Life and Times: Scumbag or not? (2026)

The Life and Times column from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘He’s just a scumbag.’ That’s what my neighbour said to me about a local landlord who’s bought up literally dozens of properties in the areas and is letting them to students room by room. The neighbour doesn’t like to be surrounded by students since she sees them as potentially rowdy and trouble-makers. But she’s also indignant that, whenever this landlord purchases a property, he puts up one of his ‘To Let’ boards at the front. In our street there are currently seven houses in succession with those signs on them. In her estimation it makes the place look untidy – ‘like a slum’, as she puts it. And even when a property is let and people are living there, the board stays up – presumably for publicity purposes.

As for myself, though I don’t mind the students and don’t find them troublesome, like my neighbour I’m not particularly happy about all those boards up there permanently. I contacted the landlord’s letting company and actually spoke with him. He’s a young chap called Nick who I’ve known since he was little when his father ran the now defunct shop at the corner of the street. We had an entirely friendly conversation in which he said that it was ‘letting season’ at the moment but assured me that the boards would come down at the end of the month when that period was over. But the boards stayed up and, when I tried to contact him again, I couldn’t get hold of him personally and was told by people in his office that they’d pass on the message. Nothing happened and I’ve sort of given up on that.

Since his boards are not just in my street but on properties all over the area (there are literally dozens and dozens), I asked one of the local councillors whether landlords were entitled to keep their boards up long-term like that. He told me they weren’t and that local regulations state they should be taken down once properties have been let. But the rub, he told me, was that, since it would take too much in the way of time and resources for the council to go round checking and enforcing, all it would do was to inform landlords of their legal duty but with no follow up.

So is Nick a scumbag for what he’s doing? In fact, are all landlords scumbags, as a friend of mind once suggested, since what they’re doing is exploiting the very basic need people have for shelter and, if they (be they students or anyone else) don’t have the money to pay for it, then tough? But there again isn’t that how the money and buying and selling system works more widely, ie, if you can’t pay, you can’t have? In a conversation I once had with a different landlord about this very thing, he expressed the view that someone who grasps opportunities to make money is doing nothing wrong but simply being enterprising and deserves to be rewarded for, as he put it, ‘showing good judgement’.

Actually, looking around my area there’s a whole range of types of landlords. Some of them own just a single property or maybe two and use the income from that to supplement what they earn from working for an employer or from small-scale self-employed activity. Others, like Nick, make it their living, become small-scale capitalists, and are always looking to expand. Other properties still are bought by large private equity companies who spend significant time and expense improving them before letting them out and don’t need to get back the money they’ve spent on them in the short term, since they’re regarded as long-term investments which will ultimately turn a profit for the companies’ shareholders. Of course, there are also landlords (or would-be landlords) who come a cropper in all this in not being able to find tenants at all. The property or properties they own, and on which they may have taken out mortgages, become an albatross around their neck rather than a source of profit and they end up having to sell, so incurring a loss rather than any kind of profit.

But then that’s the way the dog-eat-dog, anarchic system we live in works at so many different levels. It creates winners and losers even among would-be capitalists. Of course, being a winner or loser in quite that way doesn’t apply to the majority of people, those who are members of what we would call ‘the working class’ and who have to sell their energies to an employer day by day in order to provide for themselves and their families. Some do it fairly comfortably, others a lot less so, but there are very few who don’t live with insecurity about whether their wage or salary will be enough to satisfy their material aspirations and indeed, in many cases, whether the employment that brings in that wage or salary will itself continue to be secure.

But coming back to Nick, is it fair to call him a scumbag? What he’s done is to inherit the couple of properties his father owned and taken things, as another neighbour put it, ‘to a new level’. He’s seen opportunities and grabbed them. Can we blame him for that? Probably not, after all making money is what capitalism invites us all to do if we can. And that will carry on until the majority of us collectively decide to get rid of it and bring in a new society of free access to all goods and services where we’re not constantly pitted against one another but follow the more natural human path of cooperation. Then we’ll truly be able to satisfy all our needs, for shelter as well as for life’s other necessities. In the meantime, no one would object if Nick took down those boards.

Howard Moss

Life and Times: Follow the money (2025)

The Life and Times column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent BBC investigative programme (File on Four) focused on the financial crisis in British universities, revealing how most of them are urgently trying to make savings by cutting staff numbers and courses on offer. It showed how one of the underlying factors is the falling numbers of students from abroad who pay higher fees than domestic students and on whom many universities have become reliant. The result, so the programme disclosed, was desperate attempts by some institutions to recruit overseas students, even to the extent of overlooking poor qualifications or poor knowledge of English, which may lead to cheating in exams and other assessment exercises and which is then also often overlooked.

The customer is right

But, as I frequently hear from friends in my own local university, the reverberations of the funding problems are more wide-ranging and are causing considerable stress and insecurity to those employed there. One of the greatest concerns for academic employees, apart from the ever-present risk of being pressured into ‘voluntary’ severance or simply declared redundant, stems from the fact that the customer (ie the student) is now very much ‘in charge’. Gone are the days when universities were largely funded by government and regarded by most as places of ‘higher learning’ which didn’t need to be too concerned about where the money was coming from. Gone are the days when students, apart from not being charged for the tuition they received, received local authority grants to cover their living expenses. And gone too are the days when students would look up to their lecturers and see university education as a bonus that would serve them in all manner of useful ways in the years to come. Now that governments no longer fund universities to any significant degree and students have to pay for both living expenses and tuition out of their own (or their parents’) pockets, the tables are well and truly turned.

The anxiety of universities to attract students and then keep them happy when they get there has meant that the students now largely regard their lecturers as servants and are ready to complain and demand redress when things (even small things) don’t go entirely to plan for them – for example if they don’t feel sufficiently well instructed (or even ‘entertained’) by a lecturer or are given lower exam marks than they hoped for or expected. And such complaints are taken deadly seriously by the university authorities themselves with lecturers required to explain themselves and a student’s dissatisfaction not infrequently resulting in a rap over the knuckles for their lecturer or even a formal disciplinary process. And the students’ assessment of their lecturers’ ‘performance’ and the ‘scores’ they are asked to give to them at the end of each module will feed into the university’s decision about whether, for example, a lecturer passes probation, is promoted, or is made redundant if reductions in staff costs are deemed necessary. And though campus trade unions rail against this, they are, so I’m told, rarely successful in achieving any relaxation of these policies or reversal or mitigation of penalties imposed on individual union members who go to them for help.

Obedient zombies

The other thing my university friends tell me is that those who manage to negotiate the hurdles and achieve promotion to higher posts are then required to administer the above processes. In other words, they are required to put the fear of god into their ‘lower level’ colleagues. And just like most others detailed to do ‘the dirty work’ in the repressive regime that employment represents, they usually agree to it and so accept the role of (as one of my University friends puts it) ‘obedient zombie’, even if some at least carry out the tasks required of them with some reluctance but maybe justifying it to themselves on the grounds that they are somehow acting in everyone’s collective interest.

The student-as-paying-customer model that now prevails is also backed up by government policy whereby anyone dissatisfied with the service they have received from their university has the choice of two different bodies they can complain to – either the Office for Students or the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education. They can claim redress either in the form of changes to their grades or financial compensation from their University. But, over and above this, universities run scared that such complaints, if upheld, may be made public and so risk damaging their reputation and discouraging future students from applying, which would adversely affect their already precarious financial position. This of course increases the pressure put upon staff and departments within the university to make sure that, if complaints are made to them by students, ‘satisfaction’ is given, so that such complaints do not risk being taken outside the University with the possible consequences of that. Hence the prevailing mentality of ‘the student is always right’.

Money, money, money

What does all this mean for university staff in the current system? It means, for one thing, long hours to fill in for the work of staff who have left via ‘voluntary’ severance or redundancy. It means that other aspects of their work, in particular their research, that they may have been hoping would give them satisfaction and inspiration and increase the sum of human knowledge in their discipline takes second place to something that may seem to have become a meaningless and alienating grind. And it means more stress and insecurity of not knowing if their job will be safe come the next money-saving operation – whichever euphemism is used for it (take your pick between ‘reorganisation’, ‘review’, ‘restructuring’, ‘redesign’, or anything else). The undeniable reality is that the system we live in, in employment and much else, dictates that money shall be the ultimate arbiter. In extreme cases it may decide whether people live or die. In others – and this applies to university employees – it will decide whether they feel relatively comfortable with their life on a day-to-day basis or whether they lead an anxious and insecure existence sweating on their employer’s judgement about whether there is enough money in the coffers to continue employing them.

Howard Moss

The Row About Overseas Students (1976)

From the August 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Students who come to the UK from abroad to study make another part of the education pot that is at boiling point. But as with the reasons for the cuts in the education system (discussed last month) so also with the explanation of the row about overseas students. The causes have nothing to do with so-called academic freedom, or colour prejudice, or the duty to help developing countries. The cause of the dispute is within the economics of capitalism itself in one of its periodic crises.

Cuts are demanded in state expenditure by the capitalist class and in education in particular. One of the things which have been cut back on is the “subsidy” to overseas students. This so-called subsidy relates to the fact that the fees paid by all students to universities and colleges of higher education do not in fact represent the true cost of the course they will be attending. The real cost will be many times higher and the balance comes from central and local government grants to the universities and colleges, together with whatever else they can squeeze from private sources. Overseas students (estimated to be about 95,000 for the academic year 1973/4) therefore apparently cost the capitalist class considerable amounts.

For example the “price” of one year of a 3-year course in science at University College London, for the academic year 1975/76 was £157. But this figure probably represents no more than 10 per cent of the true cost of providing the services and equipment available to each student on a science course at UCL. So the call grows from the politicians (the mouthpieces of the capitalist class) and others involved to make students who come here to study from abroad pay the market price.

Material Reasons

The facilities for overseas students are claimed to be given on the basis of the moral duty of the country to help educate those of poorer countries where an education system is not provided. At times it almost gets down to the level of the charitable good souls of the do-gooders’ camp versus the mean lot of the other side This is all window-dressing with as much relationship to the real issues involved as blow-football to an FA cup final. Cheap or cut-price education for people from other countries is merely part of what is known as overseas aid, something which most of the advanced capitalist countries have been doing for years. Overseas aid has never been given for other than purely material reasons—how much will the “giving” country make on it at the end of the day? It is the same with overseas students.

The furore really began when a Cabinet committee recommended an increase in the fees to overseas students of between 2 and 5 times to bring them up to more than £2000 p.a. for advanced students in the year 1976/77 (see The Times, 11th February 1976). This provoked Mr. Alan Phillips, General Secretary of the World University Service, to say that the suggested increase would destroy Britain’s reputation as a haven for academic refugees (The Times, 12th February). Whether he himself really believes that the UK is a “haven” for refugees, academic or otherwise, only he knows. But when education is regarded as merely the best way to train man-power for the production line (as it is under capitalism), it does seem stretching it a little to make such wild statements! Is it a haven for those refugees that come to this country and cannot afford to keep themselves without doing a full time job, making studying if not impossible, at the least a most difficult task?

The arguments of the side supporting the move to increase the fees are equally spurious and at times nauseating. A letter was written to The Times (17th January 1976) by the Medical Officer of Warwick University, asserting that it is not only the fees that these students get on the cheap, since they also use resources other than academic ones. They are a drain on the National Health Service (he claimed) and they have different diseases and psychiatric problems from those of their British counterparts, costing considerable sums to treat. Worst crime of all “not only do the students themselves use the NHS but also they may bring their wives and even children.” What will he say to General Gowan (the butcher of the Biafrans but now respectably studying at Warwick University itself) when he comes in to see the medical department asking for some aspirin? It is often quite unbelievable to see the length the working class will go in defending their masters’ interests, or what they take to be their masters’ interests.

Profitable Investment

But capitalism does not need university medical officers to tell the workers the amount it has to pay to provide education as a form of aid. It has august bodies who will do some proper research for it, such as the British Council. They reported on 20th January this year that in the long term the overseas students were of great economic value to what the council called the country but of course means the capitalist class. And in a long analysis by The Times education correspondent (10th February 1976) the facts and figures to back this up are given.

He starts by saying that his initial reaction to the proposals for increasing the fees charged to overseas students is “one of guts abhorrence” to anything which would threaten the free movement and international concept of university and college education. There has never been any such freedom; but let us pass on to the more serious part of his report which, as even the most ill-educated member of the capitalist class (and there are plenty of those) will tell you, means money. The Times correspondent goes on to give some very sound reasons why it would not, paradoxical though it may seem, be in the interests of the capitalist class to raise the fees charged to overseas students, thus causing some of them to look for their studies elsewhere. He draws up the equivalent of a balance sheet showing the profit and loss from the overseas students trade. The cost is some £83 million p.a. But on the credit side, it is estimated that overseas students spend something like £75 million p.a. whilst they are over here. Add to that the fact that it is estimated that £40 million p.a. is spent at private schools which get some of the academic backwash of the so called “free movement” of students to the country. The capitalist class as a whole are already in credit. But the best is yet to come:

Add to all this the intangible, unquantifiable, but logical advantage to British exports. Students highly trained in this country who then proceed to important posts in their own country can exert great influence on contracts entered into with Britain for equipment, buildings and technical skills . . . And Lord Caradon, Britain’s former representative at the United Nations, said: ‘It is unanswerable that the foreign students who come to the country contribute in the money they bring with them far more than anything that is paid by this country on their education.’ The millions of pounds we spend on foreign students each year should be recognised as a considerable investment in the future prosperity of our country as well as a cheap and effective form of aid programme.

One can only add: “Q.E.D.”

Free Learning

Education is of course a carrot which can be used when the representatives of the British capitalist class are trying to sell goods abroad. "Buy British and get some education on the cheap.” One of the Professors of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine recognised that when he wrote to The Times (18th February 1976) discussing Barbara Castle’s visit to Kuwait for the purposes of expanding the British export trade to that country. What better way to sell your goods has been invented? What was all that about academic havens and free movements . . .?

However, despite the fact that it obviously not profitable in the long-term interests of the capitalist class to increase fees, the increase took place. As explained last month, capitalism is not capable of being a rational efficient system, even within the confines of its own interests. Either short-term exigencies do not permit it, or those advising the capitalist class get it wrong. Either way it is haphazard and no “right” answers are possible.

Education under capitalism is not “free” and never has been. Freedom is a concept which is almost completely debased by its users within the confines of capitalist society. One of the most important aspects of Socialist society will be free access. This does not only mean unrestricted ability to take from what is produced and to be able to use and enjoy the means of production. In a Socialist society (and only in such a society) knowledge will be freely available for the benefit of all. Studying and education will merely be a part of a life-long process of physical and mental enrichment; not as now, a drudgery to be suffered when young. And in case anyone has missed the point, as there will be no countries but only one world society in Socialism, so the problems of the overseas student will quickly be placed in the dustbin of the problems of a previous society.

Ronnie Warrington

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The princes are nothing but tyrants who flay the people; they fritter away our blood and sweat on their pomp and whoring and knavery.’ These were the words of Thomas Müntzer at the head of the massed ranks of a peasant army in the year 1525. Ranged against him was the might of the princes of the German Nation. How did Müntzer, the son of a coin maker from central Germany, rise in just a few short years to become one of the most feared revolutionaries in early modern Europe? 

(Penguin Random House)

Like many of Myanmar’s young men and women, Ko Naing said he had no intention of answering the call and would instead do whatever it takes to avoid the draft. ‘The one sure thing is I won’t serve. If I’m drafted by the military, I will try to move to the remote areas or to another country,’ Ko Naing told Al Jazeera from Myanmar. ‘Not only me, I think everyone in Myanmar is not willing to serve in the military under the conscription law’, he said. 

(Al Jazeera)

The ‘one land, two peoples’ analysis of the situation is nonsensical. The land does not belong to the people [proletariat], anywhere in the world. It belongs to those [bourgeoisie] who own it. This might seem very theoretical, but the mere existence of social relations on the ground shows to whom the idea of two camps belongs, ie, the ruling [bourgeois] class.

(libcom.org)

South Africa’s Western Cape is known for its dramatic coastlines and acres of wineland. But behind the blue skies and rolling hills, the province is grappling with a heartbreaking health crisis. The area has the highest rate of foetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) in the world – a group of debilitating and life-long disabilities caused when a mother drinks during pregnancy. Whilst FASD affects about 0.7 per cent of the world’s population, in the Western Cape rates are as high as 31 per cent, and across South Africa, it’s estimated that 11 per cent of all newborns are affected each year.

(The Telegraph)

As BBC Ukraine reported in November, 650,000 Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 years old have left Ukraine for Europe since the start of the war. Zelensky’s former adviser Alexey Arestovich recently claimed that 4.5 million Ukrainian men, nearly half of the Ukrainian male population, had fled abroad to avoid military service, and that 30 to 70 percent of military units consist of ‘refuseniks’ who have gone absent without official leave (AWOL) .

(WSWS.ORG)

‘And if they’ve refused three offers of a job, or whatever the number would be, and they say ‘I’m sorry, I’m not doing any of that’, you then say – in which case you must go and do two years in the Armed Forces’. 

(Daily Express)

‘Universities should be havens for robust debate, discussion, and learning—not sites of censorship where administrators, donors, and politicians squash political discourse they don’t approve of’ said the head of the NYCLU.

(Common Dreams)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

University Challenge (1995)

Party News from the September 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are you a student or employee at a college or University? Would you like to assist the spread of socialist ideas within your College or University? If so, you may be interested to know that the Socialist Party has embarked upon a nationwide campaign, leading up to and during the 1995/1996 academic session, to make its viewpoint more widely known within the student community to 1) attract more students into the Socialist Party and in the longer term 2) set up a national network of Socialist Student Societies.

The campaign will involve compiling a database of contacts (who will be put in touch with each other) in higher education establishments, writing to student societies and offering to provide them with Socialist Party speakers for meetings and debates, making our presence felt at Freshers’ Fairs and, finally, organising a one — or possibly two — day Winter School in London (involving workshops, meetings, debates & video-shows) in early December.

If you would like to get involved, please write as soon as possible to:

“University Challenge" 


c/o The Socialist Party, 

52 Clapham High Street, 


London SW4 7UN

Universities and the working class (1966)

From the September 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

"But let them not babble of Greek to the rabble,

Nor teach the Mechanics their letters;

The labouring classes were born to be asses,

And not to be aping their betters."

This mean scrap of verse was produced over a hundred years ago, as a protest against the schooling of working-class children. But its vindictive composer might as well have saved his breath; industrial capitalism demanded an educated working class and it is against this background that the education reforms of the 19th century can be understood. Not only did these reforms involve a national system of elementary schools, but the universities were overhauled, too. New colleges were established in London in the eighteen-twenties and in the following decade Durham University was founded. Oxford and Cambridge were reorganised as well. The explanation is given by G. M. Trevelyan, in his British History in the Nineteenth Century, when he points out that the impotence of the ancient universities “must eventually have ruined the country in peace and war, when matched against foreign rivals who valued scientific and educational progress. The timely reform of Oxford and Cambridge by Act of Parliament saved the situation.” Nevertheless, it was still the case that only a handful of brilliant working-class boys stood any sort of a chance of getting to a university—and this remained the case until relatively recent times. But since the Second World War there has been another bout of reforms to meet the changing needs of the capitalist system. Along with the development of so-called “comprehensive schooling” the universities have been greatly expanded. Whereas the number of full-time students in Britain was only 50,246 in 1938-39, this number had leaped to 85,421 by 1949-50. Since then this trend has gathered momentum, so that in the nineteen-sixties it is accepted as normal that tens of thousands of young workers should graduate every year. But why has this situation developed? Obviously it is not because young people are cleverer today than previously; nor does the comfortable notion that we now live in a more egalitarian society hold water. It is simply that, in order to survive in a competitive world, British capitalism needs a growing supply of scientists, technicians and engineers. The Times Educational Supplement (March 15th, 1957) summed up the ruthless economics of the education business:

Education is a weapon of war . . . It is something along with the stocks and shares and the production belt which the hard-faced men realise is necessary to the survival of this nation . . . Education is something we invest in as we once competed in dreadnoughts.

Once more there are conservative academicians to lament the new developments and teaching methods. Take, for example, Professor J. MacMurray, speaking at the Sixth Congress of Commonwealth Universities: “Cultural institutions, such as universities . . . begin to be looked on as subordinate mechanisms in the general technology of the state—their function being to produce technicians and specialists necessary to ‘run the country’." Again he is wasting his time to hark back to the days when the universities were autonomous “cultural institutions” where the sons of the rich could idle away a few leisurely years. Industry now requires a real army of the most highly skilled workers and their education has become such a vital issue that more and more the capitalist state is forced to intervene in this sphere. Between 1945 and 1957 the national grants to the universities rose from £2,000,000 per annum to £35,000,000 every year. Over this period the total grant came to something like £232,000,000. Only the state, representing the general interest of British capital, can provide the vast sums of money required and therefore, over the years, state control of the universities has advanced as the figures below clearly show.

Some people have been inclined to look upon this trend as “creeping socialism” or even as a series of concessions wrung from the capitalist class. It is, of course, nothing of the sort. The process is comparable to that of nationalisation, where other essential services are taken over by the government and run along lines which seem most advantageous to British capitalism. Clearly, it has nothing to do with socialism.

And what about the university students themselves? As the colleges come to resemble more and more mere teaching factories it is worthwhile considering to what extent the undergraduates are provided with a rounded education. When they come off the conveyor belt at the end of a three- or four-year course, how many feel equipped with a broad and useful span of knowledge and how many that they have been churned out as yet another mass-produced doctor, chemist, teacher or mathematician? Perhaps the best that can be said for the universities is that they provide an artificial environment where, for a few years, one can scrape by on a meagre allowance without having to sell oneself for a wage. But when the student finally leaves his college he is faced with much the same prospects as any other working man—a lifetime of selling his labour power to the owners of the means of production, the capitalist class.

Students often fancy themselves as being more alive and socially aware than the bulk of the working class. Superficially there might seem to be something in this, since reformist organisations of all kinds flourish in the universities. But unfortunately the conventional image of a politically conscious student population is no more than a myth. The vast majority stand for the continuation of capitalism with all its humiliations and misery. Although they are often a fairly vocal section of the community the fashionable battle-cries are rarely more penetrating than “Hands off Fanny Hill” or “Hands on Ian Smith".

Yet the outlook is not a black one. As capitalism develops the working class constantly amasses more knowledge and experience. The advances in the formal education which workers receive are only one aspect of this process. As working men and women become trained in the scientific techniques of production so they are more likely to examine society from a scientific position. They are struck by the discrepancy between the individual factory where order and planning can be enforced and the overall chaos of a class-divided society. The educated working man is a force to be reckoned with by the capitalist class. He is less inclined to be taken in by the crudest propaganda or by religious superstitions. He is, in fact, the grave-digger of the capitalist system.

John Crump

"Sick and tired of wondering . . . "

From the February 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ball and chain (2023)

From the January 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Open letter to students (2000)

From the October 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Welcome to higher education: just another few years before you have to put yourselves up for sale on the labour market

When you finish your university studies, the time will come to put yourself up for sale on the labour market. This means becoming a wage slave (or, if you’re a snob, a salary slave), working for other human beings who happen to own or control enough wealth to be able to be an employer of labour.

A not very dignified position, but something all those whose fathers who are not millionaires (whether great landowners or City crooks) have to do at some stage. Most people have to try to sell themselves at a much earlier age—at 16 or 17—and many fail to find a buyer.

Some, like yourselves, put off the evil day for another five or so years while acquiring additional skills that will, hopefully, enable you to command a higher price on the labour market. In fact, what you will be doing over the next three years is enhancing the value of what you will be selling—your mental and intellectual skills.

Some of you, too, won’t find a buyer, at least not for a few years. But then that’s the lot of the wage slave: to be dependent on finding an employer in order to have anything other than a miserable standard of living on some hand-out from the State.

The best-paid jobs available to university graduates—lawyers, accountants, advertisers—tend to be those which are the most useless from the point of view of serving human needs. Even those of you who will have useful skills—such as scientists and computer experts—will find that the best-paid jobs are doing research connected with military or commercial ends. But that’s the fault of the system and nothing can be done about it till the whole money-wages-profit set-up is done away with.

Education System, or Wages System? (2000)

From the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

• We live in a society dominated by the labour market, by the wages system. We go to school, to college, to university, in order to prepare ourselves for entering that market; to gain skills and knowledge we can sell in order to live.
• Students are workers in waiting.
• The education system is a production line, vending skills for the jobs market; and like any production line, it must produce to follow demand.
• If the labour market needs cheap unskilled workers, the education system provides. Academic achievement is not the main goal of the education system, providing for the jobs market is.
• Low academic achievement is factored in, to supply the masses of jobs that don’t need brain work.
• Only a few workers are needed to really think, thus the university system is set up to produce a small élite, to fill that niche market.
• Their skills are valuable because they are rare: but, as in any other market, if the number of graduates available becomes too large—as it does as university education spreads—they are over-produced, and then their value drops.
• Sending more people to university does not guarantee more people with higher wages and does not guarantee more skilled jobs.
• Today people gain skills, and knowledge, only to be never able to use than when they find their McJob. There’s little chance of enjoying the intellectual fruits of society when you’re slaving for a living.
• Fighting for a just education system under an unjust social system is liking trying to roll a boulder up hill, only to see it roll back down again.
• Even if you win, future generations of students will have to fight all over again as soon as the education system comes into conflict with the wages system.
• Justice can only be found through a just society, through social change: only a society where human needs and desires take over from the market, can an equitable enjoyment of the fruits of society’s learning be gained.
• There is only one way to ensure free access to knowledge for all: the Abolition of the Wages System!

50 Years Ago: Student Unions (2022)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Department of Education and Science have published a consultative document with a view to restricting the finance of student unions. This document will effectively limit the activity of organised students throughout the country. Apart from the obvious effect of severely restricting social life for resident students, all extra-mural activities, such as societies and clubs, will be impinged upon.

The reason given for the restructuring of finance is that the public money is not subject to public accountability, and that money entrusted to students unions can easily be abused. It is strange that the schooling of children can be entrusted to student teachers, yet funds cannot be. This is indicative of the common capitalist maxim that money and property are more important than people.

In point of fact, abuse of union funds is an extremely rare occurrence, and is anyway illegal without these new measures, hence the appearance of some of the officers of Sussex University Students Union in Court recently. The measures contained in the consultative document, therefore, can only be seen as an attempt to silence an avenue of protest that might at times embarrass the capitalist class.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain recognises that all unions (trade or student) are only necessary in a capitalist system where workers are in such an inferior position that they have to “go mob-handed” in order to be listened to. As unions are part of a capitalist system, and no more, it follows that union organisation cannot lead to Socialism, but can only try to provide its members with the best possible living conditions under capitalism. However, it is to be remembered that all working class organisation in the form of unions are a gauge to the maturity and consciousness of the working class. For this reason it is quite correct to protect student unions from any attempt by a capitalist government (Conservative or Labour) to restrict to any degree the effectiveness of an organised body of workers, (or unpaid apprentices in the case of many students.)

(Socialist Standard, February 1972)

Class struggles in France (2006)

From the May 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Doubtless many readers of the Socialist Standard will already know that the strikes and demonstrations in France last month had to do with the new work contracts which the de Villepin government introduced into the legislative process over three months ago. Some of this legislation is already on the statute books: the so-called Contrat Nouvelle Embauche (New Hiring Contract), for example, already covers more than 300,000 hirings in small enterprises. It was only over the infamous Contrat Première Embauche (First Hiring Contract) that President Chirac has back-pedalled  in the face of massive demonstrations. This ultra-liberal legislation was aimed at establishing more flexibility into what is often considered to be a highly protective and rigid system of employment relations in France. This legislation was justified in terms of the high levels of unemployment experienced by young people, the recent riots in France being presented as a wake-up call heard only by right-wing politicians but ignored by the more consensual politicians on the left. French workers were being asked to believe that the scrapping of legal protection against arbitrary hiring and firing was in their own interest.

Both the CNE and the CPE established the principle of abrupt firings with little or no legal protection for workers during a two-year trial period. The CNE affects workers in small enterprises and can be applied to workers of any age whilst the CPE was aimed at young workers up to 26 years of age. Once the two-year period is up (if it ever is), the happy workers will be offered permanent contracts, so everything will turn out well, in theory. Other legal dispositions packaged under the misleading term ‘law of equal opportunities’ include the possibility of hiring apprentices at 14 years of age and the possibility of inducing 15-year-olds to work at night. This partial return to nineteenth-century practices, we are told, would loosen up hiring practices and significantly reduce the high levels of unemployment recorded in the statistics produced by governmental agencies. The cost, of course, will be a significant increase in the insecurity experienced by workers who risk being laid off at any moment. This means that they will soon be unable to find decent accommodation, accumulate pension rights or simply plan for the future in such a way as to constitute normal family life. The contrast with the existing legislation centred on the permanent contract with built-in pension provision and a range of social benefits could not be sharper.

Big Lie

The difficulty of getting workers to swallow the big lie that job insecurity is a good thing being obvious, the government resorted to an ideological broadside aimed at setting one category of worker against another. The students who sparked off the movement against the CPE have been presented as privileged middle-class youth relatively unconcerned with the dire situation faced by immigrants in the run-down sink estates of the suburbs. The de Villepin government asked us to believe that these contracts were designed specifically to help a population of workers which has been consigned to suburban dumping grounds for more than three decades. (The fact that de Villepin waited for more than three weeks of demonstrations before he discovered this ideological fig-leaf shows how clumsy the public relations job has been.) Another strategy was to present French workers as dyed-in-the-wool conservatives defending a status quo made irrelevant by globalisation, the highly indebted nature of the French state and the need to remain in the vanguard of the technological revolution.

Inevitably, the ‘phenomenal success’ of Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ in reducing the level of unemployment to a mere 5 percent was wheeled out as a counter-example to French timidity, notwithstanding the fact that the definition of unemployment in Britain has been changed over 20 times since the 1970s in order to disguise the real situation. Workers in Britain are well aware that the unemployment and insecurity which they see all around them does not find its way into the official statistics. The deregulation of the labour market in Great Britain over the last two decades has resulted in a doubling in recorded levels of official poverty and a new category of working poor has emerged to replace the indemnified unemployed. The recent mass strike of over 1.5 million public sector workers clearly shows that workers in Britain are by no means living in a neo-liberal cornucopia.

This said, it’s true that many French workers have enjoyed a level of protection denied to many new entrants into the labour market, young workers and immigrants. The permanent work contract provides access to a range of social benefits and protections which are envied by those workers who hop from one short-term contract to another. The government obviously hoped that this would constitute a source of resentment and jealousy which could be exploited. It’s true that workers on permanent contracts are difficult to fire, given that breaking a contract in these cases is very expensive, compensation being proportional to the number of years worked. But this tactic has backfired: even short-term contracts are better than the almost total absence of legal guarantees contained in the CPE and CNE. Besides, over half a million ‘baby boom’ workers are now leaving the labour force every year heading for retirement, so the level of youth unemployment is bound to fall. The question is whether or not these relatively secure jobs will remain on offer to the new entrants.

The hard fact is that it’s quite clear that in the long run greater job insecurity is on the cards for everyone. Long term permanent jobs – jobs for life – are getting scarcer and even the public sector has been placed on a slimfast diet. The bosses want workers who can be hired and fired in reaction to sudden and unexpected changes in demand in markets where every sale counts. Industrial jobs have been disappearing fast to be replaced by service sector jobs which are notoriously badly-paid and insecure. These trends do not respect political frontiers. The left-wing government under Lionel Jospin imposed a shorter working week in exchange for greater flexibility in working patterns, production workers being placed on call for work during the weekends or in the evenings to meet sudden fluctuations in demand with disastrous consequences for family life. Real wage levels are stagnant or falling. Pension rights have been reduced. A capitalism which attempted to adjust fluctuations in world demand by modifying monetary exchange rates in accordance with the rules laid down by the International Monetary Fund has been replaced by a highly volatile monetary system in which adjustments are made by hiring and firing production workers. The new generation of workers is facing a future where they will be considered simply as commodities, labour power, to be bought and sold in line with demand, all human safeguards having been removed.

The movement

The movement against the new employment legislation was initiated by students at the universities of Poitiers and Rennes. Despite superficial resemblances, these students do not have the same profile as the relatively privileged students who took to the barricades in May 1968. Nowadays university students in France tend to come from the more threatened sections of that section of the working class known as “the middle-class”. Elite students usually go to the so-called ‘Grandes ėcoles’ where they are guaranteed access to a world-class education, contacts into the upper-reaches of the civil service and entry into well-paid jobs in multinational corporations. They are even paid a salary whilst they study. By way of contrast, students in the universities tend to finance their studies by doing Mac-jobs, grants being rare and piss-poor. About 40 percent of students drop out in the first couple of years, disgusted by the ramshackle organisation of the faculties and courses given by a small army of hourly-paid teachers who are already living in the state of insecurity that the young are fighting against. Those who do succeed in this often unimaginative system are usually rewarded by a succession of badly-paid or even unpaid training courses, quite rightly presented as an apprenticeship into the real world of work (exploitation).

It is this threatened section of the so-called “middle-class” which has finally come out in open revolt against the absence of perspectives which capitalism has been trying to get them to accept. What has surprised many commentators has been the brilliant organisation and determination of students formerly presented as apathetic and passive by their elders. Rather than seeking the help of professional politicians and full-time student unionists, the students set up their own system of co-ordination with elected delegates and they undertook mammoth debates on the issues involved in the new legislation. (Some of the debates lasted 72 hours.) Taking advantage of the new forms of communication offered by internet and high-speed trains they improvised a nationwide movement which quickly led to the closure of 60 of the 90-odd universities in France and the partial closure of dozens of high schools. The various attempts made to establish links with production workers have resulted in a spectacular leap forward in political awareness, workers suffering from poverty wages and unemployment having been invited to speak at student assemblies. Safety inspectors, experts on employment problems and workers in jobcentres have been given a chance to talk of their experience. Outreach into the high schools in the run-down suburbs resulted in the presence of thousands of black and Arab youths in the demonstrations, offering an apprenticeship in peaceful political agitation to youngsters subject to social stigma and popular prejudice.

Anyway, it was fun seeing the conservative government caught with its pants down. De Villepin’s authoritarian imposition of the new legislation via the undemocratic procedure of decrees failed to impress the masses. His popularity, never very great, is now in free fall and his political career is seriously compromised. Nobody ever elected him anyway. Chirac, a burnt-out old wheeler-dealer elected faute de mieux in a second round play-off with Le Pen, promulgated the CPE law while at the same time promising to amend it in such a way as to remove some of the more contentious aspects. In the end he had to withdraw it. The short-term winner has been Chirac’s sworn enemy and would-be successor, the insanely ambitious Sarkozy.  As you can imagine, the cartoonists had a field day and the only people not laughing are the leaders of the French ‘socialist’ party who are increasingly filling the vacuum in their political programme with precisely those Blairite nostrums that the young are refusing.

The moment the trade union movement was reluctant to get engaged in a full-blown conflict with the government. Doubtless this has something to do with the fiasco of its mobilisation to counter the government’s pension ‘reforms’ three years ago but it could also reflect the fact that the students have done a good job in discrediting the prime minister and dividing the government. However, the unions could have shown a little bit more muscle. Although the CPE has been withdrawn, the employers seem very attached to the CNE which constitutes a real threat to workers and, it may be added, to the ability of unions to organise workers. Indeed, the MEDEF, the bosses’ union, wants to generalise the CNE to all sectors and age-groups. 

The students, future workers, tried to expand their movement to incorporate all the various categories of workers but they clearly failed to generalize their demands adequately. Vague slogans against the precarious society more often than not failed to reach those workers who have been living from hand to mouth for some time. The reason for this is fairly simple: the general outlook of many of the poorer workers is constrained by the absence of qualifications and the urgent need to find cash. By staying largely at the level of a simple defence of their own immediate interests (in a movement which had all the strengths and weaknesses of spontaneity) the students were confronted by the rapid demobilisation of the movement as the examination season looms into sight. The movement was, after all, a student one albeit with a considerable amount of grass-roots support from the trade unions. The suspicion that the aim of the movement was simply that of defending the value of academic qualifications – what distinguishes the students from the unskilled workers – is, in this sense, inescapable. The unions, for their part, were only too glad to keep the movement within the narrow bounds of the defence of wages and conditions, notwithstanding the considerable level of economic insecurity which already exists. On the other hand there were many hopeful signs that the students were getting to grips with a more general malaise and that the movement was groping towards a wider perspective. It is at this point that the absence of a deeper understanding of what capitalism implies and of the need for a socialist movement embracing all categories of wage-earner was at its most glaring.

A Personal Note

I am not alone in having been taken completely by surprise by the students’ movement. The rapidity of its expansion and its extension to other categories in the population was nothing short of incredible. After the heavy and depressing riots of November with their mindless violence and undercurrent of racial tension, it has been comforting to see an outburst of political activity clearly directed against the poverty and loneliness of capitalist society. Despite the images shown on television, the massive demonstrations were on the whole good-natured and peaceful. The mixing together of young and old, and absence of sectarian politics, and the generally high level of debate was particularly encouraging. Although the movement has not taken a socialist direction, there is clearly a lot of discontent out there seeking a political expression and there does seem to be something of a resumption of the class struggle in Europe as a whole.

Malcolm Mansfield

. . . A Much More Private Letter (1973)

A Short Story from the March 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

My Dear Daphne,

It was very nice to see you the other day and to see you looking so well. Your mother and I were pleased to hear that you are settling down so well at university but since you went back I have been doing a bit of thinking (I get a lot of time for that nowadays) about some of the things you said to us.

I am probably more anxious than your mother, about the pitfalls you must be wary of in your future. You told us about all those layabouts at university, who go there only to have a rest for a few years and who do only enough work to get a pass. It made me very angry, that I am paying to keep these people in idleness. We have always taught you the value of hard work, in the moral sense, and this applies whether you are at university or in a job. It applied to me ever since I left school, all through my time in the army and in the jobs I’ve had since my demob. So when you talk about trying for a good degree and then going for a big job with a large firm, one of the stable ones which are not going to pack up, I think you are on the right lines. You will be set for life.

By the way when I took you back to university the term before last I did not notice any of those layabouts among your friends! In fact I liked the other students you introduced to me. Although they were young they seemed to have an instinctive respect for me and they were quite happy to just let me sit in your room while they got on with their chat. A pity they are not all like that. I think your idea, to make the first examination the stiffest and the last the easiest, instead of the other way round, would weed out a lot of the layabouts and make sure that universities are places for people who want to work.

I hear so many stories about what goes on at universities these days. Drugs and sex and communists stirring things up. I know you are a sensible girl. Your mother and I have told you right from the start that you must be on your guard against all men, who are interested in only one thing from you. Up to now you have taken our advice and we hope you carry on like that. You know that drugs are just filthy and you only have to start on them, take the smallest piece of cannabis for example, to get addicted and end up in an early grave. As for the communists, they are another kind of drug really and just as destructive. Just after the war, when I was still in the forces, I voted Labour because everyone was doing it then but I am glad I saw where all that would lead me. We cannot afford to relax in this free world and you in a university where the communists are so active must be really on your guard.

I am not grumbling at you because we know you are sensible and we are very proud of you. You have always listened to what we have said to you and we think that provided you watch your step over the next few years you are all set for a good career.

You were not the only visitor I had last week because Stan Bloomfield came to see me. It was mainly to clear up one or two details from the firm, like me keeping up paying into the pension fund and settling my holiday pay. I think Stan knows what it means to be told you are redundant after all those years with a place but I know he appreciates that I worked my notice properly and left the job in apple-pie order when I left. I hope soon I can think about another job and I don’t see why I shouldn’t get one at the same managerial level. Do you want any good kitchen hands at your university? (Ha ha).

I think I’ll close now. Don’t forget to write to me and come to see me again as soon as you can. If you cannot manage to come before the next holiday don’t worry too much because I shall be here for a while yet. The tablets they are giving me are making me a lot calmer and when I start the electric shock treatment next week I hope for a really big improvement but the doctors say it will be a few months before I will feel well enough to go home.

God bless, from your affectionate 

FATHER.

Ivan

Editorial: Students as paying customers (2004)

Editorial from the February 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blair’s position is clear. He and his government want market forces to be allowed even freer rein to ravage universities and marginalise yet further what used to be seen as their original aspiration to be centres of learning and independent research. They want universities in England to function openly as businesses selling “education” to fee-paying customers known as students; in accordance with normal market forces, those with a higher quality product to sell will be able to charge a higher price. The government would act as a middleman paying the university-businesses up front and recovering a part of it, with interest, from the customer-students after they have graduated.

A far cry from the free education at all levels that used to be a key plank in Labour’s programme and a sign of how far Labour has gone in accepting, not just capitalism, but its whole logic and ethos. But this is nothing new. Labour in power has always ended up, like all governments, dancing to capitalism’s tune since that’s what government’s are there for: to run the affairs of the capitalist class of the country concerned.

Labour has dishonoured its pledges here, as on other matters, not because its leaders are dishonest or nasty or weak-kneed or sell-outs (though some of them may be), but because if you agree to govern capitalism you have to accept doing so on its terms, allowing profits to be made, prosecuting wars, standing up to strikers, since capitalism can only work as a profit-making system under which profits must come first.

Every Labour government has ended up doing this since the first one under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924. The Blair government’s introduction of business principles into university funding is just par for the course. In fact, the whole history of the Labour Party has been that of a gradual slide into compromise with capitalism, ending up with the present Blair government which is indistinguishable from a Tory government.

Of course universities have never conformed to the image they used to project of themselves as places where study and research go on in tranquil isolation from business and money-making. Universities originated as centres of obscurantism in the Middle Ages where priests and seminarists discussed how many angels could dance on a pin-head. In fact until 1870 only those who declared that they accepted the 39 Articles of the Church of England were admitted to Oxford and Cambridge, which in the 19th century became centres for training members of the ruling class to run the Empire.

The Non-Conformist capitalists of the Midlands and the North responded by using some of their profits to set up their own universities – the redbricks – to train their children and some from humbler backgrounds to be the engineers and chemists needed to run and develop modern industry. A hundred years later it was decided to rename the polytechnic colleges – the polys – universities, thereby further strengthening the vocational training aspect of universities.

That in fact is what all universities have tended to become over the years: places turning out workers with a higher quality of labour-power to work in government and industry. True, they do carry out research but the content of this research is no longer decided purely on scientific grounds. This, too, has become increasingly commercial and business-oriented.

Not only has government funding become skewed towards such activities, but universities have to compete with each other and with universities abroad for contracts to do research for industry and business. Thus, it is now common-place to hear some university head stating that, faced with international competition, universities need more money from students so as to be able to train and retain high-quality graduates to carry out the research contracts they hope to win.

But this is what you would expect to happen in capitalist society where “commercial values”, “enterprise culture” and “business ethics” reflect the economic need to make profits above everything else since this is what drives the capitalist economy. In fact, it is utopian to imagine that universities could escape contamination by the marketplace. It is just ironic, but illustrative of the futility of reformism, that the latest move to subordinate universities to the market should have been thought up and implemented by the government of a party which once set out to try to gradually reduce capitalist influence on society.

It only remains to be seen whether it will be a Labour or a Tory government which will allow universities to change their email address from “ac.uk” to “co.uk” and add PLC after their name.

Happenings in Hungary (1956)

From the December 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Freedom” has been the battle cry in countless revolutions and revolts throughout the ages, and recent events in Hungary must have recalled past sacrifices immortalised by poets, such as Byron's “Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, tom but flying, streams like the thunderstorm against the wind.”

At the present time the conscience of the world is being stirred by the heroic but unequal struggle which the Hungarians are wielding against the military forces of the Soviet Union. The iron fist closes and the rebels drown in their own blood as another paragraph is completed in the history of Hungary—another event in a chapter of foreign invasions.

Western Bloc governments and their newspapers have mostly made statements sympathetic to the rebels. American government leaders in expressing their feelings for Hungary, were reported as saying that nothing could be done until after the elections, as they did not want to do anything to prejudice their re-election—surely touching a new “low” in cynicism.

The Western Bloc of capitalist powers desire to oust the Soviet Union from Hungary in order to enjoy the same material advantages, and not because of any lofty ideals. It is a question of business, not of ideals, for the latter do not flourish in the jungle of capitalist go-getters.

The Daily Express of 9th November printed an appealing photo of a small girl under the caption— “Stepping out to a new life; a small Hungarian refugee who has arrived at the Austrian border. Behind her are horrors that her young mind could not comprehend. Ahead of her—who knows? A succession of camps and hostels; or perhaps a new home in England. But she is wary. After these last weeks suspicion is instinctive.” Then there was a report to the effect that a Wolverhampton firm offered a house, rent free, to a family of Hungarians; while a number of countries were reported as having offered sanctuary to numbers of refugees. There have been no reports, however, of sanctuary in Britain for Egyptian victims of the British military action in Suez.

The Daily Express published a series of articles by Dr. Edith Bone, who was released in the recent fighting after seven years solitary confinement in Hungary on a spy charge. Dr. Bone revealed that she had gone to Hungary as correspondent for the Daily Worker. The writer, who is a reader of that paper, is unable to recollect any agitation at any time over the disappearance of this colleague. Following her revelation, the Daily Worker confirmed her statement, and, believe it or not, added that they never could understand what had happened to her all this time. However, this newspaper is inundated with letters from comrades horrified at what has been going on in Hungary, and D. N. Pritt, Q.C., has written an article entitled “Hungary; Keep your Heads” (Daily Worker, 9th November), apparently in an effort to calm these comrades. He charges the popular press version of events as a complete fabrication of the U.S. capitalists, and ends his article with the following astonishing paragraph: “We should all be as happy to realise, in 1956, that the Soviet Union prevented the establishment of a fascist government in Hungary.” Another article in the same issue plugs a similar theme, and is headed “ Deep-laid Plot,” and the penultimate paragraph reads: “In the circumstances, Soviet counter-intervention, if one may call it so, has surely been justified on grounds with which every British democrat, and especially every British worker, must sympathise.”

The line on Hungary that this organ of the so-called Communist Party publish, and appear to get away with, is surely a scathing criticism of the low level of Socialist understanding on the part of their supporters. Perhaps the most brazen statement of all is on the front page of the same issue, in heavy print, describes the Daily Worker as “the only paper that puts the class and peace issues fair and square,” and then goes on in the next sentence to put a question to their readers: “Friends of the Daily Worker everywhere—we ask you to settle one question with yourselves and then, immediately, with us. Could you, in our national situation, do without the Daily Worker NOW? ”

The pro-Soviet press claim that the revolt is an attempt by Hungarian fascists to seize control from a workers’ government. The Western Capitalist press, on the other hand, report the trouble as a clash of two irreconcilable ideologies, that of Communism versus the democratic way of life—they see materialised the combat between evil and good, between the powers of darkness and of light, of the machinations of the Devil against the will of God.

A Socialist analysis of events in Hungary reveal the revolt as a nationalist movement determined to seize control for the benefit of the budding Hungarian capitalist class and, as such not worth the spilling of one drop of working-class blood. Like nationalist movements in other industrially backward countries, the revolt is led by students and supported by disillusioned workers and peasantry.

The Observer (4/11/56) contains an article headed “Students Led Hungarian Revolt,” and starts with the statement that

  “The Hungarian revolution began as a student movement. This I can say with absolute conviction, having just returned from Budapest, where I discussed the matter with the insurgents themselves.”
  “The events in Budapest on that Tuesday evening had in fact been slightly preceded by uprisings in two other university towns—Szeged and Pecs. There the students had simply called upon the town councils to resign and had re-elected emergency committees from their own numbers.”
  “These committees of 15 to 30 members containing professors and students, had a single president, who in more cases than not was undergraduate. The attitude of the older members of the community was that this was a student movement, and as such should be led by them.”
  “The Student committee of the revolution in Budapest itself seems to be an even more powerful body. Its president, a young man named Josef Molnar, works in constant liaison with Colonel Meleter. commanding the Hungarian Army in Budapest. Almost all the students at this university of technology are armed.”

Hungary is only partially industrialised, and the expansion of the budding capitalist class is hampered by the Russian Government, who wish to keep the country as a market for their own industrial products and as source for. raw material and food supplies as well as for strategic reasons. Russian political and economic experts help to manage the country and give less opportunities for educated patriotic Hungarians to rise to the top jobs. University students, particularly in backward countries, are mostly members of better-off families. They are usually firm supporters of their national capitalism, and their educated sons have the training to act as spokesmen and leaders. It is economic interest that is the mainspring behind the action of the students, even though it is concealed by high-sounding ideals. While the personal courage of the Hungarians may be recognised, how often the call for “Freedom” masks the need for the development of a new class in society!

Some of the workers, believing that the Hungarian control will solve their poverty problem, give their support The peasants consider that an independent government will enable them to get a better market for their produce, though complete independence in the present-day world is more of an unobtainable ideal than practical power politics will allow, as Poland and Yugoslavia (not to mention a host of other small countries) have found out. This, then, is the Hungarian economic set-up which lies behind the barrage of propaganda.

The tragic bravery of the Hungarian students should not blind the workers to the fact that it is not in their interest to support the struggle of either the developed state-capitalism of the Soviet Union or the indigenous capitalism of Hungary. In other countries whenever the new ruling group is firmly in the saddle of government they lose no time in turning on the workers.

F. E. Offord

Off The Rails (1969)

Book Review from the November 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

An Essay on Liberation by Herbert Marcuse (The Penguin Press)

Marcuse’s latest work is an attempt to amplify and elaborate ideas contained in his earlier books such as Eros and Civilisation and One Dimensional Man, in the light of recent developments and trends in world capitalism.

Nevertheless much of the book is shot through with a very fine thread of inconsistency and ambiguity in relation to what he says in some of his other works. For instance, he refers to the Soviet Bloc as “Socialist” without qualifying his use of the terms, whereas in his book Soviet Marxism he explains that although he refers to Russia as being Socialist he does not mean it to be understood as what Marx and Engels meant in their works. His use of the term “repressive bureaucracy” aligns him with those sections of the New Left who look upon Russia as a “deformed workers’ state”—as though a caste of officials are actually responsible for the social system there and not vice versa. Marcuse is too good a Marxist scholar to know that this is not the case. But for all his considerable insight in some fields, Marcuse could not be more out of touch with the real situation when he gives his appraisal of the student insurrection of May 1968 in France and the riots in the ghettos of America. In both of these he sees manifestations of a real, growing anti-capitalist movement. Of course they are nothing of the sort. The only aim of both the May students' movements and Black Power is an amelioration of conditions within the wages-profit system.

According to Marcuse, the working class has been effectively incorporated into capitalist system psychologically and economically. He acknowledges that only a class conscious working class who want Socialism can bring about the socialist revolution. If it is true that they are so committed to capitalism, how are these powerful mental bonds which fasten them to the system, to be broken?

Marcuse’s answer is to point to the students—a new twist on the vanguard and élitest theories of Lenin and others. Not that Marcuse is actually putting forward the same idea as Lenin, for he knows very well that the working class are capable of understanding the Socialist alternative. However, he thinks that the students can be of help in arousing the workers’ awareness of their repression and servitude in capitalist society, although there is also the danger of them provoking a working class backlash, resulting in Fascist and semi-Fascist regimes. Marcuse stresses that “the established democracy still provide the only legitimate framework for change and must therefore be defended against all attempts on the right and Centre to resist the framework”. Socialists would certainly agree with this.

Creative and cultural possibilities in Socialist society, where repression has been abolished and technology and science serve mankind as a whole and not the interests of a minority class through the intensive exploitation of an enslaved class, are discussed (but a better account of this is to be found in Eros and Civilisation in a chapter entitled The Aesthetic Dimension.)

In spite of some glaring howlers, Marcuse’s work is interesting and stimulating nonetheless, and is far more optimistic in its outlook than much of the turgid drivel churned out by many left wing writers.

L.

Students in revolt (1987)

From the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nineteen sixty-eight was a year that made a deep impression on the French capitalist class. For them, its "second repetition" in 1986 must have come as a tragi-comedy (though for the Chirac government, it was decidedly a farce). Students, in the 70s and '80s, had been tagged (with relief?) as so many recycled zombies from the '50s: cynical. apolitical, self-centred, concerned solely with making it. Flattened out into a manageable crisis, in short. That the media (who either invented or borrowed the notion) were only busy making another of their identity-myths has since become all too evident.

But it was not clear on December 4 1986 (and much less so on November 27. when the first big student-organised demonstration took place in Paris). Considering how much hype was circulating about the apoliticism of the young, it comes as no surprise that the students themselves believed they were doing something apolitical. They wanted nothing to do with any of the official parties, yet they sought to affect the policy of a government.

This renunciation of theory can be explained as a resistance action (not at all distant in character from a trade-union struggle) that grew up around ruling-class efforts to cut corners on the cost of maintaining the country’s educational institutions. Students were actually lampooned (Nouvel Observateur, 5 November and 12-18 December 1986) for revolting in favour of the status quo. And it is quite true that in 1986 most of the reformist assumptions of the soixante-huitards were simply taken for granted by the lycéens and university students. They were, in effect, rising up in defence of a specific ideological configuration of capitalism, what we might call post-Gaullism. There is thus less irony than there may seem in the fact that an old Gaullist like Chirac should have spearheaded a Reagan-style. toothless-ideologue assault on the students’ position.

The issue was twofold: the Devaquet bill (which was moving toward the final stages of enactment) set out to reorganise (privatise) the university administration; the controversy centred around questions of degrees, admissions policy, tuition fees and school autonomy. The minister of national education, René Monory, sought to heighten the government's general de-nationalisation euphoria by introducing a parallel set of reform proposals (not a bill at that point) for the lycées. The most important effect of these proposals would have been to block future access to the universities for a significant percentage of lycéens. Hence, the impulse to contradict the government was a powerful and immediate one. Although the initiative was sparked by UNEF-ID. which was PS and trotskyist in its leanings, the student movement at both levels defined itself, on the whole, solely with reference to with drawing the reforms. (UNEF-ID was the coordinating committee among the university students).

And so it happened that a large body of "apolitical" opinion suddenly coalesced in opposition to the government, became transformed overnight into the Spectre of 1968. to the panic of an entire government; forced a delegate minister’s resignation (Devaquet’s); caused the Prime Minister (Chirac) to announce the withdrawal of the whole reform package; knocked the wind out of the sails of the liberal-conservative coalition's pointless efforts to turn back the clock and thus ingloriously aborted its nine-month état de grâce. And now everyone is talking about "politicisation" again.

How a paradox like this could have come about can best be explained by looking at the context in which the movement arose, which involves decisions about capital accumulation reaching all the way back to the Marshall Plan. Postwar investments in economic recovery and a policy of stimulating expansion in the "poor countries" at length bore their predictable fruit in the form of increased competition from the new accumulators in the developing countries. This generated a tendency towards capital flight into those same areas (where working-class organisations either did not yet exist, were liquidated or severely repressed so as to achieve a systematically under-valued labour-power). This was accompanied by the steady decline of reinvestment in basic heavy industry in the developed countries (with a few exceptions) throughout the 1970s, and it gave rise to an ever-increasing pressure on the developed countries' respective balances of trade.

This in turn ignited fears among the capitalist class in each of the developed countries for its own competitive standing in the world's markets, which has led to a period of relentless budget-chopping. As a result the capitalists currently raise the issue of whether the educational system they have been paying for is really serving its purpose to provide inexpensive (if not cheap) labour-power to keep their profits respectable. If not, then they must shake loose enough free capital from the educational budget (without of course having to retool industry, rethink their growth strategies or — horrors! — axe their precious military investments) to (supposedly) raise profits back up to an acceptable level — given that austerity (for everyone else) must be the order of the day. Throughout the developed world, the 1980s thus began to resound with public-spirited attacks on "outdated" educational systems.

Things were of course no different in France, even though it was a party of the left (the PS) that was commissioned to carry out the hatchet-job. Touted as the reincarnation of May 1968. the new regime of May 1981 fairly gushed with optimism and succeeded in blinding just about everybody, for a short while, to its patent inability to dictate terms to the international crisis. But the real mandate of the Mitterrand-Mauroy/Fabius team was identical (mutatis mutandis) to that of the Reagan administration, the Thatcher government and the Kohl regime. More importantly, however, nobody really seemed to care that a "socialist" party like the PS should be proposing to make a go of bringing back profits and jobs to French capitalism in the first place. The PS/PCF's état de grâce took only a year to hit the reefs, after which it rapidly disintegrated, as the realities of international competition took their remorseless revenge.

The Savary law reforming education thus came on the books in 1984; aspects of it affecting the private schools, however, caused as much of an uproar as Devaquet-Monory which presaged the PS's subsequent defeat at the polls. But the Savary law was itself only a symptom of the PS's underlying shift to the right (its abject caving in to the realities of capitalism), the premise being that the French educational system had become 'uncompetitive'. And so, après le déluge, the earlier Savary legislation still continues to apply by default.

What the "apolitical" students were therefore colliding with was none other than that dehumanising old fogey, the capitalist class itself, bent on extracting candlestick economies out of the school system merely to salvage its profits — even at the cost of flushing a large proportion of the high-school students out of the university system altogether. The students came very close indeed to realising that what were scraps for the workers are scraps for them too. They are all future workers in the end. or most of them are, and the fact that the lycéens had the support and encouragement of their parents indicates another burst of class struggle was in the making. Worry over the prospect of this was one of the principal factors which ultimately triggered the whole chain of events leading Chirac to the microphone to announce the withdrawal of the reforms.

On the other hand, any inkling that life is actually possible — and good — outside the wages system was conspicuously absent from this revolt of the students: for all their rejection of the system's catalogue of evils, their ideas nevertheless remained imprisoned within it. They may hopefully take the opportunity they have created for themselves to do some deeper and more independent thinking on the system's structural tendency to generate emergencies: they at least got off to a good start.

Failing this. 1986 will not turn out to have been so different from 1968 as they thought it was.

Ron Elbert (Paris)