Running Commentary: Myths of equality (1981)

The Running Commentary Column from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Myths of equality

Do not believe the common myth that we are no longer living in a class-divided society. Class is not about being “classy”. It is not something you can take on or reject. While there is still the institution of property in human society we are all born into families who either do or do not possess it. The Low Pay Unit has just produced Low Pay Review 4, which shows that the lowest paid workers today are relatively worse off than the lowest paid in 1886, when figures were first collected. More wealth is produced today than a century ago, but those who are born to no property and are therefore forced to go out and work, producing that wealth, now receive proportionately less of it.

Mr. Chris Pond, director of the Low Pay Unit, comments: “The government’s assertion that workers could protect their jobs by cutting wages is a cruel deception. It is in those industries in which wages have fallen furthest, precisely because of the reduction in demand for the goods and services produced, that have faced the biggest job losses” (Guardian, 2/6/81). And do not forget the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, which reported in 1979 (after five years of Labour government) that the richest one per cent in Britain own more wealth than the poorer eighty per cent.

Against this background, which is based on a minority class owning stocks and shares and other property, and deriving a vast unearned income from employing the rest of us, the “European Socialists” tell us to pull in our belts still further. On 28 April this year, an Amsterdam conference of the “Socialist International” agreed unanimously that “the time had come to promote wage controls firmly linked to economic democracy” (Guardian, 29/4/81).

Are you trying to escape from this wage-slavery which is imposed upon us? The Pearl Assurance Company has recently been advertising what they call the Capital Accumulator Plan. Basically, this means workers struggling to save up their hard-earned cash for them to spend on a few trinkets just before they die. We can be sure than Pearl shareholders, among others, will be profiting from the process.

But don’t they know there is a far more reliable “Capital Accumulator Plan”? It works like this. You inherit a few million pounds (be sure to choose the right parents) or, perhaps rob a few banks (be sure not to be caught and incarcerated). Then you employ (exploit) a few thousand workers (who chose the wrong parents) and accumulate a few million more. At the moment, there are dozens of annual Company reports being published which illustrate the process. Just take one example. Mothcrcare. Profit after tax: £8,634,000. Earnings per share: 13.39p. Dividends per share: 5p. Mr. S. Zilkha and Mr. E. Zilkha, both on the Board, have between them 11,478,776 shares. Their dividend will be £573,938.80. Their earnings will be £1,537,008. They are not employees, they are owners. They do not produce, they possess. “Profit per employee” is declared to be £4,422 for the year. Each worker, then, was paid just enough to keep them fit to work, and produced about as much again on top for the benefit of their masters. That is what is known as “Civilisation”.

Take power

The Child Poverty Action Group has produced a report. Poor and Powerless, showing how the gas or electricity is being cut off in more than 770 households each day because the families concerned cannot afford to pay the bills. This is in spite of the fuel industry’s Code of Practice introduced in 1976 supposedly to reduce the hardship of those very people. The reductions in the real value of child benefit, unemployment benefit, sickness and industrial injury, and maternity benefits together with cuts in the real value of wages, have contributed to worsen the situation since the onset of depression, For example, [ . . . ] disconnected 37,648 people last year, more than three times as many as in 1978. The report quotes particular cases, such as one low-paid family of six children, one of whom had just been discharged from hospital after a bone marrow operation, who were cut off for a gas debt of £17.

The piecemeal suggestions of the CPAG, such as forcing the fuel industries to obtain court orders for such cases, or raising benefits to low-income families, will not remove the problem. As long as people are dependent on employers or the state for a meagre income, poverty will remain an integral aspect of society. Only in a classless society, where everything is owned in common, and resources are freely available to all, will we be able to feel properly secure. As long as the profit system is retained, workers’ living standards will be cut down to the minimum that the employers can get away with it.

American fuel companies have a mechanism called a service limiter adapter. In most parts of America, it is illegal to cut off consumers’ power supplies, so they have found this simple way round it. The adapter can reduce the supply in varying degrees, so that particular appliances cease to function one by one. One New York official has said: “The great attraction is that defaulters face an uncomfortable time without lives being put at risk in freezing weather conditions”.

Sick society

The Office of Health Economics have reported that work days lost through sickness for March 1981 are 21 per cent below the average for the same month over the past four years. The drop coincides with a one million rise in unemployment and the report suggests that high unemployment has made people so afraid of losing their jobs that they may be going to work even when ill.

If not, however, perhaps they can become ill once they get there. The CBI, the Chemical Industries Association and the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries have mounted a vigorous campaign against proposed regulations to protect workers from dangerous chemicals. Section Six of the Health and Safety at Work Act, if it is passed, would prescribe the testing of certain chemicals used in industry, such as Dioxin, used in pesticides, which causes miscarriages and deformed births. “Tightening controls will involve the chemical and pharmaceutical industries in added cost, and this is the core of their objection” (Guardian, 10/8/81). In a confidential memo to members in June, the CBI stated: “CBI is likely to challenge the philosophy underlying the new controls . . . Industry has consistently opposed over-regulation and unnecessary bureaucratic controls by governments in the field of harmful substances”.

In a society of common ownership, production would be solely to satisfy human needs, and not for the profit of a minority. Under democratic control, work can become a pleasure in itself. But when it is owned and controlled by the likes of the CBI, the slogan is wealth before health.

Housing

Speaking of wealth, the Daily Mail did an interesting profile of Michael Heseltine on 17 July. It showed how the man who was sent to Liverpool to work out for his Prime Minister the puzzle of why people living in slums are frustrated, has four houses himself. One in Belgravia, worth £600,000, a country estate in Oxfordshire worth £750,000, a £100,000 “hideaway” in Exford, and a smaller place in Swansea, “not for personal occupation”.

He took some of his fellow capitalists on a bus-trip round Liverpool to see how the other sort live, and to work out how to buy off their discontent. The same issue of the Daily Mail reported on the court case involving Per Hegard, the “man who could buy everything”. His ownership of several companies allows him to live off the work of thousands, riding on their misery. He has six Rolls Royce cars, three yachts, two jet planes, half a dozen mansions and a £15,000 cigar bill.

Those who work to create Hegard wealth for him have least and suffer most, and it is in defence of the property of such people that millions die in wars fought over the control of markets; and his grasping need for profit causes pollution, industrial danger, poverty, destruction and waste.

The World Bank's World Development Report for 1981 refers to the millions living and dying in extreme poverty, and contains two predictions, one “optimistic” and the other less so. The optimistic forecast is that by the end of the century the number on the verge of starvation will fall from 750 million to 630 million. On the other hand, they say, it may rise to 850 million. But it is in our hands to make it fall to nought immediately, and to end all poverty and war, if we combine to end the profit system and create a community where wealth is produced freely for direct use according to needs.

Clifford Slapper

Reagan's new bomb and how to fight it (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

At a time when governments are pleading with unemployed youths not to commit acts of violence on the streets, President Reagan has announced that the United States government intends to proceed with the manufacture of the neutron bomb.

The new weapon (officially known as an Enhanced Radiation Warhead) has the unique capacity to kill people while leaving property intact. By emitting an intense lethal pulse of neutron radiation, the weapon has the necessary radio-active potentiality to destroy urban populations, but leave the surrounding cities standing. According to US army field manual 100-5, published in July 1976, the new bomb is an effective killer:

A one kiliton neutron artillery shell can release about 8.000 rads. An active soldier suddenly exposed to 3,000 rads could become incapacitated within 3 to 5 minutes. He may recover to some degree within 45 minutes, but, due to vomiting, diarrhoea, and other radiation sickness symptoms, he would only be partially effective until he dies within about a week.

It is a tragic symbol of the perverse use of modern technology, which could otherwise be applied to feed the thirty million people who die of starvation each year. But what else should we expect under a social system where life has always had to come second to the needs of capital? Labour is cheap and replaceable; not so factories and machinery.

If there is another world war—which is always a distinct possibility so long as society is organised on the basis of a mad race for profits—it is unlikely that modern nuclear weapons will remain unused. Of course, even a third world war involving the conventional military strategy employed in Dresden in 1945 (which killed more people than the Atomic Bomb on Nagasaki) would be far worse than anything experienced throughout most of the last two world wars. But in all probability; the next world war would involve the use of weapons of hundreds of times more destructive power than those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many military strategists, especially the Chinese, regard such a war as being inevitable. It is easy to be emotional about this prospect, but by any objective reckoning millions of human beings would perish if nuclear weapons were used in a future war. And despite dishonest and hopelessly inadequate government plans for civil defence, it is very likely indeed that those who survive such a holocaust will envy the dead.

It is assumed by some people that a third world war will never happen because governments will not want to see the level of destruction to their own property which such devastation would cause. It is argued that by pressing the button on hundreds of thousands of profit-producing wage slaves the capitalists will be killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Such an argument fails to recognise the anarchy of the capitalist system. Capitalists do not want to fight expensive and damaging wars but, when economic rivalries within the capitalist class intensify, war is the only way open to them.

If there is a third world war, the main concern of the capitalist class will be to get their industries back on to a profitable basis as soon as hostilities are over. It is quite possible that a nuclear war could be fought without the majority of the world’s population being killed. A nuclear war might take place in Europe, with millions perishing either side of the Iron Curtain. Foreseeing such a situation the American and Russian imperialists, both equally concerned with expanding their areas of territorial domination, both want to ensure that the areas hit by their weapons will be industrially operable once the war is over. This is the great value of the neutron bomb: having killed enough people to assure surrender, the factories and machinery would remain intact.

Despite the fact that many people have fallen for the pernicious government lies that bombs are a means of preserving peace and that so-called civil defence will protect them in the event of a third world war, an increasing number of working class people are opposed to the ever-increasing weapons of destruction. It is a pity that so much energy is going in support of reform bodies like CND which are wholly bankrupt of any real policies which can avert the threat of war.

To eradicate war and all of its grotesque weaponry requires more than moral indignation. Modern wars are fought under particular economic conditions and it is only when we eradicate those conditions that we can live without fear of war. In the capitalist system which exists throughout the world today in the misnamed Communist countries as much as anywhere—the ownership and control of the means of producing and distributing wealth is in the hands of a small minority. This minority—the capitalist class—is divided into competing blocs, each fighting one another over markets, raw materials and strategic positions. On the other hand the working class constitutes the vast majority of the population of the earth. Between us, we run society from top to bottom, but we do not own much of the social wealth. We do not have property to protect. We do not have overseas investments to fight about. We do not have working class enemies in Russia or China or America who we want to fight with. Fighting wars is never in the interest of the working class. It is a sacrifice of our own class interest for that of the owning class.

But CND, and all other bodies which urge us to protest about the symptoms of the system while leaving the disease intact, divert many well-intentioned workers from their real enemy which is not simply the existence of bombs, but the existence of the profit system. In The Guardian (5/8/81) a group of well-meaning reformists published a draft letter which all readers were asked to post to President Reagan. Its effective message was: ‘Please, Mr. Reagan, we don’t want to be blown up by nuclear weapons. Will you do something to make capitalism a bit safer for us?’ Such a futile plea leaves several questions unanswered: Who elected Reagan, Thatcher and the other leaders? Who is it that produces the armaments? Who provides the political consent which allows governments to pursue their militarist policies? The fact of the matter is that the working class does these things; the workers support capitalism every time there is an election; and bodies like CND openly claim that members of any party may join them because CND does not take a political stance. War will only be eradicated when the majority of the working class does take a political stance in favour of production for use and against the system which puts profits before need.

On the day BBC radio announced that Reagan had given the go-ahead to the neutron bomb, there was also a news item that bubonic plague had been detected in a wood rat in the vicinity of Reagan’s country retreat. The President’s men, it was reported, were out shooting wood rats in the area around the retreat so as to kill off the disease at its source. The working class can learn a lesson from this. The bubonic plague is a natural disease, but it can be eliminated by eliminating its source. Neutron bombs, nuclear fall-out and napalm are not natural diseases, but they too can only be remedied by removing the system which gives rise to them. Unless, of course, you are a skyscraper or a tank, in which case neutron bombs are not reported to be damaging to your health.

Steve Coleman

The Failure of Reformism (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

If, during an election, you sit back and analyse what the various rival candidates are really saying you will find that virtually all of them share the view that the government has the power both to control the economy and to solve social problems. The promises they make are based on this assumption; so are the criticisms they direct at each other, all of which boil down to “you are a bad government” or “you were a bad government” or “you would be a bad government”.

This illusion that governments can solve economic and social problems—because it is other governments that cause them—is not just shared by politicians and their parties but by the vast majority of ordinary men and women, as any conversation about politics quickly reveals. Even those who appear to be the most critical of politicians and governments share the illusion. “They’re all corrupt” suggests that if all politicians were honest then things might be different. “What we need is a government of experts” suggests that things might be different if those who run governments were more competent. “We need a strong government” suggests that the problems are caused by weak governments.

That governments—all governments—have failed cannot be denied. Over the years all sorts of policies and political combinations have been tried, yet the same problems remain. Unfortunately too, most people still seek explanations in the realm of capitalist politics—bad policies, bad politicians, bad political structures—rather than considering that some other factor, such as the way society is organised, might be responsible.

Economic Laws of Capitalism

Governments are not in fact free agents that can do what they want. They operate within a definite economic and social system which severely limits their field of action. Present-day society is capitalist, in which wealth is produced not to satisfy human needs but to be sold on a market with a view to profit. Under capitalism the means for producing wealth are not the common possession of the whole of society but are monopolised, either as individuals or through the state, by a minority who thereby form a privileged class. The rest of society, the vast majority, can only get a living by selling their ability to work (their skills and knowledge) for a wage or salary.

Capitalism is a class-divided and profit-oriented society. It is an economic and social system which works according to certain definite economic laws-governing the level of economic activity, what is produced, prices and so on-laws which can be studied and understood but which cannot be changed. Basically, capitalism works in such a way that priority has always to be given to profit-making over human needs. Of course human needs are met to some extent but, as far as the wage and salary earning majority are concerned, in a quite inadequate way, as is shown by the persistent problems over such basic needs as housing, health and education.

Because capitalism is a system of production for sale on a market with a view to profit, its whole economic mechanism is necessarily governed by the search for profits. Priority has to be given to profits as they are capitalism's life-blood. This is the system’s economic logic, which imposes itself on individuals and governments whether they like it or not. As long as capitalism lasts there is nothing that can be done to change this; governments must not only respect this logic but also apply it. They can try to avoid this—as some have done for a short while—but in the end they have to accept the logic of capitalism that profits must come first.

The “housing problem” could be solved tomorrow if production were allowed to be carried on simply to satisfy human needs. The building materials to provide a decent home for everybody exist; so do the building workers. What prevents this happening is the economic law of capitalism which says that profits must be made out of producing things; and there is no profit in producing decent homes for people who can’t afford them. It is the same story in other fields such as health, education and the environment. Human needs are taken into account only to the extent that people have the money to pay for their satisfaction. If they do, then they constitute a market, supplying which is a potential field for profit-making.

For people’s needs to be met they must have money, but the amount of money most of us have is limited by the size of our wage packet or salary cheque—by, in other words, the proceeds of the sale of our ability to work to some employer. But, once again, this is something that is strictly governed by the economic mechanism of capitalism. Prices—and a wage or a salary is a price, the price of a person’s skills and knowledge-are not fixed arbitrarily, but depend on the average amount of labour expended to produce the commodity in question. In the case of a person’s ability to work this is the average amount of labour needed to produce the food, clothing, shelter and so on that the worker and their family need to live, together with the labour cost of the particular trade or skill. This is why the consumption of the wage and salary earning majority is restricted to more or less what they need to keep themselves fit to work. It is an inevitable economic consequence of their mental and physical energies being, like everything else under capitalism, a commodity bought and sold on a market.

But there is a further reason why the consumption of wage and salary earners must be restricted under capitalism. Profits are realised (converted into money) when a commodity is sold, but they are created when the commodity is produced. The source of profits is the unpaid labour of wage and salary earners; it is that part of the new wealth they produce over and above what they are paid in wages and salaries. So the latter can never rise too high since, in doing so, they eat into profits—the life-blood of capitalism. If this happens in a particular industry or country then production is cut back, workers are laid off and unemployment grows. The larger pool of unemployed acts as a downward pressure on the wages of those still employed, so tending to restore the original wage level. For wage and salary earners there is no escape from this vicious circle.

The International Dimension

Governments are also compelled to restrain wages and salaries by international competition. Capitalism exists all over the world, in countries like Russia and China (in the form of state capitalism) as well as in admittedly capitalist countries like Britain and America. But it is not a collection of separate capitalist societies each existing within the frontiers of the more or less artificial states into which the world is divided. Capitalism exists as a single world economic and social system, of which “Britain”, “America”, “Russia” and so on are merely parts. So, even if governments had the power to control economic activities within their frontiers (which they don’t), this would still only give them control over a very limited part of the world economy. They would still be at the mercy of external economic forces.

This is a very powerful restricting influence on the freedom of action of governments. Though rarely mentioned by politicians and their parties when making election promises, it is sometimes invoked by them when it comes to finding excuses for failure. “We have been blown off course”, they often explain correctly as it happens, since the pressures exerted by the world market on governments are so immense that they virtually dictate what policies they should pursue, at home as well as abroad.

Profits, we saw, arise out of the unpaid labour of wage and salary earners and are realised only when the goods in which this unpaid labour is incorporated are converted into money; when, in other words, they are sold. Capitalist enterprises, including those owned by states, compete against each other to sell their goods so as to realise the profits incorporated in them. So competition on the world market is not just competition for sales; it is above all competition for profits.

Any national government has to respect this and to help the efforts of the enterprises within its frontiers to amass as much profit as they can. Indeed, this can be said to be the role of governments within the world capitalist economy, which prevents them ever solving the problems facing wage and salary earners. For to protect and enhance the competitive position of enterprises within their borders, governments must help to restrict the consumption of wage and salary earners to no more than is necessary to ensure their productive efficiency. But it is precisely this restricted consumption that is the social problem facing wage and salary earners, of which shortages and inadequacies in housing, schooling, health, the environment and so on are but aspects.

If wages and salaries rise too high, then the competitive position of enterprises is undermined through cost increases. Government spending on social reform measures—building more houses, increasing pensions and allowances, providing better health services, improving educational standards, cleaning up the environment and so on—is restricted by the same economic mechanism. Government spending is financed either by taxation or by inflating the currency. High taxation causes capitalist enterprises to suffer because all taxes fall in the end on profits. Inflation raises the internal price level above the world level, making exports less competitive.

So the economic laws of capitalism not only act against wages rising too high; they also prevent governments spending too much on social reforms. In fact, in the long run, only those social reform measures which pay their own way, in the sense of increasing the productive efficiency of the workforce, are passed and maintained. Examples are: education to ensure better trained and more skillful workers; a health service to patch them up quickly so that they can return to work; social security schemes to try to ensure that their working ability does not degenerate in periods of non-employment. And if a government has miscalculated and proved to be too generous—as over the National Health Service introduced in Britain after the last war—then the situation is sooner or later corrected by the reform either being drastically cut back or slowly whittled away.

We can now see why the needs of the majority are not adequately met under capitalism and, what is more, why they never can be. The problems wage and salary earners face in meeting their needs—in housing, health, education, transport and the like—are inherent in capitalism. They arise from its very basis as a class-divided, profit-oriented society and cannot be solved within its framework.

This is why politicians and governments fail. It is not because they are corrupt or incompetent or weak. It is not because outdated political institutions and structures impede them. In fact it has nothing to do with politics at all. In trying to make capitalism serve human needs (which is basically what they are doing when they try to solve social problems) they are attempting the impossible. Capitalism simply cannot be reformed so as to serve the interests of the majority of its members—those who work for wages and salaries.

Opposition to Reformism

Once it is realised that capitalism’s basic nature can never be changed by reforms, then the futility of reformist politics becomes obvious. Governments which pass reform measures to try to solve social problems are like a doctor applying ointment when a surgical operation is called for. They are dealing with effects while leaving the basic cause unchanged—a certain recipe for failure since the same cause is bound to go on producing the same effects.

The social and economic problems facing wage and salary earners can only be solved by the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by a new and basically different social system in which production will be carried on solely and directly to satisfy human needs. This is why socialists refuse to advocate or support reforms to be implemented within capitalism, which distinguishes us from all other parties and groups, even those claiming to be “revolutionary” and “anti-reformist”.

This does not mean an opposition to all reform measures being implemented. Some reforms can bring slight temporary relief to groups of wage and salary earners and, knowing the difficulties of living under capitalism, socialists don’t begrudge this. What we are opposed to is advocating and campaigning for reforms, since seeking reforms of capitalism is a misuse of time and energy which can at best result only in a temporary alleviation of the situation. Then there is the fact that most reform measures are passed to smooth out some problem of one or other section of the capitalist minority rather than to alleviate the lot of the wage and salary earning majority. If all the time and energy devoted over the years to trying to get reforms had been directed towards getting wage and salary earners to understand the need to replace capitalism by socialism, then socialism would have been established long ago; the housing problem, the education problem, the health problem, the environment problem and all the other problems we face today would be ancient history.

Adam Buick

Cops protect robbers (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism will be a world society without a police force. In fact, it will be a society without a legal system. And because there will be no laws there will be no courts to argue about them in, no prisons in which to lock up offenders, and no people who will be called criminals because they have broken the law.

The idea of socialism as a lawless, crimeless society is likely to evoke the strangest of responses from those who stand for what is euphemistically referred to as ‘law and order’. Judges will tell us that prisons and punishment must always be, for we are all sinners. The person in the street will say that without the law there would be anarchy and under anarchy nothing would be safe. Criminologists will tell us that anti-social behaviour is a necessary feature of modern urban industrial living (which is only a trendy way of saying what the judge has already said). Indeed, even most criminals will insist that a certain degree of law and order is necessary and that the best place for those who have committed worse crimes than them is in a prison cell.

As for the politicians, Leftie Frank Field (Labour, Birkenhead, no convictions) writes that ‘Like most people, I cannot conceive of a society without a police force’. (Guardian, 5/8/81). Tory Home Secretary Whitelaw warned on television recently that ‘without the police, that which we treasure as a nation would be jeopardised’. (Could he have been referring to the Stock Exchange?) Even the very silly Workers’ Revolutionary Party, in their recent GLC election manifesto, called for the replacement of the Metropolitan police force by an armed workers’ militia.

The public’s view of the police is currently undergoing a profound change. The image of the Dixon of Dock Green—type copper with a patronising concern to protect ‘villains’ from themselves and a claim to serve ‘the community’ is fast dying. The role of the police as the brutal defenders of property and privilege is increasingly being recognised. The use of the police as strikebreakers, as contributors to the harassment of racial minorities, as corrupt bullies who will often turn a blind eye to law-breaking if the price is high enough, and, in the cases of Liddle Towers, Blair Peach and unrecorded others, as the unprosecuted murderers of members of the working class.

This writer’s first experience of police methods came during the Grunwick strike in 1977 when he saw uniformed officers kicking pickets when they lay on the ground and beating people up in the back of open police vans. Many trade unionists will testify as to how the police have been used in strikes in order to make life hard for the strikers. Accounts of police persecution of legally innocent workers are increasingly common, especially in areas where there are many black immigrants. Many people convicted of crimes—and many not convicted, but charged-have told how police have illegally beaten them, forced confessions from them and even intimidated their friends and relatives.

The words of police chiefs do not help to comfort those who live in fear of ‘the boys in blue’: Metropolitan Police Chief Commissioner, David McNee, recently stated that ‘if people stay off the streets at night they will have nothing to fear from the police’, while Merseyside’s Chief Constable. Kenneth Oxford, wrote in his report to the Liverpool police committee, six weeks before the Toxteth riot, that

My policy on relationships with the community has been endorsed and strengthened throughout the year, with all members of the force being mindful in this direction. I am confident that these relationships with all sections of the community are in a very healthy position and I do not foresee any serious difficulties developing in the future. (Quoted in the Guardian, 6/8/81. Our emphasis.)

Oxford, whose force has been seen as a major contributory factor in the outburst on Toxteth streets, is clearly not a man of prescience.

Much as some people would like to turn a blind eye to it, it is a fact that the police force often exceeds its legal powers, frequently serves to increase social tensions and ignore criminality when it is committed by the rich. But this is not the root of the problem; socialists are not simply opposed to the police-or to “bad” police—but to a system of social relationships which necessitates coercive forces.

The purpose of the police is to defend property. Yes, it is true that they help old ladies cross the road (whether they want to or not) and they run youth clubs for skinheads who want to be the next Henry Cooper. This, however, is not their main job and the idea of the police as uniformed social workers is a myth. Indeed, police officers can often be disciplined by their superiors for spending too much time helping people when there is real police work to be done elsewhere. One such case is quoted by E. Bittner:

An officer was walking a beat in a quiet residential area when he encountered a middle-aged matron who had been locked out of her home. She had a load of groceries and obviously could not climb into the window she designated as open . . . He set aside hat and truncheon, climbed in through the window, and came downstairs to let her in. As she was grateful and was going to write a letter informing his superior of his meritorious service, he had to carefully explain to her that what he did was against police regulations and quite possibly against the law (since he had no evidence that she actually lived in the house). Any mentions of his actions would probably become a black mark in his personnel file. (“A Theory of the Police” in Potential for Reform of Criminal Justice, ed. H. Jacob, Sage Publications.)

Before the establishment of an official police force in 1829, policing was the direct responsibility of property-owners. Private security gangs were employed to defend the wealth of the rich against the illegal requirements of the poor. Before the rise of industrial capitalism, the administration of the law was primarily in the hands of local land magnates. They would appoint their own magistrates, pay for their own guards and be looked upon as the final arbiters in local disputes. With the increasing role of the state as a means of social control in the mid-Nineteenth century, the unity between the right of ownership and the right of coercion became blurred, but not eradicated.

The role of the early police force, as now, was to ensure the maintenance of the order of property. In an age when slums and mansions, expensive restaurants and hungry children, night clubs and homeless vagrants exist in such close proximity to one another it is vital for the owning class to have a permanent force to protect them and their property from the intrusion of the impoverished. With capitalism, the concept of criminality became synonymous with the disruption of property relationships. In earlier centuries laws tended to be justified in moral terms, but modern jurisprudence has increasingly discarded anachronistic moral and religious formulae and has described its role in explicitly material terms. The police, as a body which is directly governed by laws passed in parliament, now have a clearly political role. What the state says, the police must do.

Dirty work

The state is not an institution which has always existed. In ancient societies, when the means of producing wealth were commonly held, there was no need for an institution to defend private property. The state was a direct consequence of the earliest appropriation of wealth in the form of tools, land and slaves—by private owners. The evolution of the state, as an institution to protect and expand private property, has developed as humankind has increased its domination over the natural environment. With the emergence of nation states with their own particular economic interests, in Western Europe in the late fifteenth century, it became necessary for states to recruit standing armies to fight the battles of the various national ruling classes. At this stage of the evolution of the state machine emerged a division of its functions between military responsibilities to the ruling class—the protection and expansion of markets—and domestic responsibilities- the retention of internal order on the part of the nation’s rulers. That is the role of the police: they are the uniformed guards of the property-owning class. For every worker’s car which they retrieve and for every mugger they catch (and the police are notoriously bad at solving crimes which affect the working class), there are a hundred cases in which the police are quite directly defending property against poverty.

Of course, the capitalists do not do their own dirty work. They are the last people to be found treading the beat or risking their lives in fights against criminals. Why should they bother when they can pay suckers from the working class to act as human guard-dogs on their behalf? Just like other members of the working class, members of the police force have problems. They are dependent upon wages and, like most workers, these are never enough to satisfy their complete needs. They are frequently pushed around by authoritarian superiors who expect them to obey senseless orders. Many of them would like to be liked, but because of the real nature of their job (which is disguised during their training) they are forced to come into frequent conflict with their fellow workers. Of course, many workers join the police force because they are authoritarian, sadistic or politically motivated, but for the vast majority it is just a job, just a wage and just employment. Often the police respond to their problems by demanding more weapons or tougher laws, but in the end these will not eradicate their problems. So long as there is a system which needs repression, intolerance and thuggery in order to defend its norms, and as long as there are wage slaves who are willing to get their hands dirty defending their exploiters’ position, the police’s problem will continue.

Reformists are occasionally heard to demand the reform of the police. Indeed, the new Labour GLC leader, Ken Livingstone, has recently pledged himself in favour of a people’s police force, accountable to a ‘socialist GLC’! We have all experienced what is meant by a people’s police force. In state capitalist Poland, the armed bullies who smashed the skulls of striking workers in Bydgoszcz were called a ‘people’s’ militia. Did that stop them from viciously defending the right of capital against the needs of wage labour? To conceive of a legal system which will operate in terms of friendship and consensus within a system where ownership and control are firmly in the hands of a minority who own the productive and distributive machinery is naive in the extreme.

In a socialist society the means of wealth production and distribution will be commonly owned and democratically controlled by the whole community without distinction of race or sex. In such a society, where no factory, farm, mine, newspaper, aeroplane or house will have an owner, be it an individual or the state, there will be no need for property laws. There will be no function for police or courts or prisons. The vast libraries containing thick statutes on who is entitled to possess what (and, by implication, who isn’t) will be placed in museums. The truncheons and uniforms and judge’s wigs will be regarded as items of perverse historical curiosity. For once the wealth of the world belongs to all humanity and there for our free access, what will there be to steal and what reason would there be to steal it?

Of course, the Human Nature Brigade will not be slow to answer our question. They will correct us for indulging in such utopian dreams. They will remind us that it is not the viciously competitive, warlike system of capitalism which leads people to commit acts of violence, but Human Nature. They will inform us that it is not the system which turns sex into a commodity and makes films glorifying the conquest of women which leads men to rape women, but Human Nature. They, who are the selected élite who have special knowledge of mankind’s inherent characteristics, will be able to tell us that it is not the overcrowded, boring, stressful conditions of most workers’ lives which leads some to act anti-socially, but Human Nature. And our Nature being what it is, we shall always need police to push us around and prison warders to lock us up and judges to judge us. Socialists argue that the social environment makes men and women what they are and that a competitive, jungle society will create anti-social beasts. Change the way in which the society is organised and human behaviour will change also.

But just as capitalism creates wage slaves who want to be pushed around and want to be slaves and fear freedom, at the same time, paradoxically, it creates its own gravediggers. By subjecting the working class more and more to the reality of its exploited and oppressed condition, capitalism creates dissent. If such dissent currently takes the form of engaging in futile street battles with the police and looting the third-rate commodities from the windows of the cheapest shops, experience will eventually transform such dissent into conscious political action. After all, however many policeman’s hats are knocked from their head, the police and the class which they exist to protect will still be there. However many reforms are passed to soften policemen’s truncheons, the arm of the law will always be stronger than the power of a politically atomised working class.

Steve Coleman

Correction (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the October 1980 Socialist Standard and some subsequent issues, it was stated that less than one thousandth of the British population own eighty per cent of privately owned shares. This figure was taken from the CIS report The Wealthy, and is incorrect. They say that one per cent of shareholders own eighty per cent of the shares, whereas it is in fact one per cent of the population. (Only seven per cent of the population are shareholders.) The correct figure can be found in Class in a Capitalist Society by J. Westergaard and H. Resler, Penguin, page 158. They use Inland Revenue Statistics to show how one hundredth of the population own over eighty per cent of shares. We apologise for the error, although we have the impression that most of our readers are in the ninety-three per cent without a single share to their name, in any case.

Ours and theirs (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

The main points in the Bank of England Bulletin, which was issued last month, were well covered by television, radio and newspapers. Anyone taking what was said in these reports as what was meant would have been delighted with the good news. Here are some of the ways in which the news was reported: “Recession or no WE are getting richer abroad”; “According to figures assembled by the Bank’s statisticians . . . OUR external wealth was actually £4.3 billion more in 1979 than we thought it was a year ago”; “In 1980, for the first time, OUR assets abroad exceeded £200 billion ...” (Our emphasis).

Great, you might think. You can leave that dreary job, or stop looking for one. You can move out of your cramped home and move into spacious accommodation with pleasant amenities. No longer will your lifestyle be tethered by a meagre and insecure income. No longer will your impulses be repeatedly smothered by your poverty. So you get on the blower to the Bank of England, explain that you have heard the news about our great wealth which is invested abroad and ask how you might go about getting some of your share now.

Waiting for your reply from the other end of the line, the dialling tone, or worse, would be your signal that all is not as it seems. In fact what is described as "our overseas wealth’, if it was being reported from the point of view of the great majority, would be described as "their overseas wealth’. In Britain today, the entire pooled wealth of the poorest 80 per cent of the adult population amounts to less than that which is owned by the wealthiest 1 per cent (Report of Royal Commission on Distribution of Income and Wealth, 1980) and 93 per cent of adults do not own any stocks or shares. (CIS report, The Wealthy).

Meanwhile, in Japan the capitalist minority’s quest for profit continues with its inevitable disregard for the common social good. For many years a drug developed by a Professor Chisato Maruyama to treat terminal cancer has been dispensed at his small clinic in Tokyo. The vaccine seems to be regarded as effectual, at least by the hundreds of people who queue from dawn every day outside the clinic to collect a forty days’ supply for their suffering friends or relatives.

Research conducted at Tohoku University suggests that where the vaccine has been used in conjunction with other medical treatment survival rates in terminal cancer have much improved over treatment with other drugs. However, the small clinic cannot keep up with the demand and at the moment it is the only place allowed to dispense the vaccine. In order for the drug to become generally available it must be licenced by the Pharmaceutical Council of the Health Ministry. The Health Ministry usually rules on new drugs within 18 months but the Pharmaceutical firm making the vaccine first applied for licensing five years ago, and still no decision has been reached.

The issue became publicised after patients’ families petitioned the Ministry with 60,000 signatures, and the clamour could no longer be ignored by the government. The reason for the extraordinary delay in official approval being granted to the drug cannot be certain as deliberations of the decision makers—and this applies across the world under capitalism—are conducted in secret, or privately as they would prefer to call it.

But all of the available evidence suggests that there have been “close relations" between the Health Ministry and major drug companies. It seems that these firms are exerting strong pressure (the Yen variety) on health officials to block the commercial licensing of the Maruyama vaccine, which would present damaging competition to their own anti-cancer drugs already on the market. There is a trend for many senior ministry bureaucrats who are ‘co-operative’ with the representatives of large drug companies to be given highly paid appointments with the companies once they have retired from government employment. The rather well-titled ‘vice-president’ of one of the largest Japanese pharmaceutical companies was Deputy Health Minister a few years ago. Until the power of control and decision-making is withdrawn from the minority who now exercise it all over the world, society will continue to be run by us for them.

Gary Jay

Dons on the dole - part 2 (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

(In the June Socialist Standard a correspondent who is also a university lecturer reported on the financial cuts being planned for universities by the government’s University Grants Committee (UGC). The measures have now been announced and our correspondent looks at their effects.)

The statistics have already had detailed coverage in the media. Roughly they add up to the loss of 3,000 lecturing jobs and 20,0000 student places over the next three to four years. The Association of University Teachers (AUT) said the government had tried to give “academic respectability to a savage cut”. The National Union of Students called the measures “crude educational vandalism”. The pro-Vice Chancellor of one of the worst hit institutions, Salford University, said: “We are shocked, appalled and dismayed”.

In my own university we are still unclear on precisely what is going to happen. Our overall reduction in grant is smaller than most of us expected, but some departments, including my own, have been recommended for “concentration” with corresponding departments in other nearby institutions. Talks among the authorities of these institutions and my own will decide in which university each subject will be concentrated and whether “concentration” will mean losing jobs or just moving house for those of us whose subjects are_transferred.

The local AUT’s view is that the university will take the course that it sees as being in its best overall interest and that we must therefore be prepared to resist if necessary. What has appeared to make Union resistance more possible now than it seemed before is that the UGC had a last-minute change of heart and, instead of telling universities in precise detailed terms how to achieve their economies, simply issued figures of percentage cuts for each institution and told each one in only very general terms as to where its cuts should be operated. The AUT claims that its own representations to the UGC were responsible for this change of emphasis and that Union pressure can also therefore bring unhoped for changes of emphasis (from individual universities). This may be so, but it’s still hard to see how saving one lecturer’s job in one subject will not automatically result in another lecturer’s job being lost in another subject. No matter how much juggling is done, money will only be there for a certain number of salaries. What the UGC have not yielded on is the cuts themselves. They are allowing individual universities more flexibility in distributing their share of the cuts but have made it quite clear that, whatever the attitude of the Union and the universities, the cuts will have to be made.

What surprised most people was not the extent of the grant reductions but the way in which they were spread. A minority of institutions have been particularly hard hit, while the majority are suffering rather less than expected. The Sunday Times (5/7/81) explained this by pointing out that “what really lay behind the UGC’s decision was . . . cost-effectiveness”. In other words the main factor in assessing where the axe should fall was the cheapness with which universities had shown themselves capable of operating their courses. Those whose unit costs were expensive were most heavily penalised. Those whose cost per student was low came off best. As the Vice-Chancellor of the least affected university of all, Bath, was proud to point out: “We’re getting better results for a lower investment” (Sunday Times 5/7/81).

For a number of years now both Labour and Tory governments have talked about the need to make universities more receptive to the “needs of society”. For, although education has grown up in response to the ever increasing needs of the profit system for an increasing number of educated intellectually flexible wage slaves (which is what politicians mean by the “needs of society”), the university sector, because of its traditional “independence”, has been more difficult to mould to capitalism’s requirements and has developed in a more willy-nilly and more expensive fashion than the rest. Governments now want to bring the universities into line, to make them respond more efficiently and more cheaply to the economic needs of capitalism. And what better time than in a period of depression when cuts in so-called “public expenditure” seem especially justified and when so many people in other occupations are losing their jobs.

It’s possible of course that the government is being short-sighted and that, if the depression doesn’t last, employers in Britain will soon find themselves short of the skills of university graduates and will find it difficult to compete in producing and selling their goods on an expanding world market. But capitalism is nothing if not unpredictable and governments committed to running it have to take chances—even if this means wasting human talents and energies on a large scale and having, as a possible end result, increased economic chaos.

The cuts also highlight another kind of wastage of talents and energies that has arisen out of capitalism’s unmanageability. During the 70s universities throughout the country were told that the only way to keep their staff was to increase student numbers. With competition from the polytechnics and a decreasing number of 18-year-olds in the population it was assumed that universities would not be able to do this and that the government would be able to point to this as a reason for making cuts in finance. But a different thing happened. Instead of waiting for students to come to them, (as in the past) universities started to recruit vigorously. Academics put an enormous amount of time, energy and ingenuity into finding ways of attracting new students, and many students were found where before they seemed not to exist. Then came 1979 and a UGC visit to universities told the academics that they’d been finding too many students and they would have to cut down. Now in 1981 they’re being told even more forcefully that all that time, energy and ingenuity has been wasted and that they should have been looking for ways of saving government money not spending more.

The UGC’s letter to universities announcing the cuts said: “Reductions in resources are being imposed at a time when demand for university educations is still rising”. And this was an unwitting admission of the kind of society we live in—a society in which goods and services, including education, are not there to satisfy people’s needs but are only available when the needs of the profit system decree they will be available. The highly educated people at our “centres of academic excellence” should think hard on this and ponder on whether there isn’t a less irrational more harmonious way of organising human affairs.

Howard Moss

SPGB Meetings (1981)

Party News from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Letter: Questions (1981)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Questions

Dear Editors

I would like to know how the SPGB would solve the fighting in Northern Ireland with better results than the Tories have had; also how would you deal with the Scottish wish for independence when you come to power.

How many SPGB candidates are MPs and how long do you believe the capitalist system will exist. When the SPGB come to power will there be changes in working hours and leisure hours, and what would happen to charity organisations and fund raising appeals?

Davye Barton

Par, Cornwall

Reply:

The SPGB is basically different from the parties of capitalism, who seek power on promises to deal with problems like the Irish troubles; who cadge for votes on issues like Scottish independence and who in practice fail to solve those very problems. We stand for a social system which can only be established by the political action of workers who understand socialism and the need for a revolution to end capitalism. There is no room in a socialist party for policies of trying to reform capitalism. At present workers concern themselves with matters such as Scottish independence under the delusion that it is possible to run capitalism, with some alterations, in their interests. In fact it is not possible and all experience bears this out; by taking sides in these disputes workers are supporting one section of the ruling class against another.

No socialist candidate has ever been elected to parliament. In the last election 78 workers voted for the SPGB candidate in Islington South—a sad measure of working class understanding of socialism. We can’t set an actual time on it of course, but capitalism will last for as long as that lack of understanding persists.

There is today a distinction between work and leisure time because under capitalism the vast majority of people have to get their living through employment. The latter is measured in time because it is the process in which workers expend the labour power they have sold to employers by the hour, minute, day and so on. When socialism is established there will be no employers and employed; people will work freely and in co-operation to produce whatever society needs, and all will have free access to that wealth. Work, then, will be pleasurable, creative activity inseparable from leisure.

Socialism will be a moneyless society. The social scars of capitalism, such as poverty, which are sometimes very slightly soothed through charity, will no longer exist. There will therefore be no need for charities. 

Editors

50 Years Ago: Labour Government Fiasco (1981)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have just witnessed the inglorious exit of the second ‘Labour’ Government after more than two uneasy years of office—two years of deserted principles, political bargaining, and cowardice. During that time the cherished theories of the Labour Party have been tried, and every one found wanting, and abandoned. The Labour Party was to be a “high wage” party. More than four million workers have had their wages reduced since Mr. MacDonald became Prime Minister in June 1929. The Government confessed its inability to prevent the reductions, and indeed played an active part in some of them—notably those affecting its own employees. It was confident that unemployment could be reduced by means of its schemes of development. Yet we have seen unemployment mount to a record figure, 2,700,000; the percentage of insured workers on the register equalling the highest previous figure (23%), attained under Mr. Lloyd George’s government in 1921.

[From an editorial The Great Fiasco—Contemptible ‘Labour’ Government, published in the Socialist Standard, September 1931.]

Political Notes: Insults (1981)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

The Political Notes Column from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Insults

“You’d better get up to the North East,” said the Prime Minister to Lord Hailsham. “The people up there are sound chaps really; their fathers stuck it out well at places like Passchendaele, but they’re getting restless. Something to do with bad housing, unemployment, sickness and poverty . . . Have a word with them—tell them we’re all in this together, you know the stuff. Oh yes, better get yourself a cloth cap; not the sort I wear on the grouse moors, your expenses won’t run to that. I believe there’s a shop called Montague Bolton or Marmaduke Burton or something who do them quite cheap. Good luck.”

"You’d better get up to the North West,” said the Prime Minister to Michael Heseltine. “The proles up there are misbehaving, rioting and helping themselves to property they don't own, even if they made it all. Perhaps they’re dissatisfied about slum housing, unemployment, poverty, heavy handed police . . .  Try not to say too much though—you’re inclined to make a fool of yourself sometimes, you know. Get a few businessmen up there who’ll pretend to be surprised that people live in such conditions. Wear your best clothes and get you hair cut. Good luck.”

Since Hailsham’s fatuous insults to the working class, twenty years ago, there has been little change in the problems he was supposed to be alleviating except that if anything they have got worse. And, as Heseltine has found out, the workers’ reaction has become more violent, desperate and futile.

Yet since Hailsham’s visit the working class have had six chances, at general elections, to attack the cause of their problems. They have used those chances to elect two Labour, and two Tory, governments. This persistent support for capitalism has meant that the problems continue and worsen, and that places like Toxteth and Brixton still fester.

Little wonder, then, that cynical politicians also persist in their security, to the extent that they can so freely offer insults to working class intelligence. With support like they get, who can blame them for feeling smug?


Wets

Margaret Thatcher is said to be angry at people like Lord Thorneycroft and Peter Walker and Francis Pym who have been publicly criticising her policies and she is said to be even angrier at the press reports that she was angry in the first place. At this rate, we must ask ourselves, how long will that hairdo survive?

As a result of all this, the idea is gaining ground, that these politicians called the Wets have lit on some secret about how to run capitalism which would make life a lot easier for the working class. Some Wets are harking back to the days when it was fashionable to think that the state could spend its way out of a recession, cutting unemployment at a stroke. Leaving aside the fact that workers who are in jobs still suffer poverty, even if less acute than when they are on the dole, and the historical fact that the policies of Keynes have themselves been discredited, it must be said that the idea of politicians like these standing for a more humane capitalism is positively laughable.

Thorneycroft resigned from the Macmillan government—with Enoch Powell—in 1961 on the argument that there was not a stern enough effort to cut working class living standards. Peter Walker grew rich out of the world of fringe banks, finance houses and investment trusts, in their heyday in the sixties. He personifies the capitalist ethic that what is good is profitable, from which all abundance and happiness must flow.

Nobody should be deceived that the Tory Wets have any more to offer, as solutions to capitalism's inability to satisfy the needs of its people, than the most arid Dry. Thatcher angry? It is the working class, who are exploited, degraded and deceived by capitalism and its spokesmen, who should be blowing their tops.


Police

We might have known it. While the smoke still rose from the riot-torn cities, a pall of parrot cries, slogans and “demands” also went up, from the left wing.

“Police accountability” was one of the these demands—on Merseyside and in Brixton where, it seems, the police are pretty good at rioting themselves—which is supposed to help prevent it all happening again.

As usual, the lefties were too frantic to stop and ask themselves some necessary questions. How far, for example, is this “accountability” to go? Is it to be taken to the extent of those American states where the top policemen are elected to their office? This theoretical safeguard has led, notoriously in the Deep South, to some notably corrupt police forces whose officers have murdered people but who did not arrest themselves because that was how the voters wanted it.

On what basis are the police supposed to be accountable to the working class? To the people they police, which means the people they repress, imprison and assault? They are employed by the other class in society—by the capitalists—to assert the privileged standing of that class and to separate the workers from the wealth they have produced.

The police are accountable to the minority who live in palaces, not to the majority who live in the slums and the semis. While the working class acquiesce in this system of deprivation, they will use any control they have over any agency in the interests of the minority, to keep that minority in their position of privilege.

All experience teaches us the folly of expecting the agencies of capitalist control to change their character, to deny their role in the class struggle, to become benign and non-repressive. The workers must aim for a basic change in society, which would make those agencies redundant.

But until that happens there are likely to be a lot more broken heads—and worse—in the cause of capitalist repression and in the left’s opportunism.

A Socialist dictionary (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

1) ANARCHISM: Strange specimen of philosophy which fears power itself more than capitalism. To the anarchist the termites are the state, the police, the prisons, the family . . .  all forms of repression rather than the system which breeds them. Though claiming to be revolutionary, most anarchists support reforms.

2) BALLOT ELECTION: Socialists see the ballot as a crucial weapon for the working class to use to gain political power. When we become a majority, socialist delegates will be elected to Parliament with a mandate to abolish the wages-prices-profit system and replace it with common ownership.

3) CAPITALISM: A worldwide social system which evolved from feudalism. A minority class owns the means of production yet produces no wealth; and a class that lacks that ownership produces everything. Production under capitalism is purely for profit, not to meet human needs.

4) CAPITALIST: A member of the class that monopolizes the means of producing wealth and lives off profit, rent or interest.

5) COMMUNISM/COMMUNIST: Often confused with state capitalism, in which the means of production are owned by the state. Communism is synonymous with socialism, a system of common ownership and democratic control with production solely for use. Wealth is taken freely, in quantities self-determined by each individual. One who adheres to this doctrine is a Communist. The Communist Party and the left wing are therefore not communist.

6) DEMOCRACY: Rule by and for the people. Today wealth is created by most of the people, yet owned by very few of them. Socialism will be democratic in that production will be geared towards satisfying society’s needs, while ideas will be given the fullest opportunity of expression.

7) JOB/EMPLOYMENT: The producers of wealth—the workers—are also the non-owners. So their existence is determined by their selling of labour power (their ability to work) to the capitalist class for a wage or salary. Wherever there is employment there is capitalism, and vice-versa.

8) MATERIALISM: The doctrine that matter is the primary substance of all things. Materialism explains all existence in evolutionary terms, even Humankind’s social organisation, known as Historical Materialism. The antithesis of Materialism is Idealism, which because it stresses ideas as the basis for all existence and processes sees everything upside-down.

9) RELIGION: Not just idealist, but even sillier. Suggests all life was created by one god, or several of them, and is a force which controls us or judges us. “Goodness" or “badness" in life determines reward or punishment in the after-life. God is normally on the side of the country that supports it financially and has proven to be a very untrustworthy source of help to the sufferers in wars and miseries. Not only has no god been found, but the socialists hope they’ll positively go away so the workers will focus their attention on themselves.

10) RIGHT-WING: Like the Left-Wing it suggests that capitalism can be run in the interests of all, generally on condition that there is minimum state interference. But they don’t mean the state shouldn’t fight wars when profit demands or that the state should stop interfering with workers’ struggles for higher standards of life.

11) SCHOOL: A place where children between the age of four and eighteen years learn how to respect authority, and how to become useful workers (or capitalists, depending on the school). The appalling quality of this education is such that when children don’t like the outside world they'r being trained for, they have to look for the SPGB to learn how to get rid of it.

12) SOCIALISM/SOCIALIST: A system based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of producing and distributing wealth. Production not for profit, but for use. There will therefore be no money, wages, prices, nations or social classes. A socialist is an adherent of socialism, which clearly the Labour Party, SWP and so on are not.

13) STATE: The machinery of government (armed forces, police, judiciary system) which operates in the interest of capitalism, of profit, of those who live off profit. It is supported by taxes, a burden on the capitalist class (not the working class, who must receive enough money to reproduce themselves as a class anyway). When the world is socialist, states will no longer be necessary as the interests of each individual will be maintained by social organisation itself (free goods, free speech, freedom of movement).

14) STRIKE: The essential weapon of the working class in a world of owners and non-owners. Recognising the limits of industrial action, however, will induce the majority to resort to a political alternative.

15) TRADE UNION: Organisation of the working class to resist the encroachments of capital. It can bargain, it can strike, but it can’t bring socialism. Trade unions are significant historically since they reveal the potential power of a united working class. Time for such a majority in the SPGB working not for higher wages but the end of the wages system itself.

16) WAGE:/SALARY: The object of our work in capitalism—our source of income. The wage is actually a rationing device which allows us just a small proportion of what we have produced. There will be no wages in socialism because common ownership means free access to wealth.

17) WAR: A nation’s resort to violence to procure or protect markets, raw materials, trade-routes or political prestige. Yet we workers do the killing and the dying despite having nothing to protect. We have nothing to lose and a world to win—so let’s abolish the market system which causes so much misery.

18) WORK/WORKER/WEALTH: Work is the application of our mental and physical energies to raw materials. In capitalism the wealth-producers are working in order to live. Isn’t it time we abolished class, and therefore employment. and established a society in which we labour for our individual ends, and for society (both synonymous interests then as the contribution to society will create the abundance we may draw from freely)? Let’s end this mad system and replace it with a society of common ownership

LEVAR

Some taxing questions (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

The propagandists of capitalism are always lecturing the working class about our alleged obligations and responsibilities (to the capitalists, of course). We are told that to ask for higher wages is irresponsible, that all pay increases must be earned by higher productivity, that “restrictive practices" must be abandoned. The implication of all this propaganda is that the workers are somehow managing to cheat the capitalists and take more than they give whereas the capitalist system could not operate without the system of legalised theft through which profits are made. Putting that aside for the moment however, one might expect the capitalists, having struck this moral attitude, to set a good example themselves. This is far from the case however; taxation is a good example of their hypocrisy.

The capitalist class throughout the world is divided into various groups, each of which operates a state machine in its interests. To use the terms “country" or “nation” for these entities is to fall into a trap set by the ruling class, to create the illusion that the state represents the interests of the whole population. In order to run the services provided by the state, taxes are raised by the capitalist governments. Part of the fantasy concerning the nature of the state is that the whole population is contributing to the funds raised by taxation, and is receiving certain benefits in return. The truth, however, is that the capitalist class alone contribute to the national exchequer; the other social class the working class-does not pay taxes.

At first sight this assertion appears absurd. After all, many workers on their weekly or monthly payslips will see that a certain amount of money has been deducted for “income tax". And often when we buy something, the price tag will tell us that “value added tax” has been included. The answer to this apparent contradiction lies in the way wages arc determined.

In order to have access to the means of living, workers must sell their labour power, physical and mental energies, to an employer. Labour power is a commodity and its value, about which its price fluctuates, depends on the labour time necessarily involved in its production and reproduction. The wage or salary which the worker receives is the price of the labour power, on average just enough to keep the worker and any dependants in a state fit to carry out the tasks required by the capitalist class. Of necessity it must be the net wage, the worker’s take-home pay, which represents the price of labour power. Thus the “income tax” deduction on a worker’s pay slip is. in fact, part of the employer’s payment to the exchequer, and not a charge on the worker.

Now, in view of all the denunciations by the capitalist media of the “greed” and “irresponsibility” of the workers, what sort of example is set by the capitalist class when it comes to their own responsibilities in the matter of paying taxes? Sixty years ago Lord Clyde, a High Court Judge, set the moral tone in delivering judgement in 1920 in the case Ayrshire Pullman Motor Services and D. M. Ritchie v IRC:

No man in this country is under the the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his finances or to his property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest shovel into his stores.

More up-to-date illustrations of capitalist ethics are given in the Granada TV Production series Business Decisions. The programme screened on 28 June last was devoted to tax problems. The TV Times billing posed the following questions: “How far can a business go to minimise its tax bill? How far will the Inland Revenue go to pursue offenders and change the law?” The assembled panel of executives, civil servants and “experts” were in basic agreement that to stretch the letter of the law to its limit for the purpose of tax avoidance was perfectly legitimate, indeed laudable. When it was suggested that “the government needs this money”, a company finance manager said simply “I need it too ”.

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

One thing is certain however: if some capitalists can reduce the tax bill they pay to the state, either more must be extracted from the other capitalists, or the services provided to that class as a whole will have to be reduced. The hypocrisy in the attitude expressed by this finance manager does not lie so much in saying that “his” firm need the money (although many who have massive resources will say this) but in the sharp contrast between the morality displayed here and the continuous demands for sacrifices from the workers. The distinction drawn in the programme between tax avoidance which stays just within the law, taking advantage of loopholes in it, and tax evasion, which the state is usually compelled to punish severely, is one which is of some concern to the ruling class although in reality no difference in principle is involved.

The use of tax havens has become increasingly common, so that it is now probably the most popular method of tax avoidance. A tax haven is a country where a taxpayer from a different country may achieve some relief from the taxation in his place of origin. Small states such as Lichtenstein and the Cayman Islands, which do not need to provide much in the way of services, are famous as tax havens. The revenue authorities in these places know that there is only one reason for a non-national forming a company there. However, some eminently respectable financial centres can also be used as tax havens. It is not, for instance, generally realised that Britain comes into this category, despite all the propaganda from the ruling class about “penal rates of taxation”. There are considerable attractions for non-residents, or even foreign nationals temporarily resident here. A UK registered company controlled from abroad pays no UK corporation tax on its non UK income and is free of capital gains and capital transfer taxes. This has made a useful and prestigious base for many multi-national businesses.

It is a sobering thought that this double standard is so openly admired by so many workers. It illustrates again how little pressure is yet being exerted for the abolition of capitalism, despite the misinformed optimism of a few left wingers. People generally act in what they believe are their best interests, and tax avoidance is only one quite small illustration of capitalists doing just that. To denounce them for doing so, as many left wingers do, is to miss the point completely. The trouble is that the working class have an incorrect appreciation of where their true interests lie, still believing that the capitalist system can somehow be made to operate, like some great tropical tax haven, to their benefit.

E. C. Edge