Pieces Together: Another Labour failure (2010)

The Pieces Together column from the January 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another Labour failure

“Labour’s strategy for tackling poverty has reached the end of the road and Britain risks a return to Victorian levels of inequality, according to a major two-year study seen by The Independent. With 20 per cent of the population still stuck in poverty, the report calls for sweeping reform of the tax and welfare systems under which higher earners would finance more generous, universal benefits. The £43,888-a-year ceiling on national insurance contributions (NICs) would be abolished, so people earning more would pay NICs at 11 per cent on all their income above that level, instead of the current 1 per cent. The study, by the Labour-affiliated Fabian Society and Webb Memorial Trust, argues that Gordon Brown’s ‘quiet redistribution’ of wealth now lacks public support – and declares that one of the reasons is Labour’s tough language about benefit fraud and claimants.” (Independent, 30 November)

Ten wasted years

“Poverty has been rising in the UK since 2004 and is now at the same level as the start of the decade, a report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says. The group said that issues of unemployment and the repossession of homes had become more acute before the recession started. … The report, produced by the New Policy Institute, found that two million children lived in low-income, working households. This was the highest figure since the Foundation started collecting records. ” (BBC News, 3 December)

The other 1 percent

“According to consultants AT Kearney, the richest 1pc in the UK hold some 70pc of the country’s wealth. That there is this divide between rich and poor is not exactly new – but the scale of it, and the likelihood that it is not being narrowed by the financial crisis, is a big worry. Indeed, according to the report, in the US the amount of financial assets owned by the richest 1pc in the US is far, far lower at 48pc, and only 34pc in Australia. This must, to a large degree, be due to the fact that the UK set itself up in recent years as a haven for the super-rich, with its relatively generous rules on capital gains tax, because the income tax system itself is rather more redistributive than in the US. But the Kearney report is interesting because, unlike the traditional measure of inequality, the gini coefficient, it focuses not on income (the flow of money) but on actual substantive wealth (the stack of it that sits beneath us).” (Daily Telegraph, 25 November)

Voice From The Back: An oil business (2004)

The Voice From The Back Column from the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

An oil business 

It is not just socialists who point out that the present conflict in the Middle East has a basis in the need for oil in modern capitalism. John Chapman, who was a former assistant secretary in the British civil service from 1963-96, expressed similar views in the Guardian (28 July). “Saddam controlled a country at the centre of the Gulf, a region with a quarter of world oil production in 2003, and containing more than 60 percent of the world’s known reserves. With 115bn barrels of of oil reserves, and perhaps as much again in the 90 percent of the country not explored, Iraq has capacity second only to Saudi Arabia. The US in contrast, is the world’s largest net importer of oil. Last year the US Department of energy forecast that imports will cover 70 percent of domestic demand by 2025. By invading Iraq, Bush has taken over the Iraq oil fields, and persuaded the UN to lift production limits imposed after the Kuwait war. Production may rise to 3m barrels and about double 2002 levels.” It is surely no accident that the Bush administration is heavily backed by western oil giants, is it?

 

Another Labour triumph

“The gap between rich and poor has widened since Tony Blair took office, and social class and ethnic background still influence heavily an individuals life chances, a report by the Institute of Public Policy Research, a centre-left think-tank, says” Times (2 August). Is there anybody out there who still imagines that the Labour Party has got anything to do with socialism?

 

A wake up call

The news that HSBC, Britain’s largest bank, rang up record six-month profits of £5.2bn at the same time that they are in the process of cutting 7,500 jobs, of which 4,000 are being transferred to low-wage call and processing centres in Asia brought forth a burst of righteous indignation from a top bank trade union official. “Yesterday’s figures drew condemnation from unions representing HSBC’s employees. Rob O’Neill, Unifi’s National Secretary, said: “We don’t know how HSBC’s directors can sleep at night. Instead of rewarding staff for their part in making HSBC as profitable as it is, the bank is slashing jobs in the UK and exporting more and more work to Asia in an attempt to cut costs” Independent (3 August). We imagine the directors and shareholders will sleep just fine, it is O’Neill who should wake up. The purpose of all capitalist concerns is to make as big a  profit as possible, one of the ways they do that is by cutting costs. If O’Neill imagines the purpose of capitalism is to reward workers he is living in cloud cuckoo land.

 

Crime and punishment (1)

A piece of summary “justice” that even Labour’s tough guy David Blunkett might balk at occurred recently in Russia. “A passenger riding the Moscow Metro without a 20p ticket has been shot by a policeman. The unnamed 29-year-old has been charged with attempted murder. Labourer Rustam Balbekov was shot in the mouth and doctors say he is lucky to be alive . . . The bullet smashed his jaw and went through his neck. Witnesses heard the sergeant say: ‘Do you want to get shot?’ before he opened fire after getting no response” Sky News (4 August). Capitalism just gets madder and madder!

 

Crime and punishment (2)

The dreadful carnage keeps increasing in Britain’s women prisons. “Officers in Holloway prison are cutting down five women a day from nooses, the Guardian has learned, and recently saved one inmate six times in a single night. But these women are the lucky ones. Already this year 11 female prisoners in English and Welsh prisons have apparently taken their own lives and campaigners fear that this year will see the greatest number of female jail deaths since records began . . . At the heart of the problem is overcrowding. The female prison population, like that of men, has soared in the past 10 years from 1,811 in 1994 to 4,475 at the start of last month” Guardian (9 August). What a society capitalism has become. Shoplifters committing suicide!

TV Review: Darling and His Great Democratic Deficit (1999)

TV Review from the October 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is little more unsettling than watching some oily defender of capitalism defend the indefensible and appear to believe every word of it. A bad curry comes close, as does malaria, but these only attack the senses in a physical way. For the inducement of sheer intellectual pandemonium in his victims, little could beat Social Security Secretary Alistair Darling. In BBC1’s On The Record (Sunday 19 September) he put in a bravura Orwellian performance in defence of the government’s drive to “eliminate poverty in Britain”.

Given his apparent level of supreme self-confidence in everything his government is doing, why then—the more observant viewer may ask—did Darling barely answer a single question that was put to him? He did, of course, give answers, but rarely if ever to the questions that were actually asked. Requested by John Humphrys to outline what the government would do to help those with poverty-level private pensions which were still sufficient to disqualify them from receiving state aid, Darling replied with an answer concerning how the government plans to continue its scheme to change the tax status of savings accounts. Humphrys furrowed his brow. Asked why more people were officially living in poverty now in the UK than for decades, Darling replied by saying that there were more people now in work than under Thatcher or Major. Humphrys` furrowed brow returned. No doubt when he was asked if he wanted a glass of water before the programme began he replied with “No thank you, I’ve just eaten, and incidentally I think the government can take great credit for that”.

Even with an interviewer as tenacious as John Humphrys can be, it is still quite amazing how much politicians can get away with. And Darling’s interview was hardly on a topic without relevance. Over a quarter of UK residents now officially live in poverty. Poverty is a major contributor to death, disease of various kinds, mental health problems, increased incidence of crime, alcohol and drug abuse, to name but a few. It is probably the biggest single cause of social problems in society and yet a government supposedly elected to eradicate poverty and bring about some sort of social cohesion in Britain cannot address itself to some of the most pertinent questions it is faced with. Why?

Dodgers

This is a government which is expert at seeming to do lots of things while in reality doing little or nothing. It is forever launching “initiatives”, programmes and pilot projects operating at the margins of major social problems. The most minuscule change in the law or the taxation system is presented as a bold new leap which will help to radically alter the state of British society. Even attempts at removing previous reforms—as with the attack on single parents` benefits—are presented as brand new positive reforms. It promises full employment and the eradication of poverty—but never within any remote timescale. In short, it talks big but delivers little.

That this state of affairs has come about is only, of course, a reflection of the (political and economic) impotence of politicians. If they were able to achieve much, then presumably they would—especially if they’d been elected on that basis. But the reality is that they are unable to deal with any of the major problems they supposedly spend their time addressing—in other words, they have even ceased, in the narrow sense, to be reformists. As the economic structure and dynamic of world capitalism does not allow them the leeway to be genuine reformists and try to change the system from within, they are left to chase shadows, playing at being reformists.

To that extent, Alistair Darling is the ideal New Labour politician. He is not even a proper reformist any more, though apparently he thinks he is; he takes great pride in responding to any pertinent question with a tangential answer which can demonstrate some sort of reformist activity, however irrelevant; and he is most passionate of all about the most trifling things of all. In fact he has a hollow fervour akin to some sort of mixed-up born-again Christian who doesn’t really believe in miracles any more. Just like his Dear Leader.

Now some time ago it was mooted by several of the TV interviewers that they should take strong action against ministers and other politicians who appeared to operate a policy of deliberately not answering the questions asked of them, and who instead appear to be reading with gusto off a pre-prepared script. As in the run-up to the next General Election this situation is only likely get worse it may be time for John Humphrys and co to consider what Labour would like to ban across the public services—strike action. After all, the tactic for dealing with vandals and football hooligans in recent years has been to “deny them the oxygen of publicity”. Couldn’t workers at the BBC do the same if the politicians refuse to answer questions and therefore be democratically accountable? Just a thought, maybe, but a nice one at that.

Dave Perrin

Greasy Pole: Waiting for Poverty (1999)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Waiting For Poverty

Two years after he set out on his historic drive to eliminate the world’s problems, starting with a few in Great Britain, it seems that Tony Blair is not impressing as many people as he would like. True, there is now a new bogeyman threatening to undermine all the humanitarian ambitions of leaders like Blair and Clinton—Milosevic in place of Saddam Hussein—and the bombs fall on Yugoslavia instead of Iraq. True, a different bunch of multi-millionaires now have a Prime Minister fawning on them at receptions and banquets in Number Ten. Was this, then, what the Labour Party meant when they bellowed, in their 1997 election manifesto, that Britain Deserves Better?

Meanwhile the Blair machine which churns out sound bites, promises and threats in about equal measure has been relentlessly at work. Very little escapes its attention. We are accustomed now to hearing the Prime Minister’s views on the week’s football results, on whether Lennox Lewis was robbed of that heavyweight boxing title, on how British pop stars are doing in competition with those from abroad. So it was something of a surprise when Blair recently departed from the usual script to dissertate on a rather more substantial issue. In a speech on 18 March, Blair had another promise to offer:

“Our historic aim will be for ours to be the first generation to end child poverty. It will take a generation. It is a 20-year mission, but I believe it can be done.”

Snag

This was pretty strong stuff—ending child poverty as distinct from alleviating it. And in only twenty years. It caused a lot of excitement among what is called the poverty lobby—those tireless organisations whose members earnestly toil to expose the extent and the effects of deeper deprivation among people, only to spoil it all by suggesting remedies, like increasing state benefits, which have been shown to be ineffective and unrealistic. Listening to Blair, many of the people in the poverty lobby must have thought that this was why they voted Labour. It seemed to go unnoticed, that in twenty years’ time Blair will probably be long out of politics. By that time his speech will be forgotten, replaced by some other politician’s promise about ending the scandal of children in desperate need.

Back in 1979 the Labour Party did not lose the election because they had been wildly successful and had conquered problems like poverty. They lost it because they had been exposed as powerless to do anything about such damaging influences on our lives. At that time we had come through a post-war period of 32 years during which the majority—17 years—had been under Labour government. Their failure can be seen in their manifesto for that election, when they said that their “. . . purpose is to overcome the evils of inequality, poverty, racial bigotry, and make Britain truly one nation”. This sounds very similar to what we are accustomed to hearing from Blair. His efforts to exploit the issue in order to win support is evidence that as the last Labour government left office poverty was still an intact blight on our lives. Twenty years later a Labour leader can talk as if his party had only just got around to thinking about it, had never been in a position to realise their promises to alleviate it. That 1979 manifesto elaborated on the circumstances which, it said, made it vital to vote Labour:

“As long as there are men and women struggling with low pay, mothers stretching the household budget to make ends meet, youngsters in search of a job, children learning in out of date classrooms, patients queuing for a hospital bed or families without a decent home—then there is work for a Labour Government.”

Facts

That was the situation in 1979 and it is the situation today. We can take our pick of the facts and the statistics which tell the grim story of the extent of poverty and what it does to the lives of people. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown recently presented a Treasury survey which showed that two in every five children are born into a “poor” household—by which he meant one where the family members live at or below the official poverty line. The Treasury has also just discovered that these conditions don’t simply evaporate with time; they are handed down, from one generation to another; 25 percent of children, they said, never escape from that level of deprivation. “The next task for the Government,” declared Brown (presumably after they have completely flattened Belgrade), “is to wage war on child poverty.”

The Children’s Society (one of those toilers in the poverty lobby) point out some facts about the concentration of the worst poverty—that the highest incidence of disadvantaged children is in just 59 local authority districts, which do not include places like Mayfair and Knightsbridge. Over twenty-five percent of the children born in those local authority areas start their life underweight, an effect of the malnourishment and lack of care of their mother during pregnancy. Their mortality rate will be 30 percent higher than children born elsewhere. When they get to school they will be disruptive in class, giving additional trouble to teachers already over-burdened, they will truant four times as much as the national average and about 150,000 of them will be excluded from school in a year. The lesson is clear—if you must be born, try not to have working class parents and not to come into the world in places like Hackney, Salford and Toxteth.

As there were high levels of deprivation twenty years ago and we now have yet another government making plans about abolishing it, we might have assumed that there would be some consciousness that the problem is rather more durable than the politicians are admitting. Blair, it is said, is bored by the whole subject—knocking hell out of Yugoslavia is probably more exciting—and will allow his eyes to glaze over if some tiresome underling raises the topic in his presence. Well of course if a problem is not only very nasty but persistent it can get tedious, especially if it affects other people rather than yourself. Perhaps it was boredom that prevented any proper mention of it in Labour’s 1997 manifesto, where there were only references to vague concepts like “higher wages and employment” and “educational and employment opportunities for all”. This was part of Labour’s obsession with getting as many people as possible into employment—into proper, regular exploitation instead of on the dole—so that they equated poverty almost solely with unemployment as if employed workers were never poor, deprived, repressed and always lived in decent homes, ate the best food, wore adequate clothes . . .

Deferred

Working class deprivation is usually worse for someone who is out of work, as it is for someone who falls ill or gets old. That is because workers have only one method of getting a living—selling their ability to work to an employer. If they can’t do that, often because there is no demand for what they produce, they don’t count in capitalism’s scheme of things. But they can’t be left to expire, which would have all manner of implications for public health and the political stability of the system and so be even more expensive than granting them the right to claim the dole. But to keep them going without being in employment is also expensive so the best solution, for politicians like Blair, is to force (he calls it “helping” ) them into a job. This government has worked hard to impose that policy—on the unemployed and on single parents and now they are starting on the sick and the disabled.

Poverty is an inescapable part of capitalist society. It can be abolished, but only when there is a fundamental change in how we organise society. That is way beyond any policies or even concepts of the Labour Party. Meanwhile we are expected to be satisfied with Blair’s version of hope deferred.

Ivan

The rich get richer (1992)

From the June 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

One further aspect needs to be dealt with in this the last in our series of articles on the concentration of wealth ownership in Britain, and that is the question of what happens over time. Do the richer get richer?

From the point of view of economic theory, this is what you would expect to happen. Capitalism is based on the concentration into the hands of a tiny minority of the population of the ownership of the means of production. These function as capital for them in the sense of providing them with an unearned income. The source of this unearned income that accrues to capital is the labour of those who operate the means of production and actually produce wealth.

Ownership of capital, in other words, confers the right to appropriate a part of the new wealth that is being produced every day. Most of this new wealth—around 80 percent in fact—is used as means of consumption, by workers from their wages and salaries, by capitalists from their rent, interest and dividends, and by the state from the taxes it levies. The rest, under the spur of competition between capitalist firms to maximise profits, is accumulated as means of production, as further capital to yield an unearned income for their owners. This accumulation of capital out of profits produced by those who operate the means of production is what capitalism is all about. Capitalism is an economic system under which means of production are accumulated in the form of profit-yielding capital.

In concrete terms what this means is that the stock both of physical means of production (factories, machinery, plant, materials, etc) and of its monetary form, capital, grows over time. This is by no means a steady process—it is halted and even reversed from time to time, as in wars (when wealth is physically destroyed) and in slumps (when the same thing happens and when the value of the rest falls)—but the long term trend is upward. This must mean that in the long run those who own the means of production—the rich—get to own more means of production, more capital, i. e. get richer.

Changing estimates

So much for the theory, but is it confirmed by the facts? For all but the recent past the facts are not easy to come by. In Britain they nearly all come from the statistics about estates left in wills which the Inland Revenue has been collecting since death duties were introduced in 1894. Until 1960 it was left to individual academics to convert these into figures for the ownership of wealth by the living. They often used different methods, which meant that their estimates were not always comparable, but there was broad agreement that until the Second World War the top 1 percent owned about 60 percent and the top 10 percent about 90 percent of personal wealth, as a study quoted by the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth in its first report in 1975 showed (Table 1).

This slow long-term fall in the percentage shares of the top groups should not be equated with a fall in the amount of wealth they owned, but rather, as we shall see, with a slower rate of increase in their wealth than that of other groups.

From 1960 the Inland Revenue began producing its own yearly estimates. According to these, between 1960 and 1975 the share of the top 1 percent declined from 38 percent to 23 percent, that of the top 5 percent from 64 percent to 47 percent and that of the top 10 percent from 77 percent to 62 percent.

These figures were challenged by those who argued that they underestimated the concentration of wealth ownership. The critics correctly pointed out that the figures, being based on wealth declared to the Inland Revenue for death duty purposes, inevitably left out the wealth of the rich that was placed in discretionary trusts and other such devices or given to relatives before death precisely to avoid paying death duties. Defenders of capitalism, on the other hand, argued that the figures overestimated the degree of inequality as they did not take into account the wealth owned by the 60 percent or so of the population whose estates did not have to be declared to the Inland Revenue because they were too small. Individually the amounts were small but, in view of the millions of individuals involved, when added together made up a significant amount.

The Labour government that came into office in 1974 set up a Royal Commission, in the time honoured way, to bury its promises “to launch a fundamental attack on the principle of the hereditary transmission of great wealth, with its associated power and privilege” and “to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families”. (Did the Labour Party once really talk like this?). This recommended that both types of non-included wealth should be taken into account, and the Inland Revenue now produces each year adjusted figures which do this. This new series of statistics began in 1976 and in fact shows that the distribution of wealth has changed very little since then (Table 2).

So the change between 1975, when the top 10 percent were said to own 62 percent, and 1976, when they were said to own 50 percent, resulted purely from a change in the way the statistics were calculated. Calculated on the old basis the figure for the top 10 percent in 1989 would still be between 60 and 70 percent.

Statistical illusion

But this is not the only purely statistical factor that is involved in the figures. What the figures show are the percentage shares, and not the actual amounts of wealth, of the various categories. These shares are shares in a cake (the stock of wealth) which, as we saw, expands in the long run. This means that, for one group to maintain its share, it must get the same share of the new wealth that is being accumulated. Thus if, as is generally assumed, before the First World War the top 10 percent owned 90 percent of accumulated wealth, then, for them to maintain their share, 90 percent of the newly accumulating wealth would also have to go to them. That they were in fact able to more or less maintain this share until the Second World War (see Table 1) is a testimony to the poverty of the rest of the population whose incomes were so low that they had to spend most of it on items of immediate consumption.

If during this period the other 90 percent had between them been able to accumulate more than 10 percent of the newly accumulated wealth, then the share of the top 10 percent would have fallen, despite the fact that they were continuing to accumulate wealth and even to accumulate more of it in real (as opposed to percentage) terms than the rest of the population.

It was precisely this situation that did occur from the 1950s on. Regular and more or less steadily-rising real wages and salaries meant that the non-rich began to acquire more wealth in the form of household goods, cars and houses. When included in the figures this had the effect of reducing the share of the rich, but this is the only effect it has had and it is purely statistical.

Independently of what has happened to the non-rich, the rich have gone on accumulating wealth and so getting richer. The November 1991 issue of the official government publication Economic Trends contained a table which showed how the total amount of “marketable wealth”, broken down by category, had changed each year from 1976 to 1988, all in 1988 money so as to be comparable. The general trend was upward, though there was a fall in 1981 corresponding to the last recession; the total increased from £752 billion in 1976 to £1317 billion in 1988. Of this extra £565 billion, 13 percent went to the top 1 percent, 39 percent to the top 5 percent and a massive 58 percent to the top 10 percent (which explains why their share increased over the period from 50 percent to 53 per cent), while a meagre 4 percent went to be shared amongst the 22 million in the bottom 50 percent.

What is even more interesting than how the total amount was divided amongst the categories is how the average amounts of wealth held by each person in the categories changed (Table 3). As can be seen, despite a smaller percentage increase than the rest of the top 50 percent, the average holding of those in the top 1 percent increased by some £132,000, more than that of those in any of the other groups. So the gap between the amount of wealth held by the individual members of top 1 percent and that held by the rest of the population increased. There is no reason to suppose that these years were exceptional in this respect, except perhaps that in some earlier years the gap between the average holding of the top 1 percent and that of the top 5 percent may have narrowed.

So the conclusion can only be that the so-called decline of the rich this century is a statistical illusion. Their share has only fallen, and then only after the Second World War, because the non-rich came to acquire more wealth. But this acquisition of wealth by the non-rich made no difference whatsoever to the position of the rich. They continued to get richer in the sense of coming to own more wealth in real terms (the only meaningful sense of the word “richer”). But not only this their average holding of wealth increased more in real terms than that of the non-rich. Defenders of capitalism who say that the rich have not got richer are conveying misinformation.

Adam Buick

Correction: the first column of Table 2 in last month’s article should have read, as was clear from the context. Top 1%, Top 2%, Top 5%, etc and not Top 1%, 1-2%, 3-5%, etc.

Prejudice and Equality (2006)

From the June 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Knowing the history or etymology of a word does not always tell anything about its current usage or meaning. Silly, for instance, used to mean ‘blessed’, but that is just irrelevant to the way it is used now. Sometimes, however, a word’s origin or structure can be quite revealing. Prejudice, for instance, means ‘pre-judge’: to form an opinion about a person or idea or thing in advance without the benefit of a proper understanding.

A prejudice may well involve categorising someone in a particular way, perhaps just because of their appearance: they may be black, Jewish, female, gay, shifty looking, ‘foreign’, or whatever. They may be wearing clothing which suggests that they are a Muslim, or a shirt of a football team you dislike, or just a hoodie. Or you may hear them say a few words and decide that you don’t think much of their accent. In all these cases, a person is being judged – and perhaps dismissed or ignored – by being seen as a member of some group of people, rather than as an individual. Such a prejudice might be justified by saying that ‘they’ are all lazy or untrustworthy or potential terrorists, or just not the sort of person you want to be in any way associated with.

Stereotyping along these lines is one of the foundations of prejudice and bias.Ideas like racism and sexism are not respectable these days, and most people will deny being prejudiced – if you think you aren’t, try the online test at NEW LINK

Prejudice may be merely a matter of dislike, but when it influences the way you behave and leads to some disadvantage for the other person, then that’s discrimination.

 

Someone may be denied a job for reasons quite unrelated to their ability to do it, or they may be refused service in a shop, or made to wait in a queue. And there are far worse things, too, such as racist murders or attacks on anyone who belongs (or appears to belong) to some demonised group. Capitalism is full of examples of prejudice and discrimination. Gender and race have been the most obvious examples, with women being confined to the home, earning lower wages than men, having fewer educational opportunities, being subjected to domestic abuse, and so on. People with dark skins have been treated as less than human, enslaved, confined to the worst housing and worst jobs, lynched and brutalised. The Nazi onslaught on Jews and many other groups, such as Slavs and Roma, is probably the most notorious and despicable example.

Where there is a problem, capitalism often sees the chance of a reform, designed to alleviate some of the worst excesses and make it look as if the system and those who run it care about the most downtrodden. So there is now plenty of legislation against discrimination. For instance, the Equality Act, which came into force earlier this year, covers discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief, sexual orientation, gender, disability and race. Yet it illustrates the point that government legislation cannot in itself change people’s attitudes. Many Christians who run bed-and-breakfast establishments have objected that they can no longer ban ‘undesirables’ from their premises: gays, satanists, Muslims, even other brands of Christian – all may be viewed as not the right kind of person (Observer 26 March).

But it’s not just a matter of likes and dislikes. So often prejudice and discrimination under capitalism can be traced back to competition, for jobs, houses or government handouts. If ‘they’ come over here and take jobs that belong to white workers, then unemployment among whites could be reduced or eliminated by sending ‘them’ back or at least by putting them at the end of the line for jobs. The housing problem would surely be far less serious if ‘they’ were not allowed to jump the queue for council houses. Some group of people can be selected as scapegoats who are blamed for all the ills of society: unemployment, homelessness, crime, violence, insecurity, poverty. Tragically, workers who suffer from these problems will often put the blame onto fellow workers, who in fact may well be even worse off than they are.

Not all prejudice can be said to be caused by competition. Religious bigots, such as the christian B&B owners, can introduce their own forms of intolerance, backed up by nothing more than a dislike of anybody who is in some way different from themselves. And ideas can change, however slowly. Gays and lesbians, for instance, rarely have to keep their sexuality secret nowadays (though in plenty of countries this is not the case). Discrimination against disabled people is far less widespread than it once was. But of course, nobody could pretend that racist ideas are a thing of the past.

And there is one form of discrimination that cannot disappear under capitalism, because it is built in to the system’s very bones. This is discrimination on the grounds of wealth and power: a relatively small number of people have a great deal of both, while the vast majority (the working class) have little of either. It’s only workers who have to worry about discrimination in terms of jobs and housing: if you live off profits and have several luxury apartments and a country mansion, then you hardly need to worry about not being ‘one of us’. Equalising pension arrangements for men and women doesn’t affect you if you’re a millionaire whose post-‘retirement’ standard of living will barely take a cut.

The Socialist Party’s Declaration of Principles claims that a Socialist society will involve ‘the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex’. In a world where competition for housing and jobs is no more, where all take an equal part in producing for need and running society democratically, it will be  absurd to suggest that any kind of prejudice could still exist. Maybe we will still form first impressions of a person we meet, but that will be based on their own character and behaviour, not on lumping them in with some ill-defined grouping.

Being a Socialist implies opposition to all kinds of prejudice and a determination to treat people as equals and as individuals.

Paul Bennett

Inequality: same old story (2020)

From the April 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

When incoming left-wing Labour MP Zarah Sultana condemned the record of the Labour government in the Blair years, Tony’s representatives on Earth swung into action, reciting the litany of his good works: record investment in the NHS, minimum wage, Sure Start, Human Rights Act, Freedom of Information Act (the one he regrets), etc. What they forgot to mention was that in large measure politics is where it is now due to his regime’s greatest failing: its inability to increase the share of the national wealth for the poorest sections of society.

The Parliamentary report, Income inequality in the UK: Briefing Paper Number 7484, 20 May 2019, lays the picture out clearly. The Gini coefficient is a measure of overall inequality in a society. As the report notes, ‘this summarises inequality in a single number which takes values between 0 and 100%. A higher value indicates greater inequality’. The trend line in the table in the summary is clear, in as much as the Thatcher years saw a significant increase in inequality, which the Blair/Brown years stabilised, albeit with a gentle increase during the first Labour term. (There is some scope for the effects of benefits and redistribution not being adequately accounted for in this measure, but as the report notes, this is at most likely to flatten the trend out, rather than alter its overall directions).

It is the detail, though, of this inequality that is significant. If we take a look at the comparative income distribution, we can see how the poorest sections of society fared worst. The chart on page 13 of the report looks at the gap between middle and lowest income groups (BHC = Before Housing Costs, AHC = After Housing Costs). So, although the rate of change slowed down, after the hammering of the Thatcher years, the Blair years still saw the lowest income group falling further behind middle income groups (and much further behind the very richest in society). This is despite the redistributive effects of welfare reforms in the period.

The report suggests the bigger divergence on the AHC ratio is due to the effect of home ownership and rises in the housing market values. So, the effect of the housing market was to aggravate relative poverty still further.

The other market involved was the labour market, as the Labour government began to invest in public services such as the NHS, staff, particularly skilled staff, began to push their wages up. The labour market does not register the importance of jobs, or social fairness, it merely looks at how difficult it would be to replace a given worker.

This is important: in an economy based on buying and selling using widespread division of labour, it becomes impossible to know the value of any given person’s contribution to the final product. The actual value of goods can only be found when they are sold. The assumption is that employers will not use labour unless they have to, so everyone’s contribution is equally essential to the production of the final product. Employers will pay whatever it takes to maintain and reproduce the willingness of a particular type of worker (possessing a particular type of skill) to do the work required.

Put another way, a Richard Branson or an Elon Musk could not have their millions and billions without office cleaners, receptionists and the whole other myriad so-called unskilled clerical and manual jobs undertaken in the economy. As an example, if you needed a life-saving operation, you’d want the world’s finest surgeon, but not at the price of being dragged by your hair to the theatre by the world’s worst hospital porter, to find that it had been disinfected by the world’s worst hospital cleaner.

The modern method of production sees an increasingly collective approach to generating wealth, but it is one in which the outputs are very unequally distributed. The work that is called unskilled actually requires very definite skill and aptitude to perform, but lacks formal qualifications and many people are available to perform that work, hence making it easy to replace staff and thus hold their wages down.

The people at the very bottom of society saw the Thatcher years make them poorer, and the Blair years do little to address it, the perception became clear that ‘They are all the same’ and that Labour cared more about the elite than it did about them, especially as the very rich could be seen to be getting very richer, and the middle income groups were gently drawing away.

The radical right-wing message that it was foreigners, who mostly came to work in the unskilled labour market, holding down their incomes, became a siren song that fuelled both a rise in the BNP vote during the Blair/Brown years, and also which in turn fuelled the Brexit coalition.

The Johnson government is pandering to this perception by their newly announced immigration policy. This policy is set to restrict immigration for low-paid jobs, setting a minimum income for incoming workers. Although, there has been talk about exempting particular industries that need labour, such as seasonal pickers.

The reality is that this policy is not about reducing overall migration, but reducing the legal rights of migrant workers, and opening the door to specifically use migrant labour that can be dismissed easily and sent away without any claim to those redistributive benefits that the Tories are set to try and hold down.

Although it goes unsaid in most quarters, the lack of improvement in the lives of many people coupled with the failure of a Labour government to make significant changes to their lives, underpins most of what is happening in politics today, even the rejection of the Corbyn Labour party, in the light of people’s refusal to believe it would mean a significant change.

The Blair years’ motto ‘Education, education, education’ was based on the premise that the way out of poverty is to get training/education/skills and get a higher paid job. But someone has to do the ‘unskilled’ work, it will never go away, and the wages system will always weigh against the people doing that kind of work. This disproportionately affects women, who tend to bear the brunt of child rearing, and so cannot develop the skills and experience to hold onto the higher-paid jobs.

The only way to improve the lot of the poorest in society is to lay claim to the wealth we collectively produce, and ensure that that wealth is put to our collective use as well.

Pik Smeet

A Labour of Sisyphus (1951)

From the April 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

The position of the working class in capitalist society is like that of Sisyphus, the mythological king of Corinth, who was condemned to constantly roll a huge stone to the top of a hill, and when he got it there, it always rolled back down again. His task was unceasing. To-day a minority of the population, the capitalist class, own the means and instruments for producing wealth. It necessarily follows that the vast majority of the population, the working class, must sell their labour power to this minority. In return they receive barely enough to keep them at the customary standard of living. If they were to receive more than was sufficient to keep them they would attempt to free themselves from that economic enslavement. The working class then must produce wealth for the capitalist class and receive in return just sufficient to bring them back to the factory to produce more wealth for their masters—a labour of Sisyphus.

The tremendous productive capacity of man's labour power applied to modern industrial equipment together with the working class receiving only the necessities of life results in the great difference in income that exists between most members of capitalist class and most workers.

Reformers seeking to bring about a more equitable distribution of income put forward the plea for taxation. They maintain that by taxing the “rich” and establishing social services a large redistribution of income between the two classes could be effected. But Douglas Jay, now financial advisor to the Treasury, wrote in a book called “The Socialist Case,” “ some may argue that whatever the statistics of income and property show, a huge redistribution of income has been achieved in the last twenty-five years' by means of national taxation and the social services. . . . It is consequently rather startling to find, on an impartial examination of the facts, that there has been scarcely any redistribution at all.” (p. 45). A few pages later he quotes the “Economist”:—

  “The poorer classes of the community have therefore received back from the Exchequer approximately as much as their increased contribution. But there is very little sign that the system of taxation has effected any redistribution of income between rich and poor.”

(From Budget Supplement, 13th April, 1935, “The Socialist Case," p. 50.)

Then Mr. Jay sums up with, “All authorities are agreed, however, that the great bulk of the social services are paid for by the working classes themselves, and that there has been only a very slight shift in their favour even since before the war.” (Page 51.)

And the Labour Party after all this experience still cling to the view that taxation and social services will bring to the workers a bigger slice of the “national cake.” After the first five years of Labour's majority Government the responsible ministers claimed that taxation had reached its peak. The rich couldn't be taxed any heavier. All the social services and reforms that had been on the Labour Party's programme since its formation had been brought about. Yet Mr. James Griffiths, Colonial Secretary, said at the Labour Party Conference held in Margate:—

  “The ownership of wealth has by no means been adequately shared out. Far too much of the nation’s wealth is owned by too few people." (Daily Herald, 4/10/50.)

And Sydney Silverman at the same conference said, “There are hundreds of thousands of our fellow workers whose wages make a bitter mockery of our claim that we are providing fair shares ” (Daily Herald, 4/10/50).

The other side of the picture is filled in by the Tribune, a Labour weekly:—

  “Flicking over the pages of those same popular dailies . . . in this grim austerity Britain with its food shortages, housing shortages and labour shortages, the Government’s guiding philosophy of fair shares for all worked out in practice so that one could still have a house in town run by eight servants, a mansion in the country, a cottage by the sea, pocket money on a scale that comfortably covered details such as £3,000 a year on presents to a lady friend, another £1,000 a year thereabouts to the same lady and when after all you decided not to marry the woman, £20,000 to console her for the loss of a good thing." (February 9th, 1951.)

The “Economist” in an article examined the report of the EGA. Mission “Facts about the British Economy” and stated, “since it is the lower income groups which benefit mainly from social expenditure the report says, 'the social expenditures are chiefly financed by transfers of income within the lower income groups in accordance with variations in the patterns of consumption, family size, etc., rather than by transfer between different income level.' " (1/4/1950)1

Labour Party supporters and other apologists for capitalism maintain that even if the wealth the workers produce was divided equally among all members of the population, the increase in the average worker's income would be insignificant.

But this isn't the socialist's argument. He recognises the potential productive capacity of mankind with modern machinery and realises how production is misused in present society. He takes into consideration the waste that goes on under capitalism. In a system based on private ownership where goods are produced for sale a vast number of workers are engaged in all the multiple tasks which arise from the sale of commodities and the realisation of the profits contained in them. The waste of productive effort in the cheap shoddy goods the majority of the community must buy.

In a society based upon common ownership wealth would be produced solely for use. All members of society would be occupied in producing things to satisfy their needs. This is possible with the present industrial machinery. All that is required is that the workers realise this and take steps to bring it about.

Jim Thorburn

What's Wrong With Education: Bursting of the 'Comprehensive' Bubble (1974)

From the May 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

So the cat is finally out of the education bag — at last. The cracks have finally broken through the paper!

The situation in the Inner London schools is now so disastrous that teachers are telling the papers how, in many of them, it is practically impossible to teach. Truancy has reached catastrophic proportions. According to Dr. Rhodes Boyson MP (late Head of Highbury Grove Comprehensive School) 500,000 children play truant every day; he says “it is creating a new criminal sub-class”. Nobody really knows how many truants there are, because without frequent spot-checks absence is uncontrollable. The kids are voting with their feet. Many of those who sit through the morning to get the school dinner vote with their eyes, glaring balefully at the monkey up front in silent vicious hatred.

All the millions in money, the shiny new glass and plastic buildings, the innumerable experts (there is no field of human endeavour with more bloody "experts” than education!) and “advisers”, the gimmicks and stunts to keep the kids at it till 16 — have, in about half the schools population, lamentably failed.

Above all, it is the dismal failure of the so-called comprehensive schools. These are the hot-beds, the fertile source of the troubles. For twenty-five years the love-child of every sentimental “Lefty”, eventually official Labour Party policy, “comprehensive” was to be the magic key to crack the education problem. It was to give “equality of opportunity” to all, including the academically backward.

Only those who are actually inside the school racket (sorry — “educational profession”!) know the full story of the incredible goings-on in the most notorious giant London comprehensives. The one in North London where the kids piled the desks and chairs in the middle of a class-room and set fire to them. The other one in South London where when the teacher shouted “Will you shut up?” thirty-three boys shouted back in unison “No, we will not!”

So bad has the situation become that the Inner London Authority now has special Truancy Centres (staffed by “experts", of course) where the kids who just will not attend, any school do what they like. According to the London Evening News “what they like” is smashing things up.

The ILEA now wants to abandon “comprehensive” policy and build no more. Having scrapped the smaller, despised “Secondary Moderns” to set up vast comprehensives, small schools have become a desperate administration’s new ideal. Quite outside all the high-minded and noble educational sentiments and theories, the main motive for comprehensives was simply economy — as it was foolishly believed: saving money.

Your contributor was actually present at a meeting of several hundred London teachers in the early days when Mr. Houghton, Chief Education Officer, told them: “I don’t care whether you are for or against comprehensives — I’ve got to find a quarter of a million places on the ninth of September!” A comprehensive school saves at least three headmasters’ salaries (about £5-6,000 p.a. each) and makes many practical economies in buildings, power, heating, maintenance, catering, etc., by working on a large scale. With the result that, with the raising of the school-leaving age, 2,000 or even 2,500 children have been crammed into schools bursting at the seams.

After the war, the Labour Government set up a committee to enquire into education. It came up with the Hadow Report, which was the Bible of the teachers’ training colleges in those days. The old system of sorting elementary-school sheep and grammar-school goats was to be replaced by juniors up to 11; then Grammar, Technical and Secondary Modern up to 15. The now-notorious eleven-plus examination would decide that each child would receive education according to “his age, aptitude and ability”.

Almost as soon as this tri-partite system was introduced, the howls of protest started. True it is that the eleven-plus produced some fantastic results (like the boy whose card was sorted into the wrong box at the office — an eleven-plus failure — who went on to get a Ph.D.). The theory behind “comprehensivation” — yes, that’s what they call it! — was “equality”. Even if a boy couldn’t do differential equations, analyze a sentence, or speak German, he wore the same uniform and played football on the same pitch (although frequently he couldn’t play football either).

Faced with the fact that various kids have different aptitudes — and certainly Socialists have never thought otherwise — an elaborate system of “streaming” and “sets” was set up, to shove some through the university-animated exam, system. The teachers themselves got together and drafted a completely new examination, the Certificate of Secondary Education. Still only a few responded. A flood of learned books has poured out; teams of research sociologists have “proved” that a boy (or girl) in a “home” where money is tight, the telly never stops, there is no spare room and, above all, the parents can hardly read and despise learning—has little chance against a well-fed, contented child with ample room, warmth, light, and (most important of all) the practical example of a genuine delight and pleasure in books and learning.

Outside the school, the lure of money is compelling. A hefty well-built lad of sixteen can get a job as a hod-carrier at a man’s wage. Small wonder that the bait of examination passes fails to attract!

Thousands of teachers leave training colleges annually filled with a genuine vocational idealism and the intention to dedicate their lives to the education of our children: only to have “their hearts broken” (as they say) and leave to do anything — barmaid, petrol pump, shop — rather than “be driven mad” teaching. Four out of five girls leave in the first year.

The zealous educational reformer has now to swallow the bitter bread of humiliation. The old submissive obedience has gone. The kids are sceptical, intensely suspicious and inquisitive. To them we would say: “Why waste time and effort harassing and barracking the teacher? They are victims of the capitalist system no less (even more) than you. They are working men and women trying to do an extremely onerous and impossibly demanding job. There is something to be learned from even the worst teacher!” And: "Ignorance never helped anybody ’ (Marx).

To the teacher we say: You will never get educational equality in capitalist society. All you can do is maintain an efficient Union to protect you from abuses.

During the recent General Election the school debating society at a large north-west London comprehensive ran a mock election. The Socialist candidate, a sixteen-year-old boy, denounced the Labour Party and exposed nationalization. To cheers from the audience he declared : "We’ve got to learn, we’ve thought too much about Lenin; we’ve got to find out more about Karl Marx!” And they will, too. After all, they are finding out about practically everything else!

Horatio

Voice From The Back: The Class Struggle Today (1) (2013)

The Voice From The Back Column from the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Class Struggle Today (1)

That we live in a modern freedom loving society wherein the owning class and the working class co-operate without nasty out-dated class conflicts has recently been shown as a complete nonsense. Britain’s biggest construction companies finally admitted that they used a secret industry blacklist to vet workers as they announced the creation of a compensation scheme. ‘Unions believe construction companies face paying hundreds of millions of pounds to the 3,213 workers whose details were kept on a database kept by a shadowy organisation called The Consulting Association. The information was used by 44 companies to vet new recruits and keep out trade union activists or those who had raised concerns about health and safety’ (Times, 10 October).

The Class Struggle Today (2)

It is a popular notion, reinforced by politicians, that the police force is completely independent of class interests. Recent disclosures by the Independent Police Commission however show that this is not the case. ‘Police officers across the country supplied information on workers to a blacklist operation run by Britain’s biggest construction companies, the police watchdog has told lawyers representing victims. Independent Police Complaints Commission has informed those affected that a Scotland Yard inquiry into police collusion has identified that it is ‘‘likely that all special branches were involved in providing information’ that kept certain individuals out of work’ (Observer, 13 October). Workers blacklisted for raising issues about health and safety on information from the police should come as no surprise to anyone aware of the present day class struggle.

Hunger In The UK

We all know of charities launching campaigns to feed the hungry in Asia and Africa but here is one aimed at the UK hungry. ‘The Red Cross said it was about to launch a campaign in supermarket foyers asking shoppers to donate food to be distributed to the most needy through the charity FareShare. Rises in basic food prices and soaring utility bills have helped push more than 5m people in the UK into deep poverty. Nearly 500,000 people needed support from food banks last year, according to figures from the Trussel Trust’ (Guardian, 11 October). Half a million relying on food banks in one of the most developed countries in the world – isn’t capitalism wonderful?

How Capitalism Operates

Mr Szymkiowiak is astounded by how capitalism operates. ‘A first-time investor has told BBC News how he is ‘pretty delighted’ after Royal Mail share rose by more than 38 percent after the start of conditional trading. ‘I could potentially make £300 for doing nothing,’ Jamie Szymkiowiak said’’ (BBC News, 11 October). Mr Szymkiowiak may be astounded but that is how capitalism works. His modest little investment is as nothing compared to the billions of pounds that members of the capitalist class make from the exploitation of the working class. The owning class do nothing either except live on the surplus value produced by the working class. Astounded?

This Is Progress?

Supporters of capitalism extol its progressive nature but we wonder what they make of this development. Energy giant SSE announced a price rise of 8.2 percent. It will send gas and electricity bills rocketing by more than £100 and there is expected to be a domino effect in the next few days with other major suppliers also slapping hefty rises on the average dual fuel bill. ‘Pensioner groups said the elderly will be hardest hit, with many forced to decide whether to ‘eat or heat’ as the weather turns colder’ (Daily Express, 11 October). A winter of discontent for many members of the working class seems certain.

No Sympathy For The Unemployed

Many workers foolishly imagine that a future Labour government would be more sympathetic to the unemployed than the present government, but they should pay attention to what the Labour Party’s position really is. ‘Labour will be tougher than the Tories when it comes to slashing the benefits bill, Rachel Reeves, the new shadow work and pensions secretary, has insisted in her first interview since winning promotion in Ed Miliband’s frontbench reshuffle. The 34-year-old Reeves, who is seen by many as a possible future party leader, said that under Labour the long-term unemployed would not be able to ‘linger on benefits’ for long periods but would have to take up a guaranteed job offer or lose their state support’ (Observer, 13 October). The Labour Party want to run British capitalism and there is only one way to do that – as cheaply as possible.

Mr. Morrison's Moonshine (1950)

From the December 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Lord Acton penned his famous dictum that, because of the corrupting influence of power, “great men are almost always bad men” his knowledge of history led him to distinguish between the restricted power that corrupts and the absolute power that corrupts absolutely. The reason is obvious. The more brutal the rise the more brutal the fall; and if capitalism's Parliamentary politicians choose to cling like limpets to the pleasures and profits of office their opposite numbers in the dictatorships have no choice at all. Dictators, like gangsters, can have little hope of retiring to die in their beds. For them and their entourage the saying: “Gentlemen we must hang together or we shall hang separately” is no mere Downing Street jest. Still it is only a question of degree, and if dictators have to liquidate their old but insufficiently adaptable comrades Labour Governments, grappling with the day-to-day problems of capitalism, are constantly having to kill or maim the no longer useful pledges and doctrines that raised them to power. In the present government the task has fallen to that one-time pacifist and later organiser of victories, military and electoral, Mr. Herbert Morrison. If back-benchers mutiny, if rank-and-file sheep stray into forbidden pastures, if indiscreet ministers scare away camp-following electors, if some bitter pill has to be sugared, Mr. Morrison is the man for the job. His manner is that of the Elder Statesman dispensing wisdom, his method that of dressing up new doctrines to look as if they flowed from the old, and his technique that of the disguised fallacy masquerading as self-evident truth.

On Friday, November 17th, at Finchley he spent an evening explaining away and covering up, with the twofold object of winning back deserting so-called “middle-class” voters and of allaying trade union discontent in the ranks of the Party. The speech was reported at length in the Manchester Guardian (18/11/50) from which following extracts are taken.

Regretting “the popular antithesis between the black-coated and the manual worker” he made the point that “skill at a craft makes heavier demands upon your mental equipment than many black-coated occupations, and surgeons and many scientists have to be more skilled with their hands than the average craftsman.” Apart from a doubt whether it is true that a craftsman’s skill with his hands is any less than that of a surgeon the point is a good one—and a commonplace on S.P.G.B. platforms, from which source perhaps Mr. Morrison picked it up in his political infancy some 40 years ago. But if so he learned only half the lesson, for his remarks to the clerks of Finchley opened with the nonsensical flattery of addressing them as those “broadly known as the middle classes.” They are not “middle class” being neither a class nor middle. They are a section of the working class and it has been one of the trends of the past 10 years for the pay-packets of clerks even to fall relatively to those of craftsmen. Almost the whole of Morrison's speech was a defence of the inequalities of present day society as administered by his Government, and inevitably it had to bring in the old guff about the dignity of labour—“an honest and dignified job with their hands.” Nowhere did it do more than scratch the surface of argument and most of the awkward points were avoided. In the old days when a member of one of England's “hereditary ruling families” told the horny-handed sons of toil that the dignity of labour is more to be prized than cash and coronets he might be forgiven on the ground that he didn't know what he was talking about never having done any labouring. But now we get the same stuff from a government half of whose members have done some, and have since spent their lives getting away from it as far and as fast as possible.

Mr. Morrison's general defence of inequality might have been taken from any defence of capitalism in the past century:—“The right approach was to value each man and woman by the contribution they made to the community . . .  As a good Socialist I believe in paying a fair price for honest hard work and for the special skills which a man or a woman has the aptitude and the energy to acquire.” He added that he did not advocate “a society in which everybody is on the same level.”

A host of objections to the argument call for answer. How does Mr. Morrison, holding the views he put forward at Finchley, justify his government's refusal to concede equal pay for men and women doing the same job? How does he explain away Mr. Attlee’s declaration in 1935 of his belief “in the abolition of social classes and in the creation of an equalitarian society”? How does he or anyone else measure and compare the respective contributions to the community of, say, the £5,000 a year ex-trade union official who as Minister of Labour opposes wage increases, a £5 a week ploughman, the highly paid “Party-line” editor of a Government newspaper, the lucky inheritors of millionaire fortunes, the hospital nurse, the high-fee'd lawyer who successfully defends company profits against Inland Revenue claims, and any working-class housewife? And how does he answer the still true statements made by himself in 1932:—“the landlord as landlord and the investor as investor do not produce wealth. Yet they take in rent, interest and profit a large proportion of the products of labour,” (“A New Appeal to the Young"; Herbert Morrison); and ". . . the brain workers and the manual workers of our country are poorer and less secure than the idle rich class who do no productive work” (“An Easy Outline of Modem Socialism,” Herbert Morrison).

And above all what did Mr. Morrison and others in the Labour Party mean in the past, when they gave lip service to “the abolition of the wages system”? And how does he, as a self-styled “good socialist,” justify his opposition to the abolition of capitalism and establishment of Socialism and defend the fact, as admitted last year by one of his ministerial colleagues, that 10 per cent. of the population own 90 per cent. of the wealth of the country? Does Mr. Morrison really believe that they “contributed” the wealth they own?

Like the astute debater that he is Mr. Morrison, in his Finchley speech, side-stepped the main issues by an appeal to the prejudice he may have expected to find in his audience. An older generation of Tory defenders of the profit-system used to beg you to shed a tear for the poor widow woman struggling along on the dividends from her small holding of shares. Similarly bent on fogging the issue, Mr. Morrison begged his audience to avoid the slippery slope of equalitarianism which would give us “the slacker or the persistent absentee . . . paid as much as the man who works hard ”; but nothing about the ex-shareholders in mines, railways. Bank of England, etc., who will go on drawing their government guaranteed interest indefinitely while indefinitely absenting themselves from the dignity of labour.

Mr. Morrison deplored the evils of advancement being given by favour (vulgarly known as “jobs for the boys”) and also hoped there would be an end “to the snobbery which sometimes retards the advancement of the able man with the wrong kind of accent or social background.” Nice soothing words, but when we look at them closely what do they mean? Where does the working class boy or girl acquire “the wrong kind of accent”? Where but in the “working class” school that a Government “which stands for a square deal for all classes” provides for the mass of the population? And what is the wrong kind of social background but the working class homes and working class incomes that Labour Government intends to perpetuate?

It is an old trick of the politician who is covering up a retreat from a past theoretical position to make it appear to be an advance or at least a firm stand. This is done by using the old phrases but each time with a qualification that destroys their meaning. At Finchley he repeated the old Labour Party principle of “sympathy and support” for the infirm who are unable to work. Then it was coupled with a demand for drastic increases of old-age pensions, but now Mr. Morrison, who had not the brazenness to mention the actual 26/- a week, slipped away with the evasive: “Food subsidies, too, had been a godsend to pensioners and other retired people on small incomes.” On what principle we may ask does the “sympathetic” Labour Government give them such miserably small incomes?

Mr. Morrison knows of the vague belief among his Party's membership that class divisions and class privilege should be abolished, but in place of the substance of Attlee’s former “abolition of social classes” he now gives them the shadow of his being against “any idea of rigid class relationships"; we must “break down the barriers which separate the classes"; we must not “attach labels to people according to their social position and supposed class”; and “we as a party are opposed to anti-social privilege, whether it is privilege for the rich or the not rich.”

Of course, as Mr. Morrison knows, the class division of the capitalism we live under is not a supposition but a fact; but Mr. Morrison's party is not going to abolish the class system and its class division and class privilege. What they offer instead to any who do not see through the subterfuge, is to make the class division "less rigid," stop attaching labels to the capitalist class, keep privilege but say that it is no longer anti-social. This will be satisfactory to the capitalists and their hangers-on, political and managerial, but what is there in it for the workers? Not for them any “anti-social privileges” (what a pity Mr. Morrison did not tell us what these are). For them there is to be unlimited “dignity of labour.” Let us however not overlook the other benefit they are to receive, in the new social name and status coined freshly by Mr. Morrison. Is poverty under Tory Governments hard to bear? Then how much more endurable it will be now that the poor have been re-christened the “not rich.” By a simple masterly stroke of the pen the age-old gulf has been bridged at last and the Rich and the Poor are almost one; now to be almost indiscernably differentiated only by that tiny three-letter word not. Glorious indeed are the bloodless victories of the Labour Party “revolution.”

Edgar Hardcastle

How Capital Flourishes Under Labour Government (1950)

Editorial from the September 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Forty-five years ago, just after the formation of the S.P.G.B. and just before the formation of the Labour Party, Chiozza Money, a Liberal economist, wrote a book that played a large part in political argument for many years. It was called “Riches and Poverty.” It showed how the country was divided into two classes, the smaller of which monopolised the ownership of property and enjoyed the luxury provided by large incomes. It was nothing new for Socialists but provided statistical backing for the Socialist case. It was also used by the reformist Labour Party; but with a very different purpose. The first Manifesto of the S.P.G.B. declared:—“Society is today divided into two classes with opposing interests, one class owning the means of life and the other nothing but their power to work.” Then, as now, the S.P.G.B. insisted that nothing less than the conversion of the means of production and distribution into the common property of society could achieve emancipation. The Labour Party however promised by means of social reforms, taxation, death duties (and by the now forgotten “capital levy”) to make gradual but increasing inroads into capitalism until, imperceptibly, socialism would be here.

We have had the reforms, the death duties, the increase of income tax and surtax, and three Labour governments, the latest of which has been in power with a Parliamentary majority for over 5 years. And Socialism has not been introduced nor is it in process of being introduced. We still confront the same ruthless, exploiting, war-producing capitalist system. The task of achieving socialism still remains to be done and the method set out in the first publications of the S.P.G.B. is still the only way.

Labour Party supporters will contest the Socialist charge that capitalism has not been essentially changed; but out of the mouths of their own spokesmen the futility of Labourism can be demonstrated. Here are two Labour Party statements on capitalist ownership, the first was made in 1918 and the second in 1949.

The first was made towards the end of the first world war, in the Labour Party’s Report on general policy called “Labour and the New Social Order.”

  "Meanwhile innumerable new private fortunes are being heaped up by those who have taken advantage of the nation's needs; and the one-tenth of the population which owns nine-tenths of the riches of the United Kingdom, far from being made poorer, will find itself, in the aggregate, as a result of the war, drawing in rent and interest and dividends a larger nominal income than ever before.”

(“Labour and the New Social Order” Labour Party 1918, Page 19.)

Every one of those statements could be made again today; in particular the admission about the concentration of wealth in the hands of the small minority.

Let us now take a step forward over 30 years and read the admission made in the House of Commons on 18 May, 1949, by Mr. Glenvil Hall, M.P., Financial Secretary to the Treasury in the Labour Government:—

  “Of the 550,000 people who die each year only 10 per cent. own more than £2,000, but these 10 per cent. between them own 90 per cent, of the total property.” 

So thirty years of change has produced no result whatever. Ninety per cent. of the wealth was owned by 10 per cent. of the population in 1918 and still is.

Of course the Labour Party is again promising to do something about it. Mr. Gaitskell, M.P., who is now Minister of State for Economic Affairs referred to it in March 1949: “Property is still very unequally divided, and that is a problem which has got to be tackled.” (Daily Herald, 9/3/49). He thought that still higher death duties might do the trick but he did not explain why all the earlier increases had failed to do so. Nearly a year later another writer, Mr. Douglas Jay, M.P., who has now replaced Mr. Glenvil Hall as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, made an admission that might help to enlighten him. Speaking at Battersea Mr. Jay said:—“There is little sign that death duties are doing more than holding their own against private accumulation of Wealth.” (Daily Express 17/1/50).

One mysterious belief of Labour Party propagandists has been that nationalisation helps to lessen inequality of wealth. In the past few years the nationalisation schemes have actually worked in the opposite direction. If the mines and railways had not been nationalised the heavy losses made in the years after the war would have drastically slashed the market prices of mining and railways shares and correspondingly reduced the big fortunes invested in those industries. As it is the shareholders, by being compensated with the many hundreds of millions of pounds worth of Government bonds at fixed rates of interest guaranteed by the Government, have been saved from the major part of the loss they would otherwise have suffered. Nationalisation or state capitalism helps to safeguard the wealth of the capitalist class.

Capitalism, which the Labour Party never understood. has made nonsense of their well-intentioned but misconceived programmes. The only cure for capitalism is its abolition. The only road to emancipation is that proclaimed by the S.P.G.B. nearly half a century ago.

Smith or Gould—who cares? (1992)

From the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

No doubt it will be John Smith—the John Major clone—who will emerge this month as the new Leader of the Labour Party. Whether his rival Bryan Gould will get the deputy leadership as a consolation prize is by no means certain, but Gould has at least shown himself capable of discussing political ideas in a way that is rare in the top echelons of the Labour Party these days.

In a book published in 1985 entitled Socialism and Freedom he discussed what would have to be the features of a socialist society. The specific institutions of such a society, he argued, were not ends in themselves; they were means to achieve a situation where every individual human being would have the maximum freedom to shape their life. This, he went on, could only be achieved by spreading decision-making power as widely as possible. The “overriding aim" of socialists, therefore, must be:

to maximise the power (and therefore the freedom) exercised by each and every citizen. This can be done only by diffusing power as widely as possible—in other words, by sharing it equally.

On this definition, a socialist society was a “society in which power is equally shared by all".

At this level of abstraction, we can agree with Gould. We don't want common ownership and democratic control for their own sakes but because we think that these provide the only basis on which all humans can live the best life that is now possible. We can also agree that the way to ensure this is by diffusing decision-making power equally amongst all the members of society. However we wouldn't leave the argument there as Gould does.

This equal decision-making power must apply, in fact must especially apply, to the control and use of the means for providing for the material needs of the members of society. Every member of society must be in a position to have an equal say in deciding how the means of wealth-production—the productive resources, natural and human-made, at the disposal of society—are to be used.

What we are talking about here is a classless society in which the means of production belong to no-one in the sense that there is no group within society that has an exclusive, or even a more than equal, say in the way they are used. This is the same as saying that they belong to everyone—that they are “commonly owned”.

Needless to say, Gould doesn’t go this far. In fact he doesn't regard common ownership in this sense as being a necessary feature of a socialist society. Which must mean either that he is a sloppy thinker or that he doesn’t think that it is possible to diffuse power that widely.

Gould is, however, fully aware that we are living in a society in which decision-making power is far, very far, from being equally distributed. After giving some examples of progress made this century away from inequality (the main one being the achievement of equal voting rights in political matters for all men and women), Gould gives the following accurate picture of the situation today:

   The owners of capital—whether private or public, individual or corporate—still own, control and enjoy the fruits of the wealth-producing process and buy and sell working lives as though they were commodities. Economic power is still concentrated in their hands, with the necessary correlative that it is removed from the hands of the bulk of ordinary people for whom the wage relation bargain remains unequal and demeaning.
    The law still underpins the whole concept of succession and inheritance, so that private property—essentially an artificial, social concept which needs the backing of the law to protect it—can be accumulated to an extent well beyond that needed to satisfy even the most outrageous appetites for personal consumption.
    The welfare state, though valuable and important in itself, remains a palliative for dealing with the casualties of a system which necessarily produces major and self-reinforcing inequalities and injustices. The search for private profit remains the major motivation for economic activity.

Faced with this capitalist reality Gould rejects a policy of “total abolition and replacement" of capitalism in favour of one of “control and reform". This of course is the gradualist and reformist policy that the Labour Party has always pursued. At the turn of the century a genuine argument could go on between what appeared to be two alternative ways to socialism, but the experience of the last 90 or so years has settled the issue. The policy of the “control and reform" of capitalism is not a road to socialism at all. There have been five periods of Labour government, during which Labour was in office for a total of 20 years, yet the situation today is as described by Gould above.

In fact the failure has been even greater as instead of the Labour Party gradually changing capitalism it has been the other way round: capitalism has gradually changed the Labour Party. At one time Labour theoreticians like Gould would have argued that the long-term aim was to actually establish a socialist society in which power, including the power to control the use of the means of production, would be equally shared. Now, however, Gould is reduced to arguing that a socialist society is an impossibility and that the most "socialists" can achieve is some precarious progress towards less inequality:

Socialism is not a destination at which we shall arrive one day. There are no final victories in politics. Socialism is a constant struggle against the forces in society which naturally tend towards the concentration of power.

To a politician whose party has tried and failed to reverse the capitalist tendency towards increasing inequality, it must indeed seem that this tendency is “natural", and given the maintenance of the basis of capitalism—class ownership and production for profit—it does act as if it were a natural law in that there is nothing that can be done to stop it operating.

In using the word "natural" in this context Gould is admitting that all the Labour Party is now trying to do is not to make progress towards a socialist society, however confusingly defined, but merely to slow down and delay capitalism’s tendency to increased inequality. "Socialism" has become not a new form of society but merely the empty dream of a less unequal capitalist society.

But even this watered down version of Labour's original programme is too radical for the likes of Smith for whom a penny on or a penny off the standard rate of income tax is all that politics is about.

Adam Buick