Universities today (1980)

From the September 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Universities today are not what they were. But then what would you expect of institutions which have existed in Europe for six or seven centuries?

Originally, universities were scholastic guilds, similar to trade guilds in protecting the interests of their members. These were often foreigners who had come together to study in a particular place and were in need of protection from the extortion of the townspeople. Towards the end of the fourteenth century the guilds came to be recognised by civil and church authorities and to receive licences to teach. Today, universities are huge institutions, often employing several thousand workers, which take millions of pounds to run, find their place in a whole network of other social institutions, and ultimately serve the interests of the ruling class in capitalist society.

The extent to which universities are bound up with the wider capitalist society (in contradiction to the ivory tower image so firmly set in popular imagination) can be gauged by the statements of influential members of the ruling class. Stuart Sexton, political adviser to the Secretary of State for Education, recently said that over the next decade there would be a reassertion of the obligation of higher education to meet national needs. But these are hard times, and the chairman of IBM (UK), said more bluntly (and more threateningly) that unless the relation between education and industry improved, industry would not be successful and there would be no money to fund education. While the need to make things and to sell them has become the cornerstone of survival, he complained, incense had been burned at the altar of scholarship.

He obviously knows a thing or two about what makes capitalism tick. But the present Prime Minister is not noted for soft-heartedness and she does profess to have a zeal for cutting public expenditure. Readers may judge for themselves, therefore, whether it is likely that she would sanction the spending of £987m (the total grant to universities for the current year) to make a nice smell at the altar.

The government expect a return on this money and they will get it. First, in the shape of the production of skilled manpower—doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, and others whose mental training will have made them adaptable to the needs of capitalist society in a variety of roles such as civil servant, personnel officer, social worker. In this regard the universities of British capitalism are (for the moment) among the most cost-effective in the world, since they produce qualified graduates in a shorter time than most (usually three years) and with a lower failure and drop-out rate. Most of these graduates (over 60 per cent) go directly into industry and commerce.

The second return on government money comes from the fact that universities exist not only to teach but also to engage in research. It is here that there is a slim connection with the origin of universities and a grain of truth in the ivory tower image. “Research” covers many different types of activity in widely varying areas, from ancient history to nuclear physics. Some research will be merely scholarly, and if it has any worth it will have it simply as an addition to the culture in which we live. Some will involve work to find a definite solution to a definite problem. And some may or may not have any practical application, but it will not be possible to tell in advance.

This last point is important. There is research currently going on at Glasgow University into hepatitis and cirrhosis, and at Hull into liquid crystal displays which may replace cathode ray tubes in televisions. Much other research may turn out to be useful in these ways or it may be “useless”. But one never knows which. Florey and Chain investigated penicillin out of curiosity, not expecting to find a systemic antibiotic, and Rutherford was criticised for bothering about neutrons only fourteen years before the first atomic bombs were exploded. Now any businessman knows that a certain amount of speculative investment of resources is inevitable, and consequently funds are made available not only for research on some definite problem but also for speculative and possibly “useless” research. That is, it pays to have work going on in an environment where people are not asked at every turn “Does it pay?” (It has been estimated that the immediate financial profit produced by universities is of the order of £500m.) This in its turn makes for a climate where, by the standards of capitalism, there is relatively free discussion.

As one would expect with institutions closely bound up with society in this way, their recent history has broadly followed the fortunes of British capitalism. In the boom years of the 1960s, when demand for skilled manpower was very high, the number of universities increased from 23 to 44, with a particular increase in those chiefly concerned with technological subjects. The Robbins Report proclaimed that higher education should be available to anyone qualified to pursue it, and student numbers rose rapidly. Along with this went a change in the undergraduate image, from a pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed “chap” to a long-haired, jean-wearing hippy. The majority of students were probably never either.

But booms are followed by slumps, and this era of rapid expansion has come to an end with a vengeance. The CBI has given notice that the proportion of national resources for higher education in the last 20 years cannot be sustained in the 1980s. The government has responded to the piper’s calling of the tune by cutting £17½m off the universities’ recurrent grant for 1979/80, which was itself based on the laughable underestimate of an inflation rate of 8½ per cent. The number of qualified 18-year-olds continues to rise, but universities have been ordered no longer to increase their intake. A discussion paper prepared under the chairmanship of the Vice-Chancellor of Sussex University has spoken of the possibility of losing 60 staff posts in two years and needing to find £lm- £2m from somewhere. These are bare facts and figures which have to be translated into human experience. All universities over the last few years have been affected by frozen posts and the policy of leaving vacancies unfilled. This means that at all levels-teaching, secretarial, maintenance, technicians and kitchen staff-workers have had to do more work and, given inflation, for a smaller real wage or salary. This is, quite simply, increased exploitation, increased extraction of surplus-value from a section of the working class.

Effects on students are more varied, since not all students are members of the working class. The ruling class have to educate their offspring somewhere, and the more prestigious universities are one of the places they choose. Sons and daughters of industrialists and cabinet ministers and the like, can be found quite easily at Oxford and Cambridge (though not, say, at Strathclyde or Essex). Perhaps this is what led one academic to refer to Oxford as at once a centre of high-powered thought and a finishing school. Which role it has for any particular student becomes apparent when the time comes to leave. At Bristol University (one of the more prestigious) 3 per cent of graduates from one faculty declared themselves “not available for employment’’. For them, the garden parties held to celebrate their obtaining a degree can go on for the rest of the summer and the rest of their lives. For the rest, it will be the basic, inescapable condition of being a worker: they will have to find someone prepared to buy their labour power, and their fear is likely to be the opposite one of employment not being available for them. Being a highly educated worker is no proof against the dole queue, and this was illustrated by a recent report in The Times. Five hundred young people turned up for eight jobs in a clothes shop in Sheffield at £32.50 per week, and they included several with degrees.

In 1968 the year of phoney revolutions, universities in Britain and elsewhere were headline news. Though some thought the end of capitalism was at hand, the upheavals in them amounted only to civil disturbances, since they involved questioning only some aspects of capitalist society. They also fed the pernicious belief to be found in some left-wing circles that an intellectual elite is needed to produce a socialist revolution. Intellectuals, and especially left-wing intellectuals, should never be encouraged in their vice of exaggerating their own importance in that way. High intelligence and a brilliant mind can and do coexist with pathetic ignorance of the true nature of our political and social system. The workers by brain have no special insight, but they have no special immunity from social conditions either, and they will join forces with other workers when all finally realise where their class interest lies.

Bill Valinas

Secondary schools: educating for conformity (1980)

From the September 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the time of writing, a by no means insignificant proportion of the nation’s young, along with their parents, friends and relations, are holding their breath. The cause of this trauma, which occurs annually, is the impending announcement of the ‘O’ and ‘A’ level examination results.

Ever since the examination answers were written, markers drawn from the ranks of the teaching profession — retired and active — have been busily scratching away with their black and red pencils. Their job is to sort out the relative merits or demerits of the scripts they have been given and to deliver the ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ as the occasion warrants.

And a great deal hangs in the balance. Some students wish to enter their sixth-forms to attempt the next hurdle. Others have a conditional offer of a place at a university or a polytechnic. Many more hope to enter industry or commerce, or the “public” services. All, however, share an overriding concern: the nature and quality of the meal-ticket they must, if they are to live, acquire at the end of it all. For this is what the exercise is all about. Put another way; what, in effect, is happening is the ‘intellectual’ classification of the working class for and on behalf of the only other class—the capitalists.

It is important to remember also that by far the larger proportion of working class youngsters have already been weeded out. They are now performing the intellectually less-demanding—and usually lower paid—tasks imposed upon them by their capitalist masters and by their own circumstances. Or—more likely—they are unemployed.

From the foregoing it is evident that it is at examination time that education most clearly reveals itself in its true guise—as a transparent device for facilitating the grading and selection of wealth-producing units (sometimes described as ‘hands’) in the capitalist machine. We can forget all that cant about a ‘broadening of the intellect’; or the ‘widening of one’s cultural awareness’; or the ‘ability to express oneself; or ‘the flowering of one’s personality’. Teachers may sincerely believe that such inflated and plainly hypocritical claptrap is the prime purpose of their ministrations: it’s a dead certainty that the employers and their executive committee, the government, do not.

And if it appears that the three r’s are receiving less attention than, in the eyes of the prospective employers, they ought, then we can confidently expect some political hack at the Department of Education and Science to launch a campaign to put matters right. (Under Labour this duty was enthusiastically prosecuted by that darling of the media and doyenne of the Labour Party’s right wing, Shirley Williams).

It is no accident that the practice of, and instruction in, religion is compulsory in schools. This has been and remains a bare-faced and utterly cynical attempt on the part of the master-class to inculcate in the minds of young people a suitably docile and submissive attitude towards life under capitalism. Usury; exploitation; power-seeking and corruption in high places; culminating in the conditioning of the working class to accept war, with its possibility of a nuclear holocaust: such things require a foundation in ‘morality’ if our masters are going to get away with it. The Church and its handmaidens, the educators, have always proved ready and willing to perform the useful task of supplying it. It is relatively unimportant that the vast majority of young people reject out of hand the ridiculous incantations of the ‘lay brethren’ in their schools; (most of whom don’t believe a word of it themselves anyway); the fact remains that capitalism will have been provided with a mask of respectability, however superficial.

Another necessary pre-condition in the process of training the workforce of the future is an unquestioning acceptance. of competition as an essential fact of life. In the majority of schools this is taken for granted. There have to be winners and losers no matter what the consequences. The humiliation and sense of failure which afflicts so many of ‘education’s’ victims, so often expressed in belligerence or apathy, are accepted as unfortunate but unavoidable side-effects.

In fact, this state of affairs constitutes the beginning of a deliberate process which is essential to capitalism's survival—the division and sub-division of the working class against itself. (And what could be more dangerous and alarming to the capitalist class than a workforce which stands united in a common interest and understanding, alert to its conditions as a class and ready and willing to subject that condition to critical scrutiny?).

Schools, then, can be compared to the nurseryman's greenhouse; by the time the seedlings have reached the stage where they are ready to be introduced to the harsher environment of the garden a great deal of thinning out will have been achieved. The tougher plants will have been suitably conditioned to face their new circumstances. Likewise the products of our schools, moulded into shape and unquestioning in their acceptance of the society into which they were born, are ready to join the bigger rat-race of the world of work. Those who enter the institutions of ‘higher learning’ are as yet one stage removed from this world; the remainder, compliant and unrebellious, are only too ready to sell their labour power to the highest bidder—or to don the uniforms of capitalism’s forces of oppression and repression.

It is clear that this is possible only up to a certain point: the capitalists may have no call for the services of the school-leaver. This is the case at the present time. Capitalism is in the latest of a lengthening line of periodic crises. Unable to find markets for its increasingly uncompetitive commodities it reduces production or closes it down altogether, throwing workers on the dole. And if there is less demand for ‘educated’ workers there is clearly less need to spend as much as hitherto on schools and schooling; hence the harshness of the education cuts. (No doubt when boom time comes around once more, new cash will be forthcoming to pay for the higher standards which will then be demanded).

So what do the employers get for their money? (and it is their money which, in the form of taxation, pays the educators to do their preparatory work for them).

The first thing they get is choice. They are now able to select from the available pool of suitably sieved and classified labour and brain power those qualities and skills which, following a further period of training and conditioning (but minus the religious bunkum, of course) are best calculated to provide them with the highest return. Or they can, if they happen to be, say, the Home Office or the Ministry of Defence, select potential policemen or soldiers or whatever, from among those who by background, inclination and malleability are most likely to prove reliable in their determination to conform to and co-operate with the status quo.

Another quality the employers can be confident of commanding is a fair degree of punctuality and endurance. The school day is deliberately designed to match, more or less, the normal working day its charges will later experience. Children who have ‘clocked on’ at their school for many years are conditioned to accept without query clocking on at their future place of employment. And having arrived they are unlikely to abscond especially if the result of any such absenteeism is a loss of earnings and/or the receipt of their cards.

Again, young people who have been subjected to the approved interpretation of economic and social life under capitalism, and who have been carefully shielded from any objective and free discussion of possible alternatives, are hog-tied. With no basis upon which to challenge the existing order of society they are neutered before they are even able to begin the inevitable struggle with their future exploiters. (The unemployed will have received the same conditioning and, provided they can be kept sweet, they offer the capitalists a fine opportunity to keep down wage-costs in the scramble for jobs).

What, then, must we learn from our school-days? It is that compulsory secondary education, contrary to what we are frequently led to believe, is not primarily intended to benefit its recipients. Its main purpose is to provide the capitalists with a docile work-force, trained and conditioned up to a level necessary to achieve the highest possible rate of profit. Alternatively, the ‘educators’ must supply the ruling class with the obedient and conformist policemen, soldiers, civil servants, and so on, essential to its surviving as a class. These conditions are obtainable only given a thorough grounding in competition, doctored history and phoney moral rectitude, backed up by coercion—with or without corporal punishment. Success can be achieved only given the absence of a proper examination of alternatives, and in circumstances which preclude truly hostile or analytical questioning in open debate. Such a regime is amply exemplified by our secondary schools.

Richard Cooper

The classroom struggle (1980)

From the September 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

My schooldays were recent enough to remember and they were not the happiest days of my life. The compulsion to pay attention to pompous lectures about what is “right” and what is “wrong”; the competitive tension of examinations whereby friends become rivals for an advanced position in the employment queue; the deceit and ignorance upon which much of modern learning is based. I learnt three important things while at school how to hide from authority; how to read a good book while pretending to be listening to the teacher; and above all, how to rejoice in the abnormality which is officially scorned by the system of mass education.

The message of the Socialist Party of Great Britain is for all members of the class which owns little more than its ability to work and is therefore forced to sell its labour power to an employer in order to live. We do not discriminate between young members of the working class who are still being trained for wage slavery and those who have graduated from education into full-time exploitation. It is your common class position to which we appeal, not your age or your experience. To become a socialist does not require grey hairs or five “O” levels, but an understanding of the society you live in and a commitment to change it. If you are still at school, you can contribute towards making a better future for yourself no less valuably than any other worker; you will find no discrimination on the basis of age in the socialist movement.

1. THE PURPOSE OF COMPULSORY SCHOOLING

Schools are not there so that young people can freely learn and be turned into informed, mature human beings. Only the liberal educationalists who earn their bread and butter out of the blackboard jungle perpetuate the myth that education is about freedom and fulfilment. Schools exist to train you for your class role. Because the vast majority of people are destined to be wage or salary workers the job of schools is to give us training in working class skills and values. Boys are taught how to make things from wood and repair cars; girls are given a basic training in domestic skills. They teach us to read (good for machine instructions and understanding the lies of the newspapers), to count, add and subtract (necessary for industrial workers), to know about geography (through the nationalist eyes of the British ruling class) and history (where content is selected and, by careful emphasis and omission, the past becomes the story of kings, lords and war victories instead of workers, peasants, strikes and revolutions). They teach us to keep fit in a competitive form of warfare called sport. And they are legally bound to teach us religion (the only compulsory subject) so that we will accept their class morality.

Schools have always been the property of the ruling class and they have always served to inculcate into the mass of people the ideas of the rulers. The first schools in England were in the sixth century and their purpose was to train monks and priests to spread propaganda about those parts of the Bible of use to the feudal ruling class. The Roman Catholic Church, which controlled European education in the Middle Ages, was so fearful that literacy might be used to examine any ideas but its own that it officially supported a policy of mass illiteracy. The following extract from a letter from Pope Gregory to Bishop Desiderina of Gaul illustrates such fear of the power of literacy:

“A circumstance came to our notice which cannot be mentioned without shame, namely that you, our brother, give lessons in [Latin] grammar. This news caused us such annoyance and disgust that all our joy at the good we had heard earlier was turned to sorrow and distress, since' the same lips cannot sing the praise of Jove as the praise of Christ. Consider yourself how serious and shocking it is that a bishop should pursue an activity unthinkable even for a pious layman. We have already in hand the granting of your request, easy in mind and untroubled by doubts, provided that this information which has come to us shall have been proved manifestly untrue, and you shall not be shown to spend your time on the follies of secular literature.”

The Pope was right to fear the consequences of mass literacy, for it was the invention of the printing press and the growth of literature in the vernacular which contributed greatly to the popular dismissal of Catholicism in the sixteenth century.

The growth of industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth century produced a requirement for a workforce educated in the three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic). At first, the ruling class was slow to perceive its economic needs and some of them had a medieval fear of educating the poor:

“It is doubtless desirable that the poor should be instructed in reading, if it were only for the best of purposes that they may read the Scriptures. As to writing and arithmetic, it may be apprehended that such a degree of knowledge would produce in them a derelish for the laborious occupations of life.”
(Justice of the Peace, 1807. Quoted by R. Williams in The Long Revolution)

Robert Lowe MP, Vice President of the government’s Education Department in the 1860s, was in favour of educating the poor, but not for philanthropic motives:

“The lower classes ought to be educated to discharge the duties cast upon them. They should also be educated that they may appreciate and defer to a higher cultivation when they meet it, and the higher classes ought to be educated in a very different manner, in order that they may exhibit to the lower classes that higher education to which, if it were shown to them, they would bow down. . . ."
(Primary and Classical Education)

The modern comprehensive school fulfils this role admirably. Young workers are taught practical skills to enable us to 'discharge the duties cast upon’ us. The importance of punctuality (getting to work on time), not talking while working, passive obedience to authority, ability to memorise so-called facts, and repetition of dogma are all part of the preparation for wage slavery. They teach us history, but not our history from our angle. State education is an attempt to nationalise the minds of the working class.

It is not only in Britain and the West that education serves the needs of the ruling class. In Russia, China and the other state capitalist countries young workers are taught the virtues of employment, deference and nationalism, the only difference being that it is all done in the name of socialism. In Russian schools, where the boring memoirs of Tsar Brezhnev are now compulsory reading (like the Bible in Britain), many students have become cynical towards the elite bureaucracy that dictates over them—a cynicism they share with many young members of the working class throughout the world. Even in South Africa, where the racist system of apartheid has tended to blind capitalists to their economic needs, there is growing recognition by the ruling class that their overriding objective must be to produce profitable wage slaves, regardless of colour. Harry Oppenheimer, South Africa’s leading industrialist (he is head of De Beers diamond and Anglo-American gold mining combines) is reported to have urged the Botha government to get rid of apartheid in education:

“. . .  Mr. Botha must bring the electorate to recognise that racial discrimination and free enterprise are basically incompatible . . .  the education issue threatens to prevent the rapid and peaceful development of the country because it creates an ‘acute and growing shortage’ of skilled workers.”
(Guardian, 14th July, 1980)

This is not to say that the existence of schools is a bad thing for the working class. If you use your brain to serve your own material interests, some of what you learn at school can help you. It depends on what you study, what conclusions you draw and how far you are able to sort out the prejudices from the facts. Literacy can be a powerful weapon, opening a path to the study of the world around you, but it can also be a path to a lifetime of Daily Express editorials and Harold Robbins paperbacks.

2. CLASS INEQUALITY IN SCHOOLING

Capitalist education is unequal and the introduction of comprehensive education has not eradicated that inequality. In the days when male children were divided up at eleven into manual workers-to-be who were sent to secondary modern schools to learn woodwork and arithmetic, and the potential managers and professionals who went to the grammar schools to learn Latin and Chaucer, it was the claim of liberal reformers that comprehensive education would remove such inequality. This idea was based on the popular illusion that education determines class, whereas in fact education tends to reflect class. Inequality still exists in comprehensive schools between the poorest sections of the working class and the less poor (who often imagine themselves to be middle class). In many areas two-level schooling has continued, with the better-off parents sending their children to the better equipped, less rowdy schools near to where they live, while the children of the slums and the council estates end up in the worst schools.

The real division in education is not within the working class, but between the state education provided for the workers and the paid public schools for the sons and daughters of the parasites who own the means of living. Still Crabbe’s dictum applies:

To every class we have a school assign’d;
Rules for all ranks and food for every mind.

We have described the purpose of working class education, but what about the public schools with their spacious grounds, academic excellence and conditioned snobbery? They teach young capitalists the exact opposite to what we learn in the comprehensives: we learn to follow, they learn to lead; we learn to save money, they learn to invest and spend it; we learn how to be brave soldiers, they learn how to be distant Generals; we learn to respect property, they learn to own and control it. The public schools teach people to be superior to those not in their class. Entry to the capitalist class is not determined by competitive examination, by having better minds or working harder or having more initiative than anyone else—it is simply determined by the ownership of inherited wealth. Eton and Harrow contain some of the biggest morons on the face of the earth, but they are morons with fancy clothes, big family homes, posh accents, daddies in the City and, above all, plenty of money to invest in the labour power of the working class.

One in five members of the present Conservative government went to one of three of the top fee-paying schools in Britain. An analysis conducted by C. S. Wilson and T. Lupton in the 1950s showed that Eton alone produced 30 per cent of Conservative Ministers, of the directors of large banks, of the directors of City firms, and of the directors of insurance companies. Eton, Winchester, Harrow, Rugby, Charterhouse and Marlborough between them produced between two-fifths and half of the holders of the above-mentioned posts. Jean Blondel, in his study of Voters, Parties and Leaders, points out that:

“The 25 to 30 per cent of old Etonians whom one finds in a Conservative cabinet, in banks, in the insurance companies, have greater influence than their numbers warrant, because, being old Etonians, they have more contacts. They supply information about other old Etonians who are influential in other walks of life; they are go-betweens, they are instruments of compromises in the sector of British political, social and economic life in which they are numerous.”
(P. 24)

While capitalists spend millions of pounds on getting their children a superior education, the government tells us that it must cut expenditure on schooling because it stands to reason that nuclear bombs must be a higher social priority than school books. In the present economic recession, which is an endemic feature of capitalism, you can expect your standard of schooling to markedly drop. The June 1979 budget cut £55 million from central government spending on education and the November 1979 White Paper on public spending announced a cut in real terms of £240 million for education. This will amount to the loss of 18,000 teachers in England and Wales and increased charges for—or the withdrawal of—school meals, milk and transport. This is happening at a time when, according to the Department of Education, there is a shortage of 4,000 mathematics teachers, 2,000 physical science teachers, 2,000 craft, design and technology teachers and 1,600 language teachers.

3. REVOLUTION, NOT REBELLION

Revolution is a mysterious term. Most of us are taught at school to understand it in relation to the capitalist revolutions of the past. The French Revolution of 1789 is most people’s idea of what revolution is all about: barricades, bayonets, blood, slogans, heroic leaders and a new regime, not much different from the old one. That is not what socialists mean by revolution.

By social revolution we mean a conscious change in social relationships from those based upon private or state ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution to common ownership and democratic control of the world around us. The socialist revolution will mean the instant abolition of class divisions, the wages system, private property, and the need for money. It is a big aim, but it presents the only alternative to the present world system of capitalism.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain states as a matter of principle that the establishment of the new social order can only be possible when a majority of the world’s workers consciously understand and want it. Once majority consciousness arises, nothing can stop the conquest of power by the working class.

The tensions and contradictions of working class life under capitalism tend to lead more and more workers to question the status quo. This critical thought is essential, for once you start to formulate questions, you are half way to knowing the answers. But capitalism has an immense capacity for accommodating working class discontent and dissent and it is often able to convert challenging resistance into sterile rebelliousness.

The Labour Party Young Socialists, the left wing romanticists and campaigns for reforms have wasted the political energies of millions of working class youths. They have grown weary trying to do what none has done before them—to make the slaughter house fit for the cattle. In their late twenties the participants in the reformist movement grow tired and drop their radical poses, claiming to have grown out of such youthful fancies as wishing for a better world to live in. The system has converted them into regular channels of dissent and they end up as conservative, acquiescent workers.

It is not only into overtly political blind allies that young workers can be led. The so-called ‘alternative culture' is, on the whole, just another capitalist rip-off. You drop out of one oppressive way of life and into another. Escape via rock music or art is often at best merely pretentious and at worst an excuse for someone to get rich quick. Escape through drugs or alcohol is a boost to those who profit from human self-destruction, but ultimately serves to stupify workers and blind them to their condition. Youth cults have been used to make money out of despair, while regimenting youths into easily identifiable mass fashions: while the hippies sang of peace and love, the drug pushers dreamed of dollars; skinhead culture, with its frustrated racism and know-nothing nationalism, did its recruits little good in the dole queue; and as for the punk ‘New Wave’—what’s the use of walking around with a safety pin up your nose if you still face all the poverty and degradation of being a wage slave? Some young workers still turn in frustration to the empty skies and the empty churches for an answer, often ending up on the wrong end of the exploitation game in the Moonies, the scientologists or in a temple devoted to a guru. To really challenge the conservatism of this system, it’s not new cults we need, but liberated minds.

Mind liberation is not the same as women’s liberation (women wage slaves being exploited on the same terms as men). It means thinking about what is in your own material interest and joining with those in a common social position to do something about it. Punks, junkies and lefties can be well accommodated within the capitalist system. Socialist consciousness cannot be accommodated within capitalism: not until we have a system of society run in the human interest will socialists be content.

What, then, will be the position of young people in a socialist society? Of course, the social revolution will not alter human biology and make young humans look the same as older ones. Neither will it remove the need for those who are young to learn certain skills and acquire certain information as part of their development into adulthood. The difference in socialism will be that the young will no longer be conditioned from birth for class roles; no longer will those who are old have power over those who are young because they pay for them; no longer will education be only for the young, but instead will be seen as a lifelong process for all to enjoy the constant quest for knowledge; no longer will authoritarian discipline exist in schools, for the basis of socialism will be cooperative self-discipline; no longer will those being educated be forced to accept dogma in an uncritical fashion, for the need to inculcate norms into children will have disappeared.

Socialism will open up one new possibility which has hitherto been denied to the sons and daughters of the wealth-producing class: the right to be different, to assert individuality, to be eccentric and to be visionaries.

Steve Coleman

The trouble with culture (1999)

From the October 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The buzz word in Northern Ireland now is "culture" or—its Sinn Fein synonym—"parity of esteem". Used in conjunction with Protestant or Catholic, directly or in one of their many substitute forms, it masks bigotry and intransigence.

Back in the early 1970s I used to have to telephone a work contact fairly frequently in London. My contact was a typical Londoner, blissfully unaware of such vital matters as the Orange Order and such significant events as the Twelfth of July. It was possible for such ignorance to prevail in those days. As we discussed some unfinished matter he suggested that he would phone me the following Tuesday for further information. I told him the office would be closed then and, thinking he was missing something, he inquired, "Why?" "The Glorious Twelfth!" I replied, alluding to the fact that the 12th and 13th of July are national holidays in Northern Ireland.

He was interested, convinced now that he was being cheated: "The Glorious Twelfth! You mean the start of the Shooting Season? That's not till August!" I explained that the shooting season was a fairly continuous process here and, to his further enquiries, I explained that the "Twelfth" was in commemoration of the battle of the Boyne in 1690.

"Nineteen-sixty!" he exclaimed, displaying an appalling sense of history, "and what the fuck has nineteen-sixty got to do with now?"

In the years since, I recall that conversation as my wife and I, like all other civilised people who can get away, set out on our annual July pilgrimage from the Mecca of Orangeism. Whatever 1690 meant for most of the small population of Ireland then, it has proved a bad year for succeeding generations, irrespective of their religion or, indeed, their politics.

The mad month of July 

What's it got to do with now? Every year its anniversary brings bitterness, anger and trouble of one sort or another. Friend and foe accept the sobriquet, "the mad month" for July. Catholics, from among that endangered species of Catholics and Protestants who live together as neighbours in working class areas, frequently affirm that their neighbours stop speaking to them for a month from the 1st of July.

The Orange Order itself is made up largely of members of the working class who are Protestants. In the past it was officered first by the landed aristocracy and large farmers and later by the industrial bosses and their senior hirelings. Now, since what the Order has to offer the ruling class, in terms of bigotry and political divisiveness, is superfluous to the political requirements of capitalism, the extravagant titles of Worshipful Masters and Grand Masters is an additional sop to the working class membership.

If you substitute religion for race or patriotism—and all are ignorance-based fictions that be-devil the human race—then the Order bears a striking resemblance to the Ku Klux Klan. Like the KKK the Orange Order are Biblically Christian based. Again, like the KKK, the Order can find Biblical quotations within the hotchpotch of Bible contradictions to justify naked hatred benignly presented as genuine love. Orangeism, insofar as it contains a philosophy beyond aggressive primitive anti-Catholic godism, is a blatantly right-wing doctrine that has historically rendered invaluable service to landlordism and, subsequently, to local capitalism.

In July 1999 it hung like a sword of Damocles over the head of Trimble and those other Unionist leaders who have been forced to realise that, unless an accommodation is achieved with nationalists and republicans, the future of Northern Ireland as a separate political entity will be gravely endangered.

Of course the Orange Order and those non-Trimble and anti-Trimble unionists with which it has made common ground, are perfectly right. Trimble, in signing up to what has become known as the Good Friday Agreement, has sold out on traditional Unionism. Similarly, the political lunatics of the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA, waiting in the wings for a resumption of the death or glory days, are right: within the terms of the Agreement, the Provisional IRA and its political front, Sinn Fein, have also sold out.

In fact the negotiations that led up to the Good Friday Agreement were a concentrated process of auctioning off opposing principles by the contending parties for as much as they could get in return in the form of political kudos. What each has lost is the baggage of history; what each has gained is a snout in the power trough and an opportunity to draw Northern Ireland into the political realities of the 20th century.

The Unionists and Republicans who have remained opposed to the Good Friday Agreement want to stay true to their principles and what each calls its culture. There is no virtue, however, in such absurd loyalty; in essence, it is the retention of the opposing cultures that are sustained on the anger and bitterness that plants the bomb, pulls the trigger and creates lifestyles within ghettos of the most squalid ignorance.

The Orange Order, the most dominant element of the anti-Trimble camp—despite Trimble himself being an Orangeman—demonstrates this intransigent resolve to stay in the past. Every year the Order organises over three thousand parades in a season of some four months. Many of these are within Protestant enclaves but many are aggressively-staged marches on main roads that offer offence to some on ideological grounds and to others because they appear to be organised in such a way as to cause maximum disruption and inconvenience.

The zealots add a new dimension to the peculiar oddities of worshipping their God who, according to the Orange Order, is considerably mollified by the sight of men marching under banners to the sound of raucous music, with drawn swords and halberds and a piece of orange bunting around their necks. This God is a Protestant fundamentalist, circa 1690, who is not displeased by the insult or abuse offered by his worshippers to their neighbours.

Though Republican "culture", despite Sinn Fein and its armed wing, the IRA, being sectarian organisations, is not overtly anti-Protestant, its disgusting orgies of flag waving and absurd patriotic posturings in Catholic areas is equal to that of the Orange Order in giving the maximum offence to Protestants and, especially, to those Protestants who are Orangemen.

Opposing capitalist interests 

Ulster Unionism was the political expression of the interests of a small minority of very wealthy and influential local capitalists who, in the early part of the present century, felt threatened by the burgeoning pressure of Sinn Fein. This organisation, which inherited the popular mantle of Parnell's Irish Parliamentary Party, affirmed it to be "the first duty of the Irish nation to accord protection" to its nascent capitalist class—which Sinn Fein defined as Irish manufacturers in contradistinction to "English and other foreign capitalists".

"Home Rule", as aspired to by Irish constitutional nationalists and, initially, by Sinn Fein—prepared at its inception in 1905 to accept the British "King, Lords and Commons for Ireland"—was the political articulation of an emerging, southern capitalist class which was, incidentally, mainly Catholic. Weak and inefficient, its urgent political need was a native government that could legislate protective measures that would discriminate in its favour.

Needless-to-say, this aspiration offered a direct threat to the well-entrenched capitalists of north-east Ulster—who were, again incidentally, Protestants. The economic basis for conflict was laid and the protagonists on both sides would trawl the sewers of history in their promotion of opposing bigotries.

Neither Orange bigotry nor Irish nationalism (ultimately just another form of bigotry) were born out of this conflict but, aided by the wealth of the capitalists they served and the still-virulent post-Reformation hatreds within Christianity, both strains of evil cast a long shadow over the politics of the two states that emerged from the conflict.

The opposing bigotries that now represent politics in Northern Ireland are a meaningless left-over from the past, the traditions, as Marx says, of the dead generations that weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

The reality of the Northern Ireland political scene today is that, despite a publicly-expressed desire for peace, and a more reluctant desire for reconciliation—if that is what is needed to concretise peace—the Trimble Unionists, the SDLP and Sinn Fein remain prisoners of the past. Trimble is threatened by his dissidents and the Orange Order vociferously protesting about threats to their "birthright" and their "culture"; convinced that the clock of history can be reverted to the glory days of Unionist absolutism.

Similarly, Sinn Fein has those erstwhile comrades who claim the Provisionals are reneging on their principles and abandoning their Republican culture. The SDLP, too, has its problems; if it moves to accommodate Trimble it becomes electorally threatened by a more politically vigorous and now respectable Sinn Fein.

The day of decision as to whether the opposing parties can agree to co-operate in the government of Northern Ireland gets nearer but the question of whether the area is governed by a coalition of local politicians or remains directly controlled by the Westminster government will have little effect on the caprice of capitalism. The idea, fostered by the SDLP leader, John Hume and hotly promoted by local business, that foreign capitalists are lining up to pour investment into the province if the peace process proceeds is pure fiction. Certainly a peaceful environment is within the criteria required by marauding international capital but it is but one ingredient in the profit equation.

Experience should have shown us, both from local and outside examples, that under capitalism peace does not automatically mean prosperity. But the absence of killing, maiming and intimidation can bring an improvement to the quality of working class life in Northern Ireland and, especially, it can help the victims of capitalism to focus on the real cause of their problems.

Richard Montague

To all our overseas readers (1980)

From the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Maybe you bought this copy of the Socialist Standard from one of our members at an outdoor meeting or maybe you bought it at a bookshop. But do not think that because you bought it in Britain and we call ourselves the “Socialist Party of Great Britain” our concern is only with national affairs. Far from it. We know that it is only on a world scale that the problems facing wage and salary earners in all countries can be solved. If most of the contents of the Socialist Standard concern events in Britain, this is because you have bought the journal of the British part of a movement which exists in other countries too and which publishes journals in German, French and Swedish as well as others in English (by our companion parties in the United States, Canada and New Zealand).

Our message, then, is equally addressed to you as it is to our fellow workers in Britain: world socialism is the only solution to the problems of wage and salary earners in the country you come from, problems which are basically the same—unemployment, struggles to keep wages up with prices, bad housing, schools and hospitals, racism, insecurity and so on — precisely because they have a common cause — the capitalist system of class monopoly of the means of existence and consequently production for profit.

Capitalism is international. Economically, it operates as a single system dominating the whole world (including countries like Russia, China and Cuba where it takes the form of state capitalism), but, politically, it is divided into a hundred or so artificial “nation-states”. Each of these states seeks to ensure the loyalty of its subjects by inculcating into them, from the cradle to the grave, the idea that they are members of a “nation” with a common interest against those of other “nations”. Socialists reject this mistaken and dangerous idea, regarding themselves not as British, Irish, French, American or whatever but as members of the human race, as citizens of the world.

The real division in the world is not between people of supposedly different “nationalities” but between two social classes both of which are international: a class of capitalists and state capitalists who own and control all that is in and on the Earth and a class of people who, excluded from such ownership and control, are obliged to work for an employer (private or state) in order to live. Wage and salary earners everywhere, whatever their language, legal nationality, skin colour, have a common interest.

The world capitalist class are continually competing against each other to sell their goods profitably on world markets, to obtain cheap and secure sources of essential raw materials; to find fields in which to invest their capital more profitably. They also compete for strategic areas in order to protect the markets, trade routes, raw material sources and investment fields they have got or want. The various armed states into which the world is divided are used by rival groups of capitalists to protect and further their interests in these clashes. They represent, in other words, not the interest of the majority of their subjects, but that of the dominant section of the capitalist class established within their borders.

In these clashes of interest between the various national capitalist groups success greatly depends on the military might of the states involved. States, and the capitalists they represent, do not deliberately seek war; for them this is often the last resort, when negotiations failed. But all states are obliged to maintain as powerful an army as they can afford, not necessarily to be used on every occasion, but to threaten and to be taken into account in the negotiations and manoeuvrings that continually arise from the underlying clashes of economic interest that are built in to capitalism.

Capitalism, in other words, is a permanent powder-keg or rather, these days, a permanently-primed nuclear bomb. Its very structure as a competitive profit-seeking system generates preparations for war (and the waste this involves), the threat of war (which is ever-present) and actual wars (which are always going on somewhere in the world).

But there is an alternative way of organising the world. There already exists a global network of productive units (farms, mines, factories, railways, warehouses) capable of turning out sufficient wealth to more than adequately feed, clothe, house and educate every single man, woman and child on this planet. Technologically, this is possible, but it will only become possible socially when the resources of the world have become the common property of all the people of the world. In other words, after the abolition of private and state ownership everywhere. Or, what amounts to the same thing, the abolition of all ownership and property since in a socialist world the resources, natural and man-made, of the planet will belong to nobody; they will not be owned at all, but will simply be there to be used. Naturally, the people of the world will have to organise themselves to use these means of production and this is the second feature of socialism: democratic organisation.

On the basis of this common ownership and democratic control production will be directed solely towards satisfying human needs. The restriction of the profit motive will be removed and as much will be produced as people will democratically decide will satisfy their needs, both as individuals and as a community. The waste of capitalism, such as on armaments and wars, will be eliminated, thus making doubly sure that ah abundance of wealth can be produced, an abundance to which every member of socialist society can have free access, without payment of any kind, according to what they judge to be their need.

Socialism will see the abolition of frontiers too and the dismantling of the various armed states into which the world is now divided. As classes will have been abolished, people really will become citizens of a united world.

If this alternative of a classless, moneyless, stateless world community, without frontiers interests you and you would like to know more or would like to help us, we invite you to get in touch:

• If you are German-speaking: BDS, Gussriegelstrasse 50, A-100 WIEN.
• If you are French-speaking: BP 26, 6700 Arlon, BELGIQUE.
• If you are from Scandinavia: Bergsbrunna Villaväg 58, S-75256, UPPSALA.

We also have leaflets explaining our point of view in Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Esperanto, available from any of the above addresses or from 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

Letter: "True' Socialism from France (1980)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

"True' Socialism from France

To the Editors

I read with pleasure that the Socialist Standard had discovered our untiring efforts to show how socialism could be created and live. But I think it is good that all readers learn that ALB’s article, published in February, contains some serious mistakes or misunderstandings.

“Consumption vouchers” and, far more, “labour vouchers” are inapt words to describe the social income, as they contain an idea of scarcity. They have been used in war conditions, when you were given vouchers to get only 100g of bread a day; but they are not appropriate to Jacques Duboin’s consumption money, which has to be proportional to an abundant production. As there is no better word than the capitalist word of “money”, we keep this notion for other reasons: it shows that your income gives you the complete choice of what you think you need. The dealers have to keep accounts to allow the consumers to decide whether production has to be increased or not. (Do not forget that without profit there is no more advertising and ail its consequent misleading choices.) The necessity of keeping pseudo-prices, at least at the beginning, results not only from the desire to avoid wastage (a danger that will decrease as the sense of individual responsibility increases) but also from the fact that the consumer must be informed about the remaining difficulty to achieve what he wishes — about the raw material this production requires, its effect on the environment and the pollution it involves. No good choice may be made unless you have the most complete information and price is a good and rapid means to supply it. The most important thing you must emphasize about consumption money is that it cannot carry an interest, cannot be hoarded or loaned, and that it loses its value when it has been used once. This pseudo-money, then, has nothing to do with capitalist money in that it puts an end to that awful law which tells that “money goes to money”, widening the gap between rich and poor. This is the absolute condition without which socialism cannot live. He who calls himself a socialist and does not realise this necessity is a dreamer (remember Allende).

Free access to goods as well as worldwide socialism are our final aims, but we claim that a period of adaptation is necessary during which people’s mentalities will progress more and more rapidly as they will be free from the “prices-wages-profits” economy. Do not forget that J.Duboin was a convinced world citizen, as I and many of his followers. But if we could convince our neighbours and set up the true socialism in France, why not try? Is it not the best way to convince the others and achieve world-wide socialism?

ALB blames my father (he uses the word “mistake”) for exaggerating the impact of mechanisation and automation on employment under capitalism. This impact, nevertheless, appears easily when you look at the official data: in any western country and for several decades it has appeared obvious that production increases while employment decreases. This is the reason why he stated that income must become independent of labour. And production can now be realised with fewer and fewer workers. Evidence of this is given by the drift of labour from the first to the second sector, then from the second to the third, while the production of each sector has kept increasing. Productivity in the third sector is about to be boosted in the coming years as a result of computerization. It must overall be kept in mind that official statistics will take into account all useless, nay harmful jobs that the capitalist consumption society has created.

The most surprising criticism published by the Socialist Standard is that Duboin made a mistake in “accepting the myth that banks can create credit”. It is no longer possible, for socialists, to ignore a fact of so important consequences. May one forget where the power is? If there were some naive readers who had to be convinced, let the answer come from the House of Commons, that had appointed a committee to report on this affair; this gave Mr.McKenna. Chairman of the Midland Bank, the opportunity to declare: “Banks create deposits, but I am afraid that the man in the street should not be happy to learn that banks create and destroy money, yet this is the truth”. Let now the Governor of the National Bank of Canada state during an official inquiry: “It is the very office of banks to make money, exactly as steelmills make steel”. Colin Clark, an Australian economist and financial adviser to the Queensland government wrote: “In business circles, one could still find people trying to deny that banks create or destroy credits; I doubt however that those people could find one single genuine economist to share in this strange point of view”. If all this were not sufficient, just have a look at the Encyclopedia Brittanica (1954 edition volume III, p50) where you will read that: “Banks do not lend their money, nor their customers money: they create credits as deposits on which their customers may draw checks”. Do not forget that J. Duboin had been a junior Minister, in charge of the French Treasury; this gave him the opportunity to measure the power of banks. From this knowledge he could predict how dangerous this power would be if socialism ignored or tolerated it. World-wide Socialists cannot afford to make such a mistake.

As our aims seem really to be much the same, I would sincerely be happy if this could help to achieve our common purpose. As I have endeavoured to continue, chiefly through the publication of his newspaper, my father’s fight since his death (which occurred not in 1973 but in March 1976 at nearly 98), I do wish there will be the best mutual understanding between writers and readers of the Socialist Standard and those of La Grande Releve. 

Marie-Louise Duboin

Le Vesinet, France

Reply:

M-L Duboin’s letter unintentionally confirms the point we were trying to make in the article she criticises: that, in the movement inspired by the ideas of her father, mixed up with the correct insight that the “prices-wages-profits” system must be abolished are all sorts of confused views, often bordering on currency crankism.

1. She objects to us saying that what her father called “consumption money” would better have been called “consumption vouchers”. She feels that this latter term suggests too much the ration cards of the war and immediate postwar period. Not necessarily. Even the “labour-time vouchers” Marx mentioned would have been “proportional to an abundant production” and would have allowed the individual a free choice of the various goods available for personal consumption. But this is not the real point. Under both the system mentioned by Marx and that proposed by Duboin, individual consumption would still be rationed, being restricted by the number of vouchers a person had. Our point is that today, given the tremendous development of the means of production since Marx’s time, society could, on the basis of common ownership and democratic control, apply the long-standing socialist principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”; in other words, institute free access to goods and services according to individual need.

2. M-L Duboin argues against the immediate introduction of free access on the ground that people are not yet ready for it. “A period of adaption is necessary”, she claims, “during which people’s mentalities will progress”. What exactly does she mean here? Can this be the old objection that, if goods were free, people would grab more than they needed so that shortages would soon re-appear? If so, it is a peculiar objection from someone claiming to stand for a society of abundance. We don’t think this problem would arise because, if people can be assured (as they will be able to be) that the stores will always be adequately stocked with what they need, then there is no point in grabbing or hoarding. To do so would be to behave in a quite abnormal way. Grabbing is a product of scarcity and insecurity, not of abundance. In any event, socialism is not something that will be introduced from above for a population which will not know what to expect; it is something that will have been introduced by a majority which wants it and understands its implications. A “sense of individual responsibility” will thus already have developed before socialism is established.

3. We don’t really see the relevance of the reference to Allende. Perhaps M-L Duboin is trying to say that his fate is a warning as to what awaits anyone who tries to introduce “socialism” while retaining the present monetary system. But Allende was not a socialist, nor was he trying to introduce socialism. He was a reformist trying to extend State capitalism in Chile. His experience is thus irrelevant as far as the establishment of socialism is concerned, though of course we agree that socialism cannot be established without abolishing money.

4. Socialism cannot be established just in France or just in Britain or in any one country alone for the simple reason that capitalism, the system socialism will replace, is already a world system. The developed means of production which make possible a society of abundance only exist on a world scale and as an integrated world-wide network. A society of abundance in one country is therefore just not possible.

5. We did not say that the trend referred to by Jacques Duboin for machines to replace living labour does not exist, but only that he tended to exaggerate it. When he says, for instance, in his Economie distributive de l'abondance that “hundreds of examples could be given of a machine replacing 10, 50, 100 and often more workers” (3rd edition, 1946, p.16), this is misleading. If you just look, as Duboin is doing here, at the labour displaced at the last stage of the production of a particular commodity by the introduction of a new machine, then you get a one-sided picture. For the labour displaced at this stage will have only been made possible by the extra labour employed in earlier stages to design, construct, install and maintain the new machine. There is of course an overall displacement of living labour but of the order of a few percent and not of the fantastic figures sometimes found in Duboinist literature (and, to be quite frank, sometimes too in our own!). A further reason why overall productivity only increases at a relatively slow rate is that a new invention is never applied in one fell swoop in all the workplaces producing a particular commodity, but only slowly as competition gradually forces all the producers to adopt it. We hasten to add that we fully accept that in socialism, where the profit and labour-cost considerations that apply under capitalism will no longer exist, mechanisation and automation will really come into their own as means, not only of producing abundance, but of eliminating dull, boring, repetitive and dirty jobs.

6. Duboin thinks that her belief about the banks’ supposed power to “create deposits” must be regarded as proved because certain individuals she names have said so, notably the members of the MacMillan Committee 1931 (Committee on Finance and Industry). What she fails to realise is that, for every “authority” she quotes supporting her belief, there is another denying it.

Thus she quotes the Governor of the National Bank of Canada. But Mr. Jackson Dodds, the General Manager of the Bank of Montreal, retorted: “Now, banks are given well defined powers under the Bank Act, but the power to create something out of nothing is not one of them.” She quotes Colin Clark as saying that he knew of “no genuine economist” who denied it. Edwin Cannan, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy in the University of London provided an argued case against the belief. (An Economist’s Protest by Edwin Cannan, pages 256-266). As also did Professor Gregory, who was a member of the MacMillan Committee. Then there was Mr. Walter Leaf, Chairman of the Westminster Bank and President of the Institute of Bankers:

“The banks can lend no more than they can borrow—in fact not nearly so much. If anyone in the deposit banking system can be called a ‘creator of credit’ it is the depositor; for the banks are strictly limited in their lending operations by the amount which the depositor thinks fit to leave with them."

Duboin quotes in support of her belief Reginald McKenna, who was a member of the MacMillan Committee. When Major Douglas, founder of the Social Credit movement drew from that Committee’s report the quite logical conclusion that it meant that “new money has been created by a stroke of the pen”, McKenna wrote: “There is nothing to justify the claim by Major Douglas that I agree with his view on the creation of credit”.

What Duboin should do is to examine critically the astonishing case put by the MacMillan Report on para. 74. It was blatantly rigged. It worked out a series of ten successive loans to depositors, extending over a considerable period, but while it assumed the deposit of cash by a depositor, no depositor or borrower in their Alice in Wonderland bank ever withdrew cash. Duboin really should not go on believing that the fact that a committee is government appointed is a guarantee that it won’t utter nonsense. Incidentally, when members of the Committee were approached about para. 74, several of them disowned it.

M-L Duboin can rest assured. Socialism will neither “ignore” nor “tolerate” the banks. Together with the rest of the paraphernalia of buying and selling, they will quite simply not exist in Socialism. We combat mistaken ideas about mythical powers supposedly possessed by banks because they lead people to imagine that the solution to social problems lies in monetary reform rather than a change in the basis of society.

Editorial Committee

Poverty and housing (1980)

The Briefing Column from the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Successive governments have taken it upon themselves to tackle the problem of “sub-standard” accommodation for the working class. In 1868, 1875, 1879 and 1882 local authorities were given powers to deal with insanitary property and in the twentieth century, an official housing shortage has been designated. Pious politicians tell us that decent housing is a basic human requirement, but exactly what constitutes “decent housing” is left open to interpretation. We are bombarded with figures telling us that there has been a change in the pattern of occupancy, from 90 per cent rented accommodation in 1914, to 52 per cent owner occupation in 1974. (In that year 17 per cent of homes were privately rented and 31 per cent publicly rented.) Such figures do not take into account that, according to government figures (Social Trends 9), 33,720 people were homeless in 1976; and even these figures only refer to those registered as such with a local authority.

While there is such homelessness, there is much property standing empty — for the only reason that those who are homeless cannot afford access to it. Such people are the victims of the property society in which human needs are subservient to profit-making. For them the 1975 Housing Rents and Subsidies Act offers little comfort, for they do not have the luxury of a rent to pay. They are homeless because of rent arrears incurred, mortgage default, the fact that a landlord has repossessed the property, the loss of a tied property.

But it does not end there, for the accommodation that is occupied, although fulfilling the basic requirement of shelter, offers little more. According to Peter Townsend’s Poverty in the United Kingdom: a Survey of Household Resources and Standards of Living, 22 per cent of accommodation suffers from some form of structural defect. 16 per cent of households have no sole use of a toilet and 3 per cent do not have sole use of a sink or wash basin.

His study also points out that 17 per cent of households do not have sole use of a fixed bath or shower and that 4 per cent do not have sole use of a gas or electric cooker. Governments may pay lip service to the problems of poor housing, but the poverty in which capitalism forces the majority of society’s members to live still allows 44 per cent of households to have only one (or even no) room heated in winter, and for 2 per cent to have no electricity for either power or lights. John Wheatley, the Minister for Health in the 1924 Labour Government, dreamed of a garden city in which the working class might live in council accommodation. But in practice council accommodation has offered no more a solution to housing deprivation than the possibility of “home ownership”. Council housing estates are now graded according to their stress factor and those members of society who have least choice of accommodation are often placed in high stress areas.

Absurdly, the working class are prepared to live in the accommodation that capitalism provides, and even go so far as to invent a mythology whereby they can stand proud in the midst of their squalor. The inhabitants of “high status” suburbs look down on the council estates; the inner cities have been deserted by those climbing the social ladder and those inner cities, once “high status” districts themselves, have become areas of multi-occupancy, with their privately rented furnished and unfurnished accommodation. Rather than seeing a common interest between themselves and the other victims of capitalism, they see each other as threats to the standards of living they have achieved.

The only way we can gauge the actual conditions in which we live is to examine the potential that society can offer. The apologist claims that the standard of living has risen, but that does not mean that our position as members of the working class has changed. The property relationships that exist within capitalism deny the working class access to the potential society is capable of creating, and it is only by recognising this fact that we can begin to understand the extent of the poverty in which all members of the working class exist.

Philip Bentley

Has CND learnt nothing? (1980)

From the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The eminent historian, Professor E. P. Thompson, is not a very foolish man, although the eminent Catholic preacher, Monsignor Bruce Kent, undoubtedly is. Yet both of them have combined their energies to lead the re-enactment of what must be the most pious and futile reformist campaign of the twentieth century: the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. At its peak, in the mid-sixties, 100,000 marchers could be rallied by CND to express their opposition to nuclear arms. The result of the marching and the songs of protest and the moral cries for peace had all the potency of Canute before the waves: governments went on stockpiling arms of ever-increasing ferocity in their effort to expand and protect their areas of capitalist domination.

Leading Labour politicians were among the ranks of CND in the sixties, but what became of their pacifist sentimentalities when in office? The Labour Party, just like their Tory rivals, is forced to run the squalid military operations of the system it presides over when in power. While in opposition, opportunists like Joan Lestor and Michael Foot commit the next Labour government to all kinds of futile, but vote-catching reforms: they promise to remove Cruise missiles and to spend no more than at present on nuclear bombs. Even if the hypocrites break with tradition and do what they have promised, the world will be no closer to peace and security. Opposition to certain kinds of militarism is not enough. The widespread loss of civilian lives at Dresden in 1945 was no less atrocious because it was carried out by “conventional”, rather than nuclear, warfare; the military threat in Ireland is not diffused because only bricks and bullets are commonly used; all wars are damaging to the health and safety of the working class, whether they are based upon nuclear warheads or bows and arrows. Instead of attempting to eradicate militarism, CND merely seek to limit it.

The pleas of workers to their governments to stop nuclear armaments failed on the last occasion and they will fail this time. In 1960 the first issue of the journal, International Socialism claimed

The Campaign (for Nuclear Disarmament) has been successful in two ways. It has been outstanding in that, year by year, it has brought more people into the anti-Bomb protest, doing today what the slump did between the two World Wars in the matter of baptising (sic) a new generation with political realities. Less successfully but of at least equal importance, it has edged, be it ever so cautiously and suspiciously, towards the centre of alternative power in our Bomb-ridden society.

Naive idealism of this sort was harshly exposed in the years to come. For the Aldermarston marchers of the sixties strode on to the complacent reformism of the Labour Party, the pro-Russian unilateralism of the Communist Party, the adventurism of anarchism, the sentimentality of “flower power”, or mere cynical respectability. Most of the participants in CND learned little about what causes war: they did not go on to challenge the centre of social power (or even know where it was); they did not stop a single working class life from being lost in a war. Indeed, many of those whose moral pacifism took them into CND in the early sixties found themselves supporting one of the armies in the Vietnam war a few years later. There are currently 5,000 paid-up members of CND (Guardian, 23.6.80) and recruitment may be expected to rise rapidly in the months ahead. The recruits will generally be quite sincere workers whose attitude to socialism is that it sounds like a good idea, but that it is hopelessly Utopian. But their hope for a capitalist system without war is the real Utopia and as Karl Marx wisely observed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, when historical events happen twice they happen “the first time as tragedy and the second as farce.”

A leading player in the CND farce Act II will be the Communist Party, the historical role of which has been to defend the turns and somersaults in Kremlin foreign policy. In 1945, when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Communist parties of Europe unequivocally condoned that mass destruction of working class life as a means of defeating one of the national adversaries of Russia. L'Unita, the paper of the Italian CP, observed at the time, in an article entitled In The Service Of Civilisation,

The news that an atomic bomb was dropped by the American Air Force has made an enormous impression throughout the whole world, and has been received on all sides with a sense of panic and condemnation. This shows, it seems to us, a curious psychological perversion and a doctrinaire obedience to a form of abstract humanitarianism.

Earlier in 1945 The Daily Worker, paper of the British CP, was blatantly suggesting that

The employment of the new weapon on a substantial scale should expedite the surrender of Japan. Valuable lives in the Allied nations will have been saved by the new discovery.

No member of the Communist Party is entitled to cry in moral indignation about the callous murder of millions of Japanese workers in 1945, for their party had been the cynical advocates of such action.

It was only after 1945 that the CP changed its mind about the Bomb, but not because of any “abstract humanitarianism”. The reason was that once the Cold War commenced, the echoers of the Kremlin feared American superiority in military technology. Fear of Russian disadvantage in a war against America is why the Communist Party of Great Britain supported CND and the policy of unilateral disarmament. Those who oppose war have a duty to expose the grotesque expenditure of resources on arms by the Warsaw Pact no less than NATO.

Even some members of the CP have recently been forced to take up a more critical attitude towards Russian state capitalism. But such occasional criticism (however mild) has alienated many of the hard-line CP Stalinists, who split from the party in 1978 to form the New Communist Party. This new party is also pledged to support the revived CND, although one detects from their pamphlet, Anti-Sovietism—How To Tight It And Why, that their concern for disarmament is somewhat one-sided. The pamphlet tells us that the urgent task of the world working class is to defend the USSR from attack (p. 3), that the Russian tanks which invaded the streets of Prague in 1968 were merely intended to defeat “counterrevolutionary attempts to turn back the clock and reinstate capitalism” (p. 6) and that Russian workers “will never be drawn irresponsibly into war, or used as pawns in the interests of imperialism” (p. 11). The NCP is just the pro-Russian equivalent of the Tory party; all patriots, be they of the Left, Right or Centre, are betrayers of the working class interest.

Socialists oppose all war

It is a creditable boast that the Socialist Party of Great Britain is the sole political organisation in this country to have consistently opposed every war thrown up by capitalism. This is not because we are moral pacifists, but because as Marxist materialists we ask one question about all wars: In whose interest are we being asked to fight? In the wars of the profit system, we are urged — often compelled by law — to risk death and mutilation in a battle between rival capitalist interests over the ownership and control of raw materials, markets and strategic locations. As the working class does not stand to gain from the expansion of their masters' power, the one policy for class conscious workers is to refuse to fight in any capitalist war. The socialist objective goes beyond the negative refusal to fight: we stand for the removal of the root cause of war—the system of capitalism which is the cause of all modern social problems.

Socialists share the fears expressed by many members of CND that sophisticated means of killing may be used to wipe out whole sections of the human race. Who can think without fear of the

 

fact that the British government — a relatively small military power — is currently spending £1.3 million an hour on so-called defence? Who can read the HMSO Civil Defence leaflet, Protect and Survive, and feel anything but hatred for a “civilisation” which can soberly contemplate such brutal destruction? In the section of the leaflet entitled Challenge to Survival we are informed that

Everything within a certain distance of a nuclear explosion will be totally destroyed. Even people living outside the area will be in danger from heat and blast and fall-out.

As for the “lucky” survivors:

After a nuclear attack there will be a short period before fall-out starts to descend. Go around the house and put out any small fires. If anyone’s clothing catches fire, lay them on the floor and roll them in a blanket . . .  If a death occurs while you are confined in the Fall-Out room, place the body in another room and confine it as securely as possible. Attach an identification.

Those workers who join CND want a future without nuclear fall-out. But they are hopelessly wrong if they believe that CND or any other peace campaign will avert the threat which they fear. The fight against warfare can only be practical if linked to the democratic political fight for a new social order in which the means of living are owned and controlled by the whole community. To die for capitalism would be tragic; to live in the belief that capitalism can be humanised is pathetic; to organise for socialism is our only hope.

Steve Coleman

Saving capitalism (1999)

Book Review from the December 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Lugano Report. On Preserving Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century by Susan George. Pluto Press.

A warning of the frustration to come is given on the cover: an endorsement by John Pilger. He claims that the book is a kind of Catch-22 of capitalism'. It is nothing of the sort. The brilliance of Catch-22 is that it points clearly to the absurdities of capitalism and its wars. The dryness of The Lugano Report points only to the bankruptcy of the ideas of the Left. Although the contradictions of capitalism are painted well, the effect is spoilt by the proposal of absurd solutions. Like Pilger, George offers a useful analysis of the state of things. Like Pilger. she stops short of logical conclusions. The frustration will be familiar to any reader of the New Internationalist.

The book's title refers to the conceit that a Working Party has been commissioned to prepare a report on the future of the global capitalist system. The commissioning parties have assumed that the system is an unlikely candidate for long-term survival, and so the Working Party is charged with “providing guidance in order to maintain, develop and deepen the scope of the liberal, free-market economy”.

The report is based on solid enough premises, but the drift of the conclusions takes the book into the lunacy of conspiracy theory. The report opens by stating that the capitalist system cannot support present or future population levels, nor can it, nor should it. There are more losers than winners in capitalism, and the numbers of losers is increasing. The discontent of the losers will threaten the stability that capitalism needs to flourish. Therefore, the losers must be eliminated. That's her basic story. and the report goes on to describe various ingenious ways of how this mass murder might be achieved. This is the most entertaining section of the book: the report's authors call on the four horsemen of the apocalypse to conquer and to spread famines, wars and pestilence. What George doesn't realise is that there is no need for horsemen or conspiracies. Wars and famines are just the logical outcome of a system that cares not a jot for human needs. You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain what is perfectly legal anyway. Wars are fought in our own interests. Exploitation is not only legal, it is good for us. Governments act in secret for “security reasons”. Famines and pestilence are unfortunate acts of god.

But this is not to take away from the power of some of the pictures she paints. I couldn't help thinking of the grisly news pictures of Blair in Kosovo when the report suggests that “saving 50 people, preferably on camera, can be a convenient curtain behind which 50,000 may be eliminated”. She also echoes Oscar Wilde's explanation of why we do not yet have socialism (“it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought”) when she says:”Post-colonial pity for the downtrodden and mercy for the afflicted . . .  have all but supplanted politics of every stripe . . .  [and] yet no one can oppose humanitarian aid without appearing utterly heartless”.

After the conclusion of The Lugano Report, which we are to see as too horrific to really contemplate, Susan George offers her own alternatives. It is a classic New Internationalist line that she takes when she furiously denounces the notion that “there is no alternative”, before showing us clearly, in the alternatives she offers, that she implicitly accepts the very ideas she thinks she is attacking. She starts off on the right track: “the goals of economic activity are profit and accumulation” and “all other values must be sacrificed to them'. She goes on to claim that “this economic philosophy is championed especially by the very large transnational corporations”, but that small-and medium-sized businesses “do not generally function according to the same impersonal and remorseless rules”. Small business good, big business bad. Great news for the owners and wage-slaves of small-and medium-sized businesses: apparently they do not have to follow the rules of capitalism!

It is perfectly clear what is to be done, she says: “find out who is responsible, and how we can make them stop”. If only we could get rid of all the evil people in charge of multinationals! The limit of Susan George's vision is of small companies serving their communities and being run nicely. What she fails to understand is that all this would mean is that we would end up being exploited by hippies and yuppies instead of by the current class of capitalists.

Her view of the state is equally laughable: “Unless we can make sure that the state retains its prerogatives, I can't see who will stand between the person on the ground and transnational tyranny”. The idea that the state. the executive committee of the ruling class, would want to do any such thing is in direct conflict with the analysis presented in the rest of the book.

Susan George places her hope for the future in “fair trade” coffee and tea, in unions working to bring wages and working conditions up to “decent levels”, and in a government that will tax the evil multinationals and steal from the financial markets to fund health and education for all. This, she says. is the “only way to pay for everything that needs doing”. In other words, what we need is a different, kinder ruling class.

The book is worth reading for the same reason that the New Internationalist is worth reading. They understand capitalism and its horrors pretty well, but not well enough to understand that it must be abolished.

Stuart Watkins