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

TV Review: Something Else — Frank Finds Out

TV Review from the January 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

One genuinely enjoyable piece of British TV — entertaining without pandering to racial prejudice or mocking traditional working class stereotypes and of particular interest for its insight into the capitalist system — was screened on October 8. The programme Frank Finds Out was part of the Something Else series, made by young people: it related the adventures of a young unemployed person, confused as to the reason for his plight, setting off to London on his bike, no less.

Frank's object is not to find work but to discover who is responsible for his life being run against his own interests — “The Guilty Ones" as he calls them. His investigation of the various institutions working to perpetuate the current system was often hilarious and sometimes very pointed. On the Prime Minister he comments: 

She won't listen to your point of view if you've only got a couple of quid; try donating £30,000 to the Party, that should get you invited in for a cup of tea and a chat. 

The Royal baby (“Who's a lucky boy then?") is shown to want for nothing while workers" children live in varying degrees of poverty.

On capitalist production and the minority ownership of land, the film was trenchant in its satire. For example there was Mr. Capitaling. derived from the advertisement character Mister Kipling, making "exceedingly large turnovers" and using his inherited capital to make a surplus from the bakers and then reinvest his profit. His workers buy back a proportion of what they have produced but are compelled to return to the ovens next week, to repeat the whole process over again. And when the warehouses are full? “Simple", says Mr. Capitaling. "I close down the works" —- and here we see the now sad-faced bakers trudging dutifully to the Job Centre.

Another character, the "Villain", the embodiment of the "criminal element" in the working class, tells us that he is regarded as a "Wrongdoer" by most of society. He proceeds to show, however, that the real crime is that the land-owning class claim divine right of possession, whereas in fact they obtained their land not through currently accepted means — "Did Henry VIII go to his nearest estate agent and negotiate for St. James Park?" — but as part of an historical process of appropriation.

The "Villain" asks whether god gave these people the land or whether they just took it and concludes with the following indictment:

As Winston Churchill almost said. "Never before in the field of human con tricks, has so much been stolen from so many by so few".

Of course the presentation of the Queen, the Prime Minister, the High Court Judges, civil servants and multinational corporations as the enemy of "the Guilty" suggests that the removal of these institutions, even if possible under capitalism. would end problems like unemployment. This is false optimism: only the establishment of a society of free access to goods and services will do that.

PR, JG

Poverty — fiddling the books (1986)

From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Creative accountancy is something which, it is claimed (by accountants, of course) can rescue companies from bankruptcy. It has nothing to do with production (so no need to worry about strikes, shortage of components and the like) and nothing to do with sales (so no need to worry about Japanese competition). It is an imaginative, elegant restructuring of the books so that what were once shown as losses can now be shown as profits. This can sometimes be done through hiding real costs in the accounts, for example:

. . . the (first) nuclear programme was politically determined and exempted from CEGB rate of return tests. Without that exemption no nuclear power stations would have been ordered between 1958 and 1964. (Atomic Crossroads. John Valentine).

Another example came during the coal strike of 1984/5. when it was argued that a change in the accounting method would move many of the pits which the NCB wanted to close out of the red. The mind of the ordinary person in the street may well boggle at such esoteric, unproductive wizardry; it might also grasp how this exposes the central motivation for production under capitalism, how the very concept of profit is so obsessional that it has to be seen to be assuaged regardless of what actually goes on in the real, physical world where coal is physically dug out of the ground by real, living human beings.

We can see a similar unreality when we compare how election promises and party propaganda compare to what actually goes on in the world. This social system is characterised by some horrifying problems, many of them so outrageous that it is difficult to appreciate their full enormity How, for example, do we confront the fact that each year millions of people endure slow, tortured. degrading death through starvation while in EEC countries there is such a "surplus" of grain on the market that the British government are considering paying farmers up to £80 an acre to let their land lie fallow? How do we cope with the fact that the way capitalism uses nuclear power — Chernobyl was the most recent case in such a way that it threatens to blanket vast areas of the world under lethal radiation? How do we keep in proportion the fact that the nuclear powers have amassed enough destructive force to wipe us all out many times over and to leave the world in a condition which no sane person is likely to want to be alive in?

Such things can be accepted — they are accepted by tens of millions of workers — with a little help from the political equivalent of creative accountancy, in which reality becomes lost behind expediency. In some cases, the aim is to convince us that certain problems don’t exist. Unemployment, for example, is due to workers being unwilling to look for work. British nuclear power stations could not possibly blow up like Chernobyl, which everyone knows was made of substandard cardboard and elastic bands. The best medical care is freely available to even the poorest people in this country, which makes us all overflowing with health and vital energy. Of course there are a few matters which still trouble us but they will be dealt with — they are, in Thatcher's recent words, dragons yet to be slain. This style of argument looks good on the political balance sheets in election programmes, newspaper articles, speeches to the party faithful.

This technique has been applied with special vigour and skill to the issue of poverty. First, there is the attempt to convince us that poverty has been wiped out; it was a problem. it is conceded, in the days when the hunger marchers came down from the idle pits and shipyards and when miners were photographed scratching desolately on slag heaps. But things are different now. with millions of cars choking the roads, millions of homes wallowing in the luxury of TV sets, washing machines, microwave ovens . . . Children are better fed, better clothed, than ever. Pensioners, who were once in so desperate a plight that they formed their own pressure group, can now survive comfortably on their benefits, topped up with lunch clubs, charity outings and so on.

However, in the face of these complacent assurances, the poverty lobby persists in churning out facts about the suffering of people who exist on the barest minimum people who are malnourished, who dress in jumble sale cast-offs, who are under the extremities of stress. When the evidence to show that this is happening is too compelling to be denied, another technique is applied, which allows an admission that the problem exists but asserts that it can easily be solved with some adjustments in state benefits or by fiddling with tax thresholds and rates. This is what the Labour Party meant, when they claimed in their 1974 election manifesto that they would ". . .  eliminate poverty wherever it exists in Britain . . . achieve far greater equality of income, wealth and living standards..."

That was a very ambitious promise and since then both Labour and Tory governments have had their chance to bring it to reality. And what have they been able to do? In Britain today something like nine million people — about one sixth of the population live at or below the official poverty line, that is to say at or below the level of Supplementary Benefit. (It is not possible to be any more exact about the numbers because the last official count to be made public was taken in 1981, since when there has been a convenient official silence in the matter; however we do know that since 1981 more than a million people have been added to those on Supplementary Benefit). To put this into proportion, it should be stated what this poverty level is. A single person gets Supplementary Benefit of £29.50 a week; a couple £47.85; a family with two children £68.05, with housing costs paid separately. Not surprisingly. there is some feeling that a more realistic measure of poverty would be rather higher, say 40 per cent above Supplementary Benefit. This would increase the numbers in official poverty to about 15 million, or one in four of the population.

Apart from the official line, there are many ideas about what constitutes poverty. Keith Joseph thought that it is not being able to afford to eat (perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Joseph once preferred to dine on a slice of wrapped British Rail fruit cake - the kind of eccentricity that only the rich can safely indulge). In fact, malnutrition is by no means unknown to people on Supplementary Benefit. Mrs L has five children between 11 years and nine months; her husband is disabled and unemployed and can't lose the drink habit he developed when he was a building worker. Their home reeks of material decay and of despair. Mrs L subsists on a diet of tea and apathy. Then there is Mr J who was a factory manager, many years ago, until the strain of his job pushed him into a mental breakdown and wrecked his marriage. He lives alone now with his anxieties and his bitter memories of the days when he could at least afford to pay the bills. He is, quite simply, starving to death. People like this are beset with advice, from Norman Tebbit's caustic goadings to social workers' desperate attempts to get Mr L to give up his drinking, Mr J to balance his meagre benefits against the costs of living. Against the inexorable effects of poverty, they are fighting a losing battle. In 1984 nearly a million council tenants were behind with their rent, to the tune of about £240 million; 1.5 million electricity users and over one million gas users are currently in serious difficulty over paying their fuel bills; nearly 11,000 people had homes which were described as "theirs" repossessed through mortgage arrears in 1985 — a fourfold increase since 1979. These symptoms are such as can be costed, recorded, put into statistical tables. Less calculable are the other, equally devastating effects of deep poverty — the inability to afford adequate clothes, or decent furniture, or a warm home in winter, or a holiday, or an outing . . .

In one degree or another these deficiencies, or the fear of them, exert a constant pressure on the entire working class — on everyone who depends on employment to live. There is however another group of people who can fall sick, or drink more than is good for them, without descending into unmanageable destitution. The present John Paul Getty suffers from a persistent disorder in his blood circulation; for the past 18 months he has been staying at the London Clinic, where it costs at least £200 a day to be a patient. This is no problem to Getty for his weekly income is in excess of £1 million. The Duke of Westminster recently suffered a reduction in his income, not because he was ill and off work but as a result of the 1967 Leasehold Reform Act which, the Duke complains. has cost his estate about £2½ million in income. There is no need to feel sorry for the Duke, or to offer him considerate advice for he is the richest man in England but we might speculate on the scale of ownership of the means of life which is required to produce an income of £2½ million and reflect that that is only a part of which the Duke owns and a fraction of his income.

Poverty is persistent because it springsfrom the existence of two classes in society — one which includes Getty and the Duke, who own the means of wealth production and distribution, and the other which includes Mrs L and Mr J who don’t own them. This second class needs to be in employment in order to live. When they are in work (although they often tell themselves that they are not impoverished) they receive wages which in general, overall terms amount to about enough to reproduce their working abilities. If for any reason they can't command a wage — if they are out of work or disabled or mentally ill or a single parent — they quickly slide down to the lower reaches of poverty where their very health is at immediate risk. Poverty can't be abolished unless something is done about the way society is organised at its basis. Reforms which promise an end to poverty at the most change its shape, or rearrange its emphasis, or shift its burden from one group of workers to another.

This is what has happened in recent years. The whole system of what is mis-called social security was based on the assumption that unemployment would never again amount to much and that workers who were in work would earn enough to fulfil the modest expectations about their standard of living without any state benefits. One consequence of this was that pensioners were relegated to the lower levels of poverty; in the early 1970s they made up a little over 50 per cent of Britain's worst-off people. There was much doleful debate, during the 1950s and 1960s, about the increase in the numbers of pensioners and about whether "the country" could "afford" to pay out more and more in benefits to them. And then the recession came to change the picture. In 1981 unemployment was said to be responsible for nearly three million people being at or below the official poverty line and was exerting a downward pressure on the wages of those in work. Nearly one million employed workers in Britain earn less than what the European Social Charter specifies as the "decency" wage and over a third of all adults off dally classified as being in poverty are families where the "head" is in full-time employment. Pensioners have now be superseded, as the worst sufferers from poverty, by couples, with or without children, who are in work.

Reformists and pressure groups, in which capitalism abounds, tell us that there is great merit in this shifting of the burden of poverty from one group of workers to another while the capitalist class enjoy their privileged riches. Some years ago, for example, there was a heated debate about whether allowance should be paid by voucher to the mother or to the father by means of an "income tax allowance". It was, as we say, a heated debate — so hot that it shrivelled the important issue of why workers should bother about so trivial an adjustment in their poverty. But the reformers had their way. As long as the working class allow this to continue their poverty, which cruelly represses them, degrades them and often kills them, will continue and the issue of creatively  ending it will not be confronted.

Ivan

Cooking the Books: “Mass unemployment” (2006)

The Cooking the Books column from the September 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The government’s Welfare Reform Bill is currently going through Parliament. It provides for people on incapacity benefit and single mothers to be harassed to take some crap job or have their benefit cut. New claimants are to be treated even more harshly. This is par for the course. Cutting back on welfare payments has been the policy of all governments, whether Labour or Tory, since the post-war boom came to an end in the 1970s.

The Green Paper which preceded the Bill, bearing the Orwellian title of “A New Deal for Welfare: Empowering People To Work”, sets out the problem as seen by the government:

“In the 1980s and 1990s the welfare state failed those who most needed its help, instead of combating mass unemployment, the welfare state alleviated its worst effects and diverted people onto other benefits.

Instead of helping people into work, it locked them into long-term dependency. By 1997, there were almost 5.5 million people on benefits, 3 million more than in 1979. The number of people claiming unemployment benefits had risen by 50 per cent, while the number claiming lone parent and incapacity benefits had more than tripled.”

This assumes that, if only they had tried, the (Tory) governments of the 1980s and 1990s could have combated “mass unemployment” by somehow creating new jobs as an alternative to paying unemployment and incapacity benefits. But governments can’t create jobs at will.

The Green Paper says that total employment in Britain is now at a record high “having risen by 2.3 million since spring 1997” (when Labour took over). This is indeed what the statistics show but “employment” doesn’t have the meaning which the unwary might assume of full-time employment. It includes part-time employment however short (even one day a week), the self-employed and family members who help them, and people on training courses.

The statisticians divide the population of working age (16-64 for men, 16-59 for women) into three groups: people in employment, the unemployed and the economically inactive. The latest figures, released by the Office for National Statistics on 12 July, show that in the three months to June there were 28.9 million (74.6 percent of working age population) in employment, 1.65 million (5.4 percent of economically active working age population) unemployed and 7.85 million (21.1 percent of working age population) inactive.

The government has set itself the aim of achieving “an employment rate equivalent to 80 percent of the working age population”. A look at the above figures shows that this would be the equivalent of reducing unemployment to zero. But this is not how the government aims to achieve this.

Their plan is to reduce the number of economically inactive by at least 2.3 million:

“To achieve our aim, we will reduce by 1 million the number on incapacity benefit; help 300,000 lone parents into work; increase by 1 million the number of older workers.”

This is all very well but where are the jobs to come from? The latest ONS figures give the number of job vacancies in the three months to June as just under 600,000. Gordon Brown believes that by encouraging “enterprise culture” the Labour government has created the conditions which have allowed businesses to expand and take on more workers and that, if it continues this, more jobs will be created.

What is more likely to happen is that the employment rate will go up a little (with a contribution from people going on government-funded training courses) but not to 80 percent. Instead, the unemployment rate will go up as a result of people on incapacity benefit being transferred to “job seekers allowance”. The government won’t be too displeased with this as they will have saved on welfare payments, since unemployment benefit is lower than incapacity benefit. But it will also, unintentionally, reveal that the “mass unemployment” of the 1980s and 1990s never really went away.

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

Music Review: Tainted Lives (2022)

Album Review from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Happiness Not Included by Soft Cell (BMG, 2022)

Soft Cell began their career when punk’s angry energy was being channelled into then-new musical styles, such as the synth-based sound which has accompanied their songs of suburban angst. Since the band’s peak of popularity in the early ’80s, Marc Almond and Dave Ball have reunited for an album every couple of decades, now with Happiness Not Included. As its title suggests, their slant on society and its mood is even more jaded than before, although not without optimism.

The appeal of looking backwards is the subject of songs Polaroid, Nostalgia Machine and opener Happy Happy Happy about sci-fi’s off-kilter past dreams of the future (‘a better life with little strife, and very little meaning’). The album’s title track is a call to snap out of other stagnant ways of thinking (‘Every opinion is seen as offensive. That’s why we’re always on the defensive’, ‘Times have moved and shifting sands. The future’s in another lunatic’s hands’), and is more directly political than the other songs.

The theme of living in an alienating world is found throughout Soft Cell’s work, especially Happiness Not Included. Being hardened or numbed by life runs through tracks such as Heart Like Chernobyl, I’m Not A Friend Of God and, most effectively, Tranquiliser, one of the band’s kitchen sink dramas. This treads similar ground to 1981’s Bedsitter, although the escape from a lonely, hollow existence isn’t in a nightlife to ‘kid myself I’m having fun’ as in the earlier song, but now with taking downers so ‘I feel nothing at all’. Other tracks are more positive about finding a way out of a rut, such as Bruises On All My Illusions, Purple Zone (a collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys) and closing track New Eden. The album also avoids being too depressing by its lyrics not always taking themselves seriously (‘I feel like North Korea in the winter’, ‘It’s all the fault of the media and all the fear they feed ya’) and upbeat arrangements, particularly on Nostalgia Machine and Purple Zone. While Happiness Not Included isn’t a concept album, its songs hang together as a commentary on how people can react to these uneasy times. The result is probably Soft Cell’s best album since their first, and hopefully it won’t be another twenty years until their next.

Mike Foster

No business like . . . (1988)

From the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

How do you persuade millions of people that commerce and conscience are compatible after all? The ITV television companies certainly had a good try at this over the bank holiday at the end of May. For 27 hours, a procession of media has-beens such as Tony Blackburn, Lionel Blair, Rolf Harris and Frank Carson were given a new lease of life. Tipped out of their Rolls Royces on to our TV screens, these "entertainers" then proceeded to trot out their Bob Geldof impersonations, ordering the British public to redistribute their poverty.

The event was helped along by various other budding cheerleaders, such as that opportunist and careerist starlet of the "alternative" media establishment, Emma Freud, together with racist comedian Jim Davidson, and Derek Hatton who, having tired of making Liverpudlian workers' lives miserable in the name of "socialism", was now seen judging a beauty contest at a London nightclub while swigging bottles of champagne (for charity, of course). We were even treated to a performance from David Steel and Alan Beith, who showed that their musical ability was as flimsy as the political lies out of which they have built careers.

This charity bonanza had creaked into action on the Sunday evening, when Prince Charles gave us a message from his home at Highgrove in Gloucestershire, urging everyone to "keep up the good work", just like the local headmaster or vicar at the village fete. By the time it was all over, and Cilia Black sang "Tomorrow is a Lovely Day", many viewers must have been saying that it had better be. for the day that had passed was a tawdry shambles of crass commercialism dressed up as a caring conscience. As the picture faded, the audience could be heard chanting "Here we go. here we go. here we go . . ." and again, there was a feeling that this was yet another case of the journey being more important than the arrival.

Unlike previous such events, this was an openly commercial television charity show. With a sickening narrow-minded nationalism, the advance publicity had stressed that this time the money would go to "our own", British charities (not to mere Ethiopians, or others who might be starving). What an admission this is, that Britain also is plagued with poverty and suffering, despite the pretence of civilisation and prosperity. In fact, in Britain today there are over 100,000 registered charities, all seeking to mop up after the devastation caused by the priorities of the profit system.

The chief presenter, Michael Aspel, entered into the competitive spirit of the day by boasting at the end that "we" had beaten "the Americans" in their recent efforts to raise money along similar lines. In fact, the total raised was a pittance compared with the needs it was seeking to meet: a mere £22 million. At the time, the audience gasped and screamed with excitement that such a lot had been raised. This is only because it is more than working-class families will see in their lives. But it was only about 40p per person in this country. When divided between the several thousand charities involved in the share-out, it will hardly solve the problems they are trying to deal with. In capitalist terms, the amount collected represents the money received by General Motors last year from their car sales every 3-4 hours on average. (Their total sales last year were over 100 billion dollars.) The total spent by British companies on advertising themselves in 1987 was £5.8 billion: nearly 30 times the telethon total.

Looked at from another point of view, the total of £22 million could have been easily provided by just one man, if Robert Maxwell had donated one-third of his personal unearned income for 1987. Or if Sir John Sainsbury had added just one-fiftieth (or two per cent) of his own private accumulated wealth to the ITV begging bowl, it would have more than doubled the total collected immediately. It was certainly, then, a case of the poor throwing a few pennies at the poor and becoming hysterical in the process.

Undoubtedly the most hypocritical aspect of the May Telethon, however, was the nature of some of the donations themselves. Nicholas Scott, the government Social Security minister, came on to present a cheque for £ 1 million, made up from pensions which had been underpaid as a result of a computer error. One wondered whether this error would have been announced very loudly by the government if it had not been parading its generosity on TV. by handing back to the poor and needy those benefits which were originally supposed to have been paid to. . . the poor and needy. Then, to add insult to injury, it was revealed some weeks later that this government "cheque" had in fact been a blank piece of paper held up for effect, as the government would be donating this money only indirectly, through concessions.

The main feature of the programme, though, was a series of smiling businessmen, lining up to present cheques to the good cause, and stressing visually, verbally and in any other way they could think of. the identify of the company involved. It was not very long before the adverts shown every 20 minutes throughout the 27 hours were becoming indistinguishable from these cheque presentations. For example, there was what amounted to a full-blown Martini ad, complete with the familiar tune and a woman on roller skates with tray and drinks, who rolled on to present a cheque for a mere £ 10,000. The equivalent length of time for an ordinary paid TV ad would have cost several times as much as this, about £50.000. It seems that on this occasion both commercial advantage and conscience money came dirt cheap. Barclays Bank presented a cheque for £100,000, and had their name and image glorified across our screens. Were these charitable donations tax deductible? If they were, Michael Aspel certainly wasn't saying anything about it. In any case, as a fraction of Barclays' world profits, this amount would only represent about one afternoon of their earnings.

To criticise the pop-charity of recent years may be unpopular, but it does not take much investigation to see what is happening here. It is no coincidence that the present government, with its talk of Victorian values, and the cutting down of social benefits for the "undeserving" paupers, is quite keen on the indignities of good, old-fashioned private-enterprise charity, for the more "deserving" clients (if indeed the government believes that there are any left). The problems have remained or multiplied since efforts such as Band-Aid. and this has even been admitted by the charity guru, Bob Geldof himself. But "conscience money" allows people to retreat from real political action, safe in the false security of feeling that "something is being done". In the case of Telethon, it would be more accurate to say that "someone was being done", namely the viewers, as we were dished up hours of adverts and publicity-seeking, disguised as entertainment and compassion. . . and all for a pittance.

Clifford Slapper

Death in Downing Street (1991)

Artwork by George Meddemmen.

From the January 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

 "The Tory Party can be a ruthless monster when it sees power slipping away" (Lord Prior, former Conservative Cabinet Minister).

Everyone had expected that she would go kicking and screaming but when they forced her out of Ten Downing Street she went obediently, delighting the hordes of media hacks by shedding a few quiet tears. Not necessarily tears of grief: it is possible to weep from anger or frustration or from the humiliation of being forced to face an unpleasant reality.

For some time she had seemed to believe she was invulnerable and could go on as prime minister for as long as she chose. But the day came—after the by-elections in Bradford North and Eastbourne—when the Conservative leadership decided that she had deceived herself too long for the good of the party. It did not come into their calculations that Thatcher had been deceiving millions of people for over eleven years.

Since 1979 Thatcher has steadily dominated British politics so that elections became almost a judgement on the woman in Number Ten instead of on her government and its individual candidates. Thatcher talked as if there was a direct, personal bond between her and the millions who voted Tory. On the fifth anniversary of coming to power she said "I believe that five years ago the British people made me prime minister because . . ." and then "I believe I was re-elected with an overwhelming majority last year because . . .” At that time—in 1984—there was some dismay in the Conservative leadership at her declaration that she intended to be leader in the next election. There was even more when, after the Tory victory in 1987, she told us she would go on and on winning elections and taking prime minister’s questions and humiliating her ministers until her famous energy flagged and she was too frail to wield a handbag any more.

Pop stars and politics
Like many politicians—and pop stars and comedians—Thatcher aroused reactions which were often at one extreme or the other. You loved her or your hated her. as the Sun reader would say; unless you are a socialist, in which case you most likely regard the whole lot with a numb horror. Those who loved her, who wept when she fell, adored her as a person who held staunch principles rooted in that awful cornershop in Grantham, a person who always knew her mind and fought to the death for her beliefs. She was, in other words, just the person, after those years of cowardly consensus-politics, to stop the unions holding the country to ransom, to weed out those scruffy teachers who wreaked such moral havoc in the permissive sixties and to put those impertinent foreigners in their place. These sentiments were encapsulated in a rebuke by Cilla Black one evening when she instructed an ungrateful audience that Thatcher had "put the Great back into Great Britain”.

As many of her ministers found to their cost, Thatcher did not take easily to being thwarted; she liked to have her own way. But this does not mean that she did not at times make U-turns in her policies, even if she tried to disguise them by saying that it was everyone else who had been out of step. The final example of this was when she took the "advice” of the Men in Grey Suits and abandoned the fight for the Tory leadership. Someone of Thatcher’s reputed strength and resolution should not have been so moved by the prospect of defeat on that second ballot as to run away from the battle, especially after she had so bluntly declared that she was still fighting. This was not the attitude which so pleased her admirers during the Falklands war—although of course in the Falklands it was other people who were in the battle, taking the casualties.

Putting the Great Back Into Great Britain meant Thatcher storming into international conferences to cow the foreign statesmen by her ruthless exposure of their deceits. It was calculated to encourage people as confused as Cilla Black and as bigoted as the massed readership of the Sun in their prejudice that there is something historically desirable in all things British and that whatever it is must be defended against the threats from those jabbering, treacherous foreigners.

In contrast, other prime ministers and other politicians—including Conservatives—have for a long time been facing up to the real situation of the decline of British capitalism in the world. This decline has happened in spite of the occasional attempt to conceal it with turgid patriotic nonsense. Some politicians, like Enoch Powell and Nicholas Ridley, have accepted it sulkily, rambling on about threats to British sovereignty from European bureaucrats. Others, like Heseltine, have argued that the best hope for British capitalism is to become part of a large European conglomerate, impaired sovereignty and all.

Ignoring problems
Patriotic workers have applauded Thatcher’s verbal assaults on foreign leaders and her stand as the champion of a Great Britain although these things are not relevant to their lives. They take no account of the cruel waiting lists for hospital treatment and of vital, life-saving treatment being withheld because of a shortage of cash. They ignore the homeless who, according to a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, have doubled in numbers since 1978. They pay no heed to the deepening misery of those on the lower slopes of poverty; one recent estimate by the Institute for Fiscal Studies was that over 12 million people were living at or below the official poverty line. They say nothing about the social despair which causes increasing crime; Home Office statistics record a rise of 17 percent in the second quarter of 1990 over the same period in 1989. These are the harsh realities of life under capitalism in Britain and what really lies behind Thatcher’s regal claim, as she vacated Number Ten. that "we” leave Britain in better shape than “we” found it 11½ years ago.

The standard Thatcherite technique of dealing with poverty in the 1980s and 1990s has been to reassure themselves that it is all a matter of choice. Since 1979, the Tories tell us, they have overwhelmed us with the opportunity to choose between private and state medical treatment, between council services and those tendered out to private contractors, between joining in the great Thatcherite bonanza of making loadsamoney or being poor. We can choose to be like someone struggling to keep a family on the dole or we can be as rich as Michael Heseltine.

They proudly tell us about privatised industry with its opportunities for everyone to buy shares by just filling out a form and borrowing the money to pay for them. It sounds impressive until we realise that many workers who bought shares in that way sold them as quickly as possible. In the case of British Gas, between December 1986 and April 1987 the number of shareholders fell from 4½ million to a little over 3 million. The "public" stake in British Telecom declined from 20 percent to 12 percent between privatisation in December 1984 and June 1987. Both concerns were, to all purposes, in the hands of big investors—which do not include members of the working class.

Mortgage misery
There has been a similar story with the so- called property-owning democracy. The rise in numbers of workers living in homes which they are buying with money borrowed from banks or building societies has been hailed by the Tories (and by the Labour Party) as a sign of immense social progress. In fact it is of little consequence to the workers how they pay for where they live. At times there can be some slight advantage in having a mortgage—in being in thrall to some money-lending institution. At others there may be some small gain in being beholden to a landlord.

The fiction that a worker who "buys” a house acquires greater security and higher social status has been exposed by recent events, as thousands who have been unable to keep up with their mortgage repayments have had “their” house taken over. This is called repossession when in fact the bank or building society never really lost possession in the first place. In one particularly tragic recent case of what has become known as mortgage misery, a father cracked under the strain and, rather than lose “his" house, he burnt it down, badly injuring his pregnant wife and killing the two-year old daughter he adored. He was sent to prison for six years, to reflect on the ruin of his life in Thatcher’s Great Britain. For the building society, who were guilty of no crime, it is of course business as usual.

But in spite of the misery the Thatcher mystique survived and this was partly due to her reputation of supposedly energising a transformation of British capitalism: with a little help from her Chancellors of the Exchequer, she had worked an economic miracle which would soon have its effects on all our lives. Of course unemployed workers, or the chronically sick or the homeless, might have wondered what all this talk about an economic miracle amounted to. Perhaps Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson, the Chancellors who were once held in reverence for their miraculous talents but later despised for their blunders. might have thought on the same lines.

The government were always clear on what was meant by economic success. Thatcher set out her benchmarks in her statement on the fifth anniversary of her elevation to prime minister when she claimed the credit for:

  Inflation at its lowest for 16 years . . . Interest rates are at their lowest for six years . . . Profits are rising—and everyone wants to work for a profitable firm.

She was lucky in her timing then but by her tenth anniversary there was a different state of affairs so that among her extravagant claims of triumphant progress there were doubts:

  Yes there are problems. Inflation at 7½ percent to 8 percent is too high . . . The choice before us is a temporary rise in interest rates or a long term rise in inflation.

At the same time British capitalism’s balance of trade is in serious and chronic deficit and unemployment, having fallen, is rising again. These matters—"inflation", interest rates, balance of trade—are of no real significance to the working class and should have no political influence on them except to show how by their own standards the Thatcher government failed to control the economy. The claim to be the originators of an economic miracle was no more than a taking of credit for a particular phase in the economic cycle. Now, when the cycle is in another phase, they are desperately trying to evade the blame.

From all sides the immediate future of British capitalism is gloomy. Thatcher’s talk of more profitable firms must be set against an annual rate of company failures approaching 25,000 and the warnings from organisations like the CBI that Britain is on the brink of the most serious recession since the Tories came back to power. The reason for this is that no government can control capitalism. The reason for the Tory bombast about economic miracles and “temporary” problems in the economy is that no government can ever own up to being impotent.

Fallacies
Let us hope that the Thatcher years have at least killed off the potent fallacy that female political leaders are preferable to male because they are more perceptive and compassionate. To begin with. Thatcher’s campaign to win the Tory leadership from Heath in 1975 was notable for its ruthless manipulations of the truth. After that she submitted herself to a cynical grooming which changed her hair, her clothes, her voice, even the way she sat before the cameras. To protect her own personal position she was ready to dismiss, or force out, any number of ministers while she was publicly praising them as valued colleagues. And in a last desperate ruse to hang on to power she blatantly tried to cripple the Heseltine campaign by bringing forward the nomination date: in other words, by manipulating the rules for her own advantage.

Thatcher was described as unusual—unique, even—because she held opinions honestly and expressed them with a passion based on her conviction that she was right. But she was actually a commonplace politician, running capitalism as it has to be run, against the interests of the millions who are misled into voting for the system. She lost her job, not because of her "principles" were unsound—that is really no more than a side issue—but because she threatened to be an election loser.

As one Conservative MP said a year before, when Anthony Meyer challenged her for the leadership:

  Is she the best person for the job at present and is she going to be the winning formula for the next general election? We are a party interested in being in government.

So in the end it all came down to the same tawdry cynicism as usual. Thatcher was really no different and nothing important will change now that she has gone. It is just that, in his euphoria, John Major should remember that if the day should come when he is an election loser then the Grey Suits will be waiting on him too.

Ivan

Where are we now? (2019)

From the November 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

We, the working class, have no choice but to sell our acquired skills, knowledge and abilities to whoever is offering the highest wages as an employer, whether a private capitalist firm or some public body, in order to survive. All well and good, you might think, when times are productive and the capitalists are investing in their quest for a profit, and wages might be regarded as fairly good. You may even feel like you’re getting by reasonably well. This however is fairly rare in the grand scheme of things. Speaking for myself, I recall a period way back in the 1980s when working in the printing industry and before the onset of digital technology. I had a half-decent income. Housing was affordable, package holidays were all the rage, a car was quite cheap to run and heating your home was never much of an issue. Even putting decent, healthy food on the table was also relatively cheap.

Then came the 90s and things soon changed with the advance of media and other technologies. In the dog-eat-dog competitive world of the free market economy, companies started to go bust left, right and centre as they tried to keep up with each other for their share of the market. It was however a classic case of survival of the fittest, or more accurately survival of the cheapest. Workers were made redundant, incomes dried up as capitalist investment stalled and the harsh reality of many debt-ridden workers began to kick in as homes were repossessed; homelessness hit record highs.

John Major had taken over from the Wicked Witch of Westminster who had proclaimed that there was no such thing as society and who had thought nothing of ordering the boys in blue in to beat the shit out of striking miners who were trying in vain to protect their jobs under the misguided leadership of Arthur Scargill. Major tried every dirty trick in the book in an attempt to convince the voting public that he would be the great saviour of the country, trying to convince us that black was white and white was black. Only then to take on a peculiarly grey shade of skin tone of his own, which was satirised at the time by the television series Spitting Image.

Following his downfall, the next great hope of the people was Tory Blair and his New Labour bandwagon that rolled into town with his team of slippery, slimy city slickers kissing their way around just about every capitalist arse in town. Indeed, one of his head honchos Peter Mandelson – now Lord Mandelson – introduced us to the great new political technique known as ‘spin’, a particularly fine art of saying one thing while meaning another. This being still used by many politicians to this day.

Of course, what has been described is not something peculiar or exclusive to the periods of the 1980s or 90s. The boom and bust cycle has been a feature of modern history since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1790 right through until around the end of the nineteenth century. By then the modern-day capitalist system we currently recognise became dominant. It has to be acknowledged that it has brought some positive benefits. But also many, many more negative results to humanity, the animal kingdom and the environment in general. One only has to turn on the TV, listen to the radio or read a newspaper in order to see at first hand the impact of capitalism’s destructive forces on nature as well as on people to begin to understand that something drastic needs to be done to fix the problems and challenges that the majority of people on this planet have to face on a daily basis.

Under capitalism, we are exposed to seeing a never-ending series of wars, conflict and a whole host of other atrocities that are an inevitable consequence of the ruthless nature of the beast that can only survive on a diet of profits for capitalists, whose only concern is for themselves and their search for ever more profits – no chance or likelihood of a profit, no chance or likelihood of investment or production. In other words, whether or not there happens to be a need for a particular product, if that product or commodity is unlikely to yield a profit, there ain’t no sensible capitalist ever going to put their hand in their wallet. And that rule applies to all manner of goods and items. From the basic essentials in life, including the food and water that we need to survive, to the clothes that we wear and the homes that we live in. From the cars that we drive or the leisure activities that we might pursue, or the potentially life-saving medication that we might need in order to keep us healthy, it’s the same old story – no profit, no production.

It simply isn’t possible to try to somehow tweak or reform capitalism so that it might somehow work for everyone. That’s been tried before in the likes of Russia, China and South America and we all know what a shambles that turned out to be. In short, the basic rules of capitalism dictate that for it to be successful for the capitalist, profit has to take priority over people.

The way out can only be what we in the Socialist Party understand by socialism. A new world order that will see everyone fulfil their potential, contributing to society what they can, and taking from society what they need to lead a fulfilling and satisfying quality of life. Worldwide cooperation will replace worldwide competition as the overarching source of production, with smaller pockets of local productive forces taking place in local communities in order to meet local needs.

Life within socialism will be a whole new ball game, very different to that under capitalism. The transition or revolution from capitalism to socialism can and will only happen when the majority of the working class throughout the world has developed a clear understanding and consciousness of the need for it.

Paul Edwards

Theatre Review: ‘Don Giovanni’ (2012)

Theatre Review from the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Don Giovanni’ by Mozart at Heaven, London, Sunday 29th April 2012

Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, is set in London in 1987 with a modern libretto by Ranjit Bolt.  It was recently produced at the gay nightclub, Heaven in London. Bolt’s libretto has gay philanderer, Don, sung by baritone Duncan Rock but the rest of the cast has been reversed: basses and tenors become sopranos and vice versa.

Mozart represents the rationalist enlightenment when the bourgeois classes were wrestling power from the feudal masters of the ancien regime in 1789.  His opera, Marriage of Figaro, portrays the servile classes as good as their masters. Mozart himself was a servant to an Archbishop and the Hapsburg Emperor.

Bolt’s Don is both a feudal master with droit de seigneur and a greedy Thatcherite capitalist.  The supernatural apparition of Il Commandatore at the denouement does not have its horror-effect because the character appears like Miss Havisham from Dickens and elicits laughter from the audience.  AIDS as a Faustian metaphor is not pursued in the libretto. This is a pity because Forman and Schafer in the 1984 film, Amadeus, successfully incorporated the dark elements of Don Giovanni into the tale of the Mozart and Salieri intrigue. The aria, Il catalogo e questo, is very funny and appreciated by the audience.

In 1987 there was a palpable sense of the smell of Weimar in Britain when Thatcher won a third election victory: capitalism had been unfettered, the nationalised industries sold-off and the working class beaten down with the end of the miners’ strike.  Increased powers had been given to the police, and a Tory MP had declared on the Channel 4 programme, After Dark: Tomorrow Belongs to Us, evoking the brown shirts of Cabaret-era Berlin. Capitalism had one of its periodic crises when the stock market crashed on Black Monday. There was AIDS, and the frenzied voices of the petite bourgeois were heard in the newspapers, the Tory Party, the House of Lords, and the Police. There was talk of re-criminalising homosexuality. The Government introduced Clause 28, prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality; 30,000 marched against it and “Lesbians invade the Lords and the BBC” screamed the tabloids.

Gay rights are subject to the whim of reformist politics and moral re-armament revivals in capitalist society, as can be seen from events in 1987.  And even as recently as May 2012, in North Carolina, gay marriage has been prohibited.  This is a contradiction of capitalism: it allows gay identity to develop but still needs the working class to reproduce.  The family therefore has to be prioritised and homophobia is an inevitable by-product.  Engels identified that oppression begins with the family and the rise of class society, and thus the oppression of women and gays has its origin in class society. With the end of capitalism, the bourgeois family will vanish and, as Engels wrote: “the traditional bonds of sexual relations, like all fetters, are shaken off”. With the transformation to a socialist society all humanity will be emancipated and there will be an end to exploitation and oppression.

Steve Clayton

The Magic of the Mad-House (1992)

Illustration by Peter Rigg.

From the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the Thatcher years it was "the magic of the market” which served as the Tory mantra. Buy your own home—start your own business—purchase shares—the market rules, OK. But for millions who listened to the bogus magicians it was not to be OK. It was to be less like magic and more like a trick. Homes repossessed: businesses bankrupt; shares having to be sold to pay the debts. The magic of the market was transformed into the misery of uncontrollable, vicious economic forces which are eating away human lives and ridiculing past aspirations.

The lie about the market was not hard to see—if you were not blinded by the prophets of profit. The market was mythologised, turned into a cosy image of friendly producers happily exchanging their wares in the town square. The propaganda of the Eighties tried to make buying sound like some sort of passport to security. They spoke of a "property-owning democracy” and wage slaves were fooled into buying their wafer-thin slice of it. So-called yuppies took huge mortgages, now costing them more than the petty packages of luxury living areas which they had imagined meant success. Unemployed workers were encouraged to borrow in order to set up businesses, the debts of which now mean that for many of them suicide and the receipt of their life insurance pay-outs is the most rational economic option.

In 1992 few speak of the magic of the market. There are the rightwing nutters from the Adam Smith asylum and the Libertarian Alliance—“we demand a free market in drug pushing and a privatised police force”—but these days they have one foot in the Tory research departments and the other in a psychiatrists waiting room.

These days—the days of hopeless disillusion—a new deity has arrived on the scene: The Markets. Switch on the radio and the newsreader will foretell its next divine act. “The Markets are feeling uncertain this morning—The Markets want a cut in interest rates—The Markets are not very pleased with the result of the French referendum—The Markets want more cuts in welfare spending”. It is like a return to Greek drama where huge, invisible entities govern destiny. The day after Major devalued the pound, or, to use the current newspeak, Major allowed the pound to free fall on the Markets, a man on the BBC said that he was uncertain about the future of the British economy, but "it's all in the lap of the gods now—or rather the Markets” (verbatim quote).

So now we have it: who needs Archbishops and Popes when we have thirty year-old stock market analysts with degrees in economic gobbledegook to tell us our fortunes? The same night as the above comment the BBC TV newsreader declared, in exactly these words, that "Industry would like an interest rate cut of at least another one per cent”. Who is Industry? Is it a man. a beast, a gang, a private club? Who are the Markets when they’re at home?

Of one thing we can be sure: the Markets are not the boys and girls in white shirts and braces who run round the Stock Exchange screaming like they’re on drugs. And Industry is not the men and women who are actually involved in industrial production. The workings of capitalism are not about them. These are the makers and counters of profits.

The truth is that nobody controls the Markets. Nobody can. It is beyond the control even of the few who benefit from production for profit. But those for whose advantage all of this market madness is going on are not the wealth-producing majority. The function of the capitalist market is to sell commodities in order to provide rent, interest and profit for the small minority who monopolise the productive resources of society. It is in their interest that the majority must suffer.

Whingeing marketeers
The spectacle of Tory ministers whingeing in parliament about profit-seeking speculators disrupting the economy is truly funny. Capitalism is all about the freedom to seek profits at anybody’s expense. What do the Tories want the capitalists to do? Lose the chance of making a fast buck so that the government will look good? Just as absurd is the Labour Party's claim that given power they could tame the market. Why then have they never left office since 1924 without unemployment being higher than when they were elected? A Smith-Brown government would be just as much at the mercy of the market requirement to produce profits as all earlier ones.

Any government which finds itself in power when capitalism is going through one of its endemic crises, with the need to destroy productive forces in order to restore profits, will have no option but to ride the storm. What is particularly just about the cries of seasickness from the present victims of an exceptionally rough storm is that they were the people whose whole appeal rested upon the endless prosperity and stability which they claimed market forces generate. For many workers “market forces” are a code word for misery. The best response to the sadistic whims of the Market-gods is to send packing the market-loving messiahs and abolish the market by bringing the resources of society into common ownership and democratic control.

A marketless society is the only sane alternative to the mad-house which they call The Economy. Tinkering with it will be of no practical use; it would be like buying a new suit for Frankenstein’s monster and hoping that newly-clothed a monster he will no longer be. The urgent task before us is to unite to take society away from those whose sole intent is to sacrifice needs for profits. Then, once society is in the hands of all of us, we can begin having free and equal access to the available wealth of this abundant planet.

Steve Coleman

Northern Exposure (2017)

From the June 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have a long history in the north of Britain. The Party’s first ever meeting was in Bolton, Lancashire. To many people, the north conjures up images of slate-grey skies, broad drawls and coal faces, ranks of pokey houses stretching down hillsides, wasp-tongued matrons, factories, fog and squalor. It’s an old stereotype now permanently fossilised into a soap opera, but in truth you can still find traces of it if you go to some north-western former mill-towns on a bad weather day.

The north was certainly grim once. Slum clearances beginning in the 1930s gave way to out-of-town ‘modern’ housing estates and tower blocks in the 1950s that became the new slums, their windswept Brutalist architecture growing graffiti, syringes and crushed Special Brew cans like urban weeds. The pubs closed in all the poorest areas as cheap ‘offies’ stole their business and communities disintegrated to the point where even the concept of ‘community’ disappeared. Sink-estate lad-gangs exercised their ire on each other in mass battles while litter filled the streets and parks like tumbleweed, left by people with no cause for civic pride. Mothers called their wayward children in for tea with the universal war cry “You! Fookin’ get in ‘ere, now!” On Friday nights at chucking-out time the streets filled with strobe-flashing squad cars and riot vans. Not that the north was anything special in that respect. The same scenes could be found repeated all across the south like a low-rent franchise chain. The Sex Pistols, a London band, captured the mood of the country in enraged 4-chord rants and razor-slashed fashion statements. If the 1930s was ‘Love on the Dole’ the 1970s was just the dole. In the Thatcher years that followed, the rage boiled over.

Socialist Party members went out postering for meetings with buckets of wallpaper paste and brushes, furtively throwing up hand-drawn posters while keeping a lookout for coppers. Risking arrest was part of the deal. Splattered in sticky slop we afterwards went and had a pint of fizzy keg ale until the nerves had subsided, hoping the meeting attendance would justify the effort, though often it didn’t. Every available wall and window of every closed-down shop was festooned with layers of posters, the new atop the old, screaming the political life of the towns, the concrete and sheet-steel social media of the 1980s. We had an ‘honour’ policy not to cover over in-date posters from other groups, even the Trot groups, though they didn’t always return the favour. We took the Socialist Standard round the pubs, selling dozens of copies to half-pissed would-be rebels, disaffected Labourites and the occasional bemused National Front supporter. Meetings reflected the age – fiery speakers and no-quarter rhetoric – which visitors either warmed to enthusiastically or cowered from in fright. It was crude, and sometimes as ugly as the concrete shopping arcades. But there was no doubt that it was alive, that the towns were alive, that politics had two fists and was prepared to use them.

And then it all changed. A creeping gentrification took over the country. Our council stopped the flyposting with a simple trick. If you flyposted a meeting for a named pub, the council threatened to fine the pub £400, and £40 for every day the posters stayed up. The pubs promptly panicked and refused to host any political meetings. Fearing retaliation by far-right groups, the pubs also banned paper sales. Councils started refusing to allow paper sellers on the streets, ordering the police to move them on, while privately-owned shopping precincts insisted on trading licences which they then refused to grant. The handful of council-maintained public noticeboards, now the sole locations for legal advertising, became warzones of competing groups. All ‘honour’ policies went out of the window in a Darwinian fight for exposure. Finally the council, reacting to alleged citizen complaints that the noticeboards were unsightly, removed them altogether.

Complaints to our local council about the dereliction of their civic responsibilities yielded the response: “Why don’t you use the internet?” Yet when the council wanted to advertise its own programme of arts events it ignored this passive medium and instead planted giant billboards mounted on lampposts all along the main thoroughfares. Calling attention to this hypocrisy had no effect. Asked who at the council was responsible for the implementation of the Local Government Act which included a responsibility for community group support, council staff had no clue, and less interest. They didn’t much care that local groups could no longer advertise their meetings to the general public. It wasn’t their concern if the democratic process had effectively been silenced. People preferred their home videos anyway, didn’t they? No wonder public meetings went out of style, and radical politics went underground.

Nowadays, when you look at some parts of the north, you see an aspiration to ape the more prosperous bits of the south: private houses which were once council houses, expensive cars in drives, well-kept lawns, litter-free streets, boutique shops, gastro-pubs, hair and nail bars, upscale vernacular new build, and money. But the walls and the windows are blank and silent. Nobody has got anything to say, or any way to say it. Everywhere the debate has moved online and left the quiet towns to their dormitory slumbers. The physical landscape has been lobotomised in the interest of taste, of civic pride and good appearances. A digital generation has grown up with no experience of public meetings, and no exposure to open debate. Instead, all the talk today is of virtual echo-chambers where people only hear the sound of their own opinions reflected back at them. Even where people still gather in the few remaining pubs, they’re all simultaneously on their phones as if checking in with a higher power. If they talk at all, it’s mostly a confection of airy gossip, TV catch-ups and supercilious wise-cracking. People don’t want to argue politics because they don’t want to upset anyone, because it’s more important to have friends than to challenge them. Victorian taboos have returned for the Facebook era.

This is the creeping censorship of the modern capitalist elites. This is how they win, not with well-marshalled facts and arguments, because they haven’t got any, nor even with ‘alternative facts’ and bogus propaganda, because people are learning not to trust them. They win when they seduce us into a suffocated torpor, our class consciousness sapped by attention-deficit amnesia, our hunger for change sugar-soaked in celeb culture, vacuous clicktivism and pseudo-radical posturing. They don’t have to be right, they only have to shut us up with a barrage of noise until we forget that we had anything to say.

Times change, fashions change, but the class struggle is still the class struggle, and we are still there, even if we’ve given up the sticky paste and brushes and the crappy hand-drawn posters. We’ve had to find other ways to operate, but we still meet and discuss and we still manage to have a laugh or two along with it. Capitalism won’t give up, but neither will we. So here’s our message to new readers. Wherever you are, north or south, if you’re the kind that doesn’t give up, come and find us, help us, and join us. It’s the only thing that will work. In the end, it’s how socialism will win.

Paddy Shannon

All Yuppies Now? (1987)

From the December 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are you young — upwardly mobile — professional? Are you the sort of person who buys downtown slums and fits them out with designer furniture and hand-painted blinds? Do you drive the sort of car which people who work in car factories can never afford to drive, listen to Suzanne Vega albums on compact discs, and check the share index in both the FT and The Independent to make sure that your highly ethical investments are looking as healthy as you do after you’ve been for your six-monthly BUPA check-up? If the answer is yes – sorry, yah – to those questions it is probable that you are a member of The Class of ‘87 – the yuppies.

Under capitalism there are two classes: the capitalists who rob and the workers who are robbed. But of course, as all trendy-minded readers will know, capitalism is not what it used to be. The working class – those cloth-capped fossils who dig coal and drive trains and have dirt under their fingernails and say things like “gawd blimey, mister” and “You can’t beat ‘er Majesty and ‘arold Wilson” – has apparently vanished. The corpse has been buried by a team of sociologists-cum-undertakers who write for Marxism Today who have conducted a thorough search of the wine bars of Covent Garden and can find no trace of any horny-handed sons of toil. Even the holy trinity of the new left – Eric Hobsbawm, Ralph Miliband and Jeremy Seabrook – have announced in the columns of that robust proletarian journal, the Guardian, that the proletariat (they who work in factories and vote Labour) are missing, feared dead – or, worse still, “up North”.

Both the left and the right wings of capitalism (not to mention the centre, which constitutes the Liberals and the SDP and David Owen who singularly represents the real centre) are sure that capitalism as described by Marx and the Socialist Party is old hat. Now we all live under Thatcherism. No longer are there masters and wage slaves; these are disgusting remnants of the past, entertained only in the deranged minds of people like the present writer who, in revolutionary obstinacy, insists that everyone he ever meets is either one of the bosses or one of the bossed. But if you accept the new line – as propagated by Thatcher and swallowed by her enemies in their own haste to sound indignant about it – we now live in the age of popular capitalism. And under popular capitalism you are all in one of three classes (unless, of course, you are the Queen or one of the other aristocratic parasites, in which case you are where you always were: rich, idle and useless). But the rest of us are either in class A – people who’ve made it, or class B – people who are making it (yuppies), or class C – people who can’t make it because they are too stupid or won’t make it because they like living in squalor.

Now the object of this so-called Thatcherism is to “make it”. Needless to say, “making it” bears no relation to making anything. If you go around producing goods and services you’ll never get on in the City. “Making it” means making money. You get other people to produce goods and services and you exploit them. If you are a yuppie you are not yet in the exploiting class. (In fact – don’t tell the yuppies, now – you never will be). But you act like you are heading in that direction. You do the dirty work for the capitalists. The so-called yuppie class are simply the errand boys and girls for the capitalists. They are paid extra for taking on themselves the problems of the exploiting class.

According to the Thatcher propaganda, we are all becoming capitalists now. This is a load of old twaddle. Firstly, only 19 percent of the British population owned any shares in the week before the BP share sell-off. So even if you define all shareholders as capitalists (which is a daft definition), that means that over 80 per cent of British people are outside this new capitalist class. But it is not the case that workers who buy a few shares are capitalists. The test of whether you are a capitalist is easy: give up selling yourself for a wage or salary and see how long you can live on your share dividends – if you’re on the last can of baked beans within a fortnight you have proved that whatever you are you are not a capitalist. The capitalist class are those people who can live without having to work: they invest in the labour of others.

Secondly, if Thatcher’s policies meant that we did all become capitalists there would be no wage slaves left to produce our profits for us. If we all became the Queen, who would we have to wave at, who would there be to bring us our dinner on a silver tray? It is a necessity of class society that superiority for some can only logically exist at the expense of inferiority for most. Thirdly, there has in fact been a record number of bankruptcies under the present Conservative government. The capitalist recession is not creating vast numbers of new capitalists, as the government liars state, but squeezing out large numbers of cockroach capitalists who land with a bump into the growing ranks of the wage and salary earning class. The notion that the workers are enjoying greater prosperity than ever and that poverty is an obsolete conception is not only a myth but an unforgivable insult. Go to the Docklands area of East London – the showpiece of resplendent yuppiedom – and you will find thousands of workers without jobs or much money who are being driven out of their area because the gamblers of the City have decided to redevelop it for their own purpose.

It is not only the Tories who preach the virtues of the new yuppie vision. Nor is it confined to the Alliance (alliance?) whose dream of the new Jerusalem is everyone sending their kids to progressive “independent” (exclusive, private, fee-paying) schools and driving Volvos with push-button windows. The silly old Labour Party has decided to fall in love with the yuppies too. Bryan Gould, the genius who masterminded the Labour Party’s spectacular defeat earlier this year (next time they’re hiring a computer linked up to an opinion poll teleprinter to organise it for them), has decided that Labour needs to speak to a wider constituency. What this means is that Labour needs to work harder at convincing Tories that their shares are safe in Labour’s hand. Gould wants Labour to go for the yuppie vote. After all, Ben Elton has made a packet posing as a socialist appealing to just such an audience. As ever, the Labour Party’s tactical astuteness bears a strong relationship to a wino negotiating his way to the bus shelter. Just when the Labourites decided that there’s nothing wrong with what Thatcher says about workers getting in on the Stock Exchange, what does the old Stock Exchange do? It crashes. The opportunism of the Labour Party is boundless, as they merrily proceed to urge workers to buy council houses and invest in private medical insurance and shares – as long as they’re ethical. (Marxism Today – the theoretical organ of the Lefty Yuppie Party – is now advertising a company which will advise pseudo-Marxists with a conscience which shares they should buy if they don’t want to exploit people.)

The yuppie left has become one of the more grotesque eyesores of 1980s politics. In the good old days lefties would waste our time discussing whether Russia was a deformed workers’ state or a degenerate workers’ state or a workers’ state with minor deformities; they would quote (and often misquote) bits from Marx and insist that we Socialist Party members had failed to study our Trotsky. No longer is such rhetoric prevalent (except in Chesterfield, of course, where the whole population is currently undergoing a Collected Works of Trotsky reading course). These days the yuppie left are into “feeling Green”. If you don’t know what it is to feel Green and put yourselves in the position of a baby seal you have no right to call yourself a socialist. Coffee-picking in Nicaragua is all the rage now (even Jimmy Carter’s at it) and singing South African liberation songs at book stalls displaying pamphlets about the need for armed struggle in the Third World written by Paul Foot who lives in Hampstead. If you are a male you must become what the yuppie left calls a new man, which means that you are extremely patronising to women (who are all your sisters) and must endure the rest of your life on a permanent guilt trip for the crime of being a potential rapist. It is little wonder that most wage slaves prefer the down-to-earth callousness of Norman Tebbit and his fellow gangsters to the phony, self-righteous, condescending, half-baked outlook of the trendy yuppies who constitute the left-wing of capitalist politics.

The Socialist Party is not out to win over the yuppies. We do not appeal to the “middle class” any more than we appeal to the Wizard of Oz or the residents of Albert Square, Walford. We do not seek to trim our message to suit the prejudices of fictitious classes of people. We direct what we have to say at the working class – all workers, be they paid in wages or salaries, whether they wear overalls or carry filofaxes. Socialists do not make the leftist error of imagining that the true workers are these who live in council flats and stand on the terraces at football matches. Nor do we believe that so-called yuppies, most of whom are simply entertaining the self-delusion of privilege, are anything but workers. We have no grudge against workers who are making an extra crust out of capitalism. But they would be fools to be bought off by crusts and crumbs. The yuppies of the right who imagine that they are part of Thatcher’s new elite will find out the hard way which class they are in and yuppies of the left who feel guilty for being “privileged” people like teachers and social workers should stop boring the rest of us with the needless guilt.

Steve Coleman