Information, Planning and Decision Making

The following piece, written by the late Pieter Lawrence, is the eighth chapter of his 2006 work, 'Practical Socialism - Its Principles and Methods'.

Link to Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Information, Planning and Decision Making

Whilst the self regulating basis of production and distribution so far outlined may be adequate for an established structure of production, it could not provide for any large scale development. Expansion would require the work of information, planning and decision making. 

It remains a permanent feature of the capitalist system that its structure of production is inadequate to supply the needs of all people.  Agriculture, mining, energy,  industrial and manufacturing organisation, construction and distribution systems are all limited in their productive capacity to what the market will bear as sales of goods.  The present evidence is that on a world scale, productive capacity in relation to total human needs is decreasing.   I repeat the example that in 1975, approximately 435 million people were seriously malnourished; by 2000 this number had increased to 820 million (FAO).  Similarly with housing; over the past 25 years the numbers of people existing in shanty towns, slums and sub-standard housing has greatly increased. But even the world production system that does exist is distorted by waste, allocates vast resources of labour and advanced technology to armaments and sophisticated death machines and creates more and more socially useless jobs such as those in finance and banking.   

The great projects that communities in socialism would need to undertake would involve a rapid expansion of all useful parts of production.  Practicality would require this to be carried out in some order of priority. Its aims would be achieved in stages, first doing what was manageable, monitoring the progress made and then taking further steps. Such a strategy would provide an overall direction for day to day action in all countries as part of world wide co-operation.

Planning of large-scale development would begin with information. As an open society there would be a great contrast between the supply of information in a socialist system compared with the industrial secrecy of rival corporations in capitalism, which is supported by state secrecy with its networks of spies. In socialism there could be no trade or state protection of information on production methods, technology, design, disposition of production units or use and stocks of materials. For example, there could be no corporate or state monopoly of  “strategic materials” such as scarce metals.  With all parts of world production sharing a common purpose, there would be no difficulty in making information available through a decentralised world information system. Such an information system would be easily within the capability of existing technology.  Information technology cannot achieve its full potential for the benefit of all people except in a socialist world.

We can anticipate that in socialism, industrial and manufacturing organisation would be structured in an economical way throughout the world, regional and local scales. This would be partly determined by distribution of population and such natural factors as the world distribution of resources. Mining and processing of raw materials such as metals, chemicals, oil and coal and some basic agricultural products, particularly cereals, could be organised as a world resource with its products distributed to regions.

Once processed, materials would be supplied to regions for manufacture of component parts and final assembly of goods; these regional units could serve the needs of regional populations. At the smallest scale the supply of some needs would take place within the local community, as for example, local food production for local consumption.

Such a structure of world, regional and local production could operate together with a decentralised information system.  On the smallest scale, a local information centre, could collect statistics on the position of stocks, productive capacity, use of materials, energy etc. By collating these local statistics, regional information centres would be in a position to know the complete picture of demand and supply within a region. On the largest scale, a world information centre could collate regional statistics in a similar manner. This would present a mapping of world production.  It would be achieved by an integrated but de-centralised information system, providing any combination of information people may require on any local, regional and world scale.

There have in fact been previous attempts to produce a comprehensive mapping of an economy on a national scale. We can recall the work of W.W. Leontief which was published in the l950/60’s as “Input-Output Economics”. This was defined as, "Concerning a new method which can portray both an entire economy and its fine structure by plotting the production of each industry against its consumption from every other." Leontiff worked with statistics on the US economy and produced a table showing the exchange of goods and services for the year 1947.

One aim of Leontiff’s work was to use input/output analysis to indicate disproportionality.  (This is the recurring problem of the market system where over-expansion of one sector of production in relation to other sectors leads to a pile up of goods surplus to market capacity.  Such disproportionality can lead to cut backs in a sector which may have knock on effects throughout an economy, sometimes leading to general recession.)  Leontiff argued that if such disproportion was indicated by input/output analysis steps could be taken to keep the steady expansion of the economy in even balance, thus avoiding the problems of the trade cycle.   (A good account of Leontiff’s work can be seen in the “Scientific American”, October l951, April 1965 and April 1966.)

This part of the work on input/output analysis was irrelevant to how a socialist system could work because disproportionality would not be a problem. If one sector over expanded in relation to other sectors this would be adjusted without the devastating effects of a market system recession.  In fact there could be circumstances in which it could be desirable to go in for intense production runs of components, etc., which would be surplus to immediate requirements and then stock pile them for use over a period. This could suit the work practices of people in socialism without in any way disrupting general production. In socialism it would not be necessary to maintain production in even balance.

The methods that Leontiff had to use were so slow they almost defeated the object of the work. This is what he said. “. . . the construction of an input/output table is a highly complex and laborious operation. The first step, and one that has little appeal to the theoretical imagination, is the gathering and ordering of an immense volume of quantitive information. Given the inevitable lag between the accumulation and collation of data for any given year, the input/output table will always be an historical document." 

It might be argued that if Leontiff had been able to work with modern information technology he could have been more successful.  There may be some truth in this; however, he also hit up against a different problem which was more intractable. Even equipped with computer power his reliance on Government statistics, drawn partly from tax returns, would always result in a time lag between the actual position of production and consumption and the publication of his tables.  Also corporate secrecy rules out any possibility of immediate and direct public access to the state of production and consumption. An added difficulty was that Leontiff worked within a single national economy, albeit a large one, the United States.   Even so, modern production is world production with events in one national economy having repercussions in other national economies.  This means that even where Leontiff was able to produce a retrospective mapping of a single economy, in the context of world production, it was of very little use.

Nevertheless, although the work of Leontiff may now seem naïve and perhaps doomed to failure, its general aim was useful.  Perhaps like other such useful ideas, it could best be practised only in a socialist society.  We could look again at the work of Leontiff with a view to seeing what part a mapping of production could play in planning any significant expansion of production.

An up to the minute mapping of world production, broken down into its various regional and local parts could be maintained though the work of a decentralised information system. To begin the work of housing the world’s population in decent conditions our proposals should anticipate a large scale expansion of building and construction, part of which is the glass industry.  We noted that a unit producing flat glass uses at least eight basic materials as follows, silica sand, soda ash, limestone, magnesium oxide, aluminium oxide, potassium, so3 and iron oxide. In an open society producing glass directly for needs, a glass works could post its figures on orders, current output, stocks and required materials to its local and regional information centres. At the same time units supplying the materials for glass manufacture would post their figures on to the same centres.  In combination these related statistics would give an up to the minute view of the state of glass production and stocks throughout a region. With regional figures posted on to a world information centre it follows that the state of glass production throughout the world would be known.

With the same procedure practised by every main branch of mining, industry, manufacture, transport and energy supply, the total state of world production would be readily known. This is not to suggest that every kind of production activity would need to be added to the list of statistics. For example, with food production, it is likely that most local food production for local needs would not be relevant.  A probable exception here is regional cereal production which is already collated and recorded by the International Wheat Council. As a basic foodstuff, cereal production would need to be co-ordinated on a world scale.  With information on current production being fed into local, regional and world information centres, it would mean that although dispersed amongst the many thousands of production units, the overall state of the most important parts of total production would be readily known. 

This could provide an overview of world production and stocks with cross section or horizontal views, that is, of production as it is dispersed throughout the various regions and localities.  It could also provide vertical or sequential views of production from mining of raw materials, to processing, through worked up components in manufacture and industry, then to final assembly and distribution. It could also include statistics on resources such transport and energy supplies. From this pool of statistical information there would be no difficulty in extrapolating any particular input relative to output, for example, how much energy y is used for the production of a tonne of steel.

This would be a statistical, input/output mapping of the production system but it would not be drawn up by a central bureaucracy. It would be kept up to date by producers themselves in the de-centralised manner described. It should also be emphasised that the function of such a world information system would be to assist the various production initiatives that may be taken by local or regional communities. It could not replace the self-regulating mechanisms on which the operation of the whole production system must continue to depend. Its important function would be to supply data, indicating how some parts of production should be expanded in response to needs. Information would therefore be an aid to planning and decision making enabling any particular expansion to be undertaken in a balanced way, that is, in proportion with other lines of expansion according to the priorities of policy.  

We anticipate that in the early stages of socialism planning will be concerned with world wide initiatives to increase food production, housing and the construction of a safe world energy system. . However, with an increased demand for building materials, resources would first need to be allocated to creating the means of producing them. Building materials are produced throughout the entire structure of production which means that any large scale increase in their supply would first be an input into industry and manufacture.   Accordingly, planning offices in the various world, regional and local spheres of organisation could have the job of presenting specific proposals for development in agriculture, mining, industry, manufacture, transport, communications, energy supply, etc.

In line with the principles of democratic organisation, such planning offices would work within the policies decided by the wider community.  There is nothing inherently wrong in many of the present local procedures for planning and decision making. For smaller scale development, planning proposals could be placed before councils. For some proposals, perhaps the siting and construction of a new factory or workshop, or the use of land for housing, sports facilities or any other purpose,  councils could be delegated the responsibility of making a decision. The practice of delegating various responsibilities is one which would operate within a wider framework of democratic checks. These could include local or regional polls in, perhaps, controversial cases.

For informed decisions on large scale development, councils or parliament could have the option of setting up a public planning enquiry.  Such enquiries are already in use, but the decisions arising from their reports and recommendations are mostly made by a government minister. It is unlikely that this could be an acceptable practice. The functions of ministries should be technical and administrative and more directly accountable to the wider community through parliament. Public enquiries in socialism concerned with large scale development would assemble information on the widest possible basis from every relevant or interested source. This would involve priorities of need, required materials in relation to their world supply and reserves, technologies in relation to alternative technologies, siting, conservation, protection of the environment, available skills and so on. As with planning in general, the job of such enquiries would be technical and would not include decision making. Their work would be to collate information and issue a report, so that democratic decisions might be better informed.

Planning would extend to a world scale. It should be assumed that communities in socialism would inherit an uneven world distribution of production facilities. In these circumstances, communities in the more developed countries, as part of their world responsibilities, may want to respond to the needs of people in other, less developed regions. In these places, although people would be doing what they could through their own initiatives, it is likely that they would have urgent needs which they would be unable to provide for themselves. This would apply particularly to areas where farming methods are basic and over dependent on favourable weather. Also in areas where millions live in shantytowns.

For example, for every 1,000 hectares of arable land in Europe, up to recently, there were 60 available tractors and over 6 combine harvesters, while in Africa, for the same land area, there were only 2 tractors and 0.2 combine harvesters. In South America, where food production could be vastly increased through irrigation schemes, of the 108 million hectares of arable and permanent crop land in use, only about 6 million (5.5%) irrigated. Similarly in Africa, only 4% of the arable land was irrigated. With the much greater problem of housing, before large scale housing projects could begin, it would be necessary to construct the extra brick making facilities, cement and glass works, etc., for producing the materials. 

So, for needs such as food and housing, and to assist with greater self sufficiency of local production in all places, initially, the regional centres of developed industry and manufacture would be called upon to supply machinery, installations and storage facilities, etc., to assist with such projects as irrigation schemes and housing development in these areas. Also, there is likely to be an urgent need for the setting up or improving of services and infrastructures such as those needed for health, transport and communications. This would also be part of inter-regional co-operation.

To achieve this, a world planning office, assisted by specialised world bodies such as the Food and Agricultural Organisation, and working with data provided by a world information system, could present proposals for inter-regional co-operation, through a world council.  This, as suggested, could be an adapted form of the United Nations Organisation. As now, but with its procedures thoroughly democratised, it would comprise delegates from every country and region, and would have direct links through its own administrative bodies with every kind of regional organisation.

Nor would inter-regional co-operation in socialism arise solely from uneven development inherited from the capitalist system. A safe world energy system would be necessary, treating the planet as a single resource and as a common environment for all people. The use of natural materials would also be a matter of world concern. Inter-supply of some foods would continue to take place between the tropical and temperate regions. For a varied diet of good quality food, this would be in the interests of all people. Therefore, inter-regional co-operation and development would be a necessary feature of world organisation. A strategy for the solution of problems could be achieved through supply of information, planning, democratic decision making and finally the actions of people across the world, co-operating in a common world interest.

Pieter Lawrence

Link to Chapter 9.

Organisation of Production

The following piece, written by the late Pieter Lawrence, is the seventh chapter of his 2006 work, 'Practical Socialism - Its Principles and Methods'.

Link to Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Organisation of Production

It is often argued that because in socialism the free market will be replaced, production would have to be organised through a system of central planning.  This idea is wrong, and is one which results from the false association of socialism with state capitalist systems as they have operated, for example, in Russia and East Europe.  Certainly those state capitalist economies were run extensively through central state planning but this has nothing to do with the ways in which production would be maintained in socialism.

Of course, planning, in the various spheres of life would have an important part to play in socialist organisation.  This would be especially true in its early days when there would be so much to do by way of re-organisation and development.  However, development would be from a basis that would be mostly self regulating. We can describe this as a practice of “self regulating production for use.”  I first proposed this in two articles published in the “World Socialist,” a journal issued by the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain, in April and Winter 1984.

There is, of course, nothing new about production for use.   It is a self evident fact that every form of society must produce goods for use or consumption, otherwise we could not live.  In socialism, naturally, this would be continued but after being liberated from the economic constraints that dominate useful production in capitalist society.  

It is true that the free market system is mostly self regulating but this is not due, as some imagine, to economic factors such as exchange and the use of money.   It is self regulating as a result of the interaction of the materially useful parts of production.   This is to say the application of labour and the order and supply of worked up materials and final products throughout the structure of production and distribution.  For example, the order and supply of manufactured goods and their worked up components throughout the production system begins with an order from a final user and is passed on from shops to places of final assembly; then to the manufacture of components and further to industrial processing of materials and finally to the mining of raw materials.

Whether it is capitalism or socialism, production units would respond to the communication of required quantities of things without the need for a centralised planning authority.   So, in arguing that this would be continued in socialism as a system of self regulating production for use we are not arguing from a theory of anything new.  The ways in which production in socialism could be organised would, in principle, be a continuity of existing practice but free from the limitations of the market system.

Free market mythology

Theorists of the free market have not been content to simply emphasise its once progressive role in history, they want to make us believe that we could not exist in the modern world without it. It is acknowledged that the growth of trade and the development of the capitalist system swept away feudal society in Europe. It revolutionised our powers of production and distribution; vastly increased productivity of labour; created administration, instant global communications and some limited democracy. It can be accepted that the productive relations of wage labour and capital provided a social basis for a new and dynamic society which once took communities out of the hideous relations of feudal overlord and serf

Whilst this is not denied, the change from feudalism to capitalism only replaced one exploitative system with another.  Since capitalism became the dominant world system its productive relations of wage labour and capital have remained fixed and although it has created great powers of production, the constraints inherent in the market system prevent these powers being used freely for the benefit of all people; this is the main reason why it now acts as a barrier to the solution of problems. 

But some theorists of the free market have taken their arguments much further than proclaiming its dynamic part in historical change. They say the free market system is not simply a means of making profit but is the most efficient way of making modern production work. It is said that given the complexities of modern world production which result from the many decisions and dispersed factors that are involved, it works best when the self regulating features of the market system are allowed free play. For this reason it is argued that the market system achieves more than a viable method of producing and distributing goods, it is said to be the best practical way of running modern production in all circumstances.  It is even argued that the abolition of the market system would make modern production impossible.

These arguments centre partly on the use of cost pricing which it is said allows millions of different factors of production to be reduced to common unit of measurement which is money. In this way cost/pricing provides a market language that enables a world wide system to be co-ordinated without any kind of overall plan; it allows comparisons, and therefore decisions to be made, selecting the most efficient production methods which maximise labour productivity. It thus enables society as a whole to make the most use of productive resources which in turn provides for optimum supply of consumer goods. It is true that cost calculation can be a means of making economies in a particular business but the object of this is to maximise its profits. In general, the market system dissipates its productivity gains by creating a vast number of wasteful employments which do not in any way contribute to the real needs of the community. (See chapter 8).

But it follows from these arguments that any attempt to either abolish cost/pricing or the countless millions of economic decisions made by individuals and companies who run world production as a self regulating system, would impair the operation of the free market system in ways that would lead to inefficiency or breakdown. In this way its admirers have idealised the free market system, criticised any kind of centralised planning, and claim to have predicted the breakdown of command economies such as in Russia and Eastern Europe.

As has been emphasised, in no way are socialists in favour of government intervention or state economic management. These have mostly been a disaster for working people, but we also note that when production was expanded in the Britain of the 19th Century with trade more or less free, its benefits were hardly shared by all. A small class of capitalists took on average about 50% of national income. Some individuals became immensely rich whilst the desperate plight of many in poverty continued.   Then, as in later years, the free market system lurched from crisis to crisis, culminating in the Great Depression which continued throughout the last two decades of the century.

The free market system collapsed again with the 1920/30’s slump and it was these problems and the ravages of the trade cycle that caused people of various political persuasions to take up the name of John Maynard Keynes.  It was his theories of government intervention and economic management that suggested that the market system could be steered on an even and steadily expanding course for the benefit of all. In retrospect, it may be thought that if the benefits of the free market had been so obvious, presumably, Keynes would have gone unnoticed.

Instead, his interventionist views were taken up by many governments; his theories dominated the politics of Western Europe during the post World War II period, with even the British Conservative Party becoming converts to the Keynsian cause. Eventually Keynsian theories were mostly abandoned.  For example this happened in Britain under the Labour Government of 1974/9, when recession again bit deep into the economy.

During the 1980’s, free market theorists enjoyed renewed popularity but again it should be noted that even with Frederick Hayek a great exponent of the virtues of the free market, advising the Thatcher Government, unemployment soared to over 4 million in the early 1980’s which is a very curious way indeed of seeing how the free market system can ensure the maximum use of productive resources for the benefit of the whole population. 

It is also significant that during the 1930’s, with Western economies desperate to recover from deep recession, under the administration in America, which included many “new deal” Keynesians, and under the British Government which was more committed to laissez faire policies, both economies performed in similar ways.  Both began to emerge from the world slump at a more or less even rate. This indicates that various theories of economic management have little influence over the performance of the market system which operates according to its own economic laws. As we have emphasised the laws of the market are not susceptible to close political control.

It is true that the state capitalist economy in Russia eventually collapsed with the consequent collapse of its East European empire and this has been attributed to the absence of a free markets system.   But again it is doubtful if this was caused solely by faults inherent in state control. These were all countries with deeply demoralised work forces, living under tyrannies run by gangster regimes.  The economies suffered appalling problems of waste, distortion and corruption. It is likely that the breakdown of the state system in Russia was not solely economic but due more to political and social causes.  We also have the different example of the World War II economy in Britain, 1939/45, which was certainly state capitalist with almost complete central control and yet was highly successful in converting industry, manufacture, agriculture, etc., with great speed to its war objectives. 

Left to the free market this could never have happened. Within the limits of the war budget which paid for production, having decided what arms, aircraft and increased food were wanted, industry, manufacture and agriculture were organised to produce them. The normal operation of the free market was suspended. Although this example of the British  war economy may seem perverse, and as a command economy could not be applied in a socialist system, it does indicate what can be achieved when production and distribution can be organised directly for given production targets and when it is free from the constraints of market forces.    

But the fallacies of free market theories mostly arise from a misunderstanding of the function of its economic features. Even a cursory look at how the market system operates indicates that, for example, cost/pricing has little to do with the practical organisation of production. Quite the contrary, the mechanisms of sales for profit work as barriers at every stage of production and distribution. 

When it is said that cost/pricing is an indispensable means of co-ordinating the many thousands of material factors that make up a world production system, this is simply wrong. When it is said that market forces result in the most efficient use of resources for the production and supply of consumer needs, this is simply not true. Neither of these two alleged pillars of the moral and material worth of the free market will stand the least scrutiny when tested in the real world of capitalist production which, as we have noted, staggers from crisis to crisis, unable to use our immense potential powers of production directly for the needs of people.

It is useful here to apply our method of making a distinction between the socially useful, material factors of production which tend to facilitate production and the economic factors of the market system which tend to inhibit production.  When it is said that the use of money and cost/pricing enables consumer choice to be communicated to production and therefore activates it into supplying that choice, this is not what actually happens. Signals to produce may well pass from consumers through the shops to relevant parts of production but not as economic signals. In reality, it is every day experience that a customer will go to a shop or store and ask for an article of use. In the case of a television set a consumer may approach a salesperson and say, “I’m looking for a television set.” The salesperson will then say, “Certainly,” and after offering various models will add, “this one will cost you £250.00,” – or whatever may be the price. 

A television set is a complex thing. It would be very difficult indeed to trace and identify the productive history of every component. Its basic materials are glass, plastics and metals. So at the beginning of the sequence of order and supply, the customer asks for a model of his or her choice.  If the sale is agreed, the television will be supplied from stock or perhaps ordered from a nearby wholesaler. Then, according to the wholesaler’s stocks, more sets will be ordered from the manufacturer whose function will mostly be the final assembly of sets from their component parts.  Again, according to stocks the manufacture may order more components from his suppliers.  The work of producing components will involve glass and plastic moulding, metal casting, wire production and cutting, and circuits. From this point in the sequence, the ordering of supplies extend to the oil industry for plastics, the glass industry and the various sources of metals where these are mined and processed throughout the world distribution of raw material deposits. 

What is apparent in this network of productive links is that the order and supply of goods begins with a consumer choice which is eventually transmitted throughout the entire structure of production, first as a finished product and then on as worked up materials. At every stage the information being communicated consists of required quantities of material things. But the notion that this network is co-ordinated by the communication of economic, cost price signals is wrong. In reality, cost pricing is not passed from users to producers. The sequence of economic signals is in the opposite direction, from producers to users. For this reason, they could not possibly be signals to produce, nor can they have any practical part to play in the co-ordination of production. The idea that cost/pricing is a means of integrating modern production is free market mythology. 

But of course, cost/price signals do have a function but it is not a practical or useful function. Contrary to what market theorists believe as part of their idealisation of buying and selling, the cost/price signals that pass from producers to users act as a barrier against the free use of productive resources. When a consumer wishes to order a television set it may be an instruction to produce. But this depends on whether the would be user has the money to pay for it.  Clearly, the television salesman is not in the business of providing goods directly for people’s needs. He or she is in the business of selling television sets with a view to making profit. So goods may well be distributed for use but only on condition that distribution takes the economic form of a sales transaction from which the seller makes profit.

If we trace the sequence of production from extraction of raw materials, through  industrial processing, manufacture of components, final assembly and transport to stores, we find that each addition of labour throughout this sequence not only brings the work forward, it creates an expansion of value in the various commodities that is expressed as their prices. These prices are specified on invoices for the worked up materials or finished goods and if the bills are not paid, distribution of the goods stops. Distribution is dependent on payment not on any indication of a particular material need. The general rule of the market is “no profit – no production.”

Moreover, this economic determination of production subjects the market system to cyclical break down. If a particular market becomes over supplied or sales decline, cut backs take place, workers are sacked, machinery and equipment becomes idle and if the knock on affects become extensive, production can sink swiftly into general break down. This happens irrespective of whether there may be a real need for the goods that could be produced.

Examples of profit before needs are all around us; they are a normal part of our every day life. But a particular example that was both cynical and tragic occurred during the 1980’s when the world prices of cereals had fallen to unacceptable low levels for profit hungry agribusiness. The response of the government in America, an important source of cereals, was to arrange with farmers to take 83 million acres of farmland out of production.   This resulted in increased prices at a time when according to the Food and Agricultural Organisation, over 435 million of the world’s population were seriously undernourished. 

The power of the market system to maintain its existence is ubiquitous. For example it has sometimes been argued that different kinds of production units such as worker’s co- operatives could better work for the benefit of their communities. But this in no way could avoid the economic pressures that would compel it to work as part of the market system. Nor would its work arrangements matter.  It could be a kibbutz or a co-operative taking decisions collectively; it could be a monastery producing pottery, honey or herbs; in whatever way they may be internally organised, authoritarian or democratic, and in whichever scale they may operate, as a part of social production, they could only function as part of the economic circuits of the capitalist system.

In buying in its machinery, equipment, materials, premises and transport; and in paying its rates, any unit, including worker’s co-operatives must pay all these costs.  A generating company is not going to supply electricity free simply because a production unit declares itself to be working for the benefit of the community. The running costs of any unit include the profits made by all other units previously involved in the production of the materials, machinery, and power supplies, etc., which are bought in.  In addition, the people working in the unit must have income to cover personal living costs such as rent or mortgage repayments, food, clothes, leisure activities, and so on.

It is elementary that the pressure of economic selection determining the existence of production units exerts itself as daily book-keeping. Regardless of any aspirations to operate on principles different to those dictated by the market system, production units can only exist whilst they remain economically viable, that is, where income exceeds expenditure.  If expenditure exceeds income then sooner or later they must disappear, as the constant number of bankruptcies well attests. It is these pressures of economic selection, which cannot be set aside, that maintain the market system as an exclusive, self-perpetuating capitalist structure.

It follows that the economic pressures that compel production units to operate on a profit making basis rule out any possibility of combining the productive relations of capitalism with the relationships of socialism. This also indicates that a socialist system can only be commenced with the removal of the economic factors from production as a result of a democratic and politically conscious act.

Self Regulating Production For Needs.

The description of production in socialism as being for need is not strictly accurate; this should be expressed as production “solely” for need.  This recognises, as is self evident, that every social system must produce useful goods for consumption. So, even with all the economic constraints imposed by production for profit, the capitalist system does operate as a system of useful labour producing useful goods for consumption. What follows from this is that when we come to look at how production will operate in a socialist society, we do have something of a working model in front of us. This is the reason why we can say that our proposals for the organisation of production in socialism arise from experience and not from theoretical or futuristic speculation

It is true that modern production could not be run according to a world wide plan laid down, in advance, by a central planning authority. But the point is hardly worth making because the question does not arise. We have acknowledged that production embraces activity across the world as a vastly extensive network of links. It depends on millions of independent decisions and actions by individuals, small units, and large organisations. Its interactions are complex and fast changing in ways that constantly change the patterns of the whole system. It can only operate in a self regulating way with all its parts being self adjusting to the whole as a result of information being communicated to them.

But we have discounted the false notion that the structure is co-ordinated by economic factors such as cost/pricing. In fact it operates with the order of finished goods, worked up components and raw materials being communicated throughout the structure from points of distribution to final assembly and on to mining and processing of raw materials.  This stream of material information also calls up requirements of transport and energy supply and is not confined to industry and manufacture but also applies to agriculture of every kind.

We have illustrated this with the order and supply of television sets but perhaps a less complex example is with glass. A main producer of glass in Britain is the firm of Pilkingtons in St. Helens, Lancashire. Its various glass products are distributed throughout Britain and overseas for a wide range of construction, manufacturing, horticultural and domestic purposes. In socialism, whether or not it will keep its name, Pilkingtons Glass would be commonly owned and the workers and technical staffs who run it would be freed up to respond directly to the requirements of the users of glass. The orders for glass would be registered and therefore the total quantities of required glass would be known.

Materials for the making of flat glass include silica sand, soda ash, limestone, magnesium oxide, aluminium oxide, potassium, so3, and iron oxide. Given that the requirements for glass would be known in an area of supply, it follows that the materials required for the making of that quantity of glass would be known and these would be communicated to the suppliers of those materials. In practice the lines of communication would extend beyond these eight units to their own suppliers. However, the example outlines the means by which all the materials required for final glass production would be known throughout all relevant parts of the structure of production. Each unit would know its position. If orders are high in relation to stocks, this would indicate that production should be increased. If orders are low in relation to stocks this would indicate that production should be reduced.  This would be a self  adjusting system of stock control indicating to each production unit what needs to be done to supply consumer requirements and also to maintain the various stages of production in more or less  even balance.  It would be a basis for a system of self regulating production, solely for use.

In practice it would use the same self regulating mechanisms which now maintain the market system as a self regulating system.  This is the communication of required quantities of finished goods and worked up materials throughout the structure of world production.  The difference being that in the market system we have profit motivated production in anticipation of sales.  In socialism production would be a direct response to needs. The motive of sales and profits with its uncertainties and destructive effects prevent production being a controlled social effort, carried on by communities directly in their interests.

Pieter Lawrence

Link to Chapter 8.

The Review Column: Rhodesia (1968)

The Review Column from the December 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rhodesia

Harold Wilson, who knows where the votes come from, has never lost any sleep over upsetting his left wing. So we know what to expect from any negotiations over Rhodesia.

It was clear that the stands originally taken in both London and Salisbury left no chance for discussion. Something had to give, if the two sides were ever to talk to each other again. In other words, some promises would have to be broken, some vows once fervently taken would have to be betrayed, some fierce political infighting take place.

Smith’s political problems were severe, only partly solved by the purge which got rid of men like Lord Graham and by the Rhodesian Front’s recent by-election victory. The big advantage he had was that the Rhodesians could make concessions which were more apparent than real.

Wilson’s problem was to drop the albatross of the original pledge that there would be no agreement to independence without some copper bottomed guarantee (to use one of the Prime Minister’s favourite phrases) of majority African rule.

The "No” in Nimbar was as unrealistic as Lennox Boyd’s famous “never” over Cyprus independence. Wilson quietly abandoned NIMBAR and suddenly most of the newspapers were telling us that this once-sacred principle was foolish and unreal. Of course the left wing fumed but who cared about them? None of the M.P.s who protested went so far as to risk their career on the principle by resigning their seat. The left have always stopped short of that.

Wilson went on governing and the negotiations continued by his man George Thomson in Africa. At the time of writing the talks have reached deadlock and Thomson is back in London, although it was clear that both sides were straining to reach agreement. Even so, now that there is this apparent readiness to abandon what were once called principles, there will probably be further efforts in the future.

After all, capitalists in Rhodesia and Britain, as well as the Rhodesian farmers, have a lot to gain by the resumption of friendly trading relations. They will not let a little matter of the suppression of a few million people obstruct the noble enterprise of profit.


Troubled Air

The British Eagle pilots were really very foolish if they ever thought that, because they were earning several thousand pounds a year, they held a secure and privileged position in the working class.

In fact, their fat pay packets were a reflection of what it takes, in terms of social labour and organisation, to put a multi-million pound jet into the air with a man at the controls who is trained and fit to avoid the expensive business of pushing its nose into the ground.

Basically, this is exactly the same way as the wages of all other workers—dustmen, miners, engineers;—are determined.

But of course wages, high or low, are paid only so long as it is profitable for an employer to buy labour power. The glamour of a pilot’s job may obscure the fact that it is all done to make profit, but that is the way it is.

The employees of British Eagle could not escape from this although as the glamour faded around them it was clear that their understanding of what was happening to them was no better than that of the average dustman, miner, engineer.

They simply trod the well-worn class path of seeking a scapegoat—in this case the state airlines and in particular BOAC, which has successfully opposed the granting of licences to the independent lines for the more lucrative airlines of the world. But BOAC are themselves not free of troubles.

Their chairman, Sir Giles Guthrie, complained that a half year’s profit of £8.2 million had been cut in half by the 17 days’ pilots strike last summer. These figures take a bit of swallowing but if they are correct then they are an indication of the importance which BOAC’s workers have to the line’s operations.

Striking workers are constantly being blamed for financial troubles and social disorder (although this was one excuse British Eagle could not use). The only thing this proves is that wealth is made by workers and that they, and not those who directly or indirectly receive the profits, are the useful, productive class.

It's Nixon

Richard Nixon’s victory in the American Presidential election came after a long campaign—over twenty years long, in fact — during which he won a reputation for being ready to say or do anything to win political advantage.

This is one possible interpretation of Nixon’s early campaigns for the House of Representatives and later to the Senate, during which he rode on the widespread American neurosis about Communist activities. It also could explain a lot of his work while in Congress —for example his zealous pursuit of Alger Hiss.

The surprising thing is that the. allegation of a ruthless political ambition should be used against Nixon—that he almost alone among big time capitalist politicians should be condemned as the man it would be unwise to buy a used car from.

For where would any of capitalism’s leaders be without ambition? How far would he get, without a ruthless determination to exploit every fear, every prejudice, every facet, of mass ignorance? Would it have been wise to buy a used car from Lloyd George? Macdonald? Baldwin? Macmillan? Wilson?

Nixon is very much a political man, which means more than that he is ready to lie. It also means that he will approach the problems of American capitalism, to use a current word, pragmatically. He will not be tied by the emotions he has roused in his supporters; a lot of them are probably in for a shock.

The Republican campaign gave the impression that Nixon would be tough on demonstrators, would push a hard line on Vietnam, would cut back federal power and interference. This classical Republican image has never had any more reality than its opposite of the Democratic Party.

Faced with a situation which must be judged in terms of the interests of American capitalism, Nixon will find in many cases that he has no more power to keep his election promises than any one of his predecessors.

This will cause him no lost sleep. Presidents have to be even harder and more cynical than car salesmen.

Exhibition Review: Savage Ink - the Cartoon & the Caricature (2018)

Exhibition Review from the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Political and satirical cartoons have been around since at least the second half of the eighteenth century. An exhibition ‘Savage Ink: the Cartoon & the Caricature’, on at the People’s History Museum in Manchester until the middle of May, provides many examples from the work of William Hogarth down to contemporary comic books and graphic novels. A quote from former Tory minister Kenneth Baker makes the point that for a politician to be caricatured shows that they have arrived on the political scene.

A variety of cartoons are shown from over the years, from Hogarth’s attacks on electoral corruption to Steve Bell's criticisms of Thatcher in his ‘Maggie’s Farm’ series. Many cartoons have involved opposition to the political and economic establishment: a particularly powerful example from 1830 shows a wealthy absentee landlord haunted by the ghosts of his Irish tenants who had starved to death. In 1805 James Gillray depicted Pitt the Younger and Napoleon carving up the globe between them (a much-copied illustration), and in 1830 George Cruikshank showed Great Britain as a beehive, with Victoria as Queen Bee at the top and having nothing in common with the worker bees at the bottom.

But Cruikshank also had some very unpleasant views. He attacked Robert Owen, and the title of an 1819 cartoon needs no commentary: ‘Universal Suffrage or the Scum Uppermost!!!’. In another example of nastiness, in 1924 the anarchist Emma Goldman visited Britain, and one cartoon shows her having been beaten up, possibly by Ramsay MacDonald, who is shown in the background.

An anonymous cartoon from 1812 is a vicious sexist depiction of women reformers at a public meeting, where a member of the crowd says, ‘Come home and get dinner ready, you old baggage.’ There is no reason to think that this is criticising those who opposed women’s involvement in reform movements, but sometimes a cartoon can be, at best, ambiguous. For instance, a New Yorker cover from 2008 showed Obama dressed as a muslim and his wife as a fighter with a gun: did this satirise the scare tactics used against him (as its author claimed) or just reinforce prejudices?

An interesting exhibition with a range of cartoons, mostly focusing on individuals but sometimes addressing more general issues. 

Paul Bennett

50 Years Ago: The Political Organisation of the Working Class (1955)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Political Organisation of the Working Class

When the worker has learnt his lesson; when be knows he must rely upon himself and upon his fellows what is he to do? How is he to apply his knowledge to matters of everyday importance to him? It is evidently futile for him to assert his independence of the other political factions if he is independently to strive for measures which those factions advocate. It is also useless for him to organise himself into a party which is unable to agree upon a working programme and a common line of action.

To us as Socialists it is clear that, the Liberals and the Tories having been thrown over as parties, the principles for which they work must also be thrown over, and that, therefore, anyone holding the opinions either of Liberalism or of Toryism must be left outside the workers’ party. The party of the workers has interests which have no common bond with Liberalism or Toryism, and the party of the workers must, therefore, steer clear of anything which is in any way allied with these parties.

The political party of the workers must be the reflex of the economic interests of the workers who are the propertyless class, in the same way as the other parties reflect the economic interests of the propertied class. We are then driven to the necessity of searching for the economic interest of the worker. And this we find in the principle that the working-class having created all the wealth of society are the rightful owners of that wealth. Every man should receive the product of his own labour, but as in modern society it is impossible to determine the portion which any individual adds to the value of the articles he helps to create, we must be content to let all those who labour remain joint owners of the aggregate product.

This, however, is not what obtains in modern society where the reverse is the case. In modern society to-day the non-producers of wealth are the joint owners of the aggregate amount of wealth produced. In this fact we have surely the true differentiation of the party of the workers from the party of the property-owners. And the first object of the political party of the workers, therefore, should be the securing for workers as a class the fruits of their own labour.

If they can only secure this they will have no need to worry about limiting the hours of work, securing a legal law of minimum, or returning to the status quo ante Taff Vale. These trifling matters will soon adjust themselves when the workers take as their own the product of their own labour. And resulting from this would come the necessity of the present property-owners, unable longer to live on the fruits of other men’s labour, working so as to secure their own livelihood.

English Hypocrisy and Russian Outrages

The huge wave of indignation that has lately been sweeping over the country on account of the massacres in Russia is typical of the hypocrisy of the capitalist-class and the ignorance of the man in the street. Big headlines and stirring articles have proved effective in arousing a strong and quite unjustified feeling against Russia. The English attitude towards Russian affairs has for long been intensely pharisaical, and its real origin, imperial and commercial jealousy in Asia, has been quite lost sight of by the public. . . .

This feeling is quite unjustified from a capitalist point of view, and further it is only hypocritical, for no one, except a Socialist, can with honesty support the working-class in its efforts towards freedom. Yet we find the same people that would cheerfully starve out English strikers or shoot them down if more convenient that ignored the fearful outrages in Colorado, and that approved the recent shooting of strikers in Italy, pretending to be horrified at the actions of their fellow-capitalists in Russia!

(From the "Socialist Standard," March, 1905)

50 Years Ago: The Cry of the Workless (1955)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

These results arise naturally from the conditions of employment to-day. The owners of property are ever on the look-out for means of augmenting their possessions. They employ their capital in industrial operations simply for the purpose of deriving from its use profit or interest. So long as they get their profits increased they care little for the conditions under which the work in their factory, in their mine, or on their railway is carried on. They never seek to know whether those working for them are living happy and contented lives. For them the worker is an abstraction—the materialisation of some portion of their capital in exactly the same way as another portion of their capital shows itself as raw material, as auxiliary material, as factory building, or as finished product. He sees the worker figuring on his periodical balance-sheet as “Wages,” and cares nothing that “Wages” means so many sentient human beings capable of thinking, loving, functioning even as he does.

Why then should he hesitate, when the markets are glutted, when his “wages” have been transformed into more goods than the market can consume, when goods cannot be sold because hungry men and women have not the wherewithal to buy food, when ill-clad children cannot have clothing provided for them because there is too much in the shops, to turn adrift those he no longer wishes to employ because they are no longer profitable?

And the result is invariably that, during periods when the markets are teeming with food and clothing, the workers are sent adrift and cannot purchase the things of which they are so sorely in need.

The only solution to this state of affairs is to abolish Capitalism. The whole trend of events is in the direction of Collectivist production and the inquirer into things political and economic can see that the capitalist, having ceased to be useful, is using the whole governmental machinery to safeguard the interests of his class. 

The worker must learn that he has to look to himself and his fellows to work out the emancipation of the working-class. Only by combining to capture the political machinery and to use the power thus acquired for the overthrow of Capitalism can he hope to obtain, once and for all, a full and complete solution to the unemployed problem.

From the April 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard.

50 Years Ago: A Travesty of Trade Unionism (1955)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent sends a packet of literature explanatory of the objects and methods of the Railway Clerks’ Association. It is claimed that this Association will serve to secure some betterment of the conditions of clerical workers on railways. It is a Trade Union for railway clerks.

Now a trade union is an organisation rendered necessary by the pressure of the capitalist or exploiting class upon the class they employ and exploit—the working class. This pressure is the result of the constant endeavour of the capitalist-class to squeeze ever greater profits from the labour of the working-class, and expresses itself in the prolongation of working-hours, in the reduction of wages, or if an increase of hours or a reduction of wages are not possible, in the maintenance of both in. so far as is possible, a stationary condition, irrespective of the increase in the productivity of labour.

In exercising this pressure the capitalist-class are but functioning as a class of exploiters whose wealth is derived solely from the labour of those they exploit. In combining in a Trade Union to prevent, if possible, any reduction of their standard of comfort, any hardening of their conditions of life, or to obtain, where practicable, some larger share of the wealth they create, the working-class are but taking the precautionary defensive or aggressive measures natural to an exploited class.

The capitalist-class are fighting to increase or maintain their powers and privileges; and as these can only be maintained or increased at the expense of the working-class, their greatest concern is to keep the latter in subjection; to prevent them improving their position, except in-so-far as that improvement is necessary to capitalists. On the other hand, the working-class are fighting for the best conditions they can get; to improve those conditions if possible, and to prevent them being adversely affected in any event. And as they cannot improve their position, or for that matter maintain it, except in opposition to and at the expense of, the class above them, they are in necessary conflict with that class.

Obviously then, the antagonism of interest existing between these two classes must prevent any intermingling except in conflict. It would be absurd for the officers of one army to be in the innermost councils of the other. Hitherto, although the working-class combined in English Trade Unions have been very far from conscious of their class interests, a sense of hostility has kept them from fraternising with their natural enemies to the point of admitting them to an intimate acquaintanceship with the internal affairs of their fighting organisations.

The idea of employers being admitted to membership of Workers’ Unions has ever appealed to the most hard-headed, hide-bound and mentally atrophied trade unionist as absurd—and the clearer the comprehension of class-interests, the greater the growth of class-consciousness among the working-class, the more grotesque must the idea appear.

How then may we designate the working-class organisation that, coming into existence at a time when the antagonism of interests between the classes was too sharply defined to escape the notice of any man with an eye to see, yet admitted to the domination of its affairs, the representatives of the very class it came into existence, ostensibly, to fight. The Trade Union of the clerical workers of the railways of the United Kingdom (the Railway Clerks’ Association) has done this. Its President and Vice-Presidents are of the capitalist-class, several of them company directors, with at least one railway company director.

From the May 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard.

50 Years Ago: A Retrospect (1955)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 12th of June witnesses the first anniversary of the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. It thus affords a meet opportunity to review our year’s work to ascertain whether our hopes have been fulfilled and our efforts justified.

The formation of a new party was rendered imperative by the falling away of the S.D.F. from the path of political right doing. Those who formed the new party had, almost without exception, been members of the S.D.F., the primary and for many years the only Socialist organisation in Great Britain. During many years of its life it had held aloft the banner of uncompromising Socialism in this country and many of us hoped that it would continue to work along the lines of no compromise with other political parties which is dictated by the existence of a class struggle.

Some years ago, however, when reaction dominated every sphere of thought—political or scientific—throughout Europe and America, new ideas were introduced into the S.D.F. by members of the organisation whose Socialism was rooted in sentiment rather than in scientific knowledge. Looking around them in the political world they saw that organisations of the half-way house character were obtaining a larger measure of support than was their own organisation. Unwitting that such must needs be the case in the present stage of capitalist development, they set themselves to the task of winning their own organisation to a similar position and to the adoption of a similar line of action. In this they were highly successful and the manner in which the S.D.F. adapted itself to its new way of looking at political events is of exceeding interest, and at a more convenient season we shall unfold the manner of its development from a no-compromise organisation to an organisation believing in and accepting entangling alliances.

The falling away of the S.D.F. from its traditional method was viewed with the deepest regret by those members of the organisation who still adhered to the ideas of uncompromising Socialism. They hoped against hope that their organisation would be recalled to a sense of its wrong-doing—that once again it would return to the path of Socialist progress and weld itself into an organisation deserving the support of every Socialist.

Such was not to be the case. Reluctantly there was forced upon them the opinion that the organisation to which they had hitherto given a whole-hearted support was unworthy, and they decided to withdraw from its ranks and form a Socialist organisation into which they could throw their entire energy and untiringly work towards the making it into a strong political organisation.

This, then, was the idea of those who, in June 12th, 1904, decided to form the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

The Editorial from the June 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard.

50 Years Ago: Ethics and the Class Struggle (1955)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

The victory of the Socialist working-class is the only possible ending of this great struggle. This, however, does not mean the subjection of the Capitalist class by the workers: it means the abolition of Capitalism and the end of classes, for the great unprivileged masses cannot secure equality of opportunity without abolishing class privilege, and privilege is based on private property. The triumph of the great working majority thus involves the emancipation of all from class oppression, for the interests of the toiling masses are fundamentally the interests of humanity.

Socialism, is then, the ethics of humanity, the necessary economic foundation of a national code of morality. The interests of the human race are bound up with the aspirations of the oppressed working-class in its struggle with Capitalist domination. As it has very truly been said: “Militant, the workers’ cause is identified with class; triumphant, with humanity.”

From the July 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Proper Gander: On The House (2018)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘When we live in a house, we’re just passing through. People have occupied it before us and others will take our place when we leave’.

The interesting documentary series A House Through Time (BBC2) tracks the history of a single town house in Liverpool from when it was built in the 1840s onwards. Presenter David Olusoga pieces together the lives of 62 Falkner Street’s past residents from clues in legal documents, newspapers, the census and Gore’s business directory. A property in Liverpool was chosen because, as Olusoga explains, ‘more than any other British city, Liverpool’s ride on the rollercoaster of national fortune has been a bumpy one. No other city has been more buffeted by the cycles of boom and bust and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the place that once proudly saw itself as the ‘second city of empire’ suffered more than any other when that empire suddenly evaporated’(Guardian, 31 December). In the middle of the 19th Century, Liverpool’s economy and population were expanding due to the increases in trade centred around its docks. Ironically, although much of the city’s wealth came through the port, those living in the area were among the city’s poorest. The houses on Falkner Street were built for the developing merchant sector who wanted to live away from the dock’s cramped squalor. So, when it was built, 62 Falkner Street would have been something similar to the well-kept, expensive town house it remains today.

The address’ first resident – Richard Glenton – was a ‘louche bachelor’ who worked in the Customs department at the docks and supplemented his income by taking in lodgers. A few years later, James and Ann Orr moved in after achieving the rare feat of leaving domestic servitude. James became a manager at a Gentleman’s Club (the sort where businessmen went to read newspapers) and died leaving £16,000 (£1.5million in today’s money) to his widow. Olusoga says that the house’s early residents were ‘strivers’, who benefited financially from the increases in trade as capitalism expanded. Like Glenton, many of the house’s residents worked in businesses which centred around the docks, such as cotton trader Wilfred Steele and his wife Eliza who moved there in 1853. By then, a quarter of a million tons of cotton passed through Liverpool each year, most of it coming from slave labour plantations in the American south before being transported on to the textile mills of Manchester and Lancashire. As Olusoga notes, the cotton trade was ‘steeped in blood and exploitation and evil’ because of its reliance on slave labour. The trade boomed until an economic crisis in America which had a knock-on effect in Britain. Steele went bust and was sent to a debtor’s prison, later leaving his family to travel to America, where he returned to the cotton trade and also fought in the Civil War. Olusoga is surprised that he fought on the Union side, whereas his links to the slave trade would have perhaps made him more likely to fight for the Southern states. Other residents’ livelihoods were also shaped by wider events. Edward Lubin sold space for cargo on ships until his trade was hit by the Long Depression of the 1870s; by 1875 he was declared bankrupt. And one of the lodgers during the 1890s – Nathan Hart – sold tickets for the cramped bunks in which emigrants would spend weeks during their voyage to America, until a cholera outbreak limited travel and he changed jobs to become a ‘financial agent and picture dealer’.

The lives uncovered by Olusoga’s research would otherwise have remained forgotten in dusty old archive rooms. He says ‘the version of history I was taught at school was largely one of great men and great deeds, a history that took place in palaces and battlefields. It was silent about our shared, inner and domestic histories, the stories of the rest of us, the ungreat, who live quietly and privately in anonymous terraced houses’. (Guardian, 31 December). The ‘great man’ view of history is still prevalent, including on TV. Every week on BBC4, there seems to be another documentary about the monarchy, usually an excuse to film in telegenic stately homes or for presenters like Lucy Worsley to dress up as Elizabeth I. And of course this perspective has its place, to describe the effect which people in authority had. But it’s still the history of the ruling class, told in a way which downplays the economic forces changing society. Exploring the past through the lives of people without much status has only really been a strong tendency among historians for around fifty years. This approach - social history - tells us a lot about societal changes by the impact they had on the majority. As historian G M Trevelyan wrote, ‘without social history, economic history is barren and political history unintelligible’ (English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries from Chaucer to Queen Victoria). The characters in A House Through Time were shaped by major events such as economic downturns, cholera outbreaks, wars. Past events come to life when they can be related to the people who lived through them. For Olusoga, empathy is an important part of his research: ‘it is all too easy to start caring about figures from the past if you find yourself reading the documents that record their lives while sitting in what was once their kitchen. Or having just walked up a staircase, holding the wooden banister that their hands once gripped’(Guardian, 31 December). Studying history - or doing it vicariously through programmes like A House Through Time - reminds us that we’re all part of a longer story, and subject to wider economic trends whether we like it or not.

Mike Foster

War Exposures (2018)

Book Review from the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

'The Vest Pocket Kodak & the First World War.' By Jon Cooksey (Ammonite £7.99)

The first war photograph dates from 1846, and there were further photos of the Crimean War and the American Civil War. But the technology was cumbersome, and the scenes often had to be staged. Then in 1912 Kodak produced a smaller portable camera, the Vest Pocket Kodak or VPK (‘vest’ being American for ‘waistcoat’). This became extremely popular, including among those in the armed forces in the First World War. Never one to miss a marketing trick, the company advertised it as ‘The Soldier’s Kodak’.

Soldiers photographed scenes from the trenches and of actual fighting with their VPKs, but of course it was never going to be an uncontroversial or straightforward activity. The first action shot published, in November 1914, was doctored with a bursting shell added to increase the apparent danger to soldiers who were under shrapnel fire. In June 1915, a private from the Liverpool Scottish Regiment photographed soldiers advancing on a captured German trench near Ypres. When it was published the following month, an image of a German soldier (lying apparently dead) replaced that of a dead or wounded British soldier.

The Christmas Day truce of 1914 was depicted in some blurred photos of soldiers from both sides chatting and exchanging cigarettes. This did not go down well with the powers that be, as it made the Germans look human, and a limited ban on cameras was extended in March 1915 to cover all operational theatres, though it was not enforced as strictly as it might have been.

Cooksey also includes a photo (of unknown date and location) of ‘what appears to be the summary execution of a suspected spy by two British army officers with service revolvers.’ 

Paul Bennett

Bald and Unconvincing: Also "There are others". (1920)

From the January 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

That Fine Thing — Opportunity.

Capitalist cant and humbug still manifest themselves at every turn, and the Bolshevist movement still supplies them with some of the finest opportunities for such manifestation. Almost weekly some female member of the class who kept Russian soil soaked with blood (working-class blood, of course) for generations, escapes from the “clutches” of the Bolsheviks, and brings her troubles to these shores. Invariably she has a harrowing tale of the atrocities of “the terror.” She usually has managed to pick up a document of fearful import —Bolshevik army orders relating to the taking of women and girls for sinister purposes are the moat common; we all know how carelessly the “Reds” leave such things lying about the streets! —which is very thoughtful of her, for it enables her perhaps otherwise unconvincing narrative to be published with illustrations.

Unfortunate Lack of Evidence

But also invariably, when the Russian Countess (all the princesses have long since been laid in their nameless graves, with unmentionable accompaniments) has told her tale of horror, she has nothing to show in substantiation thereof except her ropes of pearls and her jewels (which the “Reds” might have found had they taken the trouble to search her) and precious document —which might quite possibly be a forgery. Invariably she has no mangled limbs to display before the public whom she expects to swallow so much. She does not hobble along on one leg as do so many poor fellows of the working class in this country and others. She gets about very well, thank yon; and if she did lose forty pounds of fat owing to the Bolshevik horrors (and not, mark yon, because she had to fare as other people in a land which she herself describes as starving) she soon finds it again among her fellow parasites in the West End. For, happily enough, all these horrors which she relates (even to people of “birth and breeding” being compelled to work) have happened — to other people!

The Latest Witnesses —

Not Russian countesses, but two Irish “girls,” are the latest to escape from that other “distressful country” that is not Ireland. They come with the same wearying tale of atrocities that have been inflicted upon—others. They have (the “Daily Chronicle” of Jan. 3 informs us) “a number of terrible photographs, showing the horrors of the Red regime.” And “It is impossible henceforward to hope that such stories of the Red Terror may prove to have been exaggerated; the credibility of these new witnesses is beyond question.”

And yet—there are some strange features about their narrative. One might start with those “terrible photographs.” It is a strange; thing that they do not publish them. What have they brought them to this country for, if they are not to be seen? Is it in order to talk about them, and to add to the famous Government collection of Russian photographs which are not fit for publication—for fear somebody should identify them as pictures of outrages perpetrated upon Russian workers under the Czarist regime ?

— Have the Old Falling.

It is strange reading also that two ladies, one of whom had “lost 40lb. in weight as a result of her sufferings," and the other of whom looks, from her published photograph, as though her sister’s loss has been her gain, could “run for five miles,” as the “Daily Chronicle” reports that they finally did, to escape the Red Terror. 

It is strange, also, that one of these women could lay (sic) on her “bed with the door barricaded” while “ten Bolsheviks occupied the room next to mine. . . . There night after night they carried on drunken orgies of an unspeakable character,” and yet be able to say (as both she and her sister do) that she was “never subjected to personal violence.” It is strange again how she knew the exact number, when there were so many, of Bolsheviks in that room if she had to hide herself away from them, or that they could be bo very terrible if she did not.

It is strange yet again that if the iron of these dread doings had bitten so deep into her soul --not to speak of her “weight"—the lady had a thought to spare for the observation which is replaced with prints in the above quotation. That observation was: “There was a beautiful drawing-room full of beautiful furniture.” If the fact that Bolsheviks ware holding “drunken orgies” in rooms and among furniture where only the rich had carried on theirs, is a crime of the Bolsheviks or a trouble of the lady, we may judge at once the standard by which she appraises both the villainy of the “Reds” and the depth of her own “sufferings.”

It is strange, farther, that these two ladies “have been in Kieff during each period of Bolshevik rule.” One would have thought that one experience of this “nightmare” was enough, and that they would have seized the first opportunity of clearing out of the danger zone. But they appear to have cleared out only when one of them was detected in hiding Russian officers, in other words taking an active part in the struggle against the Bolsheviks. A similar participation in warfare in any other country has its prescribed penalty. The ladies were wise to scoot.

And now for the particular horrors which the “credibility of these new witnesses” puts beyond question.

When the Reds had departed one of the ladies went to a sort of human slaughter house, where “in the garden 127 nude and mutilated corpses, including those of some women, were flung into a hole.” Obviously, she could not count these 127 bodies all flung into one hole, so it is clear that the unquestionable credibility with which the capitalist editor of our capitalist contemporary so lightly guarantees the unconvincing narrative must be made to cover even second-hand information.

Such, indeed is shown to be the case as the story proceeds, for we are told that “the man who removed the bodies from the shed told a horrible story of what he described as the staircase of death. “It seems [seems, mark you] that the victims first had to strip and then form up in line with arms folded.

“First one line had to lie on their faces, and they were then shot.

“Then the second row filed in and took their places, just behind the first row; and so row after row of corpses was piled up until there was what he describes as a staircase of bleeding bodies reaching almost to the ceiling of the shed,”

So the lady’s credibility is to guarantee the truth of what another party told her, even!

But there is a fly in the ointment, for it is obvious that the proceeding as stated could not result in “a staircase of bleeding bodies reaching almost to the ceiling of the abed.” The geometry of the thing is all wrong.

However, it matters little what the trimmings were. It would be strange indeed if the Bolsheviks, at war and pressed on every hand, did not find occasion to put some backs up against a wall. And stripped of all its embroidery, that is all it amounts to. In the reports of their opponents parallel cases are thus sententiously recorded: "Many Bolsheviks were captured and executed.” Ana it ill becomes those who took part in the filling of ten million graves all over the world, to whine because the process which they set in motion does not cease at their command.

But the seal is placed on the hypocrisy of the ruling class by the facts revealed by the inquiry into certain happenings in India, and the cool and even callous way in which those facts are accepted by our masters’ Press. Nothing that has yet been alleged against the Bolsheviks in any way compares with or rivals for sheer ferocious animal brutality the confessed and even vaunted butchery of 500 natives by a British officer. In a country where that awful specimen of bloody-minded savagery had no other right at all to be save the right of the “mailed fist,” and in their own village, some thousands of people demonstrated in defiance of their conquerors’ orders. How the British apostle of “frightfulness” hurried to the scene eager for the bloodletting; how he deployed his men on a neighbouring hilltop, and in a few brief seconds had them pouring “rapid fire” into the crowd; how he ceased the butchery, not when the crowd dispersed, not when 500 fell dead and 2,000 wounded, but when he ran out of ammunition; and how he then marched his men away from the scene without attempting to give any assistance to his victims (it was not his business, he said): all this is told in the capitalist Press. We have no need to resort to suspect sources for that information. And these revelations come to hand at the opportune moment to form an effective reply to the tales of Bolshevik barbarity. 

A. E. Jacomb

Items of Interest in the Election. (1924)

From the January 1924 issue of the Socialist Standard

Though it is a matter of minor importance, I must confess to a feeling of unholy glee at seeing that Winston Churchill failed again.

Ben Tillett, the strike breaker, succeeded in crawling into Parliament along with J. Sexton, a fitting chum.

Frank Hodges, who assisted to defeat the railwaymen in 1921, is still climbing; he is now a Labour M.P.

Col. John Ward, a deserter from the Labour Party, put up as an Independent against a Labour candidate and just managed to squeeze in.

A few who were one time “sturdy Democrats” tried a change of party but were too late—they backed the wrong horse. Among these were G. H. Roberts, Victor Fisher, and J. A. Seddon.

G. H. Roberts, Labour Party representative in the Coalition Government, put up as a Conservative but was ousted.

Victor Fisher, a onetime member of the Social Democratic Party and friend of H. M. Hyndman, put up as a Conservative and failed to get in.

J. A. Seddon was another Labour mislcader who put up as a Conservative and failed to get in.

Fellow workers, take note of the above and refrain from trusting in Leaders. Trust in yourselves in future and changes of policy by Leaders will work you no harm.

Punchinello