Sting in the Tail: None So Blind (1990)

The Sting in the Tail column from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

None So Blind

Whenever outbreaks of racial, ethnic or religious intolerance occurred in America or Western Europe, supporters of the "communist" dictatorships would claim that none of these evils could happen in "the socialist countries" because their governments, through education, had eradicated them.

These governments had, after all, exclusive use of the education system and the media for decades, so surely this, together with their avowed opposition to such evils, should have succeeded in at least reducing them.

Every day we can see the awful reality: anti-semitism, national, ethnic and religious hatreds are rife in all the so-called "socialist countries" and have even produced minor wars in some of them.

Of course the dictatorships had never even tried to remove the old divisions but had merely kept the lid on them. These divisions persist because the conditions which spawned them — ignorance, poverty and insecurity — remain, and this was something those supporters of the state capitalist dictatorships couldn't or wouldn't see.

Noble Toady

Lord Woodrow Wyatt has complained in the House of Lords about political bias by "left-wing" TV programme makers.

But what about Tory Was in the press? As was pointed out in the same debate, Rupert Murdoch owns 35% of the national press and no one can say his papers aren't biased.

Wyatt didn't complain about THAT because, you see, he is a columnist (The Voice of the People) in the News of the World which is owned by — Rupert Murdoch!

Ridiculous Ridley

The political demise of Nicholas Ridley, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, will leave all socialists dry eyed. He was the usual brand of arrogant Tory so beloved of the Prime Minister. His political departure, seen from the perspective of a socialist, is of no importance whatsoever to the working class.

What is of interest to socialists in the Ridley resignation is the background which led to it. Mr. Ridley, after what would appear to have been too good a lunch, spouted his ridiculous nonsense Into the tape recorder of the editor of The Spectator.

Even by arrogant Tory standards these were far from diplomatic musings:

This is all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe. It has to be thwarted. This risked takeover by the Germans on the worst possible basis, with the French behaving like poodles to the Germans, Is absolutely intolerable . . . I'm not against giving up sovereignty on principle, but not to this lot. You might as well give in to Adolf Hitler.

To the suggestion of The Spectator that if these were his views would he consider resignation he replied:

I've been in office for 14 years. I've been elected to parliament six times. I’m still at the top of the political tree, and I'm not done yet.

It was once said by another political trickster that "A week is a long time In politics." And it has been proved to be the case for Mr. Ridley. His political tree has been chopped down, and politically he is most definitely done.

Society in Conflict

Good news for some in capitalism is usually bad news for others and we are reminded of this by ICI's decision to close its loss-making fertiliser business.

For example, as fertilisers have lost £39 million in the last four years, then ICI's shareholders can hope for bigger dividends in future.

Against that are the 640 workers who will lose their jobs. The "greens" will be happy as ICI's inorganic fertilisers are a major source of water pollution. But if any "greens" are among the sacked workers then they will hardly know whether to laugh or cry.

Incidentally, one of ICI's reasons for the closure, that farmers are simply using less fertiliser, greatly pleased one newspaper:

There can be few things more nonsensical than one farmer ladling fertiliser onto a field while the farmer next door is being paid a set-aside grant by the EEC to grow nothing.

(The Guardian 26 July)

We can thank The Guardian for unwittingly revealing another feature of capitalism — its anarchy of production.

Roads to Ruin

Socialists are always showing that capitalism is a wasteful, inefficient social system. A recent report in The Independent 16 August Illustrates our point very well.

A committee of MPs reporting to the Department of Transport on the state of Britain's roads was scathing on the constant need for these roads to be repaired.

Robert Sheldon, Labour MP for Ashton-under-Lyne and chairman of the committee, said: "The Romans built roads that lasted thousands of years. We build our roads and eight years later we have to start repairing them."

The construction of these roads goes out to tender and the cheapest quote gets the job. The construction companies all have shareholders who are only interested in one thing — profit. So it does not take a financial wizard to appreciate that like all profit-making businesses every effort will be made to cut costs.

The cheapest materials possible will be used. In order to cut labour costs all sorts of schemes will be devised to speed up the work, inevitably producing a sub-standard job.

The extent of this shoddy production is reflected in the staggering costs of repairs:

More than £1 billion a year is spent building new motorways, trunk roads and bridges. The report said the National Audit Office had identified 210 cases of premature defects, with total repair costs of £262 million.

In defending this waste of human effort Christopher Chope, Road and Transport Minister, inadvertently revealed the cause of the whole sorry mess.

You could build all the roads so that they would not need repairs for 60 years, but the cost would be so great it probably would not represent good value.

This type of reasoning is typical of the capitalist system. Motor cars are built that only last a few years, car ferries operate that turn turtle in the English Channel, aircraft are flying with fire hazardous fittings that could be replaced by safer materials. The catalogue is a long, depressing and often tragic one.

The Lively Corpse

Someone once wrote a blood-curling story about a murderer who couldn't get rid of the body. He burned it in a furnace, submerged it in acid, dumped it in a lake, cut it into pieces, but the corpse always returned. The murderer finally gave up and turned himself in after waking up one morning to find the thing in bed with him.

This tale reminds us of the exasperating resilience of something else that will not lie down — the class struggle.

Academics and politicians are forever assuring us that it is dead and yet it constantly turns up all over the world in the form of, for example, strikes and lock-outs.

Despite repressive laws and awesome state power ranged against them, workers have created trade unions in South Africa, Eastern Europe, South Korea, etc.

As long as capital and wage-labour exist then so must the class struggle and this is something which all those who would bury it cannot change.

SPGB Meeting: A Socialist View of the Middle East Crisis (1990)

Party News from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

The letters page of the November 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard carried a couple of comments about the September 11th meeting, including critical comments from the Left-Communist International Communist Current.

There is a recording of the available. Sadly, I can't embed the video on the blog but it is available on the SPGB's website. I haven't listened to it, so I can't vouch for the sound quality.

THE GULF CRISIS – ANOTHER WAR FOR OIL

Panel – Steve Coleman, Richard Headicar, Kerima Mohideen

Venue: Conway Hall, London

Date: 11th September 1990

Caught In The Act: One of us (1990)

The Caught In The Act Column from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of us

One of Parliament's discarded traditions was that the Labour benches should be thickly strewn with men whose roughened hands and accents betrayed their antecedents as coal miners, dockers, steel workers and the like.

Some of these Honourable Members were so uncouth as to make caustic speeches about the archaic rituals, the ambitious toadying and the cross party amity which seemed so necessary to life in the Commons and to wonder how these things could be endured by a party which was supposed to stand for social revolution. Others were so struck by what they saw that they could hardly wait to kit themselves and their wives in the finery needed to participate in revolutionary activities like Buckingham Palace garden parties.

Among these vacillating members were some points of stability — people whose wealth and heritage gave them an immunity against the rampant naivety. These were the MPs who tried to deceive themselves that they were impelled by their consciences onto the side of tho class whose exploitation provided their exalted status, who tried to avert any accusations of patronising their less wealthy Labour colleagues by outdoing them in outrageous left-winging — or rather eccentricity.

One frequent outcome of this was promotion into government rank, which quickly emphasised to them that they were in Parliament to protect the interests of the ruling class and not to sympathise with a sentimental jumble of misconceived substitutes for political principles.

Electioneering

In the first Cabinet of the 1945 Labour government there were five ex-public schoolboys (including two Old Etonians) amongst them Hugh Dalton and Stafford Cripps, whose opinions and work as managers of the finances of British capitalism disqualified them from any claim to be socialists. Both were enthusiastic propagators of the ruling class message to the British workers, that they had to work harder and receive less so that their exploiters could win back their place in the world economy of capitalism.

If at times rich people sat uneasily alongside ex-miners and dockers it was because they were not considered to be One of Us. They winced as they kissed voter's babies (employing a nanny to bring up their own children, they could never be sure they were holding the child the right way up); supping obligatory pints of mild in the constituency working men's club was little short of agony to a sensitive soul longing for the sanctuary of evening sherry among elegant friends who did not speak with those dreadful accents.

That, at least, is one agony that time and political developments have eased, for as Labour has established itself as the alternative government for British capitalism its MPs are more likely to be economists, barristers, doctors or journalists than toilers by hand. The eccentrics are now members like Dennis Skinner, who performs the intellectual juggling act of supporting capitalism by being a member of the Labour Party while having a reputation for making irreverent and penetrating comments on the essential hypocrisy of the system

Tory trade unionists

The Tories have not been free of such problems After their defeat in 1945 party chairman Lord Woolton decided that the way back to power lay in getting out among the people All over the country the Tories took to the streets at outdoor meetings 

Among their London speakers was Bob Bullbrook, a thick-set man (which could also be said of his brain) with a voice like an injured buffalo. Because he was a trade unionist (he liked to introduce himself to his audiences as a gas worker, which was not liable to pacify them) Bullbrook was something of a protected species in the Tory Party so they adopted him as their candidate in some constituency where Labour sat on an Everest-like majority. Of course he failed to scale it and. unlike other Tory hopefuls, he was not rewarded with the candidacy of progressively winnable seats. When the Conservatives came back to power their interest in outdoor propaganda faded and with it Bob Bullbrook. In spite of his energy and misguided commitment Bullbrook was not One of Us.

But one example of the threatened species did survive, at least for a while, Ray Mawby was more or less forced onto the Tories in his constituency Totnes — by the party hierarchy in their eagerness to reassure all trade unionists that their interests were close to the hearts of Conservatives in even the poshest, most secure of parliamentary seats.

Educated at a council school and trained as an electrician, Mawby's dour and unappealing personality grated on the Old Etonians and ex-officers who sat alongside him. He lacked what are politely called the social graces, speaking like an electrician who has just had a nasty shock from a wrongly wired up plug and probably shovelling his peas in with his knife. His fellow Tory MPs. on the assumption that so charmless a bounder must be Labour, would sometimes ask him to pair with them (what Mawby replied was not recorded and in any case was probably not suitable for a publication intended for family reading) This treatment did not reduce his ardour for capitalism nor for corporal and capital punishment for those who offended against the system's law and order

After holding a couple of minor jobs under the Postmaster General (which hardly helped to sustain the propaganda about the welcome awaiting trade unionists in the Tory Party) Mawby was contemptuously and relievedly deselected by the Totnes Tories and, no doubt to the satisfaction of a lot of trade unionists, he was then forced to sign on the dole. It was as much as he could expect he was. after all. not One of Us.

Madness

A lot of energy is expanded in analysing the collusive aspects of capitalist politics and the effect this has on the way the system is organised and governed. Bitter, rejected people like Mawby are prone to develop ideas about how much moro efficient — more repressive, predictable, exploiting — capitalism would be were it not for irrelevant prejudices that power should be wielded by those who went to the 'right' school and university or who wore in a ’good' regiment — or active in an ideologically right trade union. That neat, simple theory has led the outraged sensibilities of many a political reject. The snag is that it does not match with reality.

Whoever has been in charge of capitalism, and whatever their origins, the effects on the system and on the working class whose exploitation nurtures the entire set-up, has been unnoticeable. At one time it may be a languid. superior Trollope-addict like Macmillan: at another a professed meritocrat like Wilson or Heath: at another a philistinic small town grocer like Thatcher

These leaders offer material enough to assuage the appetite of the hungriest sociologist searching for an illusory insight and solution for capitalism's desperate problems. One vital fact fails to engage their attention: by its nature this social system cannot satisfy human needs, it must produce schisms.

Ray Mawby once said it would need a psychiatrist to discover why he went Conservative. Well yes — that goes for them all: it is not absolutely necessary to be mad to support capitalism but it helps 

Ivan

Germany reunites (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The East German state circus, traditionally one of the most revered in the world, has been closed down. What animals can be sold will be; the rest are to be killed. The market has come to town and the unprofitable circus must go. Into the fertile area of East German magazine sales has come the West German and American porn industry. There are profits there, you see. Ah, the sickly smell of free-market "liberation’’.

If you read the British press it all seems so simple. East German Communism has been swept away. The free marketeers have come from the West to make life good. Germany is to be unified. The Germans are to be the most prosperous of Europeans. Hurrah for capitalism! The reality is different. There never was communism in East Germany, but state capitalism, ruled over by a class of party bosses who ran East German exploitation for their own ends.

State capitalism, not socialism of any description. has failed utterly and now East Germany is to be integrated into the rest of the private-capitalist world. Germany is being unified, but it is still divided between those who own its resources—the capitalists—and those who produce its wealth—the workers. These two classes, whose interests are diametrically opposed to one another, can never be united, except in terms of a national illusion. As for prosperity coming to Germany, there are plenty of workers who will tell a different tale—particularly the more that they are exposed to the harshness of the unregulated market.

Massive unemployment

East German workers face massive unemployment. In the past their jobs, which were often state-subsidised in order to maintain the appearance of full employment, produced goods for the East German national market. Now that market is being saturated by West German capitalist outfits which can sell higher quality commodities than East Germany is able to make. Of the 8000 East German firms, which are due to be privatised in October, the vast majority cannot compete on the open market with their West German rivals. In particular, food, textiles and mechanical engineering firms are going bust.

According to Creditreform, a West German credit-rating company which is now active in the East, there will be two million workers unemployed in East Germany after the October privatisation. The "good news" is that new jobs—just under a million—will emerge by the end of 1991 in new services, notably financial institutions and hotels (Rheinischer Merkur, 15 June). Even if this promised light at the end of the dark tunnel of unemployment proves to be a correct prediction, who wants to move from producing useful wealth to taking jobs counting money in banks or insurance houses, or waiting on tourists? Is that what liberation means? And it should be noted that even if the most optimistic forecasts come true, there will still be over a million unemployed East Germans by the end of next year.

East German workers with jobs are discovering something else: that they are expected to pay West German prices for goods and services, but the capitalists investing in East Germany are only willing to pay old East German wages. So. we see the disgusting contradiction of East German stores with shelves full of hitherto unobtainable commodities, but all that the East German wage slaves can afford to do is look at them longingly.

They were fed the lie that once the Berlin Wall came down they would enjoy access to all the goodies which they had spent years seeing advertised on West German television. Well, the Wall is down, but poverty persists. Is it any wonder that the German press has reported a major increase in petty crime in East Germany? The capitalist explanation is that the East German workers have yet to understand the ethos of private property relations and are recovering from years of state-capitalist frustration. The fact is that they are angry, particularly the young East Germans who were promised a market which would liberate them; they have been offered unemployment or low wages, and commodities which they are too poor to buy. Such is capitalist "freedom".

Struggle against new bosses

Workers who were out in the streets last year to bring down the Honecker dictatorship are now having to struggle against their new bosses. Workers in the East German shoe and leather industry have called nationwide token strikes to draw attention to their plight. More than half a million jobs are at stake in that industry and all that "liberation" offers them is a future job in a hotel or a bank.

The striking workers will be defeated. The hypocritical German capitalists, who showed such theatrical concern for their struggle when it was fought against the old state-capitalist elite, could not care less what becomes of the workers now that they have their grubby hands on the united German shoe industry. At the end of last year the German press was celebrating the struggle for freedom being waged by the newly-formed Free Federation of German Trades Unions, an umbrella organisation of East German non-state unions. The same union called for an increase in net pay of 50 percent as from 1 July this year. The same newspapers who were cheering them on less than a year ago are now denouncing their "impertinent" demands.

The East German workers were right to overthrow the anti-democratic state- capitalist dictatorship of the Communist Party. They were more than right: they were heroic in taking on a force which we now know was planning to put down the rebel workers in the same way as the Chinese dictators did at Tiananmen Square. But the victory of last winter was a battle won. not a war ended. The East German workers had better realise that the owners of the Earth, be they private or state capitalists, Eastern or Western, will oppress and exploit them until they are dispossessed of their ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution. The class war goes on. Experience will teach this to the East German workers—as it did to the many Polish workers who recently organised a massive rail strike against their new oppressors in the Solidarity government—but a period of temporary enchantment with the wonders of the illusory free market is bound to occur.

Housing crisis

East German wage slaves who have voted to be led by Kohl and his team of market-lovers. and the other workers conned by the reformist promise of welfare capitalism offered by the SPD, need only peep over the border to Hamburg where their fellow workers, long-standing members of a "free" capitalist nation, face a major housing crisis.

The Hamburg Abendblat (27 April) reports that rents in Hamburg have increased from early 1989 to early 1990 by an average of 33 percent. This figure is second only to Stuttgart where the rent per square metre has gone up 39 percent in the past year. The German housing problem has led to widespread opposition to the granting of housing to East German workers wanting to settle in the more prosperous Western sector. So. after years of waiting for the Wall to come down. East German workers are now being told not to compete with their Western counterparts for cheap or subsidised housing. The new Wall is made of poverty and fear.

The Guardian (27 July) referred to the West German housing crisis as “a political battlefield . . . a social scandal in a land of conspicuous prosperity: the squeezing out of the housing market of tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands of citizens". The West German Housing Minister. Gerda Hasselfedt, estimates that one in four East German homes are “uninhabitable" and three in four “need to be totally renovated". If new homes are not to be built, and old ones improved, by the state, then who will take on the task?

Private property developers and landlords certainly have no interest to gain in building houses and doing up old ones for the benefit of poor people. On the contrary, with an excess of supply over demand their economic interest is to push up the rents and interest rates on mortgages. As ever, the housing problem is not about an inability to produce houses—last year there was a 14.7 percent increase in German house-building, mainly at the more expensive end of the market. It is about the inability of workers who need homes to pay for them at prices that will bring profits to capitalists.

The housing crisis has also given rise to a wave of anti-immigrant feeling amongst the least enlightened workers. Where Turkish “guest workers" were once tolerated, German racists are saying that that it is bad enough having to compete with other Germans without having to put up with "foreigners". In the riotous celebrations following the German football victory in the World Cup:

East Berlin and Hamburg . . . witnessed bloody battles between police and young right-wing extremists, as well as attacks on Vietnamese, Turks and other foreigners . . . In Cologne a group set on a young Turkish taxi driver trapped in the delirious crowd, trying to overturn his car and lynch him. Police again used tear gas and batons to help him escape . . . (Guardian, 10 July).

The government has responded to this rise in racist insecurity by passing an Aliens Law which is designed to frighten away non-German workers wanting to settle there.

Germany is set to be the new European superpower. If you have millions of Deutschmarks invested in the Bundesbank you may be in for some sharp rises in profits. But most readers of this journal do not. Neither do the West German workers struggling to pay high rents. The hundreds of thousands of East Germans who are being thrown on the scrap heap of the unemployed do not. Nor do those who will have to face cuts in German welfare services which will have to be made so that taxes can be kept down so that German capitalists have money to invest in the East. In East Germany the circus is closing down and the lions are being given a fatal jab; for the wage slaves of Germany the future offers little in the way of either bread or circuses.

Steve Coleman

Workers' Paradise (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Out of the 1600 essential goods supplied by the government, 1500 are in short supply. If prices rise two or three times, as they are expected to do, you can imagine what will happen to the 80 per cent of the population who are close to the poverty line". 

- Gennady Yanayev, leader of the official Soviet trade unions. (Times, 30 June).

Contradictions of capitalism (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Defenders of the capitalist class, noticeably those from the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute, have recently been rather vocal in claiming that commodity production—buying and selling and the market—represent the climax of human economic development and in asserting the uselessness of anyone seeking to establish an alternative social system.

This confident bravado coincides with the collapse of state capitalist dictatorships in central Europe. Confusing nationalisation and state planning with socialism, these ideologists present capitalism, particularly the private form they favour, as a “rational” system effortlessly drifting towards some kind of free market Utopia in which every facet of the social world will be reduced to a commodity relationship. Some even suggest that governments and their economic advisers possess the necessary management skills to avert economic problems, while politicians, journalists and academics tell us in unison to be satisfied with our lot and to realise we are living in the best of all possible worlds.

This form of blinkered conservatism miserably fails to understand the workings of capitalism and the array of contradictions to be found within commodity production and distribution.

Economic crises

Despite the political rhetoric, for the governments and the economists who frame their policy documents there remains the uncomfortable fact that the economic and social problems which are features of capitalism cannot simply be wished away. Take for example economic crises and trade depressions which express all the contradictions of commodity production and highlight the anarchy of a system whose sole aim is to produce commodities for a profit.

It was Marx who discovered that crises spring from the very character of capitalism itself. Capitalism produces commodities which have to be exchanged to realise the profit embodied in them and the medium of exchange is money. Yet in this transaction there is an implicit contradiction which Marx expressed in the following way:

No one can sell unless some one else purchases. But no one is forthwith bound to purchase because he has just sold.(Capital. Vol I. chapter 3. section 2a).

Any break in this commodity chain of buying and selling will result in a crisis in which:

The spinner cannot pay because the weaver cannot pay: both of them do not pay the machine manufacturer who does not pay the iron, timber and coal merchant. All these again cannot meet their obligations as they have not realised the value of their commodities . . . and a general crisis thus arises. (Theories of Surplus Value, vol.III pt 2 pp 284-285).

Marx's theoretical explanation of the irrationality and unpredictability of capitalism, and of its crises, small and large, national or global, has been verified empirically, not only during his life-time but afterwards too. We only have to think back to the crisis and resultant trade depression at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s to see the vindication of Marx over the dreary academic economists and their theories of capitalism as a smooth-running rational system.

Profit before Need

There is currently a slump in the housebuilding industry. Before the crisis there was a feverish boom, with developers building as fast as they could acquire land. Workers within the building industry or related to it were able to gain higher wages, estate agents were snapped up by large corporations with many trading seven days a week, while the Sunday Supplements predicted the boom would last forever.

Then the break in the chain occurred between those buying houses and those selling them. Suddenly developers found they had unsold houses on their hands with interest repayments still outstanding to the banks. Some went bankrupt bringing unemployment and disruption to the lives of their employees. Contractors and building workers found work evaporating, while materials began to stockpile and large distribution companies began to lay off workers. The government and their economic advisers were neither able to predict the depression in house-building nor do anything about it once it had occurred.

This is a classic example of the way under capitalism a contradiction develops between production for profit and social need. Because of the inability to sell houses and realise a profit, house-building is stopped or cut-back while the needs of people for housing are passed over and remain unfulfilled.

This contradiction under capitalism between production for profit and social need takes place in other spheres of commodity production too. Peter Buchanan's 'Open Space' (BBC2 29 May) recently exposed the lie of the consumer fantasy world of the advertisers—the stick which beats the bucket of swill—by showing us homeless men in Cambridge being driven off a skip full of out-of-date supermarket food. There is also capitalism's complete indifference to the needs of 1.8 billion children under the age of 16 in the world to-day. According to a recent report, 61,000 children under the age of 5 die every day in the extreme poverty-stricken areas of the world as a result of preventable diarrhoeal diseases most of which are caused by poor water (Guardian, 25 March). In a rational society producing directly for social need this problem could easily be dealt with through the use of existing technology and of the skills of people working in the field of sanitation engineering. But we don't exist in a rational society: capitalism is perverse and indifferent to anything but the making of profit.

Despite the well-meaning but totally misplaced and ineffective effort of people in charities, the problem of starvation exists side by side with food mountains and deliberate underproduction. Farmers are paid subsidies not to produce and agricultural land is taken out of production to ensure profits are maintained. It would only be someone with a profitable interest in capitalism or someone who had been bought by the capitalist class to produce ruling-class ideas who could ever depict capitalism as "rational" or as a society representing the best of all possible worlds.

To rectify the problems, both social and economic, which affect workers today throughout the world, capitalism has to be abolished and replaced by socialism. To create this new social system of common ownership and democratic control over the means to life in which these problems can be solved and the needs of society met, requires conscious political action by a working class majority. No one else can do it for us. Until we take the necessary steps to capture political power then economic depressions, unemployment poverty and unfulfilled needs will continue: to borrow a phrase from one of Mrs Thatcher s speech writers, "There is no alternative".

Richard Lloyd

50 Years Ago: An Offence to Destroy Food—But only in War-Time (1990)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reviving a practice adopted during the last war. the Government has issued an order under which it is an offence to waste food. Heavy penalties, up to two years' imprisonment and a £500 fine, may be imposed on persons who wilfully or negligently damage or throw away anything "used by man for food or drink other than water", water being already covered by bye-laws.

This seems all very reasonable. What could be more natural than that it should be illegal to destroy or waste food when there are human beings in need of it. But observe. The order to this effect introduced in the last war ceased when the war ended. No authorities stepped in to fine and imprison the individuals and companies responsible for destroying wheat and coffee, throwing fish back into the sea, feeding milk to pigs, and so on. Indeed, in some countries the destruction of foodstuffs to keep up prices was organised with the active support of State authorities themselves.

There is, indeed, something very unnatural about the social system that permitted such things.

[From an editorial in the Socialist Standard, September 1940.]

Death of a politician (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Have you recovered yet from the death of Ian Gow? How devastated were you by the assassination of that implacable, unquestioning, indiscriminate supporter of capitalism as administered by Thatcherite Tories? In one respect Gow's death was unremarkable: we were told how clever, brave, considerate, reliable he was (readers can add their own laudatory adjectives from the vocabulary they will have amassed from the tributes paid to other dead politicians). Apparently, political life is teaming with such estimable people and we should grieve deeply when they die. The only problem is why, if we are governed by such capable leaders, is the world in such a mess? Are we worse off, when one of them dies, than we were when they were alive?

Ian Gow was the son of an eminent doctor. He went to public school and did his National Service as an officer in one of those regiments which liked to pretend they still rode into battle on horses. He qualified as—and always looked like—a solicitor before turning his attention to politics. After contesting a couple of constituencies where the Labour majority made his a hopeless cause (in one, at Coventry East, the voters were so impressed with Gow’s qualities that they gave his Labour opponent—Richard Crossman—a doubled majority) he was handed the plum seat of Eastbourne. In 1945 the Labour Party, fielding a personable ex-officer against the remote and disdainful Tory incumbent had come within shouting distance of winning there. But the colonels and landladies of that seaside town quickly got their political bearings back and by the last general election they were presenting Gow with a majority of almost 17,000 while the Labour candidate could scrape up less than 5,000 votes.

Selsdon man

In parliament Gow soon put down his markers, joining the Selsdon Group which opposed Ted Heath’s drift away from the policies agreed by the conference of Conservative bigwigs at the Selsdon Park Hotel in the run-up to the 1970 election. Selsdon foresaw a Tory government declining to intervene in disputes between employers and workers, or in the case of an unprofitable company, or to use official influence on wages and prices; state interference in such affairs had led to the dire condition of British capitalism in the 1960s: henceforth they would all be left to be sorted out by the pressures of the market. The Labour Party delightedly likened these ideas to the emergence of a primitive being—Selsdon Man.

Heath put Selsdon Man out of his misery. attempting to resolve the crisis which hit his government by his famous U-turns on Rolls Royce and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and some other issues. The Selsdon Group—Nicholas Ridley was another member—campaigned against this abandonment of what it saw as the policies essential for the salvation of British capitalism: the free market, privatisation, education vouchers, private health services and big cuts in taxation and public spending. It might have occurred to the Selsdon Group that theories about state intervention had developed because private enterprise left to itself had failed to control capitalism but people like Nicholas Ridley have never been susceptible to arguments based on fact.

Gow's membership of the Group could not have harmed his reputation with Thatcher, who when she came to power in 1979 made him her Parliamentary Private Secretary, which was a polite name for her whipper-in and nark. In that job he was a meticulous note-taker at any meeting of potentially rebellious Tones and infuriated his colleague Jim Prior by openly stimulating opposition to Prior's Bill to set up an Assembly in Northern Ireland to start "rolling devolution" there. Prior called it a “disgraceful episode" but to Gow it was all in the day's unsavoury work; he was. in any case, a hard-line unionist.

He also irritated a lot of Tories by his sickening admiration of Thatcher, at one time saying that she had no great need to admit that she was ever wrong because she was almost always right. At times he was too much for even the Thatcherites to bear; one complained that, while he was preparing himself to contribute to the usual grovelling ovation at the end of one of the prime minister's speeches. Gow was "blubbering" before she had even begun.

Thatcherite Christian

If Gow had any ability beyond this kind of work it was not glowingly evident during his time as Minister of Housing (for which he was qualified by his ownership of a large and lovely 16th century house in the Sussex countryside) and then as Minister of State at the Treasury. When he resigned over the Anglo-Irish Agreement he could spend more time on church affairs, for he was as dogged a Christian as he was a Thatcherite.

It comes as no surprise that Gow should complain about the Church being too political (which meant critical of the Thatcher government and voicing concern about issues like deep poverty and homelessness) and not sufficiently Christian (which meant blindly supportive of Thatcher and careless of any human suffering). Although he was a Christian he clearly had reservations on that stuff about us all being god's children equally loved by our maker, for he opposed sanctions against South Africa and voted against legislation designed to relieve sex discrimination. He demanded an unquestioning acceptance of the killing of the three IRA members by the SAS in Gibraltar—a predictable attitude from a man who operated on the simple principle that "our" side was always right and "their" side always wrong. His physical concept of Jesus is unknown but he did not like men with beards since he suspected them of being what he called socialists.

At all events Gow was doing very well. A partner in a successful firm of solicitors, a member of Lloyds and of several costly and exclusive London clubs, with a liking for mixing and drinking exotic cocktails, he would have had reservations about the meek inheriting the earth. There is indeed little progress towards that illusionary object under the Thatcher government, which is perhaps why Gow supported it so ardently.

This is not the place for any detailed account of what this government has done: it can be summarised by saying that it has taken advantage of the present world economic conditions to inflict such damage on the trade unions as will take them a long time to recover from. It has ferociously attacked working class living standards and in particular those on the lower levels of poverty, who have been treated most savagely. It has seen the dreams of many of its bedrock supporters—small business people and those with a mortgage on their home—turn into nightmares which they can't wake up from. And while it persistently assures us that this suffering is necessary so that things can become better in the long run, and better permanently, the fact is that the problems persist. The rate of bankruptcies and insolvencies is increasing; price rises are accelerating and the CBI has recently stated that British capitalism is on the brink of another recession. This is the chaos which Ian Gow stood for so blindly.

To criticise the victim of an assassination, to take a hard look at how they thought, spoke and acted, is not to condone their murder. Political assassination is a futile business, which removes one twister to make room for another; the only effective way to deal with society’s problems is through democratic political action aimed at getting rid of capitalism and its twisting politicians. This is a social system which brutalises its people, under which life is cheap and millions die every year through wars or unnecessary diseases and “accidents". Being assassinated means that politicians who glorify in this inhumane way of running human affairs can go to their graves on a wave of outrage against their killers instead of against capitalism.

Ivan

Between the Lines: From the people who brought you John Wayne (1990)

The Between the Lines column from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

From the people who brought you John Wayne

When all that stands between us and the mass annihilation of a third world war are a few hours on the clock, who will we have to turn to and find out what is going on? Who will be telling us that it is right to fight? Who will say that the enemy is satanic and must be defeated at all costs7 Who will insist that the wasted lives of war are heroic gestures? Who will scream at us from morning to night that war is noble, that 'our side' has god on its side, that 'they' will never win. even if most of us must die to stop them?

It is one of the sickest ironies of capitalism that if there is a third world war, fought over the interests of the competing millionaires and billionaires, it will be the media, which is largely paid for and almost totally ideologically obedient to those billionaires and millionaires, that will have the monopoly on explaining what is going on. The capitalists not only possess the power to blow us up, but they have the power to con us into believing that it is right and necessary that we should be blown up.

The power of the media is never more dangerous than in time of war. It is then that the lies become bigger, the audacious assaults upon our intelligence greater, the resorts to half-truths and historical distortions grosser. If the news broadcasts are always but an echo of the interests of our masters in their world affairs, in war time the news becomes a blasting verbal cannon-fire of propaganda

In this war in the Middle East the TV newsreaders have done everything but put on uniforms. They have been recruited to the task of justifying the military force of 'our side' and attacking without explanation the 'madness' of the newfound enemy, to whom Britain used to be a major arms supplier. It is like Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four: four years ago Saddam was the friendly dictator who could be relied upon to kill the Iranians: now that he is the official enemy people who have never even heard of him before must be taught to hate him with a passion that only the media can whip up.

Who will the next hate figure be? What further methods will the media use to brutalise us into screaming that we want war? It is a dangerous box which workers have invited into the corners of their living rooms: it emits the poison gas of pro-war propaganda. Never mind all the reports of on links between TV violence and real violence — what about the link between news reporters who glorify war and tho widespread support for the indiscriminate slaughter of warfare which that generates? Or is that a legitimate use of TV to corrupt the minds of tho vulnerable7

Turning women into thugs

Speaking of corrupted minds and also of war — the two are closely linked — Channel Four showed a truly frightening documentary called Soldier Girls (16 August, 11pm). It was directed by Nicholas Broomfield and Joan Churchill. (Broomfield must be one of the most powerful and perceptive makers of documentaries depicting the lunacy of nationalism and militarism) The documentary was about the training of women to become soldiers in the US army. There are few things more disgusting to see than rows and rows of women, capable of producing life, lined up with guns and idiot's uniforms, learning how to destroy life. The documentary showed with awesome clarity just how these trainee thugs are brutalised, their sense of dignity and decency is forced out of them as they learn to become nothing but unfeeling cogs in the killing machine. Those who do not conform are punished by crazed officers whom the Iraqi army could only hope to match for madness.

One trainee, Private Johnson, made it clear from the start that the lunacy of army life was not for her. The officers tried everything to push her into line. What angered them most was that she kept on smiling as they shouted at her. Soldiers are not meant to smile. They punished her, they lectured her, they verbally assaulted her, and still she smiled when she should not have done. In one part of the documentary Johnson is taken into a room by two officers for what is laughably called 'counselling'.

A uniformed female officer and a male nutcase scream and shout at her The latter tells her: "Every time I look at you, Johnson, you got that same smart-arse look on your face, that same silly little smile. And then you got the gall to tell the lieutenant that you want to stay in my goddam army — and not do a damn thing for it. That's what irks me, Johnson You don't give a damn. The troops can't stand you. I mean, even our worst troops out there can't stand you. They don't even want to be around you. You are the type that irritates people just by your presence, without oven opening your mouth. Haven't you realised, Johnson, that you have that capacity to piss someone off just by standing there? Just the way you stand radiates total apathy, complete uncaring about god, man, animal, life water . . ." Incidentally. Johnson was black and the two officers were white. At the end of the documentary Johnson is seen leaving the army; if there are medals for smiling in the face of military madness. Johnson should receive one.

The only difference between training US killers and training Iraqi ones is that the latter are more likely to be killed. Perhaps the Middle East lunatics talk more about the god who is not there; the American screwballs talk about red. white and blue rags on poles which they would die for. It is all crazy — and those who deliver its messages are crazier still.

Steve Coleman

SPGB Meetings (1990)

Party News from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

What’s wrong with the unions? (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who said:

  When British industry is successful, we have near full employment, rising wages and salaries, and expanding social service . . . For Britain to provide a rising standard of living for all its people there must be a modern, efficient and competitive manufacturing base. Only manufacturing industry has the potential to keep our trade with the rest of the world in credible balance. Without this essential balance, economic growth will inevitably be slow or stagnant?

Was in Margaret Thatcher or Neil Kinnock in a party political broadcast? The President of the CBI? The Governor of the Bank of England? A Daily Telegraph leader berating a group of “greedy" workers engaged in industrial action? It was, in fact, Ron Todd, General Secretary of the TGWU. and Ken Gill, General Secretary of MSF. writing in a joint pamphlet Making Our Future. Manufacturing in the 1990s.

The Transport and General Workers Union remains Britain's largest union with a membership of over one-and-a-quarter million at the end of 1989. The T & G is made up of 14 trade groups ranging from Docks and Waterways to Textile, Food, Drink and Tobacco to Administrative, Clerical, Technical & Supervisory Staff. The ACTS personal organiser (filofax) contains a simplified guide to the T & G. In it, Ron Todd writes:

  For the TGWU the aim of a just and fair society has not changed in 100 years. What has changed is our understanding of what is fair. Justice today means the right for all who want to be able to sell their services for a good decent wage, in a safe working environment, and for those who cannot work to be treated as human beings.

Them and Us
So there we were. Monday morning, nine ack emma. Sixteen individuals whose last experience of a classroom learning situation was donkey's years ago. Sixteen individuals glance apprehensively at each other with the uncomfortable expression of those caught in the no man's land between workers and management.

Sixteen relatively new shop stewards on their induction course. As the tutor walked slowly into the hall the collective nervousness disappeared to be replaced by a frisson of anticipation. It was difficult to control the desire to leap up and chant in unison “Norman Willis, TUC! Norman Willis, TUC!" The prospect that the next three days would initiate us into the secrets of trade union power that the media is always going on about, and the passing on of the knowledge that would access us into the band of activists able to withdraw the labour of their members at the wave of a rule-book, was a giddy one. The reality, that trade unions are a product of the class struggle which is a component part of capitalism, was a constituent sadly lacking from an induction course that turned out in the end to be an indoctrination course.

The emphasis in this type of union course is concentrated on the practical skills required by a shop steward in the day-to-day industrial struggle—handling grievances, the internal organisation of the union, health and safety, and issues involving law. Role-playing exercises in grievance disputes and wage negotiations assume a them-and-us attitude. However, the them and us as presented by the union is not that of the capitalist class and the working class. It is not presented as the economic division between the minority who own and control the factories, the land, transport, communications, banks and shops and the majority working class who are forced to sell their labour power in order to live. It is presented as a division between management and workers.

If you have no alternative but to sell your physical or mental ability to work, your labour power, then whether you be a fitter/welder or finance director of a multi-national company, you are a member of the working class. The working class—us—is engaged in a battle with the capitalist class on two fronts, the economic and the political. The economic power which the ruling class enjoys derives from its grip on political power. The ruthless pursuit of profit, inherent in capitalism, requires that workers should group together in order to protect themselves from the worst excesses of capitalism.

It does not require that workers allow trade unions to be run by those who profess that capitalism can be reformed or restrained in favour of the working class. The trade unionist fixation with the pursuit of “a good decent wage" remains a forlorn objective when there is a world to win. The transition from a society based upon production for profit to a moneyless, wageless. classless, stateless society— socialism—requires concerted political action on the part of the working class.

Working with capitalism
In 1983 the TUC published a pamphlet Hands Up for Democracy, designed to "set the record straight” and "answer some of the grossly misleading anti-union propaganda which has become increasingly common in recent years". It says:

  In the real everyday world we live in, more and more people see a trade union as their best chance of security—an insurance policy, or even a passport to a better way of life. Most people don't have very much power. Big decisions always seem to be taken by someone else. Unions are the way ordinary people try to turn the they into we, to claim for themselves some of the power over the decisions that shape their lives.

The pamphlet goes on to list some of the things trade unions are involved in. These include “working with employers to increase productivity, to sort out problems of work and to make industry more efficient". The aims of trade unionism as seen by the TUC are "to build a better future" and to see “successful industry competing in world markets".

The prevailing ideas in society are those of the ruling class. The continuation of capitalism is dependent upon the support of the working class, those who run capitalism on behalf of capitalists but who derive the least benefit from a society based upon production for profit not use. Trade unions pay no small part in upholding and re-inforcing capitalism's contention that there is no alternative to a society where there are wage-earners, employers and industries competing on world markets.

Many trade union members and officials would, no doubt, be shocked at the suggestion that they are actively supporting capitalism. For do they not profess themselves socialists? In the A-Z of Trade Unionism and Industrial Relations (Sphere. 1986) Jack Jones, a former TGWU General Secretary, wrote:

  The trade union movement, while working within a capitalist economy to do the best for their members, has traditionally espoused policies aiming at the extension of public ownership and control or the replacement of private by public ownership and control, usually described as nationalisation.

Maybe. But what has nationalisation to do with socialism? It is just state capitalism

Despite the cosy relationship with capital—private or state—that trade union bosses try to foster, the ruling class has a greater awareness of the social relationships inherent in capitalism than does the working class. Over the last decade, there has been almost annual legislation designed to weaken the position of trade unions.

Yet the need is not for better-educated trade union members, shorter hours or more wages. The need is for socialism. As Marx told the British trade union leaders of his day in an address to the General Council of the International Working Men's Association in 1865:

  Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system.

Dave Coggan

Tolpuddle and today (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Rally is held every July to remember six Dorset farm labourers who in 1834 were sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia for the crime of organising a combination of workers to protect and attempt to improve their wages and conditions. In the past few years Socialist Party members and supporters in and around Dorset have attended this event, organised a stall offering a wide variety of socialist literature, and generally argued the case for world socialism and against capitalism in all its forms.

The Tolpuddle Rally, in common no doubt with many other trade union and working class events, shows the positive and negative aspects of working class organisation in the 1990s. On the more positive side, there is the anger of many workers at the problems, frustrations and limitations imposed upon us by a social system based upon minority class ownership of the means of life, production for profit and the exploitation of the useful majority; our ability to struggle and organise against such conditions is also clear. The problem is that workers seem too content to endlessly struggle against particular problems, attempting to treat them in isolation from the social system which creates them.

The events that the Tolpuddle Rally commemorates took place well over 150 years ago but despite the gap in time many similar problems remain today. One such example is trade union organisation. Workers at GCHQ are still involved in the basic struggle for the right to combine to protect and attempt to improve their wages and conditions of employment, following the ban on trade union organisation in that establishment in 1984. Trade unionists as a whole have in the last few years seen the introduction of legislation designed to weaken their ability to engage in effective industrial action. These events in themselves say much about the concept of freedom and democracy in capitalist society.

The struggle for trade union rights is of course a vital one so long as society is divided into two classes: those who produce but do not possess and those who possess but do not produce. For the former, trade union organisation is the only means of protection from the encroachments of capital. However, trade union organisation needs to be more about working class self-organisation and democratic control from bottom to top and less about letting leaders make decisions on our behalf. Secondly, trade unions which attach themselves to political parties which support capitalism, such as the Labour Party in Britain, risk having their effectiveness reduced when that particular party is in government. Also, the effectiveness of trade unions is very much dependent on economic conditions. Finally, whilst trade union organisation is vital for working class industrial self-defense, it is not an end in itself; workers also need to organise consciously and politically to abolish the system which is the root cause of the need to engage in this endless day-to-day struggle.

Fruitless diversions
Workers have been distracted from engaging in all-out struggle against the root cause of their problems by becoming involved in fruitless diversions and worthless causes. The two distractions that were most evident at Tolpuddle this year were the Poll Tax and state capitalism.

The collapse of state capitalist dictatorships in much of Eastern Europe has not deterred small groups of extreme dogmatists from putting forward the obscene idea that state capitalism equals socialism. The group next to the Socialist Party stall, the Revolutionary Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), were putting forward the outrageous claim that Albania is a socialist country where people live in peace, harmony and prosperity. "Hands Off Albania!" their headline screamed. The one interest socialists have in Albania is in looking forward to the day when workers in that country follow the example of other workers suffering under the heel of state capitalist dictatorships and organise to bring down that system, not as an end in itself but as a prelude to co-operating with workers in the rest of the world to establish genuine freedom and democracy.

There are hopeful signs that the end of the detestable regime in Albania might not be that far off. Whilst most workers have quite rightly rejected the idea that systems similar to the one in Albania can in any way serve the interests of the working class, groups such as the RCP(ML) have succeeded in distorting the idea of socialism in the eyes of millions of workers across the world. The fact that any person, group or party should still put forward such undiluted crap is a testimony to their inability to understand the world they live in.

As for the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign, whilst this might be seen as less dangerous than the nonsense put forward by the Albania Supporters Club, in many ways it is just as damaging if only because more workers are attracted to it. Whatever the rights and wrongs of their actual campaign. what stands out is how such reformist demands direct workers' energies towards single issue campaigns and distract their attention away from analysing and acting on the real cause of their problems. Thousands and maybe millions of workers may be drawn to this campaign but. even if it is successful in abolishing the poll tax and replacing it with something else, workers would still be left facing a hundred-and-one problems. The poll tax is not the cause of workers’ problems, which existed in abundance before it was even thought of. Policies such as non-payment could well leave workers facing action by the state which will result in them becoming more impoverished than would have been the case had paid their poll-tax bill, and the failure of such campaigns will lead to political disillusionment.

Opposition to one specific policy such as the poll tax will not create conscious socialists as this can only be achieved by a movement whose one aim is the abolition of capitalism through education, organisation and democratic and conscious political action. This is not to deny that it is the experience of capitalism that causes workers to ask fundamental questions about the society they live in and to seek explanations and alternatives. The point is that more often than not reform movements lead only to dead-ends and disillusionment.

Socialist presence

What then can be achieved by attending events such as the Topluddle Rally? Whenever workers gather, and particularly at events where ideas are being discussed and exchanged, socialists have to be involved in putting forward the basic fact that capitalism cannot be reformed to work in our interests and that alternatives such as state capitalism are no alternative at all. Unclear ideas cannot be defeated by ignoring them.

What was achieved at Tolpuddle this year on 15 July was that the socialist movement was seen as being alive and active and putting forward a clear alternative. Participation was very encouraging. Apart from members and supporters from the Bournemouth area, support came from socialists in London, Brighton, Bristol, Surrey, Kent, Wiltshire and Devon. All in all about 20 members and supporters were engaged in selling literature, distributing leaflets and engaging in political debate.

To the workers we came into contact with at Tolpuddle and to all workers throughout the world, the socialist message is loud and clear. Don't waste any more time or effort attempting to reform capitalism or in the delusion that in some part of the world state ownership has proved itself to be a more effective or humane system than the private variety of capitalism.

Instead of campaigning for this or that reform join the movement which has as its sole aim ending a social system which cannot satisfy the needs of human beings and replacing it with one that could—one based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of producing and distributing the things we need to live, production directly for use. and free access to all goods and services on the basis of self-determined need: in short, a world-wide system run by human beings for human beings.

Ray Carr

Green Scenario (1990)

Book Review from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Getting There. Steps to a Green Society. By Derek Wall. Green Print. £4.99

During the Euro-elections last year Derek Wall was one of the Green Party's three national spokespersons. He wasn't heard of much as the media ignored him in favour of Sara Parkin. This probably pleased some Green Party strategists who feared his leftwing views might put off the muddle-in-the-middle voters they were targetting.

For example, while one platform speaker at the Green Party Conference last September proclaimed “we come not to bury the market economy, but to use it” (Independent, 22 September). Wall writes that "ecology is incompatible with the market".

He is undoubtedly right here. Where wealth is produced by separate firms competing to make profits out of supplying a market, it is considerations of cost-saving and profit-making that will determine the materials and methods of production used: the short term will prevail over the long term and the cheaper over the ecologically appropriate.

Wall sees the solution as lying in the establishment of a decentralized society where much less would be produced and consumed than today and where these reduced needs would be mainly met locally. Money would not disappear completely but its role and influence would diminish drastically since peoples needs would be met directly (growing their own food, making their own clothes, etc) or on a barter, mutual aid or gift basis.

This might not be capitalism but it wouldn't be socialism either. In any event Wall doesn't call it socialism but a "Green society" and sees it as coming into being in embryo within capitalism (indeed as already having come into being in the form of "picnics and parties, collective allotments. co-operative buying, shared meals, local community news sheets, learning exchanges, tithing, ecological transport") and eventually growing to be strong enough to dissolve capitalism into a network of “local economies". This, according to him. is the way to "smash capitalism gently".

It couldn’t work of course. People can't just opt out of capitalism and begin satisfying their needs on a non-market basis. To launch and sustain this, money would be required (to hire or purchase land, premises and machinery, for instance) and, as long as capitalism exists, there is essentially only one way most people can obtain this: by going out and working for an employer for a wage or a salary. It is true that another possible source of income does exist in payments from the state. However, these are never generous and are in fact deliberately kept as low as practicable so as to offer a very miserable existence to those unable or unwilling to work for an employer.

Nor is the capitalist state going to allow state payments to be used to try to undermine capitalism in the way Wall suggests. But replies Wall, this time echoing official Green Party policy, a Green government would introduce a Basic Income Scheme under which everybody would receive a payment from the state, as of right and without means-testing, of an amount sufficient to satisfy at least their basic needs without having to go and work for an employer. The theory is that people could use this income to finance an "alternative economy".

It's a nice theory, but where's the state going to get the money from? It could only come from taxing the profits of capitalist firms, but any attempt to raise the massive amount that would be required to finance such a scheme would provoke an immediate and widespread economic slump. Wall, however, believes that "bankers create money out of thin air" and seems to be advocating that the state should do the same and simply create the money it needs, just printing pound notes and handing them out! Unlike banks, the state could do this but as the amount of real wealth in existence would remain unchanged this would result in a massive inflation that would rival that in Germany after the first world war.

Actually. Wall is not quite that naive. He does realise what would happen should a Green government committed to such a programme ever come into office:

A Green government will be controlled by the economy rather than being in control. On coming to office through coalition or more absolute electoral success, it would be met by an instant collapse of sterling as ‘hot money' and entrepreneurial capital went elsewhere. The exchange rate would fall and industrialists would move their factories to countries with more relaxed environmental controls and workplace regulation. Sources of finance would dry up as unemployment rocketed, slashing the revenue from taxation and pushing up the social security bills. The money for ecological reconstruction—the building of railways, the closing of motorways and construction of a proper sewage system—would run out.

But if this is the case, as it would be, a Green government would clearly be unable to help an embryonic green economy to develop by introducing a Basic Income scheme to allow people to escape from the wages system. In admitting this Wall is also admitting the non-viability of his scheme to “smash capitalism gently".

Adam Buick

A message for Cathy (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Somewhere in the middle of the Byline broadcast 'Cathy Where Are You Now?' (BBC1, 9 July), which was promoted as a sequel to the twenty-year-old documentary drama 'Cathy Come Home', viewers may have heard a familiar lament to the effect that we all "have a right" to a roof over our heads. Let us state at the outset that if there is one essential need among many others that under the capitalist system we have absolutely no right to it is a home. Were it otherwise none of us would be without one. Cardboard City could exist only as a sick joke in a tuppenny historical satire. That exploiter of human need, the landlord, would have gone the way of the slave-trader and the witch-burner.

What failed to emerge from the broadcast in any other than an incidental sense is that housing, far from constituting an inalienable right, carries no higher status than that of an entitlement conditional upon the would-be purchaser's having enough money to pay for it. Since most of us are dependent on a wage or salary, what we finally own is not a home, which is the property of the money-lender, but a mortgage. Moreover, as with any other commercially-negotiated loan, it has to be paid for—"serviced", as the euphemism has it—and expensively at that. Mrs Thatcher's "property-owning democracy" is, for most of us, a shadow of a thing, productive of nothing more substantial than nagging worry if not illness and, for a desperate minority, even suicide. That this judgement applies as absolutely to those of us who are buying "our" council houses as to any other house-buyers is axiomatic (Mrs Thatcher’s "gift" of a qualified ownership has already been paid for in rent over the years). Erstwhile council tenants can be—and indeed are being—evicted where they default on their new mortgages.

And what, exactly, have these council tenants been offered? A quick trip round the average council estate should disabuse even the most hostile among the self-styled "middle classes" that its occupants, where they are able or willing to buy, are "getting something for nothing". Built on the cheap, many of these mean ghettos have degenerated into underserviced and infested slums, veritable universities of disaffection and crime, where the policeman enjoys a higher profile than the social worker or the health visitor. The sorry truth is that thousands of council tenants, far from being able to buy their all too basic accommodation, stand in arrears of rent and are in no position to clear their debt.

For many—nowadays a majority—who are obliged to resort to the private market, theirs is in many respects an equally depressing plight. While government ministers juggle cynically with their recurrent financial crises (an endemic feature of the capitalist system they so enthusiastically espouse) house-buyers are finding their mortgage repayments increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to meet. Let borrowers introduce the term “rights" when they next meet their building society manager in yet another effort to renegotiate their loans. Their reward must be, if not the uncomprehending stare, then the patronising smile of the worldly-wise money merchant whose primary purpose is to safeguard the building society's assets, not to provide shelter for the "impecunious".

Skid Row and Cardboard City

In the case of that increasingly large number of erstwhile "proud home-owners" who are forced onto the street, there remain the hotel room and the shared kitchen and lavatory already discovered by so many single parents—usually abandoned young mothers—and their children. A few statistics provided by the Byline programme help to illustrate this growing scandal. In 1966, homeless families in emergency accommodation numbered 4.400; in 1989, that figure had risen to 38,000. In what was described as an average hotel of thirty-six rooms the occupants shared one kitchen bookable in advance, forcing many to resort to the junk food market or to shift for themselves late at night— too late for the children, who had to make do with a stop-gap meal earlier in the evening.

In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that so many homeless people are prepared to risk police and local authority harassment by taking to the road in converted vehicles, or living in tented dwellings. Squatting continues to provide some homeless with a roof but relentless official pressure backed by changes in the law have made this option much more difficult. Such makeshift arrangements as vehicle conversion, fixed of mobile, do at least afford a measure of independence, tenuous though that may prove to be. The long-tolerated experiences of traditional travelling people such as the gypsies, for whom harassment of one kind or another has always been a hazard, are visited upon these more recent and, in many cases, involuntary nomads. Authority in its various manifestations has always and everywhere found it difficult, both socially and politically, to come to terms with those who demonstrate a readiness to break free from its magisterial control. Police harassment. often prejudiced in itself, is in reality a response to any uninformed public resentment which may contain more than a hint of jealousy.

The final depth for all too many, however, has to be the cardboard boxes of Skid Row. During a recent Nick Ross phone-in the Housing Minister, Michael Spicer, was heard earnestly reminding us that Cardboard City is populated by the single homeless male—as if, even were it entirely accurate, this dismal fact constituted an extenuating circumstance for government to cling to as it peddles its miserable excuses. We are now informed that the government will commit fifteen million pounds to the task of clearing city pavements of their down-and-outs. That this is cosmetic—mere political opportunism—is searingly obvious. What an advertisement for "popular capitalism" in Britain, one of the world's richest countries (but rich for whom, one wonders?) that visitors to London should have to run the gauntlet of the cardboard squats of the moneyless and jobless as they negotiate the precincts of the concert halls, bridges and underpasses of the capital city. Why. even poor old Mother Theresa confessed to shock. So they'll find a barracks for them and then amend the law to prevent them from returning to be stumbled over. Out of sight, out of mind. Charles Dickens would have relished such material: Spicer's ugly cant would have made his mouth water. So what is to be done?

Providing homes no problem

At this point the 'Cathy' follow-up collapsed into bathetic nonsense of the “nobody should have more than one home” variety. "People who are prepared to work hard should be allowed a loan. Security? Why, the house they promise to build, of course”. ‘‘Bricks and mortar should be released for all who want them". ("Released"? There's a euphemism for "sold", if you please!). Nowhere in the broadcast was it even hinted that, were we all to enjoy, as of right, adequate housing the capitalists, who control the building industry would be bankrupted. Abundance in any commodity spells ruin for the profiteers. Prices would plummet and production cease.

Paradoxically, the planet itself is made of building materials. And in this country alone the necessary skills abound. Thousands of building workers are unemployed. The accumulated experience of centuries could be brought to bear on matters—heating and ventilation, for example—that even the Romans could approach with confidence. It could all happen but for one baleful impediment: under capitalism capitalists must capitalise—or perish. This inescapable requirement applies as surely to state capitalist Russia and China as to the mixed economies of Japan and the USA. The money system serves to facilitate what amounts to a form of rationing in the means of life itself. And the misery this entails is allowed to continue in order that a small minority class of parasitical manipulators should be maintained in the life-style to which it is accustomed.

So the only answer to housing deprivation, as to all other such “problems” under the capitalist system, remains unfettered production to meet need (as opposed to profit). Which means the end of capitalism. All of which leads to one unavoidable conclusion: whereas the world's capitalists understand this perfectly clearly, which is why they make—and have always made— such monstrous and unprincipled efforts to conceal the truth from the rest of us, we, the working class, who produce everything, have hardly begun to. Until we do, the Cathys of this world must remain homeless.

Richard Cooper