Socialism and the immediate future (1952)

From the April 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

The starting point of any fruitful discussion about the conditions of the immediate future must be found in the present ones. Past revolutionary changes of the economic system have taught us that in any new society there can never be a complete break with the conditions of the immediate past. The physical basis upon which the new society rests is the end product of the development of the economic and political forces within the old society. This is why socialists stress the necessity of understanding how capitalism functions, as a necessary pre-requisite to taking action to replace it by Socialism.

The method and means of production that Capitalism has developed and will develop are the only ones upon which Socialism can be built. As long as thinking about the future takes the form of planning an ideal world, as an architect plans a house, it will remain a dream, unrelated to and without bearing upon the present. One of the chief reasons why those who agree that Socialism is desirable refuse to work for its establishment is that it is regarded as having no connection with what to-morrow is likely to bring. It is important, therefore, to emphasize that the form of society we direct all our efforts towards attaining is possible to institute to-morrow, given the understanding of and desire for it by the majority of people.

What is there about Capitalism that enables it to continue, in spite of the fact that it produces effects which are repulsive to the majority who endure them? The answer is that acceptance of its basic institutions— wage-labour and capital, money, the state—is deeply rooted in most people’s minds. These institutions govern property relationships and their continued existence is, in fact, unchallenged except by socialists, though others may express a desire to modify some of them.

The basis of production under Capitalism is the pursuit of profit and this economic basis creates effects which permeate the whole of capitalist society. It is not just production for sale and profit that is tacitly, if not avowedly, accepted by the majority, but the whole set of ideas, ethics or morals that is in line with it The two-class nature of present society is accepted, not consciously as a scientific theory, but implicitly in all the conventional mental attitudes towards it in practice. Such is the power of tradition that most people invariably expect the continuation of property relationships into the immediate future at any rate and can conceive the possibility of only superficial changes in them.

Having acknowledged the power of tradition let us now look more closely at how it exercises its sway over the minds of all who fail to examine it critically. The class that owns the means of production and distribution also controls the instruments of mass education and propaganda — schools, churches, newspapers, cinemas, radio, etc. Only those ideas and concepts that do not militate against the present order of things are reproduced on any wide scale. In effect there is an even narrower choice of mental diet than that dictated by the requirements of Capitalism as a world system. Periodically the citizens of each nation are inculcated with the ideas needed to ensure their support for the prosecution of a particular war, though not for war in general

The ideas and edicts which make up the moral code (in the widest sense) of the present system must be acceptable to or at least not opposed by, members of both capitalist and working class. In the case of the former, rights connected with property ownership are to be upheld and of the latter their continued acceptance of wage-slavery is required. Although the moral code is interpreted in a different way in each of these rôles, it necessarily has certain feature which are common to both. For example, most workers offer as much resistance to the idea of a world without money as capitalists do, and they have the satisfaction of knowing that this is a “common sense,” i.e. mass produced, attitude. Their explanation of this similarity of outlook is that the basic difference between capitalist and worker is not primarily a political one, but one of relationship to property. An employer stands in relation to his employee as owner of means of production to non-owner and the relationship is accepted, willingly or not, by both.

In order to retain the acquiescence of workers as a whole in this arrangement the capitalist class, through all the media of mass influence, diverts their attention from abolishing it by allowing and often encouraging them to reform it The level of political understanding is prevented from rising by the dominance of the so-called "practical” programmes which involve the continuation of the property system and the consequent need to preserve it in modified or unchanged form.

Thus Capitalism continues because the possessing class uses its control of the means of mass influence to persuade the producing class that no other order of things is possible. It is the task of socialists to point out that there is an alternative which may be put into effect just as soon as the need for it is commonly understood. To hold no opinion about how society is and could be organized is not neutrality but assent to its present form, Capitalism. It is not logical for workers who are capable of achieving Socialism to refuse to work for it because it appears to be out of the question as far as the immediate future is concerned. Once the position is taken up that Socialism is the only solution to our common problems then all political effort should be directed towards bringing the day of its establishment nearer. This involves the rejection of all the ideas and concepts that sustain Capitalism and the adoption of a revolutionary outlook towards all its institutions.

To many workers it may seem a tall order to refuse to swallow the mental dope which is offered on every hand to give the ugly present a roseate hue. This is no doubt partly due to the fact that the routine work connected with capitalist propaganda is mainly carried on by members of the working class themselves, either as their paid job or, in its less obvious forms, as conventional conversation. Unfortunately most minds tend to act only as receivers of ideas, which they repeat to others, and the most powerful transmitters are capitalist controlled. However, once it is realized that their object is to keep the property basis of present society intact then there is a strong incentive to challenge every idea that seeks, no matter how indirectly to prolong it.

Stan Parker

SPGB Meetings (1993)

Party News from the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

A New Capitalist Revolution? (1952)

From the October 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the passing of time and the acceleration of the tempo of events over the last few decades, there seems to be growing among the supporters of Capitalism a desire to see their system as young and virile as it was a century or more ago. In Britain this desire has lately found expression in the concept of a New Elizabethan era, with all its supposed opportunities for giving rein to those doubtful virtues of individualism and enterprise.

In America, however, there is no comparable period of history upon which to found such a mythology of a golden era to return. Instead of feeling that they have something approaching senility which can somehow be rejuvenated, propagandists for American Capitalism appear to be very concerned to create the impression that they have something completely new—an American Revolution, unique, progressive, and above all superior to a "Socialist” Britain or “Communist” Russia.

Let us take a closer look at some of the evidence that is brought forward to substantiate this theory of a new capitalist revolution. One of the most consistent media used to expound it in this country is the monthly "Reader's Digest.” In its August issue there appeared an article on “Humanising Industry—A New Revolution” (from “Time” magazine), and in September “The Unsystematic American System” (from “Harper’s Magazine”). Both are fairly representative of the sort of views that Americans are encouraged to hold about their country’s economic system in historical relation to the rest of the world.

Humanizing Industry

One of the chief effects of the Industrial Revolution upon workers as a class was their reduction to the status of appendages to a vast impersonal machine, caused by the development of mass production for a market. Socialists recognise that the nature of Capitalism is such that within it no basic change can be made in this subservient status of the workers. But, according to “Time” magazine:—

“Now a second Industrial Revolution, quieter but more profound, is sweeping through U.S. industry. Its name: Human Relations in Industry. Its purpose: to give the worker a sense of usefulness and importance. Its goal: to make life more fun by making work more meaningful.”

This, one may think at first glance, sounds just what the doctor ordered. But these otherwise admirable sentiments turn out to be only a build-up for a variant of that bugbear of regimented workers, time and motion studies. Pioneered in the 1880’s by Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose system caused managements to think of workers as little more than machines that had to eat, these studies facilitated speed-up on the factory assembly lines up to the point where greater “efficiency” no longer yielded greater output. Then in 1923 a sociologist, Elton Mayo, made the startling discovery that the men were poor producers (i.e., produced less than was felt could be squeezed out of them) because they were unhappy; so he prescribed four daily rest periods and brought in a nurse to whom workers could complain. Result: production for the first time reached the established quotas of efficiency.

The industrial psychologists were called upon to counteract the ill effects on production of the over-application of time and motion studies. But have these refinements in any way altered the workers' status as sellers of labour power? Obviously, the object of introducing welfare measures is to create more efficient workers, and not “to make life more fun.” It is certainly an adroit move on the part of employers to disguise their profit motive by talking about making workers happy, though this is not to suggest that they prefer unhappy ones. The proof, however, that the workers’ feelings are the by-product of the system and not its chief concern is the obstinate reluctance of employers to spread a little happiness by granting wage increases.

While on the subject of humanising industry it is interesting to note that some American observers dispute the view that any real change has taken place. Thus, in “Hollywood—The Dream Factory,” Hortense Powdermaker writes:—

“The technique of business and many other organizations in trying to personalize their selling relationships, such as by announcing the name of employees to customers, really fools no one. The fact that the name of the post office clerk, the bank teller or the person who handles complaints in the department store, is posted, does not really influence their relationship with customers."

There is no reason to suppose that the selling relationship between worker and capitalist has in fact changed, despite the propaganda to the contrary.

New Role of the Unions

In order to gain the fullest advantage from the introduction of expensive plant and machinery, industrialists in America have been obliged to find ways of overcoming the resistance of workers to intensive exploitation. Recognising the labour unions’ right to bargain collectively, the employers have turned what might have been defeat into victory by inviting them to co-operate in the task of exploiting the workers.

“Management began to learn that the once-feared unions themselves held keys to higher production. In Pittsburg the United Steel Workers challenged one management to name its most productive department. Then the union boosted production there by 210 per cent, in a month.

“In one Detroit metal tubing company, every attempt to boost production by special incentives had failed. The company offered the union a novel proposal: set a certain standard for labour costs and let workers and management share all the savings when increased output drove costs below that figure. Not only did production beat all records, but the workers themselves began prodding slackers.”

Perhaps the author of the above, in his enthusiasm, has not noticed the irony of using the phrase “a certain standard for labour costs” in an article on humanizing industry. It effectively explodes the myth that American capitalists regard their workers as something more than costs of production. A few extra dollars “profit-shared” seems to be a pretty high price to pay for the spectacle of workers prodding each other instead of the boss and his union-leader lackey.

The working class of America (and elsewhere) has yet to see that if its “share” of the profits becomes more than an insignificant fraction of the total profit, then this enables wages to be reduced, which in turn makes it harder to get a cut out of what the boss saves on labour costs. New production records become new standards, which the worker must exceed before he qualifies for his hand-out There is nothing revolutionary about this ingenious device—the carrot is perhaps a little juicier but is still out of reach of the straining donkey.

The Unsystematic System

According to the article in the September “Reader’s Digest” the word Capitalism no longer fits the present American system because "it stands for the primitive economic system of the 19th century.” Let us grant, for the purpose of argument, that another word may be used to denote the economic system of the 20th century to date. Have there been any fundamental changes to justify the assertion that a revolution has taken place comparable to that transforming Feudalism into Capitalism?

“A combination of patchwork revisions of the system—tax laws, minimum-wage laws, subsidies, guarantees and regulations, plus union pressures and new management attitudes—had brought about a redistribution of income, from the well-to-do to the less well-to-do.

”. . . the business system as a whole seemed to run better if some of the national income was ploughed into improvements in the income and status of the lower-income groups, enabling them to buy more goods and thus to expand the market for everybody. Americans had discovered a new frontier to open up: the purchasing power of the poor.”

The claim to have redistributed income must be treated with considerable scepticism. Every capitalist power describes its reform measures in this way; in this country Lord Beveridge may be credited with having reorganised poverty along similar lines. The most significant part of the argument concerns the purchasing power of the poor. Note that no reference is made to abolishing poverty—the poor are still to remain such, but with improved income and status.

To sum up. Capitalism in America, far from having been revolutionised, is still immensely strong and resourceful. It has succeeded in gaining the acquiescence of the majority in ways that are remarkably similar to those used in Soviet Russia—allegedly new management attitudes, democracy in industry, raised purchasing power of the poor. But, even assuming that all these things have all the advantages claimed for them, the system based upon private property and exploitation has not disappeared. Neither the threat of war nor the poverty and insecurity of the majority has been removed.

To workers seeking a way out of their problems without understanding what causes them, the idea of a capitalist revolution may seem to be a kind of second best to a socialist one. To socialists, the word revolution has a precise meaning—a complete change in the structure of society. All imitations must be refused, since they bring inevitable disappointment and delay the coming of the real thing.

Stan Parker

SPGB Series of Meetings: History . . . Not Our Masters Voice (1992)

Party News from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

My guess is that this series of meetings were organised by the (then) new Camden Branch of the SPGB.

Unfortunately, only one of the meetings listed is available as an audio recording on the SPGB's website. Maybe recordings of the other meetings are out there somewhere. It would be nice to know who gave the talk on Tudor England.

Here's a link to the audio recording of Clifford Slapper's meeting:

• The Movement for "National Efficiency" 1880-1914

Human Nature and Socialism: 4—Capitalist Patterns of Behaviour (1953)

From the August 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Continued from the previous issue.

4—Capitalist Patterns of Behaviour

In previous articles we have seen that, although men do, in a very real sense, make history, they are nevertheless also products of conditions and creatures of circumstance. Since we are primarily concerned with the possibilities of change that exist today, we should discover as much as we can about the sort of human behaviour that is produced by Capitalism. Provided that we bear in mind the limitations of the phrase, we may enquire what sort of "human nature” has resulted, so that we may more adequately see the respects in which change is both possible and desirable.

Every society, no matter the form of its social relationships, presupposes that men engage in productive activity. The way in which they come together to produce wealth (the economic aspect) is the key to all the other aspects of society. The basic question to ask, then, is: how does man work under Capitalism?

The outstanding feature of present-day labour is that the bulk of it is undertaken, not primarily to satisfy a human need, but to satisfy something interposed between production and consumption called a market. Everything is dominated by the basis of the system which recognises only motives of material gain. A tailor, for example, can no longer appeal to society’s need of clothing as a justification of his existence. He has to say^that tailoring is one way of “making a living.” He Is considered a “successful” tailor, not because he makes good clothes for people, but only when he achieves an income remarkably large for a tailor. The cash nexus, not need, is the determining factor, since, without money, access to both the means and the fruits of production is denied.

False Separation

There are a number of consequences of this economic set-up that constitute a condemnation of present arrangements and a challenge to make better ones. First, there is the separation of the individual’s interests from those of the community as a whole. The objective of the employee in selling his working abilities is to receive a pay-packet "for himself.” The objective of the employer in buying those abilities is to reap a profit “for himself.” Both may, of course, form temporary alliances with others of their class but, within Capitalism, each worker is a potential (if not an actual) rival to every other worker seeking employment, and each capitalist a rival to every other capitalist seeking profit.

Production under Capitalism is social, not individual, yet the worker does not labour primarily because in doing so he renders a service to the community. Lacking access to the means of production, he is compelled to become "gainfully” employed. He gets back in wages part of the value of what he produces, and the employer gets his profit out of the remainder. The conflict between "capital” and "labour” arising out of the capitalists’ ownership of the means of production and distribution constitutes the class struggle. It is entirely out of place to apportion blame to either capitalist or worker for their "selfish” conduct. Nor is it helpful to suggest a reconciliation between classes while consenting to the continuation of a system that makes the gain of one class the loss of another.

Capitalist division of labour is objectionable because it makes harmful separations in the productive process. Production is separated from consumption, enjoyment from work, mental labour from physical labour. These separations lead to antagonisms, and the function that should be an integrated whole is divided against itself. Thus the producer of wealth who demands more wages is castigated for making the "consumer” suffer higher prices. The worker who takes his ideas from capitalist propagandists is encouraged to vent his frustration as producer on to the consumer, and his frustration as consumer on to the producer—and the underlying, but real cause of the trouble is ignored.

The aim of the employer is to make the human labour power that he has bought as productive as possible. All kinds of aids to intensified exploitation are introduced, so that the maximum amount of profit is achieved in the shortest possible time. It is a matter of little concern that the conditions of work are such that all joy is taken from it, and the worker comes to look upon it as an evil necessity. The remedy applied, under Capitalism, for this deplorable state of affairs is not, as one might reasonably hope, the adjustment of the work to the needs of the worker as a human being, though industrial psychology whitewashes its economic motives by pretending to do this. Instead a substitute —leisure—is found for the satisfaction that is lacking in capitalist employment. Tied to unpleasant, boring and socially useless jobs, people are encouraged to make their non-working hours the centre of their lives, the part that they "look forward to.” But you cannot switch on a human being as you can a machine, and so the way in which the hours of employment are spent inevitably has its effects on the ways of spending leisure. Regimented and controlled at the factory or office, the worker tends to lose the desire to participate actively in his own amusement, and all to often relies on mass-produced entertainment to be sold to him. 

Impersonality and Excessive Specialisation

As a consequence of the commodity function placed upon human labour power, personal worth is reduced to exchange value. Everyone has his price, not only for what he does but for what he is. Human relationships are regarded as the subject of calculated business transactions ("what does he want in return?”) and are lacking in all dignity. The situation is well described by Hortense Powdermaker in "Hollywood— The Dream Factory”:—

“Man has become increasingly lonely. Although people live in close physical contact, their relationships have become more and more depersonalised. We have a sense of being with people, and yet do not feel in any way related to them. The technique of business and many other organisations in trying to personalise their selling relationships, such as by announcing the name of employees to customers, really fools no one. The fact that the name of the post office clerk, the bank teller or the person who handles complaints in the department store, is posted does not really influence their relationship with customers. The market place is still basically impersonal."

Perhaps the greatest denial of human characteristics is the excessive specialisation of function that Capitalism has developed. In earlier societies man was able to combine in one person many different functions and, in relation to his society, his development was many-sided. The craftsman in feudal times had the satisfaction of making whole articles, and his work held interest and pleasure for him because he could clearly appreciate the social value of what he produced. Today the worker rarely makes a whole article or gives a service that is wanted, not for business, but for its own sake. He is part of a machine for producing wealth and, like all machines, he must be made to function as "efficiently” as possible. Thus the multifarious operations required in the production of a motor-car for competitive sale must, as Ford has shown, be broken down into their simplest component parts; so that the ultimate aim is that the worker shall make only one movement as frequently as possible.

Throughout the whole range of capitalist employments the accent lies on paying attention almost exclusively to a small section of the whole economic process, which involves a failure to comprehend that it forms a segment of a much wider field. Few men have first-hand experience of any productive activity outside their own jobs—they come to rely more and more on the services of “ specialists.”

Symptoms of Maladjustment

What sort of cultural “superstructure” arises from this falsely separated, depersonalised and excessively specialised mode of production? In the short space of this article we can only touch upon a few aspects of present society, and show that they are given their character by the capitalist system. We read, for example, in Margaret Mead’s ‘“Male and Female,” of 

“ . . . the cultural meaning of prostitution and promiscuous homosexuality, venereal disease, acute alcoholism, and sex crimes. These all occur, and their form and frequency are indices of the maladjustment that exists in the United States, as in every modern society. They are symptoms of the state of society, just as the phobias and compulsions of the patient are symptoms.

“They are systematically related to the culture.” 

When we compare this approach to the one that seeks to lay blame for society’s ills on the individual’s wickedness, we can see how much more rational the former is. The solution, we perceive, is not to complain that there are “problem” people in the world who must be reformed, but to tackle the cause of the problem in the world itself. The dualism that characterises everything under Capitalism—buyer and seller, employee and employer, competition and monopoly, work and leisure—is perhaps most apparent in the gulf between the theory of what should be and the practice of what is. This is aptly illustrated by Bergen Evans in “The Natural History of Nonsense”:—

“We are brought up to expect rewards for certain kinds of behaviour and then thrown into a world in which none of the signals works. We are taught as children to be kind, self-sacrificing, and helpful, never to to be greedy or aggressive. Then we must five in a ruthlessly competitive economy. We are taught to be honest, in preparation for a world in which honesty is often penalized, and dishonesty, in a thousand forms, is often rewarded. Our ambition is stimulated and we are assured of success if we will onty ‘apply ourselves,' when actually, by the very nature of things, nine out of ten must be disappointed, and chance carries as much weight as merit.

“ The result is mass frustration and despair.”

#    #    #    #

Such is the capitalist environment into which we are born. Yet, in spite of it all, people do, on the whole, manage to be kind, unselfish, helpful and honest, and their greed and aggressiveness is mostly the reaction to unfortunate circumstances. It is certain that if such a disunited, contradictory, and anarchical system as Capitalism can hold people together in society, then one which is designed to harmonise with their needs will not fail because of the frailty of human nature.

Stan Parker

(Next Article: We Learn From Social Scientists.)

The Future of Leisure (1953)

From the July 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

The phrase “working for a living” suggests a distinction between working and living which most people accept. But if “working occupies five or six days a week and fifty weeks a year, how much “living” is left?

That was the challenging question put to readers of the “Radio Times” some little while ago, in describing a programme on “What is Work?” The question is of particular interest to socialists, who advocate a form of society in which such a distinction between working and living (or the division of living into work and leisure) will no longer be recognised.

The present division which exists for most people between their work and their leisure is the product of historical conditions. Probably the concept of leisure as something apart from and opposed to work was unknown in societies in which there was no privileged class. Some primitive people have no word for “work” —work is for them the expression of living. And even the class-divided Greek civilisation evolved no separate word for leisure—the word they used also meant “school.”

The handicraftsman and artisan received a certain satisfaction from the work they did. They made whole articles, and used their skill and inventiveness to overcome the difficulties which arose. They were really educated by their labour. But the manufacturing division of labour under Capitalism has changed all that. A large proportion of workers are relegated to monotonous machine-minding and office routine, and few are able to gain real satisfaction from their work.

Even those who do make things that are useful to people often do not gain the pleasure of a good job well done, because of the tyranny of clocking-in, speeding-up, and down-to-a-price quality of products. Capitalist and worker alike are dominated by the need to compete successfully with others, since failure means an end to their “living"—yet success is bought only at the price of orienting one's life to goals that are trivial and artificial instead of basic and real.

Leisure Class

The emergence of a class in society that is not compelled to participate in production coincided with the beginning of private ownership. A leisure class was the outgrowth of an early discrimination between employments, some being considered worthy (“exploit” by the males) and other unworthy (drudgery by the females).

“During the predatory culture labour comes to be associated in men’s habits of thought with weakness and subjection to a master. It is therefore a mark of inferiority and, therefore, comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his best estate. By virtue of this tradition labour is felt to be debasing, and this tradition has never died out. . . . In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence. . . . A life of leisure is the readiest and most conclusive evidence of pecuniary strength and, therefore, of superior force; provided always that the gentleman of leisure can live in manifest ease and comfort.”—(“The Theory of the Leisure Class” Veblen, p. 36-8.)

Yet the fact remains that work is the foundation of any society. Hence, the value of work to society should be its prime consideration. But because, within property society, the dominating ideas arise from people who need not toil, and because a substitute for satisfaction from work must be found for millions who know it only as an evil necessity, leisure becomes the supreme goal.

Employment is a necessity imposed upon all but a privileged few. Consequently there comes to be a divergence between the conditions of working “for a living” and the kind of life which is held out by supporters of the system as desirable. The message preached is that the end of life is idleness and enjoyment. But workers, having absorbed the message, must return to the factory or office to earn the money without which they cannot live.

Machinery of Amusement

The means of mass influence—press, cinema, radio and television—all focus attention on those aspects of our lives that have nothing to do with everyday tasks. People figure in the “news” who are notable only for having money and time to spend. The constant display of wealth and leisure as desirable ends influences the standards of those who seek an outlet to express themselves which the conditions of their work deny them.

Various factors have combined to oust the old family-gathering type of popular leisure—doing has given way to watching and listening. Probably the Victorian party-piece was not as happily endured as many would have us believe, nor is the advent of television the unmitigated evil that some suppose. Nevertheless, leisure has largely taken on the form of a commodity that is passively consumed rather than an experience that is actively enjoyed. As Henry Durant writes in “The Problem of Leisure":

“All forms of leisure have become commercialised, endless devices are offered to the idle person, each to be enjoyed only on condition that he has money to pay. Without money he is condemned, unable to share in the pleasure and pastimes which press on him from all sides. But commercialisation does not merely erect a gate through which only those with the necessary fee can pass. It has a profound effect also on the nature of the fare offered. The ’machinery of amusement’ is run by business men actuated by business motives. Their concern is not primarily with the character of the entertainment or amusement they provide, for it is merely the means to the end of making profits.”

The ways in which leisure is spent are unavoidably influenced by the prevailing conditions of employment. Take, for example, the workers on a belt system in a factory who, in the course of their work, use only a small part of their brain capacity and nervous system. To stave off monotony their off-duty hours are mostly spent in such feverish pleasures as speedway and the more hectic forms of dancing—and their nervous systems inevitably suffer.

When work lacks interest it is either forgotten altogether on “knocking off” or else it is the subject of grumbling. It is not complimentary to be told that you can never forget your work; and those who do take their socially useless work seriously often develop boring personalities and have few interests outside their daily occupations.

Self-expression

Here we can do no more than touch upon the various ways in which people search today for something different, something outside of their own drab existence. The cinema is an obvious example that springs to mind, but there are others that are not so often considered. All the preparations, the plans, the excitements and the ballyhoo that surrounded the recent Coronation surely demonstrate the emptiness of most people's everyday lives. And what of the weekly football pool coupon that excites study and comment out of all proportion to its importance? The punters are members of a Happy Circle, so they are told—and the atmosphere of mock geniality is shattered only when a court action is brought over winnings. Then it is admitted that the “Happy Circle" is just an advertising circular.

Some imagine that the socialist revolution either will or ought to bring a state of affairs where all will spend their leisure as the wealthy do now. Certainly the atmosphere in which they move is one to which the adjective “drab" hardly applies. Yet if you ask those who minister to the “needs" of the élite whether the latter really have the control over their environment that is the mark of free men, then the answer may surprise you. According to one writer, for instance, the rich take up gambling more or less because they are driven to it—they find they are “out of it" unless they join in roulette or whatever happens to be in vogue. And so they drift from one aimless diversion to another . . .

Whilst the first onset of mechanisation has taken all the joy from work, it may be predicted that its final result will be to return to human activities a freedom that is absent today. Man will then possess the machines and use them selectively, thus restoring dignity to all human occupations. Labour, in Marx's words, will be not merely a means to live, but itself the primary necessity of life.

Stan Parker

Human Nature and Socialism: The Role of the Socialist (1953)

From the July 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Continued from the previous issue.

3—The Role of the Socialist

Let us try to see how socialists can use their knowledge of man in society to achieve social change. We must first discuss human nature a little further from a theoretical standpoint, in order to relate it to other socialist theories, and in particular to historical materialism.

There are two main points about human nature that are implicit in Marxist theory (though Marx and Engels avoided the term “nature” in connection with “human” because of its idealist associations). One is that it is essentially subject to change, and the other is that it is entirely made up of the behaviour and powers of individuals or groups within their environments.

Human nature is to be understood neither idealistically nor mechanically, but dialectically. It is no single universal form or essence which individual human beings share; nor is it the mere sum total of those individuals. It is the sum total of the needs, desires and activities of human beings in society. In other words, man can be no more than what men actually do in their historical and social environments. Thus human nature is essentially the history of humanity, and has nothing to do with any idealistic concept of some changeless entity called man.

Man has evolved as a species slowly and continuously through all the various phases of human society, from tree-climbing anthropoid to his present status. This evolution has been social, cultural, psychological— but hardly at all biological. It is therefore in a dual sense—biologically and socially—that human nature is to be understood; and this is why it has been truly said that human nature changes in some of its respects because it remains the same in others.

Production and Change

Of all the factors determining historical development the decisive element is the production and reproduction of life and its material requirements. Men must be in a position to live in order to be able to make history. The production of the immediate material means of subsistence, and the consequent degree of economic development form the basis upon which all other institutions, concepts and ideas have been evolved. All these things must be explained in the light of the material basis of life, and not vice versa.

Against this, the idealists portray history as though it were dancing to the tune of men’s ideas, or, more precisely, the ideas of a few “great men.” So determined were Marx and Engels to combat this line of thought that they ran the risk of being accused of saying that the production of the means of life is the only factor causing change. But, as Engels points out,

"Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic base. It is not that the economic position is the cause and alone active, while everything else has a passive effect There is, rather, interaction on the basis of the economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself." — ("Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence," p. 517.)

At each stage of history there is a sum of productive forces and relations of individuals to things and to one another—all handed down to each generation from its predecessor. While these forces and relations are modified by the new generation, they also prescribe the conditions of life of that generation. In short, circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.

Men are products of certain conditions, and therefore changed men are products of other conditions. But it must never be forgotten that conditions are changed precisely by men. Man changes history, and is thereby himself changed and, in this sense, “all history is but a record of the continuous transformation of human nature ” (Marx).

When production was primitive, man’s simple biological needs determined his activities—but as production developed his needs developed also. In the process of production man is driven to a fuller comprehension of the world in which he lives. By acting on the external world and changing it, man changes his own nature.

History-making Animal

The basic difference between man and other animals—the change-over, as it were, from non-human to human—is when he begins to produce his own means of subsistence. This is not to say that animals don’t produce. The difference is that human production is premeditated, planned action, directed towards definite ends. Again, this doesn’t mean that no animal acts according to a plan. But, with man, consciousness takes the place of instinct, or, to put it another way, his“ instinct” is a conscious one.

“What distinguishes the most incompetent architect from the best of bees is that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he constructs it in reality,” wrote Marx. The labour process ends in the creation of something which, when the process began, already existed in the worker’s imagination in an ideal form. We may say that what ultimately distinguishes men from other animals is consciousness of method in production. The animal merely uses external nature, and brings about changes in it by his presence. Man, by his changes, makes nature serve his ends.

Yet man is not only a nature-controlling animal. He is also a history-making one. He is the sole animal who has worked his way out of the merely animal state —his normal state is one of consciousness, one to be created by himself. Man’s mastery over nature, of which he is a part, consists in the fact that he is able to know and correctly apply its laws.

Man has achieved a considerable measure of success as a nature-controlling animal, but when it comes to history-making there is much less cause for satisfaction. Broadly speaking, human action has achieved its desired end only in exceptional cases, and much more often it has achieved the exact opposite. Unforeseen effects have predominated, and uncontrolled forces have been far more powerful than those set in motion according to a plan.

These and other considerations lead socialists to believe that man has not yet made truly human history. “Only conscious organisation of social production,” says Engels, "can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for men in their aspect as species.”

Understanding and Co-operating

The question may be asked: why has man, who has been so successful in developing his powers of production, made such a failure of history? The answer is that men have made bad history because they have been unable to prevent the means of production from conflicting with the relations of production. They have been so preoccupied with having to “make a living” in competition with others that they have had no control over the long-term consequences of their actions. The history and human nature that have resulted have thus been unplanned and mostly unintended.

In the process of controlling nature man has been scientific, in the widest sense. But in the process of making history he has not. Man makes a machine by manipulating suitable materials in a certain way according to a planned purpose. On the other hand, he makes history as an indirect result, almost a byproduct, of quite another activity—that of competing with his fellow-man to “earn a living.”

The conditions of property society have never been, and can never be, such as to allow men to solve their problems with a collective will or according to a collective plan. The dominating motive being individual self-interest, their efforts clash, what each individual seeks is obstructed by others, and what emerges is something that no one sought.

Man has had greater success in his efforts to master the forces of nature than those of society, which dominate him as a power independent of himself. Slave to classes and to the conditions of class society, man (whether as owner of property or non-owner) has been merely a class animal. He has not yet become truly human, in the sense that he has been passive instead of active in the historical process that makes human nature.

The case for Socialism amounts to saying that history, like the control of nature, ought to be planned and consciously organised. It ought to be produced, like any other product, for a purpose, and this purpose ought to be broadly human, not narrowly individual. It should aim at the transformation of human nature to make man integrated, complete, and balanced through the free use of his creative energies.

The role of the socialist consists in his capacity for understanding the world, for understanding its natural and historical movement, and for co-operating consciously with all the factors that are working towards classless society. We are able to speak of Socialism as a potentiality because it already exists in the minds of men in an ideal form, just as the house exists in the architect’s imagination even before the blueprint stage.

Without classes, human nature can at last become the product of human science rather than the by-product of class struggle. With the abolition of class control of economic forces, when the whole of society has gained mastery of the conditions of social life, man will be able to exercise real control over his own nature. With the release of his human powers from capitalist servitude, he will be able to shape his environment so that it promotes the fullest possible development of all his faculties.

Stan Parker

(Next Article: Capitalist Patterns of Behaviour.)

Food for profit: food for thought (2003)

From the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The work of growing and preparing food should involve pleasure, not exploitation of those engaged in it. The environment should not be damaged by profit-seeking, short-term policies for “marketing” food. The consumption of food should be a healthy activity based on need, not ability to pay.

Capitalism cares little about the working conditions of the people who produce food, the effects on the environment of how it is produced, or the well-being of its consumers. Socialism will mean a fundamentally different set of priorities regarding food – no exploitation of producers, proper regard for environmental consequences, need not profit as the motive for distributing and consuming it.

Exploiting producers

There is ample and growing evidence that workers engaged in the food industry are among the most exploited and poverty-stricken producers of a vital “commodity”. This is especially so in the Third World. The Guardian (17 May) gave details of the working conditions and daily lives of wage-slaves in just one African country, Kenya. The general picture, if not the details, could be repeated in many other parts of the economically underdeveloped and developing world.

A group of Kenyan women are picked up by the company truck from their homes at 4 am to arrive at the workplace in time for the 4.30 am shift, which lasts until 3.40 or 4 pm, as laid down by Kenyan law. Their job is to top and tail beans for the English market. They work in refrigerated packing sheds next to Nairobi airport, standing at stainless steel benches. They work “flexitime”, depending on the amount of orders they have to complete each day. Sometimes they can go home early, but if the orders are big they have to work until they are finished.

Gladys (not her real name) is dead on her feet after a 12-hour shift with only one break. She lives with her husband and three children and works to earn enough money to send them to school. In the block where she lives 100 people share a lavatory and outside tap. She has no choice about the hours she works or the way she is paid. There is no overtime, but performance-related pay instead. The employer’s representative is candid about this: “We’ve found that by introducing PRP we can reduce the number of the workforce.”

Environmental consequences

The capitalist food industry is bad for the environment as well as for the workers. In many parts of Africa and elsewhere, land where people were growing food for local consumption has been turned over to land growing food for export – cash crops. The greenhouses and tunnels of the intensive farms shrink the lakes and blight the shores with algal bloom. There is excessive extraction to water the crops, pollution from pesticide run off, deforestation caused by the logging industry and workers having to cut wood for cooking fuel.

In the last 20 years or so there has been much controversy over the introduction of genetically modified crops. There is nothing inherently damaging to people or the environment about genetic modification. For thousands of years the seeds of plants with more desirable characteristics have been selected for planting the following year – in effect, a form of genetic modification. What is harmful is not the technique but its use in the pursuit of profit. Agribusinesses have sought to patent the “terminator” gene introduced into plants. Crops are harvested normally, but the germ of the grain is sterile and seeds have to be purchased each year. Only in capitalism, where the prime aim is not human welfare but profit, could such a mad idea be put into practice.

Bad for consumers

Food today is bad for consumers in a number of ways, all connected with the market system. On a world scale there are crises of starvation and obesity happening at the same time in different places. Peasants who were once self-sufficient can no longer earn a living from their produce. Increasing numbers of people in the economically developed world grow grossly fat and unhealthy on the heavily promoted commodities of the junk-food industry.

Capitalist methods of food production have led to a number of outbreaks of food poisoning resulting in deaths and serious health damage. In the 1980s it was the injection of hormones into calves to fatten them quicker that led to birth defects. There followed salmonella, E coli, BSE and a spate of more recent food scandals. The causes are a mix of misuse of GM technology, pesticides that induce cancers, animal maltreatment, no or inadequate labelling, and abysmal hygiene standards. Market forces always value profits above human welfare. Whatever remedial measures are taken are usually too little and too late.

Food in socialism

Marx famously dissuaded us from writing recipes for future cookshops. We can speculate about the future, but would be wise not to go into too much detail. However, since socialists advocate the replacement of capitalism with socialism we are obliged to outline, at least in principle, how the new system will work. Without majority agreement and action on these principles some form of capitalism, reformed or unreformed, will continue.

Socialism means a classless society – no working class employed and exploited to produce food among other commodities, no capitalist class to own the means of food and other production and distribution. With no workers required to be employed in activities useful only in capitalism – banking, insurance, the war industry, among many others – more of us will be able to devoted more time and energies to producing and distributing food. With profit no longer the spur to activity, short-term policies leading to environmental damage will give way to long-term and sustainable policies.

Probably there will still be big eaters and small eaters, vegetarians and carnivores, even those who like fast food once it is rid of its capitalist connotations. In our pamphlet Socialist Principles Explained we discuss how food production and distribution may be organised in a socialist world. To some extent existing bodies like the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN may be converted and used for socialist purposes. But it may be that other and novel arrangements will be called for.

Socialists today lean towards being technophiles or simple-lifers, or somewhere in between. Some of us look to a future of socialist restaurants and hotels and less home cooking – others like the idea of having more time for artisanal rather than industrial food production and preparation. All tastes will be catered for.

Stan Parker

Human Nature and Socialism (1953)

From the June 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Continued from the previous issue.

Numerous undesirable social conditions have been and still are explained away or justified by the glib remark that “you can’t change human nature/’ Yet the science of anthropology shows these conditions to be cultural acquisitions, subject to change, and not the inevitable result of something inherent in man. Let us try to see, then, the particular ways in which human nature is supposed to be unchangeable, and what follows from thinking in this way.

Human nature is held, by opponents of Socialism, to be unalterable in certain respects that effectively prevent any conscious improvement in social conditions. Men, it is said, will go on acting in the same old ways, and so inevitably bring the same problems that have “always” faced them. Of course, if this were the case then it would be useless even to try to improve things; we might as well face the “inevitable” now. But those who hold this view obstinately refuse to have the courage of their convictions, and they are often found taking very active measures to avoid a fate, such as grinding poverty, that they forecast for others.

What are the reasons for holding and propagating the idea that “you can’t change human nature”? From the point of view of those seeking too justify Capitalism, there are many reasons. People are unemployed because they are “naturally lazy”; fight wars because they are “naturally belligerent"; cheat, injure and bankrupt each other because they “naturally act on the profit motive.”

There are many variants of these arguments, and not all are put as directly as the examples quoted. Sometimes the objector to social change will try to coat the bitter pill that he forces himself to swallow. “Of course, it would be a good thing if people could always live in peace, but until we get a new race of human beings I am afraid this will be impossible.” He wants social change, but only provided that certain impossible conditions can be fulfilled—which amounts to not wanting social change at all.

We can now see where all these arguments lead. It is toward the prevention of future change through the spread of a philosophy that justifies present evils. If men can be persuaded that what they want is impossible to achieve then they will give up struggling for it. Instead, they will content themselves with whatever crumbs they can pick up within the present set-up, in the knowledge that all social evils from which they suffer are “natural,” and therefore unavoidable.

"Incurably Selfish”

There are two main ways in which human nature is said to be unalterable. One is that men are supposed to be universally and incurably selfish, and the other is that mankind is mostly stupid and unteachable, and that intelligence is the prerogative of a few “born” leaders.

Let us examine these statements to see what truth they contain. If men were really incurably selfish, then there could never have been any sort of stable society, because no one would have co-operated with anyone else. If men were really so stupid by nature, then they could never have overcome previous obstacles to the development of their productive forces, and Capitalism could never have grown out of Feudalism.

When we take a closer look at the “incurably selfish” argument, we see that it rests upon the assumption that everything that men do involves loss or sacrifice for other people. Now there is no question that some of the things men do have that effect. But there is equally no question that society depends for its very existence on the fact that there is co-operative behaviour, and that people do work at things which are of no immediate benefit to themselves.

We may infer from this that behaviour which benefits other people is at least as consistent with human nature as that which harms other people. Nevertheless, granting all this, it might still be true that selfishness exists in human nature side by side with social-mindedness, and that therefore it cannot be eradicated. Or, to put it more concretely, there are some things which men need so badly that they will injure other people in order to get them.

The answer to this is that, though such behaviour exists and may even be the general rule in property society, it is not natural to human beings. The fact that there is unselfish behaviour means that selfishness is not inherent in man. People only act selfishly or anti-socially when they can see no other way of obtaining what they desire (by co-operation, for instance) then there is no reason to suppose that they will not choose it when they see that it is better to do so.

Justification for Behaviour

It is important not to confuse selfishness with self-interest. Self-interest is the satisfaction of one's desires; selfishness is the satisfaction of one's desires at the expense of someone else. Self-interest is an integral part of human nature, but selfishness is not—unless it is assumed that everything we do is at someone else's expense. But we continually do things without detriment to other people, and the satisfaction of some of our desires, such as companionship and love, involves the satisfaction of other people's. Any selfish, anti-social behaviour that is present cannot therefore exist in the desires themselves, but only in the way they are sometimes satisfied.

Having seen that there is nothing in human nature that necessitates men's injuring one another, we must conclude that there is nothing in human nature that necessitates war. War can occur under certain conditions, but as far as human nature is concerned these conditions need not exist

There is one contradiction in the argument of “selfish human nature” that we must point out. If it really is selfish then all men must share an equal guilt and it is a case of one sinner condemning another. But those who use the argument give the lie to it themselves, because they impute incurable selfishness only to others and never to themselves. We have never met the objector to Socialism who seriously maintains that if an article were freely available he would still fight someone for his share.

The real reason for the doctrine of human selfishness is not hard to discover. It is a justification for the anti-social behaviour that a highly competitive society produces. The employer blandly counters the accusation of “selfish profiteering” with “selfish wage demand,” and the worker who is not class-conscious falls for the trick. In reality, all the antagonisms result from the nature of the system that all except socialists support, and not from the selfish natures of either capitalists or workers.

“Stupid and Unteachable”

The other way in which human nature is commonly said to be unalterable is that people are, on the whole, stupid and unteachable. Human intelligence is supposed to be too weak to enable people to solve the complex problems that face them—they must fight a losing battle with ignorance. The particular form in which we usually meet this argument is that most people are incapable of understanding Socialism. Allied to this is the assertion that ordinary folk would never be able to run society in their own interest.

It must be noted that, although most people are supposed to be incapable of understanding what are sometimes called the abstruse principles of Socialism, the understanding of such complicated matters as the balance of payments or the American electoral system is assumed to be quite within their power. Propagandists for Capitalism never tell us that we are too stupid to understand the tortuous arguments used, for instance, to prove that the way to preserve peace is to prepare for war. The point is not that arguments either way are too complicated and therefore beyond universal comprehension, but that the will to learn is actively discouraged when its threat to the continuation of Capitalism becomes apparent.

From the unwarranted assertion that most people are stupid flows the equally unwarranted assertion that therefore they must always have leaders. And why must they have leaders? Because those who are in the position of having a following do not wish to lose their privileged position. The existence of leaders and “the led" implies that the former have the power to make decisions, whereas the latter have not. In co-operative enterprises the concept of leadership is foreign, since all the participants have a common purpose. When you know what you are doing you do not need somebody else to "lead” you to do it. The leader is thus the reflection of “the led,” and the measure of their ignorance (not stupidity), and both disappear when people know what they want and how to get it.

As we saw in the first article, human nature is strictly what is common to the natures of the vast mass of all human beings. It has nothing to do with possession or non-possession of knowledge, which is governed by environmental factors, such as whether the particular knowledge is available to people.

The varying capacity for acquisition of knowledge (which is sometimes called the intelligence factor) means nothing more than that some people learn certain things quicker than others, and does not prove that some are incapable of learning. Language—the expression for all communicable experience—is the possession of humanity as a whole, and it is the crassest prejudice to suppose that its fruits are beyond the reach of any individual or section of society.

Stan Parker

(Next Article: The Role of the Socialist.)

New Socialist Party pamphlet (2002)

Party News from the June 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Socialist Life is a collection of 28 published and 5 unpublished short stories by Socialist Standard writer Heather Ball. Many readers liked Heather's distinctive writing style and found it full of charm, warmth, humanity and humour. Sadly, Heather died before she could complete her writing project. This collection of her stories, published by the Socialist Party, is a memorial to her indefatigable commitment to socialism. Send a cheque made payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain to 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN. Price £3.00.

Blogger's Note:

I'm not sure what happened but for some reason the text of this pamphlet isn't available on the SPGB website, and it also looks like it is currently out of print. Therefore, reproduced below is the introduction to the pamphlet, and links to Heather's short stories mentioned in the introduction. Four of Heather's unpublished short stories which were originally included in this pamphlet are not currently online but they are on my to do list.

Introduction to A Socialist Life by Heather Ball

This is a collection of short stories first published in the Socialist Standard between July 1995 and November 2000. They are brought together here for two main reasons. First, readers have appreciated Heather's distinctive style of writing — they find it full of warmth, humanity and pervaded by a gentle sense of humour. And second, those who haven't previously read anything by socialist writers may find their appetite whetted by Heather's collection.

Sadly Heather died before the project was complete. This collection of her stories is thus a memorial to her indefatigable commitment to socialism.

Most of the collection is divided somewhat arbitrarily into three parts—people, places and situations. In fact all the stories concern people in some way—their ideas, their behaviour, their strengths and weaknesses, their frequent niceness and occasional nastiness. To a large extent places are the contexts in which people live and work, and situations arise out of people trying to cope with the opportunities and problems that they face.

Part 1 starts with Heather's recollections of her parents. Her father was a lifelong Bolshevik, but he taught her how to be a socialist. Her mother endured a life of struggle against poverty, a struggle that included occasional selective stealing to feed and clothe her family. In 'Ordinary People' Heather talks about the men and women who do valuable work, despite sometimes being patronised by ‘experts'. In ’Humankind' she describes how people are normally helpful sociable beings despite their capitalist environment. The same point is well illustrated in 'The Bailiffs' when, after Heather's family furniture is repossessed, the neighbours rally round to replace most of what had been taken.

Next a group of elderly neighbours discover that it's good to party. In 'Passing the Time' Heather finds that chatting about the Queen Mother can be a chore and a bore. Later Heather is visited by Mr Brown, a Social Security Officer, and she wonders whether he is aware that his job depends on the fact that in capitalism some people go to the wall.

In Part 2 we see Heather as a schoolgirl making her revolutionary debut by organising a strike against a tyrannical teacher. The next piece is about Heather's fellow pupil, the unassuming Dorcas, who told the truth about her dislike of the school and most of its teachers and was roundly castigated for doing so. At a 'Careers' interview Heather's school bosses scoff at the idea that she wants to write. An office, shop or factory job was what they had in mind for her. In 'Uncles' she relates how as a child she watched her mother pawn her father's best suit to a man she at first believed was a not very nice relative.

The next few stories are about the places and people Heather encountered as a young worker. In 'The Office' she confesses that she was too young to realise that, rather than failing the workplace, the workplace had failed her. 'The madhouse' is Heather's name for the small hotel she worked in, and she observes how things can go quite well when the boss is on holiday. Then follows an amusing and perceptive account of how she applied for, and rejected a really lousy job as a capstan lathe operator.

As an adult Heather goes to the doctor and is told not to worry about the present profit system and its consequences — whose is the saner point of view, the doctor's or hers? She goes to an open day at her child's school and is mildly mortified at the treatment she receives on inadvertently gatecrashing a room reserved for the bigwigs. A much different kind of place is 'The Naff Caff’, featuring cheap grub and animated (often political) conversation. Within its walls, muses Heather, 'dwells a little bit of socialism'.

Part 3 links people to situations. First, the process of joining the Socialist Party. Not an easy one. Hopefully others will react as Heather did on hearing the case for socialism for the first time: 'SPGB, where have you been all my life?' Next she tells how setting up a literature stall can good way of opening people's eyes to an alternative to capitalism, and meeting their 'human nature' and other objections. In Norwich, elsewhere, a lot of misguided youthful energy goes into 'Direct action': reclaiming the streets, cutting fences, daubing statues, setting up peace camps, guerrilla gardening, critical mass bike rides — in short, 'pissing about with capitalism'.

The later stories are more by way of personal reminiscence, though they all illustrate facets of Heather's socialist life. She puts 'Cleaning Houses', still too often regarded as women's work — in sensible proportion, while not quite going to Quentin Crisp's extreme position that after four years the dust doesn't get any thicker. In 'Ethics' Heather rejects combative and mistrustful capitalist values in favour of unspoken socialist acceptance and acknowledgement of mutual existence. And she rejects 'Ageism' and other discriminatory policies which say who shall have jobs and who shall not. Diana's death is an opportunity to reflect on 'Misplaced Admiration': an occasion for lauding the cosmetic, the contrived and the overly sentimental, rather than a better life for all. Finally, Heather attends a meeting of 'Alcoholics Anonymous' to learn how to fight the demon drink.

Part 4, Last Thoughts, contains only two stories, both written after Heather had been diagnosed as suffering from motor neurone disease. Her frustration is clear in 'Small Talk' as she becomes 'impatient with the foolishness of existence'. But optimism and humanity reassert themselves triumphantly in 'Consciousness', with Heather certain that The system will never succeed altogether in eradicating the understanding we all share of being human and needing one another.'

Included in part 5 are five stories that for one reason or another were not published in the Socialist Standard. In 'Adoption' Heather writes of her feelings about her adopted granddaughter, to be loved and cherished as all children should be. In 'Books' we are able to compare our favourite choice of reading with Heather's. 'The Car Boot Sale' shows her speculating that socialism will give us the same opportunity to give and take things without the intrusion of money. 'Vegetarianism' gives Heather the opportunity to explain how, as a child, she came to this philosophy and its consequence for eating habits. Finally, she writes of her wartime experience of evacuation as very much a mixed blessing.

Heather wrote from the heart as well as the head. For her socialism meant more than just common ownership and the absence of poverty and war, etc. Economic equality and the resolution of class conflict were only the beginning. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in 'Humankind'. And perhaps no single paragraph exemplifies the biting anger, the humour and the inspiring sense of aspiration that characterised her view of socialism:

"[in present day society] there is an erosion of everything socialism requires and capitalism despises — co-operation, self-respect, love even. I hesitate to use the word 'love' when talking about human relationships' — the suspicious sidelong glances I get sometimes make me wonder if it is thought I am advocating multiple orgasms for everyone. Love to me represents the possibility of having such good feelings about ourselves that we can afford to have them about other people too. Yet in this miserable society where money and exploitation must come first, we are discouraged from showing too much concern for one another in case this detracts from our real purpose—to provide profit and power for a minority”.

Michael Gill 

Stan Parker 

2001

Part I People

• My Father
• My Mother
• Ordinary People
• Humankind
• The Bailiffs
• Neighbours
• Passing the Time

Part II Places

• The Strike
• Truth
• Careers
• 'Uncles'
• The Office
• The Madhouse
• Whitlow And Boyle (Engineers)
• Madness
• Local Dignitaries
• The Naff Caff

Part III Situations

• Joining the Party
• The Stall
• Direct Action
• Cleaning Houses
• Ethics
• Ageism
• Misplaced Admiration
• Alcoholics Anonymous

Part IV Last Thoughts

• Small Talk
• Consciousness

Part V Unpublished

• Adoption
• Books
• The Car Boot Sale
• Vegetarianism
• Evacuation

Socialism on the slate? (1951)

Pamphlet Review from the March 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nationalisation has always figured prominently in the plans which Labour Party theorists formulate from time to time for the administration of British capitalism. Labour politicians out of office are full of schemes for the betterment of society, but when, as now, they have had ample time to put their ideas to the test they have to try to explain what went wrong. A good example of this stock-taking mood is a recent publication of the Parliamentary Socialist Christian Group entitled, “‘Dirty Coal' and Socialism,” which purports to be a statement on the true meaning of nationalisation.

Fifty-nine Labour M.P.s give their general support to the argument of this pamphlet. They are quite safe in so doing, since at no point does it touch, even lightly, upon issues which are of any concern to the working class. After some sanctimonious claptrap about the will of God, and men being by nature selfish there is a sort of recapitulation of capitalism over the last century or so, with special reference to the widespread acceptance, in his time, of Disraeli’s  "two nations.”

“To-day, the march of events, in which we may reverently discern the hand of God, has made such acceptance obsolete.

We therefore affirm that it is now a major task for Christians to find out how to reawaken in most people a sense of satisfaction and of responsibility in their duly work, without the loss of production which the breaking-up of industry into small units would mean." (p. 7)

How very anxious these Labourites are to convince us that every objection to capitalism, now its responsibility is theirs, is obsolete. Marx's ideas, according to them, are obsolete, poverty has been abolished, hunger is unknown, and now, apparently, the class division in society has been ushered out of existence by the helping hand of God.

The Christian task of reawakening satisfaction and responsibility, in a system that breeds their opposites, is really nothing new. How to reconcile the workers to their exploitation and to gain their support for its continuation have long been the aims of capitalist propagandists, and have given rise, among other things, to the gentle art (hardly science) of industrial psychology.

In order to obtain any sort of conscious support for a particular group to run capitalism it must first be shown that the proposed methods are different from, and superior to, those of rivals, past and present. The signatories of the pamphlet are of the opinion "that most Conservative industrialists would welcome consultation for negative reasons—as a trouble-shooting device, an insurance against unrest.” (p. 10). This implies that the Christian Socialists want consultation for a positive reason, which turns out to be the taking by all of some share of the responsibility for working out the policy of industry.

Let us try to understand what is meant by this much-publicised democracy in industry and how it affects the workers. We may take as an example the question of pay for a certain type of job. The workers say it is too low, and in a gentlemanly way their representatives sit round a table with those of the boss, the managers. The boss is not prepared to pay higher wages, and to support his decision he quotes die Government to the effect that increased wages lead to increased prices and the workers are then no better off. The latter won’t have this—they want a larger share of the cake they produce, but what choice have they? What fresh arguments can they produce to alter the decision, and what pressure can they bring to bear to back up their demands, except the threat or action of withdrawing their labour? There can be no advantage to them in relinquishing the right to strike, and thereby helping to make the “responsible” decision of rejecting their own wage demands.

It is true that many employers are willing to pay a little more for the services of reasonably contented workers in industries which require skilled and relatively permanent labour. This is done, not out of any abstract sense of fairness, but merely in order that the greatest profit may be realized from the use of expensive plant and machinery.

If workers were willing to work for a decreased real wage then no offer would be made by their employers to pay more. The standard of living of the working class is maintained or increased only as a result of their own efforts against the employing class whose interest is to buy the maximum energies of the workers as cheaply as possible.

So much for consultation in industry in general. We now come to the main theme of the pamphlet under discussion—the nationalisation of “our” basic industries. Having been flattered by the use of the first person—somewhat in the style of the valet asking his master "Which suit shall we be wearing to-day?”— we learn that

“Nationalisation is a long and ugly word. We prefer to speak of public or common ownership, which can include other forms of ownership than national ownership and administration through public corporations. Nor do we refer, as some do, to the 'socialised' industries: it seems to us that such a usage may cause confusion in the minds of those who already think, vaguely, that nationalisation is Socialism, instead of merely a necessary part of the machine or framework within which people can begin to learn the Socialist way of life.” (p. 11).

It is difficult to appreciate in what way the word “nationalisation” is ugly. "Demobilisation” is only one letter shorter, yet no stigma attaches to it on that account. The unpopularity of nationalisation lies not in the length of the word but in the reality to which it refers. We have always pointed out that nationalisation is not socialism, and we have also pointed out it has no connection with learning the socialist way of life either.

This notion of giving people a little taste of socialism, so that they will come back for more if they like it, is a typically reformist one. It always turns out that these dainty tit-bits contain the same old capitalist ingredients, and leave the same bad taste in the workers' mouths.

There is ample evidence to show that nationalisation is merely a particular form of capitalism. It is true that sections of the capitalist class oppose it when it threatens to reduce their income from the industries taken over by die state. However their show of resistance must in most cases be interpreted as an effort to obtain greater compensation. The groaning and grunting of the "dispossessed” capitalists in industries in the process of being nationalised is comparable to that of all-in wrestlers who are keen to show the customers how much punishment they are supposed to be taking from their opponents.

The group of fifty-nine who call themselves Christian Socialists also play down the angle of material prosperity, for the workers at any rate.

“Common ownership of the major industries does not lead us all at once to the good life by Act of Parliament; but it is a prerequisite of that end.” (p. 14).

An attempt is made to show in what way such “common” ownership (nationalisation) is a prerequisite of the good life. We are told that the most important point is that the public interest should determine industrial policy.

We must be forgiven if we are a little sceptical about the significance of this statement. To our knowledge no government has ever admitted to acting against the public interest. Our own benevolent Labour government is resolutely facing a cut in our standard of living only because it will, they say, hurt the wage-earners less than unrestrained inflation, and is consequently “in the public interest.”

Lord Bruce of Melbourne, chairman of the Finance Corporation for Industry, had this to say on nationalisation:—

“The Socialists have blindly pursued the dogmatic theory of national ownership. Others have made almost a fetish of private enterprise. The result is that the nation is divided politically, as if this was a great fundamental issue. This is, of course, pure nonsense. Neither public ownership nor private enterprise is the sovereign remedy. Some industries may be suitable for public ownership. The overwhelming majority are not—the iron and steel is an outstanding example of this latter class."

(Manchester Guardian, 22.9.50).

We are not concerned with discussing the relative merits of state or private ownership in any particular industry, or in general. The basic features of capitalism remain the same in either case—the. relation of buyer of labour power to seller, with the propertyless and poverty condition of the latter.

Those workers who expected a better deal from the state than from private employers have been, and are being sadly disillusioned. In rejecting claims for pay increases for railway workers Mr. W. P. Allen, for the Railway Executive, recently told a Court of Inquiry “It is possible that far too many of those in our employ expect far too much from nationalisation far too quickly.” (The Star, 8.1.51).

As time goes by it is becoming increasingly clear that the interests of the majority of people cannot be served by any group of leaders who profess to be ‘‘on their side” any better than those who avowedly rule them. As Gordon Rattray Taylor puts it, "workers in nationalised industries are slowly waking up to the fact that they have only changed one kind of master for another.” (“Are Workers Human?” p. 18).

To those who voted Labour last time in the belief that state ownership holds out a solution, or even a step towards it, of their problems we say—profit from your mistake. The only prerequisite to a good life is your understanding its highest expression—a socialist world.

S. R. Parker