Finance and Industry: Who goes bust? (1966)

The Finance and Industry Column from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who goes bust?

Many workers refuse to accept the hard fact that they have been condemned for life to work for a wage or salary for those who own the means of wealth production. Spurred on by stories of how ordinary workers have risen to be wealthy capitalists, they imagine that they, too, can do this. Such people long for their own shop or snack-bar or garage to escape from wage-slavery, Unfortunately for them they often find they have to work harder for themselves (or their creditors) than they had to when working for wages. For some it’s even worse—they go under and are cast back into the working class, less their savings.

The latest annual report of the Board of Trade on bankruptcy gives as the top lines among the 3,404 who went bust in 1965:

The list continues with hardware and electrical goods retailers, confectioners, tobacconists and newsagents, meat retailers, plumbers, fruit and vegetable retailers, general stores, electrical contractors, commercial travellers and so on. In other words the small shopkeepers and businessmen that workers often wish to be.

Next time you hear the story about how good capitalism must be because so-and-so rose to be a capitalist, remember the other side of the story: for every one who succeeds hundreds fail completely and thousands more are condemned to a life of drudgery and worry not unlike the rest of us. Besides capitalism can’t work without a working class, which means that most of us don't even get a chance of becoming a petty capitalist.

World Capitalism

Socialism can only be world-wide because capitalism, the system it will replace, is already so. Modern industry has a world-wide character which ignores frontiers. But although millions co-operate to produce wealth this wealth does not belong to society as a whole; it belongs to just a part of society. Today wealth is produced socially but owned privately. This is the basic contradiction of capitalism. Private ownership of the means of wealth production in fact conflicts with modern technology. One aspect of this is the division of the world into competing, and often warring, states.

Many people don’t realise that the typical firm today is not the small builder or motor repair man mentioned in the previous section. Production, in many lines, is dominated by a few giant, international firms such as Shell, ICI, Unilever and Philips. Sir Paul Chambers, head of ICI, made an interesting speech at the International Management Congress in Rotterdam on September 20. He doubted whether the creation of a Western European economic bloc could be more than a short-term solution to the problems created by the vast size and international character of some modern industries. Modern technology, he said, could be a source of “strife" if its international character were not taken into account. Chambers went on:

I have pointed to the aircraft industry and the inevitability of the growing integration of aircraft firms on an international basis. Almost every emergent country wants its own airline, but it has to rely upon the major makers—mainly British and American—for its needs. A similar trend can be seen in computers and in photographic materials and equipment. In car manufacture the integration of firms is beginning to take on a similar international character. The complete sovereign independence of small states is becoming inconsistent with the growing economic dependence upon large international industrial groups domiciled elsewhere. (Financial Times Sept. 21, 1966).

Men like Sir Paul Chambers do not think in national terms. They know that capitalism is international and act on it. The workers, those who run these industries from top to bottom , in all countries, might well learn from this.

The right to be lazy

Are you tired even before you start work? Do you dislike having to work hard for eight or more hours a day?

Peter Lennon, in the Guardian of September 22, wrote up some of the views put forward on these and other questions at a recent international conference on psychosomatic medicine in Paris:

Many citizens manage to reach a condition of distressed exhaustion before doing anything at all. They wake up tired, grouse through the day, and at night mourn departed sleep. A scrabble and tangle of humanity, they stew in bad air and petty psychological turmoil, buffeted by noise and needled by a multiplicity of unrewarding duties. In eternal competition with shadowy colleagues and goaded by social obligations beyond their capabilities they experience a feeling of impotence and inadaptability. Neurotic fatigue is the result.

Professor Chombart de Lauwe claims that fatigue, other than muscular fatigue, has its origins in the discrepancy between our means and our needs: between aspirations and social pressures—the eternal discrepancy between a possible life and the life we are forced to live.

At least one concrete conclusion to rejoice the civilised emerged from the conference: laziness, far from being the shameful attribute of the social renegade is the man of sensibility’s criticism of an unnatural activity: hard work. It is also his defence against a barbaric way of life.

A hard look at the conclusions of these eminent specialists leaves us with these convictions: the prestige attached to daily strenuous toil is a myth and a shabby modern one, and it is seriously probable that, in spite of generations of domesticity, intense, sustained daily work is incompatible with the realities of human physiology.

Lennon writes in an amusing way. But, when you come to think of it, it is a serious matter that most of us should be condemned to a lifetime of boring, toil. The least we should do is ask: Does this have to be?

Work, of course, is necessary in any human society. But it does not have to take the form of “intensive, sustained daily work”. If such boring, unsatisfying toil is “incompatible with the realities of human physiology” (as most of us must suspect anyway) then socialist society can abolish it. Indeed it should abolish it. Work itself cannot be abolished. However it is up to the defenders of capitalism to show that wealth can only be produced by people, working under unhealthy conditions, doing jobs they find dull and uninteresting.

Adam Buick

Mrs. Partington again. (1911)

From the July 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

John Bull for June 10 published an article headed “Is the Small Trader Doomed? The Multi-Shop Octopus.”

Once again the wild, despairing cry of the small shopkeeper is heard deploring the passing of his kind. After describing the methods by which the great firms oust the “little men,” the position of the combine’s employees is summed up thus :

“The lot of the employees is very unsatisfactory, the majority of these companies refusing to employ a man who has been in the service of their rivals, no matter why he left his previous situation. They are discharged on the merest pretext, as the continuous advertising amply proves, and their wages compare unfavourably with those paid by the small trader. One of the managers recently remarked that he did not think it advisable to keep a man more than 6 months as by that time they had exhausted all his ideas. Pick his brain and throw him on the human scrap heap !”

“The remedy” for the small trader is, John Bull tells us, “for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to impose a tax on multi-shop trading, as is done in Germany.”

Is this a case for Bottomley’s “Business Government” or—the Lunacy Commissioners ?

A. Kay

Blogger's Note:

Once again mention of a 'Mrs. Partington' crops again in the early issue of the Standard. Once again, here's a link to give you the background details.

The Romance of Modern Trade. (1909)

A Short Story from the July 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent issue of the Storekeepers’ Journal contained a paragraph with the heading printed above. It stated that the writer was sanguine enough to believe that storekeepers throughout the country would, without exception, join in the chorus of congratulations that had been showered upon Sir Timeous Skipton at the honour so recently conferred upon him by His Majesty the King, an honour which was not merely a personal one, but was shared by the whole trade of which Sir Timeous is so shining a light. It recalled the now well-known fact that Sir Timeous started storekeeping in a very humble way in the South only a few years ago, and by his industry, pluck, and keenness has become one of the largest of the successful produce distributors of modern times. As head of the international concern with which he is associated, his name has become a household word. Such a career, concluded the writer, is a complete answer to the croakers who say there is no scope to-day for the enterprising man, and that the opportunity for the individual to succeed no longer exists. Let such remember and act upon the Scriptural injunction, “Go thou and do likewise.”

I showed the paragraph in question to a friend whose commercial affairs bring him into contact with many who fail as shopkeepers, and he told me the following life story. He called it

THE TRAGEDY OF MODERN TRADE.

Many years ago. long before the advent of the “Merchant Storekeepers,” “Multipule Traders,” and the like, a young married couple, whom we will call Mr. and Mrs. Jones, opened a grocery and provision shop in a fairly large town in the Midlands. They both worked in the business, rarely took a holiday, regularly paid their wholesale houses and thus remained on good terms with them, brought up their children healthily and educated them as circumstances permitted. As they grew up the sons assisted in the business and looked forward to ultimately taking it over, whilst the daughters cheerfully performed the household duties. They had no idea of trouble—at any rate, business trouble—ever coming their way. The town’s population grew, and Mr. Jones, being widely known and greatly respected, increased his turnover until it reached nearly five figures per annum, and his devoted, unassuming wife and himself were looking forward to shortly retiring upon a sufficiency to ensure their freedom from anxiety during their final steps in the journey of life. One day, however, a neighbouring house owner, in view of the development of the town, converted a number of houses adjoining the Jones’ shop into shop premises, and a few weeks after the one next door to Mr. Jones was opened as the local branch of Skipton’s Limited. The Jones were not greatly perturbed at first, although they began to talk among themselves when at the new shop cheese could be purchased at one penny per pound cheaper than Mr. Jones could buy it wholesale. Others of the shops were taken and opened by the Jampress Tea Co. (which the travellers who called upon Mr. Jones hinted was really being run by Skiptons Ltd. under an assumed name), the World’s Dairy Co., the Grey Mole Tea Co., the Inter-colonial Butter Co., and others, all attempting by methods quite foreign to Mr. Jones’ idea of legitimate business, to capture his trade, in which they ultimately succeeded. His customers gradually deserted him. His turnover dropped in a few years from nearly ten to about two thousand pounds, and at last the crash came. He called a meeting of his creditors, and they, realising that the old chap had been “broke” by the irresistible march of capitalist development (“unfair competition” he called it), generously presented him with the furniture to which they were legally entitled, and accepted their eight shillings in the £,, some of them reflecting that it was not the old chap, honest, sober, industrious, aye, and Nonconformist and Liberal as he was, who had succeeded in life, but that, despite all these virtues he had “gone under,” largely through the successful efforts of the “Merchant Storekeeper” who had been so recently honoured by His Majesty.

As for the sons, one of them became a machine-like manager of a “multiple” shop at a “salary” of thirty-two shillings and sixpence per week, out of which princely sum all shortages of stock were deducted, and before being appointed signed an agreement not to accept a position in a similar business within a radius of fifty miles for a period of ten years. He gave up attending chapel and went, instead to the Sunday meetings of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. After hearing the speakers trace the ruthless development of industry and trading to the Trust stage now existing, and realising, in view of their teaching and his own bitter experience, that the day of the small man and the small concern was passed, he eventually joined their ranks and worked for the realisation of the only system wherein the individual will have the opportunity to lead a full and free life. The operations of Sir Timeous Skipton had prepared his mind to receive the truth, as they are preparing that of many another man.

The other son “went to the dogs,” was arrested for sleeping on the Embankment and was sentenced by Alderman Sir Timeous Skipton to imprisonment with hard labour for being a “rogue and a vagabond.”

X. Y. Z.

A Look Round. (1906)

From the December 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the National Anti-sweating Conference held recently at the Guildhall, and opened by the Lord Mayor, Mr. Stephen Walsh, M.P., declared that, despite their powerful organisation, the Lancashire miners are in a worse condition to-day than they were in eighteen years ago !

* * *

During the Conference Mr. D. J. Shackleton, M.P., vigorously defended child labour, and appealed to the delegates to let Socialism alone and concentrate their energies upon “something practical.”

* * *

Mr. Shackleton is vice-chairman of the Labour Party in the House of Commons, lately called the L.R.C. Under its auspices various members of the S.D.F. and I.L.P. have run as “Labour” candidates, in order to get the financial support of affiliated trade unionists.

* * *

The Workmen’s National Housing Council, judging by its Seventh Annual Report, seems to be in a jubilant mood. There are affiliated sixty trade unions, without counting branches, forty-three trades councils, with a few other bodies. During the general election it issued a simple test question to all candidates and received a very large harvest of replies, many of them being very encouraging. Still more encouraging, we are told, is the fact that after persistent attention from the Council lavished on those members who promised to get financial aid for housing from the Imperial Exchequer, and the constant stirring up of ministers, the Government are now committed to the principle, and promise for rural England, Scotland, and Wales, something similar to the Irish Labourers’ Bill— cheap money and plenty of it—4¼ millions at 3¼ per cent. for inclusive money charges. This will be of great assistance when it is fulfilled, and the Council are on the point of asking far the moral support of every affiliated body to keep the Government up to the scratch next session ! That’s progress !

* * *

It will take something more than “moral pressure” to induce the capitalist class to do the only thing that will benefit the working class, viz., get off the workers’ backs.

* * *

The “test questions for candidates” is a favorite game of the reform politicians. Obviously if any body of men submit certain questions to candidates they must support the candidates who reply favorably and oppose those who do not. Thus we have the S.D.F. and I.L.P., through their affiliation to the National Workmen’s Housing Council, supporting capitalist candidates, whilst “in another place” declaring those candidates to be working class enemies.

* * *

The S.P.G.B. is out for the abolition of the capitalist system, not its patching up. It therefore wastes no time on so-called reforms, but aims straight for revolution.

* * *

In dealing with a complaint that tramway men often found their day of ten hours was spread over fifteen, Captain Hemphill at the L.C.C. said the facts were not as stated, but that the question was receiving the very careful attention of the Committee, who hoped to bring up a report at an early date. This really means, reading between the lines, that the “ten hours’ day” for tramway employees is another Progressive lie.

* * *

Captain Hemphill also said that the Council had recently spent a sum of £1,500 a year more than had been spent by the old companies, with a view of reducing inconvenience to the men.

* * *

Improvements in the means of transit tend to increase the ratio of exploitation of the workers, whether employed by the private trust, or the public monopoly form of capitalism. Drivers and conductors of modern electric tramcars are subject to a very much greater menial and physical strain than were those of the old horse cars, but their wages are practically the same, and even when higher, the increase is in no sense proportionate to their extra wear and tear. The same applies to motor bus and railway workers.

* * *

Mr. R. Bell, M.P., emphasised this in his Annual Report to the recently held Congress at Cardiff. During 1905, he said, the goods train mileage decreased by 400,000 miles in spite of an increase of 11,300,000 tons in goods carried. To have carried the goods traffic of 1905 under the conditions of 1900 would have required over 2,500 more engines and sets of men. Calculating four men to each engine—driver, fireman, cleaner, and guard—this would have meant an increased staff of at least 10,000 men in the running department alone. Instead of this he calculates that this increase in the volume of traffic has been conveyed with some 1,200 less engines and sets of men, for, as different railway chairmen have stated at half-yearly meetings, they have been enabled to take many of their older locomotives out of traffic, and the full number shown to be owned by the companies were not actually working. Thus the mental and physical responsibilities of the men generally have been vastly increased, and the firemen particularly, who have to shovel nearly double the quantity of coal on the large engines without any extra pay at all.

* * *

There was another paragraph in the Report which should be interesting to readers of the Socialist Standard. It relates to the men employed on the North Eastern Railway, and reads as follows:

“This movement on behalf of all grades was sanctioned by the Executive Committee in September, 1903, and the programme adopted by the men at a conference held at Darlington was duly forwarded to the company. Not much progress was made, however, until 1905, when as a result of interviews in March and July a few concessions were obtained for men working large engines and with heavy trains, together with an increased bonus for the East Coast men.

“The programme was still pressed, but further delay arose in consequence of changes in the chairmanship and managership. In April and May, however, the committee of the movement and myself had a ten days’ conference with the general manager and chief officials, and .also another day’s discussion with the general superintendent. The programme was fully discussed, in addition to a large number of grievances, resulting in substantial concessions being obtained for the men. The men’s delegate meeting, however, would not take the responsibility of accepting the terms offered, and decided to refer the matter to the branches concerned. The Executive Committee, therefore, requested the branches to arrange special meetings at which the North Eastern members should vote for or against accepting the terms. The result showed a majority of 802 against the terms, but as only a very small proportion of the men had voted the Executive Committee decided to accept the terms for the men, and to suggest to the company that, a conciliation board be formed. The company have this proposal under consideration at the present time.”

* * *

The italics are ours.

* * *

In the November issue of the “Journeymen Bakers’ Magazine” Mr. L. A. Hill returns to the subject of the Union’s 48 Hours Bill, which was dealt with in our October number. He said it was most essential that this Bill should be passed into law. Machinery had displaced and would continue to displace large numbers of men. Whereas there would be before the introduction of machinery work for five men, there was now only work for three. If the Bill was passed he estimated that it would find employment for some 5,000 men, and that it would be in a measure, a way of solving the unemployed question in the baking trade.

* * *

As we pointed out in October, the effect of a compulsory 8 hours’ day for bakers, however secured, would be to kill the small bakers and drive the trade into the machine bakeries, where the 8 hours’ day already obtains. It would thus tend to displace 2 men out of every 5, to use Mr. Hill’s figures, and would intensify instead of solving the unemployed question in the baking trade.

* * *

The “Daily Express” continues to expose the Fraud of Capitalism. In connection with Mr. Lever’s Soap Trust (I beg pardon—”economic amalgamation”) it said,

“The grocer of to-day is almost as much ‘tied’ as the publican who is managing a ‘tied’ house for a firm of brewers.

“He has practically ceased to be a free agent, and is becoming more and more of an automaton who is forced to hand out over the counter the ready weighed articles supplied by great trusts and powerful owners of proprietary articles.

“He has little or no share in the selection of the articles he is to sell, and can control neither the price he pays for them nor the price to the customer. He does not even have a chance to see the quality of the goods he sells or to weigh them. Certain sealed packets come to him and automatically he hands them over the counter.

“Acting on the instructions of one or other of the great firms who have selected him to sell their goods, he has occasionally to say that a certain article is ‘just as good’ as a different one desired by a customer, and to see that a customer does not buy the goods he first wanted.

“Twenty years ago a grocer was able to give his customers all they required, but now certain goods are pushed on him, and he in his turn has to force them on the public.”

* * *

Coming back to the “Daily Express,” this organ of Tariff Reform, which recently declared that the American workers, owing to protection, were exceedingly prosperous, made the following admissions in its issue of November 12, last:

“In spite of the wonderful surface prosperity, America is seething with discontent, and the party of the ‘have nots’ is a very real danger.

“The power of the trusts and the great business combinations has been growing rapidly. The small business man has been driven into the Bankruptcy Court in ever increasing numbers, and has considered himself lucky if he could secure a place as a salaried employee of the trust which absorbed his business. A generation ago most of the dwellers in American cities owned their own homes or looked forward to owning them. Now, they would laugh at the suggestion, and they bitterly resent the prospect of a lifetime as a rent-payer to some millionaire or real estate corporation.

“The working men, in spite of their nominally high wages, are bitterly discontented. Wages are not so high as they seem. The bricklayer who earns 24s. a day cannot depend on more than six months work in the year, as there are periods of two or three months in New York when no building can be done on account of the severe weather. The same rule applies to all the building trades, and to the lake and river transportation trades, and to those employed on the railways fed by the lakes and rivers. 

“In spite of all the nominal prosperity, New York has its unemployed problem every winter—not so acute as London’s problem, perhaps, but still a very serious problem.”

* * *

As we have so often pointed out, the working class is poor and the master class is rich all over the world, no matter what fiscal or other conditions obtain.

J. Kay

Capitalism and the Shopkeeper. (1911)

From the April 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist teaching of the truth that capital is becoming concentrated in the hands of a diminishing number of capitalists has been recently attacked, from two points of view, by the “illuminati” of the I.L.P. and by the Anarchists.

In both cases is the wish father to the thought. Both parties have a case to bolster up, and both have diligently sought for “facts” to support their tenets.

The Joint-Stock Company and the small shopkeeper are stock illustrations supposed to prove the theory of the division of capital among an increasing number of happy and deserving recipients. The “theory of increasing misery” has its converge in the theory of a slow but sure evolution into terrestrial paradise. No one will be able to say of any particular period: here ends capitalism and Socialism has its birth ; but the change will be gradual, peaceful, ethical—through the Joint Stock company and the small shopkeeper, and small reforms, vide Bernstein & Co. Let us look into the position of this small shopkeeper.

The English race have been reputed a nation of shopkeepers; the growth of multiple retail stores has suggested the remark that we are now a nation of managers. It is beyond dispute that the existence of thousands of company stores has limited the scope for individual success in the retail trade, and has driven the small retailer to accept the most casual and unremunerative portion of that trade. A huge business is carried on in multiple and chain shops, by mail-order businesses, departmental stores, and other massive concerns. They cause tradesmen great anxiety ; all along the line the small shopkeeper is exploited ; manufacturers are making attempts to deal direct with the consumer ; department stores are trying to filch suburban trade ; they are spoiling the retailer by well-organised mail-trading systems.

If the man with little capital can exist to day at all it is as a retailer; but even this small sphere of activity seems narrowing. Half a century ago little capital was required to become a retailer. In no branch of commerce is the personal factor, the knowledge of a customer’s wants and whims, of such value. The old tradesman was in personal contact with hundreds of his customers, and it was once thought that. here was a barrier to Joint Stock Company success in the retail trade. However, slower than in manufacture, but as surely, the big capitalist is gaining ground.

In the North of England the shopkeeper has two competitors—the multiple stores and the co-operative societies. These obtain the cream of the cash trade, and leave to the shopkeeper a hazardous credit trade, plus what he can catch when the stores are closed—for he works fifteen hours a day. Certainly, as one walks along and sees hundreds of small shops, it would seem as if the small trader throve in spite of powerful competitors. But even if we grant an increase in the number of small shops, it does not imply greater prosperity for their owners, nor that a certain number of proletarians have risen out of their class and become independent shopkeepers. In large towns hundreds of these “emporiums” are run by workingmen with the aim of adding a trifle to their petty wages, just as, as Kautsky has shown, in Belgium many of the belauded peasant proprietors work in contiguous mines and milk to help eke out a livelihood.

It is certainly the ideal of thousands of workingmen to “get out of the factory,” as the phrase goes, and live a life free from the factory buzzers, managers, and foremen ; alas, many are called but few chosen ! The majority of them have not even a sporting chance of obtaining a livelihood from their shop alone. Years ago such, small speculators had better opportunities of becoming successful retail merchants, but to-day they are snowed under by powerful enemies. The big fish, are swallowing the little fish even in a branch of commerce where so much is in favour of the small fry. The Marxian law surely stands unassailable everywhere if it is applicable to retail trading. The following figures relative to the number of shops in Prussia are taken from Bernstein’s “Evolutionary Socialism.”

Bernstein remarks : “It is not the large businesses that offer the most deadly opposition to the small ones; the latter provide it among themselves.” If he can obtain comfort from such statistics his position is surely in dire straits.

The better placed shopkeepers who manage to obtain a “living” are, too, getting more in the clutches of the big capitalists. Most retail tobacconists are merely agents for the Imperial Tobacco Company ; in the grocery line such firms as Lever Bros, are obtaining great power ; and in every department of retail trade we meet with combination and association. Competition is as dead as piety. Arrangements are made amongst manufacturers to keep up prices, and amongst retailers to do likewise. Small dealers attempt, through their associations, to buy collectively. A few weeks ago a Manchester ironmongers’ association actually discussed a proposal that they, as an association, commence a large store in the centre of the city, to enable them to fight the great firms with better prospect of success. These stores, it was stated, were stealing the most profitable portion of the trade ; and individually they could not compete with the splendid displays and powerful organisation of the stores.

The transition from a nation of shopkeepers to a nation of managers is the transition from “small to big industry,” analogous to the transition from handicraftsman to factory hand in the sphere of production. The journals which circulate amongst the various retailers are not blind to this change, however much the I.L.P. official gang may deny it. The “Boot and Shoe Trade Journal” is a better judge of the havoc wrought by company shops amongst small retailers than is Ramsay MacDonald or the editor of the “Labour Leader.” And when the present chairman of the I.L.P., Mr. W. C. Anderson, was peripatetic organiser for the Shop Assistants Union, his stock speech was a lament at the small opportunities possessed by modern shop assistants, of budding into independent shopkeepers.

The Socialist must wish for a quick awakening, both in the ranks of the shop assistants and those of the shopkeeper. The former in permanently proletarian, the latter liable to drop into the proletarian ranks at any moment. The assistant, working in a shop, amongst thirty more of his class, that shop being but one of six hundred owned by his employers, is better able to appreciate the vast changes in the retail trade than are I.L.P. critics and Anarchist theorisers with creeds to defend at any cost.

John A. Dawson

Small Shopkeepers and the Government (1959)

From the April 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

A dozen years or so ago, the small shopkeepers of Britain—those, who, looking in the social mirror, see themselves as part of a non-existent “middle class’’—were “cashing in” on a market depleted by the hardships of the 1939-45 world war.

In those days of a “sellers’” market, requiring no “salesmanship,” the goods flowed off the shelves and the cash flowed into the tills with an unrestricted rhythm that brought some recompense for their “behind the counter" drudgery. Some of them even had visions of forsaking their imaginary “middle class” status and paving their uphill route with sufficient pound notes into the coveted ranks of the bourgeois élite!

Such ambitions, however, founded as they, are on the “quicksands” of boom and slump trading, can be likened to Omar’s lines

“The worldly hope men set their hearts upon
Turns ashes, or it prospers and anon.
Like snow upon the desert’s dusty face
Lighting a little hour or two is gone.”

For, from 1956 onwards, a “rot” set in, until to-day they are struggling to pay accounts for goods pressed on them by the “couriers” of commerce, the so-called “high pressure salesmen.”

Unfortunately the majority of these small shopkeepers do not understand the real nature of the “Good” or “Bad” times they experience behind the counters of their “slave pens.” Pathetically enough, they put their trust in the Government of the day as being some autonomous power capable of shaping their destiny. Indeed, this outlook is not limited by any means to small shopkeepers. As an illustration, there are the recent delegations to Parliament of representatives of the Lancashire cotton industry alarmed at the “foreign” cotton imports which threaten to put them in “Carey Street.”

The question arises — “Is the Government” the sole arbiter of imports and exports? If it were, there is no reason why it should not accede to the demands of any particular trade delegation and thereby ensure continued political support. However, there are economic forces at work as a result of the present organisation of society into competing groups of Nations which determine, by and large, the actions of the British Government or any other national entity. As Sir Anthony Eden remarked after the Suez action: “. . . My hand was forced . . .” and what forced his hand but the plain unvarnished need of British commercial interests for the uninterrupted flow of oil via the Canal ? “Great Men” or “Lofty Ideals” notwithstanding.

But to return to our small shopkeepers—many of whom do not even own the premises they occupy and, in the case of newsagents, have to rise earlier than the majority of factory operatives. One such newsagent, known personally to this writer, rises at 4.45 a.m.. remains “open” until 8 p.m. and has not even had the orthodox “capitalist” holiday for years on end. In addition, he “opens” on Sundays until noon.

Whilst this may be an isolated case of very long hours, these small one-man shopkeepers certainly qualify as members of the working class! They are really salesmen for capitalist concerns.

Yet many of them are Tories or Labourites, identifying their interests with the ruling class in Britain who exploit them. Mostly they have vague ideas about “Fair Trading,” but when asked to define such a misnomer as this, they can only lamely point to the local “cut-price” competitor, failing to realise that this is the “healthy competition” they give their political support to when voting for capitalism to continue.

In conclusion, so long as world society is split up into rival groups of nations, competing with one another for the sale of their commodities, with 90 per cent. of the national wealth owned by 10 per cent. of the population, causing as it does, the POVERTY which besets the mass of the human race, there can be no solution in agitating for fiddling reforms or hoping for “better times” under the present of any future “governments.”

What IS required is the total abolition of class ownership of social wealth, including mines, electricity plants, productive machinery of all kinds and transport on land, sea, and in the air. In short, the abolition of commodity production, with its buying and selling and advertising: shoddy goods for the masses, but diamond tiaras for the few. Its centrally-heated mansions, and oil-stove shivering hovels. To say nothing of the colossal waste of human lives and socially produced wealth in recurrent wars, etc. Is this the sort of world small shopkeepers are striving for ?

If not. then they should join up with the world movement for the achievement of Socialism, helping to abolish the chain of wage slavery wherein they are but a link.

G. R. Russell