The real state we’re in: a response to the iPaper’s jobs fair propaganda (2026)

From the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vicky Spratt’s glazing dispatch from the Youth Guarantee Jobs Fair at Boxpark Camden reads like a press release from the Department for Work and Pensions (In Camden, I saw the antidote to Gen Z’s endless job rejections). She describes a ‘buzzing’ event where recruiters from Arsenal Football Club to the NHS handed out chocolate bars and baseball caps to smiling young jobseekers. Secretary of State Pat McFadden who was also present waxes lyrical about ‘welfare reform’ that puts ‘work and opportunity at its heart’. It is, by her account, ‘the antidote to Gen Z’s endless job rejections’.

I was there too. And I saw something very different.

I am not a young person. I am in my late 40s, a former events manager who once worked across Europe (bringing revenue into the UK economy), until Brexit devastated the industry I loved. My case manager at the DWP, aware of my age and experience, sent me to this ‘youth’ jobs fair anyway. What I witnessed was not an antidote. It was a symptom.

The fiasco of the ‘Fair’

Let us begin with the basics of event management, a profession I practised for years before this government destroyed my livelihood. A jobs fair is, at minimum, a professional event requiring adequate space, accessibility, and basic dignity for attendees. Boxpark Camden, a street food market, offered none of these.

The DWP, symptomatic of its ‘The Thick Of It’ style corporate culture, decided to go cheap and secure the food hall’s grubby, rickety beer hall tables and bench seating on the second and third levels. There was no space to move. If you used a wheelchair, crutches, or had any mobility impairment, you could not have navigated the space at all. Access was via narrow staircases only. There were no accessible toilets. The noise was overwhelming, a cacophony that made conversation, let alone professional networking, nearly impossible. The food vendors I met weren’t very happy that their tables were occupied all day by companies (and consuming outside food) and the place packed with unemployed youth.

My case manager knows I have ASD and auditory processing difficulties so added a note on my file to say that a quiet space is required for my meetings. This environment was not merely unsuitable; it was actively hostile. I travelled over an hour and a half on two buses to reach it, despite my job coach’s insistence that the journey was shorter. DWP are notorious for this sort of support for disabled jobseekers: sending us to inaccessible, sensory-overloading spaces in the name of ‘opportunity’. I suppose my job coach has quotas to meet lest he end up back in the electronic dole queue behind me.

For a former event manager, the incompetence was staggering. The UK events industry, worth £68.7 billion in 2024, has been battered by Brexit with 82 percent of industry respondents reporting that leaving the EU negatively affected their business, and 67 percent experiencing significant or minor losses.

The damage is documented and severe. A Stanford study estimates that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6-8 percent, investment by 12-18 percent, and employment by 3-4 percent. The events sector saw losses of up to £1 million for individual companies. A major exhibition that drew 45,000 visitors annually moved from London to Barcelona. UK musicians have seen a 27 percent decline in small and medium-sized EU festival bookings, with 95 percent of affected artists experiencing decreased earnings.

The government’s own policies have helped hollow out a sector that once employed people like me. And yet when the DWP needs to organise an event, this is the best it can manage: a chaotic scramble in a food court which they probably got for free on a mid-week day in Camden.

Vicky Spratt writes warmly of hospitality roles ‘with training,’ care work, and paid experience on offer at this ramshackle event. What she does not interrogate is the quality of these jobs.

I spoke to the recruiters. Many of the ‘opportunities’ were barely really jobs at all, just the dregs of the labour market. Dishwashing in basement hotel kitchens. Zero-hour contracts in care. Jobs with such high turnover that employers attend fairs like this not out of social responsibility, but to factory farm disenfranchised young people and process them through. The symptom of an economy that has failed to provide meaningful work.

This is the ‘Youth Guarantee’ in practice: an £823 million scheme that offers employers £3,000 per hire, incentivising them to cycle through the cheapest possible labour rather than invest in genuine skills development. McFadden praises Marks & Spencer for creating 1,000 ‘training roles.’ He does not say what those roles pay, how long they last, or whether they lead anywhere. The structure of the scheme itself, paying employers to take on the long-term unemployed, creates a perverse incentive to treat young workers as subsidised, disposable inputs rather than human beings with futures.

Pat McFadden continues his spiel that ‘the narrative that says young people are shirkers and snowflakes … is wrong’. This is clever positioning. Rejecting the most overtly cruel rhetoric, he presents himself as the compassionate reformer and saviour. Actual policy direction reveals the same old coercion dressed in snake oil language.

McFadden describes hiring incentives and work experience placements as ‘welfare reform.’ He says the ‘best way into welfare reform’ is to ‘put work and opportunity at its heart’. This is not reform. This is the ideological enforcement of wage labour as the only legitimate form of existence.

But the Labour Party and the unions that founded it have always been occupied in trying to solve wages problems within capitalism, never questioning capitalism itself. The result? The problems multiply and become more complex and the armies of ‘solvers’ become larger and larger. There is not the slightest prospect that these people will solve the problems, because it is the very nature of wage-labour itself that causes the problems in the first place.

McFadden’s reform talks of cliff edges where people lose housing benefit if they enter work but his solution is not to question why housing should be contingent on employment at all. He speaks of ‘talking to people and working out how the government can help them to change their lives’ but the only change on offer is insertion into the labour market, on capital’s terms, at wages that do not cover the cost of living.

The right exam question, as McFadden puts it, is not how to assess what benefits people are entitled to. It is whether a system that forces millions to sell their labour power to survive while a tiny minority accumulates wealth from their subsequent labour is worth preserving at all.

Abolition of work

The young people Spratt interviews are not ‘snowflakes’. They are victims of a system that demands their labour while offering them precarity in return. Amina, the law graduate relying on Universal Credit who told the iPaper that ‘nobody replies’ to her applications, is not failing the labour market. The labour market is failing her. Brendan, who calls online applications a ‘black hole,’ is not lazy. He is alienated from a process that treats him as an input rather than a person.

The ‘black hole’ Brendan describes is not a glitch in the system. It is the system functioning as designed. Capitalism requires a reserve army of the unemployed applying for dozens, hundreds of jobs, hearing nothing back, to keep wages low and workers desperate. The DWP’s job fairs, with their chocolate bars and branded pens, are not an alternative to the black hole, they are it. To discipline the unemployed, making them visible, countable, and grateful for whatever scraps are offered

A genuine alternative would begin with the recognition that work as currently organised, serves capital not human need. What would society look like where housing, healthcare, education, or sustenance were not dependent on employment? Where the means of production were collectively owned and managed? Where the purpose of economic activity was the satisfaction of human needs rather than the accumulation of profit?

McFadden will never ask these questions. The Labour Party, committed to managing capitalism rather than transcending it, cannot ask them. But over a million young people classed as NEET, the highest figure since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, are to be herded through food courts and told that their problem is a lack of ‘opportunity’.

What Spratt won’t ask

Spratt’s article is not dishonest, but it is narrow. She does not ask why a jobs fair for young people was sending an experienced professional approaching her 40s to a youth event. She does not ask why the DWP chose a filthy Camden street food market over an accessible conference venue. She does not ask why the jobs on offer weren’t skilled careers but, overwhelmingly, low-wage, high-turnover positions where you’ll still be visiting food banks rather than skilled careers. She does not ask why a law graduate is on Universal Credit after six months of silence from employers. She does not ask why the ‘solution’ to youth unemployment is always more work, never less capitalism.

Spratt does not ask Pat McFadden whether the welfare system he oversees is designed to support people or to discipline them. Whether ‘work and opportunity at its heart’ is a promise or a threat.

In the end, McFadden’s ‘welfare reform’ is nothing more than an attempt to make wage-working seem more palatable, to dress coercion in the language of opportunity.

A.T.

Material World: Paycheck to paycheck (2026)

The Material World column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

We’re used to hearing that the overall standard of living in the West is significantly higher than in the countries that make up what used to be known as the ‘Third World’ but are now commonly referred to as the ‘Global South’. For many of these, most sources indicate progress in expanding access to basic necessities such as water, sanitation and health facilities. Yet a recent joint report by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that approximately 1 in 4 people globally, or close to 2.1 billion, lack access to clean drinking water and that this contributes to roughly 3.5 million deaths per year, nearly 400,000 of these children under five.

More broadly, according to an Oxfam International report from June 2025, 3.7 billion of the world’s population, or around 45 percent, live in conditions of moderate or severe food insecurity with over 700 million living on less than 2.15 dollars per day and 3.4 billion living on less than 5.50 dollars per days. This means that many are unlikely to have the money to eat regularly and so will often skimp on food or skip meals. In addition, the business data website Statista has reported on a United Nations estimate that around 1.1 billion people worldwide, including around 50 percent of the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, are living in slums, described as ‘areas of self-built, unsanitary housing where extreme poverty is rife’.

How does all this compare to the standard of living in what is seen as ‘the richest country in the world’, the USA? We would expect it to be a lot higher overall, and indeed it is. But what are things actually like? Wildly differing figures on living standards, poverty and deprivation are to be found depending on the sources you consult. For example, the CNN Business website recently reported on a Bank of America analysis which estimated that around 1 in 4 (24 percent) of American households are barely getting by – living ‘paycheck to paycheck’, as they put it.

The bank’s statisticians combed through data on millions of customers to track how much they spent on basics such as housing, groceries, childcare and utilities and found it constituted over 95 percent of their income ‘leaving little to nothing left over for the “nice-to-have” things like going out to dinner or taking a vacation, let alone saving’. One of their interviewees who had a degree but was working in a construction business about to shut down is quoted as saying ‘to be 34 and living paycheck to paycheck with no savings, things are pretty crappy right now’.

However, a different survey came up with a quite different result, which was that the proportion of workers living paycheck to paycheck was not 24 percent but 67 percent. This figure emerged from the Financial Wellness in the Workplace Report by the PNC Bank, based on workers aged 21 to 69 working full time at companies with more than 100 employees. It painted a picture of workers struggling to cover everyday expenses, especially with cost of living currently outpacing wage growth. A Newsweek report on this survey quoted Taylor Nelms, vice-president of research and insights at the Financial Health Network, as saying: ‘The percentage of U.S. households that say they spend more or the same as they bring in has been remarkably consistent, hovering around 50 percent over the past several years but right now it’s compounded by high housing costs, insurance premiums, and the return of student loan payments. These are the areas where households feel most squeezed’.

There’s clearly a big difference between these survey results, but whichever figure you take as reliable, it’s clear that many millions of people in the world’s ‘richest country’ are not only not rich but are materially insecure and struggling to keep their heads above water, with some in particularly straightened circumstances. The CNN report highlights some of the typical symptoms of this – people falling behind on their bills, minimum credit card payments being made, an increased percentage of borrowers late on their car loans (referred to as ‘a clear sign of financial distress, especially since car loans are historically the last payments Americans are willing to miss’), and people filing for bankruptcy having incurred large medical debts while ill. Nor does any of this take into account the undoubtedly worse conditions of those who have no employment at all or are homeless or not registered to work. The current estimate of the number of unemployed people is 4.4 percent of the workforce, so 7.6 million people living in even worse circumstances than those ‘just getting by’.

What conclusions can we draw from this? First and foremost that, though wage and salary workers in what is usually considered the most advanced part of the Western world are undoubtedly better off on the whole than their counterparts elsewhere, this does not prevent many of them from suffering poverty and insecurity. And this in a world which, if it were organised rationally (ie, with a system aimed at catering for the needs of all and not the profits of a few), could provide abundantly for all of its 8.3 billion population. Already in fact the world possesses enough productive capacity to eliminate global poverty many times over. Yet this can never happen as long as we have a system – the market system – which ensures vast wealth inequality between the tiny minority of people who own most of the resources and the large majority who own little more than their skills and energies and their ability to sell these for a wage or salary.

It is no kind of aberration, therefore, that the USA has, according to Forbes Magazine, 905 billionaires with a combined wealth of 7.8 trillion dollars and that, according to Federal Reserve data, the top 1 percent of households in the United States hold 30.5 percent of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent hold 2.5 percent. Rather it is the inevitable consequence of a system (production for profit) that has no mechanism for meeting the basic needs of the whole of humanity and will always fail to do that. This being the case, it is as clear as it can possibly be that the majority of the world’s workers need to take collective and democratic political action to bring that system to an end and replace it by one that will be cooperative, moneyless, wageless and based on free access and production for use.

Howard Moss

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The latest Oxfam report which was released at 4th UN Financing for Development meet in Seville, Spain, shows that since 2015 the top 1% people in the world have amassed US$ 33.9 trillion in new wealth which is enough to end annual poverty 22 times over. 

(Scoop Independent News)

In some cases, health professionals perform FGM [Female Genital Mutilation] secretly in exchange for payment, turning the practice into a commercial enterprise, 

(People Daily)

The island is currently facing its worst economic crisis since the 1959 revolution. Long and daily power cuts, scarce internet connection, food and medicine shortages, and high prices are the realities of present-day Cuba. Some staple items like beans are nowhere to be found; rice production has declined and much is now imported. Sugar, too, has become an import in Cuba, which, until recently, was the leading sugar exporter in the world. People cannot make ends meet with their meager incomes — a doctor’s monthly salary is approximately $50. Even by conservative World Bank estimates, 72 percent of all Cubans live below the poverty line. Beggars seem to be everywhere, with the African community descendant from slavery being the most economically victimized. 

(Consortium News)

The entire political and intellectual machinery of the French ruling class is now moving in this direction. That includes the miserable little left, led by the Socialist Party, who bark at us from morning to night. They don’t realize that they’re participating in a broader establishment strategy: acting as the left-wing auxiliary of the right. They live in a dreamworld, wanting France to be like Germany, with a grand coalition of the centre: Social Democrats who are indistinguishable from liberals, Greens who are always clamouring for war. These people are doing the work of dividing us every day while pretending to be for unity.

(Portside)

One recent survey discovered that 70 percent of Americans are the most financially stressed that they have ever been in their entire lives. That figure alone tells us that we have a major economic crisis on our hands. The cost of living has been rising much faster than paychecks have been, and most of the country is just barely scraping by from month to month. Anyone that attempts to deny this is simply not living in reality. 

(Zero Hedge)

Donald Trump styled himself as a populist, ‘anti-establishment’ president. But look at what he has actually done in office, and you see he’s a status-quo politician with nothing to offer working Americans.

(Jacobin)

Will voters finally stop both blaming politicians for their troubles and depending on them to end them? Will voters—and non-voters—transform themselves into people who act for themselves, in their own interests, instead of allowing others to act for them? That would be what social change looks like. The survival of the human race may well depend upon it. 

(The Brooklyn Rail)

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

The Purpose and Method of Colonisation. [1] (1914)

From the June 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some time ago the Bishop of Hull, speaking on the relation of Christianity to Social problems, referred to the decision of the Japanese people, not to make Christianity their national religion, and said:

“This was because the shrewd Japanese had known too much about the lives of professing Christians. During the time when the present Archbishop of York was labouring in Stepney, a Japanese traveller called upon him and asked to be put in the way of seeing the real inner life of the people of the East-end. The clergyman did not refuse, bat he said he could only pray that the Japanese visitor might forget as soon as possible many of the things he saw . . . The Japanese could not fail to perceive that as a people we were hopelessly divided, class against class . . . squalid poverty at the one end of the scale and stupid luxury at the other.”

It would appear that even the Bishop felt that Christianity was not playing a very creditable part in the sordid tragedy of this much belauded civilisation, although we have no doubt that he would not publicly endorse the charge of the Socialist that religion is always to be found on the side, and, indeed, is the active ally of the forces of oppression.

In the face of the hideousness and injustice of the social conditions obtaining in Christian countries—”the terrible social difficulties,” as one eminent prelate said—the purpose of missionary societies, who go to great efforts and spend enormous sums in bringing this 20th Century civilisation to the “heathen,” might well puzzle those who, although not Socialists, will readily agree that the conditions of existence in modern society not only leave much to be desired, but are in fact paradoxical in the extreme.

The all too apparent and ever increasing poverty of the great mass of the people, which means their shortage not only of those means, opportunities and healthful environment which afford culture and minister to a high development of one’s physique and intellect—the only guarantee for the real enjoyment of life and therefore the road to happiness—but their shortage even of the barest and crudest necessities of existence, side by side with undisputed abundance of all those things, or “unparalleled prosperity.” The paradox of increasing insecurity and harder toil, owing, not as one might suspect, to the failure or misunderstanding of nature, or the difficulty of producing the means of subsistence, but in spite of or contrary to the continuous advance in understanding, mastering and utilising the forces of nature, and more insecurity and harder toil as the result of ever greater facilities to produce.

Neither of the above mentioned instances of glaring inconsistencies and cruel ironies, which could, of course, easily be multiplied, will be denied. Nor is there, so far as the non Socialist is concerned, any remedy for, or any escape from, that condition of things. It is easy to get their admission that unemployment with all its attendant evils is inevitable, and that it exists side by side with excessive toil oa the part of those “in work.” It is common knowledge, “but cannot be altered,” that overcrowding, slums, homeless and shelterless exist side by side with spacious, comfortable and healthy empty and half empty houses; it is equally common knowledge, “but cannot be altered,” that there is preposterous waste of all sorts of commodities side by side with the most pressing and bitter want. Foodstuffs, especially of easily deteriorating nature, such as vegetables, meat, fish, etc. are rotting and perishing in markets and stores in enormous quantities, while uncounted workers with their families are suffering the pangs of hunger. Fuel, such as coal for instance, is being uselessly destroyed to an incredible extent alone in keeping battle ships continually “prepared,” while in cold days the lack of the same precious fuel accentuates the gloom and squalor of innumerable dreary habitations and causes sickness and death due to insufficient warmth.

Anyone reading, for example, the records of such institutions as the Salvation Army, or the Church Army, Dr. Barnardo’s “homes,” etc., etc., the signposts of “civilisation,” or their soul stirring appeals on behalf of the thousands of destitute men, women and children reduced to implore the humiliating, degrading and demoralising help of such charities ; or anyone having perused the facts in Seebohm Rowntree’s “Poverty: A Study of Town Life,” or “How the Labourer Lives,” or Sir Charles Booth’s “The Life and Labour of the People of London,” or Dr. Wallace’s “Social Environment,” or the eloquent comparisons in Chiozza Money’s “Riches and Poverty,” or any other of the numerous similar enquiries, again might fail to detect the reason for the enthusiasm of missionary organisations in transplanting a system such as produces the crying evils and glaring inconsistencies surrounding us.

“In London”—so ran a whole page appeal in the “Daily Telegraph” in the cold month of February—”at this moment there are thousands to whom each degree’s fall in the thermometer is so much additional agony. Men and women feel it keenly, acutely, and to the hapless children it means suffering untold. Think for a moment of some of its phases. There is no money to buy coal, the grate is fireless, . . . and there is nothing but a bit of hard, dry bread. Even the solace of a cup of tea becomes impossible then . . . the pangs of hunger are felt with tenfold force, and the emaciated mother and the shivering children huddle together in the gloom of their bare room. . . . The poor, thin rags that serve as an apology for clothes; the broken boots, through which toes and heels protrude, no warm blankets at night. . . . You cannot—you dare not say you do not see these sufferings. No one can go a walk or drive of half-a-mile in London without passing them:

Women, children, young and old,

Groan from pain and weep from cold;

From the haunts of daily life,

Where is waged the daily strife,

With common wants and common cares

Which sow the human heart with tares.

For we know the long drawn-out misery is there—on our right hand and on our left in this great, proud, wealthy Capital of the Empire.”

“No food, no fire, no home.” “Work for starving women,” etc., etc. Such are other head lines to advertisements in the Daily Press of civilised Christian countries !

Besides this, eloquent figures can be quoted from capitalist economists and statesmen, and a long row of Bluebooks produced, which go a long way to explain a good many of the social anomalies surrounding us.

1,400,000 persons in the United Kingdom, for instance, appropriate between them some £634,000,000 whilst 39,000,000 other people share between them £935,000,000. 30,000,000 people of the United Kingdom own no land, whilst 7 landlords draw £14,640,000 per annum in ground rent!

Is it a wonder that there are 13,000,000 continually on the verge of hunger and that the great majority of the people are at the mercy of a small minority ? And is it a wonder that this stupid disproportion of wealth-distribution should produce anarchy ?

And the same tale of chronic poverty and consequent degradation can be told of the overwhelming majority of the peoples of Germany, Austria, France, America, and the rest of those countries where His Majesty King Capital reigns supreme, and where, consequently, Their Worships Profit and Prostitution, male and female, are the pillars of civilisation. Any native from an “uncivilised” land who had been shown through the factory hells of Continental or American industrial centres and brought into contact with the “life” of the workers there and their “homes,” might well be excused if not rewarded, for bringing to an abrupt end the career of the missionary babbling to him about the blessings of civilisation.

Chronic strikes, bread riots, sordid tragedies of strife, misery and want, police and military brutalities, are evidence that there, as here, millions do not receive a “living wage,” and that there, as here, they are, as the Bishop said, hopelessly divided—class against class.

If then, as can be done, overwhelming evidence can be brought that the system of human co-existence in the so-called civilised Christian countries is “rotten from top to bottom”—as one great apologist for the system has put it—if besides, the worst that can be said by the Socialist is being repeatedly admitted and substantiated by capitalist economists and statesmen, and if, in spite of the struggle with nature having been won by “civilised” men, the great majority of them have still to live from hand to mouth and, not having any property, have to eke out this existence of perpetual penury and insecurity with the spectre of starvation haunting them, it would certainly seem strange that the contamination of the pure atmosphere of the “uncivilised” with our system and institutions should tend to produce there something different from what it produces here—that is, anarchy and social idiocies.

Rudolf Frank

(To be Continued.)

A Look Round. (1906)

From the October 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist propaganda in Bulgaria is not quite such easy work as here, if one may judge from a letter, written in Esperanto, received from a comrade there.

* * *

The Socialists held a Congress at Varna in August. Previous to the opening they organised a public meeting. One of the speakers condemned the persecution of the Greeks by the Bulgarians. Naturally, this displeased the “Nationalists.” They dubbed the Socialists “pro-Greeks” and threatened to kill the speaker (Harlakov). On August 10th, during the afternoon sitting of the Congress, a band of about 30 hired assassins entered the hall and commenced to shoot with revolvers. About 100 shots in all were exchanged. One Socialist was killed and several wounded, but three of their opponents bit the dust and about a score were wounded. From which it is apparent that the Socialists of Bulgaria are not only prepared to move resolutions, but know how to shoot straight. Harlokov was slightly wounded in the shoulder. The delegates then considered it advisable to change the venue of their Congress and accordingly continued their labours at Shumeri.

* * *

The balance sheet of the London District Board of the Amalgamated Union of Operative Bakers and Confectioners for June quarter contains some interesting figures. £154 18s. 7d. was paid into the Sick Fund and £227 1s. 6d. paid out. The Management Fund received £128 16s. l1d. and £133 1s. l1d. was expended. Out-of-work contributions amounted to £127 18s. 9d. and payments to members £145 14s. 6d.

* * *

It is poor consolation for the members to be informed that the out-of-work payments show a diminution as compared with the previous quarter, in view of the secretary’s statement that the decrease is chiefly due to unemployed members having reached the end of the benefit period.

* * *

During 1902 this Union made 1,211 new members and lost 1,583. 1,066 were enrolled in 1903 and 1,061 were lost. In 1904 730 joined and 870 were lost, and in 1905 899 joined and 960 fell out. The London District has now commenced to enrol “Trade” members at 2d. per week.

* * *

The fact of the matter is that the condition of the working class is becoming so precarious that increasing numbers of them are unable to pay the sums demanded by the Unions and the latter are compelled to pay sick and unemployed benefit at an ever increasing ratio.

* * *

The Bakers’ Union is concentrating its efforts upon a Forty-eight Hours Bill. “We have determined” says Mr. L. A. Hill in the August issue of the official organ “to re-introduce our Forty-eight Hour Bill into Parliament and to continue if necessary to re-introduce it until victory crowns our efforts and our banners wave upon the ramparts of freedom for the operative baker.”

* * *

“Freedom” via a Forty-eight Hours Bill is good, especially when the same writer in the same column says “The eight hours day is after all a temporary palliative, which, while it would undoubtedly have the effect for the time being of absorbing the bulk of our unemployed, would not be lasting in its effects.”

* * *

In the September issue of the Journeymen Bakers’ Magazine Mr. Hill returns to the subject and says “if by Trade Union or legislative action your hours are reduced, your employer, and other employers also, will need more men, and it is not too much to say that every unemployed baker in London will obtain work.”

* * *

Of course this is sheer nonsense. Already the eight hours day is in operation in several bakeries, and instead of more men being employed there are fewer. And not only so, men who have worked for the “smart yankee” who is running one of the largest bakeries in London and the suburbs aver that they would sooner work 12 hours in the ordinary shop that does not possess machinery than 8 hours in the machine bakeries.

* * *

Without machinery, a skilled baker turns about 10 sacks of flour into bread in a week of sixty hours. In an up-to-date bakery, such as exists in London and Glasgow, 22 sacks is the normal output per man per week. But under exceptional circumstances (say in the event of a strike or lockout) one skilled operative, with the aid of a fireman and unskilled labour, could turn from 400 to 500 sacks of flour into bread in a week. The public would get bread whilst the Trade Union bakers starved. An Eight-Hours Act would not affect the machine bakeries. It is already in vogue there and they can successfully compete against the small shop. The small man could not stand the increase in his wages bill which Mr. Hill claims would follow the passing of the Bill, as the competition of such firms as Price & Co., the V.V., and the Co-operative Societies would prevent him raising the price. He would therefore “go under” and the trade would pass into the hands of the machine bakeries.

* * *

The Bishop of Birmingham in dedicating a new chapel at the Aston Workhouse said the problem of the unemployed was complicated by the fact that so many parents were content that their boys earned a little money by selling newspapers, running errands, and such like casual employment. At the time when they wanted to be engaged in a self-respecting industry which would be really useful to the community they found themselves out of employment at the age of 18 or 20 without any trade behind them.

* * *

What a heap of money some people get for talking nonsense. Are there no unemployed with a “trade behind them,” none who have passed through the various stages and mastered the difficult processes of “a self-respecting industry” ? Why even the Trade Unions that made returns to the Board of Trade during August shewed that out of a membership of 596,010, 22,528 were unemployed. This is equal to 3.8 per cent.

* * *

These would be men “with a trade behind them” and as they represent only a fraction of the Trade Unionists, the extent of unemployment at a period when, according to Reynold’s Newspaper, we are experiencing the beneficial results of ousting a Tory Government and electing a Radical one can be imagined. If the country contains only five millions of workers with a “trade behind them,” there would be, on the basis of the returns made to the Board of Trade, 190,000 unemployed. There’s prosperity for you !

* * *

Sir J. Crichton Browne was nearer the mark at the Congress of the Sanitary Inspectors’ Association at Blackpool when he said “The struggle to acquire property, to win applause, to earn bread was fiercer than ever; the pressure of labour had been transferred from the muscles to the nervous system, for physical energy was supplied by steam and electricity, and it was nerve energy that was needed to control machinery, and the indications were that the nerve tissue that supplied the energy was more easily exhausted than it used to be.”

* * *

In commenting on the Report of the Inland Revenue Commissioners, which has just been issued, the Daily News says : “The income reviewed by the department is estimated at over nine hundred and twelve millions. That is the share of the national income which passes almost entirely to the upper and middle classes in the form of rent, salaries, and profit on businesses. It is a figure continuously leaping upwards. In the changes of ten years the value of English land and houses has advanced by 21 per cent.; the profits of business concerns have increased by 41 per cent.; the salaries of Government, Corporation, and other public company officials increased by the enormous proportion of 67 per cent.”

* * *

And it is during this ten years that the unemployed problem has reached an intensity never known before; that Trade Unions and Friendly Societies have been faced with an enormous strain upon their Funds owing to the increasing inability of even the “thrifty” members of the working class to find employment and to keep in good health ; that the average amount per depositor in the Post Office and Trustee Savings Bank has, since 1899, fallen every year. Truly, the master class is getting richer and the working class is getting poorer.

* * *

There were 121,979 persons in England and Wales certified as insane and under care on January 1st, 1906, being 2,150 in excess of the figures recorded on the corresponding day of 1905.

* * *

On January 1st, 1906, according to a Parliamentary paper issued by the Local Government Board, there were 926,741 paupers in England and Wales, equal to one in 37 of the population. The proportion in London was 1 in 32. The insane paupers have increased from 49,986 in 1872 to 108,629 in 1906.

* * *

It is claimed that the rate of able-bodied paupers per thousand of the population has decreased, their place having been taken by those described as “not able-bodied.” This probably means that the working class, in increasing numbers, are being physically and mentally incapacitated.

* * *

At a meeting of South Wales steel makers at Swansea on September 2nd it was decided to form an association to be known as the South Wales Siemens Steel Association, having for its object the protection of makers’ interests and regulation of trade. Arrangements were made whereby funds will be deposited to place the new association on a proper basis. The chairman is Mr. H. Eccles (Britton Ferry), the vice-chairman Mr. F. Gilbertson (Pontardawe), and the secretary Mr. R. W. Evans (Llanelly).

* * *

According to a return recently issued from the Department of Labour and Commerce, Washington, the United States Consul at Lille (Mr. C. J. King) describes a new invention for spinning flax and flax waste. Mr. King says the process, which is one recently patented by Mr. Arthur Guillemaud, tends to simplify the present method by applying the system of spinning cotton to flax. It consists in replacing the high cumbersome machinery now necessary in flax spinning by low self-acting reels, such as are employed in cotton spinning. The machinery differs little in appearance from the cotton frames, being simply adapted to the exigencies of the flax fibre. The bobbins are set at the back, the yarn running off through the watering tank (for wet spinning) placed between the bobbins and cylinders. As the yarn, passes through the cylinder the water is pressed out into a canal directly under the lower cylinders. The yarn then runs off perfectly dry to the reels, and, owing to the long self-revolutions, a better and smoother yarn is the result. The new method decreases the general expenses and saves labour, and the air of the rooms is less infected, and the floors are changed from stagnant pools into dry and sanitary places. Mr. King adds that the new method should prove of considerable value in the development of the linen industry.

J. Kay

Rowton Houses (1957)

From the February 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here the soul finds poppy-juice to ease and glad her,

   And the radiant lotus-flower of royal slumber.

Surely this cemented stair's a golden ladder

    Angel-cohorts, bearing lilies, climb and cumber . . . 

     (Rowton House Rhymes.)

Dirty washing never flapped more disconsolately on a line than these men. They hang over the barrier at the Broadway’s edge watching the traffic pass, stamping their feet among muddy newspapers. The neon lights flick on and off, touching their flesh first red and then green. They stare at the bright shop windows and at the painted faces borne perilously past on stiletto heels. Spasmodically, they drift off home to bed. For them, and for a few thousand like them, that means to the local Rowton House.

To most people, the term “Rowton House” evokes an image of a verminous flop-house where dead-beats and desperadoes rub shoulders, paying a copper or two for a couple of feet of rope under the armpits (has anyone ever slept like that?) The Houses are the butt of many a music-hall joker and the subject of much prejudice; few employers would take on a cashier who gave the local Rowton House as his address and it has been known for a mother hearing that her son was living at a House, to storm hotfoot from the provinces to take her boy away from such supposedly evil surroundings. Yet it is a fact that if such impressions ever find their way into print, a sharp solicitor’s letter is enough to extract a public withdrawal; once the B.B.C. had to climb down and apologise after a comedian’s crack about Rowton Houses in the programme “Palace of Varieties.”

So it seems that Rowton Houses are not as bad as most people think them to be. What is the truth of the matter? What are they like, what type of person uses them and what goes on inside them? And how did they come about?

Light-hearted Aristocrat

The founding of Rowton Houses was the work of Montagu William Lowry-Corry, who was a light-hearted 19th Century aristocrat, a favourite of Disraeli, who caught the famous man’s attention by livening up a stodgy party at Raby Castle. Corry became Disraeli’s private secretary and served unflaggingly through all the years of his chief’s prominence as Chancellor of the Exchequer and later as Prime Minister. When in 1875 Disraeli persuaded the Cabinet to try for a loan from Rothschild to buy a substantial interest in the Suez Canal Company, it was Corry who ran the errand from Downing Street to get the banker’s approval. Later, when Disraeli had relinquished power and was a pitiful figure, it was usually Corry’s arm he was seen to be leaning on in public. Corry got his reward in 1880 when he became the first and last Baron Rowton. When Disraeli died (with Rowton; of course, at his bedside), he left all his papers and letters to his secretary’s discretion.

Rowton conceived the idea of his Houses in the early 1890’s after the investigations into common lodging houses which he undertook as a trustee of the Guinness Fund. At that time the lodging houses of London were little better than the sort of place which Dickens described in Bleak House. The Lodging House Bill of 1851 had been drafted to stamp out the kip-houses where, it was said, the bugs could be scraped up by the handful and the only sanitary arrangements were communal buckets placed one to a room; a room which could hold anything up to 60 people. But there were many convenient loopholes in the Bill and it is certain that 40 years on there were still some unsavoury establishments for Rowton’s investigations. The aristocrat also made it his business to approach the Embankment sleepers—one story tells of him leaving the House of Lords of an evening and spending the best part of the night talking with the Thames-side down and outs. It was then that Rowton decided on his scheme to build cheap working men's hotels, where at prices they could afford, the homeless of London would find a clean bed, food and somewhere to sit of an evening. At the same time, the venture had to yield a return on the money invested in it; Rowton’s slogan was said to be “ Philanthropy—at five per cent.”

First Night

Brushing aside the warnings of his friends, Rowton put £30,000 of his own money into the building of the first House at Vauxhall. This was opened on the very last day of 1892, when only 77 men paid their sixpence for a night's lodging. Over 400 beds were left empty and the first day's takings in the catering department came to about 15s. 10½d. The building had been designed so that in the event of failure it could easily be converted and sold as a warehouse and it seemed that this would have to be, but business became brisker; in the first month over 200 beds were taken nightly and soon the 400 mark was passed. In 1894, a company, Rowton Houses Ltd., was formed with a capital of £75,000, of which £30,000 was given to Rowton in return for the money he had invested in the Vauxhall experiment. At the company's first annual meeting it was reported that the House had been full to capacity on nearly every night and a comfortable dividend of four per cent. was declared. Other, ’Rowton Houses were subsequently built at King’s Cross, Elephant and Castle, Hammersmith, Whitechapel, and Camden Town, each in densely populated areas, within easy reach of the principal transport termini and centres of employment in the markets, docks and railway goods depots.

The Houses have always been an interesting barometer of the prevailing economic weather; for instance during the slump of the thirties, there was a decrease in the number of beds booked by the week and a striking increase in reservations on the days when the dole was paid at the local employment bureau. At that time at least five doctors and nine journalists were resident at Rowton Houses, touching elbows with men whose living depended on a charity ticket. When the 1931 dole was reduced to 15/3d., the Houses cut their prices so that a man could live there (just about) on the money. Their budget allowed for nothing apart from food and lodging; not surprisingly, many men took to a bench on the Embankment rather than face a tobacco-less existence. During the two World Wars the Houses were variously used as barracks, refugee centres and unofficial air-raid shelters.

Rowton Houses To-day

Rowton Houses Ltd. is to-day a solidly flourishing £505,000 capital company, with assets of some £650,000 and a dividend steadily at about 8 per cent. It is not a charitable institution or a trust and has no connection with any religious organisation; business, pure and simple, is its line. “Although we are undoubtedly doing a good work,” said a one-time director of the company, “there is nothing of patronage or philanthropy about it.” The Houses never spend money on public advertisements, yet something like 98 per cent, of the 5,000-odd available beds are filled each night; how many hoteliers would like to be able to make a similar claim? The company has its own laundry and maintenance staff and supplies a barbering and cobbling service in the Houses. Charges have recently been increased from 2/6d. to 3/- a night (in 1910 it was 9d.). It is here that the profit is made— although the catering department pulled in nearly £130,000 during 1955, there is little profit in this side of the business. Post-war full employment has made its mark, in the Houses which now offer special private rooms, instead of cubicles, at 35/- a week. A dinner of soup, steak pudding with potatoes, followed by plum tart and custard, costs 2/8d. (in 1910 again, it would have set you back by 7d.)—and the House dining rooms are open to non-residents.

What are the Houses like? From the outside they are imposing, barrack-like buildings with their smooth red-brick and small windows. Their impressive size—for example at Hammersmith—is often blanketed by the buildings which have sprung up around them. Inside, overwhelming impressions are of the white and chocolate glazed bricks which are everywhere in all the Houses, the smell of cheap tobacco, the men who are openly down on their luck and looking for something cheap and quick, men who are existing on their wits (on one afternoon visit, nearly every other lodger seemed to be studying a greyhound race card). Men stand aimlessly in the entrance hall, despite stern notices asking them not to. The floors are stone or wood and there are no soft §eats— all the furniture is in wood, mostly with iron standards. The dining rooms and kitchens are unfailingly clean, with much up-to-date equipment. There is a billiards room (always well full of an evening), writing room and lecture room—now, of course, with television installed—in each House. For some reason, draughts is a passion of Rowton House residents; regular demonstrations take place, which give men the chance to show off their considerable skill at the game; the 1948 English champion was a Rowton House regular. All the Houses have their permanent lodgers—some of them have been booking the same cubicle, week after week, for over a quarter of a century. 

Queer Types

Because Rowton Houses offer such cheap accommodation, we can expect them to attract some poor types. Sure enough, there are descriptions of wanted men in the reception desks, alongside the file of past residents who are now banned because they fought or stole or carried lice or made a mess in their rooms. No one is allowed to book in unless he produces some evidence of identification, which is checked against these files. Occasionally, gangs form and make a nuisance of themselves until the management can weed them out. The reception staff show all the signs of being case-hardened towards people who, after all, are their clients. And among the residents are the simply queer cases: the man who wore two jackets (and this on a stuffy evening).

Apart from these, the Houses are used a lot by young men who have left home to follow a job—the list of letters awaiting collection reveals the number of Irishmen and foreigners in residence. For these the Houses are not a bad proposition; they are usually earning a wage on which they can afford to get out in the evening, when the glazed bricks and old men’s pipes are by no means at their most attractive. It is a different matter for the old ones, who make up a good part of Rowton Houses’ customers. These are the men who have no family to care about them, whose life has been reduced to the tightrope act of living on a retirement pension. For them, apart from the cheapness, the Houses offer the attraction of living in the company of fellow human beings instead of eking out their last days in a lonely room. Here is one of the tragedies of post-war conditions; the lot of old people is to-day as precarious as it has ever been—indeed, some say that it is worse since the Welfare State boys took over the running of British Capitalism. Evidence of the tragedy can be seen in the Rowton Houses, in the old men sitting out the long evenings on the hard wooden seats, staring with patient eyes at the walls, waiting for the next meal, for bedtime, waiting in the end to die.

None is Secure

The Houses are fond of describing themselves as working men’s hotels—one of their officials actually went so far as to use the term “residential Club.” (A brochure says “Up to London? Stay at Rowton House”). Of course, all this is to rather stretch the meaning of words; no Rowton House lodger is ever called "sir” by the staff and nobody gets a hand with his luggage when he arrives. We can say that the Houses are not dirty or verminous, nor are they the stamping grounds of footpads and cut-purses. The most respectable among us could spend a night in them without fear. Because of this, a first inspection can give a strongly favourable impression; but that is only because one goes there expecting something much worse. In cold fact, they are places where men put up when they are too poor to have an independent home. The problem of not being able to afford the good—and some of the not so good—things in life is the bugbear of the great majority of us in the Capitalist world, where everything has its price and the amount we can buy is restricted by the narrowness of our wage packet. Some of us may live in a semi-detached in Accacia Avenue: but if some day we should be unable to work because there is a slump or because we have suffered an accident or have grown old then we could easily become clients of Rowton Houses. It is poverty which has been filling the places for over 50 years and will go on filling them as long as Capitalism lasts. Nobody is secure. The next time we see someone shuffling through the doorway of a Rowton House we may all reflect that there, but for the grace of something-or-other, go we.

Ivan.

The Rear View: KISS (2020)

The Rear View Column from the October 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

KISS

‘The traditional class war has been waged between wage-earners (who sell their labor) and their employers (owners of capital and the means of production). These classes have been assigned various names (proletariat, bourgeoisie, capitalists, etc.) but these broad class definitions don’t describe all the class conflicts emerging in the modern U.S. economy…. Six years ago I took a stab at defining America’s Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy (April 29, 2014), to which I would now add a tenth class, gig economy precariat, …’ (charleshughsmith.blogspot.com, 27 August). 

We should clarify that workers sell labour power, and capitalists extract surplus value. Smith’s ten ‘classes’ – the Deep State, Oligarchs, New Nobility, Upper Caste, State Nomenklatura, Middle Class, Working Poor, State Dependents, Mobile Creatives and Gig Economy Precariat – add further confusion. All people are either workers or they are capitalists and if they are in the former class they are robbed and they are relatively poor and they have a world to win, if they are in the latter class they are exploiters and they are relatively rich and the world is theirs, literally: ‘Study Shows Richest 0.00025% Owns More Wealth Than Bottom 150 Million Americans’ (Common Dreams, 10 February, 2019) and every 38 seconds a US citizen dies of poverty and poverty-related social conditions. Warren Buffett, whose 82 billion dollar fortune makes him the 6th richest person on Earth, once stated: ‘there’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’ Winning worldwide.

Pie in the sky

‘…Anna Howard Shaw, an American Methodist pastor and suffragette, became the first clergywoman to preach in Sweden. That was in 1911, at an international women’s suffrage conference, and long before women could be ordained in the Church of Sweden, in 1958’ (yahoo.com, 23 August). Today female priests there outnumber men, but earn less: ‘…around 2,200 kronor (213 euros, $253) less a month than their male counterparts…’ It should not be imagined that the mundane campaign for equal pay is new – it was , for example, commented on in The Socialist Standard of December 1904. And according to a report from 2017, women will have to wait 217 years for wage equality! Yet believers are in conflict over the status quo. Consider, ‘Christian fundamentalist Stacey Shiflett insisted that Trump was sent by God himself to govern the U.S..’ (alternet.org, October 21, 2019) v. ‘Right now, in America with this movement there is love and truth and justice breathing, the American people are resisting the suffocation and resisting the death. And thank God it is happening’ (alternet.org, June 19). Neither campaigns for wage equality or to abolish religion will end exploitation. The supreme aim of the workers must be their emancipation from wage-slavery, and the fight against superstition is but one phase of this great fight. But it must never be forgotten that since religion is always used as a weapon by the ruling class against the workers, no socialist in the struggle for working class emancipation can honestly avoid the religious conflict.

Priests, police and politicians

The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, quoted above in opposition to the Trump-supporting Christian, is president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival. With regard to the killing of George Floyd, he ‘…experienced a range of feelings. Derek Chauvin, that white police officer, the way he posed was something I have seen a hundred times — it was how people pose over dead animals’ (op. cit.). Barber blames the President: ‘Trump is fundamentally against the things that would help all Americans. Trump may have started talking about Latinos and Mexicans being rapists, but he will not even protect the country from COVID-19 which is killing everybody.’ If Trump is removed next month, it will be business as usual: the capitalist system which robs, slaughters and degrades will continue. To be clear, police are workers. They, like the vast majority of society, need to work in order to live. Yes, they have been used to break strikes but some have used the strike weapon themselves. The nature of their work does not exclude them from other members of their class. This is also true of those who form the vast bulk of the military. Should they leave, these workers need to find employment elsewhere, in order to support themselves, one of many problems not experienced by the 1 percent.

The chutzpah of philanthropy

 ‘Li Lu says he walked into a lecture Buffett was giving years ago at Columbia University and “…was instantaneously taken by him. What he basically taught me in that course was that somebody with high moral principles and integrity can make a lot of money off the market by being wise and smart and moral,” Lu says. …Says author Miles: “He’s transformed my life personally, more than anyone else in terms of modeling good behavior and having fun. He’s made me a better person, made me rethink my own philanthropy, in terms of helping those who through no fault of their own were born on the wrong side of the track” (finance.yahoo.com, 29 August). The capitalist class is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, and makes a deal with the poor saying: ‘If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this I require, this I purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary!’ (Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844). Such chutzpah – the capitalists suck out our very life-blood and then place themselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when they give back to us a mere fraction of the wealth generated by our class.

Working hard (2020)

Book Review from the October 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

What’s Wrong With Work? by Lynne Pettinger (Policy Press ￡12.99.)

As the author says on the first page, a book with a title like this is an invitation to grumble or to comment that it’s going to be a long book. In fact it is of interest more for some of the points that are made than for any overall argument.

One important theme is the centrality of informal work, which is difficult to define but essentially applies to employment not covered by national legislation or entitlement to benefits such as paid annual leave or sick leave. According to the International Labour Organization, two billion people (just over sixty percent of global work activity) are in informal work, and this figure rises to ninety percent in developing countries, where a substantially greater percentage of women than men are informally employed. What might be called standard contracts of work are becoming rarer, with seasonal work, on-call work and zero-hours contracts being more common, even if they do not count as informal work.

The book pre-dates the move to working from home as a result of coronavirus, but still has quite a bit to say on homeworking, the ‘hidden workforce’ mainly consisting of women. Further, work can be not just hidden but invisible, as with cleaners who work when offices are otherwise closed. Cheap clothes are made by invisible workers, as nobody would supposedly buy goods made in such dire conditions if the workers were really visible.

Care work is also often hidden, taking place in people’s homes. It is usually seen as low-status and low-skilled, partly because it has generally been associated with women. Yet its importance is undeniable in terms of the health and wellbeing of those cared for. Working on and with human bodies emphasises the crucial role of connections and relations between people.

Green jobs can allegedly be supported by all sides, from government policy-makers and employers to unions and community groups. But in practice many ‘green jobs’ are dirty and dangerous, such as recycling. The manufacture of solar panels relies on processed metal ores and can be damaging to both the environment and the workers who make them.

Researchers often discuss the recent increase in informal work and the rise of the gig economy and of precarity. But Pettinger notes that ‘Informal work is globally and historically the most common form of work’. So-called full employment is really an exception, an ideal applying in western Europe from the 1950s to the 1970s, connected to the notion of a male breadwinner. Not that even then it meant there was no unemployment.

Paul Bennett

Cooking the Books: A salaried economy, no thanks (2009)

The Cooking the Books column from the September 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

“ From the hawkers, rickshaw drivers and shoe shiners on the streets of downtown Jakarta to the cash-in-hand car mechanics, cleaners and nannies in the smart neighbourhoods of London, the underground economy is booming”, said the Times (24 April) commenting on a report that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had just published. Entitled Is Informal Normal?, the report estimated, according the Times, that in the world “a record 1.8 billion workers are employed in underground activities, compared with 1.2 billion in the formal sector”.

Actually, “underground activities” is inaccurate. The term preferred by the OECD is “informal” by which they mean buying and selling activities that are not declared to the tax or social security authorities. In developed capitalists such undeclared economic activities are “underground” but are only marginal. In other parts of the world, however, – India, Indonesia, most of Latin America, Asia and Africa in fact – they amount to over 50 percent. This is mainly because they don’t have to be declared. In a chapter on “Informal Employment and Promoting the Transition to a Salaried Economy” an earlier OECD report explained:

“In less-developed non-OECD countries, statistical estimates usually include purely informal work, which is unregistered but not hidden because there is no effective requirement for it to be declared. Formal employment with payment of tax and social security contributions becomes an ‘island’ in a large ‘sea’ of informal work. The formal sector may still account for over 50% of GDP – due to its higher relative productivity – suggesting that the benefits from a longer-term transition to a salaried economy through progressive expansion of the sector can be large” (Link).

A “salaried economy”? As one where most paid work is done by people paid a wage by an employer to do it, it’s another name for a capitalist economy since capitalism is based, precisely, on waged labour. The rickshaw drivers and shoe-shiners of Jakarta are not wage-workers. They are workers in that they work and provide a use-value, for which they are paid. But what they get from selling their service is only enough to allow them to cover the costs of being able to keep on working. They don’t produce a surplus over and above this and so don’t contribute anything towards economic development, i.e. capital accumulation.

What difference would it make if instead of selling their service directly to the customers, they were to become employees of a rickshaw or a shoe shining company? They would still be doing exactly the same work as before and getting more or less the same money. The difference is that employers are not philanthropists. They only employ someone if there’s something in it for them – if they can end up with more money than they had invested in buying the materials and hiring workers. In other words, if they made a profit on their capital.

Marx explained that the source of this profit is the unpaid labour of the employees; they not only transfer the value of their own upkeep to the product but also a further amount for which they are not paid and which belongs to the employer. This extra value is new value, most of which is accumulated as new capital. The OECD wants to turn rickshaw drivers, shoe shiners and the like in countries where informal work is currently high into salaried wage-slaves because this is what the capitalist development they favour involves. As socialists, we stand for the “Abolition of the Salaried Economy”.

Editorial: Why Pray? (1905)

Editorial from the August 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

“There is a lamentable increase in the number of those who are only casually employed and the difficulty is increasing every year for elderly and even middle-aged men to obtain work. God help the labouring man when he gets old.”

Thus Mr. Thomas Holmes, one of the best known of police court missionaries. But for that matter God help the labouring man when he is young. And God help the labouring man’s wife and the labouring man’s children whether the labouring man be young or old. If God can help he may as well help all who require it, and if abject want justifies helpful intervention, then many a million of the working-class of any and all ages of this and other countries have qualified.

So we might pray if prayers could avail. But Mr Holmes has been appealing to his God for 21 years. Before him countless multitudes raised their voices in supplicatory chorus to the same supposititious personage in the same nebulous region. “God help all poor folk” they cried but God was deaf, or God was dumb or God was impotent for no response came and has not to this day. So that the poor have tired of appealing and those only pray who desire a cheap salve for their souls and an easy road from a difficult position, or those who, sufficiently educated to be conscious of their helplessness, are not sufficiently educated to have severed themselves from beliefs of fetiches born in the childhood of the world.

We are concerned that all poor folk should know why they are poor so that they may apply the remedy for their poverty which collectively they have the power to do. And the first thing they will appreciate in the day when they understand is, that neither gods nor devils nor heavens nor hells can help them into their own ; that upon themselves and themselves alone must they rely for any change they may desire in the poverty that environs them, that eats into their lives and against which they protest and sometimes actively rebel. They will understand then that prayers will not prevail against the robbery of which they are the victims ; they will understand that they must work out their own salvation and achieve their own emancipation. Mr. Holmes must pray if he will. We know a more excellent way.

Anti-capitalism or just anti-capitalists? (2001)

Book Review from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Naomi Klein’s book No Logo has been widely proclaimed as a manifesto for the anti-capitalist movement. Klein herself disclaims any notion that she has written a manifesto, but the book is still well worth examining. It deals with the development of enormous global corporations and some of the resistance to this; the title reflects a general anti-corporate attitude.

It is common to observe that all high streets look very much the same nowadays, with Next, Virgin, Pizza Hut and McDonalds being found more or less everywhere, and not just in the UK. This illustrates the rise of the brand or superbrand, which is constituted by an image or a logo much more than just a range of products. Marketing gurus see the brand as crucial – companies should create a brand, not just sell a product. For instance, John Grant’s The New Marketing Manifesto argues that a brand is “a popular idea or set of ideas that people live by”. Brands “add value to people’s lives”, and are the new traditions (now that older traditions such as a sense of community have decayed). This kind of celebration of brands shows an uncritical acceptance of capitalism’s values.

In contrast, Klein looks behind the logo and the label to expose the darker side of branding. The logo has expanded in size and importance with items of clothing just being empty carriers for the brand. She quotes the boss of Nike:

“For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.”

Companies such as Nike, Gap, McDonalds, Disney and Starbucks are not simply multinational corporations (which would mean they have different brands and products in different countries), but are truly global corporations (with the same brands and marketing wherever they operate). Nike in particular has emerged as a real superbrand: its swoosh logo is an immensely popular tattoo in the US, among both customers and workers. Imagine flaunting your status as a wage slave by having your employer’s logo tattooed on your leg. Some American teenagers are quoted as saying that Nike is more important to them than their girlfriend is.

One theme of No Logo is the way in which advertising, sponsorship and the market have expanded into areas of life which were previously free of them, thus resulting in the loss of what Klein calls “unmarketed space”. A blatant instance of this is in schools, where companies sponsor lessons and TV programmes and all manner of equipment. Sponsorship of sporting and cultural events is now far wider than it has ever been.

But perhaps the biggest effect of the growth of the top brands is on employment. Increasingly, such companies are moving production to developing countries, especially in East and South-East Asia, in pursuit of cheap labour. Countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, China and the Phillipines have been happy to provide so-called free-trade zones or export-processing zones, with tax breaks for companies and no right to union organization for workers, as a means ot attracting the global corporations. Sub-contractors are used, so that, when questioned about wages and working conditions, Nike, Reebok and so on can reply that they do not actually employ anyone in Indonesia or wherever. Their production becomes far more flexible, as they don’t need to own land or factories, and can respond more easily to fluctuations in demand. They will also happily move prodution ftom one developing country to another in pursuit of a cheaper and more docile workforce. Young workers are often drawn into these zones with promises of good pay, only to find appalling wages, long hours, dangerous conditions, and tyrannical bosses, who may lock workers up if they refuse to do overtime. Some of the descriptions are reminiscent of nothing so much as Engels’ accounts in Condition o/ the Working Class in England in 1844—sweatshop conditions have just been exported to the “Third World”.

Companies such as British Airways and Debenhams have relocated much of their call centre work to India, where wages are a fifth of the UK level. The workers are given crash courses in British culture, everything from soaps to football, so they can chat knowledgeably with the callers, who don’t suspect that they are speaking to someone in Delhi or Bombay

However, while workers in Indonesia or Vietnam can make clothes, shoes or whatever, they cannot sell them in North America or Western Europe. Here, the global corporations have led the way in the notorious Mcjobs – part-time or temporary work often on near-minimum wages. In coffee bars such as Starbucks, workers may have to work two or three shifts a day, to coincide with the busy periods. This gives the company the flexibility to cope with fluctuations in business without having to pay people to just stand around, but for staff it is, to say the least, extremely disruptive. In other companies, Microsoft for instance, jobs are contracted out to agencies who (surprise!) pay far lower wages. Again, this boosts flexibility and the ability to respond to booms and slumps in demand, avoiding such problems as redundancy pay. Many “permatemps” have been employed in this way for years, without gaining proper employee rights.

This, then, is the picture that Klein presents, of a world increasingly dominated by global corporations and their cultural and economic impact, where wotkers slave away in sweat shops for a pittance with little ability to fight back, and where temporary jobs hold sway. Profits soar, while the workers suffer.

The final section of No Logo deals with various kinds of opposition and resistance to the superbrands and the kind of society they represent. This can range from the fun but ineffectual – such as parodying advertisements or throwing custard pies at Bill Gates – to to the more substantive responses of Reclaim The Streets and the wider ‘anti-capitalist’ movement. Such activity Klein describes as “laying the foundations for the first truly international people’s movement”. Here are some examples:

• Exposing sweatshop and child labour, including school pupils discovering who made their uniforms
• Local councils entering into selective purchasing agreements, and refusing to buy from companies that (for instance) trade with Burma
• Secondary boycotts against cornpanics that supply other companies rather than the public directly
• Campaigns such as that against Shell in Nigeria
• Klein is well aware of the limitations of brand-based politics, e.g. that boycotts can be counter-productive and that such campaigns tend to miss the broader economic context. Her argument, though, is that “you’ve got to start somewhere”, so you might as well start with aiming your attacks at one big corporation, normally Nike.

However, the idea of “starting somewhere” naturally implies going on to address other issues in the fullness of time, and it’s here that Klein’s ideas become mundane and just plain disappointing For instance, she advocates enforcement of existing ILO treaties, and that employment codes of practice be drafted by the workers themselves rather than by the corporations. All this of course assumes the continued existence of employers and employed, and offers no vision of the ending of class division.

Global capitalism is not a new creature, it is just capitalism writ large and even nastier. A return to pre-global capitalism would be no altetnative, even if it were practical. But it should now be clear beyond dispute that national-based solutions to humanity’s problems are pointless, and that a world movement, leading to world socialism is urgently needed.

Paul Bennett

Blogger's Notes:

Though not listed in the contents of the August 2001 Socialist Standard as a book review let's be honest, to all intents and purposes, this is a book review. No Logo was also reviewed in the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard by Cyril Evans.

At the Bottom of the Heap (2006)

From the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The chairman of the Bench had wanted to send Chu Hua to prison, so she had been let out of the dock to speak to the duty solicitor in case he could persuade the magistrates to a less vengeful sentence. Now she sat squirming downwards and backwards into her chair, her dull eyes flickering in fear, clutching her threadbare jacket against the chill of the interview room. She did not look like a criminal who threatened to undermine what all right-thinking people – like magistrates – uphold as the basis of civilised society. It was not that she had cloned credit cards, nor dealt in controlled drugs. She had not sexually abused any children, nor deceived impoverished young women in Eastern Europe into coming here only to find that the well paid jobs they had been promised were really as enslaved prostitutes. She had not murdered anyone, nor robbed a bank at the point of a gun. “So why did you” asked the solicitor, “try to sell those counterfeit DVDs?”

It was sad story, eked out with the help of the interpreter. Chu Hua was born in a remote village in North China; the interpreter knew of the area, that it was deeply impoverished, obviously not borne up by the flood of supposed prosperity of supposed “socialist” China. Chu Hua’s parents tried to provide for their family from what little they produced in their vegetable garden. They could not afford to send the children to school so Chu Hua was scantily educated and illiterate, with no prospects of improving in that village. In 2001 she came to England as an asylum seeker, on the grounds that she was a member of the Fa Lung Kung cult. Her application was refused and now she has to report each month to the Home Office Immigration Service, and she is not allowed to take employment or apply for benefit. Sometimes she gets cash-in-hand work as a cleaner but this lasts for only a week or so because she is scared of being reported for benefit fraud. She is reduced to relying on friends and other contacts for food and somewhere to live, sleeping on floors in a roomful of other people. But bad as this is she thinks it is better than her former life in China.

Cult

On the face of it, the Fa Lung Kung seems to do little more than practise slow, hypnotic, Tai-Chi like meditation exercises – like those hardy early morning groups in many an English park. The problem in China was that it developed into a hugely popular movement with a membership large enough, and ardent enough, for the government to outlaw it as a destabilising influence. At some point it wandered beyond meditation, claiming that its followers can see through a “third eye” which protects them and can cure them of diseases. Such preoccupations, on a large scale, can be addictive enough to affect workers’ disciplined acceptance of their role as wage slaves. A ruling class will not be happy to allow too much brainwashing which does not promote their own power and influence over society. At times Fa Lung Kung has been tolerated in China (although it was banned under Mao Zedong’s regime as unhealthy and superstitious) but in recent years there has been a fierce crackdown in which the cult’s followers lost their jobs or were sent to prison where they were beaten or even killed. As might be expected, the movement spawned a considerable media industry and not a few con artists to exploit anyone vulnerable to claims about mystical powers of mental adjustment to social stress. Even so the mere fact of membership of the cult was accepted in the United States as justification for asylum; as Chu Hua soon found out, that did not apply in this country.

So she spends most of her days wandering along the local High Street and it was there, in an indoor market, that a man who must have noticed her vulnerability suggested that she could earn a little money by helping him sell some DVDs. It was not long before the police saw her – and recognised her as someone who had been arrested twice before for the same offence. Her two previous appearances in Court had resulted in her being ordered to do Community Service, which she had completed happily as it was better than the High Street and kept her occupied, scrubbing off graffiti or cleaning school playgrounds. She must have wondered why she was not allowed to do the same kind of work for a wage. But now this was her third such offence in a short period and the Court was running out of patience with her.

Pirates

The recent explosion in the production and sale of pirated DVDs has alarmed the industry, which sees it as a threat to its profits. The biggest operator in this field is HMV, which also trades in CDs and owns the Waterstones booksellers. During the last complete year, HMV recorded a pre-tax profit of ú136.2 million – up by 9.9 percent on the previous year. Not all of this, of course, came from the sale of DVDs; Waterstones is notorious for its ruthless cost cutting war against independent booksellers and makes huge profits from best-sellers like the Harry Potter books. But DVDs are extremely important to HMV’s profits; while the group’s underlying sales were down by 4 percent during the last year the sale of DVDs went up, and with it HMV’s share of the market for them, of which the group claims to have “the lion’s share”. So they are bound to take any threat to their pre-eminent position seriously – and that does not mean they worry about a few school-age computer wizards downloading and writing their own, illegal, copies of DVDs to share with their mates.

The copyright laws, with their harsh penalties, are there to aid HMV in their war against the pirates. One local authority recently decided that pirated DVDs and CDs represented so urgent a threat to their community that they formed an alliance with the local police to hunt down the pirates and close down their factories. On one gloriously successful day for the partnership the local plods and council penpushers seized £30,000 worth of illegal DVDs and CDs from one business, then a few days later went to the place again and took possession of another £20,000 worth. During the past year they have “visited” more than 90 premises, seized over 150,000 items, closed down one DVD factory and launched several prosecutions. These achievements are publicised by the council with such pride that some of their citizens may overlook the fact that they do not have an exactly successful record when it comes to their other responsibilities. Not long ago this council was assessed, in terms of the services it supplies to vulnerable people such as the homeless, the elderly or children in need, as one of the worst in London, to the extent that they were under threat of being taken over by a Whitehall hit squad.

Priorities

But of course that council was utterly correct in its priorities because the realisation of a profit through the orderly, legally controlled process of production for sale must take precedence over any human need. It is the priority of capitalism and when all is said and done it is what people like councillors and MPs are elected for – at least as things are for the present. If we had a society with a different priority wealth would be turned out to meet human needs, so that all people would have unfettered access to it, which would be enough to give any self-respecting councillor a seizure. It would be the end of the social arrangements which made it imperative for Chu Hua to come all that way across the world although when she got here it was made plain to her that she was not welcome. And now she is a threat to a mighty corporation like HMV.

In any event Chu Hua’s fears overcame her; she took her chance to leave the Court and did not come back. Huffing and puffing, the chairman was openly pleased to have his opinion of her so quickly vindicated and readily agreed to the prosecutor’s request for a warrant for her arrest. If she comes up in Court again she will have yet another charge – Failing to Surrender – against her. She is out there somewhere, scraping along somehow, vulnerable to a host of predators. We can only hope she survives.

Ivan