Why you should be a socialist (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some years ago, a Guardian writer wrote a succinct sentence: "Who stands for nothing falls for anything." This statement rings true for all socialists aware that their fellow workers, voting, for instance, for mainstream parties come election time, are in fact acquiescing in their own exploitation.

Labour, Tory and Liberal candidates are fond of telling workers, and indeed of convincing them, that a vote for them (the candidate) is a vote for themselves (the workers). By electing such-and-such candidate, we are told our taxes will come down, our hospitals will improve, our schools will churn out brighter pupils, that homelessness will disappear, that there will be less unemployment and more jobs and streets free of criminals. In short, we are offered a vision of utopia. The optimistic worker falls for all of this, only to have their expectations dashed on the rocks of capitalist reality.

In the absence of any coherent ideology, the worker will invariably fall for anything. This is not to insult members of the working class by casting aspersions on their intellect. It says more about the skill of politicians when it comes to regurgitating the same old cant. These administrators of capitalism, the politicians, have been plying their trade since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. They have, therefore, become adept, highly skilled in the rhetoric of bullshitting workers. So successful are they, in fact, that a lot of what they have been saying have become the prevalent ideas in society; racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalism, hostility to the unemployed, the disabled, trades unions and criminals — all these prejudices have their roots more or less in the advent of capitalism.

Workers in this country are constantly reminded they are British, that they have a queen and a culture and a heritage, that they live on an island "the envy of less happy lands". Workers are raised to be nationalistic, patriotic and to stand when the national anthem is played at closing time in the British Legion. And then when wars break out, workers are encouraged to fight workers from other countries, under the delusion that freedom and democracy is at stake. But wars only break out when the interests of the dominant class of one nation clash with those of another, whether it be over trade routes, areas of domination or mineral resources. One US worker-cum-soldier, being interviewed en route to the Gulf, said he had never even heard of Kuwait until the order came through to mobilize. If he had not heard of Kuwait, you can bet he had no idea why he was being told to kill workers in Iraq.

Some workers actually believe their interests are served by killing workers they have never met before in far-away lands, workers who are similarly hoodwinked by their masters to protect their profits and potential markets. They fall for all the jingoism circulated by politicians.

When the Tories came to power in 1979, they had made great use of the slogan "Labour isn’t working", pointing out that unemployment stood at 1,000,000 and that this would fall under Conservatism. Workers fell for this, but within a few years unemployment figures had tripled, in spite of the Tories having made 17 adjustments to the way the original statistics were calculated. Statisticians put the real figure at 4.5 million.

When Mrs Thatcher resigned from office, workers were told she was the "greatest peace-time prime minister". Workers applauded her, some gave her a standing ovation, forgetting she had sent troops to the Falklands and the Gulf, sanctioned the US bombing raid on Libya, increased the troop presence in Northern Ireland and sent battalions of shield-thumping police to confront striking workers at Wapping and Orgreave.

The Labour candidate tells the worker how the coal industry would be safe under Labour, pointing to the number of pits closed since 1979. The worker tuts and pledges support, unaware that a Labour government closed 223 pits between 1965 and 1970.

Lies

The Tories conned workers into investing their hard-earned savings into the newly-privatized nationalized industries. The Labour governments who introduced nationalization (or rather state capitalism) had already told workers these industries belonged to the people. This did not, however, deter workers from buying shares in what theoretically already belonged to them. The Tories did not tell the workers that the returns on their investments would be minimal, nothing compared to the returns big business could expect, and that privatization was only meant to benefit the capitalist class in the first place.

The Tories had another idea — to encourage workers to set up their own businesses. Hundreds of thousands of workers were hoodwinked into believing they could compete with the big boys. Hundreds of thousands were to realize that in a climate where even some of the big boys could not survive, what chance had they. Politicians are always keen to assure workers that a country under their administration will be crime-free, but in the past 15 years there has been a sevenfold increase in reported crime and Britain's prison population is the largest in Europe. Inner-city riots have become so commonplace that they no longer make the headlines, and crimes such as joyriding and ram-raiding are so widespread they have become hackneyed in the plots of television serials.

Over the years, workers have been told there will be "peace in our time", that they’ve "never had it so good". Workers are urged to "watch" the lips of politicians while they repeat "no more taxes". The promises are as endless as they are futile, but still the worker falls for them.

In March this year, William Waldegrave reaffirmed what socialists already knew: "In exceptional circumstances, it is necessary to say something untrue in the House of Commons" (Guardian, 9 March). It doesn’t take much imagination to envisage which "circumstances" — those hidden truths about the nature of capitalist society that would cause a furore amongst workers were they revealed, but which remain a hidden truth because to reveal them would upset the capitalist minority whose system the politicians administer.

Leaders

Again, the administrators of capitalism have convinced workers that they need leaders. So prevalent is this idea that workers perpetuate the illusion themselves on behalf of the leaders, for instance, conditioning their children to take heed of everyone from the local vicar to the village bobby — all of whom see to it that the child never thinks for itself and will never challenge the status quo. The leaders, the politicians, however, are themselves only following the dictates of the profit system, which is itself governed by uncontrollable economic laws.

Workers have been led so long they have forgotten their potential collective strength. We seem unaware that everything in the world is produced by workers, from a pin to an oil rig, not thanks to politicians, but in spite of them.

Think of the artificial brakes that are put on production, the inventions that could benefit humanity, but which are suppressed because their introduction would cause the influx of a product which would in turn diminish somebody’s profits from a similar more expensive product. Most workers are aware of this, but fail to challenge the contradictions of capitalist society because leaders have convinced them there is no alternative society. Workers are told that socialism has already been tried and has failed miserably. But socialism has never been put into practice in any country, and those nations that called themselves communist were in reality only state capitalist, which politicians knew all along.

Workers will continue to be led and to believe what leaders tell them so long as they do not believe in themselves, in their own capabilities. A worker who does not understand how society is really organized, whose conditioning has alienated them from their consciousness will fall for anything.

There is nothing special about a socialist. They do not assume the airs and graces and the arrogance of Leninist vanguard parties, who believe the workers can only achieve a trade union consciousness and who wish to lead the workers into oblivion. Socialists are simply workers who have made a conscious effort to understand society from their own objective position and who have realized that is their position in the relations of production and who can apply this relationship to every aspect of life in present-day society.

The capitalist system is only as strong as the socialist cause is weak. The contradictions of capitalist society will only continue as long as workers are oblivious of them. If you’re reading the Socialist Standard for the first time, then you’ve already made the conscious decision to think for yourself and to reject what you had hitherto been told about socialism. If you stand for socialism you’ll fall for nothing.

John Bissett

Social Cut-backs or Social Revolution (1996)

From the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the past the big argument in the working class movement was
 “Social Reform or Social Revolution?” At present, as there have
been no beneficial reforms for over twenty years and with none on 
offer, the choice is rather “Social Regression or 
Social Revolution?”

Over the years a running argument has gone on between reformists and revolutionary socialists. Between those, on the one hand, who wanted to concentrate on pursuing improvements within capitalism and, on the other hand, those like ourselves who wanted to concentrate on ending rather than reforming capitalism.

The reformists argued that reforms were worth pursuing because they bring immediate benefits to people. We didn’t deny this could happen but pointed out that reforms could never be anything more than palliatives and that they could never solve the problems they were directed at.

We added—and this was the most important factor for us—that campaigning for reforms was not a sound way to build a socialist party as it would attract the support of reform-minded people who would eventually drag the party in a reformist direction. Campaigning for reforms diverted time and energy away from campaigning for socialism, so postponing the achievement of the only framework within which the problems could be solved and so in fact prolonging the existence of those problems and the suffering they caused.

What was required was an immediate change in the basis of society from class ownership to common ownership; in other words, a social revolution.

We have to admit that, although we won the argument at an intellectual level, we didn’t win in terms of convincing even a large minority of those who wanted to further the interests of the working class or of those who considered themselves socialists. Most of these felt that, if reforms could be had, they should be pursued. To their way of thinking, socialism was a long way off, so what was wrong in trying to get improvements via reforms in the meantime? Some reformists called themselves “possiblists” to emphasise that their policy was to pursue something that was possible as something that was achievable in the immediate future, “something now".

In some ways this was an understandable (though mistaken) attitude but it had consequences. Reforms, as measures introduced by governments, have to be pursued by political means; which implies the need for a reformist political party. In Britain this was the Labour Party and, this century, hundreds of thousands of people put their time and energies into building up Labour as the political vehicle for obtaining reforms within capitalism

Reformists in power

Labour, in power, did introduce some reforms but the main purpose of any government is not to introduce reforms but to run the common affairs of the capitalist class of a country. So, in assuming government power to introduce reforms, Labour also assumed responsibility for running capitalism. As, however, capitalism by its very nature is a system based on the exploitation of wage-labour for profit and can never be made to run in the interest of the exploited majority, anybody taking on responsibility for running the political side of capitalism has to do so on capitalism’s terms.

Capitalism can only run as a profit-making system in the interest of those who live off profits and against the interest of the useful majority of wage and salary earners and their dependants. This is why all Labour governments ended up taking measures against the interests of the majority (such as restraining wages or opposing strikes) and disappointing, by cutting spending in such fields as health, housing, education and pensions, those who saw them as a vehicle for obtaining reforms.

This has always been the limitation of reformism. Capitalism can never be reformed so as to work in the interest of the majority, so the most that reforms are only ever going to be able to do is to alleviate some problem a little but never solve it. Such reforms as capitalism can be pressured into granting are always granted on its terms, basically, as long as they are not too expensive and as long as there is something in them for the capitalist class or some section of it—in terms, for instance, of a better trained or less inclined to be sick workforce.

Any reformist party that becomes the government has to work to capitalism’s agenda not its own of trying to improve working class conditions. If profits and reforms conflict it is profits that must come first.

Profits before reforms

n the first half of the 1970s the background to the reform-revolution argument changed. Since the post-war boom came to a final end with the world economic crisis of 1973-4 there have been no beneficial reforms, there have been no improvements in the fields of housing, education, health, pensions and state benefits generally. Quite the opposite in fact, the reforms that existed at that time have been gradually whittled down.

No government in Britain since the mid-70s has introduced any reform. All of them have cut back on reforms. All of them have been anti-reform governments. The basic reason for this has been the increased competition on world markets that the end of the post-war boom heralded. In order to provide businesses operating from within their frontiers with the means to remain competitive all governments have had to take measures to increase profits.

Profits are the source of funds businesses draw on to invest in the more up-to- date equipment and productive methods needed to keep their productivity and costs in line with those of their competitors. Profits are also the main source of government revenue. Governments produce nothing and so have to be maintained out of the surplus value produced by workers over and above the value of the goods and services they consume.

Apart from what they borrow, governments obtain their income via taxes. Although taxes don’t all fall directly on profits as corporation tax and income tax on dividends do, all taxes fall indirectly on profits. This is because direct taxes on wages and salaries and indirect taxes on the goods and services that workers consume increase the amount of money workers must have to be in a position to maintain their working skills. They increase the cost of the workers’ consumption. To take account of this, employers have to pay higher wages and salaries, which reduces their profits. However, the benefit of these higher nominal wages doesn’t go to the worker; it goes via taxes to the government. The result would be the same if workers paid no direct or indirect taxes and received lower wages and the government taxed profits directly.

Government income and profits come out of the same pot, the surplus value produced by the workers. The more there is for one, the less there is for the other. During the post-war boom this latent conflict did not come to the surface except occasionally during balance of payments crises and the relatively mild recessions of the period. With the world market expanding, sales were relatively easy and profits were rising. Most of the time capitalist firms were able to let go without too much problem a portion of their profits to finance government spending, including on reforms, especially as the result of this reform spending—a relatively healthy, well trained and contented workforce—would benefit them in the long run in terms of a more productive and therefore more profit- producing labour force. Despite this levy they still had enough profits left to accumulate as new machinery and more up-to-date productive methods.

When the post-war boom came to an end, however, and the period of intense world market competition opened up, the situation changed. Capitalist firms needed all the profits they could to stay competitive and the cry went up “cut government spending”, “cut taxes”. Governments had no alternative but to comply. In fact the political and economic history of Britain since the mid-70s is the history of the means adopted to reduce the share of surplus value taken by governments, so as to leave more for profits.

Although this policy is particularly associated with Thatcher it actually began under the 1974-79 Callaghan Labour government, even if reluctantly. Labour had started by trying to spend its way out of the 1973-4 slump, i.e. by increasing government spending, but had been forced by economic circumstances (as relayed via the IMF) to do a U-turn and cut spending on reforms.

When the government sought to cut spending by local councils, both on wages and on the services they provided, the result was the notorious Winter of Discontent—when rubbish piled up uncollected and bodies were left unburied—which the Labour Party has only recently succeeded in living down.

Undoing reformism

Thatcher, however, showed no reluctance. In fact she made it a crusade. When she was elected leader of the Tory Party in 1975 she declared that her aim was to “destroy socialism”. By this she meant not socialism (which of course hadn’t been established to be destroyed) but the house that the post-war Labour government built, and the Tory governments of the 1950s maintained, of a capitalist economy with a large state sector and a Welfare State providing benefits as of right. Destroying “socialism” meant destroying this and, unusual as it is for a politician to honour a promise, she did.

The nationalised industries were sold off to the private sector. Local council spending was capped and services which people had come to take for granted, including help for the elderly, the sick and the handicapped, were axed or charged for. Council housing too was sold off. Market forces were introduced into the NHS and prescription and dental charges increased enormously. The conception of the Welfare State as a state that provided benefits as of right to people in return for the contributions they paid was abandoned and the old National Assistance (previously Poor Law) system where benefits were only paid after a means test to people in dire poverty was reintroduced.

Not only have there been no beneficial reforms since the mid-70s, there are not likely to be any in the foreseeable future either. Such struggles as reformists have engaged in over the past twenty years have been defensive, not struggles to achieve some new reform but struggles to prevent some previously-achieved reform from being taken away.

This, too, changed the terms of the argument between reformists and revolutionary socialists. When reforms are achieved the hope is there, even if illusory, that they may be steps forward towards a better society ; reformists are able to claim, as some used to, that a slow accumulation of reforms was the way to socialism; and ordinary workers will be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. But in a period when reforms are being taken away this argument can’t be used. Who can claim that slowing down things getting worse is a step towards socialism or any sort of better society?

Back to charity

How have reformists reacted to the disappearance of the only thing—the availability of reforms—that gave their mistaken position an air of plausibility? In two ways. One has been to cease to be reformists by coming to accept the present, unreformed capitalist status quo. This is the option the Labour Party has chosen. The other has been to retreat into charity and individual case work, the option taken by those who have gone into charities like Shelter, Child Poverty Action Group, Low Pay Unit, Age Concern and the like. Both options are an admission of the failure of the original reformist project of going into parliament to get legislation passed that would improve the condition of the working class.

The Labour Party is still a “reformist” party in the broad sense of the term, as a party that mistakenly believes it can make capitalism work in the interest of the majority. But in this it doesn’t differ from the Tory and Liberal parties which suffer from the same illusion. In that sense they, too, are reformist parties. But reformism was originally a current within working class opinion which sought to improve working class conditions by means of social reform legislation.

Because it now accepts that it must govern capitalism on its terms and according to its economic laws, the only reforms Labour now offers are not social reforms but constitutional reforms such as the abolition of hereditary members of the I louse of Lords or regional government for Scotland and Wales. Unlike social reforms, these don’t cost anything and so won’t be a burden on profits but, equally because they don’t cost anything, they don’t offer anything tangible to people and leave their conditions—and problems—completely unchanged.

All they amount to is rearranging the furniture, a game the Liberals and Nationalists are into too but with different proposals as to where to put the furniture. Apart from this, politics today is a choice of which gang of professional politicians is to form the government and preside over the capitalist system as it is without trying to extract social reforms from it. That is no longer on the agenda. Reformism has now become a fringe political movement, as represented by Arthur Scargill’s breakaway SLP.

The campaigning charities have come on the scene more or less avowedly as mere stretcher-bearers dealing with the worst casualties of capitalism. Their aim is not even the old reformist one of trying to improve the conditions of the whole working class by social reform legislation; it is only to try to help out the worst cases. They don’t think in terms of solving the problem they have targeted. They act on the assumption that the problem and their charity work will have to continue indefinitely, a never-ending struggle not, as with the reformist struggles of the past, to achieve and maintain social reforms but only to help out a tiny minority of those affected. They do demand legislative changes and they do ask for more money to be spent to help their clients, but the most they have ever got is the removal of some minor anomaly in the treatment of similar cases.

This is what “possibilism” has been reduced to—dealing with individual worst cases—as this is all that is possible under capitalism today in terms of social action.

The argument for reformism was weak enough anyway but, faced with this bleak social prospect, it’s got nothing going for it at all.

Adam Buick

Nightmare on Downing Street (2001)

From the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Having no discernible agenda much different from the Tories, Labour are reduced to negative campaigning to try and win their second term. Their latest poster displays the post-modern ironic kitsch typifying their approach to politics: “the Tories present Economic Disaster II” it brays in mock movie-poster fashion, with Michael Portillo as Mr. Boom, and William Hague as Mr. Bust, in a Reservoir Dogs pastiche. Labour, the party that for nearly twenty-odd years was stifled by Tory-inspired memories of the Winter of Discontent, is now more than happy to return the favour upon them, and to strive to become the party of “economic competence”.

Labour has consistently proclaimed economic stability to be the core aim of their economic policy; as the sound-bite has it: “No return to boom and bust”. What this means, in effect, is the end of the expansionary economic policy attempted by previous Labour administrations. Instead of using state power to try to influence basic conditions of the market, such as interest rates, investment levels and currency values, they are now intent upon holding the economic playing field level. The intention behind this ‘stability policy’ is that firms can plan and invest ahead in a stable environment, thus eventually overcoming Britain’s investment gap. To justify their change of direction, they pointed out (in their 1999 budget) that high inflation typically hits the poorest in a way not overcome by rise in incomes or employment rates.

The core of their stability programme was the independence of the Bank of England from day-to-day political control. Without interest rate levels being under direct political control, politicians can act as though the “economic levers” of capitalism are not in their hands, in a true laissez-faire fashion. So if something goes wrong they are not necessarily to blame and can plead that they are powerless to turn the situation around anyway (which is true enough).

Nevertheless, the Bank of England does not in reality have an entirely free hand and many of the parameters within which it operates are set by the government itself . For instance, after its independence was granted the Bank was given strict instructions to implement its monetary policies in such a way as to make a strict target of annual increases in the price level of 2.5 percent achievable.

The reasoning behind having a stable rate of price increases per annum is that it allows investors (and more particularly lenders, who can lose out badly through inflation) to plan their operations and investment strategies with greater certainty; in turn this encourages people from oversees to invest their finance capital in Britain. It also allows for the appearance of market discipline in the economy to the effect that industry cannot rely on government intervention to bale them out of economic problems.

Thatcherite legacy

It is not only this apparent aversion to inflation that Labour has carried over from the Thatcherite Tory policies of the past: attempts to trim the size of the state also feature as a central plank of their policy. To this end the size of the civil service continues to fall – from 431,000 in 1989, to 358,800 staff in 1999 (although some of this reduction has occurred due to civil servants being “hived-off” to Public Finance Initiative (PFI) firms, and thus continuing in place, just not on the government books).

It is noticeable that another continuation of Tory economic management – and thus a break with Labours past – appears to be in the area of state subsidies. According to the Office for National Statistics, subsidies under the Tories, in their final year, amounted to £6,124,000 whereas in the first year of Labour they fell to £4,870,000. By 1999 they only rose £5,758,000. This picture is slightly complicated by Europe, since agriculture will have received subsidies directly from the EU, and Britain received some £434,000,000 in European Social Fund subsidies in 1999 too. Since these funds don’t come directly from the British government they don’t add to the total for state subsidies.

But Labour has still managed to reduce subsidies and has done so in part in the same manner in which it with taxation – by use of ‘Tax Credits’ and alterations to taxation structures to provide incentives or confer advantages. A recent example is the Motorola plant in Scotland which is threatening closure: the government in an attempt to help keep it open has offered to send Treasury officials help it assess its current financial operations so that it can benefit to the fullest possible extent from the existing tax structure. This type of action allows the government to direct funds towards firms it wants to support without breaking European competition/subsidy rules, and without appearing to fund ailing firms from the taxpayers’ purse. Likewise, they also offered Credit Guarantees to Cammell Laird, in an attempt to use state backing to enable private capital to keep the firm afloat.

Instead of intervening in the economy by legal and state powers, Labour has chosen instead to take a “mediating” rôle. Their main action has been to use ‘good offices’ to try and resolve economic problems without direct and overt intervention. Their rôle in the Rover/BMW deal typifies this well. Although they did not offer to use state cash or power, they discussed alternatives with all the parties, and used public statements to pressurise them where necessary. This is why they cried foul when Corus sacked its workforce without talking to the government first. Their aim all along has been to give the appearance of representing the “public interest”, without actually and actively interfering in the operations of the market economy.

Partly, this reflects the central regard they have for the rôle of competition within the economy. This was typified by their passing of the Competition Act, and the renaming of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission as the Competition Commission. The investigation by the Commission into the operations of key supermarket chains is an example of the governments aptitude for using behind the scenes pressure to influence major economic actors.

Their reasoning for encouraging competition is that it increases economic efficiency, and promotes productivity. Instead of macro-economic control of the sort they attempted in the past they have turned instead to supply-side microeconomic measures where the engine for economic action and growth is seen as the individual firm and workplace. Their fervent hope is that through increasing the efficiency of business through competition , market discipline will enable firms to close the productivity gap with such near competitors as France and Germany, making Britain an attractive place for investors and so help further domestic economic expansion. Their policies are thus geared around actively encouraging competition and providing the “right environment” for businesses to grow and provide jobs.

The other main plank of their productivity policy has been education. By improving the skills on offer from workers to the employers they hoped to enable Britain to increase productivity through highly skilled labour. So far this aspect of their policy has been highly compromised by the shortage of teachers especially in key subjects like Maths and the sciences. Teaching numbers have fallen dramatically from 857,000 in 1990 to 730,900 in 2000 which has meant that despite increasing spending on education there have been minimal returns so far. In turn their main response has been to move the academic goalposts and also to try and use bullying tactics to increase the productivity of the existing teaching staff.

Despite some “local difficulties” so far the Labour government has benefited from a relatively buoyant world economy and their economic intervention has been just of a sufficient order for them to be able to claim some sort of rôle in this apparent “success”. As the economic slowdown closes in on them though, their second term is likely to show what they are really made of when it comes to the hard choice of laissez-faire free-market capitalism as opposed to the active state interventionism of their corporatist past.

Whatever the outcome, their current billboard poster of Hague and Portillo is seriously misleading for by labelling the Tories an “Economic Disaster II” waiting to happen, they disguise the fact that there can be only one economic disaster, “Capitalism: the disaster continues”, an epic for which they have been as responsible as anyone else.

Moreover, with turnout at the election expected to be the lowest in modern political history perhaps the working class are now beginning to see what socialists have been claiming over decades: that none of the small-time crooks from either gang vying for a starring rôle in this particular film can make any fundamental difference to the plot.

Pik Smeet

Running Commentary: Up, up and away (1987)

The Running Commentary column from the June 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Up, up and away

June is bursting out all over. And one of the biggest balloons fit to bust is that of Richard Branson, who is putting all his ego into one basket to fly in a hot air balloon across the Atlantic.

It's a strange thing for anyone to do. least of all him — surely he can afford a seat on one of the Virgin Atlantic flights. Of course it's being presented as a challenge. The media loves dramatic pictures of the rich wasting their money in ever more extravagant ways. The same reasons, the same "get up and go" mentality that is supposed to drive Richard Branson as a high-flying capitalist, breaking new markets, also apparently force him to break daft records (“Mr Branson, why do you exploit the working-class?" "Because it's there.").

The real basis behind the Atlantic crossing is as one part of the publicity for Virgin and Branson's plans to turn his £260 million business into a billion pound concern and from there make Virgin the biggest entertainments multinational in the world. That's all you'll be seeing on TV this month when the cameras cover the ocean crossing — one big advert.

Richard Branson is one of Margaret Thatcher's favourites. She originally wanted him to lead a campaign to encourage more adventurous entrepreneurial activity among British business, but he preferred the national litter brigade that is UK 2000.

As far as Thatcher is concerned never mind fly across the Atlantic, he could walk across it. His life reads like one of her speeches: he set up a small business running a record shop at the age of twenty and after fifteen years he had amassed a personal fortune worth £160 million (the average owner of a record shop would have to save their wages for ten thousand years to get that). What is not so widely known, glossed over in the life story, is that Branson found himself in a pickle early on when he tried to defraud Customs and Excise of £60,000 and was only saved from prison by his youth; and that his climb started with the help of £10,000 from a friend. Obviously the lesson for us all is that the only way to get on inside capitalism is to have the right friends and the right lawyer.

In fact, while Richard Branson is cooped up in his pressurised aluminium capsule 35.000 feet above the Atlantic for a week or so (it's his companion I feel sorry for), the profits from Virgin record company won't suddenly dry up. The money will keep rolling in — he may break records but you can be sure he plays absolutely no part in making any records. Richard Branson is not needed, he's redundant, like anyone who lives off ownership, off the work of others. It's bad enough having these parasites, but to have them parading themselves on TV . . .

Ministering to women

The Labour Party has promised that if it is elected to government it will establish a Ministry for Women with Cabinet status. A party policy document, Labour's Ministry for Women, refers scathingly to male domination within society:

With few exceptions, men make the laws, administer the laws, carry out ministerial decisions. control our industries, run our public services and negotiate pay and working conditions. Women are not in positions to articulate their demands or to ensure their needs are considered.

To overcome this male domination, Labour proposes that the Minister for Women should sit on key cabinet committees and have regular access to the Prime Minister. A House of Commons Select Committee would be set up to monitor the Women's Ministry which would be directly responsible for sex equality legislation and the updating of the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts.

For many women workers, dissatisfied with the double burden of (low) paid work outside the home and unpaid housework and childcare inside the home, fed up with the lack of good child-care facilities and concerned about health issues that particularly affect them, Labour's proposal may seem attractive.

And if Labour's analysis of the problem (as quoted above) were actually correct there might be a certain logic to setting up a Ministry for Women. But, while it is true that most (though by no means all) positions of power and influence are occupied by men, to say, as Labour does, that "men make the laws, administer the laws . . .", gives a highly misleading impression. It would be more accurate to say that a small handful of men and one or two women make the laws, and control industry and society while all the rest of us - men and women - never get a look in.

And while it is also true that in many areas of life women workers do get a worse deal than men workers and a Ministry for Women just might ensure a higher degree of equality with working men, that equality will be worth very little if it still means, as it will, that a handful of people own and control wealth and monopolise power while the rest of us are excluded from a share in either.

Persuasion

The look of scepticism takes a moment to register. You sense the turmoil going on in the mind. There is a short embarrassed laugh. "Well, of course, it's feasible, but unlikely ever to happen". Have you suggested something outrageously shocking? No, you have just presented the case for socialism. This initial acquaintance with socialism can cause severe shock to those who derive their attitudes toward life from daily helpings of the Express, or Telegraph.

Your interlocutor, still confused at having their illusions about society shattered, fixes you with a glittering eye and proceeds to catalogue reasons why socialism will remain a Utopian ideal. "We need leaders" . . . "Human beings are inherently aggressive" . . . "You will never convince the majority" . . . "The task is too daunting". A look of triumph replaces the previous incredulity as they bathe in the self-congratulatory assumption that your argument has been totally refuted.

Why should the concept of socialism prove such a difficult one to handle? For socialists the case is self-evident. The benefits of socialism are as obvious as the solution to yesterday's crossword.

However, as the prevalent ideas in society are those of the ruling-class, then the socialist propagandist has to contend with a lifetime's brainwashing. To many people, fed on a diet of carefully controlled misinformation by the media, the word socialism evokes a Pavlovian response — Reds under the bed. shortages and dull conformity — not forgetting the ultimate threat to civilisation, the replacement of Eastenders with an endless re-run of Politburo speeches. Socialism, of course, stands for none of these absurdities.

Socialists do not pretend that the transition to socialism will be perfect. However, when the world belongs to everyone and decisions are arrived at democratically by all involved in those decisions, who needs leaders? There are violent — sick — individuals in society, it is true, but contrast that with the massive, legalised, institutionalised violence committed by the state on behalf of its capitalist rulers.

The task of persuading the majority of the working class that wage slavery is not in their interests and that the means of creating a better society lie in their power, may appear daunting but to paraphrase Marx (Groucho); socialism is one club that should have us all as members.

Dave Coggan

Cooking the Books: Entrepreneurialism (2024)

The Cooking the Books Column from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article in the Sunday Telegraph (2 December) appealing for Tories to vote Labour, subtitled ‘My party extends the hand of friendship to those who voted for the Tories but feel let down by their failure to act’, Sir Keir Starmer praised Thatcher for having ‘set loose our natural entrepreneurialism’. Entrepreneurialism, what’s that?

One dictionary defines it as ‘the ability to start new businesses, especially when this involves seeing new opportunities to make money’. This is not what most people remember the Thatcher government of the 1980s for. Selling off nationalised industries and council houses, cutting social benefits, mass unemployment and hammering the miners come more readily to mind.

Thatcher is on record as declaring:

‘I set out to destroy socialism because I felt it was at odds with the character of the people. We were the first country in the world to roll back the frontiers of socialism, then roll forward the frontiers of freedom’ (tinyurl.com/mus4fr9v).

By ‘socialism’ she meant of course the sort of restrictions on the workings of private capitalist enterprises that the Labour Party used to preach. Private capitalist enterprises supported her because they wanted more ‘freedom’ to choose how to make profits. In writing of ‘our natural’ entrepreneurialism Starmer even agrees with her ridiculous claim that this accords with ‘the character of the people’.

Entrepreneurs are people who invest money in producing something or providing some service with a view to making more money in the form of profit. This is not necessarily their own money but is frequently money borrowed from a bank or some venture capitalists or even the state who reckon that the entrepreneur has identified a potential way to make more money in which they can share.

In chapter 23 of Volume 3 of Capital on ‘Interest and Profit Enterprise’, Marx discusses how this extra money is divided between the lender of capital and the entrepreneur who actually uses it:

‘The functioning capitalist is here assumed as a non-owner of capital. Ownership of the capital is represented in relation to him by the money-capitalist, the lender. The interest he pays to the latter thus appears as that portion of gross profit which is due to the ownership of capital as such. As distinct from this, that portion of profit which falls to the active capitalist appears now as profit of enterprise, deriving solely from the operations, or functions, which he performs with the capital in the process of reproduction, hence particularly those functions which he performs as entrepreneur in industry or commerce. (…) [P]rofit of enterprise appears to him as the exclusive fruit of the functions which he performs with the capital, as the fruit of the movement and performance of capital, of a performance which appears to him as his own activity.’

Entrepreneurs, especially those who succeed in making lots of profit, have a high opinion of themselves. They see themselves as ‘wealth creators’. They are certainly more involved in this than the mere owner of capital but only because they identify some new way of making money by organising workers to produce wealth.

Entrepreneurs are obviously more useful from a general capitalist point of view than mere coupon-clippers living off dividends or interest as they are an active section of the capitalist class identifying new ways of making profits, the driving force of capitalism. Which is why governments, as the guardians of the overall general capitalist interest in a particular country, seek to encourage them. It is part of their remit. Thatcher recognised this. So does Starmer. Labour is now more than ever an avowedly capitalist party and is openly saying it will govern as such.

Death of a politician (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

Selsdon man

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

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

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

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

Thatcherite Christian

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

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

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

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

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

Ivan

Voice From The Back: Pay up or die (2002)

The Voice From The Back Column from the July 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pay up or die

“The National Institute for Clinical Excellence, which authorises drugs for prescription in England and Wales, is set to reject Glivec, which was developed to combat chronic myeloid leukaemia. Data presented to the American Society for Clinical Oncology show that it is three times more effective than existing therapies . . . The drug is expensive costing between £19,000 and £28,500 per patient per year, depending on dose. But the results on first chronic myeloid leukaemia and now gastro-intestinal stromal tumours suggest it is a life-saver” Times (28 May). A life-saver perhaps, but only if you have the cash.

Marx and the Observer

In an article entitled “Life’s good. Why do we feel bad?” in the Observer (19 May) by Richard Reeves we find a rare reference to Marx. The article is the usual bleat about how despite rising living standards everybody seems to be less happy, but it has the merit of quoting Marx on the subject. “Karl Marx, who for all his faults knew a bit about capitalism, captured the keeping-up-with-the-Jones dynamic of market economics perfectly: ‘A house may be large or small; as long as the neighbouring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all the social requirements of a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace and the little house shrinks to a hut.’ With mass media, the palace doesn’t need to be next door – it can be beamed into our living rooms. And the competition doesn’t stop with the three-bed semi; it applies to our car, our children’s clothes, even our bodies.”

The height of nonsense

An obvious example of how capitalism is totally anti-human is how it makes you feel bad about having a small wage, a small car, or a small house but now, even just being small. In the New York Times (5 May) it is reported that some members of the working class in Japan in order to get a job or a spouse are subjecting themselves to a painful operation where their shinbones are cut in two, a brace is applied and they are taught to turn a screw so that metal pins can pull their bones apart a millimetre a day. As Ms Zhang of Beijing said from her hospital bed, “ I’ll have a better job, a better boyfriend and eventually a better husband. It’s a long term investment.”

Industrial scrapheap

The Channel 4 programme Old (23 May) gave some horrendous statistics about the elderly poor in Britain today. “Almost 2.5 million old people in the UK live below the poverty line. More than 180,000 old people are physically abused in their homes every year. Every 24 seconds an old person falls victim to crime. The decomposing bodies of 1,000 old people are found in their homes every month. More than 21,000 old people are living in hotels for the homeless.” Capitalism is a harsh competitive system and reserves its most callous treatment for the impoverished elderly, an aspect of capitalism that young workers today would do well to consider when contemplating their futures.

Shady Deals Inc

When attending primary school young workers are indoctrinated with the ideas of hard work, thrift and honesty. But from some of the stories that we hear about “our betters” they must have skipped those lessons. In Chris Ayres’s Wall Street Diary in the Times (6 June) we read about some of the antics of the owning class. “The Vice-President of the United States is facing an investigation for dubious accounting practices at his former firm. One of America’s richest business leaders has been indicted for orchestrating an international art scam. Two top finance executives at two separate energy companies have died from self-inflicted bullet wounds – amid an industry-wide trading scandal. Then there is the investment research scandal being played out on Wall Street; the widespread fraud in the telecommunications industry; the shaming and ultimate destruction of the Andersen accounting firm; and, of course, the collapse of Enron, the energy company that triggered the whole sorry story.”

Shady Deals plc

“Fee-greedy investment bankers, duplicitous analysts, shifty accountants and fat-cat executives may have perpetrated a share-bubble conspiracy lapped up by gullible investors that has brought corporate America into disrepute. But as the British economy loses its sheen, the self-preservation society that is the Square Mile is itself becoming tainted by sleaze. From alleged spread-betting insider-dealing rings to false accounting scandals, corporate Britain has witnessed a string of dubious transactions and dodgy practices. Corporate investigators have told the Observer that scams which were under wraps during the good times are now coming to light. In recent months, there’s been a significant increase in the number of fraud cases they have been asked to investigate” Observer (9 June).

Thatcher and the left

Peter Mandelson, the Labour MP and close adviser to Tony Blair has written an article in the Times (10 June) where he tells us that the Labour Party is now Thatcherite. “No serious challenge on the Left exists to Third Way thinking anywhere in the world. This is hardly surprising as globalisation punishes hard any country that tries to run its economy by ignoring the realities of the market or prudent public finance. In this strictly narrow sense, and in the urgent need to remove rigidities and incorporate flexibility in capital, product and labour markets, we are all ‘Thatcherite’ now”. This is the Labour Party that the SWP, SA and various other leftists will urge workers to vote for at the next election!

Ubiquitous Marr (2007)

Book Review from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

A History of Modern Britain. Bt Andrew Marr. Macmillan, 2007, £25.

Some readers will find much to like about this book, written by the ubiquitous teleMarr, radioMarr and Daily Marr and based on his recent TV series on BBC2. It is entertaining, witty, good-humoured – and never boring. Others will be less keen, seeing its 630 pages as obese and garrulous, stuffed with descriptive detail but light on discussion of ideas (do we really want to pay good money to learn about Churchill “sitting in his hospital bed wearing pale blue pyjamas with a silk shirt and cardigan?”)

The book has five parts, each covering about a decade from the end of the World War II to the present time. Marr sums up the 1945-51 period: “Labour had made Britain a little more civilized and certainly fairer. But it had accomplished nothing like a revolution.” He write of “a certain vision of British socialism” and the word socialist (as noun or adjective) is used dozens of times in the book. But always it refers to Old Labour people or policies like nationalisation.

Part Two, titled “The Land of Lost Content” (meaning happiness) is about the 13 years of Tory government, (1951-64). Marr drops a few top political names (Macmillan, Home), rakes some sexual muck (Profumo, Vassall) and celebrates miscellaneous celebrities of the time (Ernest Marples, the Beatles, Sir Bernard Docker). Domestically, manufacturing industry and shipbuilding were in decline and “the growth of car mania” was under way. Internationally, Suez was a disaster, and British Empire was reducing to Commonwealth of nations.

 

Part Three takes us on to the years 1964-79. Andy calls this part “Harold, Ted and Jim”, meaning Heath’s Conservative government was sandwiched between the Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan. Economics is one theme: the balance of payments crises, the pre-Thatcher rise of the free market, the overflowing rubbish winter of discontent (1979). Internationally, Rhodesia broke away from British rule, and the “troubles” in Ireland got worse. But Marr seems most enthused by cultural issues: legalising homosexuality, reducing censorship, the growth of the pop music and celebrity industries.

The author calls Part Four “The British Revolution” (1979-90). He means Thatcherism. It “heralded an age of unparalleled consumption, credit, show-off wealth, quick bucks and sexual libertinism.” Marr believes that Thatcher was “extremely lucky. Had Labour not been disembowelling itself and had a corrupt, desperate dictatorship in South America not taken a materialistic gamble with some island sheep-farmers, her government would probably have been destroyed after a single term.” Maybe – probably not. It’s idle speculation. More solid is Marr’s account of why Labour lost power after and took 18 years to regain it: briefly, failure to deliver on promises.

Marr lingers for six crocodile-tear splashed pages over Thatcher’s political death. The poll tax was a disaster for her. “One by one the inner core of true Thatcherism fell back.” She eventually resigned, but not before fixing John Major as her successor.

Part Five, oddly called “Nippy Metro People”, brings us up to date. First there are seven Major years and then a Blair decade. The blurb for the book talks of “the victory of shopping over politics… a culture of consumerism, celebrity and self-gratification.” Marr reviews recent economic and political events: the pound not going in with the euro, the modernisers of Labour who moved it away from the “unelectable” left. But again he gives prominence to cultural matters: the Diana cult, New Age spiritualism, celebrity glossy magazines, the costly Dome.

On the last page Marr shows his inegalitarian hand on leadership. “[We] need those optimistic politicians, the next leaders, the ones whom we’ll laugh at and abuse. And we need them more than ever now.” Speak for yourself, Andy – only sheep need shepherds!

Stan Parker

Badged and Kebabbed (2023)

Book Review from the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Badgeland. By Steve Rayson. Bavant Press. 2023.

This is an engaging and well-written account of a life spent in left-wing politics during the 1980s, mainly in the Labour Party and also in Militant for a time, referencing a variety of Trotskyist and leftist groups from the era, together with their preoccupations and campaigns. Hence the Badgeland title – from ‘Rock Against Racism’ to ‘Coal Not Dole’.

Rayson starts as a schoolkid with an interest in politics in his home town of Swindon before moving on to be a student radical at Bath University and then after graduation to various management positions, initially at the former Greater London Council (GLC) before its abolition by Thatcher.

He charts an emerging disjunction in his life between the metropolitan sophistication of London and its progressive social liberalism and the visits he makes back to his working class roots in Swindon to visit family. There, the working men’s club frequented by his father and his friends has little time or interest in the radical left. Much to Rayson’s dismay they instead developed much more of an interest in buying their council houses and making a quick buck by joining in the various share-offerings of the privatized utilities. It is a tale that reflects a fundamental and wider shift at the time, when former working class trade unionists became seduced by the alleged benefits of the ‘property-owning democracy’ promoted by Thatcher’s Tories.

The book is funny by turn and sad at others, and in essence charts his frustrations at the failure of most of the campaigns he got involved in, from CND and the Miners’ Strike to the fight to save the GLC. He also traces the parallel tendencies within the left that were to emerge as New Labour, making an accommodation with Thatcherism that Rayson was uncomfortable with.

Eventually, after his time as a manager in local government, Rayson became an entrepreneur himself and in the ultimate irony claims that his life in and around Trotskyist groups prepared him well for the task, incongruous though that may sound. Part of a recalled conversation with a left-wing friend at the time is worth repeating:

‘I think all start-up founders should join a Trotskyist group as a teenager. It is far more valuable than studying for an MBA. They run weekly education sessions, they give you homework and individual mentors. They make you do presentations and coach you in the art of public speaking.

Okay, you have to moderate the hand movements and stop referring to everyone as comrade… But seriously it was Trotskyists who helped me achieve my ‘A’ Level grades to get to university…

Trotskyists teach you sales skills the hard way. They put you outside M & S with newspapers saying ‘Smash the Capitalist System’ and challenge you to sell as many copies as you can. It is the sink or swim school of sales training and better than any selling course…

They demonstrate how to build organisational capacity and communicate a consistent vision to their members. They generate revenues that are out of all proportion to their small size and are incredibly resilient. They create and publish national newspapers. They are also experts at guerrilla marketing which is a required skill for entrepreneurs.’ (pp.352-3).

In this he’s not entirely wrong of course, and others have made successful careers in public sector management for themselves based on some of these skills. Rayson has also worked in that sector and as a consultant too, and clearly still has an interest in radical politics.

These days, despite his various campaigning disappointments, he says he tends to vote for the most radical candidate on offer. Perhaps he’s even voted for the SPGB. Strangely enough, there is an argument that our commitment to a society of abundance and free access to wealth without a coercive state means that socialism as we see it could be the most creative and ‘entrepreneurial’ society of all. But then again, he would never have learnt any of that from Militant or the RCP.

DAP

Greasy Pole: The Death and Life of Selsdon Man (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was early in 1970 and Harold Wilson’s government, which less than four years before had been returned with an emphatically increased majority, was sinking deeper and deeper into unpopularity. The Conservative opposition’s leader, Edward Heath, was very different from his predecessors Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home, with their image of long days slaughtering on the grouse moors. In keeping with this, the Tories went out to persuade the voters that they were a party of radical change. Some months were devoted to labouring over policy reviews and draft manifestos and in February 1970 the leaders met at the Selsdon Park Hotel to draw it all together into a programme designed to win them the next election.

The discussions at Selsdon were driven by Heath’s desire to get into Number Ten with a more or less clean sheet, as a leader who was reacting against the past. This meant against the confused and erratic blundering of Wilson’s government, which the prime minister liked to describe as pragmatism but which others might call a triumph of opportunism over principle. In fact, in electoral terms there was something to be said for the “clean sheet” because there had been several examples of stunning victories after the promise to be a purgative change from a dismal, discredited past. This was the case when Labour won in 1945 and again in 1964 and since then it has happened with Thatcher in 1979 and Blair in 1997.

Thatcherism

The decisions taken at Selsdon Park were centred on a concern about tax cuts, a more vigorous programme of law enforcement (both of them voter-attractive) and a more selective access to social services and state benefits (which have become more popular in recent times). “After the 1964 and 1966 defeats,” wrote Margaret Thatcher in her memoirs The Downing Street Years (apparently forgetting that a few other people were also involved), “I joined with Ted Heath in a rethinking of party policy which seemed to foreshadow much of what we later came to call Thatcherism”. Selsdon was treated to an overdose of media interest, partly because of a panicky response when an unprepared Heath was required to face a band of reporters on the Saturday and was advised that it would be most useful to emphasise a tougher policy on law and order. It was thus no surprise when a strident communiqué came out of the conference, promising the electorate an invigorating dose of market-driven economic liberalism as an alternative to Labour’s hopeless blunders.

Heath began to talk about a “new style of government” which would abolish the policies of wage restraint which previous governments (including Conservative) had seen as so essential to the prosperity of British capitalism. “We have always been opposed to compulsory wage control,” he informed us soon after Selsdon, “We opposed it in the House when the Bill was going through, and we are opposed to it and we will not introduce it”. At the same time, there would be no more government investment to rescue failing companies; “lame duck” firms would have to “stand on their own two feet” or expire. The market, left to itself without any interference from the government, would operate to ensure that only the strong and useful—the profitable—would survive, which would be to the benefit of everyone.

Primitive

The first reactions to Selsdon were that it was a boon to the Labour Party and a terrible mistake by the Tories. Wilson made the most of it; he was then at the top of his form as a political con-artist and came up with the name of Selsdon Man for those responsible for spawning such primitive, brutish ideas, as against Labour’s model as a party standing for a modern, civilised, caring society. Selsdon Man, a political cave-dweller, was assumed to have lost the next election for the Tories.

In fact there is some reason to think that Wilson got it wrong, that Selsdon was not so much out of tune with the times. In his biography of Iain Macleod, Robert Shepherd states that the discussions were not as fervent as most people imagined; it was more a matter of sorting out policies which would distinguish them from the Labour Party. Heath described the event as “quite unspectacular” and grumbled about the “fuss” in the press: “I can think of no major new departure which emerged”. Robert Blake, the historian of the Conservative Party, thought that Selsdon did the party more good than harm and John Ramsden, in his history of the party—An Appetite For Power—considered that, in contrast to Labour’s obvious disarray, a co-ordinated policy which looked as if it might endure would be a vote winner.

And so it turned out, as Heath won the election in June 1970 and the voters waited to see whether he would live up to the brave declaration in his preface to the Tory manifesto: “Nothing has done Britain more harm in the world than the endless backing and filling which we have seen in recent years. Once a policy has been established, the prime minister and his colleagues should have the courage to stick with it.”

U-turns

The voters did not have long to wait. In July that year the news came that Rolls Royce was in deep trouble, largely through losing massive amounts of money over the design and production of an aero-engine for Lockheed. This, clearly, was a “lame duck” company which should be left to die because it could not “stand on its own two feet”. But instead of having “the courage to stick with” their declared policy and allowing Rolls Royce to go under the Cabinet, after trying to persuade some banks to put up the necessary money, unanimously decided that the state would have to step in with a virtual nationalisation of the firm. “Ministers had been forced to consider,” Heath excused himself afterwards, “whether we should allow our political reservations about state aid to outweigh considerations of the unemployment effects which would result if we let such a great concern go to the wall.” He did not say so, but the effects on votes was also on their minds. Pragmatism, in other words, ruled OK.

It ruled again, a couple of years later, when the affairs of the long-ailing Upper Clyde Shipbuilders reached crisis point. A 1969 memorandum written by the mad marketeer Nicholas Ridley had advocated a complete government withdrawal from UCS but this kind of ideological approach was, even after Selsdon, in reality unacceptable. Pragmatism—a concern for the effects on employment and therefore on votes—demanded that, first, the Yarrow yard should be separated from UCS, with a sweetener in the form of a large government loan. Then, in February 1972, during a debate on unemployment, the decision was announced to bail out this latest “lame duck” with state aid.

By that time the Selsdon policy of non-intervention in wage bargaining had also gone by the board. In April 1971 Heath was “encouraged” when the secretary of the TUC, Vic Feather, offered to negotiate over an incomes policy, wrongly described as not only “voluntary” but also “new”. If Heath had stuck by the Selsdon policies he would not have been encouraged, but outraged, by Feather’s offer. By the autumn of 1972 we were back with an attempted government freeze on wage rises, through various stages of severity, policed by something called the Wages Board.

Rover

So Selsdon Man did not live long after the election which he had so generously helped the Tories to win. There are still attempts to bring him back to life; the wretched Trade Minister Stephen Byers was once an ardent advocate of the beneficial effectiveness of the market but—like those before him who were confronted with a similar problem—he had to stop his attempts at resuscitation when he met the crisis at Rover cars. Selsdon Man may have seemed to be before his time but he did achieve one thing—to expose how ready are politicians to abandon the plans which, they have solemnly assured us, are the one sure way of dealing with capitalism’s problems.

Ivan.

In Rude Health? (1998)

TV Review from the November 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Britain is a place of warm beer and sandwiches, lazy days on the village green watching cricket, a place of order and conformity. At least that s what John Major reckoned. But in doing so he reckoned without the stars of Rude Britannia (Channel 4,10pm, Thurs 15 October).These were some of Britain's rudest people who were counterposed to those who deplore the behaviour and openly hanker after a return to the rose-tinted past.

That Britain was ever the kind of place John Major thought it was is open to dispute — what is clearer is that whatever level standards of behaviour were in the past, there has been a serious decline since. When Major said he aimed to build a society “at ease with itself” he was stating a political intention he was never remotely going to be able to fulfil. And so it has turned out — if this programme is anything to go by Britain is a more competitive, selfish and inconsiderate society than it ever has been.

This was illustrated time after time via the filmed behaviour of those who just couldn't give a monkey’s about anybody but themselves. One or two of them were not only prepared to admit this when questioned, they were actually proud of it. One who showed no lack of remorse was the man who parked in the disabled parking spot at a supermarket when there were scores of other places free. When challenged about it by a disabled woman it turned out the gentleman in question was none other than an officer of Her Majesty's constabulary. His response was not to admit his culpability and mutter something about “being in a rush” as most probably would, but to insist that he had not violated any road traffic laws!

Happy days are here again

Then there was the guy in Accrington who went about his business with total disregard for everyone else, whether he was driving his car or just walking around the shopping precinct. His most revealing response to questions about his attitude was to comment that “I am too fast for Accrington”. In truth, here was a poor sap, convinced that he was among the movers and shakers of society, a child of Thatcher and son of Satan, who thought that the most effective way to exercise his muscle was to barge past old ladies in the high street and knock them over. Needless to say, the reality behind the image was revealing — a man in a poorly paid job with little self esteem who wanted to make himself appear bigger than he was. When asked by the interviewer “if you are too fast for Accrington, then why don’t you just leave?” he had no cocksure reply to utter, in fact no answer of any kind at all. To give an answer would have been to reveal that he did not live life to the Max. This was a man who, in reality, lived life in the bus lane.

While it would be wrong to assume that the kind of anti-social behaviour exhibited by individuals in this programme is already widespread as such, it is undoubtedly in the process of becoming so. That this should be the case is not surprising. John Major was doomed to failure in his attempt to halt the slide because he failed to recognise that, first and foremost, it is the market system itself which promotes such types of behaviour and engenders such anti-social attitudes. There is no compelling evidence to suggest that humans are born to be rude, aggressive and anti-social. On the contrary, it is human sociability which is the primary reason why our species has been the most successful on the planet—humans, unlike other animals, are generally able to plan and organise our affairs in a conscious manner, ensuring long-term stability. But the economic, social and political structures created by humans in various circumstances influence human behaviour in turn, and if social systems develop in a manner which promote competition and individualism (as say, a result of natural or artificial scarcity in relation to wants) then humans will adapt their behaviour and attitudes accordingly.

Any society — like the market system — which is based on division, competition and rampant individualism, and then sustained by the creation of generation gaps and the spread of atomised, isolated thinking and behaviour, is going to produce the sort of anti-social attitudes illustrated in Rude Britannia. So it is the ultimate irony for all the Colonel Blimps of this world that the system they admire so much — capitalism — is what has done so much to undermine many of the values they hold dear, values which arose in a different sort society to that which now exists.

But why should a rational thinker want to turn the clock back? The future could be far brighter than any rose-tinted view of the past could allow if the working class grasped the importance of collective action and the necessity of solidarity and class organisation. For the only way to overturn the “every man for himself” culture eating away at the heart of society is in the forging of a united struggle — a united struggle against the system which is currently pitting worker against worker in one of the shabbiest episodes it has yet conjured up in its extremely shabby history.

Dave Perrin

House price blues (1989)

From the February 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the first few months of this year millions of workers will have to cut their personal spending in order to pay more interest on their mortgages. In other words, their standard of living will fall. All will have to cut back on food and holidays, some will even lose their homes. This, however, doesn't worry Nigel Lawson. As Chancellor he has not only welcomed this situation but claimed responsibility for it. While this is merely empty boasting (governments can't control interest rates at will), the fact that he should want to cut back on consumption illustrates that capitalism is not a system geared to meeting people's needs.

Lawson says he has raised interest rates (the price paid for borrowing money) in order to combat inflation. In fact it is the other way around: he has raised interest rates because of rising inflation. The capitalist institutions that lend money to the government are interested in what is accurately called the "real" rate of interest — the return they get after rising prices have been taken into account. So, if the general price level is rising, the government has to offer a higher nominal rate of interest to those lending it money, at least if it wants to maintain its level of borrowing.

The price level has been rising in Britain over the past year, partly due to the government continuing to inflate the currency by printing too much money but also because of the increased level of activity as the economy moves slowly out of the stagnation phase of the capitalist business cycle. Hence the repeated rises in the minimum lending rate (what used to called the Bank Rate) over the past year, culminating at 13 per cent last November.

Building societies are financial institutions which, like banks, survive by borrowing money at one rate of interest and then re-lending it at a higher rate. This means that when the general rate of interest goes up building societies, being no more able to “create credit" than the banks, are obliged to raise the rate of interest they pay those who lend them money (their depositors) and the rate they charge those who borrow from them. As their name suggests, building societies specialise in long-term loans — of twenty, twenty-five years — to house buyers. They operate by lending people the money to buy a house and then requiring them to mortgage it to them as security against repayment of the loan. In law this means that they become the owner of the house, although the person taking out the mortgage retains full occupation rights as long as he or she continues to repay the loan.

So, when we are told in a recent government publication, Britain: An Official Handbook, that at the end of 1986 there were more than 14 million owner-occupied dwellings in Britain, this is not strictly true. Those still paying off their mortgage — some 7.5 million — are only occupiers, not owner-occupiers; they don't become owners until they have repaid in full and with interest their debt to the building society. It is only after a lifetime of being in debt and occupying a house belonging to a building society that they finally attain the lofty status of "property owner", fit citizens of Thatcher's “property-owning democracy". In the meantime their position remains insecure. If ever they fail to keep up their payments the building society will evict them from its house and sell it to recover the amount of the loan, a fate suffered by tens of thousands of people each year and which can now be expected to increase. They also remain at the mercy of rises in the rate of interest, which the government can cynically welcome as a way of making them cut back on their personal consumption.

Since coming to power in 1979 Thatcher has pursued a policy of encouraging people to become homeowners, as part of her plan to eliminate Labour party-type reformism ("destroying socialism", as she misleadingly puts it). She hopes that people who own their own homes will believe they have sufficient a stake in the country to abandon traditional working class demands for higher wages and salaries and better state provision for health and welfare; that in fact they will oppose such demands and vote for the Tories for ever. For her, capitalist property will be more secure if surrounded by a mass of small house owners.

While a few social climbers may have swallowed Tory ideology, Thatcher's policy has been popular for quite other reasons. Many people want to own their own home simply because it gives them some control over part of their lives. They don't like to have to ask permission of a landlord, whenever they wish to modify or improve their home; they want to be able freely to exercise the creativity denied them at work.

Even if all workers owned their own homes, capitalist society would remain class-divided: the majority forced to live by selling their ability to work for a wage or salary and a minority of owners of the means of production living off unearned income in the form of rent, interest or profit. When socialists talk about inequality of property ownership being the basis of capitalist society in Britain we mean ownership of the means of production, of land, raw materials, factories, machines and other instruments for producing wealth. Owner-occupied houses are not means of production; they are not, and cannot, be used to produce more wealth. In this sense they fall into the same category as cars, washing machines and other household goods; they are consumer goods, means of consumption — workers have to consume accommodation, be it owned, mortgaged or rented, in order to keep themselves fit to work. Homeowners, therefore, are not capitalists and neither do they have any interests in common with capitalists.

This important distinction between property in means of consumption (houses, cars, household goods) and property in means of production, or capitalist property, is lost in the statistics of property ownership published from time to time. Even so, these figures show a considerable inequality: in Britain the top 1 per cent own 23 per cent of "accumulated wealth". This means that if property in means of consumption is taken out of the figures the level of inequality is far greater. Figures for West Germany in 1969. for instance, showed that while 1.7 per cent of private households owned about 35 per cent of "total private wealth", they owned 70 per cent of "private wealth invested in production". The proportions in Britain will be similar. Owners of capitalist property are, quite literally, in a different class from owners of means of consumption. To gain entry into this class you need to own a lot more than your home.

Besides, owning your own home in no way frees you from having to go out and sell your ability to work for a wage or salary in order to live. Workers who own, or who have mortgaged, their home have to sell themselves on the labour market just as much as workers who live in council houses or private rented accommodation. Nor, as the recent rises in mortgage rates shows, does it free you from the financial problems inextricably associated with being a wage and salary earner in capitalist society. “MORTGAGE BURDEN TURNS YOUNG INTO NEW PAUPERS" read the headline of a recent article in The Times (31 December) which featured a young couple in Hertford who had bought and mortgaged a home (a one-bedroomed maisonette, or sort of glorified Portakabin) in July. Their first monthly payment had been £360. From January they were going to have to pay £460 a month, leaving them just £55 a week between them for personal spending (food, car, gas. electricity, telephone).

Homeowners remain non-owners of the means of production and so remain members of the working class, with the same interests as wage and salary earners have always had under capitalism: to establish a system based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and to press, while capitalism lasts, for higher wages and salaries. Thatcher has got it wrong. Home ownership does not give workers an interest in the continuation of capitalism.