Party Pars. (1909)

Party News from the June 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

Strengthened and enthused by our recent successful Conference, the Party is more fit and ready than ever to carry on the work of Socialist propaganda, and with the advent of summer that work becomes more pleasant and more profitable.

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The Lecture list is growing, the fighting line is being extended, and the enemy engaged wherever “Reaction” still can rally a single defender. In the matter of debates the Anti-Socialist Union is giving our Party special attention. Their representative, Mr. Hutson, being met at Battersea by our Comrade Allen, Mr. Turpin at Paddington by Comrade Watts, and Mr. Taylor at Islington by Comrade Anderson. In each case, of course, our speakers successfully disposed of their opponents, and good work was done in explaining the principles of the Socialist Party and in exposing the weakness of the Anti-Socialist case.

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At Tooting a debate had been arranged between Comrade Anderson and a Councillor Freeman, but owing to serious considerations of employment, Comrade Anderson was prevented from attending and Comrade H. Joy took his place. This was, perhaps, rather fortunate, as it enabled one of our younger speakers to prove his mettle. From our point of view the debate was a complete success, and more shall be heard of Joy.

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In Finsbury Park an impromptu skirmish took place between our Comrade Fitzgerald and a Mr. Collins of the Anti-Socialist Union. The latter, of course, suffered severely but wants more, and he shall have it. Our Islington comrades are fixing up details for a debate. They are also arranging a meeting with the Rev. J. A. Waldron. At Battersea and at Romford delates are pending with representatives of Anarchist and pseudo-Socialist parties.

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In the Provinces our Burnley comrades arc carrying the war into the enemy’s camp, Blackburn, Colne, and Darwen being visited and a large amount of literature disposed of.

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A branch of the Party has been formed at East Ham, and one is being formed at Walthamstow. Readers and sympathisers please note.

My Friend Jones. (1909)

A Short Story from the July 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like the printer in Ibsen’s “Enemy of Society," I am a man of discreet moderation and of moderate discretion. I disclaim and abhor violence. I am one who is prepared to compromise with the enemy to obtain part of what I desire. When agitating for a specific loaf l am ready to accept either half the loaf or the promise of a quarter at some early future. Society is not composed of blacks and whites, or clear-cut classes of workers and shirkers, like my friend Jones imagines. I once thought that as he grew out of youth he would cast aside his perverse, impossible spirit. Society is an organism, a growth, a whole of which we humans are interdependent cells; and my politics and economics are not rigid, cut and dried doctrines, but flexible and fluid habits of mind. Let me give you a few examples of his ridiculous rigidity.

Our town boasts a successful debating society. Many of my Labour comrades entered this society with the avowed aim of cunningly permeating the debaters with a moderate, calm Socialism. Whatever the subject matter of the debate was we astutely endeavoured to show its relation to Socialism. Especially when the orthodox subject of State Socialism was dealt with by the enemy in the orthodox manner did we try our level best to show the society that the essayist was attacking a noxious and antiquated chimera. We were slowly compelling by superior logic, even our opponents to see that the old, rigid, unemotional, cataclysmic, class-struggle Socialism was un-English—Continental, in fact—and is now entirely discredited. I personally played a prominent part in showing how we attain Socialism step by step, now by the abolition of barmaids, now by Sunday closing of drinking dens, now by finite but ever increasing taxes on the value of land. The old view of the coming of Socialism, the expropriation of the expropriators, the stubborn opposition of the plutocracy, the determined democracy, the blood-red dawn of the Socialist Monday morning—all this I ruthlessly exposed by explaining how all successful modern exponents of Socialism believed in such a peaceful, pellucid transition to Socialism that no one would be able to say that here at a definite stage capitalism capitulated, and here the Socialist Commonwealth was born.

Then up rose my friend Jones and to the very evident glee of the enemy attacked my moderate, permeating Socialism after the manner of his kind, brazenly, vigourously, and with the self- confidence peculiar to him. He poked fun at my “organic social movements” and substituted his hair-raising class war; he declared that the fantastic analogies of all the “philosophers" from Spencer to Macdonald were no adequate equivalent for the clear-drawn illustrations of the Marxian class struggle. He had no faith in the crux of our creed, that the social instincts of the plutocracy will prove more powerful than their class interests. He attacked bluntly every institution of any note whether political, charitable, or charitable-theological, from the Fabian Society to the Emigration Army. The Liberal leaders who would meet us half way were humbugs, the Labour leaders had been humbugged. Palliatives postponed Socialism. Socialism spelt revolution, the deliberate, conscious overthrow of capitalism; the working class organised politically, with their representatives in Parliament, economically, in enlightened Socialist Trade Unions. In short, the work of months was undone. The society no longer accepts our assertion that revolutionary Socialism is cremated. We have, through the impulsive Jones, the onerous task of defending not simply a minimum wage, a minimum of education, a minimum of leisure and the conduct of the Labour Party, but even now Socialism itself. I am afraid that we shall be compelled to cancel Jones’ speaking engagements with our local Labour Representation Committee.

But the climax of my friend’s political career came when he was our candidate at a municipal election. His election address was unpractical and doctrinaire; it lacked constructional spirit; it was brusque in dealing with some of the chief planks on our programme, viz., that we should have better railway facilities in one of our wards, and that the recreation ground was in want of repairs. And when but three days from the poll he rashly alienated the Nonconformist and Salvation Army votes. “General” Booth had just previously passed through the town on a tour, and Jones took advantage of the occasion to make a badly timed attack on what he termed “Salvation Syrup.’’ But the Nonconformist incident was typical of the impossibilist spirit. My friend’s election committee had invited a very popular and influential dissenting minister to address a meeting for the people’s cause. At the great risk of offending his congregation the minister accepted. He was a new convert to Socialism. I just forget the particular organisation of which he was a member—a “League of Progressive Thought’’ or something of that kind. But certainly it was a Socialistic organisation. Jones.was glum and saturnine when informed about his new comrade, but nothing he said prepared us for his unwise and precipitate action at the meeting.

It was certainly a great meeting. The council school was full and cheers greeted the plucky young minister when he arose to give hie address—or sermon, as Jones said. I thought his speech splendid. He declared himself in favour of an eight hours day for railway workers, endowment of motherhood, and a Minister of Labour. He also spoke well in an appeal for the cultivation of the best sort of Socialism, the improvement of individual character, the care of the Soul: for was not the regeneration of the individual the aim alike of the Church and of Socialism ? He showed how Martin Luther and John Wesley each had dim but unmistakable premonitions of the Socialist idea; and with his fine tenor voice moved his audience to tears by an earnest condemnation of contemporary society as a mingling of blank and blatant Atheism and the most unrighteous materialism.

Then Jones spoke. He almost sneered at the minister's vivid denunciation of the slum. Flat and plain he said that had he been aware of the minister's ideas he would never have occupied a platform by his side, and that if the reverend gentleman wanted regeneration and abolition of blatant Atheism he would discover suitable allies amongst the Primitive Methodists.

The election was not won. Jones is not yet councillor or member of Parliament. His latest freak is to join a small and noisy gang of impossibilists. These men are such a body of troublesome revolutionaries, that the cultured and elegant editor of the Socialist Review tells us that they are driving our sensitive Labour leaders into the arms of the Liberal party. They heckle our lecturers, demand debating engagements, and frighten the life out of our young speakers. They forget that the English working man is not built after the fashion of bis French and German compeers: he is definitely conservative, with a defendable love for venerable traditions and ancient institutions. So we must humour him and organise a Labour party without a programme, for as our comrade Wardle, who is a member of Parliament — a body which is the Will of All, the general active Will of the nation — as our comrade has shown, a pregramme was the means of wrecking the historic Liberal party, and will be the destruction of the Labour Party if it is so forgetful of its constructive spirit as to adopt one.

John A. Dawson

White House bugged (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Could President Reagan, the greatest supporter Big Business has ever had in the White House, be responsible for a cardinal sin against capitalism?

In the highly competitive world of exterminators, the answer is a gloomy yes. In short the President helped in the promotion of a perfect product that supermarkets won’t touch: a powder that rids homes of cockroaches permanently so needs to be bought only once.

‘Stores don’t want a once-and-for-ever sale,’ explained Alan Brite, president of the company that makes Roach-Prufe. ‘They like repeat business.'

‘Who would want to produce a tyre that never wears out, an everlasting battery or a car that lasts a lifetime?’

Mr Brite traces his problem back to the day Ronald and Nancy Reagan found cockroaches in the White House. They called in chemists and experts from the University of California and consulted the permanent staff who, like millions of Americans, had accepted that periodic infestations were as inevitable as the seasons.

The final solution the experts revealed was Roach-Prufe. The Reagans tried it and the dreaded cockroaches never returned. The word leaked out and, in a blaze of publicity that would have cost millions, the public clamoured for Mr Brite’s product. But it was rejected by a marketing system geared to a fast turnover of the imperfect.

So instead of despatching the powder in truck loads to thousands of outlets across the nation, Mr Brite has to use more expensive door-to-door salesmen.

Daily Mail, 18 November 1981

How the Land Lies (1982)

From the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Modern society is sometimes praised as a “property-owning democracy” in which with one or two rare exceptions (like Our Royal Highnesses) everybody starts life on an equal footing and our acquisition of property will depend on what we desire, the extent of our drive and initiative, and generally on what we deserve. Under capitalism, it is argued, if we reduce state interference to a minimum, everybody will be free to acquire what he or she wants. How far is this notion of the democracy of private property borne out by the facts?

There are 41,879,000 acres of land in Britain but to know exactly who owns what is difficult. The most recent comprehensive investigation into land ownership was the New Domesday Survey of 1873 which was intended to demonstrate that land had become more fairly distributed since the first Domesday Survey in 1086; but the result was to prove the very opposite. Since then there has been a certain reluctance on the part of British landowners to disclose details of their holdings. For example, in 1976 the Country Landowners Association attributed their reticence to the “practical difficulties” involved in finding out what they own. But then members of the aristocracy never were able to cope with the "practical difficulties” of life.

However, the available information demonstrates that the ownership of land and property is in the hands of a very small minority. The reports of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth (1975-80) show, for example, that the wealthiest 8 percent of the adult population own 91 per cent of the land. Some of these wealthy landowners are aristocrats—you may find the Duke of Buccleuch wandering about his modest 268,000 acres of green and pleasant land, or you might see the Countess of Sutherland on her motorised lawnmower gliding over her 150,000 acres. Such ownership, which cannot even pretend to be based on merit, is defended by the nobles and their sycophants as being the birthright of the golden caste. Much property is also owned by members of the ruling class who have made their fortunes from wealth created by the working class in industry. The late Charles Clore is an example. Among his knick-knacks were the British Shoe Corporation, William Hill the bookies, Selfridges, Mappin and Webb, Garrards the royal jewellers and countless properties. Clore’s main interest was in property development which he began in the 1930s and eventually went on to “build” the Hilton Hotel—although, strangely, neither bricklaying nor architectural design seem to have featured in his talents. Clore was a frank man, and when asked whether he liked art, replied “No, I like blocks of flats”.

Financial institutions—particularly insurance companies and pension funds—have also become major landowners during the last twenty-five years. Land is a sound investment, especially during periods of high inflation, and now nearly 20 per cent of the assets of these institutions are invested in property.

It is sometimes argued that the enormous wealth of pension funds, including a good deal of property, denotes a significant shift of riches to ordinary working people. Apart from the fact that what each worker contributes to the fund only really amounts to unpaid wages, it is not the case that the fortunes of the funds are the property of the workers to be enjoyed in the same way as a capitalist would benefit from his share portfolio. A miner, working hard and living in poverty does not have fewer daily difficulties because the National Coal Board owns, for instance, a 50 per cent interest in the Watergate building in Washington.

So, on the one hand there is a small minority who, between them, own most of the land. On the other hand there are those of us — the overwhelming majority — who own about as much of Britain as we can fit into our pockets. Margaret Thatcher is very fond of quoting the high proportion of residents in Britain who are “owner-occupiers”, and some people are always eager to tell you how secure their lives are, or how proud they are to be a “capitalist”, because they own their own homes. As a matter of fact, not only do most people not own their homes, but most believe they are owners are not. Most people who boast about their home ownership make lifelong regular payments to mortgage companies, building societies or banks to pay for their accommodation and are really in a very similar position to rent payers. According to the 1981 report Judicial Statistics (issued by the Lord Chancellor’s Office) 27,000 people lost their homes during that year when they fell behind with their mortgage payments and had their homes re-possessed through the courts.

Under the present social arrangements having a roof over your head depends not on need but on how much you can afford. So, to take one example, while more than twenty couples recently camped out in front of Waverley District Council’s offices in Surrey hoping to be “lucky” enough to buy cheap homes at bargain prices of £20,000 (Guardian, 7/12/81), the spacious and luxurious Heveningham Hall in Suffolk discreetly changed hands for £726,000 (Guardian, 8/1/82). Over the years there have been various suggestions about how to solve the housing problem, some less serious than others. Lady Spencer of Althorp, for instance, thinks that stately homes are an anachronism. “Of course they are. Who needs 100 rooms today? They are abnormal, and my husband and I have always thought the answer is to add a little normality”. This normality consists of throwing their place open for business occasions, conferences and to tourists. Perhaps we should all take another look at our living rooms, give them a once-over with a duster and telephone the CBI to see if they’ve already made arrangements for their next annual conference. Then there are the more serious reform proposals.

Given the chance to form the next government, would the Labour Party or the SDP-Liberal Connivance solve the housing problem? Local authorities estimated last year that there were 547,000 unfit homes in England alone, plus 1,035,000 homes lacking one or more of the basic amenities. Des Wilson, the first director of Shelter, the national campaign for the homeless, recently said:

The desperate truth now is that those of us who spoke out about the scandal of Britain’s housing problem in 1966, when Shelter was launched, find ourselves back at square one. All the signs are that this year fewer houses will be started than at any time during the last fifty years.

The well-intentioned people in Shelter are fighting a losing battle; for as long as houses are built not for people to live in but for sale or rent, then there will be a mismatch between what we want and what we get. Listening to the renewed pledges and promises from Labour politicians to “provide adequate housing for everyone” and deciding to give them one more chance will not solve anything. Under the last Labour government the rich got richer; the dole queues got longer; the high-rise hell-holes erected as Labour’s answer to inner-city slums in the 1960s began to crumble; the number of homeless grew and the number of houses being built fell.

Labour, like the SDP and the Liberals, asks for your trust in its ability to solve problems by making a good job of governing capitalism. What actually happens is that capitalism always makes a good job of governing whichever party is in “power”. The forces of the market, as the profit-system convulses its chaotic way through boom and slump, glut and dearth, are more powerful than a hot kitchen-full of politicians. The present social system entails the minority ownership (by individuals or states) of the land and the means of life, while the propertyless majority are exploited to create profits for the wealthy.

This system spreads across the world. In a television documentary last year it was estimated that from a world population of about 4,000,000,000, approximately 3 per cent own about 80 per cent of the planet (Global Report, 1981, BBC, 30/12/81). Private property society is not the only way that people can live and there is no reason to suppose that the social organisation into which we were born is the one which will endure indefinitely. In fact, the one thing of which we can be certain is that there will be change; but the kind of changed society which will exist tomorrow will depend on action today.

Gary Jay

Rape Prejudice (1982)

From the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rape-inspired panic arising from a series of recent incidents has, to put it mildly, served to distort the true picture, which is bad enough as it is. There was the televised questioning, by incredulous Thames Valley policemen, of a woman who complained that she had been raped. There was the decision by the Scottish law authorities not to prosecute three young men suspected of raping and slashing a young woman in Glasgow. And there was the rapist who was “only" fined £2,000, rather than being sent to prison, because the judge thought his victim had contributed to the offence by her negligence (she accepted a lift in his car when there was no other way to get home which she could afford).

These incidents have been interpreted as proving that there is a lot wrong with the way the offence of rape is dealt with. The police won't believe the victim, or if they do the authorities won't prosecute the offender, and should the case come to court some doddering male chauvinist judge will let the man off lightly. One result of this is a dramatic increase in the interest being taken in rape; Spare Rib (February 1982) claimed: “Every accessible Women's Liberation group has been flooded with telephone calls from women wanting to do something". The London Rape Crisis Centre said their switchboard was jammed with calls, with a 100 per cent increase in the number of women alleging that they had been raped.

Naturally the press has rushed to exploit this panic, confident that nothing sells newspapers like sex. Acres of newsprint have been turned by this particular plough. Here for example are some headlines from the same page of the Daily Telegraph of 30 January: 2 Years For Sex Assault “Too Little". “Horrifying” Sex Attack By Railman; Jail For Raping Prostitute; Sex Attackers Bound Husband. And all this, mark you, from a “quality” newspaper; the hysteria among the other levels of Fleet Street, where soft porn is habitually dressed up as moral indignation,was of historic intensity.

One spin off of the decision not to prosecute the three Glasgow men was the sacking of Nicholas Fairbairn from the job of Solicitor General of Scotland. Fairbairn’s defence of the decision in the Commons was itself panic stricken and so earned the contempt of the House, where they will readily applaud all manner of deceit but cannot abide an incompetent performance at the Dispatch Box. The Baron of Fordell (to give Fairbairn his other name) is an Old Etonian who lives in a castle in Dunfermline—a comfortable, ruling class world away from the sordid working class slum where the girl was raped and knifed. He once informed the Commons that: “It is part of the business of men and women that they hunt and are hunted and say ‘Yes' and ‘No' and mean the opposite”. Any sympathy for this boorish aristocrat should be tempered by the knowledge that he still hopes to get into the government. Immediately after being sacked by Thatcher he described her as “. . . probably the warmest and kindest human being that those who have met her have ever had the privilege of encountering”, and a few days later as ". . . very loving, very kind and very compassionate”.

The Glasgow case provoked a great swell of outrage on the opposition benches. Relentless penal reformer Robert Kilroy-Silk denounced the government's decision to stand firm against the panic and not to change the law on dealing with, rapists as “. . . totally unsatisfactory . . . a grave disappointment to all women and those who want law. order and justice maintained”. Kilroy-Silk, normally among the loudest of those demanding more leniency for criminals, has tabled an amendment to the pending Criminal Justice Bill providing for harsher treatment-mandatory gaol sentences for convicted rapists. There is nothing remarkable in Labour reformers, who endlessly and boringly trumpet their progressiveness, demanding that the clock be put back. Standing out against a popular panic can lose votes.

In this country rape is the third most serious criminal offence, after murder and treason (like discharging blanks from an imitation pistol when the queen is nearby on a horse). The panic is obscuring the fact that it is notoriously difficult to judge the frequency of rape and whether it falls or rises, or even to compose a satisfactory legal definition of it. The statistics depend on highly subjective elements—on whether a woman decides she has been raped, whether she then reports it to the police and whether they believe her; whether the final conviction is for rape rather than for a lesser charge. To begin with, only about two-thirds of reported rape is recorded as such by the police.

For what they are worth, then, the figures show an increase of 39 per cent in cases of rape recorded by the police in England and Wales between 1970 and 1980—from 884 to 1225. During the same period, all recorded sexual offences fell by 13 per cent. Nearly a quarter of recorded rape now happens in the area of the Metropolitan Police, which might say something about the delights of life in one of capitalism's great urban concentrations.

The last great outcry about rape arose from a particularly nasty case in 1973, which brought stiff gaol sentences for four men in the RAF. Their appeal eventually reached the House of Lords, where Lord Hailsham spoke from beneath his wig in words which raised a storm. No man, said Hailsham, could be convicted of rape if he genuinely believed, however unreasonably, that the woman was actually consenting. Tediously vociferous Labour MP Jack Ashley quickly composed attacks from his dictionary of cliches, describing Hailsham's ruling as a “Charter for Rapists” and fulminating in the Sunday Mirror (where better?) that “The Scales of Justice have swung heavily in favour of rapists. . . “Amid all the fuss it went almost unnoticed that the four men remained in gaol. The result was a new Act in 1976 which, among other things, attempted a redefinition of rape.

This law was the latest in a very long line; as might be expected, rape has preoccupied legislators for a very long time. Four thousand years ago the Babylonian code of Hammurabi decreed death for any man who raped a betrothed virgin (married victims were classed as adultresses, were bound and thrown into the river). More recently the Second Statute of Westminster (1285) chillingly proclaimed that any man who . . ravishes a wife, maiden or other woman . . . shall have judgement of life and member" . . .  Rape remained punishable by death until 1840, although it was likely that the severity of the sentence had long disuaded juries from convicting.

Early rape law was concerned with the protection of women as men’s property; it now claims to provide for the restraint of the offender as well as for revenge for the rest of society. With a few exceptions, the sentence is assumed to match the nastiness of the act and to express a widespread abhorrence of it. This apparent symmetry is dented when we remember that this is a social system which legalises and rewards a great deal of activity which goes directly against human interests—a society in which sexuality is too often a neurosis, liable to relieve itself in horrific excesses.

Sexual behaviour—including misbehaviour such as rape—does not spring from nowhere; it is socially conditioned. In her book The Mountain Arrapesh Margaret Mead told of a primitive people living in harsh, remote mountains in New Guinea. The Arrapesh’s living conditions persuaded them that they depended on peaceful co-operation for their lives and this was the basis for their morals. They were neither aggressive nor even competitive; they did not engage in warfare. These attitudes extended into their sexual relationships:

Of rape the Arrapesh know nothing beyond the fact that it is the unpleasant custom of the Nugum people to the southwest of them. Nor do the Arrapesh have any conception of male nature that might make rape understandable to them.

In contrast were the Gusii people, studied by Robert Levine, who lived in the Highlands of Kenya, in seven tribes which were further split into clans and sub-clans, all traditionally hostile to each other. But each group imported wives from another group, which carried over the tribal hostility into their sexual activity in the marriage. The husband’s role was to hurt and subordinate—to rape—the wife, who resisted to the limits of her powers. At a conservative estimate, during 1955/6 rapes happened in the Gusii at the rate of 47.2 for each 100.000 of the population, while the rate in England and Wales was about 4 in each 100,000 (See The Facts of Rape, Barbara Toner).

Capitalism, a technically more advanced society, also fashions sexual conduct through a basic antagonism. It exists, first of all, on the antagonism of the commodity—wealth which is socially produced but privately appropriated. For the majority, access to that wealth is through the antagonistic relationship of wage labour. Capitalism conditions antagonism in sexual relationships. On the one hand it idealises the monogamous, nuclear family where sexual contact is as predictable, contained and as unsatisfying as an intravenous drip. On the other hand it sells promiscuity, in its popular press and in the sexually loaded inducements to buy cars, cigarettes, clothes . . ,

Capitalism is preoccupied with productive efficiency, with keeping the exploitative process pouring profits into the balance sheet. It can spare very little resources for the misfit, who cannot measure up to its expectations in social or sexual terms. Capitalism is a society populated with rejects, where deviance is more isolating than crime. Little wonder that sometimes the despair of the deviant misfit may explode into an act of intolerable aggression, with all the humiliation and suffering which it brings.

The true horror of rape is its deprivation. Sexual activity is necessary to human beings but it is no mechanical business; it is improved by some mutual respect between the participants. Rape substitutes anger and despair for affection; it makes a torture of a human essential.

Capitalism could never concede that its people are its victims, and must behave as such. So rapists will continue to be punished and after they are sentenced will experience a living hell in prison, at the hands of convicts anxious to reassure themselves that there are others more wretched than they are. This sordid mess is just one measure of the struggle before us, before we have an abuse-free society, of liberated relationships in humanity.

Ivan

Action Replay: 888online - Gambling’s Bête Noire (2017)

The Action Replay column from the December 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recently the online gambling company 888 was fined £7.8 million by the Gambling Commission after it was discovered that thousands of its customers who had voluntarily banned themselves from gambling online were still able to make wagers due to a technical glitch in the system. The company reported the problem to the commission in February this year which prompted a review of its license.

Roughly £3.5m has been wagered over a year by ‘self-excluded’ customers. One gambler bet £1 million, £55k of it stolen from their employer. Sarah Harrison, CEO of the Gambling Commission said ‘safeguarding customers is not optional. The penalty package of just under £8m reflects the seriousness of 888's failings’ (i newspaper 1/9/2017).

The 888 site currently provides online casinogames in download and web-based instant play for PCs, tablets and mobiles,including classic table games such as blackjack, roulette and baccarat. A Random Number Generator is used to ensure that performance is truly random.

Statements from 888 proclaim their commitment to 'a proactive policy of corporate and social responsibility reflecting the high ethical standards it sets for itself' and emphasise that ‘self exclusion’ is a tool used by the gambling industry to enable customers to cease playing for at least six months. Should a customer cease gambling with a particular account after a ‘self exclusion’ period, 888 and other gambling firms are duty bound to close the account and return any residual money to the customer. However, despite all the procedures, in the case of 888 it didn't work.

We need to ask why advice offered by (a) the alcohol industry to ‘drink responsibly’ and (b) the gambling industries advice to bet responsibly i.e. to ‘stop (betting) when the fun stops’ is dubious. Gambling, like smoking and drinking alcohol is highly addictive and creates dependency and social problems. Online betting is the new ‘cash cow’ of gambling. The puerile advice offered by both industries is ineffective because it puts all the responsibility on the consumer and none on itself. Both gambling and alcohol are lucrative businesses and under capitalism wherever there is money is to be made profit will always be more important than people.

Kevin.

Pipes of peace? (1982)

From the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Modern industry and transport and the daily lives of people are wholly dependent on sources of energy. It used to be coal and coal gas and their use for the generation of electricity; then oil took the lead and now it is a combination of many sources including nuclear energy, solar energy and natural gas. If the world operated on the basis of co-operation to meet human needs it would be a problem of selection, with due regard to suitability, local availability and safety. But capitalism, which at present dominates the whole world, is not like that at all.

The world is divided into some 150 nations, each with its armed forces, grouped in a number of alliances, each pursuing policies designed to further the interests of the dominant section which for the time being controls each government. And inside each nation there are rival capitalist groups. The result is that schemes to transport energy materials from places where they are abundant to places where they are needed become over-ridden by national rivalries and military considerations. But for capitalism, these would be simple economic and technical problems.

A case in point is the planned pipeline to take Siberian gas to Western Europe and Japan. Inter-governmental discussions of the pipe-lines are ranging over the dictatorship in Poland, Russia and Afghanistan ; American foreign policy towards Europe; disarmament and the continued existence of Nato.

The Russian government, which already supplies considerable natural gas to Europe, now plans to build a 3,600 mile pipe-line system from Western Siberia to European borders from which gas will be pumped to West Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Holland, Belgium and Switzerland. According to the Financial Times (18 December 1981) it is estimated to cost 15 billion dollars to build and “is the biggest East-West trade deal ever”. Big orders for the steel pipes and compressor stations are to go to German and French companies though, for these latter components, some companies were relying on General Electric of USA.

Critics of the scheme, among them the American government, argue that it will make Europe dangerously dependent on Russia, thus weakening Nato. The argument came to a head when Reagan announced his policy of putting pressure on Russia (over Poland) by banning “high technology” exports and calling on support from European governments. (This would include the compressor parts from American General Electric.) The German and French governments denied the danger of “too great reliance”, pointing out that Europe will also have access to gas supplies from Algeria (which already has a gas pipe line to Italy) and Nigeria. Both governments affirmed their intention to go ahead with the agreement with Russia. The Russian interest is said to be that, with declining oil production and exports, “hard currency” revenue from the gas exports is desperately needed to finance the huge imports of grain needed because of the deficiencies of Russian agriculture and a series of harvest failures.

Japan is also involved, through negotiations to help develop oil, gas and coal resources in Eastern Siberia, to be financed by Japan, with repayment in the form of Russian delivery of the energy materials. But, according to an article in the Observer (21 February) the continuation of this scheme is now in doubt because, among other difficulties, there is conflict inside Russia between supporters and opponents.

There is evidence of a battle of bureaucrats in Moscow, with Gosplan, the supreme planning authority, and some ministries doubting whether Siberian development is worth while . . . it is said that the rate of return on inputs in Siberia is not high and very long-term. These arguments are challenged by a Siberian lobby.

To add to the complications for Japan, “China insists that the development of Siberia threatens its security”. In the meantime Japanese companies are contracting to supply pipes and pipe-laying equipment for the other project, the pipeline from Western Siberia to Europe.

While NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) is under strain over conflict of interests about the Russia-Europe pipeline, it is also faced with the other possible aim of American policy, the withholding of food supplies to put pressure on Russia. The British, French, German and other governments have reaffirmed their support of NATO but some of them, particularly Germany, are complaining that the Reagan government pays too little regard to the interests of European capitalism. The British Labour Party, while supposedly committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament, also recently declared its continual support for NATO. It was of course the Attlee Labour Government which, with a complete U-turn of foreign policy, took British capitalism into NATO and embarked on massive re-armament, designed, as they said, to ward off a threatened Russian invasion of Western Europe.

The Times in a leading article “Food is Peace” (26 February) urged Reagan to disregard the lobbying of American farmers and his election pledge not to use a grain embargo against Russia, and to go all out to use food as a weapon to force the Russian government to change its policies. “Raw materials are vital strategical weapons. No raw material is as vital as food . . . The Soviet Union knows perfectly well that its dependence on our food production is a major and constant source of weakness. We should show them that we know that too”.

This is the way the capitalism of America, Europe, Russia and the rest of the powers bedevils the meeting of human needs and turns every issue into one of potential military conflict.

Edgar Hardcastle

50 Years Ago: Lord Beaverbrook & Nationalisation of Banks (1982)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is the fate of labour Party reformists always to have their reform demands stolen by the openly capitalist parties as soon as the work of popularisation has been carried sufficiently far to give the demands an electoral value. A particularly cruel theft has just been perpetrated at the expense of the Independent Labour Party by Lord Beaverbrook who is a Conservative.

At the last election the workers showed emphatically that they did not like the Labour Party-1.L.P. programme. This chilling experience caused the I.L.P. to polish up its old reforms and look around for some new and more attractive ones. One of the old demands that appeared to contain promise of being a good vote-catcher was the nationalisation of the banks. But hardly had the I.L.P. published the Report of its Finance Policy Committee, recommending a scheme of state control for banking and credit, than Lord Beaverbrook snatched it up. These are the two proposals for a state bank.

The I.L.P.:

A central bank supervising the issue of credit and currency, international exchange operation and government income and expenditure. A unified banking system, with branches throughout the country, for the local financing of industry and commerce. (New Leader, March 25.)

Lord Beaverbrook:

Send the Bank of England about its business! Let it continue to perform the functions of a joint-stock bank, establish a Central bank, owned by the nation, equipped with all the powers necessary to provide abundant credit and hedged about with all the restrictions required to safeguard the permanence and stability of the structure. (Sunday Express, April 17, 1932.)

Lord Beaverbrook’s article was headed “Don’t reduce wages”, and in it he appealed to the workers to rally round the demand for nationalised banking as the way to prevent wage reductions. 

(From an editorial State Control of Banking- Lord Beaverbrook steals some thunder, published in the Socialist Standard, May 1932.)

50 Years Ago: Distorting Marxism (2017)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

The theory and practice of the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain is based on Marxism; that is, we accept as valid the main theories put forward by Marx about history, political economy and politics. We accept that the materialist conception of history is a very useful method for examining and understanding social and historical events and changes. We accept that Capital is a brilliant analysis of the workings and historical tendency of capitalism and exposition of how the working class are exploited. We accept too that the working class can be freed from wage-slavery only by its own efforts, by taking class-conscious democratic political action to get Socialism. We were unaware that in so doing we were 'emasculating' Marxism and we are not prepared to consider the allegation that we have distorted Marx's views until and unless Mr. Therrien, or anyone else, produces some evidence.

As a matter of fact it was Lenin and the Bolsheviks who twisted Marx's theories. For Marx the emancipation of the working class had to be the work of the working class itself. Lenin rejected this. In What Is To be Done? he says, contemptuously, of the working class that 'exclusively by its own effort' it can only reach a trade union consciousness. Socialist understanding, Lenin argued, must be brought to them from outside—in Russia by a band of professional revolutionaries organised as a vanguard party. In other words, Lenin and the Bolsheviks held that a vanguard party could free the working class rather than the working class, through its own class-conscious democratic political action, free itself.

(from Reply to a Letter, Socialist Standard, December 1967)

Themes from Marx (1982)

Book Review from the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Penguin Books have recently reprinted the third volume in their selection of Marx’s political writings. Titled The First International and After, it contains much of Marx’s work between the founding of the International Working Men's Association in 1864 and his death in 1883. Two themes that occupied Marx during this period seem particularly worth commenting on: the making of socialist revolution, and the nature of socialist society.

Marx made it quite clear that the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class. In his Provisional Rules for the International, he stated:

That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves: that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies. but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule.

A letter circulated jointly by Marx and Engels in 1879 reiterates this view:

When the International was formed, we expressly formulated the battle-cry: the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. We cannot ally ourselves, therefore, with people who openly declare that the workers are too uneducated to free themselves and must first be liberated from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois. 

Years of writing and activity had taught that the workers cannot be liberated by leaders or vanguards, but only by their own efforts.

And what would be the nature of the revolution bringing about this emancipation? Here there is no doubt that, while Marx considered that force would generally be necessary, he did envisage the possibility of a peaceful revolution in certain circumstances. In 1872, Marx made a speech in Amsterdam at the Hague Congress of the International:

   The workers will have to seize political power one day in order to construct the new organisation of labour . . . We do not claim, however, that the road leading to this goal is the same everywhere.
   We know that heed must be paid to the institutions, customs and traditions of the various countries, and we do not deny that there are countries, such as America and England, and if I was familiar with its institutions, I might include Holland, where the workers may attain their goal by peaceful means. That being the case, we must recognise that in most continental countries the lever of the revolution will have to be force; a resort to force will be necessary one day in order to set up the rule of labour.

To a journalist who interviewed him in 1881, Marx said:

 In England. for instance, the way to show political power lies open to the working class. Insurrection would be madness where peaceful agitation would more swiftly and surely do the work. In France a hundred laws of repression and a mortal antagonism between classes seem to necessitate the violent solution of social war.

In the last hundred years, the circumstances which favoured a peaceful capture of political power have expanded at the expense of "laws of repression", so that Marx’s emphasis on force is now outdated.

Developments since Marx’s time have also affected the relevance of his remarks on the nature of socialism continued in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. This is the work relied on by leftists for their claim that socialism and communism must he distinguishable. But the text provides no justification for any such distinction; rather Marx speaks of two phases of communist society, in the first phase, distribution might be on the basis of the amount of work done by each producer, while in the "more advanced phase", the precept to be followed would be: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!" Our insistence on Marx's exact wording here is not mere pedantry, but is intended to make it clear that the distinction he is making is not between two different types of society, but between two phases of a single society, both phases being characterised by common ownership and abolition of wages, prices and profits.

This point is also relevant to what Marx says in the Critique about the dictatorship of the proletariat:

  Between capitalist and communist society lies a period of revolutionary transformation from one to the other. There is a corresponding period of transition in the political sphere and in this period the state can only take the form of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marx, then, envisaged three stages: the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into communism (= socialism), the lower phase of communism. and the higher phase of communism. The leftist distortion is to call the lower phase "socialism", and then to identify this with the dictatorship of the proletariat. For Marx, however, the dictatorship of the proletariat was not a type of society at all but a type of state, as the above quotation shows. There is no warrant in Marx for the view that the dictatorship of the protetariat means the kind of society which has existed in Russia for three-quarters of a century. As for the two-phase conception of socialism, technological advances mean that it would not take long till “all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly”, and free access could be introduced.

Paul Bennett

Packaging breaks (1982)

From the July 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

What sort of picture is conjured up in your mind by the thought of foreign travel? The travel agents are working their hardest to whet your appetite: in their brochures the sun shines every day, the grass is greener than anywhere else, the sands are pure golden and the sea a lovely clear blue with no hint of any oil slicks or bits of sewage, wreckage or plastic beakers. Then there are the hints of sexual pleasure. These pictures of people on package holidays on the Costa del Sol or Corfu, or wherever it is, usually show them cavorting happily in their swimming trunks and bikinis. And if you wanted to be really naughty, there are holidays on offer to famous towns where, in addition to soaking up the history and “culture” on offer, you can indulge yourself a little after dark by visiting the Red Light area—if, that is, you have any cash left by then.

One of the arguments frequently used by those who tell us how much better off we are than our forefathers is the number of workers nowadays who go abroad for their holidays. It cannot be denied that many more do so than was the case even 25 years ago, and before World War II it was difficult to find a worker who had been out of the country other than on military service or in connection with his work and even that was uncommon. By far the biggest factor however is the cheapening of the holiday. When Edward VII was on the throne, continental holidays were expensive affairs which only the wealthy could afford. Cheap holidays for workers had only just come in. The excursion platforms at Blackpool Central station were built at this time to receive the traditional exodus from Glasgow during the annual holiday week. (Those with a little more money would go to the neighbouring, posher, resort of Lytham St. Anne’s.) Even to-day this is the only holiday for many Glaswegians. The changing pattern does not mean that the masses have risen to the level of a holiday abroad: it is the latter which has descended to the level where workers can afford it. Enjoyment, recreation and travel are all businesses now. Just as Blackpool is shoddy (or workers could not afford to go there) so cheap hotels and holiday flats are mushrooming on the Costa Brava so that the holiday trade can reap its profits.

The multiplicity of travel firms with their gaudy brochures and television commercials testify to the cut-throat competition in this business. What Winston Churchill once described as “terminological inexactitudes” abound, and many hopeful workers have been shocked by facilities which do not live up to their billing, and in some cases are nonexistent. The ruthless competition has led to a high degree of instability in the trade. Workers who have been saving, often for a long period towards their break from routine, have found themselves stranded and embarrassed when the firms they booked with have gone bust. The financial structure of these companies is often as ramshackle as the holidays they offer if they do stay in business. The collapse of Court Line in 1975 and Laker Airlines earlier this year testify to this, although Sir Freddie’s breakfast, like the kippers and champagne of the swindler Horatio Bottomley before him, will still come out of surplus value extracted from the working class.

What awaits these travellers when they reach their destination? How different will things really be from what they have left behind at home? In William Morris’ News from Nowhere the narrator wakes up from a dream to find himself in the twenty-first century. Capitalism has been abolished and common ownership is in operation. On going into what he took to be a shop, he is most surprised to be told that he can take all he wanted and that no money was required. He was told that England had become “a garden where nothing is wasted and nothing spoilt”. If only we could come back from our holidays, if we can afford them in the first place, with such a talc to tell!

Even on the cheapest, most rushed of package tours, no-one could get by without some foreign currency to satisfy essential needs. Everywhere in the world goods are produced for sale, not for use. The overwhelming majority are compelled to sell their labour power for wages while the minority who buy this labour power live off their backs. In fact, so completely is the rationale of the present economy accepted, so impossible do most workers still find it to consider living in any other manner, that attention is automatically fixed right from the start on small local variations which become magnified out of all proportion.

As I occasionally travel abroad on “firm’s business”, I find that examination of the apparent differences between countries actually reinforces the essential sameness of capitalism everywhere. For instance in Athens, Paris, Hamburg and New York—cities where I have been in the last three years—public transport costs are much less than in London. In New York there is a 60 cents charge on subway and buses, irrespective of distance. This was useful to me when I managed an afternoon’s sightseeing, but that is not why these cheap fares operate. The operation is effectively subsidised by capitalists who exploit New York workers in order that lower wages can be paid. As long as these employers believe they are getting value for money, the cheap fares policy can be expected to continue; but different policies will be pursued if it is felt that the scheme is not operating profitably. Los Angeles—apart from inner city ghetto areas such as Watts—has virtually no public transport at all. These differences are of emphasis only and the arguments involved are of concern to the capitalists. It is they who foot the bill.

A visit to Hamburg directs attention to the way capitalists of various countries tackle the problem of prostitution. The Daily Telegraph (27/11/81) devoted some space to comparing British, Dutch, French and West German practice. In West Germany brothels and soliciting are legal only in special controlled zones. In the St. Pauli district of Hamburg about 2,000 prostitutes operate in an area of one square kilometre, where there are also striptease clubs and other sexual stimulus. The rest of the city, where all this is illegal, seems to be largely free of these “sins”, and a police spokesman who is quoted as seeing advantages in the system because it means less work has got a point. But so too does the more “moral” type of capitalist who argues, much as Mary Whitehouse, that if brothels are licensed they will acquire an aura of respectability. Despite the apparent differences these viewpoints are in basic agreement in concern for capitalist values, and the only question again is one of emphasis.

The contrast in housing standards between the two classes in society is just as clear wherever you go. The modern trend towards high rise flats in place of the earlier back-to-back terraced houses (of which there are still plenty in industrial towns such as Leeds and Bradford) is obvious, with only a few local variations in style. In Hamburg, because of wartime devastation, older buildings can be seen only in a small area near the centre— which may deceive the casual observer—but this was the only apparent exception to the rule.

Attending meetings at foreign firms and using their facilities such as workers’ canteens has given me every opportunity of observing the essential world-wide similarity of paid employment, or as it is better described, wage slavery. Indeed, what differences could there be? When on a package holiday there are factors operating which may cloud this basic unity. The tourist will not be going to work, which in itself can make things look better than they really are. And, although the local people will practically all be workers, the fact that they are employed in the holiday trade and their living depends on making the tourist as happy and relaxed as possible means that holidaymakers’ experience and impressions are not likely to form a representative picture.

It is not easy to obtain figures on the distribution of wealth and property in various countries which can easily be compared. This is due to considerable differences in definition and the way the statistics are compiled. It is clear however that the basic fact of class monopoly of the means of wealth production is the same all over the world, irrespective of whether governments admit to being capitalist or claim to be socialist or communist. The use of money means that the wages system is in operation. In turn this shows that the majority have no stake in the means of living and, in order to survive, must sell their talents to the owning minority. However some comparative figures were published in The Times (14/3/78). These concern post tax personal income of households, which is a gross understatement of the wealth of the wealthy because it excludes permanent wealth in the form of capital and land. On the other hand, it also excludes incomes in kind such as school meals and subsidised housing, but these items are virtually infinitesimal in comparison. The survey encompassed eight countries: Australia, Britain, Sweden, France, Ireland, Canada, Japan and the United States. The share of the top twenty per cent surveyed varies from 39 to 46 per cent of the total, while the share of the bottom twenty per cent varies from 4 to 6 per cent.

You cannot run away from capitalism by taking a trip abroad, as the system is basically the same everywhere. There is a way out however. Socialism will work in the interests of everyone. While we may still wish to see how others live in different climates, none would feel compelled to travel anywhere to “get away from it all”.

E. C. Edge

Who needs social security? (1982)

From the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Forty years ago, at the time of Beveridge, the modest aim of social insurance was to guarantee to every citizen in the event of unemployment, sickness and old age "the minimum income needed for subsistence”. When National Insurance was introduced in 1948 the Attlee government expected that as it developed means-tested supplements would become unnecessary. Socialists knew that plans for National Insurance would not end the poverty of the working class.

Now nearly 1 in 10 of the population gets at least part of its income from supplementary benefit. The social security system, which includes national insurance and supplementary benefit, has become a kind of monster. It accounts for 28 per cent of public expenditure. Yet poverty and insecurity are still part of working class life. There are dozens of different benefits, some administered by central government and some by local authorities, with many different procedures to get them.

Over the years changes have been made in the scheme; other plans, especially for pensions, have been studied. The graduated pension scheme which was wound up in 1975 was used at times by Conservative and Labour governments to raise money in the present without improving pensions in the future. The latest pensions scheme has earnings related contributions for an eventual two-tier pension and will, it is hoped, reach maturity in twenty years  . . .  Retirement pensions amounted to 50 per cent of the total social security bill for 1978/79. The position of pensioners illustrates the complexity of the system. The basic weekly retirement pension for a married couple of £47.35 (plus 25p if aged 80!) is inadequate to live on without supplementary pension to help with housing costs. Those who qualify for this supplement are then entitled to claim additional allowances.

Some who qualify for supplementary pension may be a little better off claiming s rent and rate rebates instead, while others outside the limit for supplementary pension may still get rate and rent rebates. About 50 per cent of pensioners have occupational pensions which, with their state pensions, are just sufficient to take their income above the supplementary level and disqualify them from additional payments. Many pensioners claim to manage tolerably well — membership of the working class has given them years of practice — but it is the breakdown of health or other disaster that underlines their vulnerable position. The system of supplementary payments and the small amounts disregarded when assessing allowances, means that pensioners and all those who depend on the state have varying incomes. Schemes which would pay enough to remove the need for all kinds of allowances are more expensive than means-tested benefit paid to those "really in need".
Pensions, sickness and unemployment benefits under the heading of National Insurance have entitlement related to contributions. It is Supplementary Benefit which causes most controversy, for those struggling to live at or near subsistence level and for others who imagine the recipients of state “handouts” are scroungers who live in luxury. Supplementary benefit is a small part of the social security system. In 1978/79 £2.500 million were distributed, nearly 15 per cent of the total social security bill. (In 1979/80 the net value of tax forgone in respect of mortgage interest amounted to nearly £1.500 million.)

Benefits that are means-tested are calculated as a matter of arithmetic. Only 6 per cent of the money handed out by the Supplementary Benefits Commission was within their discretion, but this is the area which gives rise to the myths about special treatment and prejudice. The system of "discretionary allowances" gives a few claimants an "exceptional circumstances addition" which might be for extra fuel, or a single payment perhaps to replace footwear. If this sounds like a caring state looking after every need of its poorest citizens, the discretionary system "is one of the most arbitrary and meanly operated parts of the entire Welfare State (J. C. Kincaid. Poverty and Equality in Britain). These payments must not be looked on as a right but are reserved for those particularly "deserving". David Donnison was Chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission from 1975 until its dissolution in November 1980. In The Politics of Poverty he points out that if every client asked for every discretionary payment available, and then appealed, the pressure of work on local offices would cause the system to collapse. Staff had to deter claims. The "rules of thumb" invented by local offices to replace the book of rules which had "grown into several massive volumes", were kept secret; they varied in different offices and for different claimants. There was prejudice against the unemployed who tend to be among the poorest claimants (losing entitlement to national insurance benefit after 12 months and not eligible for the long term rate of supplementary benefit) and are least likely to win appeals.

During his time with the SBC Donnison set out to review and change its principles and practices. The dilemma of reformers is put neatly by him, when he wonders if half a loaf would be better than no bread (the result is usually crumbs). The Commission decided to support the Social Security Bill (1980) even though the resulting changes would be made without spending more money or increasing staff. Improvements they had sought for the unemployed, and a twice yearly lump sum grant for all claimants which would "make a drastic reduction in discretionary payments tolerable". would not be made. The system has been simplified and its rules made clearer. There is less discretionary benefit, and a Specialist Claims Control adding to the misery of the poor by zealously testing the validity of their claims. (Is this the "special case officer" Donnison was expecting to have more time to help claimants "sort things out"?) Working for reform meant gaining the sympathetic interest of the right officials, MPs and Ministers, regardless of party.

Pressure groups work in a similar way. Organisations like the Child Poverty Action Group and Age Concern assemble information, collect signatures and compete with each other for money. Their most successful work has been in taking up the cases of individuals. The SBC had listened to, and even advised, pressure groups, but in 1979 a Cabinet Minister dismissed members of the poverty lobby as " . . . crickets in the field”. They were not leaders of a movement. The Callaghan Government had kept quiet during the May 1979 election about its decision to increase Child Benefit, thinking it would be unpopular. Opinion polls after the March 1980 budget showed an increase in support for the Government: cuts in social security did not invoke mass protest.

Poverty is not a popular cause. Against the background of recession other workers have their own problems, and in any event accept that some of them have better living standards than others. Unions will fight to defend wage differentials. In a competitive society the converse of the idea that those who "get on" do so by their own efforts is that the poor are somehow to blame for their position.

The same kind of reasoning suggests that many of the unemployed choose not to work because of the generosity of benefits. The scale of fraud is also exaggerated. Claimants are more likely to get less money than they are entitled to. Unclaimed benefit is reckoned to have been worth £400,000,000 in 1979 (Guardian 21 June 1982). Less than 4 per cent of workers would not be much worse off if they were unemployed. Put another way "several hundred thousand households are affected” (Guardian, 23 June 1982) by a poverty and unemployment trap which makes families worse off by earning more (because of reduced benefits) and not much worse off if unemployed.

The government is facing opposition from its backbenches over its refusal to restore the 5 per cent cut in unemployment benefit, made last year, before taxation of that benefit starts this month. Two charities object to Norman Fowler’s plan to give allowances for the care of handicapped people priority over restoring unemployment money. Mr. Tim Yeo, director of the Spastics Society said:

Many of the disabled are also unemployed. So by not restoring the 5 per cent cut in unemployment benefit to pay for an increased invalid care allowance would be giving with one hand and taking away with another (Guardian, 5 July 1982).

Successive governments’ intentions to help the "less well off’ (modern euphemism for poor) are inevitably linked to improvements in the economy. The bank of England has forecast only “modest" economic growth and unemployment is expected to stay at the present high level. Far from becoming unnecessary, cuts in insurance benefits indicate more dependence on means-tested supplementary benefit.

The social security system will continue to be amended. Reforms being put forward include ending the married man’s tax allowance in order to finance substantial increases in child benefit. All of the suggestions are made in the context of a social system which always considers cost before need. The aim is still to give the minimum amount necessary to sick, elderly or out of work members of the class whose “normal" way of getting money is through employment.

It must not take another forty years for the working class to discover that the problem of poverty, however defined, will not be solved by reform.

Pat Deutz

Why workers must combine (1982)

From the September 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The wealth of society is produced by the class of men and women who neither own nor control the means of wealth production and distribution: this is the great social contradiction of capitalism. Labour is the source of value, but those who labour are destined to relative degrees of poverty, while those in positions of ownership enjoy lives of privilege and luxury and are not compelled to produce anything. To state that capitalism is a system of class exploitation is not to moralise about it, but to define it scientifically.

Wage labour and capital must always be in conflict; the class struggle is inevitable in a society where two classes have directly opposing interests. James the capitalist wants Jack, the worker to work hard, take low wages and be thankful he’s employed. Jack the worker wants to expend as little energy as he can and receive as high a wage as possible. Jack is grateful to James for "giving him a job and a wage" — if he thought about it he would see that he is in fact giving James a free ride in life. Employment is a contract which is only entered into when where is a likelihood that workers will create more than the value of their labour power.

If the working class were half as "selfish" and "greedy” as the propagandists for capitalism claim, there would have been a socialist revolution years ago. Socialists are depending on the self-interest of our fellow workers, for only when they are so inspired will they create a society in which the best things in life are free for all. At the moment, contrary to all the bogus talk about “selfishness”, workers willingly accept inferior lifestyles, die to protect their bosses’ markets and generally regard exploitation as inevitable. The majority support the status quo, not because they are stupid, but because capitalism is well-geared to perpetuate those ideas which defend the position of the capitalist class.

Capitalism's propaganda may divert workers from the socialist solution (although it will not be able to do so forever), but it cannot shield them from the problems which class society throws up. No amount of clever talk and trickery can deny experience. In the early days of capitalism, workers and animals were treated by the capitalists almost indistinguishably; indeed, the British ruling class have always cared rather more for their pet dogs than for their human wage slaves. Lives were casually lost because of the use of insecure machinery, slacking employees were ruthlessly beaten, the hours of labour were so long as to cause physical harm, children were forced to perform filthy, dangerous tasks and any workers who resisted were sacked and left to starve. All of this was experienced by British workers only five or six generations back, and many of the capitalists living in respectable affluence today owe their positions to such ruthless exploitation. The same horror story is, of course, a permanent social feature of many parts of the industrialising world of today.

Experience of exploitation teaches workers elementary lessons about self-defence, the first usually being the value of combination. Many capitalists would like it if workers were unwilling or unable to combine — if they could be kept atomised so that individual "trouble-makers" could be picked out and excluded from employment. The moment that workers combine for the purpose of looking after their interests the long journey to self-emancipation has begun. Trade unions combine two factors: consciousness and organisation. Firstly, trade unions mark the recognition on the part of workers that they produce the wealth of society, that by striking they can stop production and force the employer to take them seriously, and that there is a common enemy: the boss. Secondly, trade unions provide important training in how to organise in a democratic manner. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx expressed his clear recognition of the importance of industrial combination:

Big industry masses together in a single place a crowd of people unknown to each other. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of their wages, this common interest which they have against their employer, unites them in the same idea of resistance — combination. Thus, combination has always a double end. that of eliminating competition among themselves while enabling them to make a general competition against the capitalist. If the first object of resistance has been merely to maintain wages, in proportion as the capitalists in their turn have combined with the idea of repression, the combinations, at first isolated, have formed in groups, and in face of constantly united capital, the maintenance of the association became more important to them than the maintenance of wages. This is so true that the English economists are all astonished at seeing the workers sacrifice a great part of their wages on behalf of the associations which, in the eyes of these economists, were only established in support of wages. In this struggle — a veritable civil war — are united and developed all the elements necessary for a future battle. Once arrived at that point, association takes a political character. (Kerr edition. p.188.)

If Marx was unduly hopeful in seeing trade unions as ‘training schools for socialism’, he was quite correct in realising that only experience of conscious solidarity can provide workers with the kind of self-awareness necessary to turn them into a revolutionary class. Because they were not mere idealists who painted pictures of socialism in their heads. Marx and Engels did not attack trade unions as non-revolutionary organisations; they realised that only from their experience of self-defence could workers learn to take political action to end exploitation itself.

The earliest records of working class industrial combination stand as clear proof of just how heroically and effectively workers are capable of struggling. At the end of the eighteenth century the British capitalist class was so scared of combination that they passed the notorious Combination Acts, which made it illegal for workers to unite in their own defence. But illegality was no barrier to the dedicated workers who formed underground combinations. They understood that only by uniting could they be strong — just as the workers in Poland did when they defied their state capitalist masters and set up Solidarity. In 1812 the Scottish weavers came out on strike, defying the laws of their masters. In 1816 the South Wales miners came out. . . in 1818 the Scottish miners ... in the same year the Lancashire spinners. Many of these men and women were imprisoned or deported, but the combinations survived them. The north-east miners formed an illegal brotherhood and each worker had to swear “a most solemn oath to obey the orders of the brotherhood, under the penalty of being stabbed through the heart or of having their bowels ripped up”. When the Combination Acts were finally repealed in 1825 the workers responded with a wave of well-organised strikes. In 1826 the Lancashire cotton spinners fought a vigorous, but ultimately unsuccessful battle to resist a reduction in wages. In 1831 the marines and cavalry were used to crush a strike by the Durham miners. The ferocity of that assault, and that of the troops in their barbaric attack upon the Welsh ironmasters in the same year, showed that the capitalist state could and would use every violent tactic, including the killing of strikers, in order to protect the power of the parasitic elite. Although state violence secured short-term gains for the capitalists, in the long-term it only contributed to a greater feeling of hatred by trade unionists against the bosses. As Brontcrrc O’Brien wrote in 1834 :

The great advantage of a strike is that it increases the enmity between labourers and capitalists, and compels workmen to reflect and investigate the causes of their sufferings. . .

Legalised robbery

Many workers over-estimated the importance of trade unions as forces in the class struggle. They did not realise that as long as they confined themselves to struggling over the rate of exploitation — over how much of the values produced by workers shall go to the capitalists and how much shall constitute the price of labour power (wages and salaries) — there could be no way of breaking free from the inherently exploitative nature of the wages system. The economic laws of capitalism demand that workers must be legally robbed of the fruits of their labour in order for the system to run profitably. Trade unions can only provide limited defence against the level of exploitation; they are powerless to eradicate wage labour as such.

Socialists stand for the abolition of the wages system and argue that it is to this end that workers of all lands must combine, politically and democratically. But that does not mean that we arc unaware of the immense importance of industrial combination for the working class. The socialist attitude towards the industrial struggle is necessarily ambivalent; we encourage workers who are organising along sound lines in their own defence; but we recognise at the same time that most trade unionists support capitalism, knowingly or otherwise, and that the trade unionist aim of “fairness” under capitalism is illusory and reformist. Writing in The Labour Standard in 1881. Engels explained the impossibility of establishing “fairness” within the wages system:

But let us inquire out of what fund does Capital pay these '“very fair wages”? Out of capital, of course. But capital produces no value. Labour is, besides the earth, the only source of wealth; Capital itself is nothing but the stored-up produce of labour. So that the wages of Labour are paid out of labour, and the working man is paid out of his own produce. According to what we may call common fairness, the wages of the labourer ought to consist in the produce of his labour. But that would not be fair according to political economy. On the contrary, the produce of the workman’s labour goes to the capitalist, and the workman gets out of it no more than the bare necessaries of life. And thus the end of this uncommonly ‘fair’ race of competition is that the produce of the labour of those who do work is unavoidably accumulated in the hands of those who do not work, and becomes in their hands the most powerful means to enslave the very men who produced it. (7 May 1881.) •

As members of the exploited class, socialists join trade unions to defend their living standards. While a majority of workers support the wages system there is no other action which a socialist worker can take; except, of course, to engage in socialist propaganda. As socialists we support the principle of trade unionism. We do so because we understand where workers would be without unions and also because we see them as providing useful experience in the class struggle. In countries where democratic trade unions do not exist we urge workers to form them; and in countries like Britain, where apparently independent unions do exist, we urge workers to ensure that they are run as democratically as possible and to refrain from allowing trade union strength to be sidetracked into support for capitalist political parties. Much as we support trade unionism, as opponents of the wages system we [also] reject the limited, sterile and ultimately conservative position of most trade unions. So, socialists support trade union action and we seek to establish a system of society where industrial combination will no longer exist because exploitation has been ended.

The Socialist Party exists to encourage our fellow workers to acquire an appetite for something more than the crumbs from the cake which we, as a class, have baked. Put an end to pleading for a little more — to demanding the "right” to be exploited — to seeking "fairness” from a system which is based on the legal robbery of the workers as a class. Having learnt to combine for the purpose of negotiating with the master class, let us now unite to abolish their political power.

Steve Coleman

Material World: Europe: A Whiff of Fascism in the Air (2017)

The Material World Column from the December 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many of us recognise a rightward swing in British and American politics in recent times and throughout Europe topics of immigration, Muslims and refugees are now dominating election campaigns like never before. In France, Le Pen’s National Front. In The Netherlands Geert Wilders EERT Dutch Freedom Party. In Germany, Alternative for Germany (AfD) has made a strong showing. But all those parties have been rejected in general elections. Some, sadly have been more successful.

Despair and deprivation are fertile ground for the populist demagogue. Political and economic crises bring forth renewed discontent based on old slogans. Nationalist parties have been making significant gains and only too frequently elections in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have become contests between the right and the further-to-the-right. Some call it fascism but it is more accurately described as nativism where scapegoating foreigners offers an increasingly successful tactic for gaining political power. Populist regimes have opportunistically seized on refugees and migrants to promote xenophobia for political gain, tapping into fear and prejudice  

The recent election as Austria’s chancellor of Sebastian Kurz of the Austrian People’s Party and (at the time of writing) a possible coalition with the Freedom Party of Austria is yet another signal of this shift to the right. The nationalist rhetoric of Kurz has given the extreme right FPO no point of differentiation, making the impending coalition more likely.

In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party and in Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński ‘s Law and Justice Party (PiS) have openly embraced far-right policies. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban referred to asylum seekers as ‘poison’ and advocates ‘ethnic homogeneity.’ To counter the country’s declining population he announced a housing grant and loan scheme for couples who promise to have babies. Since his election in 2010, Orban has been accused of setting up an authoritarian state, jiggling with electoral laws, placing cronies in the judiciary and media, and squeezing funding for groups critical of his regime. Orban was re-elected in 2014 with more than double the combined vote of the next two candidates. Mainstream politicians are also critical of Orban, but they know that the alternative is even less attractive — the extreme right Jobbik party is Hungary’s second-largest.

The Czech billionaire media-magnet Andrej Babis has also been recently swept into power with his own political party, ANO, ‘Action of Dissatisfied Citizens’, where his anti-immigration policies appealed to many voters who agreed with the Czech president Milos Zeman that the flight of refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan was an ‘organised invasion’.

In 2015 Slovakia’s Interior Ministry spokesman Ivan Metik announced it will only accept Christian migrants when it takes in Syrian refugees under an EU relocation plan. Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister, reinforced that message the following year, saying that Slovakia will not accept ‘one single Muslim’ migrant into the country.’ He further stated ‘…Islam has no place in Slovakia… I do not wish there were tens of thousands of Muslims.’

Political factions almost everywhere have turned immigration into a political football. Ruling nationalist party leaders have seldom dissociated themselves from xenophobic racist violence. During the 2015 election campaign, PiS politicians ranted about immigrants and hate-crimes have multiplied six-fold since 2010.

Capitalism both unites and divides workers. The system compels our fellow workers to unite in order to defend their interests, but it also imposes upon us the necessity to compete individually for jobs. This rivalry creates animosity between workers of different nationalities, regions and religions, by endeavouring to bind the workers of one nation to the idea that they have a common interest with ‘their’ nation’s employers. The only way to overcome these divisions is to strive for the solidarity of all workers, regardless of their nationality, language or faith. Native-born workers may think that excluding migrant workers will help them. But if the employers can hurt one section of the working class, it is easier to hurt the other.

Our fellow workers in Central and Eastern Europe have nothing to gain from the return of nationalisms which ravaged this part of the world several times.  Our class is clearly international. We are all interdependent. The Socialist Party maintains that workers must free themselves of patriotism and any concept of national superiority, for without discarding these ideas of the ruling class they will never themselves be free.

‘We have to fight against nationalism,’ said Jean Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, ‘We have the duty not to follow populists but to block the avenue of populists,’ adding, ‘Borders are the worst invention ever made by politicians…’.

We can only agree. Instead of nation-states (or transnational trading blocs), we could have instead a worldwide socialist cooperative commonwealth as an alternative way of life.

ALJO