as ground rent. The landowners are thus enabled to draw an income without having to invest any capital, let alone having to do any work, purely and simply because they monopolise a portion of the globe’s surface. The oil sheiks and, in other OPEC countries, the State which owns the land under which there is oil, are in the same position. Their royalties are a pure monopoly income paid them for nothing. (A qualification is necessary here: to the extent that they don’t spend all this windfall income in riotous living — and some of them try hard to — and invest a part in oil production, then a part of their income becomes profit, a return on the capital they have invested, and not differential rent. A part of their income, though, is always such rent.)

Since the cost of production of oil is cheapest in the Saudi Arabia area, the sheiks who monopolise the land there get the biggest free income, differential rent, royalty, monopoly profit, call it what you will, quite literally for doing nothing. This explains, incidentally, why Sheik Yamani can afford to be in favour of more ‘moderate’ price increases than some of his fellow price-fixers. All they have to do is to lounge about in their palaces waiting for the money to roll in — just like the landed aristocracy of Britain until the opening up of much more fertile wheat lands in North and South America during the nineteenth century deprived them of this privilege.

Absolute Ground Rent
Marx, in Volume III of Capital, identified another element in the income of landowners over and above differential rent, what he called ‘absolute ground rent'. This was the ransom the landlord class was able to extract from the rest of society — essentially, a diversion of surplus value from the capitalist class to the landlord class — by exploiting its position as the monopoliser of a limited natural resource, land. Such absolute rent can only exist where the landowners are well organised, where in fact they form a compact and relatively small group, as did the aristocracy in Britain in the nineteenth century. Today’s oil royalty owners are in a basically similar position. A relatively small group, the members of OPEC, has been exploiting its monopoly position to extract absolute ground rent from the industrial capitalist world. This is different from differential rent — which will come their way anyway, whether the OPEC cartel exists or not, simply as a result of the normal workings of the capitalist economy — and depends entirely on the balance of forces between the two sides.

As the world’s oil resources are used up, so the cost of producing oil — and hence its value and price — tends to rise in any event, since less productive wells and fields now have to be exploited. As the cost of production of oil rises, so, of course, the differential rent of the oil monopolists falls, an additional reason, no doubt, why the rulers of the OPEC countries are seeking to recuperate the loss of this part of their purely parasitic income by trying to increase the other clement in it, absolute ground rent.

This quarrel between the OPEC rulers and the capitalists of the industrialised world is not one that concerns the world’s workers. For, as our analysis has shown, it is essentially a conflict over the division of the spoils of the exploitation of the working class. When we describe the OPEC rulers as ‘parasites’ it should be clear that they are parasites on the world’s industrial capitalists. Since these latter are also parasites they’re the ones who directly exploit wage-labour for surplus value — the oil sheiks and other OPEC rulers are really parasites on parasites.

What happens to the surplus value the working class produce after it has been extracted from them by the industrial capitalists during the process of production whether or not these latter are forced to share some of the loot with some other group, and how much — does not affect the workers. But it vitally concerns the capitalist class. Which is why they have launched the current press campaign — with its racialist undertones and including the myth that rising oil prices cause inflation — directed against OPEC.

If the rent, absolute and differential, of the oil sheiks were reduced to zero, the working class wouldn’t gain a penny. But the capitalist class would, just as they did following the abolition of the Corn Laws in Britain after 1848 which enabled them to pocket a part of the surplus value which they had previously been constrained to disgorge to the landlord class as rent.

Adam Buick

Words, words, words . . . (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following article is reprinted from the September 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard.

"I am told that people say I bawl. Well, I allow it, I do bawl and I will bawl." So said a famous tub-thumper of two hundred years ago, and in various tones, for various causes, they—we—have been bawling ever since.

Rhetoric under the sky is the oldest, most powerful form of persuasion. It was done in the agora, the market place that was the centre of social and political life in a Greek city. Petronius heckled an orator in Nero's Rome—"by a set of dribbling witticisms you found you could make audiences titter"—on his way to the bawdyhouse. In mediæval England John Ball stood on hillsides demanding freedom and justice for the poor. In Shakespeare's day news, scandal and sedition were put into ballads and sung in the markets, and old Saint Paul's was "the market of young lecturers, whom you may cheapen here at all rates and sizes"; Mark Antony—and his audience—had their prototypes. Through the centuries that followed, in the squares and open spaces they cried salvation and the rights of man—the revivalists, the Chartists and the rest.

The Socialist Party was founded when open-air meetings had never been more copious, when the sects and parties vied with one another in the streets for the attention of the working class. Different conditions engender different approaches. There was more rhetoric in those days—to the modern mind more "ham" perhaps, but it was necessary. The slick, confidence-making political speech belonged to the wireless-telegraph future. Aspiring speakers, practising declamation, tried "The Charge of the Light Brigade", "Men of England" and "The Bells" on one another.

Politically conscious people were more theory-conscious that they are to-day. Marx and Engels were not long dead, Kautsky, Luxemburg and Plechanov in their prime; Bernstein's revisionism and the Fabian Essays were argued fiercely. Socialist speakers had to know their theory and know it well. Many of them learned by heart what were considered key passages of important works: sections of The Communist Manifesto, the statement of historical materialism from The Critique of Political Economy, pages of Capital, of Darwin, Spencer and No Compromise, and bits of Shakespeare too. It was a fine thing to support the analysis of capitalism with

" . . . You take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live."

If the politicos were more learned, the others made up for it. A speaker too vigorous in attacking the prejudices of a prejudiced audience was asking to be thrown in a horse-trough, and not uncommonly he was. Robert Tressell describes the reception of a "Clarion" van by the ragged-trousered philanthropists of Hastings:

  "The man on the platform was still trying to make himself heard, but without success. The strangers who had come with the van and the little group of local socialists, who had forced their way close to the platform in front of the would-be speaker, only increased the din by their shouts of appealing to the crowd to 'give the man a fair chance.' This little bodyguard closed round the van as it began to move slowly downhill, but it was completely outnumbered . . . 'We'll give the swines Socialism!' shouted Crass, who was literally foaming at the mouth." 

On most platforms, feeling carried the day. The Liberals and Tories could raise cheers with reference to the Empire and the Flag; the worst accusation against a policy was "it will ruin the country". Emotion was not altogether disfavoured by Socialists. Words like "traitor" carried a great deal; labour leaders were invariably called "Labour bleeders" or "fakirs", and there was even a Party song called "The World for the Workers".

The platform manner changed after the first war, at the same time as urban growth and road traffic began to eliminate meeting-places. The radio and the pictures arrived, and speakers had to compete with them. Some of the smaller parties were swallowed by the Labour and Communist Parties, so that theoretical argument gave place to "practical policies" and calls for "action now." In the thirties a new sort of political meeting appeared, with the speaker surrounded by microphones and no questions allowed. The rhetorical tradition of Parliament, too, suffered a blow when Labour came to power with Cabinet Ministers who were without oral grace; Gladstone, Balfour and their contemporaries could often be taken down verbatim to read as excellent prose.

Today audiences are more tolerant (and more knowledgeable too) and speakers, on the whole, more urbane and more discursive. Perhaps there are more wisecracks and fewer long quotations, because our age prefers the former as a condiment to learning. One tradition which the Party has always maintained is that of giving the platform to opposition. Other parties don't do it; the Socialist Party, which has everything to gain and nothing to fear from open discussion, never refuses, and many a truculent opponent has deflated himself trying to present a case against Socialism under the Socialist Party's own auspices.

The industriousness of Party speakers has always been remarkable. Before the first war, two dozen of them held something like a hundred and thirty open-air meetings a month in London alone. The numbers were similar in 1939, and today the meetings still are a vital part of the Party's propaganda. Debates, too: Liberals, Labour, Tories, Communists, pacifists, fascists, parsons, anarchists—all of them have had their petty panaceas atomized by Socialist speakers. Several debates were published as pamphlets, and they are remarkable examples of the Party's case in action.

Fifty years' speaking for Socialism—fifty years of writing for it, as well. The Socialist Standard is unique. It has never known a paid journalist; its writers and editors have been bricklayers, clerks, housewives, busmen—all sorts and conditions of working people in their spare time. The first page of the first issue said:

  "In the Socialist Party of Great Britain we are all members of the working class, and cannot hope that our articles will always be finely phrased, but we shall endeavour to lay before you on every occasion a sane and sound pronouncement on all matters affecting the welfare of the working class. What we lack in refinement of style we shall make good by the depth of our sincerity and by the truth of our principles."

The Standard was too hard-hitting to have such refinement, and there was little room for fine phrases in Fitzgerald's relentless logic or the rumbustious onslaughts of Jacomb. Euphemism was scorned, and the contributors said just what they meant. When the Manchester Guardian slighted the Party, a Standard headline called it the "Liberal skunk press"; Lloyd George was a liar. Asquith an assassin, and their confreres hypocrites, frauds and political prostitutes. It seems that surprising that the Party was sued for libel only once.

The style of the Standard then, as now, owed to two principal sources: the sociological textbooks of the time, and popular journalism. From the latter it drew a peculiar Joe Miller waggishness that was part of the stock-in-trade of successful newspaper columnists, easier to exemplify than describe. Thus, the Editorial Committee apologizing for a writer who had not made himself clear to a correspondent: "He developed what he calls his style by studying a burr-walnut piano case in foggy weather". A debate with a suffragette was irresistible, and its report was resplendent with quips about "ye gallant knight Anderson" and "the poor girl". Perhaps the acme of this sort of wit was with a highly dramatic poem which had the refrain:

"Go! reckon your dead by your forges red,
  And in factories where we spin;
If blood be the price of your cursed wealth,
  By Christ! we have paid in full".

The poem was called "Gawd Struth We Have."

The writers on economics, socialist theory and political issues put forth their subject-matter lucidly and without frills or ambiguities; style which came naturally through close acquaintance with Engels, Kautsky, Plechanov and the other classical exponents of Marxism. The popularization of academic and technical subjects influenced later writers, and is still doing so—"science for the citizen" has made its mark. Just as on the platform, the people addressed are more widely informed and less concerned with theoretical questions. That does not mean, however, that the modern writer—or speaker—may neglect theory; it means that he must apply it more widely in a world with wider horizons.

And so it goes on; the business of persuading people to think straight, because that is what the Socialist wants. Words are our weapons. Words, words, words . . .

Robert Barltrop