Some Interesting Quotations. (1929)

From the September 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The Times” on the Unsolved Problem of Capitalism.

Virtually, there is no problem of production in industry. In nearly all industrial countries many plants work at less than full capacity, for the real problem with them is to sell and not to produce.—(Times City Notes, July 15th.)

* * *

Mr. Snowden on the War.

Let it be remembered (he proceeded) that Great Britain entered the War in support of treaty rights and in defence of the safety and security of other nations. She willingly did that; she willingly sacrificed her blood, not in her own interests. As Lord Balfour said, no vital British interest was menaced when Great Britain entered the War.—(Mr. Snowden, addressing the Hague Conference on Reparations. Report in Times, August 9th.)

* * *

The “Morning Post” on Mr. Snowden.

When, for example, he pretended that Great Britain entered the War, not in her own interest, but in defence of others, he was using a sort of cant most offensive to those who know (as we all know who are frank with ourselves) that Great Britain entered the War for the defence of her own existence, which was threatened hardly less directly than the existence of Belgium and France.—(Morning Post, August 12.)

* * *

Miss Ellen Wilkinson on the Futility of her Party.

This one simple truth has got to be borne in mind (and stated)—that unemployment is a byproduct of Capitalism, and you can’t solve it, or even appreciably lessen it, within a system which by its working is bound to create more unemployed. That is the real difficulty of this Government.—(New Leader, July 12.)

SPGB Meetings (1929)

Party News from the September 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

Editorial: Trade Unions on the Rocks (1946)

Editorial from the October 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a confused welter of argument about unofficial strikes, big and little unions and the "Closed Shop,” what is by far the most fateful aspect of the trade union situation is being disregarded, though it is the underlying trouble of which the others are largely symptoms. What has happened during the war, and still more since the Labour Government came into power, is that the trade unions have increasingly ceased to be independent organisations of the workers in the struggle against the employers over wages and conditions of work, and have become instead organisations for disciplining the workers in the interest of the Government’s wages and production policies. The present Government, having taken over from Churchill the responsibility of administering capitalism, puts at the forefront of its programme an intense drive to find markets abroad for British exporters in competition with the capitalists of other countries. The plan has several features that are related to each other. One is the continuation of “ austerity ” at home so that more goods can be sold abroad. Another is the effort to lower costs of production to a competitive level in the markets of the world, partly by modernising the technical equipment of various backward industries and partly by seeking the co-operation of the workers, through the trade unions, in the campaign to increase production. The third part of the plan was the Government’s belief that by retaining the control of prices for essential goods, clothing, etc., wages would remain more or less unchanged at the level reached at the end of the war. Not wanting to take the very unpopular step of preventing wage increases by making them illegal—as some governments have done—the Government here hoped to keep wage increases in check by appealing to the workers, and particularly by appealing to the Trade Union executives, to moderate their demands. In short, it was regarded by the Government as essential, if British capitalism was to regain its overseas markets, that the trade unions should largely abdicate their proper function of struggling to raise wages in the present favourable situation, and should instead act as a brake on the demands of the workers. That this is a correct reading of the minds of the Ministers is shown by Mr. Dalton’s speech ill the House of Commons on October 23rd, 1945, when introducing his budget. He pointed out that the Government was spending some hundreds of millions of pounds a year subsidising food and other articles in order to keep prices down, then he went on to talk about the effect on wages : —

“It has also helped to restrain any disproportionate increase in wage rates, which, if it had occurred, might have disturbed the whole balance of our economic life, and might have sucked us into the fatal whirlpool of inflation. Here I wish to pay tribute to the steadiness and good sense which the trade unions and their leaders have shown during the war in this regard. . . . Wage rates . . . have climbed steadily all the time, and that has been right; yet there has been no break-away rise, no uncontrolled rise such as we might easily have seen had it not. been for this continuing cooperation between the Government—in this case the Coalition Government—and the trade unions, both recognising that the common interest was best served by this joint effort of the two parties to keep prices and wages on an even keel.”

Mr. Dalton calls it “co-operation” between the Government and the trade unions, but in fact it has been co-operation between the Government and the trade union executives to hold back the natural and correct desire of the workers to struggle for higher wages before unemployment and eventual slump make it impossible to do so.

Mr. G. D. H. Cole, himself a Labour Party supporter and one who approves of this damping-down policy, described it in very appropriate terms in the Observer (8/9/46). He sees that the workers are restive because they feel they no longer control their officials, and feel that the unions are “merely a bureaucratic machine run by the officials for the purpose of keeping them in order.”

Mr. Cole seeks a remedy, but adds:—

"This is not too easy, now that most wage bargains are national in scale, and wage demands have to be squared with the requirements of a national wages policy—as they have in fact, even if the existence of such a policy is disclaimed. The Trade Unions have become, perforce, instruments for disciplining their more unruly members, as well as for representing them; and this sets up a tension that will be cured only by time, as people settle down to the changed conditions.”

Mr. Cole has correctly diagnosed the cause of the present discontent of trade unionists which shows itself in unofficial strikes and efforts to break away from the discipline imposed by the officials on behalf of the Government, but he and the trade union officials who support that policy are quite wrong in their belief that the workers should, or will, go on accepting it. The trade unions must regain their independence and freedom of action or they will become moribund and useless. The unions are not being endangered by the virile independence shown already by some trade unionists; they are being throttled from above by the fatal tie-up with the Government. Their health will tie restored only when the members can again know that they are able to exercise democratic control over union policy and are free, when they deem it wise, to use the only weapon they have under capitalism, the strike.

It is popular in Labour circles to denounce totalitarian regimes under which trade unions are State organs, and strikes are forbidden. Mr. Morgan Phillips, Secretary of the Labour Party, on his return from Russia, wrote about the Russian unions: - 

"I am not sure that the workers’ organisations can be regarded as ‘trade anions' in the British sense that they are free agents to act and speak as their members demand, irrespective of Government stricture. The very fact that strikes are illegal seems to dispose of any pretence to freedom of action as we know it ” (Daily Herald, 21/8/46).

It would not be a bad idea if Mr. Phillips would now take a look at what used to be independent trade unions in this country and observe that, by a less brutal and less obvious process of deterioration, they are heading towards the state of the Russian organisations. It is plain that the unions here will not be rescued from that fate by the Labour Government or by the trade union executives who have been responsible for the present state of things. Salvation will come from the members themselves when they wake up to the fact that Labour government cannot abolish capitalism or the class struggle inseparable from capitalism, and when they regain control of their own organisations for the purpose of defending their interests on the industrial field.

It should be added, however, that while Socialists support sound trade union action they have to point out, too, that trade unions, though necessary and useful organs of working-class resistance, cannot emancipate the working class from capitalism—that can be done only by a Socialist working class politically organised to take control democratically of the machinery of government, for the purpose of abolishing capitalism and introducing Socialism.

Communist slogans for capitalism (1946)

From the October 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leading Communist Arthur Horner, like the Jack Horner of old, has stuck his finger into the Trades Union pie, and pulled out a nice fat plum—the post of General Secretary to the National Union of Mineworkers. After the cheers of the C.P.G.B. have subsided, let us see if this appointment benefits the mineworkers, or the mine-owners.

Addressing a mass meeting of miners at Tonypandy, he said :—

“Production needs are so great that the time has come to apply the slogan “ If a man won’t work, neither shall he eat ” (Daily Express, 26/8/46). 

Horner, of course, has learned this brutal slave-driving threat from the source of all Communist inspiration—Soviet Russia, and although this self-same slogan was incorporated in the first Russian Constitution of 1918 for the new “Socialist State,” it is difficult to understand why Horner shall proclaim it in Capitalist Britain, unless it is for the extraction of more surplus-value from the miners. Perhaps he, like the Daily Herald, imagines that Britain is now a “Socialist State” !

This wolf in Marxist clothing continues:—

“The present manpower cannot produce the coal that Britain needs to maintain full employment.”

With unemployment figures growing all round him, this so-called ”leader” of the proletariat dares to suggest that “full employment” is even possible under Capitalism, which demands a constant reserve army of unemployed to act as a lever against the struggles of employed workers, much less that it is actually in existence now.

The next “ gem ” (he certainly “went the whole hog” at Tonypandy !):—

“ A large increase of manpower for the pits is vital if there is to be a rapid restoration of coal exports.”

Instead of telling the miners about Marxism, or Communism, this “revolutionary” is forced, by the very nature of his position as ”Labour Tamer ” in the capitalist circus, to sidetrack and confuse the workers’ minds with that old, old capitalist motto, “ Export or die,” which is so necessary (for the capitalist class) at this stage to beat rival capitalist states in the race to hustle commodities into the markets of the world.

Impressively, Horner juggles with figures containing heaps of 000’s, concluding that :—

“If we can restore the 1939 position . . . we can .. . wipe out the American loan and the burden its commitments represent.”

For these few words of cheer the British Capitalist class (who bear the “burden”) will have cause to thank “Comrade” Horner, and perhaps arrange a knighthood for him—who knows? But the matter should not interest the working class of either America or Britain, whose “burden” under Capitalism has always been that of “ making both ends meet ’’—whose wages represent the cost of keeping them fit for reproducing their work and their class. It is absurd to suggest that the American loan is anything but a business arrangement between the master class of America and Britain, and the millions that Horner quotes are of no interest to the working class of either country.

Speaking of unemployment in Wales (having already talked about “maintaining full employment”), Horner, like a Stalin contemplating a “purge,” says:—

“ The cause of the failure must be traced and ruthlessly eradicated.”

For once we can agree, but as the only answer to the social evils of the day is the abolition of the system of society that Horner is supporting, and the institution of a system based on common ownership of the means of life instead of private or state ownership, the task is left to us Socialists to explain to the miners of Tonypandy and workers, wherever the Socialist message can penetrate, their position in society to-day.

Armed with sound Socialist knowledge, and the will to unite for victory, the working class will achieve its emancipation, in spite of the confusion and disillusion spread by office-seeking Communist opportunists.

Michael La Touche

Muddled Thinking of a Labour Leader (1946)

From the October 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

“If ever there was a risk of over-production causing unemployment there is none now. For at least a dozen years there must be conditions of shortage which with the best energy and effort cannot be removed. We are in arrears. We need have no fear of the supply exceeding the demand.”

(Reynold’s News, Nov. 30th, 1919.)

Within two years of making this statement there were over 2,000,000 unemployed.

Now Mr. Clynes is at it again. In a statement from his home in Putney he said:—“Avoidable stoppages, absenteeism and dislocation in the workshop lead to reduced production of goods. The less there is to buy the more men must pay to get what they want. ” (Daily Express, June 17th, 1946.)

Though the wording is different, the implication is the same. All we have to do to ensure a high standard of living is work hard. Intensified production inevitably produces a surplus; under capitalism goods are produced for sale, demand meaning the ability to pay.

At present, in a world denuded of goods, there is a ready market for goods of all descriptions. Modern mass-production methods, as applied to industry, will create an abundance. In due course the markets will be flooded. The capitalists, being unable to sell all the products at a profit, will curtail production, and many workers will be thrown out of work.

Mr. Clynes should think of the years between the wars before he commits himself to these bland statements.

Meller.

"Rake's Progress" (Political Version) (1946)

From the October 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

The majority of people know Mr. Strachey as Minister of Food. There is a minority who have come to regard him as an exponent of Marxism as well. Indeed, Tom Driberg, M.P., in Reynolds' (1/6/46), said that it was as a Marxian economist that he approached the Labour front bench. That a copy of Marx’s “Capital” leaves Mr. Strachey’s bookshelves when invited to Cabinet discussions is doubtful. Nevertheless, in an article in the Daily Herald (28/5/46) on Mr. Strachey, Mr. Francis Williams resolutely refused to convey any suggestion of a Marxist skeleton in the cupboard of Mr. Strachey’s political past and merely commented "He wrote able and bitter political works, some of which have been regarded as minor classics of the Left.” In these minor classics Mr. Strachey developed major attacks on the Labour Party. In the ”Coming struggle for power” (p. 338) he accused them ”of laying down the working-class organisation necessary for Fascism.” Theorists like G. D. H. Cole, who, he alleged, believed in a form of controlled high-wage-paying capitalism, he charged with having the same political objectives as the Fascist Corporate State. His now somewhat uncomfortable prognostication of Mr. Morrison was that he envisaged a Whitehall or Smith Square controlled capitalism, adding that the difference between Mr. Morrison’s views and those of G. D. H. Cole were merely one of emphasis and mode of expression. His own party he summed up as—“Labour Party rotten before it was ripe” (“The Nature of Capitalist Crisis,” p. 341-352). From the Herald's viewpoint such a skeleton is best kept under lock and key. It was left to the New Statesman to frivolously twitter “Mr. Strachey’s series of Socialist studies must have been the one brilliantly successful attempt to translate Marxism into the King’s English.” While the King’s English reputation of the New Statesman is deservedly high, their qualifications to pronounce on Marxism is notoriously low. It is, of course, Mr. Stracliey’s Marxism which is in question.

Mr. Strachey’s exit from the Conservative Party into the Cloud-Cuckooland of I.L.P. politics, his pre- Fascist Mosley associations and monetary reform theories, are without significance apart from confused thinking. His Marxist reputation rests largely on the fact that via the Gollancz Press he spread and popularised Stalinist fairy-tales of Socialism in Russia for political adolescents of the vaguely termed middle class. Ironically enough it was the Fabian anti-Marxist Webbs who were his intellectual paramours in all this, their work, ‘‘Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation,” his authority. (“The Theory and Practice of Socialism,” p. 49.) The Public Hangman is not usually asked to write a thesis on the need for the abolition of Capital Punishment. Fabianism, whose high priests were the Webbs, is merely State Capitalism, and it was G. B. Shaw who, on returning from a visit to Russia, proclaimed, “The Bolsheviks have only realised the Fabian Programme.” The Webbs’ work on Russia was then but the priestly blessing of their own creed. The "Marxist” Strachey appears as the uninvited acolyte in the Fabian temple.

It is not surprising, then, that he hailed the new Russian Constitution (direct vote and secret ballot) as a super Democracy, quoting Soviet leaders’ views that a classless society was coming into being (‘‘Theory and Practice of Socialism,” p. 148), although admitting (p. 165) that hitherto the illiteracy of the Russian population had prevented it. Later, Engels is quoted to show that the State is an instrument of ruling-class coercion. The growth of Soviet State bureaucracy indicates, then, a classless society’s need for increasing ruling-class coercion. Leaders, however, were chosen in Russia through long and searching apprenticeship in the Communist Party (p. 163) and were controlled far more effectively than those of the capitalists. It is this, he said, which made working-class control unique. The carefully controlled “chosen” were later liquidated as wreckers, spies and Fascist criminals. Truly this form “of working-class control” was unique. In the section, the Economic System (‘‘Theory and Practice of Socialism”), Mr. Strachey heavily underscored his ignorance of the nature of Socialist society. To Marxists, Socialism is the democratic ownership of the sources of production. But not only will the producers control the instruments of Labour, they will also determine the character and manner of the productive process by which the products of their labour are turned out. Mr. Strachey simply denies this. For him, Socialism is planned production par excellence, the Soviet model its working hypothesis. For common ownership he substitutes a Planning Authority which would control and decree wealth production and distribution, quantitatively and qualitatively. His quick phrase that the Planning Authorities’ conscious and deliberate decisions will be set up and controlled by the community (p. 42) is a pure verbal concession. Ownership and control of wealth production are inseparably integrated; thus the non-control by the wealth producers must entail non-ownership as well, and the workers in Mr. Strachey’s scheme would he as effectively divorced from the means of production as they are now. Mr. Strachey’s “Marxist” production for use suspiciously resembles Stuart Chase's “Economy of Abundance.” Both agree on the economic ideal of maximisation of wealth distribution and centrally organised control. Stuart Chase saw it as a means of continuing Capitalism. Mr. Strachey mistook it for Socialism.

Inevitably, then, all the economic categories of capitalist society reappear in Mr. Strachey’s new one, viz., trade, markets, wage labour, etc. in deference to the new social forces they are called Socialist. Mr. Strachey assures us that Socialism will have an unlimited market, but any Marxist Economic primer could have informed Mr. Strachey that the market is the economic mechanism whereby a profit-making society (Capitalism) merely realises the profits that are created in the productive sphere by exploitation in the form of wage labour. An unlimited market would then presuppose unlimited profits and, of course, unlimited exploitation. A desirable but hitherto unrealisable capitalist ideal. Production of value and surplus value is inherent, then, in Mr. Strachey’s “Socialist Society”; just as in “The Only Socialist Country,” profitability of Soviet enterprise to get higher levels is constantly being stressed by Stalin. Thus the productive limits of such an economy would be set by this profitability principle with its concomitant features of mass overproduction and unemployment. In substance, the difference between all this and a highly developed monopoly Capitalism or State Capitalism is less than the shadow of a ghost’s shadow.

Mr. Strachey thought that inventing, say, a working model of how a planned economy might work in America or here avoids our discussing Socialism in the abstract (“Theory and Practice of Socialism,” p. 29). Actually, it avoids discussing Socialism altogether. Only the theoretically incompetent would pose such a proposition. Socialism cannot be discussed in the abstract because it is itself the historic product and consequence of the actual concrete conditions of present society. True, Socialism will have its technical as well as economic problems (Strachey substituting technical re-organisation for an economic revolution in productive relations confused the two), but these can only be solved by the conscious participation of the majority, consistent with the prevailing ideas and genuine social needs—existing at that time. Socialism cannot, then, by its very nature be a sum of ready-made recipes imposed from above by a Planning Authority. Socialism, because it is an historical process, provides not only the conditions but the means for its own realisation and fulfilment, thus demonstrating its scientific worth over blue-printed Utopias. Mr. Strachey, on his own showing, is a Utopian.

Mr. Strachey did tell us that a knowledge of Marxism avoids our becoming the dupes of capitalist planning. Informed by such knowledge, he supported the idea of Popular Front government with a planned programme of social measures. Anyone refusing to co-operate in the formation of this get-together Mr. Strachey stigmatised with the sin of sectarianism. Out of all the political sinners, our sin was the most scarlet. Of our party, he said they neither attempt nor wish to attempt to work in the Labour movement (”What Are We To Do,” p. 909). Had we campaigned for and on behalf of co-operation with the Labour Party a little previously, Mr. Strachey might have hissed "Social Fascists.” He. added that our sole purpose, like religious bodies, was to provide subjective comfort and consolation to our members. Yet Mr. Strachey, in attempting to account for the failure of any real working-class political achievement, had to resort to the expediency of using a S.P.G.B. principle—that working- class knowledge is the essential condition for working-class emancipation—in order to show why this must necessarily be so. In ‘‘The Nature of Capitalist Crises” (p. 347) he admits that lack of working-class understanding leads workers to give their energies, even their lives, hopelessly trying to achieve what is inherently impossible, and finally becoming dupes and blind drudges for talented adventurers. Mr. Strachey unconsciously, it seems, presented the working class with a truly tragic Hobson’s Choice, but at least it concedes us the advantage of providing subjective comfort to our own members rather than material comfort to allegedly "talented adventurers.”

But all this was in the past. Came the war; the second imperialist war, which Mr. Strachey’s Marxist knowledge enabled him to predict with certainty (“The Nature of Capitalist Crisis,” p. 960). What he forgot to predict was that he would support it. At the beginning Russia was outside of it and his former Communist Party allies were violently, even if temporarily, proclaiming it as ”a war between robber nations for world domination.” Mr. Strachey was thus faced with a conflict of loyalties between his own fatherland and adopted one. It was then Mr. Strachey discovered Soviet totalitarianism. He even discovered in the same sentence that “it (Soviet totalitarianism) has not hitherto turned out to be of a totally different character from other totalitarianisms ” (“The Betrayal of the Left,” p. 201).

It is true that the Dictatorship versus Democracy issue (p. 204) is complicated for Mr. Strachey by the fact that the "Socialism” which he supported existed only in the form of a totalitarianism to which he was opposed; and the capitalism which he opposed possessed the democracy which he supported. So Mr. Strachey decided to burn his Russian boats by declaring (on p. 205) "that the enforcement of totalitarianism was a catastrophe from which the world might never recover.”

Nevertheless, the inevitability of war did not necessarily guarantee Allied victory. At times there were difficulties. In an article in the Observer (2/6/46) on Mr. Strachey it is mentioned that a critical moment in the development of British bombing policy had been reached. Heavy raids on German cities, causing heavy civilian casualties among German civilian women might, it was thought, rouse British public objection. But Mr. Strachey was standing by. Says the Observer:

“Strachey was put on the air. Gently he took the minds of his listeners off the receiving end of the bombing attacks and fixed it on the courage of the crews and the plans behind the attack. So the outcry feared by Bomber Harris never came.” 

Consequently, it seems, neither did any bombing respite for German women and children, as the possible result of public sentiment. Mr. Strachey had made a vital contribution. "Mr. Strachey believed in bombing,” says the Observer, "and developed Bomber Command faith with the same invincible logic that had gone before to 'Revolution by Reason,’ the Communist Party and the Popular Front.” The Spectator, once commenting on Mr. Strachey’s “The Coming Struggle for Power,” said "He had established a range of social, intellectual and political contacts which were likely to remain a record.” A range which includes Marxism and Mass-bombing is a record and should remain one.

That Mr. Strachey still accepts the "Marxist” inevitability of war seems to be evidenced in the House of Commons debate (12/3/46). Speaking on the future structure and character of the R.A.F., he said:

"Ultimately it would have to he decided whether the long-range bomber component of the R.A.F. was to be designed primarily for existing types of chemical explosives or atomic explosives.”

It would seem that on many an occasion in the Labour Party a left-wing Mrs. Gamp creates a right- wing Mrs. Harris, not only to give the lady a piece of his mind, but as a useful medium for proclaiming one’s political virtues. As in the case of Dickens’ Mrs. Harris, she becomes after a time an embarrassment to her creator. She is then allowed to quietly lapse into the obscurity from which she emerged. In Mr. Strachey’s case she may have become a war fatality instead—a victim of that mass-bombing from the British, which, from the British side, he supported with such faith and invincible logic.

Ted Wilmott

Mr. Thurtle misfires (1946)

From the October 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Ernest Thurtle, Labour M.P. for Shoreditch, sometime member of the Fabian Society and I.L.P., and sometime belligerent war-supporter turned pacifist turned war supporter, writes a weekly column of pontifical political comment and behind-the-scenes chit-chat for Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express under the title “ Labour Point of View.” On Sunday, September 1st, he wrote the following: —

"Sympathy for the little fellow struggling against the big one is natural, but in the present dispute between the little and big unions of the transport workers common sense appears to be on the side of the big battalion.

Mr. Frank Snelling, the national organiser of the little union, which is fighting so spiritedly, is what is known in Labour circles as an S.P.G.B’er. Decoded, this means a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, a strict Marxist sect of microscopic membership.

Because the little party had so few members, who oozed Socialist self-righteousness, the larger movement was wont to refer to them derisively as the Small Party of Good Boys.”

That is all Mr. Thurtle has to say. He gives no facts about the dispute and no reasons why he believes that all the common sense is on one side. He does not mention that the S.P.G.B. has members in the T. & G.W.U. as well as in the N.U.P.W., and it is evident that his sole object in. referring to the dispute was to provide a peg on which to hang the unoriginal remarks about the S.P.G.B.; from which we conclude that his anguished outcry is really due to some of the “microscopic membership” of the S.P.G.B. having got under his skin some time or other.

We thank him for one thing. He concedes that the kind of self-righteousness we ooze is “Socialist”—our complaint about Mr. Thurtle and his party is that Socialism is the last thing they can be self-righteous about.

Nearly all of the remainder of Mr. Thurtle’s column was devoted to a penitent’s lengthy explanation of his own errors.

“Let me confess,” he wrote, "that I, along with other Labour candidates at the General Election, in stressing the importance of good relations with Russia, avowed confidently that a Labour Government would win the co-operation of the Soviet. We believed this. How wrong we were !”

Yet he still cannot see that the capitalist clash of interests is not altered by having British capitalism run by a Labour Government and Russian State capitalism run by a so-called Communist Party. He still Ands the situation ‘‘puzzling.” If he had any Socialism to ooze he would not have believed the nonsense he told the electors. (Incidentally, as he obviously obtained votes under a misapprehension, what about emulating his father-in-law, the late Mr. George Lansbury, and resigning to give the electors a chance to say whether they still want him as their M.P.?)

There are occasions when Mr. Thurtle, in his efforts to coin a telling phrase, tells more of the truth than he ever intended. On April 14th, in his Express article, he congratulated Mr. Dalton on having “achieved another Budget success ” ; but he added the following two-edged remark: —

"His 1946 favours are neither large nor numerous, but they have been distributed with great skill. It needs much knowledge of human nature to be able to please so many with so little." (Our italics.)

That final sentence should be treasured as a fitting emblem of Labour Governments—but it needs to be read alongside another saying; that you can’t fool all the people all the time.

P. S.

SPGB Meetings (1946)

Party News from the October 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

Editorial: Beyond the revolution (1979)

Editorial from the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The occasional reference to socialism from the so-called revolutionary left betrays the historical irony that those who now adopt the terminology of socialist revolution are deeply committed to the maxim of the German reformist, Bernstein, that “the goal is nothing, the movement everything”. They care more for movement than for direction; more for growth than for principle; and more for the tactics of struggle than for the nature of victory.

Those who refuse to sacrifice socialist intention for reformist demands are labelled utopian. This universal smear of the left is reserved for those clear-sighted workers who enter the historic battle of the classes because they look forward to the fruits of victory and not the ‘reality’ of repeated defeats.

For them the goal is everything, the movement never more than a means to it. The Socialist Party of Great Britain aims to establish a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community. Those who reject that aim are idealists, stumbling among the chaos of capitalism, searching for new brick walls to bang their heads against. A definition of socialism is not a blueprint of how it will be.

It would be extreme arrogance for socialists, in 1979, to devise detailed plans for the lives of emancipated humanity after they have carried out the political act to establish socialism. Like Marx, we are not the designers of a Utopia, but we do not fear prediction and speculation regarding life in a socialist society.

In socialism (under socialism somehow seems to be the wrong means of expression here) a baby will not be destined to accept the label of class. Male or female, black or white, mentally and physically normal or abnormal, it can expect the freedom to develop as a social individual in a world based upon the practice of co-operative equality. The capitalist-style family will not exist, if indeed the family is retained in any form. Certainly there will no longer be imposed sex roles, indoctrination in the name of education, and repression in the name of discipline. Now, a child must learn to become a wage slave — or, if lucky, a supposedly cultured parasite. In socialism children will learn from experience over which they will have control.

No society can operate without work, and neither will socialism. Not employment, which is simply the capitalist word for slavery, but useful, self-imposed, creative work. Production in a socialist society will be for use, not profit; with each member of society giving according to his or her ability and taking according to self-determined needs. There will be no wages as a price for a worker’s labour power, nor money as a barrier to the world’s wealth. Free access will be the basis of wealth distribution.

Without the compulsion of wage labour, men and women — and children, if they are able to — will contribute to the tasks of production and distribution. Work will be transformed by socialism; no more dull conditions, no more master-slave relationships, no more shoddy production of cheap commodities, no more need to do one job for life. The aim of work will be production of the best and the satisfaction of the producer. The latter is an important qualification. There will not be a producer-consumer division in socialism, but satisfactory lifestyles both inside and outside the production process.

Socialist society will be a political and economic democracy. Everyone will own everything', since private property will not exist. Does that mean we shall have the right to take each other’s coats? No: it means that men and women will use what they need, sometimes permanently as in the case of a coat, sometimes temporarily as in the case of a library book. There will be no rights of property. If someone takes another’s coat — either by accident or because they are acting irrationally — then there will be free access to as many new coats as are needed. Economic democracy will mean that decisions about production and distribution will be made socially, either by the whole of society — which would be no problem even today, with current methods of world communication — or by those involved in the processes, if society is prepared to leave the decision to them. We do not aim to replace the present capitalist elite with a new bureaucratic elite. The socialist revolution will be a permanent revolution in the sense that once enacted, people would have to participate in running society.

Free mobility will be available for everyone in a socialist society. Today, workers are born and they die in one country, usually without travelling far out of its borders. No boundaries, nations or provinces will divide socialist society. The world will be one. That is not to say that we aim to create a monolith, devoid of cultural, language and other variations.

Social organisation in socialism will not depend upon governments, leaders or parties. These only exist in class society, where laws are the expression of the ruling class interest. When the socialist working class take power, they will use the law to dismantle capitalism and build socialism. Once that has been done, there will be no laws created by one section of society in order to control another.

Just as there will be no secular laws, so there will be no laws of the phoney creation of primitive man — god. Socialist society will have no need for religions and utopias beyond the grave. What if a minority within socialism want to continue their religious lifestyle? Then they shall be free to do so, and those who want to walk across the Red Sea or jump from a high building without a parachute may do so too.

The morals of socialism will be fashioned by common ownership and free access, and by the sovereignty of democratic decisions. Taboos about sex will be as laughable as taboos about witchcraft are today. To those conditioned by the popular prejudices of capitalism, socialism seems amoral. In truth, it will be a society which will reflect human urges — the imagination and the self-interest of humanity.

Labour's mock battle (1979)

From the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are about to witness yet another Battle for the Soul of the Labour Party, which might be an awe-inspiring spectacle were it not for the fact that the amount of inspiration will be in inverse proportion to the degree of understanding.

Cynics will take hot-blooded part in this Battle, rather like troops who have just swallowed their rum ration before going over the top. They are convinced that it is a significant event which will affect the history of the British working class. Realists will know that it has all happened many times before. The prize in the Battle is less the Soul of the Labour Party (whatever, and wherever, that may be) than its seat, which it wants to restore to the benches of power as quickly as possible. And that, really, is what all the excitement is about; the Battle is being fought only because Labour was defeated at the last election.

The battle lines, as usual, are drawn up left and right, and each side has begun bombarding the other with missiles stuffed like shrapnel with nonsense. From the left comes a pamphlet called Labour Activist, which splutters:

The last Labour government ignored the advice of the trade unions and the party at large, and let the Tories in . . . The only question is whether the unions and the party will be mugs enough to fall for this a second time around.

Obviously there is something wrong with the left’s arithmetic if they think that this is only the first time a Labour government has disappointed its own supporters. However, they show a proper concern, for a party of capitalism, for winning and holding power, and this is shared by their opponents on the right. Sailing over from them, in a pamphlet called Labour Victory, is this:

The Left’s preoccupation is in controlling the Labour Party, it is not in achieving government.

Leaders

Clearly, since the left and the right have been lobbing grenades like those at each other for a very longtime, there has been small progress in the techniques of manufacturing political ammunition. There is little better to hope for from the ambitious ones, whose main contribution to the Battle will be their bid for the Labour leadership. People like Healey, Benn, Shore, Silkin and Hattersley will be trying to convince their party that they each offer the best hope of misleading enough workers into voting for another dose of Labour government. They have little more to sustain them than unsavoury memories; apart from that, they are a drab lot. Indeed, one of them — Sam Silkin — thinks that becoming unexciting was the big problem with the last government, that it ran out of steam — which makes it sound as if the working class can most easily be induced to vote for capitalism in a state of sweaty hysteria.

There is as much to be said for that point of view as for another which is more popular — the idea that the working class are a stolid, reliable lot who want a new society and are only waiting for the Labour Party to be true to itself before they vote it into power for evermore. Part of that theory is that Labour was once on the right track but has somehow lost its way. Labour Activist, for example, complains about Labour MPs who supported “. . . incomes policies, public spending cuts, or any other policies which fly in the face of the Labour Movement.” Roy Hattersley (The Guardian, 30 July 1979) puts a different slant on this idea when he worries that Labour’s defeat came because “We appealed to the public simply as good managers who could run the economy more efficiently than our opponents.” Hattersley does not complain that there was anything wrong in that appeal, nor that it exposed Labour as an anti-socialist party; only that as tilings turned out, and capitalism’s crises overtook them, they were seen as bad managers of the economy.

Profits

Far from having lost their way, the Labour Party have remained steadily on course. For example, soon after they won power in 1964 there was a flurry of anxiety on their part that nobody should take seriously anything they might ever have said about abolishing capitalism. Perhaps, in some unguarded moment at a miners’ gala, one of them had made an unwise statement. The capitalist class needed to be reassured:

Profits, provided they are earned by efficiency and technical progress, and not by restrictive practices or abuse of monopoly, are the sign of a healthy economy. (Douglas Jay, at the International Chamber of Commerce, 20 October 1964.)

Business men have more hope of making progress and money under a Labour government than they had before. (George Brown, interview in The Director, April 1965.)

That government, which was intending at one time to solve all our problems, grappled for a few years with the crises of British capitalism, and then, discredited and in disarray, was turned out by the working class. That defeat was followed by — yes — an inquest and a Battle for the Soul of the Labour Party. At that time the leading opponent of Harold Wilson was Roy Jenkins, whose reputation was for an elegant, witty, ‘liberalism’. Jenkins was obviously pretty desperate to become leader because he went to the lengths of almost speaking the truth about the Labour Party, which is akin to a boxer hitting his opponent below the belt after the bell has gone to end the round. To begin with, he debunked the promise on which the Wilson government had won a lot of support in 1964, that the ‘technological revolution’ would bring greater prosperity for us all:

. . . there is some reason to believe that the social and technical changes which accompany and make possible a faster rate of economic growth may even intensify inequality, unless strong countervailing measures are introduced.

And he summed up the achievements of that government:

The poor are still poor. Property speculators — and some others — are as relatively rich, as were those with an accepted position at the top of the social structure. The result, quite inevitably, is increasing social strain. (The Observer, 12 March 1972.)

Inequality

After that it would have been difficult for Jenkins to ignore the part he had played, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, in keeping the poor and the property speculators in their respective poverty and riches. “Not enough”, he said, “was done to change society. I take my fair share of the responsibility.”

Well, Labour ministers seem to have learned a little since then; so far there are no signs of any member of the Callaghan government taking any blame for their record. No minister has yet put their head on the block to atone for the fact that the rich actually got richer during the first two years of the last Labour government. According to a report published in July by the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Wealth and Income, between 1974 and 1976 the richest one per cent of the population increased their share of wealth from 22.5 per cent to 24.9 per cent. During the same period, the richest ten per cent had their share increased from 57.5 per cent to 60.6 per cent. And this after their share had declined under the Heath government.

So after all the risky fulminations from people like Jenkins, and the implication that it would be different next time, the property and share speculators continued to prosper under Labour. One example is Tory MP Edward du Cann, who in March, while Labour was still in power, made £1.4 million from a deal involving Cannon Assurance, in which he was a major shareholder.“The country”, he commented, “needs people who are prepared to be adventurous.” (Financial Times, 9 March 1979). The day after that, the Daily Mail reported what had happened to someone less adventurous, from the non-property speculating, non-share owning class: a foreman at a GEC factory, who committed suicide when he and eight workmates were made redundant.

Lie

There is no prospect of this situation being changed as a result — whatever it is — of the great Battle for the Soul of the Labour Party. Indeed, one of the most prominent participants in that Battle, Tony Benn, seems to think that Labour has been steadily advancing backwards for over forty years. In his recent book, Argument for Socialism, Benn says:

I have copies of Labour’s election literature which 1 distributed in the 1935 election . . . That manifesto was far more left wing — with its demand for the nationalisation of the Joint Stock Banks — than the Labour manifesto of 1979.

In spite of this, Benn’s loyalty is unshaken: “. . . I was born into the Labour Movement, like millions of others, and I intend to be in it when I die.”

Those millions are fighting a mock battle over the details of organising the capitalist system in which property speculators grow rich off the workers who suffer — and often crack — under the strain of it all. The great lie of the Labour Party, which its members are required to swallow and to regurgitate at times like elections, is that basically they stand for a different society. Sometimes, says the lie, one or two things go wrong which delay Labour’s plans to bring in the new world. But always they are working towards it.

It is fair to ask how much more profit the du Canns need to make, and how much more suffering the working class must absorb, before the lie loses its attractions. The failures and the frustrations of the Labour Party have been with us for a very long time now, and promise to be with us for a very long time to come. So, too, have their great purges and their historic Battles for their Soul.

In the excitement and the chaos of the fighting, one fact will be obscured. When the gunsmoke clears it will be the ruling class, people like du Cann. who will survive to drink a toast to victory — their victory. And it will be members of the working class who will populate the casualty lists.

Ivan

Mountbatten: ruling class casualty (1979)

From the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Violence, within and between individual states, is inescapable under the social system of capitalism. States often disagree over their mutual boundaries; each, in normal circumstances, wishes to preserve, or to extend if possible, its frontiers. The larger the territory, the greater the chance of profit. The ideas of ‘race’ or nationalism, of separate language-groupings or cultures, or the traditions of such groupings, are often called on by both sides in such disputes. So is religion. Among capitalists in Great Britain and Ireland at the present time, and among those who take up the banners of either the British or the Irish capitalist class, there is such a dispute. Should Northern Ireland become part of Irish capitalism, or should it remain part of British capitalism? Cultural and racial traditions are appealed to by both sides. The slogan of a ‘united Ireland’ is opposed by the cry that the six counties are really British. Catholics are exhorted to support one side, and Protestants the other.

Many Northern Irish workers, deceived by the ever-active propagandists of capitalism, have strong views as to whether they would rather be exploited by Irish or British capitalism. Capitalist boundary disputes cannot be ‘solved’, except by the forcible transportation of thousands or even millions of people such as we saw, for example, in eastern Germany and eastern Poland after 1945.

In the capitalist struggle over Northern Ireland, twenty-two people were killed by the IRA on Monday August 27. As a single day’s casualty list, it was high by Ulster standards, being rivalled only by the numbers of demonstrators killed in Londonderry on one day in 1972 by the British army, and by some massacres in public houses caused by bombs planted by the other side. Among the twenty-two dead in August was Earl Mountbatten of Burma. Why was his death greeted with such grisly satisfaction on one side, and such ostentatious horror on the other?

Unemployed royalty

Mountbatten was by descent a member of a kind of condottieri of minor German royalties who ranged over Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seeking new positions, new countries, and (with luck) new thrones While in northern and western Europe the feudal barons had given way to kings and eastern and south-eastern Europe was split among the Russian, Austrian and Turkish Empires, in the middle of Europe the barons had evolved into petty princelings of small states, mostly German-speaking. Some were consolidated by Napoleon, and the 160 principalities of 1789 became only thirty-eight in 1815. Nevertheless, that still meant a lot of royal families, all with younger sons and daughters to be provided for as improved medical care led to the survival of more babies.

At the same time, two careers opened to the fortunate: marriage into the more important royal houses of Europe, or the filling of new thrones in the east of Europe as the older empires crumbled and new independent states were established. Others of the successive ducal broods followed their more fortunate brothers and sisters, and commanded armies or navies or found other well-paid niches — or rich spouses, or both — within the ruling hierarchies of the larger European countries. Some had to try two or even three different states before finding a satisfactory position for themselves.

The royal base from which these adventurers set out was obliterated in 1871 when Prussia swallowed up most of these petty territories in the creation of the new greater Germany. But the destruction of the thrones did not mean the destruction of their occupants, and for many decades after 1871 these ex-royalties continued their ancestral occupations.

British connection

Mountbatten came from the line of dukes of Hesse. Already very well connected, the Hesse royal family came into the British royal family's circle of acquaintance, and two of the four sons of Alexander and his Polish countess (Louis, Alexander, Henry, Francis) decided to become British and make their fortunes in the UK; Prince Louis of Battenburg was chosen as the husband for another of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters, and Prince Henry was accented as the husband for Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter. Honours quickly flowed in: Louis became Admiral of the Fleet, personal aide-de-camp to Victoria, Edward VII and George V, and First Sea Lord.

Jackpot

Another of the Battenburg boys seemed to have hit an even bigger jackpot. In 1879, the Bulgarian capitalist class established its de facto independence from the Turkish sultan and invited Prince Alexander of Battenburg to become the country’s monarch as Prince of Bulgaria. Immediately, Alexander’s younger brother, Prince Francis, the fourth of the Battenburgs, turned up as a colonel of Bulgarian cavalry, only too ready to swear undying allegiance to Bulgaria as soon as he could find it on the map. After Alexander had enjoyed only seven years as front man for the Bulgarian ruling class, however, Russia decided the country was getting too big for its boots and kidnapped Alexander, forcing him to abdicate. This nasty experience subdued him, and he returned to Hesse, still financially well provided for, and settled down there as an ex-monarch. Prince Francis, however, was not beaten yet. He married the daughter of Nicholas I, King of Montenegro; but his efforts to learn the Montenegrin national anthem were in vain, as the country, and its royal house with all the perks attaching to it, disappeared in the First World War.

These royal adventurers often fought loyally for ‘their’ countries, despite relatives on the other side. Nor did they worry too much about how repressive or otherwise the regime they served turned out to be: relatives of the British royal family ran anti-Semitic pogroms and jailed or executed opponents in Russia and elsewhere, and other relatives of British royalty fought for the Nazis in the last war — Prince Charles has a German cousin, born in the 1930s, named Adolf after Hitler. The international background of this stratum of ex-German royalties contrasts strangely with the jingoism and chauvinism — ‘my country, right or wrong’ — which each state shoves down its workers’ throats in war and peace.

Mountbatten

The British Battenburgs found themselves under suspicion in 1914 when a wave of anti-German hysteria swept the country. Prince Louis of Battenburg, whose brother-in-law was a Grand Admiral in the Imperial German navy, was forced to resign as First Sea Lord. They avoided all such future complications by changing their name to Mountbatten. George V further anglicised his cousin’s husband by creating him Marquis of Milford Haven. Prince Louis had four children: George, second marquis; Louis, later Earl Mountbatten; Victoria, who married Prince Andrew of Greece and was the mother of Prince Philip; and Louise, who married Gustav VI of Sweden, becoming Queen of Sweden. Louis entered the British navy and eventually became an admiral, filling many top posts in the armed forces and elsewhere. He was personal aide-de-camp to Edward VIII, GeorgeVI and Elizabeth II. He was Chief of Combined Operations in 1942-3, Supreme Allied Commander in south-east Asia in 1943-6, Viceroy of India in 1947, Governor-General of India in 1947-8, First Sea Lord in 1955-9, and Chief of Defence Staff in 1959-65.

He chaired a committee investigating security in British prisons, and recommended the formation of new high security units. His personal fortune was greatly extended by his marriage to the Hon. Edwina Ashley; her father was a Conservative MP, a government minister and a peer, and her mother the only daughter of Sir Ernest Cassel, who made much money out of publishing. Mountbatten’s personal record of prominent positions in the service of British capitalism, particularly in the titanic struggles (so costly in destruction and in human suffering) of the British state earlier this century against its rivals, together with his close relationship to the royal family, ensured him the panegyrics which duly appeared in every national newspaper on his death.

Slaughter

It is true that some past criticisms were mentioned in the obituaries. Some recalled the heavy loss of life, allegedly through faults of advance planning, in the Dieppe raid of 1942 which Mountbatten masterminded. Others referred to the slaughter which followed when he went to India in 1947 (the British ruling class not being able any longer to keep such a vast country as its own private possession), pushing through the partition into India and Pakistan so quickly that many minorities were caught on the wrong side of the new frontier and were promptly massacred; perhaps half a million died.

Northern Ireland

Both sides in the Northern Ireland dispute stand aghast at violence — when it is committed by the other side. The IRA deplore British violence, but they have not only killed British soldiers and prominent men like Mountbatten; they have frequently killed also mere bystanders. The Mountbatten bomb also killed a local boy who worked on the yacht. British newspapers were horror-struck at such indiscriminate homicide, but the British army in Northern Ireland has also killed innocent bystanders who got in the way of gun-battles (apologising afterwards, like the IRA does). And during the Second World War, while Mountbatten played a leading part in the direction of the British war effort, many innocent German women and children were deliberately slaughtered in bombing raids. The 100,000 killed in a single Allied raid on Hamburg (many of them burned alive in a fire-storm) must have included thousands of babies, boys and girls, women and old people, as well as hundreds of foreign conscripted slave-workers — besides all those left mutilated, crippled and disfigured. Nor was any apology considered necessary. Where were the horrified newspaper articles and broadcasts then?

If you handle pitch, you get dirty fingers. If you support and work for capitalism, violence — committing it and suffering it, as Mountbatten did — is likely to be part of the deal.

Alwyn Edgar

50 Years Ago: On leadership (1979)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The society we aim at building in the future is one wherein all will have a free and equal hand in the ordering of affairs. When can such a society be built on foundations such as blind worship of the leaders of a day?

We repeat, therefore, again the lesson we have been repeating for the last 25 years: no leader, however' honest, clever or well intentioned, can lead the workers out of slavery. No man or group of men, however intellectual, can found a new society which depends for its success upon the knowledge and understanding of the bulk of the population. There is no royal road to socialism. It can only be attained by working men and women who know what socialism means and how it is to be obtained. Therefore it is necessary for working men and women to do the comparatively small amount of thinking that is necessary to understand socialism. When they have done so they will know the steps to be taken, and will no longer need to rely on the weak reed of leader ship.

(From an editorial ‘The Communist farce’, Socialist Standard, October 1929.)

The theory of capitalist crises (1979)

From the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the long run, production under capitalism expands. The accumulation of capital, the self-expansion of value, is, after all, the economic logic of capitalism. The expansion of production, however, does not proceed smoothly at a steady rate but is interrupted from time to time, so that the graph of production under capitalism has the appearance of a series of peaks, each generally higher than the previous one (see graph). The troughs in between represent periods variously described as crises, depressions, recessions.

World capitalism is now in one of these troughs, and has been since 1974. But sooner or later it will recover from this depression, just as it has from all previous ones. This is because a depression itself creates the conditions for a re-expansion of production.

In a depression, three things occur which tend to raise the rate of industrial profit. First, a number of capitalist enterprises go bankrupt and their assets are sold off cheaply to their rivals. The result is a fall in their capital value, or a depreciation of the capital invested in them, so that less profits are needed to maintain the same rate of profit. Secondly, the increased unemployment tends to depress wages, and this once again tends to raise profits. Thirdly, the cutback in productive investment means that the demand for money-capital is reduced while at the same time the supply (from capitalist enterprises who are not re-investing) is increased, resulting in a fall in the rate of interest and so to a rise in the proportion of surplus value going to industrial profits.

These — depreciation of capital, lower wages, lower interest rates — eventually raise the prospects of making profits high enough to encourage those capitalists who have not been re-investing to begin investing again. Business confidence returns. Production begins to pick up and, through the chain reaction effect of more money being spent both by capitalists investing in new means of production and by workers now earning wages again, at an increasing rate.

So begins the process of economic recovery which develops into a boom . . . and eventually ends in a crisis and another depression. This is because boom conditions lead to ‘over-investment’, to too much wealth being devoted to expanding the means of production. This is inevitable due to the anarchy of production under capitalism, to the fact that production is not socially controlled and planned but is decided by hundreds of competing enterprises — and, on the world scale, states also — acting independently and in isolation.

When business is booming, capitalist enterprises assume that this will continue and so plan to expand their productive capacity. The demand for labour power increases, unemployment falls as the ‘reserve army of labour’ is drawn into production; wages, under the pull of enterprises competing among themselves for scarce labour power and the push of trade union action from the workers, rise. This in itself tends to reduce the rate of profit.

But what generally sparks off a crisis is one key industry over-expanding in relation to its particular market. The competing enterprises in that industry will all have assumed that they would be the beneficiaries of the expanding market and all of them will have expanded their productive capacity. The result is that the market for their particular product becomes saturated; they have over-expanded their productive capacity in relation to their industry’s market. Unsold goods pile up, the expected profits are not realised, the industry in question is forced to cut back its production. Now the chain reaction which encourages the recovery of production after a depression works in the opposite direction. Other industries are affected by the cut-back in the industry, which has over-expanded and, if this is a key industry, the end result is a generalised depression.

So the cycle — depression, recovery, boom, crisis, depression — has been completed and is ready to begin again. Governments try to intervene to stop this cycle, and occasionally make matters worse by their mistaken monetary policies, but there is essentially nothing they can do about it. This — boom, slump, boom, slump, boom, slump — is the way capitalism works.

It is important to realise that crises are not caused by overall production having expanded beyond overall market demand, as is suggested by one theory which was once popular in social democratic circles, and echoes of which are still to be found in the writings of some calling themselves Marxists. Such ‘under-consumptionist’ theories argue that crises are caused — and, in an extreme form, that capitalism will eventually collapse — through total social production coming to exceed total social purchasing power, or what amounts to the same thing, through total purchasing power coming to be insufficient to buy the total social product.

Crises under capitalism are not caused by a lack of purchasing power. They are caused by the anarchy of production under capitalism leading to an overexpansion in relation to a particular market, or, from the point of view of production, over-expanding disproportionately in relation to other industries. When this happens, the purchasing power to buy the over-produced commodities is there but it is not used because the commodities in question are not what those who have the money want to spend it on.

To be more specific, what happens in a depression, as far as overall market demand is concerned, is that some capitalists choose (because of low or nil profit prospects) not to spend their money on buying machinery, raw materials and labour power. This non-spending, or hoarding of money, interrupts the circulation of capital. Which is precisely what a depression is: an interruption in the circulation of capital. It is also why depressions are never permanent. Sooner or later, in one way or another, the conditions will arise which will encourage those capitalists who have been hoarding their money-capital to re-invest, so restoring the circuit.

Those who hold the under-consumptionist view that crises are caused by capitalism’s tendency to produce more than it can sell have got it wrong. If it were indeed the case that built in to capitalism was a chronic tendency for market demand to fall short of production, then how could capitalism have continued for so long? It should have long ago foundered in a glut of unsaleable goods. The fact that capitalism still exists, and still manages to expand production in the long run, is a living, if unpleasant, proof of the falsity of all under-consumptionist theories.

The fact is that there is no flaw in the economic mechanism of capitalism that is going to cause it permanently to break down or clog up. Capitalism will continue going through its cycle of depression, recovery, boom, crisis, depression until the working class consciously decide and act to end it by bringing production under the conscious democratic control of society on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production.

Adam Buick

The GDR: up against the wall (1979)

From the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The German Democratic Republic’s location on the periphery of the Soviet bloc and its constant confrontation with one of the most powerful economic forces of the Western world, the Federal Republic, has had its effect on the formation of internal opinion and dissent. In contrast to its East European neighbours, there is no sustained civil rights movement and manifestos of ‘opposition’ have appeared in official publications. As the country celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, however, there are signs that the East German leadership cannot re-establish with the population an understanding similar to that which existed in the early 1970s.

A new, tough orientation on the regime’s part is linked to a challenge to the Communist Party leader Honecker’s authority. His failure to manage the economy over the last few years (and what some see as his dangerous concessions to consumerism) have laid him open to attack from sections of the leadership who fear a general decline of political controls. Since the spring, the government has sought to link political repression against writers directly to its drive against the ‘grey’(Deutschmark) market. Sharply rising prices for raw materials and a deterioration in the terms of trade with the Soviet Union have led to demands for greater effort, without the Party being able to provide adequate rewards. Wages of East German workers have risen faster than the supply of consumer goods, with private savings at the beginning of last year standing at a record level of 80,000 million marks. A reluctance to respond readily to yet another call by the Party for increased production, voluntary shift work and rationalisation points to further clashes.

Although rents, electricity, transport services and basic goods like bread, potatoes, sugar and salt are relatively cheap, their sales price does not cover production costs — the low prices of these products correspond to the extremely low wages drawn by the majority of the population. The state takes its subsidies, which maintain the price of necessary goods at a low level, from the enormous differences which exist between the production costs of luxury items and the sales price to the consumer. For the majority, then, there are low wages, and therefore necessary goods are cheap and permit the reproduction of their labour power, while the privileged receive high salaries and have access to luxury items. ‘Illegal work’, normally undertaken at weekends, brings more income than a whole week of regular work in state enterprises.

Additionally, the suicide rate in the country is striking. According to the most recent figures it stands at 35 for every 10,000, while there are 22 for every 10,000 in the Federal Republic.

Widespread anger and resentment exists, on the one hand over the privileges enjoyed by the ruling elite in the form of exclusive shops selling Western goods, and on the other over the scarcity of items such as cars, television sets, good clothes and furniture. Recent strikes in the Fritz-Hekert-Werke in Karl Marx- Stadt, the Narve electric lamp factory in Berlin, and demands for payment in hard currency (Deutschmarks) for workers who are employed in export production for the West, indicate the scope of the difficulties with which the Party is faced. An ‘affluent society’ similar to the West is not just the ambition of the rulers anxious to perpetuate their power, but also corresponds to the immediate interests of the ruled.

While the size of the country and the thoroughness of police surveillance have prevented the growth of a significant underground, the last two years have seen the coming into the open of the first dissident, inner-Party opposition in Eastern Europe. Coping with such internal critics has posed more of a problem than would be the case with religious/ ethical reformers and ‘anti-Marxists’.

At the beginning of 1978 a manifesto purportedly drawn up by the ‘League of Democratic Communists of Germany’ was published in the West German magazine, Der Spiegel (2 and 9 January). Predictably, the document’s main concerns were with the establishment of a pluralist democracy in the East and the reunification of Germany. Attacks on the Soviet Union and the corrupt and inefficient system in the GDR were the manifesto’s other main thrusts:

No ruling class of Germany has ever sponged so much and secured itself against the pepple as those two dozen families who run the country like a self-service store. None has ever had such excessively golden ghettoes built in the forests which are guarded like fortresses. None has so shamelessly corrupted and enriched itself in special stores and private imports from the West, through decoration, bonuses and special clinics, pensions and presents, as has this caste.

Calling the Soviet leaders ‘Red Popes’, Communist leaders generally ‘Red-lacquered Nazis’, and the East German Party’s Politburo ‘Polit Quislings’, the League seek an end to what they call “the Asian production method of bureaucratic state capitalism”.

The most telling attack on the Party in the 1970s has come from a middle ranking cadre, Rudolf Bahro, presently serving an eight-year sentence after being found guilty of ‘treason’ in July 1978. Published in West Germany in 1977 (and in England last year), The Alternative in Eastern Europe is a left-Communist critique of the GDR system and what he calls a “strategy for a real communist alternative”.

Bahro argues that the Soviet type system, which is a model for the GDR. constitutes a distinctive type of social formation which is neither capitalist nor socialist. He suggests a parallel to Marx’s concept of the Asiatic mode of production in which there exists a ruling class not based on private property ownership but organised as an administrative and ideological apparatus. But he ignores the hallmarks of capitalism which predominate in the GDR just as much as in the West. The fact that a monopoly of the means of production is not legally recognised is immaterial — wealth is in effect the property of an individual or group if there exists a right in fact against the other members of society to use it and control its use.

Bahro’s position is not the familiar Trotskyist one, however. He shares our view that the objective backwardness of revolutionary Russia and the weakness of the working class there led inevitably to a new omnipotent state apparatus; that Lenin and the Bolsheviks, whatever their intentions, had paved the way for Stalin’s forced industrialisation and all the “practically unavoidable consequences of a definite historical progress”. For him, as for us, the East European system is not a deformation of socialism.

In the GDR, social and political needs are subservient to the goal-rationing objectives of the state Party apparatus. The oligarchy at the top of the pyramid decides the goals for which the surplus product should be used, and subjects the entire reproduction process of economic, social and cultural life to its regulations. Bahro’s concern is with the conception of the division of labour in society, and he argues that the basic attitude of the producers to ‘their’ state is not essentially different from that of workers in Western society to ‘their’ corporations. He points out that “given the perpetuation of the division of labour, commodity production and money, nothing has altered in the principle of how work is assessed. Wages are simply the price that the appropriator state pays for the commodity labour-power.” (p.205). Just as the worker in the West not only improves his own conditions of existence by productive activity, within the given limits of the system, but above all expands capital, so in the GDR “he increases the potential for the Party and state machine’s power of disposal, and thus increases his own impotence in relation to it” (p.241).

Bahro maintains that for the last twenty years the GDR has been spending labour on a growing scale for luxury goods for the privileged strata. “We can hear”, he says, “ the director of a Berlin textile works, a factory moreover which predominantly employs female labour, say on the radio that ‘the growing needs of the population dictate to us the three-shift system’ — even if wardrobes are bursting! If you do not want to remain ‘backward’, you must throw out your furniture three times in the course of your life. We accelerate the ‘moral depreciation’ of technical consumer goods.” (p.269). This pressure on workers to keep buying is depressingly familiar, although Bahro rightly points out that while in the West trade unions are a reality, it is scarcely possible in the GDR to influence the relative level of income since it is the Party and government which adjust the proportions in favour of particular groups.

Bahro places his hopes in an accumulation of what he calls “surplus consciousness” which can no longer be satisfied and contained within the system of subordination and hierarchical division of labour. For the first time in human history, he argues, an energetic capacity is no longer absorbed by the immediate necessities of human existence. Whereas previously the scarceness of the means of satisfaction always opposed educated elites with uneducated masses, the increasing demands of technology bring about the conditions for widespread growth of individual development and consciousness.

Unfortunately, though perhaps inevitably, his ‘alternative’ programme leaves much to be desired: the abolition of all bureaucratic privileges and the democratic control of administrative processes is its extent. A new ‘League of Communists’ is to implement a series of measures, including university education for all and the rotation of manual and intellectual work, and the result (which he calls socialism) will demand the continued existence of the Party.

To be an effective opposition, however, the workers’ struggle for legal rights of political expression in the GDR must be coupled with a determination to achieve socialism, a world society where goods and services are freely available according to need; where the state, national frontiers, political parties and the wage labour and capital relationship itself no longer obtain. Only this is worth an eight-year prison sentence.

It should not be forgotten that the GDR remains a Soviet military zone, with twenty Russian divisions kept on a war footing. The three million East German workers who voted with their feet between 1949 and 1961 doubtless have few regrets about leaving what is now considered the best example of ‘socialism’ in practice. Yet it would be wrong to say that the grass is greener over the Wall; seeds on both sides have scarcely taken root.

Melvin Tenner

Grappling with Grundrisse (1979)

Book Review from the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’ by Roman Rosdolsky, Pluto Press, 1977.

There has never been a time when the conditions for a transformation to a Socialist society have been so ripe. Socialism has never been as indispensable and economically feasible as it is today, (p.488)

 This is certainly not a book for the dilettante or the dabbler, but for the dedicated Marxian buff. We have here a systematic comparison of the seven large notebooks compiled by Marx during fifteen years exhaustive study of the bourgeois economists, with the published product, the Critique of Political Economy and Capital.

These notebooks came to light, somewhat mysteriously, in 1931. The source, presumably, was the archives of the German Social Democratic Party, known to be Marx’s (and Engels’) literary executors. They next turned up in Moscow at the Marx-Engels Institute, which published them, but they were not translated into English until 1973.

They are now published by Penguin under the title Die Grundrisse, referred to as ‘the rough draft of Capital’, and reading like a telephone directory or railway timetable. Here is no Karl Marx the brilliant political literateur whose searing epigrams made Capital world famous, but Dr. Marx the methodical, painstaking craftsman systematically cutting down sequentially P. Proudhon, David Ricardo, Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, J.B. Say et al.

Rosdolsky’s work is no slavish recap of Marx but a rigorously critical reappraisal. He claims that a mistake was made in The Communist Manifesto in stating that capitalism could “no longer maintain its own paupers”, and that Marx was unduly influenced by the crises of the 1850s. Leafing through Rosdolsky’s copious quotations, we can almost hear Marx’s cerebrum ticking over, following his devastating onslaught on the orthodox and radical economists to his positive conclusion — Surplus Value. Item: Adam Smith, who never understood the real nature of creative labour, calling it all ‘pain’. Item: David Ricardo, who could never accept the existence of constant capital. Item: P.J. Proudhon, with his pathetic ‘free credit’, and many others.

Not content with all this, he then embarks upon a rasping re-evaluation of the whole of the ‘Golden Age’ of Marxian literature, from 1890 to 1925. He reviews and challenges almost every writer of note: the Germans — Kautsky, Bernstein and Luxemburg; the Austrians — Hilferding and Bauer; the Russians — Plekhanov, Tugan, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin; Joan Robinson (Britain); and Sweezy and Baran, the Americans, are all taken to the cleaners.

It is difficult to follow Martin Nicolaus’s somewhat obscure, if not peevish, stricture in a footnote reference to Rosdolsky in his foreword to Die Grundrisse. He calls Rosdolsky’s book “quotation- ridden” and complains that ‘Ros’ has “not taken the science [of Marxism] a single step further”. How you evaluate Marx’s work without quotations is a secret known only to Mr. Nicolaus. Seeing that Rosdolsky was exposing the Stalinist economists (?) for the sycophantic fakes they were when Mr. Nicolaus was writing rubbishy pamphlets about the ‘Workers’ State’, we are satisfied that it was Rosdolsky who ‘took the science further’.

An intriguing sidelight of Die Grundrisse is the further evidence it gives on the notorious Bohm-Bawerk controversy, that is, Bohm’s claim that Marx ‘invented’ Production Price in the third volume of Capital to explain away the ‘discrepancy’ between average profit and the Labour Theory of Value in the first. We now know not merely that Marx wrote (as Hilferding proved) Production Price before Volume I was finished, but that it was in Grundrisse years before Capital was even started.

Incidentally, the little old SLP (now defunct) published Hilferding’s reply to Bohm in 1920, much to its credit; and Eden and Cedar Paul, the English translators, sparked off what Rosdolsky called a ‘splendid polemic’ between Bernstein and Hilferding (in Die Neue Zeit) over the use of the German word ‘daher’ — ‘consequently’ or ‘therefore’. Hilferding claimed that Bernstein left it out deliberately to distort Marx (p.519), but Rosdolsky points out that Engels had already put it in (in Volume I).

Rosdolsky is slightly suspect in accepting what he calls “Luxemburg’s breakdown theory”. This all turns on the precise translation of the German word ‘Zusammenbruch’ which means ‘collapse’. (Whether he means this or ‘break-down’ is arguable.)

The section on the Law of the Falling Rate of Profit and the almost complete recap of Marx’s private ruminations on the nature of the Law of Value and Labour in socialist society, are well worth re-publishing in the Socialist Standard.

‘Ros’ suggests that the notorious ‘increasing misery’ thesis refers to the industrial reserve army only, and corrects common fallacies regarding the proportion of Surplus Value to increases in Constant Capital, which is inverse.

As a result of this book, and the ‘rough draft’ on which it is based, we now know considerably more about the origin of Marx’s Capital. Certainly Lenin, Hilferding, Luxemburg and Franz Mehring (Marx’s biographer) were all unaware of its existence, as were the founders of the SPGB. Despite this, we were able (in 1904) to get it all absolutely right. Everything in Die Grundrisse proves this.

Horatio