Injustice and “the law” (1998)

Theatre Review from the August 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nabokov’s Gloves (Hampstead Theatre.)

Employment is a central feature of most people’s lives, and its impact on behaviour has been widely documented by modern playwrights. In the last five years or so it is easy to remember Alan Ayckbourne's aspiring entrepreneur finding himself literally involved in murder in A Small Family Business; two young city types playing the money markets and thereby occasioning the collapse of the family firm in which their parents work in Serious Money; and Wesker's cook driven to uncontrollable violence as he succumbs to the pressures of life in The Kitchen. And now in Nabokov’s Gloves at the Hampstead Theatre, Peter Moffat shows how the lives of a handful of young barristers are affected by the practice of law.

Nick is a smooth-talking, conceited barrister whose great passions in life are football and pop songs. Both matter far more than his partner, his other relations and his work as a lawyer. But when he becomes fixated with a client his cosy, privileged life quickly collapses. Critics in the posh papers noted Nick’s constipated emotional life and other inadequacies supposedly characteristic of English males. I wouldn’t gainsay Nick’s retarded emotional development, but I would charge the practice of law as having much to do with many of his obvious deficiencies.

In Britain the legal process is like some elaborate game. It is a game which is concerned with winning rather than with justice; with the manipulation of juries and evidence rather than truth-telling: a game in which barristers who represent the interests of clients behave with what is seen as a praiseworthy inscrutability and detachment, even when they know that their clients are guilty as charged. Indeed far from “the law” being a virtuous activity, its practice and also the wellbeing of its practitioners must necessarily become compromised when winning is the order of the day. Justice, like truth and honesty, need and compassion, are inevitable victims of a system which puts winning first and everything else second.

All this is very clear in Peter Moffat’s revealing and engrossing play. If some of the critics choose to ignore the obvious, and to take refuge in clichés about “the weaknesses of the middle class English male” (whatever they are), that is their privilege. Moffat has fashioned an acerbic piece of drama which is played with great conviction by a talented cast, and which grips the audience from first to last. A play which shows the practice of law as a hollow sham, the basis of a privileged lifestyle for its practitioners; the whole sustained by double-dealing clerks intent on more business and thus more money for themselves and their professional (sic) colleagues. Far from the practice of law being a principled activity Moffat suggest that its amoral pragmatism damages both the emotional and moral wellbeing of all those caught up in its clutches. The tainted values which are required in order to succeed, serve only to undermine and tarnish the rest of lawyers’ lives.

But then we shouldn’t be surprised that in an unjust society those who serve the cause of supposed justice are also its inevitable victims. The nature of law in a class-divided society is essentially to serve the interests of the dominant, minority class. And there sure ain’t no justice in that.

Michael Gill

The daily class struggle (2021)

From the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rough life expectancy of a person in Britain will be about 28,800 days. Those days are the only ones we will ever have, we never get refunds, we never get leftovers, at best we can increase our allotment of days: with a bit of help from medical science. For someone who works full-time, assuming a full career from 18 to 65 working five days a week, they will give over 12,220 of those days to their employers.

That’s just at the raw level of days. Of course, not every second of each of those days is given over: but usually, the best hours are, the active alert able to perform hours. Eight hours of each of those days is given over to sleep (preparing for another day of work), another couple of hours each day are typically spent travelling to and from work, leaving the rest for eating, relaxing or meeting up with friends and family. But all the other activities are conditioned by being able to turn up to work the next day.

So, here we have the idea of the class struggle. When we give our time over to our employer, we give it to them to achieve the ends they desire. In a capitalist society that means producing commodities: good and services, which they can sell with a view to making a profit. The longer we work for them, the more they can use us, the more we do for them, the more goods and services they can sell for more profit. Thus, they will want as many days from us as they can get.

But, here’s the thing, the struggle isn’t just over days as such, it is about the very definition of ‘day’: what amounts to a day’s work? The number of hours we spend working for them increases how much they can get us to do for them. The fewer hours we work for them, the more time we have for ourselves, for our friends, families and communities.

But it’s not just the length of the day: it can also be about the intensity: working harder during the hours we give over also increases the amount of work and profits we produce for the day buyers. The harder we work at work, the less we can do in our own time, the more it becomes a time for recovery to return to work. Employment contracts are written in the language of abstracted absolute hours, but the reality is that it is what we are capable of doing – or being made to do in a day – that defines what happens to us and our employers.

Just look, for example, at the recent struggle over unionising Amazon warehouse workers. The accusation was that they were worked to such a strict regime that the staff there had to micturate into bottles because they weren’t allowed adequate comfort breaks. The intensity of the class struggle is played in the bodily functions of the workers. Amazon leads the way in the scientific study of efficiency, making sure that every ounce of effort they obtain from their employees is usefully turned to their profit. Making sure that not a second of the day’s work is wasted.

The class struggle, between the people who sell their days and the people who buy them is a struggle to define what happens to the very time we have on Earth. No amount of a rock spinning gets to define that.

Let’s make this a little more concrete. There are roughly 31 million people who are in employment in the UK. Not all of these people are full time – for instance about 3 million are ‘underemployed’ and would like more hours. That might seem strange, but given that our society makes selling your days a condition of getting access to the goods and services you need to live (and that we have to buy from the people who are buying all the days), people want to sell their days. To put that is perspective, about 9 million would like fewer hours (but preferably with the same pay).

(Just as an aside, the 31 million in employment doesn’t encompass the whole of the working class, their relatives who depend upon their sale of days are just as caught up in this system of robbery: we are looking at the vast majority of society being enmeshed in this dispute over days and what to do with days).

But let’s go back to that 31 million. Each of them will sell about 12,000 days of their lives to an employer. 31 million multiplied by 12 thousand leads to a number with more zeroes than it’s worth the breath to say: do the sums yourself, if you want to use a portion of your life on such a thing.

Think about what could be done with that number of days: our ancestors built marvels like Stonehenge with nothing more than deer antlers and lots of days of work: the benefit of all those days’ labour goes not to us, the workers, but to the owners of the world. They need us. Without our days of effort, nothing would get done; but the rewards for all that hard work goes to them, not us.

And, just to be clear, this isn’t about them under-paying us for those days or settling a fair price for them. The very fact that we sell our lives means that the priorities, the decisions about what to make and do with our time is taken away from us, and it is the priorities of the buyers that decide what goes on in the world.

Pik Smeet

Blogger's Note:

The text of this article originated out of a talk given at a SPGB Discord Meeting on the subject of May Day.

50 Years Ago: Traffic Problems (1963)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Truly the motor is everywhere, but on the crowded roads of the metropolis its presence and speed have raised a problem for which the multitudinous highway authorities seek in vain a solution.

To such a pass have things come that the attitude of the average motorist is practically that the roads are his property, and that all others are trespassers, to be hooted off.

. . . the sinister result of modern traffic conditions has a deeper meaning than is realised or expressed by commentators in the Press. It signifies the growing pace and intensity of industrial fife, the universal acceleration of production, and the decreasing value of the life of the worker when put in the balance against the pleasure or profit of the class that owns the country. The huge and increasing size of industrial centres, and the greater distances between the workers' homes and the factory, the need for more quickly transferring labour, the greed of the rack renter of the central districts, the knowledge that the workers' time is money to the capitalists, the rush for profits of a transport trust, and the all-pervading atmosphere of hustle, recklessness. and speed is engendered by capitalist greed and the ever-increasing world-wide competition—all these are symptoms of the deep-lying social malady.

But so long as class ownership remains, for just so long will the long list of killed and maimed continue fail grow, and all remedial measures fail to keep pace with the break-neck speeding up of our daily tasks.

From the Socialist Standard,
 January 1913.

Down the pit (1982)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

For many people the symbol of the worker is a coal miner. The man who goes down the pit takes with him the image of the beleaguered proletariat, and comes back up plastered with dust and defiance looking even more so. It's hard, dirty and dangerous work: it fosters resentment, producing the "them" and "us" attitude between the employers and employees. Its history goes back centuries, to the days when men, women and children dug the coal with bare hands in 20-hour shifts, living and dying like troglodytes—all for a pittance.

This powerful image produces intensely felt solidarity among miners who often live in isolated communities and express their consciousness in traditional ways: chapel, singing, club drinking, brass banding, rugby, football and strikes. As the pay of miners has gone up the wages league table, the source of miners' resentment is popularly felt to have disappeared: for the days of child labour are long gone and the stunted, semi-crippled men with "buttons down the back" (permanent scabs from continual banging of vertebrae on low overhead beams) described by Orwell in the 1930s, have gone too.

The road to Hell

What's it really like down a mine? I was recently offered a place in a party visiting Silverdale Deep in Staffordshire. A chance to compare the image with reality was too good to miss. People are encouraged to go down the pit, it's a public relations exercise for the employers—and for the employees, it turned out.

In the pit canteen we were met by two men, symbols of "them and us". Them was a mining engineer in charge down at the face for that shift; he was smooth, knowledgeable and authoritative about mining output per man/shift, the efficiency of Silverdale compared to other pits and all the technicalities of coal getting. Us was the coal face shop steward for that shift; he was a craggy, old Potteries boy, brimful with frightening tales of disaster at the pit, who insisted that we all swig our pint mugs of tea and cram as much bread and marge as we could into ourselves, to survive the trip.

We were kitted out with hard hats and head lights, connected to belt-hung wet-cell batteries: then we strode with trepidation to the pit head. The cage plunged a thousand sickening feet in a few seconds and then stopped so swiftly that I thought my skull would burst.

Stepping out of the cage my image of a coal mine collapsed. For the brightly illuminated main gallery was not black, but white. Lime is plastered everywhere near the foot of the shaft, in an effort to lay the dust that peppers you in blasts of warm and cold air. We trudged out of the whiteness and into the blackness for 500 yards, with Them in front, and Us behind. Then we came to a downward-sloping conveyor belt. Us took over here. He demonstrated how to pitch yourself safely onto the man-ride at ten-yard intervals. We did, and rode another thousand feet down into the pit. Them caught the visitors at the end of the man-ride, but Us disdained his help and stepped off deftly. We walked another 500 yards along a maze of narrowing tunnels, in a strangely smelling stream, towards a distant noise that grew to a roar.

Into Hell

"It's an Anderson-Boyes mark ten coal-cutter", screamed Them in my ear, as Us spat tobacco juice into the dust cloud around the beast. Half an hour we spent at the face and that was the only  conversation possible. But we looked and wondered. A traction motor the size of a rhinoceros, attached to a circular saw as big as an elephant, lumbered along a railway bed and knocked lumps of coal the size of settees off the face, through jets of water and arc lamps, down a gallery not much wider or higher than a Nissen hut.

It was too much to take in all at once, so I staggered to the end of the face for a rest and to leak away the tea, suddenly realising why the stream had smelt so. "Yer might at least piss away from us!", bawled a voice. Peering into the gloom I saw a line of boots sticking out of the catacombs. Part of the shift were on a tea break and were munching at the contents of their snap tins. "First time down, eh, kid?" he yelled, "bleedin' awful, ennit? Goo on back in there, or you'll miss the best bit!"

At the face the machine was stopped briefly, as Them, Us and others crawled over it, making adjustments and panting through their masks. They finished resetting and, at a curt nod from Them, Us carefully positioned all visitors on a raised catwalk. Them walked down the face pulling a series of hydraulic levers. Then the entire coal-cutter, rails, catwalk, pillars and roof slid forward two yards—followed by an earthquake, as the now unsupported world behind us came tumbling down and the coal-cutter took out lumps like motor cars in a new pass along the face.

Capitalist pigs

As we left, a man yelled, "tell 'em up there what it's like down 'ere!" We tramped in stunned silence to the manride and gratefully flopped onto it. The rollers massage your body as you rumble upwards and I was nearly asleep when something tapped my foot. It was Us; he'd crawled up to talk. "Of course", he shouted, "This ain't a proper way to run a pit. They do it right in Russia. They've 'ad their revolution. Done away with the capitalists. That's what we oughter do!" For a moment I was dumbstruck. It was like something out of a really bad novel. The "old bolshevik" trying to convert the "middle class intelligentsia", two and a half thousand feet underground! For that was how he saw himself and me. The I remembered that I was a socialist and launched the counter-argument at him in the only language the noise permitted. "No! Russia's no bloody good! Neither is violent insurrection, it only gets workers killed. Nationalisation is a fraud! What's the difference between a private capitalist pig and a state capitalist pig?" We argued all the way up to the pit head, until, stepping out of the cage into the fresh air, all the visitors started to cough up black phlegm.

After a change of clothes, a wash and a gargle, we trooped into the pit canteen, to drink an incredible amount of tea and have a de-briefing. Pneumoconiosis and silicosis were on all the visitors' minds, as we contemplated what two hours down the pit had done to our lungs. "We only get the odd pneumo", said Us, "it's like trench feet, a matter of morale. If the men could get the pay and conditions they want and the management would only cooperate, it would disappear altogether". At this Them demurred: "If the men would only wear their masks all the time, there would be no more silicosis", he said. Someone pointed out that the only time Them had worn his mask was when adjusting the coal-cutter, and even then he had to take it off to shout orders. A lady visitor went to the heart of the matter when she said "This isn't work that anyone should do for mere money". "Too right", said Us. "The mines should belong to the miners, the ships to the sailors, the trains to the engine drivers. All industry should be run for the public good". At this Them got quite heated and made a speech about the need for profitability in the private and public sectors. It was obvious that the two of them had been doing this for years, because Us rescued the de-briefing with a tale of humorous disaster. Then we went home, I coughed up coal dust for a fortnight.

The world for the workers

Well reader, where do you stand? Which side are you on? Are you for Them or for Us? What's a fair wage for a man's working lifetime down the pit? Can you quantify discomfort for the face worker? Should it be more or less than that of the deep-sea trawlerman? One thing is certain—this side of capitalism there is no solution. But, on the other side, beyond the garbled dream of the shop steward, there is, for the taking, a socialist world. A society without "them and us", without  public or private ownership, without buying and selling, wages and jobs; where everyone, including miners, will have free access to the wealth created. Only the harmony of that society could adequately compensate for such toil—if it were necessary. To be sure, the solidarity of the miners has never risen to the level of socialist class consciousness, but how much of a push would it need to make it do so? Just a few thousand socialists explaining the difference between "the mine for the miners" and "the world for the workers".

B K McNeeney