The queer side. (1911)

From the March 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under a capitalist regime one is either exploiter or exploited ; there is ever a gulf between the two sections of society, and that gulf widens as the system developes. The affairs of every-day life give the lie to those who, from ignorance or interest, promulgate the idea of the identity of interest between robber and robbed.

* * *

“Before an audience of 10,000 sightseers and guarded by a band of 300 police, Lord Deceis has been married to Miss V. Gould, heiress of Mr. G. Gould . . Lord Deceis is 45 years of age, his bride 18. . . A cake costing £200 was imported for the purpose from Scotland. . . . The bride wore a dress of white satin embroidered with silver . . and a rope of diamonds.”

* * *

“That the worst of slums may exist even in fashionable Folkestone was proved at an inquest on the body of an old woman, of 72 named Mary Sellars. The evidence proved that she died under the most terrible conditions of suffering and neglect. ‘In a small attic 8 ft. x 10 ft., which contained as furniture an iron bedstead, an old chair and a pail,’ said the coroner’s officer, ‘he found the deceased, in the midst of the squalor, lying naked save for the protection of a pair of trousers, an old skirt and a coat thrown over her.’ The deceased had suffered from pleurisy and peritonitis, and had not had any food for hours before death.

“The husband was a corporation labourer earning 18s. a week. The coroner censured him severely, and the jury returned a verdict that ‘Death was due to natural causes.’ ”

* * *

The above cuttings are from the same issue of Reynold’s Newspaper (12.2.11). The first refers to a marriage of members of the capitalist class—people who have never performed a necessary function in the production of the wealth they waste. The latter records the death of one of the exploited—a member of the class that produce the wealth that loafers such as Lord Deceis may roam the world in luxury and comfort, and that the daughters of millionaires may purchase titles.

Such is the evidence of the “identity of interest.” Wealth produced by one class whose members starve, and owned by another class whose members squander.

* * *

“Death was due to natural causes.” It is, of course, natural for a person to die under such conditions, but are the conditions natural ?

It was natural for a policeman to die after receiving a bullet in a vital part, but the twelve “good men and true” returned a different verdict. But then the policeman was a defender of private property, while the woman was only a worn-out toiler. More evidence of the “identity of interest.”

* * *

A writer in the same paper says “Pauperism is the question of the hour. . . The public mind is aroused to the importance of the subject and measures heroic are advocated in order to strike at the root of the evil.” He also quotes Dr. Chalmers as having said “It is thus, then, by a sort of festering and spreading operation, the sphere of destitution is constantly widening in every parish where the benevolence of love has been superseded by the benevolence of law. The following might be given as an example of the benevolence of love.

* * *

The Evening Times, reporting an interview with a Mr. Mumford, chairman of the Paddington Works Committee, quoted that gentleman as follows :

“These figures might be given as an approximate estimate of the numbers of willing to work “out of works” in the building trade :

Painters 3,823

Plasterers 297

Bricklayers 847

Carpenters 597

Navvies 1,269

Labourers 5,254

“It is a simple proposition in the economy of labour to suggest that housewives get their houses in order early this season in order to give work to the painter and others, and to save the extra money they will have to pay when the men are in demand for the Coronation week.”

* * *

The usual form of “benevolence.” Get the work done now, primarily in the interest of the poor unemployed workman, but incidentally—quite incidentally of course—to save money. That means that the same amount of work will be spread over a longer period at a reduced cost. It means that, in the long run, less wages will be paid. That appears to me to be a good method of increasing poverty—but then, of course, the more poverty there is the greater scope for the “benevolence of love,” for this particular sentiment, like appetite, “glows by what it feeds on.”

* * *

The other brand of benevolence can be witnessed in the spectacle of the kind Liberal Government endeavouring to persuade the aged pauper to leave the workhouse and starve outside on five bob a week. According to a writer in the London Quarterly Review, the cost of London indoor paupers, including all charges, amounts to £34 15s. 11¾d. per head per annum. The benevolence of the law offers them £13, and that fierce democrat, Lloyd George, swells his manly buzzum and talks about “sweeping poverty from every hearth.”

* * *

The fringe of the evil is not touched by such reform, much less does it “strike at the root.” The cause, as Lloyd George admits, “lies deep down in the social system,” where also that antagonism of interest finds its root—in the ownership by a class of the means of life. It is indeed questionable whether George & Co. could do anything if they desired to, as all things work to the interest of those who own.

* * *

A contributor to the Nineteenth Century Magazine (Jan., 1911) says that the introduction of State maintenance means that the husband gives the wife less for housekeeping because the children are now provided for by the benevolence of the State. True, and the unemployed worker will reduce the price of the said husband’s labour-power by the amount so saved in order to obtain a job, and so in a short space of time the average wage will suffer a depreciation equal to the diminution of the burden placed upon it.

Nor does it necessarily follow that money wages will drop. The cost of living of the working class is continually on the increase. The Board of Trade Labour Gazette (January, 1911) shows a steady increase in the price of necessaries. The price of food in 1909 reached a point that has net been recorded since 1884. So, even did money wages remain stationary, the workers’ condition would be worsened. The same official return for Feb., 1911 shows a fall in the total wages bill of £49 per week, while the number of unemployed has increased.

The interest of the ruling class is to rule and to keep a subject class as cheaply as possible and all such alterations will be toward that end.

The interest of the working class is not to be ruled, but to shake from their backs those social parasites who keep them poor and insult them by talking twaddle and endeavouring to prove what is obviously untrue, that these tinkering reforms and proposals are introduced “in the interests of the masses.”

Twel.

Bounty babies. (1912)

From the December 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

Smiling mothers everywhere, clasping their new arrivals as though they hadn’t a care in the world. Thus the highly coloured posters picture the thirty bob benefit, the “endowment of motherhood,” under the “People’s Insurance Act.”

In the black hells of mining villages, midst the smoky and dirt-ridden factory towns, and around the death-stricken courts and alleys of dockland—there faces you this poster. In foul St. Helens, in Dante’s Dowlais, in unprintable Canning Town—there is this cynical caricature displayed.

Mark the pink and glowing faces of the wives of workingmen, the mothers of the working class. There is no deathly pallor there, no line of sorrow or privation, no mark of haunting worry and anxiety. No, all these are wiped out by the hand that was going to “banish poverty from every hearth” in three years.

Provided they have paid in sufficient to clear administration charges, the doctor’s “eight and six,” the sanatorium’s cost, the druggist’s demands, the approved society’s levy, etc., and if they have enough then left, the mother is to get thirty bob ! But to win this she must do without sickness benefit for two weeks before and four weeks after confinement. The medical benefit also is withdrawn when the “thirty pieces of silver” come. The doctor is not supplied. He must be paid out of the money. So must the midwife, and all the other expenses. It is open to the approved society to provide these and pocket your thirty pieces. If the mother seeks the portals of the lying-in hospital, they get her money. If the child is still born, then it is a case for the referees, lawyers, medicos, etc. These are the joys that await the woman who presents her “marriage lines” to the commissioners and her babe to a grateful country.

The Liberal frauds even boast that one million mothers of the working class are going to be made happy with this thirty bob every year. It is a significant comment upon the prevailing social system that in the richest country in the world one million mothers stand in need of a thirty-shilling dole to enable them to bring their babies into the world. Think who it is that require this assistance. It is the wives of the workers, not of the idlers ; the toiling wives, not the won’t-work women, who need it—and who have to pay for it.

I have sometimes wondered what the result would be if an official called with a “maternity” benefit upon a parasitic partner—say Mrs. John Jacob Astor, the “Titanic” heroine, who brought the three-million-pound baby into the world, or Mrs. Vanderbilt, who gave birth to a millionaire child at Wimbledon lately. The idler’s wife would collapse with horror at the bare suggestion that she stood in need of such humiliating aid, and the footman would do things which hurt.

One million workers’ babies need bounties ! One million veteran and broken toilers need pensions for the December of their days. Thus confesses the Government. If the babes only knew ! If they live through the strife and struggle of the dozen years of childhood, what lies beyond ? They have to serve the sentence of close on sixty years hard labour—sixty years of servitude passed upon them by the owners, the robbers, of the world’s wealth.

Not only hard labour at bench, or machine, but hard labour in the weary, heart-breaking, never-ceasing round of visits to the slave exchange, the factories and workshops, begging a job.

There is the incentive. After sixty years of back-breaking toil they will stand in dire need of a pensioner’s dole. But the babies do not know, go they live on.

No, not all of them. Only some of the toilers’ children escape the clutches of Death. The Registrar General in bis report tells us that in the mining towns of Durham, in the Rhondda Valley, in the cotton-weaving town of Burnley, in the pottery town of Longton, and in many other places, 200 out of every 1,000 children born are done with life before they are one year old. What is being done to stop tbis murder ? Precious little, even in the face of the steadily falling birth-rate. As Father Ring and otbers have shown, as lying in hospitals have reported, the children of the transport workers died off like flies at the time of the strike because their mothers were starved by the callous scoundrels who own and control the means of life.

In textile factories, in dressmakers’ and tailors’ workshops, in pottery bakehouses, in chainmaking sheds, in jute mills and matchmakers’ mortuaries, there sweat the mothers of the toilers’ race. In creches, in nurseries, in open streets and blindalleys, and in locked rooms their loved ones must be left while they mint millions for the parasites and their pets. No wonder Lancashire doctors report that in time of strikes and lock-outs the early days are marked by declining infant mortality and illness. This is because the mothers are set free to look after their little ones. True, as in East London,, when the dispute lasts long all this improvement is wiped out by the starvation that inevitably ensues.

The children of Carthage were sacrificed to Moloch, but the quick death of these was merciful, for all its seeming barbarity, by comparison with the lingering torture of the starved mites of the modern workers. The newspapers are full of sickening stories from the “homes” where the babies are brought to die. The present Tooting case, where five infants died within a week, is an example.

Again, the Southwark Coroner pointed out on November 12 that 600 children are burnt to death every year in England—mainly the tragedy of flannelette ! Flannel is not for the infants of the working class.

After infancy, school, for a meagre and begrudged apology for education, rushed through in the shortest possible space of time. The Board of Education tells us that of those fourteen years of age only 36 per cent. are at day school—the rest are at work !

The masters, however, want, the children before they are fourteen. The Interdepartmental Committee on the Partial Exemption of School Children (1909) said (vide Report): “It was most strongly represented to us by millowners round Bradford and Halifax that any restriction, on the supply is liable to cause inconvenience to employers.” The half-time system meets the masters’ demands in that it is cheap and the children are docile.

Ever since 1900 the number of half-timers has steadily risen. It rose from 74,000 in that year to 78,000 in 1903, 80,000 in 1904, 82,000 in 1906, 85,000 in 1908. At twelve years of age the boys and girls are busy in the heated sheds and mills, grinding out profits for those who own. Although the Board of Education states that over 60 per cent. of the children attending school are defective in health, Mr. W. Sykes, of the Teachers’ Union, stated that in 24 years’ experience he had never known a child rejected, as physically unfit, although some of them were not robust enough to be employed in the playground. (Before the Board of Education, Nov, . 4, 1907.)

What is the lot of the children working half-time at twelve years ? The Committee referred to told the Government that “their progress is retarded, if not absolutely brought to a standstill. The children come to school tired and sleepy. . . . They are unable to pay proper attention to their school work. The boy . . . loses a large part of his education . . at a time when the value of education ought to become greater to children.”

They tell us that “the results of several statistical investigations made in more than one half-time town indicate distinctly that the weight and chest measurement, and sometimes the height, of half-time children, are less than half those of full-time children in the same place and of the same age.”

What shall you think, then, of the Labour Party members who try to keep the little ones in the mills to be murdered ? Mr. Shackleton, before he got his present job, supported with might and main the maintenance of the half-time system, and his fellow Labour members resented any attack upon this masters’ man. Now Mr. W. A. Gill, a shining light of the Labour Party in the House of Commons, opposes the abolition of the half-time system. In the half-time debate on April 26, 1912, he said he “agreed with those who believed that in letting them (the children) go to school half the day and be trained to work during the other half, they were doing what was best for their children.” One almost fancies one can hear the bosses telling him to say it.

Bad as half-time is for children of twelve and thirteen, the labour leaders have done their best to force the children into the mills and fields full time at those ages. In short, they have helped the murderers of the children in their nefarious work, and, like Shackleton, they will get jobs.

In May, 1906, Sir John Brunner, the millionaire chemical-factory owner, introduced into Parliament a Bill “to amend the Education Act.” This Bill bore the names of its backers, Mr. Will Crooks, of the Labour Party, and also Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, its secretary.

While Mr. MacDonald’s party were “pledged” to fight for the raising of the school age, he fought to lower it. Whilst twelve and thirteen were the earliest ages for partial exemption from day school, he tried to make them the statutory ages for total exemption !—conditional always, upon their being driven to night school to have their tired brains racked with education.

We opened with the blessings of childhood, but the blessings belong to those who do the children in—to the Penruddocks and the Wilesmiths ; to the Abkar Reformatory rulers and the Tooting philanthropists, the thoughtful factory owners and the rural lordlings. The blessings will fall upon the children when, through the triumph of Socialism, the power of property over human existence has gone for ever.

Adolph Kohn

So, this is Social Security (1966)

From the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

"During the last 50 years a comprehensive scheme of national insurance has been gradually developed to become the central feature of our system of social security.” These were the words of the then Minister of Pensions and National Insurance Richard Wood, in a forward to a government booklet: Everybody’s Guide To National Insurance, May, 1964. If this statement does anything at all, it underlines capitalism’s continuing, indeed developing, need for all sorts of compulsory insurance provisions for its working population.

We have come a long way since the days of Lloyd George and his five shilling pension proposals, and the very limited dole and "panel” medicine of the inter-war years. To even these comparatively modest measures, there were always the objectors who thought “the country could not afford it,” but it was Lloyd George himself who shoved his opponents contemptuously aside with the observation that paying a pension was cheaper than maintaining old people in work-houses. And this has been the sort of criterion which has guided the reformers ever since; despite the professed humanitarianism of the Labour Party, their spokesman Jim Griffiths was under no illusion about the aims of national insurance when he commended his sweeping post-war proposals to the Commons on February 6, 1946:

The loss to the Nation caused by preventive illness alone is appalling, for it has been estimated at £300 millions a year, equal to 3/5ths of the cost of the scheme in its initial year. To those who fear we cannot afford this scheme, I would advise them to ask themselves if we can afford to go on without it. 

Under this National Insurance Bill, a wide range of “benefits” was enacted based to a large extent on the old Beveridge proposals, and estimated to cost some £452 millions in 1949 and £496 millions in 1955. Contributions were to range from 2/2d. to 4/7d. a week from workers, and their employers were to make weekly contributions ranging from l/9d. to 3/10d. per employee. There was also to be a grant from the Exchequer, and all of this money was to be pooled in the National Insurance Fund, to which would be charged the costs of benefits and administration.

This arrangement has remained largely unaltered over the years, but it is nonsense to suggest, as some Labourites and others were doing then, that the scheme would abolish poverty. Prime Minister Attlee claimed in a Commons speech (February 7, 1946) that “the Bill would help to maintain the high standard of purchasing power among the masses of the people.” But just take a look at some of the benefit rates then, and see if you agree with him: — 

Unemployment or sickness               26/-per week (£2 married couple)

Pension  . . .   . . .                             26/-per week (£2 married couple)

100 per cent Disability Pay                45/-per week 

Nat. Assistance (ordinary) . . .            50/-per week

    for man and wife (begun 1948)      65/- per week

Incidentally, an interesting and pertinent comment is made on the scheme by M. Penelope Hall in her book The Social Services of Modern England. She says:

One drastic modification in the Beveridge Plan was made at the start. Benefits have never been paid at subsistence level. Beveridge regarded this modification to his scheme as disastrous. 

In the 20 years since 1946, government cost estimates have been sadly put out by continuously rising prices and increases in the cost of living, so that various amending Acts have had to be passed, stepping up the benefits and the contribution rates. By 1959, for example, unemployment, sickness and pension rates all stood at 50/- per week single, while National Assistance was at 76/- (normal) and 96/- (special) for a man and wife. This was the year, you may recall, that the Tories were pointing with pride to their achievements in this field, ignoring such uncomfortable facts as 1¾ million people having to apply for National Assistance—about 1.4 millions of them old age pensioners.

But even the Conservatives, jubilant at their 1959 election victory, could not pretend that provisions were adequate, even by the miserable standards that capitalist politicians set, and not long after that their graduated pensions scheme was introduced, which meant larger contributions from those earning over £9 a week, to secure proportional payment in addition to a flat-rate pension. Under such an arrangement, you would get an extra sixpence a week added to your flat-rate pension for every £7 10s. paid in, and when you consider the piffling extent of these changes, you might wonder what all the song and dance was about. Certainly there was nothing from the workers’ point of view, although from the Government’s angle the new scheme gave the pension system some flexibility, and so no doubt was intended to keep down the extra cost.

The whole question of National Insurance was tossed about by the main parties at the 1964 election, and it was becoming apparent anyway that an overhaul was due in the system of payments and contributions. For example, while there was not the heavy and persistent unemployment of the twenties and thirties, there was the question of “labour mobility” and the tiding over of unemployed workers when retraining for new jobs, following the decline of some of the older industries. So the Labour Government’s measures now include compulsory compensation payments to any worker made redundant after a minimum of two years at the same job.

In the government’s social security arrangements, it is interesting that they have retained essentially unchanged the graduated pension scheme of which they had been so scornful when the Tories introduced it. In addition, there is the “Earnings-Related Short-Term Benefits Scheme” which just means that there will be a flat-rate sickness and unemployment benefit of £4 a week minimum, plus further payments, depending on your average weekly earnings between £9 and £30 a week. Here again we see the pressure of present-day conditions in the government’s attempts to offload at least some of the burden of the rising cost of benefits from the central Exchequer. Quite clearly also, the 1946 scales and payment methods no longer suffice to keep workers ticking over in sickness or between jobs, and once more the modern emphasis is on “flexibility”. It could be that this is something we shall see more of in the future, what with the growth of new industries and the decline of the old, to say nothing of plain old-fashioned unemployment because of trade crises.

And what other changes have there been recently? Oh yes, the old Ministry of Pensions and Njational Insurance has been replaced by the brand new “Ministry of Social Security” (surely a contradiction in terms) with responsibility for all the schemes which were formerly administered separately, such as National Assistance. These particular payments will be known as “supplementary benefits” and are a fitting reminder of the way in which reformers' plans can misfire. In 1953, Lord Beveridge admitted that he and the experts had originally expected National Assistance payments to be on a small scale only and to gradually diminish. But, in fact, the very opposite has' happened, and the government has resigned itself to the fact by allowing for increased rates of benefit when the new arrangements start in the autumn.

What all these measures add up to is merely the organisation of 1966 poverty by 1966 methods, and the usual attempts to maintain the workforce at the appropriate standards of health and efficiency to keep capitalism’s production and profits going. It has been the irritating habit of Labourites to claim that these Acts bring dignity to workers’ lives, but their very existence is an indication of the essential indignity of working class life. And despite the increasing intricacy of state insurance and widening of its scope, there are many who stay stubbornly poor even by “Supplementary Benefits” standards. Like the 15,000 families admitted by Assistance Board Chairman Lord Runcorn to be “living on assistance at the moment, at an income well below their needs, because allowances are based on the best estimate that can be made of a man’s future earnings.” Or like “those whose take-home pay is less than they need by assistance standards, although in full employment.”

Eddie Critchfield

Correction (1933)

From the October 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Origin of Unemployment Insurance.

In an article in the September issue. "Do Social Reforms Kill Socialism?" it was implied that Unemployment Insurance was directly borrowed from Germany. This appears not to have been the case. Health Insurance was directly borrowed from Germany, and the working of the Health Insurance system there was known to those who introduced Unemployment Insurance in England, but although the practice of Governments making payments to the unemployed was, of course, known, the principle of insurance had not been applied to it. In a Liberal Party publication, “A Nation Insured," written by Leo Chiozza Money, and published in 1911, it was stated that "in unemployment insurance Britain is leading the way."

This correction does not affect the argument contained in the article.

Ed. Comm.

The Old Age Pension snare. (1908)

From the July 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Pursuant to their policy of buying working-class support with spurious coin, the Liberals have added another to their list of cheap sops. They raised a “working man” to the Cabinet, and it has been counted unto them for righteousness at the ballot-box. They have given a Small Holdings Act to enable those poor devils of workers who have saved a trifle under capitalist slavery, to get back to the slavery of petty enterprise and lose it. They have announced with temerity (later overwhelmed by trepidation) a measure to save the worker sending his “soul to hell” with hops (?) and arsenic. And now they have decided to administer another dose of “The Mixture,” the antidote to Socialism, from the bottle labelled “Social Reform”—Old Age Pensions to wit.

What has led them to this act of magnanimity concerns us little here. Our business is to show how hollow is the claim that the realisation of this great item of the programs of the S.D.P., I.L.P. and other reform bodies masquerading as revolutionaries, contributes one iota to the material advantage of the working class. Well indeed can the capitalist captains quell the murmurings which the seeming waste of so much good provender calls up among the more ignorant of their own hosts with the cynical assurance: “Dear brethren, it is entirely compensative.”

Entirely compensative it certainly is from the point of view of capitalist interests, and it is because of the vital importance of the workers understanding this that this criticism is penned.

“Now to dip the test-rod in.”

Viewing the working class as a whole we see a mass of workers living by the sale of a mass labour-power for a mass of wages. This “mass” view of the workers becomes daily more imperative as the development of capitalist production daily eliminates the personal from human affairs, crushing individual opportunity, disfranchising individual skill, reducing all to the mean level on the workers’ side, as it obliterates the individual on the masters’ side, depriving capital of a personal owner, of nationality even, and making the productive machinery of the world less and less private property in the sense of separate and detached ownership, and increasingly a class possession.

Karl Marx has clearly shown the commodity nature of this labour-power, and has proved that the wage (apart from temporary fluctuations which cancel one another) is merely the equivalent of the labour-power which it purchases in respect of one quality common to both—the only quality common to both—that is, embodied necessary human labour.

Man creates nothing—he merely alters forms. He labours at the plough and in the mill, produces necessaries of life, and consumes them. And consuming them he produces latent energy, or labour-power, which he sells. And just as, when the woollen manufacturer consumes coal in his furnaces, the value of that coal lives again in the woollen fabric, so the value of the necessaries of life socially necessary to the production of labour-power is resurrected in that labour-power. Again, man labours in the gold-mines and produces gold, and this gold preserves in full—not the value of the necessaries consumed by the miner to enable him to produce his labour-power, oh, no. That was represented in the miner’s wages, and if the gold had no greater value than was paid in wages for its production there could be no profit for the employer. Between the cost of production of labour-power and its power of production—what it costs to create it and what in turn it is capable of creating—there is a vast difference. The day’s labour-power which the mine-owner bought cost only the product of a quarter of a day’s labour to produce. A quarter of a day’s labour, then, is the value of a days’ labour-power, but this labour-power expended (with utility and prevailing economy), a day’s labour-power is converted into a day’s labour, and that which reappears in its product—gold—is the same that appears in labour-power, viz., the cost of production in units of human labour time.

We see, then, that the labour-power which the workers sell and the wages they sell it for are equivalents when they exchange at par. They are equal values by virtue of the congealed labour they contain, as the two-pound loaf and the two-pound weight are equivalents by virtue of their one common quality, weight. And just as no other commodity owner can force the price of his goods (or shall we say sell them) above their value in the face of competition, so can the workers obtain for their labour-power no more than its average necessary cost of production. Less will not suffice to reproduce the requisite efficiency and maintain continuity of supply : more is debarred them by competition.

The crude statement that wages tend to sink to the level of subsistence under the prevailing “standard of comfort,” faulty though it is in view of the fact that the wages of the workers as a body are never high enough to enable them to provide subsistence—fresh air, pure food, maternal knowledge, and the like—necessary to rear more than half their children to the age of six years, is a fair shot at the truth. But the mystifying element, of course, is contained in the idea of a Standard of Comfort, for this seems to indicate a power in the human will that one can hardly credit, to defy the operation of the laws of competition. What, one asks, is this Standard of Comfort ? How is it established and how maintained’?

The Standard of Comfort is, as Karl Marx says, the creation of an historical process, but today the most potent factor in its determination is the advance of capitalist production itself. The growing intensification of labour, the increasing insecurity of livelihood, the rising tide of unemployment, the herding of vast numbers in slums, the stripping of every rational pleasure from life—all these things make stimulants and intoxicants a necessary part of the Standard of Comfort, as does the more general education demanded by modern capitalism render literary and other “refined” indulgences a part of the necessary bill of fare, and therefore a part of the necessary cost of production of labour-power, into the value of which they enter, to demand an equivalent in its price—wages.

Theoretically wages, since they are the equivalent of the necessary cost of continued production of labour-power, are paid in order that labour-power may be produced. When therefore they are spent on expensive food when cheaper would do as well, on white bread when brown would afford as much sustenance at less cost, on meat when vegetarian diet is so much more economical, on whisky which conceivably gives no sustenance at all, on maintaining the aged whose period of usefulness to the capitalist is passed, then Capital is aggrieved, and capitalists look askant and wonder why all this leakage.

Long ago they discovered that if they reduced the workers’ drink bill they lowered the cost of production of labour-power, and hence cheapened it. Now they have discovered that if they in some measure relieve the workers of the burden of their aged they once more reduce their cost of subsistence and depreciate their wages. It is entirely compensative.

The workers have to learn that so long as their labour-power remains a commodity, remains an article produced for sale in a competitive market, it can command no more than its cost of production. Indeed, they are not robbed here (except in the sense that the sale is compulsory), for it is an exchange of equivalents. (It is in the conversion of that labour-power into labour that they are robbed—robbed of the difference between the value of the one and the other, which the masters call profit.) They have to learn that all those things which the conditions they live under render necessary to the production of their labour-power, in such volume and quality as the labour market needs must be surrendered to them out of the wealth they produce. The woollen manufacturer aforesaid supplies coal for his boilers in order to get motive power, but if his engineer makes a first charge upon it for other purposes, if he takes part of it home for the kitchen grate, then the deficiency must be made up. It is a law of mechanics that we cannot get more out of a machine than we put in, and the same applies to the human machine. If the wages which are paid to the workers as a body (we are taking the “mass” view, not the individual) for the purpose of continuing the supply of labour-power is generally expended upon things which are not fundamentally, but only conditionally necessary to that purpose—on whisky, appearance, maintaining the aged and incapable, and so on—then the fuel for the labour-power still must be provided. Therefore, what does it matter to the workers as a class whether these things which circumstances make so necessary to them that they are ready to make them first charges upon their means of subsistence, are allowed to them as wages or as “State assistance”? They might be “State” housed, “State” clothed, “State” educated, “State” doctored, “State” washed, lathered, shaved and shampoo’d, but still, while the last essential—food—is withheld from them, they must fight in the labour market for work, be overworked and unemployed, hungry and anxious and toil worn, just as much for the remnant of the necessaries that they cannot exist without as for all.

Any such reforms as State Maintenance of School-children, Old Age Pensions, and so on, are mere shuffling of the cards, and can add nothing permanent whatever to the material wealth of the workers. Indeed, some of them may have the reverse effect, for under the present arrangement the teetotaler has some monetary advantage from the fact that a modicum of the cost of the generally necessary stimulants appears in the value of his labour-power, while the single man with no children outside the workhouse is the better paid because provision is made for the (capitalistically necessary) children in the general wage instead of in “State Maintenance.” Even an overwhelming Socialist majority in the House of Commons could not increase the “return to Labour” by reforms, for all the reforms still leave the competitive labour market untouched. The only way is to abolish that labour market by abolishing the property condition out of which it arises, by substituting, that is, common for private ownership in the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth. That is revolution, not reform. That is ending the capitalist system, not mending it. That alone is the object of a Socialist party and of working-class politics.

So we denounce the Old Age Pension Bill as a useless and mischievous reform measure—useless because it leaves the workers where they were, mischievous because of its power for misleading them. Unfortunately the “mind’s eye” is peculiarly subject to optical delusions. As the sun appears to travel round the earth, as the water seems to race past the ship, so to the untrained “mind’s eye” of the average worker the so-called palliatives appear to palliate. As when “General” Booth finds a job for one poor downcast wretch, it is forgotten that without his interference another would have got the job who must now be work-less, and the impression is created that unemployment has been lessened by this “invaluable agency,” whereas all that has been effected is a shifting of the suffering, so these paltry reforms, so fondly hugged and cuddled by all other parties in this country claiming to be Socialist save the S.P.G.B., seem to be ameliorative, and so seeming capture the popular fancy, revive and strengthen the working-class belief in the goodwill and magnanimity of capitalist politics, ay! serve even to lure our own from beside us, and range them, bitter and militant, against the very cause they profess to revere—Socialism.

And this is why they are such powerful instruments in the hands of the master class for diverting the gaze of the proletariat from the revolutionary proposal. Truly “social reform” is perfectly summed up in the sententious description of that astute politician, Mr. A. J. Balfour—”the antidote to Socialism.” For this reason we cry out upon all those reform parties who, falsely, describe themselves as Socialist, and denounce them for what in truth they are—misleaders of the working class, and therefore adjuncts of the capitalist parties.

A. E. Jacomb

The real motive behind State Insurance. (1911)

From the July 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just as with Labour Exchanges and Old-Age Pensions, so with the latest dodge, State Insurance it is a soporific. All along the line of Liberal legislation an examination shows that the benefits go to the employing class, not to the employed.

In working-class districts all over the country, the people are told from Liberal platforms that poverty and destitution, sickness and disease, are to be vigorously dealt with and eradicated, while at the same time the employers are being assured that these schemes, far from costing them anything, will, in the long run, result in a greater return for the sums that are to be expended.

Lloyd George, at Birmingham, exposed the mockery of the claim that these measures are being introduced to benefit the working class. He said:

“Take a brewer’s horse. How well he is looked after – well fed, cared for, and doctored. If he does not feel up to the mark he has got a guardian there specially looking after him. He says there is something the matter with his horse to-day. He is kept there, is doctored, until he is right. That is not merely humanity, it is good business. Take a machine. If you neglect a machine, a very small matter develops into a big one. It may simply mean that you want to oil a bearing, to tighten a screw. But if the machinist says I cannot afford to allow this machine to rest for two or three days in order to overhaul it, what happens? That machine has a bad breakdown sooner or later, and it may have to be scrapped. It is good business to overhaul a thing of that kind in time before it develops.”

Just so. To keep the worker in a fit condition ensures a greater output, and the increased efficiency resulting from such condition will enable the employer to wring more profit out of his victim, for, while the labour power may cost a little more, the return is certain to be greater.

A paper issued by the Government contains still more significant statements from German employers who have experienced the working of similar insurance schemes. The president of one of the largest associations of employers in the iron and steel industry, basing his opinions on special enquiries addressed to leading firms, says, among other things:

“The laws ‘pay’ employers from their own standpoint, since they, too, are given a greater feeling of security . . . and they are protected against constant disputes with exacting claimants.

“The proof that these laws are remunerative to employers lies in the fact that an employer has an interest in having at his disposal a healthy and efficient labour force.”

From the “Chemical Industry” comes the statement that:

"From the standpoint of the employers these laws are remunerative to the extent that the efficiency of the worker is increased, and without the insurance laws  correspondingly higher wages would have to be paid.”

Herr E. Schmidt, president of the German Tobacco Manufacturer’s Association, says:

“To-day, however, these contributions are booked either to the general expenses account or the wages account – for they are, in fact, a part of wages . . . Speaking as one employer to another, I am of the opinion that the investment in these insurance contributions is not a bad one.”

Apart from the capitalist as employer, the statement of the Poor Law Board of Frankfort-on-Main that “the insurance laws have unquestionably afforded direct and permanent relief to the Poor funds” is reiterated by the thirteen towns quoted.

To sum up the whole question, it is but necessary to quote Dr. F. Lahn, Director of the Bavarian Statistical Office, bearing in mind that the State referred to is a capitalist State, and that “national economy” means for the working class a greater speeding up – an economy in the matter of wages. He says:

“Industrial insurance is regarded by many people as a burden placed on certain branches of economic production, and is judged in the same way as taxation. Such a view is just as one-sided and fallacious as if one were to represent our schemes of sanitation, education, and poor relief as a system of national taxation instead of as important constituents of our national system of social welfare, devised to awaken slumbering powers in the body politic, to use them in the service of the State by the nurture and increase of our productive efficiency to further the national economy and the welfare of the State. If it is true that in the keen rivalry of the nations victory will lie with those peoples which have at command the greatest reserves of strength and health, industrial insurance must take a leading place in this policy of industrial welfare.”

Just as Germany a few years ago recognised that in order to obtain the markets of the world they must have efficient labourers, so to-day the “British” capitalists, ever behind, realise that to combat Germany they must economise, they must obtain a better quality of labour-power – if possible without increasing its cost. Hence there is a welling-up of the milk of human kindness in the capitalist breast, and we get State Insurance and the like.

Twel.

The Death of the Welfare State (1996)

From the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Supporters of capitalism have always denied the need for a fundamental change on the grounds that the system can take care of the 
poor through state help and welfare, now the welfare state, the
 sacred cow of reformists everywhere, is being attacked 
from every direction

Labour and the Tories have, it seems, moved closer together than ever with respect to their attitudes to the welfare state. On 8 May the Guardian reported Labour’s Chris Smith, shadow social security secretary, saying:

"Surely it is time to get away from the sterile battle lines of public and private. . . The principle must surely be that the state acts as guarantor of all provision, the regulator of all provision and the administrator of some. ”

How they intend to guarantee those provisions that they don’t provide, which will presumably have to be provided by individuals for themselves through insurance, is not made clear; in fact not a lot is made clear. What is crystal clear, though, is that Labour has abandoned its commitment to the welfare state along with Clause Four; the to-and-fro of reform and counter-reform between the major parties, such as it was, is over.

This to-and-fro was never, of course, a simple external relation between the parties but has been just as much a part of their internal make-up since the Second World War. Labour introduced the NHS but also introduced prescription charges and charges for dental and optical treatment; the Tories under Macmillan expanded the council house building programme; the current cause of much argument and agonising within Labour—child benefit—was introduced by the Tories in 1945 before Labour took office that same year. The case of child benefit is perhaps particularly interesting and informative, given the possibility of the next Labour government abolishing it for 16-18 year olds.

Family Allowance, the immediate forerunner of child benefit, was agreed in principle in 1943 by the wartime coalition government, and introduced by the Conservative government of May-July 1945, gaining the royal assent on 16 June 1945. The Labour movement was split on the issue, with many trade unions opposed to this reform—but why? Wasn't it to benefit working-class families? In fact, it wasn’t, anything but, the capitalist establishment wanted to introduce this reform because they felt that capitalism in the UK couldn’t afford not to. In 1940, Eleanor Rathbone MP, chair of the Family Endowment Society, argued in favour of the introduction of Family Allowance, saying that a “man with a wife and family is much less likely to act (revolutionarily) than one who has given society no such hostage”. Family Allowance was to be an incentive for working-class men to have dependent families—which could then be effectively held hostage by the state should he question capitalist authority. The ruling class also favoured the introduction of this “benefit" on a more basic level; the unions, hardly revolutionary' themselves, would have been less inclined to oppose it otherwise. The Tory MP L.S. Amery, again arguing in favour of this reform (in the Times, 14 January' 1941), said that Family Allowance would “afford a logical basis upon which a stand could be made against all further wage increases”. It was thus seen as a method of keeping wage bills down.

Who benefits?

If Labour now want to abolish child benefit for 16-18 year olds, is it in order to correct past mistakes, to somehow pass on a real benefit to working people after all? No chance. While they haven’t said exactly what they would spend the money on, they have gestured vaguely in the direction of education; but whose education would it be spent on? Many working-class families have, over the years, come to rely on child benefit, particularly to help support children in further education. If child benefit is abolished for precisely those of the age to go into further education, how will the less well off working-class families be able to afford to keep them in education? The simple answer is, they won’t. The only options for many will be for 16 and 17 year olds to try for places in the already over-subscribed YTS system (adding further to the already massive pool of cheap labour for bosses), to directly enter the employment market with little or no chance of a job and no benefits, or to leave home and beg on the streets. What a marvellous range of choice capitalism offers.

There is another option of course, at least for those families with at least one wage-earner—to fight the employers for higher wages to compensate for the money lost. But if this was thought even vaguely likely, Labour would have been more reluctant to have considered this particular cut. The last thing they want is to encourage class conflict, particularly under their own administration; but the relative weakness of the trade union movement at the present time makes an immediate escalation of class struggle unlikely.. this doesn’t mean that it won’t happen; workers may find themselves forced to fight by sheer material circumstances. But the point is that the ruling class, at least in the West, is being forced to take back reforms that have been previously granted and supposedly reformist parties are being forced to institute and administer the process.

On the one hand, capital feels it can no longer afford reforms, on the other, it also feels that it must take past reforms away and to bolster itself at the direct expense of the working class because of the relative weakness of the trade union movement. This is happening right across the west, with the temporary' exception of France where the government keeps trying to cut back on the welfare state but where workers’ solidarity has so far forced them to back down. They will keep trying, though, because French capital is no more isolated or “sovereign” than anywhere else. In other parts of the world, such as the Far East, home of what western capitalists habitually refer to, with some envy, as “tiger” (“dynamic market”—note the use of this term in labour’s new Clause 4) economies, there have often never been any reforms, even basic democratic ones, to roll back, while countries such as Vietnam refer to themselves as socialist while they introduce some of the most vicious, exploitative capitalist economic structures in the world. Global capitalism is precisely that; nobody is insulated from pressures on profits, which under capitalism is where sovereignty always really lies.

The to-and-fro of reform and anti-reform has always been the pattern to some extent, but things appear to have reached a state where reform has effectively lost its impossible fight. Reformist parties such as Labour have almost entirely capitulated; they were never going to introduce socialism anyway, having only ever been at most state capitalist parties, but now they have given up entirely. A never-ending pissing into the face of a gale has left them wet and weary and has exhausted what emancipatory desire they might once have had. All their desires now are masturbatory and egotistical, focused on nothing more than the plaudits of high office that mask a basic sterility.

There are few more frightening, deadly or apt symbols of the failure of reformism than the world-wide rise of tuberculosis. The steady and virtually inevitable erosion of welfare reforms has caused the number of cases of TB to rise steadily in the west over the last few years after most people had thought it had been effectively eradicated. In other parts of the world, of course, it had never gone away in the first place. A recent article on TB in the Guardian Weekend (27 April) put this point quite succinctly. In the 1970s there was a general optimism in the west that TB was effectively gone for ever, thanks to vaccine research and improved living conditions. But only in the west:

“Admittedly, no one country ever wiped it out completely. And in the third world, things remained not much better than they hail always been. But, hell, they were free to buy our superdrugs weren't they? ”

Well, no, they weren’t. They couldn’t afford them. Profits, as ever, came first. As they do with HIV research, even while HIV is forming what the same article designated a “devil’s alliance” with TB, not that it’s on the increase again in west. Who is most at risk from TB? The poorest and weakest members of society of course, the elderly homeless and immigrants shoved into cramped and poverty-stricken living conditions. But as the welfare state is dismantled, it seems highly likely that TB will spread further, and it will spread first through the poorer sections of the working class. As the Guardian article

again puts it:

". . .  tuberculosis is universally recognised as the disease of poverty. And as such, it acts as a chillingly efficient barometer of the human physical condition. Today, that barometer has swung right off the scale throughout the third world, and at the same time it is beginning to rise in Britain and other advanced capitalist states. ”

Reformism has failed and how the reformist project is collapsing; as it does so, evils we thought were wiped out or at least under control, are coming back with increasing vengeance. TB is not just a disease, in the contemporary world it’s also a symptom of the failure of reformism within capitalism.

In the film Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard says of American hypocrisy in war: “We cut them in half with a machine gun and we give them a band-aid.” Reformism was always a similarly inadequate response to capitalism’s violence in the name of profit, trying to patch up the symptoms of the disease that capitalism itself is. Now, though, the ruling class can’t even afford to keep the first aid kit stocked up. It’s high time the rest of us realised the necessity of taking on and eradicating the disease itself.

Jonathan Clay

Why social reform is useless. (1914)

From the September 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has all along claimed that the only solution for the social diseases rampant in capitalist society is Socialism. The professional “Socialists” of the B.S.P. and I.L.P. type, whilst claiming the same in a somewhat misty and hazy manner, seek always to put some pet scheme of social reform before the working class. They are not alone, however, in their schemes of reform, for the capitalist class are well in the front as far as reform is concerned. The consequence of this being that some reformers who are able to hold their situations cling more tightly to the governing class, whilst others not so fortunate have jumped to the other end and have become anarchists, or what is the same, syndicalists.

Reform, to-day, chiefly through the activities of the politicians of the master class, has become very popular with the mass, many regarding it as eventually being capable of removing the anomalies of existing society.

Let us, therefore, see what reform has already accomplished for the workers; we shall then have an idea what to expect from the effects of reform in the future.

Before examining these reforms, however, let us, very briefly, look upon those people who are especially interested in social reform.

First of all there is the sentimentalist, who, without any reason at all, is always wailing about the afflicted and poverty-stricken, so much so that he is absolutely blinded by his own tears from seeing the true state of affairs. Then there is the petty bourgeois reformer, the small capitalist, who at times may describe himself as a “Socialist,” but is always showing his fear of Socialism, for in his ignorance he believes that Socialists will confiscate what little property he may have—it may be his wedding ring or in some cases his house. Then again, we have the professional politician whose business it is to pander to the “mob.” In his cunning way he will invent all sorts of nostrums for the people, who, through their ignorance, are led to believe now one set of politicians, now another set, never realising that they are being hoodwinked by them all.

How these humbugs have been using the Home Rule for Ireland red herring to befool the mass is at once a comedy and a tragedy. And yet people will go on believing, in their simplicity, that the so-called leaders of the opposition and the Government are serious in their manoeuvres. They cannot see that it is merely a means to keep the workers divided and ignorant of their true social status.

The many reforms one might mention, instead of benefiting, injure the workers. One of the pet reforms of the sentimentalists is the “feeding of the school children.” Now, every sane man and woman wishes to see children fed ; but we cannot afford to allow sentiment to get the better of our reason. We know that those who possess children wish to feed their children by their own effort. State grants merely make, in most cases, subservient wage-slaves of those who receive them, thus making the work of the Socialist more difficult.

But what of the economic effect of such a measure ? Why, a woman who has children to look after, by paying a small sum of money to “farm” out her youngest child whilst her elder children are being fed at school, is enabled to .go to the factory or mill and be exploited at a low wage as married women are known to be.

The Old Age Pension scheme is another Act that has benefited the capitalists immensely. For whereas it costs to maintain a pauper something like fourteen shillings a week, they manage to get the aged State pauper to exist on five shillings. The Compensation Act seems on the face of it to be of much value to the worker. By being crippled or maimed they are sometimes able to get a certain sum of money as compensation. It may be true that in individual cases the Act has had some advantage for the worker. But it is hardly necessary to-day to repeat the facts of “too old at forty,” or a man with a slight injury not engaged, or if engaged, then at a lower rate of pay. The Compensation Act is a very good Act—for the capitalists.

We shall not talk of the Labour Exchanges, for even the over liberal-labour M.P.’s who at the inception of the bill claimed it to be Messiah itself, are now calling them “blackleg institutions.”

The Insurance Act again, compels the workers to submit to be mulcted of a certain sum of money so that they may keep going a lot of well-paid officials who are to ticket and number them and keep them in their respective grades.

The “Health” Insurance Act is a direct affront to the workers. It says it can prevent sickness ; it can do no such thing. Disease is bred by the conditions under which the workers must toil and live ; only Socialism can ensure healthy working and living conditions. Those who supported the “Health” Insurance Act avow by their action that they are the direct enemies of the working class.

Then there is the class of reformers who advocate the nationalising and municipalising of private enterprises, such as the railways, trams, etc. Here, again, we find that where national undertakings are in existence the lot of the workers engaged in those concerns is very little, if any, better than the wage-slaves in private firms. We know how the postal employees fare in the hands of a capitalistic government ; how the municipal workers of Leeds, Blackburn, and Dublin have been treated by unscrupulous and tyrannical corporations.

It is the very nature of capital, whether it be organised on national, local, or private basis, to oppress and exploit the workers. Only when it suits the capitalist class—who now have the mastery in these matters—will municipal or national enterprises be undertaken, and then only for their benefit.

“But,” say some ignorant persons, “it cannot be denied that these undertakings are able to cut down rates and taxes.” By such talk are they able persuade the workers that public enterprise is a benefit—because it saves rates and taxes. Before taxes are levied a person must receive, an income of no less than £160 a year; and in so far as the worker comes within the Health Insurance Act., i.e., receives less than £160 per year, he is not liable to pay taxes. “But he pays rates ?” shrieks our reformer. “For he certainly lives in a house—poor one though it be.” Here again our reformer is wrong : the workmen pays merely a rental for his house, the rent going up or down according to the demand for and supply of houses within a given area. The rents of the workers are not affected by the rising and lowering of the rates, which proves that it does not concern the working class, but only the property owners.

“But,” the reformer will say, ” if he does not pay taxes directly, he certainly pays indirectly, on his tea, tobacco, etc.” Again our social reformer errs ; for the worker is not robbed in the sphere of exchange. It is in the domain of production where the robbery of the workers is carried on. The latter, although producing all the wealth of society, are only allowed to buy a small portion of the wealth which they produce. Receiving a wage, the price of his labour power, he is not able to buy up all that he has produced. Therefore the concern of the working class is not that tobacco, or tea, or any commodity is dear, but that the major portion of what they produce is filched from them. It would make precious little difference to the working class as a whole, if all articles were cheapened in price if in like proportion their money wages dropped, or vice versa, their money wages rose while prices rose in the same proportion. The working class have never had the power, nor can they have such power under capitalism, of dictating their terms to the master class. Which proves that it is not the price of an article that matters, but the control by the workers of their own working conditions which Socialism alone can give, which matters.

Of late we have had the land taxers, with Lloyd George at their head, trying to revive an old nostrum. What villains these landed gentry are ! Certainly no one can say a wrong word against the people Lloyd George represents—for is he not the heaven anointed “Messiah,” himself ! Yes, Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer, the landlords are sucking the blood of the farm labourers and workers in general, but it is a mere flea-bite to the outrageous plunder and spoliation of your masters, the capitalists.

This nostrum, if put into practice, will certainly relieve capitalists of a burden. But will it help the workers ? These professional diddlers claim it will by opening up new land and industries. By such means, it is asserted, will the unemployed be absorbed and wages, as a consequence, raised.

Yes, but the land taxer has never looked into the nature of capital. The capitalist reformer looks to this scheme as being a means to increase profits. Seeking the support of the workers, he leads them to believe that wages will also rise. History shows that although profits have risen enormously, real wages have fallen. And this has come about through capital becoming greater by inventions of machinery and the speeding up of the workers.

This has been going on all along and taxation of land values will in no way disturb that process. Thus while land taxation will benefit the members of the commercial class, (who own little land), by easing their burden of taxation, it in no way guarantees to the workers better living conditions.

Having then examined the most popular and so-called beneficial reforms, we find their ill effects far outweigh what can be said in their favour. And naturally so. For the fact is that reforms which are enacted by a capitalist government are used generally for the benefit of the master class. They touch only the externals, and never the internal or foundation of society. So long as the basis of capitalist society remains, so long will the social diseases, that are a result of that basis, remain.

The whole foundation of capitalism must be removed for Socialism to take its place, for not till then will society be relieved of the social cancer that affects it to-day. Mere talk that reform may benefit under certain imaginary conditions that may arise in the future is futile. We as Socialists know that we cannot afford to deal with fantastical side issues ; for we are convinced that Socialism is the only means for the emancipation of the working class. Therefore, we must ever be advocating Socialism before the working class so that they may be prepared for the change in society.

“But,” say some reformers notably of the I.L.P. and B.S.P. type, “we cannot afford to wait so long, and besides, we are legislating Socialism step by step until we shall have secured the lot.” Our misguided reformer cannot see that it is not Socialism that is evolving, but capitalism. Day by day, as capitalism becomes more and more powerful, the workers’ position in, society becomes increasingly deplorable. The capitalists (who legislate—not the workers) will not legislate themselves out of power gradually despite the talk of some crazy people about “revolutionary reform,” rather will they seek to increase their power.

Only by the working class themselves taking conscious revolutionary political action will the fight be finished and their victory assured. By the workers taking such action, the capitalists, in their attempt to save their power, will dole out reforms in plenty, but the working class politically and intellectually organised will not be hood-winked as they are to-day. They will, through their political supremacy, abolish private ownership of the means of life, and institute social ownership for social use. Then and only then will society be freed from the glaring anomalies that exist to-day, viz., luxury and idleness on the one hand ; poverty and slavery on the other.

L. Marks

The Welfare State (1950)

From the June 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

All the major political parties applaud the Welfare State. They vied with each other, during the election campaign, to claim credit for bringing it into existence. The Conservatives made the most of the fact that the government which set up the commission to inquire into the problem of reorganising the social services was a coalition Government predominantly Tory. The Liberals claimed their share of the glory because Sir William Beveridge, who gave his name to the report, was chairman of the Commission, and a Liberal. To the Labour Government was left the triumph of passing the legislation.

The truth about it all was that the so-called “Welfare State” arose not through the good will of any political party but because of the need to adapt the social services to the changing condition of capitalism. The need to allay any possible working class discontent after the war. Of course, it was a benefit to the health of the working class. That was another reason. To take advantage of post-war conditions and capture as many foreign markets as possible it was necessary to increase production. To do this a healthy efficient working class was needed.

But the capitalist class give with one hand and take back with the other.

The New Statesman and Nation, criticizing the Daily Mail's handling of the figures which led to the headline “Father Pays £34 9s. a year to Put Family of Four on the Panel,” makes some calculations of its own and comments:—

“This would make ‘fathers' payment for health services (Daily Mail calculation) around £23. or almost equal to the estimated benefit (Marshal Aid calculation) which a family receives under the scheme.”—(April 1st. 1950).

From these figures, as far as the health services are concerned, the working class are just getting what they pay for. The Economist in an article deals with the total social expenditure, and it quotes from the report of the E.C.A. Mission to the United Kingdom, “Facts about the British Economy.” Publishing a.table giving the Mission’s estimates The Economist writes: —

“The left-hand side of the table puts the total social expenditure for an average family—on the assumption that the population can be divided into families of four persons—at 57 shillings a week, including expenditure from the local rates and from the national insurance funds. The right-hand side of the table gives estimates of taxes paid by lower income families in 1948, taken as those with an income of under £500 in 1947. The total taxes estimated to be paid by such families who make up about 80 per cent. of the population, were larger than the whole of current social expenditure.” (The Economist, 1/4/50).

The socialist view is that the Welfare State won't abolish the poverty problem which confronts the working class out is just the best method the capitalist class have devised to distribute wages from the point of view of efficiency. When the Beveridge Report, the blue print of the Welfare State, was published, the Communist Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Party and some sections of the Tories were in favour of it. The Socialist Party of Great Britain thought fit to publish a pamphlet putting forward the socialist view. It had the title “Beveridge Re-organises Poverty.” How right it was! The Economist thinks that way too. It later continues: —

“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 group, in accordance with variations in the patterns of consumption, family size, etc., rather than by transfers between different income levels.’ ” (The Economist, I /4/50).

J. T.

Labour and ‘the lower-working-class’ (2024)

From the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.’ (George Orwell)

In his 1937 book, The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell, describes what it was like to be born into a family that saw itself as of a superior class to that of the working class ‘I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class… In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking about there is far more consciousness of poverty than in any working-class family above the level of the dole.’

Back in 1966 class differences were much more obvious to everyone. In a television programme of that year, The Frost Report, John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett acted out a class sketch. Utilising the differences in their heights, Cleese was upper class, Barker middle and Corbett lower. Lines include ‘middle class’ saying, I look up to him because he is upper class, but I look down on him because he is lower class.” Ronnie Corbett: “I know my place.” After describing the advantages of their two ‘superior’ classes, Corbett, looking upwards at both ends the sketch with, ‘I get a pain in the back of my neck.’

Speaking of pain, Labour are at pains to persuade UK capitalism that it need have no qualms about a Labour government. Labour will indeed do its utmost to carry on from the Tories the position of government as the executive committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

At Davos in January, the Labour shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves let it be known that, ‘With Labour, Britain will be open to business. We will restore stability and security into our economy. We will restore Britain’s reputation as a place to do business. And we will be a trusted partner with business in delivering the change our country and our economy needs’ (Guardian, 16 January).

A few months on, they are letting it be known that they are going to be sorting out those pesky proles who can’t or won’t be active wage slaves. Social welfare costs the capitalist class as a whole money that they would much rather benefit from themselves rather than subsidise the – in their eyes – undeserving poor, scroungers and economically useless.

Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall has laid out their intentions:

‘Under a Labour government there would be “no option of a life on benefits”, the Party has said, as it set out plans to reduce the number of young people not in work, education or training.’

‘Under our changed Labour party, if you can work there will be no option of a life on benefits,’ she said in a speech to the centre-left Demos think-tank in London, where she sought to outline Labour’s commitment on “investing” in young people’ (Guardian, 4 March).

Ten years ago Channel Four aired a series of five programmes which looked at the lives of people living in Winson Green, Birmingham. The programmes were titled Benefits Street. The programmes have been called ‘poverty porn’ as they portrayed those featured in the worst possible light. Allegedly ninety percent of the street’s inhabitants were on benefits.

The Socialist Standard, February 2014, carried a TV review of Benefits Street.

‘Benefits Street (Channel 4): yet another tawdry docusoap which reveals how some people just leech off others. The real parasites here are, of course, the programme-makers – feeding off the lives of the people they film… The producers of Benefits Street have maintained that the programme is ‘fair and balanced’, but in reality it’s as fair and balanced as a broken see-saw. The editing, title and format of the show aim to exploit, rather than express the participants’ struggles. The producers have been taken in by the prevailing mood among the elite to demonise those victimised most by capitalism’.

The Labour Party appear now to have the same detestation and contempt for those in society on benefits as did the Channel Four producers of Benefits Street. You won’t hear it from them but the only solution to capitalism’s ills is its replacement by socialism.

Dave Coggan

Doubtful Benefits (2005)

From the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s another day with a ‘Y’ in its name, so the government must be attacking benefits scroungers again. The routine pieties of the modern political age are to talk about ‘helping people’ out of ‘the benefits trap’ and ‘back into work’ – joining the perennial political duties like cutting red tape and reducing government spending. The reason why these problems never go away is because they are problems caused by the very system which puts the politicians in power, and which they cannot resolve without destroying themselves and their own elevated statuses.

David Blunkett – now returned to the cabinet after resigning last year for abusing his office for personal gain in helping his lover’s nanny get a visa quicker – has been making loud noises about the ‘crackers’ Incapacity Benefit system. It is Blunkett’s role to sound like a bruiser, to talk tough and act tough, seen by many as appealing to Labour’s core constituency – former Tory voters on council estates. He bemoaned the continuing rise of people on incapacity benefits (many driven there by previous efforts to try and cut benefits claimants, helped by staff driven by targets to reduce certain types of benefits).

There are currently 2.7 million people on incapacity benefit in the UK, with something like 29 million people in employment (possibly the highest UK figure ever). According to the BBC, that is four times the number of IB recipients compared to 30 years ago. Of course, many things have changed since then, not least the structure of the benefits system as a whole.

Blunkett, however, still wants to drastically reduce the numbers on incapacity. Revealing his new status as a medical doctor, Blunkett pronounced that getting out to work is a better cure for depression than staying at home watching daytime telly.  This startling revelation must have shocked his fellow healthcare professionals who had been labouring under the impression that depression is a medical ailment of the brain as much as a break is a medical condition of the leg. Perhaps

Blunkett will now advise a brisk walk as a cure for that. Behind the tough rhetoric, though, as ever with the modern Machiavellian Labour Party, is some old-fashioned Old Labour style reforms: plans to make the benefits system ‘a ladder to self-reliance’ and to give assistance with training and finding jobs to people who are on IB. Simplification of the system may actually help people who are supposed to be too ill to work but have to be well enough to run from pillar to post to fill in their 2,000 page benefits claim form signed in triplicate in blood. Or something like that.

This is cut from the same cloth as the New Deal and all their previous schemes to ‘help’ the unemployed back to work by badgering them and managing them into being full-time professional job seekers. Of course, this runs counter to any notion that they can quickly cut costs. This month also saw the National Audit Office reveal that only 5% of people on IB were able to access back to work schemes. To assist more people through such structures will actually increase the cost of managing the benefits, not decrease it, as massive expansion would be required.

This is the central conundrum for governments: caught between a real problem beyond their control, trapped by their own eternal propaganda of cost cutting, they cannot pursue their eternal propaganda of getting people off benefits. Instead, all we have is a Groundhog Day of pronouncements and denouncements as the Ministers try to be seen doing something, usually by trying to portray the people who are dependent on benefits as somehow culpable and at fault for the whole of the costs of the benefits system.

Politicians are struggling to define the typical benefits recipient, to legitimise the idea of welfare so they can attack it and reduce costs and also increase downwards pressures on wages and the labour market. Most people in the UK are probably only two pay cheques away from needing to call on benefits, but rather than portray it as a system to help people and prevent catastrophe it is universally presented as a location of cheats, frauds and scroungers, riddled with layabouts and other undeserving poor types. Benefits and being on benefits is to be despised and feared.

Despite this, though, people are compelled to claim them because of the wages system, because they are too ill to work or because work is not available. The benefits system actually benefits employers who otherwise would face the costs and disruption of having to keep on people whose illness makes them turn up to work irregularly, who would lie in desperation to gets jobs about their illnesses, and push much of the cost currently borne generally through taxes directly onto capitalists who employ many workers.

Herein is the rub of the £3 billion lost from the system by fraud and ‘error’ – much of it will have been small sums given to people which will have made their lives easier. Some of it will have contributed to the real living needs of claimants. The real tragedy is not the fraud or the overspend, but that much of the £109 billion budget is wasted assessing people, categorising people and cheeseparing their entitlements.

There is enough food, clothing and housing to go round. The world today is not short of wealth. In order, though, to maintain labour discipline, to keep the labour market in existence, a massive welfare budget must be expended to deny access to the things people need.

The simple fact is that we live in a society overripe for socialism. The material possibility has been around the corner for years. When we remove the barriers to the access of wealth, we also remove the barriers that make some people unemployable, that make socialising and community a cost that has to be scraped out of local authority and social services budgets. We would remove the binds, the need to support a restrictive welfare system but simultaneously to attack it and try to reduce its budget, by the principle of producing freely together.

Socialists, unlike leftists, do not support the welfare state, do not see it as a way to socialism, but as an inevitable part of capitalism, of administering poverty. The abolition of poverty – not in far-flung imagined foreign fields where poverty is vividly drawn by the masters of propaganda, but on the very streets where we walk and it is painted out by those same illusionists – will mean an end to the welfare ideology. With luck, it will also mean seeing less of David Blunkett’s face revelling in his own ‘stern compassion’.

Pik Smeet

Editorial: The Show Opens. (1906)

Editorial from the March 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Westminster Palace of Varieties is now open and the performance is about to commence. Already the inaugural ceremonies have been held and have passed off without hitch of any sort, the quick-change artistes, sleight-of-handists, lampoonists, thimble-riggers, contortionists, low-comedians, heavy “leads,” infant prodigies, double-summersaultists, clowns, pantaloons and the rest having been at infinite pains to get their parts off letter perfect. The troupe manager has announced the programme which, however, may not strictly follow the advertised order, and we are now in a position to know the turns that may come on although, of course, we are not able to anticipate all the “business” the artistes may introduce. With some of the programme we, like our fathers before us, are very familiar. “Safe” turns these, which have already come through the heat of controversy and the burden of examination, mellowed but little impared in the eyes of the average audience who still applaud the “gags” and “wheezes” as though they were all new and novel. For those, however, who, being afflicted with good memories, have not unnaturally wearied of the horrible sameness of the performance, new turns have been introduced, from these great things are expected. It is confidently anticipated that they will prove good draws and secure for the management the continued and extended patronage of the great public, All of them, however, will be found, we think, of the stage stagey, bearing no relation to the real life of the people, and although the audience may respond in a manner gratifying to the Showmen, they will find that there is as little in the new business as there was in the old—that directly it is endeavoured to translate into every-day existence the schemes that look and work out so effectively in the parliamentary story they will be found out as the mere sleight-of-hand tricks they really are. On the stage they seem real enough. Off the stage the are tawdry and ludicrous.

An Affecting “Turn.”

The great feature of the show we understand from the theatrical Press is to be “Social Reform”— “Revolutionary Reform” as one paper described it. The management simply palpitates with “Social Reform.” The whole Company will concentrate upon “Social Reform.” Indeed, so pronounced is their “conspicuous zeal for the social question” that when Mr. G. N. Barnes (of the great L.R.C. combination) had finished his quiet and lucid argument for old age pensions, there was a strong expression of Liberal approval and—O! marvel of marvels!—”more than one ministerialist shook Mr. Barnes by the hand !” Surely zeal could no further go—especially when we know the revolutionary extent of Mr. Barnes’ reform. He would pay to the deserving worker upon attaining 65 years of age, 5/—five whole shillings without deduction—per week. And the average age of death of the working class is less than one half 65 ! And 5/- per week as Mr. Barnes may not know (being only a “Labour” troupist) would barely confine the bones of a man within his skin, let alone keep his heart pulsating within him. “It is a disgrace to the head and heart of the nation that agricultural labourers should receive only 14/- or 15/- per week” says Mr. Barnes. “He cannot live upon it.” So at a time when he will want a little less hardship and a more expensive form of nourishment, and when he will be unable to augment his income through failing strength, instead of sending him to the workhouse (where his maintenance will cost at least twice as much) we will recognise his services to the State, his many years of arduous endeavour in the building up of the prosperity of the country, by pensioning him with 5/- per week—every week regularly—and let him spend his last days in honourable retirement and comfort—or die like the ungrateful dog he would be and may heaven have mercy on his soul as we have had on his body. O ! a zeal for “Social Reform”; a great-heart hunger for the well-being of the common people. And many a ministerialist shook Mr. Barnes by the hand for very sympathy and appreciation ! It must have been an affecting moment.

The Inaugural Chorus.

The opening chorus of a Parliamentary Sessions immediately following a general election if it seldom improves, is always interesting. The members arrive with their blushing honours more thickly upon them than the electoral eggs (rhetorical and other) of their political opponents ever were, and full to the brim with good intentions that generally serve, subsequently, to pave the road to Hell. So that if by any chance they are enabled to vent their oratorial ability upon the King’s alleged speech, their sayings are likely to be as near as they ever will be to the most advanced views they may treasure in the inmost recesses of their heads. This will apply more particularly to the Labour members who, accustomed, as it is pointed out, to taking the floor in all sorts of gatherings, would not be afflicted with that temptation born we understand of the dignity and grandeur of the “mother of Parliaments” which maketh the heart of the ordinary fledgling to run to water within him. Being, therefore, without the handicap of “nerves,” and having an almost unlimited field over which to roam, these Labour candidates (who, by the way, seem to have suddenly been born again as “Socialist” candidates) may be expected to strike out vigorously or as vigorously as they ever will strike. In these circumstances it is interesting—as marking the manner of parliamentarians they are likely to be—to note how these advanced “Labour Party” representatives have deported themselves in speech in the most advanced (revolutionary reform) parliament in English History.

Signs & Portends.

The case of Mr. Barnes has already been mentioned. He is not likely to set the Thames afire. Mr. Keir Hardie seems to have been strong on Temperance Reform and against Conscription—but so are quite a number of sober and respectable capitalist members on both sides of the House. Mr. O’Grady will be loyal to his leader—a promise he may find it more difficult to refrain from breaking than he apparently thinks at present. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald (whose bosom, we learn, flamed like unto his chief's with the red tie of intransigency) would have the manufacture of volunteer clothing taken away from sweating contractors and given over to the Army Clothing Department—a sweater’s paradise ? Mr. Crooks has confined himself so far to interjecting his customary inanities, and the others—are waiting for chances. To the “Labour Party” collectively the “King’s Speech,” which contained of course nothing definite likely to be of value to the working class, was so satisfactory that they decided to move no amendment, while the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress rushed in eagerly with a resolution of gratification and thanks to the Premier. Altogether not a very auspicious commencement. However, as we expected no more we are not so depressed as those who thought the new members would start the fight at the very first opportunity—on the subject of the unemployed who cannot wait without starving, for example. Persons who, professing Socialism with the lip, will reduce it to “Labourism” to secure election, may well be expected to sink their “Labourism” after election to secure a standing. We shall not be astounded, therefore, at anything they may do or not do—unless, indeed, they suddenly awake to the necessity of striking a blow for their class against all the forms and opinions of a capitalist House of Commons. We shall none the less watch their proceedings carefully and report to that portion of the working class we are able to reach.

Meanwhile it is of interest to note that the conditions of the chinaman in South Africa which before the election were depicted on every Liberal poster as slavery in its most degrading form, have now become “well fed and well cared for,” conditions which the Liberal Government do not at present propose to affect, while to describe such conditions as slavery is “terminological inexactitude.” In ordinary everyday language the Liberal election propaganda upon the Chinese Labour Question was entirely fraudulent, conducted as we pointed out with the deliberate intention of deceiving the electorate.